Andrzej Stasiuk's new book, "Dojczland," has climbed almost to the top of the Polish bestseller lists. Books about the western neighbours sell well in Poland. Poles always want to know exactly what is going on the other side of the Oder-Neisse line. Stasiuk is a master of scurrilous – and sometimes black – humour, and people somehow always want to laugh about the Germans – in literature at least, because in reality there is rarely reason to.


















Published by Czarne

Of course Germany has a different name in Polish, namely "Niemcy", which literally means "land of the mute" (it being almost impossible to communicate across the language barrier). This is something the book also addresses, the way Germans and Poles talk at cross purposes – especially well-meaning individuals who are open to reconciliation. In Poland it has provoked a debate about a critical question for the country: How do we want the Germans to see us?

As well as scrutinising today's Germans, this slim volume – just 112 pages – also picks apart the Poles. At first glance it seems to be a travel book. Stasiuk describes what he experienced, saw and thought as he criss-crossed Germany on a reading tour. But in fact he draws a sophisticated double portrait of the Germans and the Poles with flights of sarcasm and a wonderful sense of grotesque. At one point he writes in an apparently innocuous tone: "Travelling in Germany is psychoanalysis."

The narrator is a caricatured travelling author who fits all German cliches about the Poles: he drinks, he constantly thinks about pulling a fast one on the Germans (but doesn't dare), he whinges about their love of order, and loves Mercedes and BMW (which he calls by their affectionate Polish nicknames "Merz" and "Beemka"). As this stereotype Pole he ruminates on those self-same cliches about Poles, but also on Poles' prejudices about Germans, seeming to take some of them seriously, poking fun at others. And returns again and again apparently jokily and ironically to what Polish sociologists call the "Polish complex", namely the feeling of not being taken seriously by the western neighbours, getting nothing more than a paternalistic pat on the back.

Here Stasiuk takes up the theme of his stage play "Night – A Slavo-Germanic Medical Tragi-Farce", which premiered two years ago in Düsseldorf to great – but short-lived – acclaim. There too, he addresses the broad complex of German-Polish prejudices, distilled into the figures of a German Mercedes owner and a Polish car thief. After an accident in which both are involved, the German receives the Pole's heart as a transplant. Stasiuk once summarised his analysis of Poles' relationship with their neighbours in this black observation: "Being Polish means being the last humans east of the Rhine. Because for a Pole the Germans are like well-designed machines, robots, while the Russians are more like animals."

With the self-ironic, provocative approach of "Dojczland" Stasiuk has again divided the critics in Poland. The left-liberal Gazeta Wyborcza is thrilled at how he "juggles with prejudices" and sees the book as a humorous but at the same time thought-provoking contribution to relaxing the relationship between Germans and Poles, where both sides take their share of the punishment. The nationalist conservative press, on the other hand, accuses him of bringing the nation into disrepute and taking insufficient account of the tragedies of history. They say he almost completely skates over the terrors of German occupation during the Second World War. In fact, the war is powerfully present at several places in the book.

For example when Stasiuk, here without a shred of irony, describes the author Henryk Grynberg, a Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered by the Germans, at a celebration at the Leipzig Book Fair. Grynberg sits on his own at a table groaning with the finest food and drink, silently watching the German publishers and critics mulling around with their glasses of prosecco. Or the book's key scene: Waiting for a flight at Stuttgart airport last spring, watching TV coverage of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Auschwitz. Had the "capo di tutti capi of the religion of universal love and forgiveness" somehow actually managed to deal with all that German guilt, he asks himself. And adds that he was apparently the only waiting passenger to show any interest in the footage from Auschwitz.

The book's cover epitomises Stasiuk's bewildering attitude to symbols and leaves the critics bemused. It shows the silhouette of a soldier's head. The helmet has slipped down over his nose and has a Mercedes star in place of the Prussian spike. Ties round the helmet is a red and white ribbon like those worn by fighters in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising that was brutally suppressed by the German occupiers. Is it meant to be a Pole who loves Mercedes and forgets the tragedy of his own people? Or a German who ingratiates himself to the Poles with reconciliatory gestures but is actually more interested in being recognised as the world's leading car manufacturer and pushing his products?

Some critics also complain about Stasiuk's persistent references to drinking throughout the book. The way he goes on and on about a particular brand of American bourbon and his tales of intoxication and the hangovers that follow will damage the reputation of the Poles abroad, they say, and represent an intellectual ingratiation to the arrogant Germans. In fact, here Stasiuk is paying homage to the Russian Samizdat author Venedikt Erofeev who died in 1990. In Erofeev's "Moscow to the End of the Line", which was banned in Soviet times and is very popular in Poland, the drinking also takes place on two planes – in the story and while writing it.

Stasiuk conjectures that it might be better were there no Germans in Germany, only gastarbeiter and immigrants. "They should disappear somewhere and just send money from time to time." Then he reflects on what good it could possibly do the Poles to learn so much about the misdeeds of the German crusaders of the Middle Ages in their first year at primary school. This single sentence suffices to challenge the whole current of patriotic education that in recent years has returned to confrontation and difference rather than searching for what the neighbours have in common.

Here he seems to confirm the claims of his critics that he sets out above all to undermine the confidence of the Poles and to blacken their name abroad, especially in Germany. In the past two years, during the reign of the two Kaczynskis, Stasiuk was one of the main targets of the pro-government press. He was accused of besmirching the honour of the president and prime minister in the German media, and his sarcastic essays about the Polish zone of occupation in Iraq were regarded as tantamount to treason. Referring to his numerous invitations to Germany – which now also form the framework for "Dojczland" – the infamous political magazine Wprost called him a "paid influence agent of Berlin". Well, now Stasiuk will have to put up with receiving many more invitations to give readings in German literary institutions.


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This article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on November 7, 2007

Thomas Urban is the Poland correspondent of the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Andrzej Stasiuk, born 1960 in Warsaw, writer, poet, essayist and literary critic. Winner of many prizes (including the 1994 Foundation of Culture prize and the 1995 Koscielski Prize); also nominated twice for the Nike Prize. In youth, practiced many professions, was engaged in pacifist movement, deserted the army, and spent a year and a half in prison. After this, wrote for underground newspapers. In 1987, moved from Warsaw to a little village in the mountains, where he presently lives. Publishes books at Czarne Publishers, a publishing house he has run together with his wife Monika Sznajderman since 1996.

Translation: Meredith Dale