Freedom of Speech. The Wrocław Way

‘When telling Wrocław’s story, it is easy to overlook a thread that has run through the city almost unbroken since the fifteenth century. This thread is woven by printers, typesetters, booksellers and publishers – people who, over successive centuries, have painstakingly set type, worked the presses and reproduced texts. In an age when artificial intelligence assembles words automatically, their efforts are all the more worthy of recognition,’ writes Michał KŁOSOWSKI

Medieval Printing and the First Polish Words in Print

.The story begins in Wrocław in 1475, when the earliest known texts printed in Polish appeared in the city. Perhaps it is no coincidence that five centuries later Wrocław became one of the leading centres of underground publishing in communist Poland. Between Kasper Elyan’s press and Solidarity’s duplicators lies a remarkable chapter in the history of a city in which printing was never merely a trade.

The earliest trace of this history is one of those Wrocław treasures whose significance extends far beyond the city itself. In 1475, Kasper Elyan established the first printing house in Silesia. Only a few decades had passed since Gutenberg’s invention, which meant that printing was still a new technology, and the printed book was only beginning to transform European culture. It was during this period that a printing house was set up in a city under the Czech Crown, inhabited by multilingual speakers and hosting one of the key dioceses in this part of Europe, securing its place in the history of the Polish language. Elyan’s Statuta synodalia episcoporum Wratislaviensium – the Synodal Statutes of the Bishops of Wrocław, dated 9 October – were not, of course, printed with posterity in mind. They were essentially a practical text intended for the clergy. Among their pastoral instructions was a recommendation that the basic prayers be taught to the faithful in the languages they actually spoke. Alongside Latin, the volume therefore contained prayers in local languages, including the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary and the Apostles’ Creed in Polish. These are regarded as the oldest known texts printed in Polish. One of the two surviving complete copies is held by the Wrocław University Library.

When I came across this episode while writing about the history of the Church in Wrocław, I realised that it contained something deeply characteristic of the city. The first words printed in Polish did not appear in a linguistically homogeneous environment or within an institution built around the modern idea of the nation-state. They were not printed in the territory of the Polish state at all. They appeared because medieval Silesia was multilingual and the Church had to speak to the faithful in their own languages. From the outset, printing served as a bridge between institutions and everyday life, with the aim of making the written word understood.

A City That Learned to Print

.After Elyan’s pioneering press, printing in Wrocław developed unevenly, but by the sixteenth century it had become a permanent part of urban life. This was the age of the Reformation and humanism, of expanding schools and the rapidly growing power of the written word. Europe was discovering that print could preserve knowledge and spread ideas with unprecedented speed. Without printing houses, it is difficult to imagine either the success of the Reformation or the later emergence of public opinion. Plenty has already been written about the Gutenberg revolution, so let us turn instead to Wrocław, where its effects can be traced with remarkable clarity. In 1538, a printing house run by Andreas Winkler was established under the auspices of the city council. This was no longer the venture of a lone pioneer working at the margins of urban life, but the beginning of a printing community that would remain a distinctive presence in Wrocław for centuries. Printing houses changed hands and owners, often combining printing with bookselling and publishing. Wrocław was exceptionally well placed: one of the leading cities of Silesia and Central Europe, it stood at the crossroads of routes to Prague, Vienna, Kraków, Leipzig, Poznań and lands further east. Books, like people and ideas, crossed borders far more easily than later national maps of Europe might suggest. The catalogue of Silesian prints from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century preserved at the Ossolineum alone contains nearly two thousand publications.

The Korn Family and Wrocław’s Turn Towards Poland

.At the time, Wrocław was not part of Poland. How, then, can the history of printing in the city connect its medieval past with the twentieth century? The answer may lie with Johann Jacob Korn, who settled in Wrocław in 1732 and built a business that would become one of Silesia’s best-known publishing firms. Interestingly, from the very beginning, he also targeted the Polish market. In 1733 he published Szymon Starowolski’s Varro. He also developed a newspaper venture that eventually led to the creation of Schlesische Zeitung, one of Wrocław’s most important and longest-running daily newspapers, published until German Breslau ceased to exist in 1945.

