The Palimpsest City: A Philosophical Journey Through Gdańsk
Like ancient parchment bearing traces of multiple texts, Gdańsk reveals layers of meaning that have been written, erased, and written over again—each iteration leaving ghostly impressions of what came
I. The City That Admits Its Own Invention
There is something refreshingly honest about a city that openly admits its façade is largely fake. Standing in Gdańsk’s reconstructed Main Town, surrounded by what appear to be medieval merchant houses with their distinctive stepped gables and ornate frontages, I found myself confronting an unusual philosophical proposition: What if authenticity lies not in original materials, but in the courage to acknowledge one’s own construction? Here, in this Baltic port that the Kashubs called Gduńsk, the Germans knew as Danzig, and the Poles reclaimed as Gdańsk, Europe’s most complicated urban experiment unfolds—a city that achieved authenticity precisely by admitting its artifice.
As I walked through these rebuilt streets with my old Canon camera, I couldn’t help but think of my own academic journey in post-communist studies. How many of our own intellectual frameworks, I wondered, are also reconstructions—honest attempts to build meaning from the chaos of collapsed certainties?
The story begins, like many European stories, with disaster. By March 1945, when Soviet forces finally took the city, almost the entire historic center was in ruins, with fewer than 40 residential buildings remaining intact in the Main City (no, my grandpa, also Mikhail Minakov, did not do it, I thought; his contusion was sustained in Königsberg, and he was demobilized several weeks before the Danzig campaign). What had taken seven centuries to build was destroyed in roughly a week. But this destruction was not just the reckless violence of war; it was the harsh punctuation mark ending one chapter of European history and starting another.
The demographic change that followed was even more dramatic than the physical destruction. By 1950, over 100,000 Germans had been expelled, while over 100,000 Poles from Central Poland and more than 25,000 from Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland replaced them. According to official statistics, at least 85% of the 1950 population were post-war newcomers. Gdańsk had become a city of strangers—strangers to the place, strangers to each other, and perhaps most deeply, strangers to themselves.
But there was one group that provided continuity through this upheaval, though their story is often overlooked in grand narratives of reconstruction. The Kashubians—the indigenous West Slavic people of this region—had been here for over fifteen centuries, weathering waves of Germanic influence, Polish rule, and Prussian domination. The Kashubians, with their own language and cultural traditions, had settled along these Baltic shores since the early medieval period. Originally, they populated the area between the lower Oder to the west and the lower Vistula to the east, but centuries of German colonization had pushed them eastward into Pomerania. By the time of reconstruction, their settlement area had shrunk to the west and south of Gdańsk, yet they remained a living link to the region’s deeper past.
This demographic revolution presents us with a philosophical puzzle that would have delighted the French phenomenologists: What happens to the identity of a place when virtually everyone who inhabits it is new? Gdańsk had become a city populated almost entirely by displaced persons—Polish refugees from territories lost to the Soviet Union, urban pioneers from central Poland, and the resilient Kashubian communities who had somehow preserved their distinct identity through centuries of political change.
Walking through the reconstructed streets, I wondered what the Kashubian families made of this grand rebuilding project. Their ancestors had lived through the original Hanseatic prosperity, the Teutonic Knights, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Prussian rule, and now communist reconstruction. What wisdom had they accumulated about the rise and fall of political projects?
The decision to rebuild was itself an act of philosophical audacity. Initially, reconstruction was controversial due to anti-German sentiments and the attitudes of new settlers, who favored modern architecture. The decision to recreate historical buildings was politically motivated to symbolize the city’s reunification with Poland. Between 1952 and the late 1960s, Polish architects and artisans embarked on an extraordinary project: they would reconstruct not the Gdańsk that had been destroyed, but an idealized Gdańsk that had never quite existed.
The reconstruction was not tied to Gdańsk’s pre-war appearance; instead, its goal was to recreate an idealized state that existed before Poland was partitioned. Architecture from the 19th and early 20th centuries was often overlooked, while influences from Flemish, Dutch, Italian, and French styles were emphasized. Here was urban planning as ideological statement: the new Gdańsk would embody not what had been, but what should have been—a Polish city freed from the corrupting influences of Prussian dominance.
