04/06/2011

Kommander's Car



An earlier column, on the Baltic Sea, looked at the British tendency for stereotyping when considering other parts of Europe but that it seemed harder to get a handle on some countries than others. The same could apply to cities . Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen: everyone thinks they know them, everyone knows songs about them. Berlin is familiar through numerous films – often either ones full of shadows, raincoats and furtive conversations or of gigolos, brothels and night clubs in the Weimar era-- and artists from Bowie to Japan have covered the city. But other capitals stay a bit hazy at the back of the mind. What could you say about Tallin? Ljubljana? Podgorica? Lutenblag? (The last named doesn’t actually exist, it is the capital of the spoof fictional country of Molvania)

There are other places that sort of fall between these two camps: there are a set of widely held images, and a handful of songs, but they tend to be fairly monochrome, a very partial view. Poland and its capital Warsaw perhaps fall into this category. Western songs about Warsaw are generally pretty bleak: if given visual form they would be some graffiti on a grey rain -flecked wall of an apartment tower block. It seems hard, too, for song writers to escape the shadow of World War 2. Take Warsaw by Joy Division (whose original band name was actually Warsaw and whose change of nomenclature was inspired by the prostitution area of a concentration camp): it is a bleakly dark and gloomy sound that supposedly references Rudolph Hess. The 1977 David Bowie/Brian Eno collaboration, Warszawa, is an equally stark and desolate largely instrumental evocation of the city. In Warsaw Girl, Olenka and the Autumn Lovers painted another depressing picture: ’Standing in the line waiting for her daily bread...bedroom in a concrete slum, a narrow alleyway, a shadow in a smoke-filled bar”. It comes as quite a relief to find Mike Batt’s Warsaw is just about a tragic romance: “In Warsaw a heart is breaking and now there’s nothing we can do. In Warsaw she will be waiting but I can’t go back again” (It is not clear why not: hasn’t he heard of Wizz Air?)

It is true that it is not difficult to find the grey and gloomy in Warsaw to match the songs above. Away from the cobbled streets, alleyways and outdoor cafes of the Old Town area there you can soon find the housing blocks and graffiti, concrete expanses, the anonymous shopping arcades where you can still espy 'Man at C&A'. (Rather like the Hatfield of the Oxford Street column). But you can also find the parks, theatres and concert halls. And you can also see the mixture of past and present and the echoes of the Second World War that many songs still reference. You can see it not just in the large areas totally rebuilt since 1945 and in the museums and memorials to the Warsaw Ghetto but sometimes re-enacted in a real living sense. On a visit there last week there was a late night altercation between a Pole and German visitor at the hotel. The German was later seen in the early hours wailing by the war memorial outside; ’Nobody likes the Germans’ came the lament.

In some ways the song here, Kommander's Car by Katy Carr, is in the same genre as those mentioned that see today’s Warsaw or Poland through the prism of the recent past. It is also, however, an unusual sort of song, an example of an artist of today building a song round the reminiscences and memories of someone else: a kind of oral history returned in musical form. Katy Carr, a singer of English/Polish heritage, wrote the song around the story of an escape from Auschwitz of four inmates in the camp commander’s car: it was subsequently performed in Poland to the surviving escapee and to audiences in Warsaw and London. (The song only makes sense with the accompanying video. The first link below shows the trailer and shortened song version. The second link gives the full song) By such an exchange does the past and present become interlinked.

Impressions of places are, I suppose, a mixture of personal experiences and preconceptions gleaned from song and film and photos. The expectation of Warsaw might, therefore, be bleak and – like Budapest –gloomy. My own experiences are based on a few days – but ,then, Bowie wrote Warszawa after a brief train stop-over there. What struck me most was the blend of past and present into one, where sometimes what seemed old was a recent reconstruction. And what I take away as images are perhaps trivial things- a shop window in a cobbled street full of different kinds of breads and pastries or eating beetroot soup whilst the sun sets over the clock tower opposite – but they give colour to the black and white tones put up by many songs. The Shangri-Las once did a song called Past, Present and Future: it wasn’t about Warsaw but the title maybe fits.


31 comments:

  1. Fascinating Geoff! Also, happy one year anniversary! Tomorrow is one year to the day since you started this blog:) I wish I could explain fully how much it's meant to me this past year. THANK YOU for the education, enlightenment, provocation and affirmation.

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  2. Just spotted the new column is up! Great column Geoff! For anyone curious about the fictional country of Molvania, by the way, I recommend the "travel guide" - http://www.molvania.com.au/molvania/ - one of the funniest books I've ever read......