Successive generations of the Korn family continued the business, with Polish books remaining an important part of its catalogue. Thus, although German, the family became a major publisher of books for Polish-speaking readers.

Books published in Wrocław found readers both among Silesia’s sizeable Polish-speaking population and across the border in the Polish lands. The reason for producing them was simple: there was a market for them.

The nineteenth century brought an even greater expansion of print. As Wrocław industrialised, small workshops increasingly gave way to businesses equipped with modern machinery. This transformation gave rise to an information industry. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no modern city could function without printing houses. They delivered newspapers to residents each morning, sustained political and economic life, and supplied the rapidly expanding system of mass education with textbooks in previously unimaginable numbers. The printing press, whose history in Wrocław reached back to Kasper Elyan, had become part of the great urban organism.

1945: How to Print a New City

.The year 1945 marked a turning point. The history of printing in Wrocław is particularly compelling because it cannot be divided by a simple line into a ‘German’ period and a ‘Polish’ one: the two had overlapped throughout the centuries. The war did, however, bring a violent rupture in the city’s social continuity. Its former residents were leaving Breslau, while Poles arrived in their place, many of them uprooted from homes of their own. Machines, buildings, workshops and technical skills could not be replaced overnight.

Before the war, the city had more than a hundred printing workshops. One of those to survive the siege relatively intact was Luetzow’s printing and cardboard factory. In June 1945, Professor Stanisław Kulczyński instructed that it be acquired for the newly forming Polish universities. It began operating as the Printing House of the University and Polytechnic in Wrocław, later renamed the Wrocław Scientific Printing House. One detail from its early days says more about the era than many monumental accounts of Wrocław’s ‘return to the Motherland’. On 1 August 1945, the factory employed four Poles and thirty-six Germans – printers, typesetters and linotype operators. The new Polish Wrocław thus printed its first books with the help of people from a city that was itself symbolically ceasing to exist.

The first Polish book to be printed in post-war Wrocław, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Janko the Musician, was released in September 1945. Bookshops and book-lending facilities were established for the first time in the city, and the University Library underwent reconstruction. Tadeusz Tułasiewicz, one of the organisers of Polish cultural life, asked how the Polish identity of these lands could possibly be built without Polish books. An entirely practical question, given that people were arriving from Lwów, Kraków, Greater Poland, Warsaw, central Poland and the lost eastern territories. They needed schools, newspapers, textbooks and libraries. Wrocław was to become Polish not merely in administrative terms – it needed a Polish language of everyday life, and only print could provide it. This was why the arrival of the Ossolineum mattered so much. Its library came to Wrocław in 1946, and its publishing house began operating in the city the following year. An institution born in Lwów became one of the foundations of post-war Wrocław’s intellectual identity. The move carried symbolic weight: an institution that had lost its home city found a new home in one that had lost much of its former population and cultural life. The two now had to rebuild together. In time, the Ossolineum became one of Poland’s leading academic and humanities publishers, while its Biblioteka Narodowa series educated generations of Polish schoolchildren and university students.

The Wrocław Scientific Printing House also played an important role. In 1952, it was incorporated into the Polish Academy of Sciences; five years later it received the name by which it would be known for decades. It printed academic publications, including the most typographically demanding works, with mathematical formulae, chemical notation and complex linguistic characters. It survived communism as well as the subsequent political and economic changes, before finally closing in 2019.

The State That Sought to Control the Word

.Printing may have revived after the war, but it did so under the close control of the communist state: a printing house was an industrial plant but also a place subject to particular scrutiny. The authorities understood what Wrocław’s printers had known since Elyan’s day: reproducing a text changes its significance. A single sheet of paper may express a private opinion; ten thousand identical sheets become a social force. The state’s reach extended beyond editorial offices and publishing houses to paper supplies, machinery, printing works and print runs, while censorship policed the texts themselves. The official circulation of the written word formed part of the political system.