The irony is almost too perfect for fiction. Communist authorities, following Marxist principles of historical materialism, undertook a project of radical historical idealism. They were not simply rebuilding a city; they were constructing a usable past. The medieval merchant houses that rose from the rubble were staffed by Polish craftsmen using communist labor brigades to create a future capitalist dreamscape. The result was “an improved, even slightly fantastic version of Gdańsk” that “has become comfortable and modern, but has retained its historic charm” while resembling Amsterdam more than any historical Danzig ever did.[1]
I found myself thinking of the Kashubian artisans who must have participated in this reconstruction. Their traditional crafts—embroidery using five symbolic colors, ceramics decorated with traditional designs, weaving from pine roots and straw—represented authentic continuity in this landscape of reconstruction. While the city was being reinvented architecturally, the Kashubians quietly preserved rural cultural practices that had been passed down for centuries.
This brings us to the philosophical heart of the matter. In a century obsessed with authenticity—from Heidegger’s search for authentic existence to contemporary tourism’s hunger for authentic experiences—Gdańsk offers a different model entirely. It suggests that authenticity might lie not in preserving original materials, but in honestly acknowledging the process of construction itself. The rebuilt city does not pretend to be unchanged; it openly acknowledges its reconstruction while simultaneously asserting its legitimacy.
Consider the deeper political implications. After 1990, this concept was criticized by Donald Tusk, who called the reconstruction “in the spirit of Communism” the city’s second catastrophe of the 20th century.[2] Yet Tusk himself—along with Lech Wałęsa and the Kaczyński twins—emerged from this “inauthentic” city to become Poland’s most authentic political voices. The reconstructed city had somehow produced the most genuine Polish leaders of the post-communist era.
It strikes me that this is where the Kashubian contribution becomes crucial, though it’s rarely acknowledged. These leaders didn’t emerge from a cultural vacuum—they grew up in a region where Kashubian families had maintained traditions of local self-governance, collective decision-making, and cultural autonomy for generations. The democratic sensibilities that would prove so crucial in the 1980s had deeper roots than we usually recognize.
There is something almost magical about this process, something that recalls the Ship of Theseus paradox that has puzzled philosophers since antiquity. If you replace every plank of a ship, is it still the same ship? Gdańsk took this thought experiment to its logical extreme: the Polish communists replaced not only every building but nearly every inhabitant, yet insisted—quite successfully—that the result was more genuinely Gdańsk than what had come before.
The genius of this approach becomes clear when you contrast it with other European cities' relationship to their reconstructed heritage. Dresden’s Frauenkirche, rebuilt after German reunification, presents itself as a restoration, carefully distinguishing new stones from old. Warsaw’s Old Town, also reconstructed after wartime destruction, emphasizes its faithful recreation of pre-war plans and drawings. But Gdańsk makes no such claims to archaeological precision. It admits to being an interpretation, a reading of the past filtered through present needs and desires.
This honesty extends to the most quotidian details. Walk behind those carefully reconstructed medieval façades, and you will find yourself in communist-era apartments with their characteristic small rooms and utilitarian layouts. The city openly displays its temporal layers rather than hiding them. It is simultaneously ancient and modern, Polish and international, authentic and constructed—and it sees no contradiction in these multiplicities.
The Kashubian community, I realized, had always embodied this kind of multiplicity. In the 2021 census, 179,685 people declared Kashubian identity, but 166,839 declared it together with Polish identity—92.9% of the total. They had never seen being Kashubian and being Polish as contradictory. Their example of comfortable multiple identity may have taught the whole region something about living with contradictions.
Perhaps this is why Gdańsk produced such an extraordinary generation of political leaders. Growing up in a city that openly acknowledged its own construction, surrounded by communities like the Kashubians who had long practiced the art of maintaining a distinct identity within larger political structures, they learned early that identity is something you build rather than something you inherit. They understood that nations, like cities, are imagined communities that require constant reconstruction. When the time came to rebuild Poland itself after 1989, they had already internalized the most important lesson: that the courage to admit your own artifice is the first step toward genuine authenticity.
The ultimate irony of Gdańsk lies in this paradox: by honestly admitting its own construction, it became more real than cities that pretend to unchanging genuineness. In a world where so much of our heritage is carefully managed nostalgia, Gdańsk offers something rarer: the spectacle of a city confident enough in its own identity to acknowledge how recently and deliberately that identity was constructed.
