Surrender: from Danzig to Gdańsk

Abstract

Kashubia is a remote hill region to the west of the Polish city of Gdansk. Today it is the subject of glossy internet advertising for ‘the Kashubian lake district’. A century ago it was still an isolated rural area, a by-word in Danzig for rustic backwardness. Half a million Kashubians spoke a dialect which was more Slavonic than Germanic, but they were a people for whom any sense of identity beyond the immediate region was only beginning to emerge. The fact that their language was spoken by all classes in the region, with the beginnings of a literary tradition, gave it a strength which distinguished it from other Polish dialects (Stone:521–9).2 Cut off from its eastern approaches by the massive Vistula delta, Danzig looked west to Kashubia as its main hinterland. In the opening passage, set in 1899, of Gunther Grass’s classic novel The Tin Drum a Kashubian peasant woman named Anna Bronski sits gathering potatoes. She is wearing the traditional great skirts of the region. A Polish stranger appears, chased at a distance by two Prussian policemen. He hides under Anna’s skirts and, as she gives the policemen false directions, he furtively impregnates her. The family later moves to Danzig where Agnes, the child of this bizarre but symbolic union of Kashubia with Poland, marries Matzerath, a German soldier from the west. But she also continues her youthful liaison with her cousin Jan Bronski, who has identified with Poland.