If it weren’t for Wrocław, I wouldn’t be a writer today.

‘Wrocław is first and foremost my hometown. I grew up in this city, and my whole life is intertwined with it. If it weren’t for Wrocław, I wouldn’t be a writer today,’ Marek KRAJEWSKI tells Agaton KOZIŃSKI.

Agaton KOZIŃSKI: Norman Davies called Wrocław a ‘microcosm’ of modern Europe. Do you agree with him?

Marek KRAJEWSKI: I think about it a bit differently. Wrocław is first and foremost my hometown. I grew up in this city and my whole life is intertwined with it. If it weren’t for Wrocław, I would not be a writer today.

What makes Wrocław so inspiring to you?

I love mysteries, both personally and professionally, as a crime fiction author. And writing crime fiction is, after all, a form of constructing and resolving puzzles. In my childhood and teenage years, Wrocław was such a mystery to me. I still remember my amazement when I saw the plaster of one of the old tenement buildings fall away, revealing the German inscription ‘Obst und Gemüse’, which means fruits and vegetables. How did it get there? My school kept pushing the official propaganda that this was an ancient Piast city, claiming its very stones spoke Polish. And here, all of a sudden, I saw a text written in German. I couldn’t comprehend it and I wanted to find an explanation. Wrocław had been presenting me with these kinds of puzzles since I was a kid.

When did you solve this puzzle?

Many things were unclear to me for a long time. Why, for instance, were old buildings in Wrocław taken apart and the bricks transported to Warsaw? Why was the letterbox in my house labelled ‘Briefe’ in German, not ‘Letters’ in Polish? Or why were the city authorities removing Baroque ornaments from townhouses in the city centre? Later, I found they saw the Baroque period as German and the Middle Ages as Piast. This was their way of making Wrocław more Polish. But as a teenager, I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t realise these urban interventions were motivated by politics. Back then, it was a real mystery to me and I was intrigued, but it also made me feel like I was truly part of the city. That’s how Wrocław inspired me and created me as a writer. And that’s why I can’t talk about it in the dispassionate way of Norman Davies, using terms like ‘microcosm’. The only way I can talk about my city is with emotion.

What kind of emotion?

Admiration. Admiration and delight in the multicultural history of Wrocław. My city bears the marks of its Polish, Czech, Austrian, and German past. All this creates a melting pot known in Latin as ‘varietas’. This variety is my city’s great asset.

Of all the books you have written, the most important are two series of detective stories. One of them takes place mainly in Wrocław, the other mainly in Lviv. How similar do you think these cities are? How much do they ‘rhyme’ with each other?

Modern Wrocław has emancipated itself from its Lviv past, but if you go back to the Wrocław of the 1950s, 1960s or even 1970s, you will find many traces of Lviv. The intellectual elite of Wrocław is of Lviv origin. The University of Wrocław was created by professors from Lviv, who also had a major contribution to the creation of our University of Science and Technology.

After the war in 1945, Professor Stanislaw Kulczynski – previously rector of Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv – became the first rector of the then-single institution that later became these two universities.

In fact, there are more examples of this, and not just limited to academics. Almost all the journalists working in Wrocław in the post-war period were from Lviv. Growing up, I was always surrounded by the Lviv dialect, with its distinctive eastern melody. That’s how my mother and uncle talked. Lviv made a very strong imprint on the cultural and scientific fabric of Wrocław. Of course, this began to change as a growing number of Poles from across the nation migrated to the city, each person bringing their unique language and traditions. Many linguists consider Polish spoken in Wrocław to be the purest form of literary Polish in the country. This is the effect of mixing so many very different dialects with the sophisticated language of the city’s intellectual elite. This was the crucible in which post-war Wrocław was formed, and this is what the city is today.

How do you think Wrocław will evolve? What do you think it will look like in the future? Is it possible – to refer again to Professor Davies – that it will become Europe in a nutshell, a postnational city?

No, it’s a grim picture. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about this vision. I would like Wrocław to remain the way it is – simply a Polish city. A city that doesn’t deny its founding traditions. Today, Wrocław draws on the traditions of its German past as well as those of the pre-war Polish city of Lviv, each ennobling and enriching the other. This is part of Wrocław’s DNA. How will it evolve? Today we have 200,000 refugees from the east – from Ukraine and Belarus. That’s a quarter of Wrocław’s population. They will certainly leave their mark on the city and alter its DNA, causing Wrocław to change again. The city will start to evolve. In what direction? We don’t know that yet.

The interview was conducted by Agaton Koziński.