This, then, is what makes Gdańsk Europe’s most honest city. Not because it preserves some pristine past, but because it openly admits that the past is always a construction of the present. In doing so, it teaches us something profound about the nature of identity itself—whether of cities, nations, or individuals. We are all, in the end, reconstructed beings, building ourselves from the rubble of what came before. The question is whether we have the courage to admit it.
II. The Workers Who Dreamed a Nation
If the reconstruction of Gdańsk’s buildings represents one kind of political imagination—the creation of an idealized past—then what happened in its shipyards thirty-five years later represents another: the invention of an impossible future. On August 14, 1980, an unemployed electrician named Lech Wałęsa scaled the fence of the Lenin Shipyard and walked into history. What followed was perhaps the most improbable political revolution of the twentieth century: 17,000 shipbuilders would create the first independent trade union in the Soviet Bloc, and in doing so, begin the process that would ultimately bring down the entire communist system in Europe.
I must confess that visiting the European Solidarity Centre moved me in ways I hadn’t expected. As someone who has spent years studying political transitions in theory, standing where history was actually made, felt overwhelming. The philosophical implications of this moment are staggering. Here was a group of industrial workers who, through nothing more than collective action and moral imagination, managed to puncture holes in what had seemed like the iron laws of historical determinism. Marx had promised that the workers of the world would unite, but he had never imagined they would unite against workers’ states. The Polish shipbuilders accomplished something that violated every theoretical framework available to understand it: they used Marxist principles of solidarity to dismantle Marxist governance.
The immediate cause was prosaic enough—the dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz, a popular crane operator, just five months before her retirement. But the deeper causes ran much deeper, back to the bloody suppression of workers’ protests in 1970, when Polish security forces killed dozens of demonstrators in the same shipyards. The movement’s origins lay in this earlier trauma, creating what might be called a generational debt of conscience. The workers of 1980 were settling accounts not just with their immediate employers, but with a decade of accumulated grievances.
What I found particularly fascinating was learning about the role of intellectuals in bridging different communities. The figure of Lech Bądkowski embodies this perfectly—a Kashubian writer and journalist who became the first spokesperson of Solidarity. Here was someone who understood both the local cultural traditions and the broader political possibilities.
Lech Bądkowski (1920-1984) was a Polish writer, journalist, and activist who co-founded the Kashubian-Pomeranian Association in 1956. As a representative of the area’s literary circles, Bądkowski joined with the striking Gdańsk Shipyard workers in August 1980, became a member of the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, and later served as its spokesman during negotiations for the Gdańsk Agreement. His presence symbolized something crucial: Solidarity wasn’t just an industrial movement, but one that drew on deeper regional traditions of collective action and cultural autonomy.
I think this Kashubian dimension helps explain something that has always puzzled observers of Solidarity—how did this movement manage to unite such diverse groups? The answer may lie in the region’s long experience of maintaining cultural identity within changing political systems.
Wałęsa himself embodied the contradictions of the moment. Fired from the shipyard in 1976 for anti-government activities, he had spent four years as a kind of industrial exile. When he climbed that fence on August 14, he was technically trespassing on his former workplace. The symbolism could hardly have been more perfect: the excluded worker returning to claim not just his job, but the very idea of what work could mean.
The initial strike was called, and the workers’ demands were met on August 16—higher wages, the reinstatement of fired colleagues, the usual stuff of labor disputes. But then something extraordinary happened. As many strikers began leaving the yard, Anna Walentynowicz and Alina Pienkowska convinced their colleagues, including Wałęsa, to transform their victory into something larger. They would stay on strike not for themselves, but in solidarity with workers at other enterprises throughout the region.
This decision—to continue a successful strike out of solidarity with others—represents one of those moments when political philosophy becomes lived reality. The workers had discovered, in practice, what theorists from Rousseau to Rawls had argued in principle: that individual liberty depends on collective freedom, that no one is truly free until everyone is free. They were enacting, without knowing it, the most sophisticated theories of political obligation, but they were doing so from the concrete reality of shared labor and mutual dependence.
The role of the Catholic Church was essential here, but I think we often overlook how this intertwined with local Kashubian traditions. The Vistula River in northern Poland is seen as a dividing line between early Lutheranism and Catholicism, with Kashubians to the west generally adopting Catholicism. The Church in this area had extensive experience working with ethnically diverse communities, which may have prepared it for the inclusive approach with a Catholic influence that characterized Solidarity.