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  3. Oh dear, I would have said that Tallin, Ljubljana and Podgorica were all fake too:)

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  4. Oh dear - it's funny you mention Wizz Air. I took a flight with them last month from Barcelona to Prague. They missed the deadline for landing at Prague, which closes its airport at 11pm. So they wanted to land us in Katowice, Poland, where we should take an 8 hour busride to Prague. We tried to have a mutiny and so they just cancelled the whole flight. WORST AIRLINE IN THE WORLD!

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  5. Wow, this story made me laugh a lot - even though I suppose it's quite sad: "The German was later seen in the early hours wailing by the war memorial outside; ’Nobody likes the Germans’ came the lament". Brilliant.

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  6. Great column! I'm not totally sure what 'Man at C&A' means - but is it this Specials song - http://www.thespecials.com/music/view/21 - ?

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  7. My first impression of Warsaw was how well built the place was. The city is very much a celebration of the versatility, beauty and strength that can be found in concrete. Yes concrete is an excellent building material, but don’t build a whole city out of it. Perhaps I am being a little harsh, after all Warsaw was almost entirely destroyed by the Germans in 1944 following the Warsaw Uprising and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Warsaw is sometimes known as the “Phoenix City” because it has risen from the flames.

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  8. I love how we get realtime postings - you went to Poland last week?? So cool!

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  9. Warsaw was nothing like I expected. I expected gray and dreary skies and buildings and unhappy people. Instead I got YARN BOMBING. I tried to explain this guerrilla activity to someone recently and they thought I was making it up. But no. Yarn bombing is serious. Knitters (or crocheters) get together and cover something banal with knitting (or crocheting). Crazy times.

    In the Old Town, I saw a man standing on his head. He stood on his head for a really long time. I didn’t give him any money, but in hindsight, I should have. Because standing on your head for like hours on end is pretty damn cool.

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  10. Oh my god - it DOES look like Hatfield!! - http://www.nrgtravel.com/images/Warsaw/warsaw6.jpg

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  11. The young German was crying on my shoulder at about 5.00 in the morning. Found out the following day that the monument was erected in memory of 500 young Polish officers murdered by the Russians. Schade!

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  12. Geoff you may enjoy ‘City of Ruins’, a five minute-long documentary which simulates an aircraft flight over a ruined Warsaw in 1945 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxb5H77wYt0

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  13. Geoff, I agree that one of the images of Warsaw people have is the graffiti-covered grey concrete apartment building, but actually the graffiti there is often really interesting and historic - including leftover Communist graffiti:

    http://www.travelpod.com/travel-photo/brett-millie/2/1284585900/communist-graffiti.jpg/tpod.html

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  14. Pre-war Warsaw looks so different:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWy15-o2thA
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrHfHtzCl7s

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  15. I'm not sure I ever fully understood why the Soviets rebuilt cities after WW2 with so little interest in aesthetics - although I know it was because they were trying to the plain, utilitaritan ‘political correctness’ of Communist ideology.

    It's rare that people remember Warsaw as it once was - the Paris of the east - a vibrant, visually gorgeous city that, with its crossroads position between the east and west of Europe, reflected in its architecture the entire spectrum of European civilization. Historical treasures dating back centuries stood side-by-side with the latest architectural trends. Its leafy cobbled boulevards, ringing with the clatter of electric trams, horse-carts, bicycles and shiny black motor-cars, gave Warsaw a cosmopolitan ambience comparable to neighbouring Prague and Vienna.

    Tragically, this Warsaw was shelled, bombed and dynamited to oblivion. And while the government after 1945 did agree to rebuild some isolated elements (such as the Royal Castle and Old Town Market Square), they erected an essentially new city on top of the rubble. Bland concrete blocks, in place of the Gothic spires and ornate clock towers which are now gone forever.

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  16. Hello, thanks for the mention. You might also want to write about my song "The Ride To Agadir".

    Mike

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  17. I had never heard of Warsaw Girl, but here is their song Olenka and the Autumn Lovers for anyone who wants it.......
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZc0hwQ1s4A

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  18. Here is the Shangri-Las song Past, Present and Future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3hCZiTNric

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  19. I love the Bowie song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gy94N_mcWs. Apparently it was inspired when David Bowie walked around one of the peripheral railway stations in Warsaw. He took a walk during the stopover of the train running from Moscow during a journey on the trans-syberian railway in 1977. The surrounding of the railway station is quite industrial and depressing, which you can hear in the song. The name of the rail way station in Warsaw is "Warszawa GdaƄska."

