We, Noble Warrior Heroes
From the three of us on this photo, the best is Tyras, a Great Dane, who once attacked a Russian ambassador, Alexander Gorchakov. According to the story, the ambassador pointed something with his hand and Tyras thought that Gorchakov wanted to attack his human. Tyras was a very good boy and definitely deserves a statue.
The question if one of the other two deserves a statue is the subject of this text.
(By the way, if you see the paywall, and still want to read this text, here’s the friend link)
Hi. My name is Maciek. I’m the one in a rainbow Scala t-shirt on the photo. I live and work in Berlin, and that’s where the photo was taken. I come from the south of Poland — from a place that in the times of Tyras was known as Three Emperors’ Corner. My ancestors, as far as I know, were peasants and millers. Most of them never moved much from their place of origin. Even nowadays my decision to relocate first to Warsaw and then to Berlin — instead of staying home and having a traditional family life — is considered unusual by my broader family.
But even though I’m a more adventurous type, I’m not that far away from the average. Most of the time I write code, do some sports, and read tons of history books. I have never even attacked a Russian ambassador.
The third person on the photo, though, he’s a completely different pair of coconuts. Otto von Bismarck was the force behind the rise of the German Empire. He started his political career in 1847 in what was called German Confederation — a mess of around forty states played against each other by Austria and Prussia (which also belonged to the Confederation, in a way that two cats can belong to a host of sparrows if they sit in the same bushes). A year later Europe was shaken by a series of liberal-socialist revolts. They didn’t achieve much but they might have given Otto an idea that this is the bottom and if his country doesn’t want to die, it needs to kick hard and swim up. In the following years, he rose in the ranks of Prussian politics and then, through diplomacy and warfare, led it to unite almost all German lands north and west of Austria into a modern centralized country. During his rule, Germany went through the industrial revolution. Railways connected all the important cities. Life for common people became safer. Many of them moved to cities and their average wealth rose — even though from our point of view they were still horribly poor. When Otto resigned from the post of a chancellor in 1890, the German Empire was a major player in Europe and the world.
On the other hand, Otto hated Polish people to guts.
Back in the 18th century the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth succumbed under external forces, as well as its incompetent government, and was partitioned between Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The conquered nation sure didn’t know how to stay conquered. For the whole period of the Partitions, Poles were a major pain in the ass of their Prussian masters, siding with Napoleon Bonaparte when the opportunity arose, starting uprisings, or simply finding loopholes in oppressive legislation.
The government —the one under Bismarck but also before and after— answered with the Germanisation program. Otto’s policies caused discrimination, suffering, and often the death of many of about 2.5mln Poles living under Prussian occupation. Lands were confiscated and given to German settlers. The Polish language was replaced by German in public life, in schools, and even in religious ceremonies. The authorities always feared insurrection and terrorism, so a Polish person couldn’t dream of a good job in the military or the administration. Otto himself thought that Poles will always be traitors. In a letter to his sister from 1861, he wrote:
“Hit the Poles so hard that they despair of their life; I have full sympathy with their condition, but if we want to survive, we can only exterminate them; the wolf, too, cannot help having been created by God as he is, but people shoot him for it if they can.”
On top of that, sometime after Bismarck died in 1898, his ideas of militarization and of replacing Poles with German settlers in the eastern part of the country were picked up, applauded, and executed to a horrible end by a certain mediocre Austrian painter.
So, do I want his statue removed? No.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel any reverence to Otto. In fact, I have some ideas involving paint and memes. But I don’t think the only way we can look at a statue is a way to honour someone, and toppling them is in most cases something I’m against. “Most cases” is the key term here. Of course, some people shouldn’t have statues — the mediocre Austrian painter doesn’t have even one in modern Germany, a country very liberal when it comes to commemorating past leaders from almost all ends of the political spectrum. The same goes for Leopold II, Joseph Stalin, and a few other despicable little shits.
But most of the people from the statues were not like them. They got on the statues for what good they did, even if they did some bad things as well. Often, they were heroes to some people, but villains to others. Whatever they did, they thought they had good reasons to do it. They were complex human beings, as we all are. We can look at Otto’s statue and think of it in several ways, from admiration to discussions about the wrongs he did, to simple appreciation that it makes the place look better. The idea that we should just look at the bad part is, in my mind at least, closely associated with many rather awful moments in history, when self-righteous radicals destroyed monuments of the past. Destroying was all they knew and because of it the people quickly started to hate them even more than their predecessors. Eventually, they were killed or banished and their statues were toppled in turn.