By August 17, the Interfactory Strike Committee had presented the government with 21 demands that went far beyond workplace concerns. They wanted the right to organize independent trade unions, the right to strike, the release of political prisoners, and increased freedom of expression. What had begun as a labor dispute had become a comprehensive challenge to the nature of political authority in communist Poland. The shipyard workers were claiming not just better working conditions, but the right to reshape the entire social contract.
On August 31, Wałęsa and Deputy Premier Mieczysław Jagielski signed an agreement that gave in to many of the workers’ demands. Wałęsa signed the document with a giant ballpoint pen decorated with a picture of Pope John Paul II—a gesture that perfectly captured the alliance between labor organizing and Catholic social teaching that would prove central to Solidarity’s success.
Within weeks, the Interfactory Strike Committee had evolved into something unprecedented: Solidarity claimed 10 million members by September 1981—representing one-third of Poland’s entire working-age population. No political organization in modern European history had ever mobilized such a broad cross-section of society so quickly.
What strikes me as remarkable is how this movement combined universal principles with deeply local knowledge. Bądkowski and other regional intellectuals brought an understanding of how communities could maintain their identity within larger structures—lessons the Kashubians had been practicing for centuries.
The movement’s success stemmed partly from its ability to speak multiple political languages simultaneously. To workers, it offered the promise of genuine representation and improved conditions. To intellectuals, it provided a forum for discussing human rights and democratic governance. To Catholics, it represented the application of social teaching about human dignity. To regional communities like the Kashubians, it offered the possibility of cultural autonomy within a democratic framework. This ideological flexibility was not a sign of intellectual confusion but of political genius—Solidarity had found a way to unite different constituencies around a shared commitment to expanding the realm of human freedom.
The government’s declaration of martial law on December 13, 1981, seemed to prove the naivety of this approach. General Wojciech Jaruzelski banned Solidarity, arrested its leaders, and imposed military rule. Some 6,000 activists were detained, including Wałęsa himself. Bądkowski continued his opposition activities underground until his death from cancer in 1984. His funeral, attended by 5,000 people including Wałęsa, Geremek, and Donald Tusk, became an anti-government manifestation.
I find Bądkowski’s story particularly moving because it represents the bridge between the old Poland and the new. He had fought in World War II, witnessed the reconstruction, helped build the Kashubian cultural revival, and lived to see the birth of Solidarity—though not its ultimate triumph.
But appearances deceived. Even underground, Solidarity continued to enjoy massive popular support. The movement had tapped into something deeper than immediate political grievances—it had articulated a vision of human dignity that could not be legislated out of existence. When Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, it was recognition not just of his personal courage but of the transformative power of the idea he represented.
The ultimate vindication came in 1989, when a change in the USSR’s foreign policy and collapsing domestic economic conditions forced the government back to the negotiating table. The Round Table talks led to semi-free elections in which Solidarity won 99 of 100 Senate seats and 160 of 161 lower house seats they were allowed to contest. Within months, Poland had its first non-communist government since the 1940s.
Yet here we encounter the deepest philosophical puzzle of the Solidarity story. The movement’s very success created the conditions for its own decline. By 2010, thirty years after its founding, the union had lost more than 90% of its original membership. The shipyard that had been the birthplace of Solidarity was declared bankrupt in 1996.
This decline saddens me, but I think it also contains an important lesson about the nature of political transformation. Perhaps the point was never to preserve Solidarity as an institution, but to demonstrate that ordinary people could reshape the terms of political life.
This trajectory—from revolutionary movement to marginalized organization—may seem like a story of failure, but it actually illuminates a profound aspect of the nature of political transformation. Solidarity succeeded not by preserving itself as an institution, but by transforming the entire context within which political life operated. Like a good revolutionary movement, it destroyed the conditions that had made it necessary.
As Donald Tusk said at the unveiling of Bądkowski’s monument in 2024: “There would be no ‘Solidarity,’ no independent Poland, no peaceful and very responsible process of building a new Poland, if not for Lech Bądkowski.” The Kashubian intellectual who bridged local traditions and universal principles had helped create something larger than himself.