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  20. Here is Warsaw by Joy Division - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuVG2WUlLyw
    Apparently the lyrics include a reference to Hess' prison number, 31G-350125, and many believe the song to be about Hess. To add to this, Bernard Sumner once shouted "you all forgot Rudolf Hess" from the stage at one of their gigs.

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  21. Martha-C&A was a high street chain that vanished from the UK some ten years ago. 'Man at C&A' was a rather naff range of mens wear for 'normal men'- which was what the Specials' song was referencing.

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  22. Thanks Geoff! (and for anyone else American, "naff" means "dorky" - I just looked it up!)

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  23. I found online the description of the real story on which the song is based:

    Kazik was imprisoned as a young man in Auschwitz for being a Polish Eagle Scout on 20th June 1940. Exactly two years later, on 20th June 1942, upon discovering a friend’s name was on the list to be killed, he decided they had to escape. Kazik and three fellow prisoners made their daring escape, driving the Kommander’s car to freedom. Stealing SS uniforms and guns, they vowed they would shoot themselves rather than fail in the attempt as the ramifications to their fellow prisoners for attacking the guards would be unthinkable.

    Just metres from the last of four barriers, the gate had still not opened. One of Kazik’s fellow escapees grabbed his shoulder and said “Do something.” Kazik got out of the car in the SS uniform and yelled in German at the solider “Wake up you bugger. Get this gate open before I open you!” The guard swung open the gate, thinking Kazik was the Kommander and the four men drove away to freedom.

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  24. Here are the full lyrics to Kommander's Car:

    VERSE 1
    50 m is all that lies between us Come to me baby Come to me and save me

    CHORUS
    Drive! Drive! We’ve got to drive – We’ve got to drive away – hey hey!
    We’ve got to drive away hey hey! We’ve got to drive away hey hey!
    Drive! Drive! We’ve got to drive – We’ve got to drive away – hey hey!
    We’ve got to drive away hey hey! We’ve got to drive away hey hey!

    VERSE 2
    Take my hand love Out of this darkness This polish bird must FLY
    and he won’t be back no more
    yes he won’t be back no more x 3
    Eighty metres Osiemdziesiat metrow Fifty metres Piedziesiat metrow
    Eighteen metres Ociemnascie metrow Fifteen metres Pietnascie metrow

    Out in the Kommanders Car! Out in the Kommanders Car!
    Drive! Drive! We’ve got to drive – We’ve got to drive away – hey hey!
    We’ve got to drive away hey hey! We’ve got to drive away hey hey!
    Drive! Drive! We’ve got to drive – We’ve got to drive away – hey hey!
    We’ve got to drive away hey hey! We’ve got to drive away hey hey!

    VERSE 3 [CHORUS CHORDS]
    Kazik! Zrob cos Kazik! Zrob cos Kazik! Odzknolem sie
    Faktycznie przeciez oni na mnie licza

    VERSE 4
    My heart it beats and my palms are wet This Polish bird has Flown

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  25. She has also produced a short film on the same topic of the escape from Auschwitz - called "Kazik and the Kommander’s Car" from 2009. It's a documentary about a Polish boy scout, Kazimierz Piechowski, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz concentration camp and then made a daring escape. Carr’s song about the escape provides the soundtrack for parts of the film. The film was inspired by the Holocaust exhibition at IWM London, apparently. Directed by Hannah Lovell.

    Looks like it's screening again in London later this month: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/119868%5D

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  26. Apparently she is also now trying to shoot a feature film about Kazimierz Piechowski and his escape from Auschwitz disguised as an SS soldier.

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  27. This is such great English folk! With interesting electonica.

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  28. I love this singer (hadn't heard of her before) - she is kind off Beth Orton meets Cara Dillon with hints of Eleanor McEvoy.

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  29. She has great album artwork too = http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/898/59340108.jpg

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  30. Thank you Geoff. I see you don't repeat artists, but if you visit Berlin, you might consider listening to my song "The Berliner Ring", which is actually a large motorway which goes around Berlin, much like the M25. I used it as a metaphor for Marlene Dietrich’s time in Berlin. Before Dietrich left Berlin she was a huge cult star in Germany and this song questions whether her move to the USA was a good thing for her career.

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  31. Thanks! I haven't been to Berlin but will listen to the song there when I do.

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