It is the right thing to do to stand up against hate, but if the only way you know how to do it is to go around destroying things then you’re not a part of a solution. Hate can never be appeased by more hate. Only by abandoning hate, we can do it. Stick with me for one more point in the Polish-German relations.
After WW2, the new communist government played on the anti-German sentiment to portrait West Germany as an enemy. According to propaganda, it was a country of imperialists and hidden Nazis who only waited for an opportunity to retaliate and take back territories that now belonged to Poland. It was quite an accomplishment to convince people of it since there was East Germany in-between West Germany and Poland, and they were supposed to be the good guys while still being Germans. But it worked. It let the tyrants pose as guardians against the eternal enemy. The us-vs-them mentality, hardcoded in our brains by evolution since our ancestors were two tribes of apes throwing feces at each other, worked in their favour.
But then in 1965 the Polish Catholic Church, probably for the first and only time in its thousand years of history, did something good. The bishops wrote an open letter to their German counterparts and included words that resonated in the churches both in Germany and Poland: “We forgive and we ask for forgiveness”.
The first half was pretty straightforward: the Catholic Church, basically in the name of all Polish citizens, forgave Germans. But if that was hard to swallow already, the other half was madness. “What the fuck are they supposed to forgive us?!”.
And yet it had to be done. Many Germans suffered from retaliation after the war, even though they were not the ones who did anything wrong against Poles. They were just of the same nation as the actual perpetrators, and since actual perpetrators were nowhere near, they were killed, raped, and expelled in their stead. Just as God in the Torah, we like to blame people for the sins of their ancestors and clansmen. But that was an injustice, and in 1965 the next generation of Germans felt again that Poles can’t be trusted and maybe, one day in the future, Germans should take revenge on them. The wheel of hate was ready to roll again.
And so the Catholic Church — in its one time in forever attempt at being useful — tried to show Poles that forgiveness has to work both ways, that it has to be unconditional, and that it is not only a gift to the oppressors but also something that the oppressed need to do for themselves. If we go to other people and say “we will forgive you only if you do this and that, and don’t you fucking try to defend yourself, you villains”, that won’t work. That’s not forgiveness. That’s forced submission and humiliation. The other people will remember that. They will hold the grudge, and soon everything will come back to how it was before. To prevent this, both parties have to start from scratch and rebuild their relations.
And indeed, relations improved considerably. Today Germany is the best ally of Poland we could dream of. We are in European Union. We can travel, work, and live in both our countries. We are coworkers, friends, and lovers (well, not all at once — it’s a figure of speech, you understand). The current right-wing Polish government is not very happy about it and brings up the “evil German” stereotype often in disputes with the liberal opposition, but even they know people are tired of it. Only the far-right, nationalistic neo-Nazi types (oh, the irony) are still obsessed with it and the current ruling party is not very happy to be associated with them either. Germans, on the other hand, learned their lesson very well. They are not afraid to talk about the past but they also state clear and prove at every step that it is the past. Right now Germany is one of the most progressive countries in the world. I might be overly optimistic here, but I’ll risk and say that I think we broke the wheel.
So, to finish this convoluted and way too long article (cheers if you’re still reading this), I’d like to stress out again that toppling statues is in most cases a bad idea. It’s counterproductive. Childish, even. It simplifies the whole complexity of history and human beings into “us vs them”. Good = our side = leave it. Bad = their side = topple it. I hope the example I brought up — even though it’s not exactly about statues but rather about the bigger picture — will convince you to refuse to take part in it. Instead, when you feel like you want to topple a statue, think about how you can spend the same time and energy in a more constructive way. Go fight for a cause that can make a positive difference in people’s lives right now. Support a charity that helps those in need. Remember about the past, but use it to learn from it, not to justify your current wrongdoings. Don’t let hate and anger dictate your actions. In short, try to be the person your dog thinks you already are.
If you want to read more:
- “Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947”, Christopher Clark
- “Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II”, Keith Lowe
If you have thoughts and want to share them, here’s the link to an open letter on Letter.wiki (but comments on Medium are also fine).
The picture of Otto von Bismarck superimposed on the outline of the German Empire comes from the gallery of Lucian Bucur at DeviantArt.
The other pictures are just memes. Some of them made by me.