Standing in the European Solidarity Centre today, I’m struck by how the story continues. The Kashubian language is now recognized as an official regional language, taught in schools, appearing on street signs. The patient work of cultural preservation that people like Bądkowski championed has borne fruit in ways they could hardly have imagined.
The shipyard workers had dreamed themselves out of existence, and in doing so, they had dreamed a new nation into being. They had shown that the most powerful form of political action is not the seizure of state power but the expansion of human possibilities—the seeding of new ways of being together that make old forms of domination obsolete.
Today, tourists visit the European Solidarity Centre, built on the site of the old shipyard, to learn about this extraordinary moment when workers became political philosophers and political philosophy became lived practice. The irony is perfect: the site of working-class rebellion has become a destination for middle-class edification. But perhaps this transformation is not a betrayal of Solidarity’s legacy but its fulfillment. The workers who once built ships have built something more durable: a new understanding of what it means to be free.
III. The Lessons of Becoming
Standing today on the former site of the Lenin Shipyard, now transformed into a gleaming museum and conference center, I found myself confronting the final philosophical puzzle that Gdańsk presents: What happens when the places that birthed revolutionary change become monuments to their own transformation? The European Solidarity Centre, with its rust-colored façade deliberately echoing the industrial heritage it commemorates, represents the ultimate metamorphosis—revolution packaged for tourist consumption, rebellion domesticated into heritage.
As I walked through the Centre’s exhibitions, I kept thinking about the visitors—school groups, international delegations, curious tourists. What do they take away from this place? Do they understand that the principles of 1980 remain as relevant today as they were then, or do they see it all as safely historical?
The transformation is both more subtle and more radical than it initially appears. Where once stood the massive cranes and assembly halls that built ships for the Soviet fleet, there now rises a complex dedicated to “building civil society.” The shift from heavy industry to “democracy industry” encapsulates not just Gdańsk’s evolution, but the broader trajectory of post-communist Europe itself. The city has become a laboratory for understanding how societies navigate the transition from one form of modernity to another.
This transformation reveals something crucial about the nature of post-communist transition that standard political science accounts often miss. The conventional narrative depicts 1989 as a clean break—from dictatorship to democracy, from planned economy to market capitalism, from East to West. But Gdańsk tells a more complex story, one in which the past is neither simply abandoned nor uncritically preserved, but creatively recombined in unexpected ways.
The Kashubian story embodies this complexity perfectly. Since 2005, Kashubian has enjoyed legal protection as Poland’s only official regional language, taught in schools and used in local administration. Here is a community that suffered under communist policies of ethnic homogenization, yet emerged from the transition stronger and more visible than before.
Consider the curious fact that this reconstructed city, populated largely by post-war newcomers, somehow produced the entire pantheon of post-communist Polish leadership. Lech Wałęsa, the shipyard electrician who became president. Donald Tusk, the liberal who would later lead the European Council. Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, the hyper-conservative twins who came to dominate right-wing politics. And most recently, Karol Nawrocki, the hyper-patriotic historian born in Gdańsk who served as director of the Museum of the Second World War in the city before becoming Poland’s president in 2025. These men emerged from the same local environment, walked the same reconstructed streets, yet their political visions could hardly be more different.
I’ve often wondered whether this proliferation of leaders reflects something deeper about the city’s culture. Growing up in a place where Kashubian families had practiced forms of local democracy for generations, where cultural survival had required constant negotiation with changing authorities, perhaps prepared these future leaders for the complexities of democratic politics.
This proliferation of political leadership from a single locale suggests something profound about the relationship between place and possibility. Growing up in a city that had been literally reconstructed from rubble, that had openly acknowledged its own invention while insisting on its legitimacy, these future leaders internalized a particular understanding of political reality: that institutions, identities, and nations are human constructions that can be unmade and remade. They learned that authenticity lies not in preserving some pristine past, but in having the courage to build something new.
The irony deepens when we consider that these leaders, despite their shared origins, came to embody radically different visions of Poland’s future. Tusk’s liberal cosmopolitanism and Jarosław Kaczyński’s conservative nationalism represent opposite poles of contemporary European politics. Yet both emerged from the same reconstructed city, both were shaped by the same experience of Solidarity, and both learned their politics in the same shipyard culture of collective action. Gdańsk had somehow produced not one political tradition but an entire spectrum of possibilities for contemporary Poland.