In 1976, the Wrocław Book Printing House, the Wrocław Cartographic Printing House and the Wrocław Commercial Printing House were merged to form the Wrocław Printing Works. It was a model characteristic of the Polish People’s Republic: concentrating production in a large state enterprise improved efficiency but also made the means of production easier to control. Yet the presses still depended on human hands. When Solidarity emerged, it became clear that the workers behind one of the most important parts of the information system possessed a particular kind of power. The ‘days without newspapers’ of August 1981 were highly symbolic: printers and distribution workers protested against the manipulation of information and restrictions on Solidarity’s access to the media. The state owned the newspapers and the printing works, but once again ownership of the machinery proved insufficient when the person standing beside it refused to follow orders. A still more important revolution, however, was taking place outside the state-run printing plants.

The Printing House That Must Never Be Found

.Independent publishing was already developing in Wrocław before August 1980. One of the most important circles in the emerging opposition printing movement gathered around the Biuletyn Dolnośląski, published from 1979. Kornel Morawiecki was among them. Successive searches and Security Service operations led the opposition to a simple conclusion: an underground printing operation could not function like a conventional business. The more professional and centralised it became, and the more it relied on a single location, the easier it was to track down and destroy. It had to operate on the opposite principle: dispersed, small-scale and sustained by people capable of setting up a new site elsewhere whenever one was exposed. It was, in effect, a clandestine theory of communication that Jürgen Habermas could only have dreamed of. What mattered most was not the quality of any single machine but the resilience of the network.

When martial law was imposed on 13 December 1981, the authorities gained almost complete control over the flow of information. Telephone lines were cut; radio and television carried only official announcements. Opposition activists were interned, while the army and the Citizens’ Militia were deployed on the streets. In these circumstances, a simple sheet of paper carrying the news that Solidarity’s structures still existed acquired extraordinary importance. Kornel Morawiecki himself escaped internment. The still-undiscovered network of the Biuletyn Dolnośląski, together with hidden equipment, made it possible to establish the editorial team, printing operation and distribution network of Z Dnia na Dzień (Day by Day) with remarkable speed. The paper became the organ of the underground Lower Silesian Regional Strike Committee of Solidarity. Its first issue following the imposition of martial law appeared on 14 December 1981.

When Fighting Solidarity was founded in 1982, Wrocław became its principal stronghold and publishing centre. A network of independent printing sites was developed; dismantling it required the Security Service to do more than locate a single site – it had to uncover the entire system. Publications included Solidarność Walcząca, Biuletyn Dolnośląski, BIS, Wiadomości Bieżące, Kontra and Wolna Polska, followed by many others. Underground publishing relied on an entire infrastructure of editors, printers, people who procured equipment and materials, and hundreds of distributors.

A City of Bridges and Ideas

.In 1475, Kasper Elyan printed Polish prayers because he wanted the word to reach people in a language they understood. In the centuries that followed, Wrocław’s printing houses published in Latin, German and Polish because the city stood at the meeting point of cultures and markets – and because doing so simply made commercial sense. The Korn family supplied Polish books to readers on both sides of changing borders. After 1945, the printing house became one of the instruments used to build a Polish Wrocław, and for a brief time German specialists and Polish pioneers of the new city worked side by side at its machines. The Ossolineum brought from Lwów not only its collections and traditions but also the conviction that culture, passed from one generation to the next, helps a community endure. In 1981, it became clear once again that the question of who controls the written word is fundamental to freedom.

Yet no account of the city would be complete without another, far less spectacular thread: that of a person bent over a type case, a typesetter arranging one letter after another, a press operator setting the machine in motion, a printer examining a freshly printed sheet and, finally, a conspirator working in his own flat, knowing that several hundred more copies must be ready before dawn.

Michał Kłosowski