Perhaps this diversity reflects the Kashubian model of identity—the ability to be both Kashubian and Polish, both local and national, both traditional and modern. This comfort with multiple loyalties may have influenced the whole region's approach to politics.
The economic transformation of Gdańsk parallels its political evolution. The decline of the shipyards, which reached its nadir with the bankruptcy declaration in 1996, marked the end of the city’s identity as an industrial powerhouse. But rather than simply deindustrializing, Gdańsk reinvented itself as a center for services, technology, and tourism. The old shipyard became a symbol rather than a workplace, valuable precisely because it was no longer economically productive.
I found this transformation both inspiring and melancholy. Walking through the areas where my tour guide pointed out former industrial sites now converted to shopping centers and apartment complexes, I thought about the workers who had built their lives around those jobs. Economic transition is never just about statistics—it’s about human stories.
This shift from production to representation highlights a broader change in how European cities perceive their purpose. In the industrial age, cities like Gdańsk gained their identity from what they produced—ships, for example, but also the political movements that grew out of the shipbuilding culture. In the post-industrial age, they define their identity by what they symbolize. Today, Gdańsk is valuable not because it makes things (it mostly builds luxury yachts now), but because it stands for certain ideas about democracy, solidarity, and human dignity.
The tourist industry that has grown up around Solidarity represents this transformation in miniature. Visitors come not to see active shipyards but to experience the memory of shipyards, not to witness workers organizing but to learn about workers who once organized. The past has become a product, but a product with genuine transformative potential. The thousands of visitors who tour the Solidarity Centre each year are not merely consuming heritage; they are engaging with ideas about political possibility that retain their radical edge.
Yet I worry about the commodification of this history. When tour groups rush through the exhibitions taking selfies, are they really grappling with the implications of what happened here? Or are they treating it as just another stop on the Baltic tourism circuit?
My concerns about commodification became viscerally real during my visit to the European Solidarity Centre. The permanent exhibition moved me profoundly—perhaps because it awakened my own memories of those tumultuous Perestroika years between 1985 and 1991, when I was young and the world seemed to be transforming before my eyes. Walking through the recreated shipyard gates, seeing the photographs of workers’ faces filled with hope and determination, I felt that familiar mixture of excitement and uncertainty that characterized those revolutionary moments.
But then something happened that shattered this emotional connection in the most disturbing way.
Descending to the ground floor, I encountered a conference on Security Technologies, complete with exhibition stands advertising surveillance and control services to governments and private companies. At one booth, I found myself in conversation with a security veteran who, upon learning of my interest in the Solidarity movement, assured me with professional confidence that such a movement would never succeed today. His company, he explained, would have advised General Jaruzelski on how to manipulate public attention and establish more effective security measures. He spoke of social media monitoring, predictive analytics for crowd control, and psychological operations as if they were mere technical solutions to the problem of popular uprising.
I was appalled. Here, in the very building dedicated to celebrating the triumph of workers over authoritarian control, contemporary authoritarianism was marketing its services. The irony was so stark it felt like a deliberate provocation.
Several minutes later, still reeling from this encounter, I sat in the Centre’s café and noticed an advertisement for a tourist card offering substantial discounts for visitors to Gdańsk. The promotional material featured the iconic image of Lech Wałęsa during the 1980 uprising—his face transformed into a marketing tool, his moment of revolutionary courage reduced to a tourism incentive. The man who had risked everything to challenge state power was now being used to sell city breaks.
The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. In the span of half an hour, I had witnessed Solidarity’s legacy simultaneously preserved as sacred memory, corrupted by those who would prevent its repetition, and commodified for consumption.
But the most sobering encounter came later, as I explored the deindustrialized dock areas where steampunk sculptures now mark the sites of former industrial glory. There I met three workers taking their late lunch break near the waterfront. Curious about how contemporary workers viewed their city’s revolutionary heritage, I struck up a conversation in my broken Polish. The results were deeply troubling: two of the three were only vaguely informed about the Solidarity movement’s actual history and significance. One of the three was not a member of any workers’ union. Most disturbingly, only one believed that workers today could effectively defend their rights through collective action.
These men worked in the very city where workers had once shown the world that solidarity could topple seemingly invincible systems of power. Yet they seemed to inhabit a completely different universe from the one celebrated in the museum just 500 meters away.
This striking sequence of encounters clarified an essential aspect of political memory in post-communist Europe. The Solidarity Centre presents the movement’s legacy as an ongoing debate, questioning what the principles of 1980 might mean today. However, my day revealed three very different responses to that question: the security industry views those principles as threats that must be effectively neutralized; the tourism industry sees them as products to be sold; and many current workers consider them irrelevant to their present (non)struggles.
The deeper lesson of Gdańsk’s transformation concerns the nature of political memory itself. Revolutionary moments create not just new institutions but new forms of consciousness—new ways of imagining what is possible. But consciousness, unlike monuments, requires constant renewal. When it atrophies, the physical monuments become mere shells, beautiful perhaps, but emptied of transformative power.
This approach reminds me of how Kashubian culture has survived—not by freezing traditions in amber, but by adapting them to new circumstances while preserving their essential spirit. Traditional Kashubian embroidery still uses the same five colors representing forests, fire, sun, earth, and water, but contemporary artists incorporate these symbols into modern designs.
This approach reflects a sophisticated understanding of how political traditions actually work. Contrary to conservative fantasies of unchanging values handed down from generation to generation, genuine political traditions survive by constantly adapting to new circumstances. They remain alive by changing, and they influence the present by refusing to remain locked in the past.
In this sense, the transformation of Gdańsk from an industrial city to a democracy museum represents not the death of Solidarity but its evolution. The workers who once organized strikes have been replaced by educators who organize workshops on civil society. The specific demands of 1980—for independent trade unions and the right to strike—have been generalized into broader principles about participation and human dignity. The local has become universal, the particular has become general, the historical has become philosophical.
Walking through the city today, I’m struck by how many languages you hear on the streets—Polish, of course, but also English, German, Italian, and others. This multilingual reality would have been unimaginable during the communist period, yet it somehow feels appropriate for a city that has always been a meeting place of cultures.
On my visit to the local university campus, I encountered a statue that embodied this linguistic complexity in the most unexpected way. The bronze figure of Krzysztof Celestyn Mrongowiusz (1764-1855) stands before the University of Gdańsk library, a man virtually unknown outside Poland yet crucial to understanding the intellectual heritage of this region. Mrongowiusz was a student of Immanuel Kant; young Krzysztof Celestyn attended the philosopher’s lectures on metaphysics, anthropology, theology, and ethics, taking detailed notes that remain among our most important sources for understanding Kant’s teachings today. But what made him remarkable was his decision to devote his life to defending and preserving the Polish language in Prussia, creating some of the first Polish-German dictionaries and translations.
Standing before his statue, I was moved by the irony: here was a man who studied with one of Germany’s greatest philosophers, yet chose to dedicate his scholarly life to preserving the linguistic heritage of a people dismissed by Prussian authorities. He represented a different model of intellectual engagement—one that chose local loyalty over imperial opportunity.
In 1797, at the request of Prussian authorities, Mrongowiusz drafted a memorandum proposing the establishment of a Polish language chair at the University of Königsberg, following a royal decree introducing Polish as an optional subject in universities and gymnasiums. When the proposal failed due to local resistance, he moved to Gdańsk, where he served as a pastor and taught the Polish language while conducting pioneering research on Kashubian folklore. His presence in the city created an intellectual bridge between the philosophical sophistication of Enlightenment Königsberg and the grassroots cultural preservation efforts that would prove so crucial in the centuries to follow.
The ultimate philosophical lesson of Gdańsk concerns the relationship between place and possibility. Cities, like people, are not simply the products of their past but the authors of their future. They become what they choose to become, within the constraints imposed by history and geography, but not determined by those constraints. Gdańsk chose to become a symbol of democratic possibility, and in making that choice, it helped create the reality it symbolized.
This is perhaps why Gdańsk feels simultaneously familiar and strange to contemporary visitors. Its reconstructed architecture evokes a medieval past that never quite existed, while its political legacy points toward democratic futures that remain unrealized. It is a city caught between times, serving as a bridge between the Europe that was and the Europe that might yet be.
For me, this captures something essential about the post-communist condition—we’re all living in this in-between space, building new identities from the materials of the past while trying to imagine different post-transition futures.
The lesson extends beyond Poland, beyond post-communist Europe, to anyone grappling with questions of identity and change in the twenty-first century. We live in an age when old certainties have collapsed and new possibilities have not yet crystallized, when traditional sources of meaning have been undermined, but alternative sources have not yet been established. In such circumstances, Gdańsk offers a model: the courage to admit your own construction, the wisdom to build on ruins rather than starting from scratch, and the faith that authenticity lies not in preserving the past but in creating futures worthy of the sacrifices that made them possible.
Conclusion: The Courage of Reconstruction
As my train pulled away from Gdańsk’s central station, heading back toward Frankfurt an der Oder, I found myself contemplating the unique gift this rebuilt city offers to anyone willing to accept it. I repeat: Gdańsk has shown me that the deepest authenticity comes from openly recognizing our own artifice, that the most meaningful truths come not from holding onto what was, but from having the courage to create what we think should be in the future.
I keep returning to the image of Lech Bądkowski’s grave, marked with the Kashubian Griffin and the words “writer, soldier, citizen.” Here was someone who understood that identity is not a fixed inheritance but a conscious creation, shaped by the stories we tell and the communities we build.
There is something almost universally applicable about Gdańsk’s example. How many of us, after all, have not had to reconstruct ourselves after some personal catastrophe? How many communities have not faced the choice between clinging to a damaged past and imagining a different future? How many nations have not grappled with the question of what to preserve and what to leave behind? In all these cases, Gdańsk suggests, the path forward lies not in denying the fact of reconstruction but in embracing it as an opportunity for conscious creation.
The Kashubian example is particularly instructive here. They survived centuries of strong assimilation pressure from Germans and Poles by maintaining their cultural core while adapting to changing circumstances. They show us that preservation and transformation are not opposites but dance partners.
The shipyard workers who dreamed themselves into political relevance and then dreamed themselves out of economic necessity understood something profound about the relationship between memory and hope. They probably knew—or felt?—that the past is not a fixed inheritance but a living resource, valuable only insofar as it enables us to imagine and create better futures. They showed us that the most revolutionary act is not destroying the old world but building a new one, brick by brick, idea by idea, relationship by relationship.
In our own age of accelerating change and collapsing certainties, when so much of what we took for granted about politics, economics, and social life is being called into question, Gdańsk’s lesson becomes urgent. We are all, whether we admit it or not, living in reconstructed cities, working with inherited materials to build something that has never existed before. The question is whether we have the honesty to admit it and the courage to do it well.
I think now of those three workers by the waterfront, and of the security officer so confident in his ability to prevent future Solidarities. They represent two different forms of forgetting—one passive, born of new domination that successfully disconnected them from their history; the other active, born of the determination to ensure that history does not repeat itself.
Perhaps the deepest gift of any true journey isn't the collection of experiences or the accumulation of knowledge, but the recognition of our own capacity for change and our responsibility to keep the conditions for that change possible. Gdańsk, in its honest acknowledgment of its multiple reconstructions, reflects the human condition itself. We are all palimpsests, reconstructed beings bearing the traces of what came before while writing new stories over the old. Our identities are false syntheses of true chaos inside and outside us.
But my encounters there reminded me that reconstruction is never a completed project. Each generation must choose anew whether to preserve the possibilities that previous generations fought to create, or to allow them to atrophy into mere tourist attractions.
The city that admits its own invention teaches us to admit our own—and in doing so, to claim authorship of our own becoming. But it also teaches us that authorship comes with responsibility. The workers of the 1980s didn’t just create a movement; they authored a possibility that future workers might also organize, dream, and transform their circumstances. Whether that possibility survives depends not on museums or monuments, but on whether each new generation recognizes it as their own inheritance and their own obligation.
As my train carried me away from Gdańsk, I found myself thinking not just about what I had learned, but about what I had been asked to remember, to preserve, and to pass on. The reconstructed city had taught me its most important lesson: that everything we value must be continuously recreated, or it ceases to exist.
Notes
1. Gdańsk after the Post-War Reconstruction. (n.d.). Transparent Cities. Retrieved from https://transparentcities.in.ua/en/news/yak-zminyvsia-hdansk-pislia-povoiennoi-vidbudovy
2. Tusk, D. (1998). Udawanie miasta. In G. Boros & Z. Gach (Eds.), Program ożywienia Śródmieścia Gdańska (pp. 44–53). Gdańsk: Regionalny Ośrodek Studiów i Ochrony Środowiska Kulturowego.