Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 2, Autumn 2019 | Page 17

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
like other German graves and cemeteries. Regardless of historical circumstances�which
may justify some human actions�the destruction of cemeteries is, and always has been,
disgraceful. When I became mayor of Wroclaw, we bought out all tombstones from the
destroyed cemeteries that were still in the possession of local monumental masons. We
invited bids and built a unique Common Memory Monument. The monument, incorporating
some of those headstones, commemorates all the former residents of Wroclaw.
What is more important than the erection of the monument, however, is that the day
after its ceremonial unveiling, people of Wroclaw came here in large numbers, solemn
and filled with undisguised emotions, and lit hundreds of candles.
The Pan Tadeusz museum, soon to open its doors to the public in the heart of Wroclaw,
on the Rynek, will be a modern cultural facility with a tour starting with the display
of what is probably the most treasured artefact relating to the history of Polish literature�the
original manuscript of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz. Visitors will be able
to “touch” its virtual pages, turn them over and print them out. However, the core idea of
the museum concerns something much more important. What we want to show there is
the great extent to which Polish nineteenth-century literature, from Mickiewicz to Sienkiewicz�we
really have a lot of manuscripts from this period, by these and many other
writers, in the collections of Wroclaw’s Ossolineum Library�played a role in shaping
our present-day attitudes. All of the Polish twentieth-century pro-independence insurrections,
from the Warsaw uprising to the fall of communism, which was defeated by
the Solidarity movement, were in fact rooted in romantic and post-romantic ideas. Our
national pride and our attitudes to the outside world have largely been formed by these
readings and the culture and tradition that have grown around them. Without a doubt,
this is what defines the Polish thinking of my generation and older generations. And this
is the story that will be told by the Pan Tadeusz museum.
Wroclaw’s development is founded on a strong economy, which has been growing at an
amazing rate of 13% a year since Poland’s accession to the European Union. This rapid
growth is a result of numerous projects aimed at creating new jobs. During just the first
two years of participation in the common market, 125,000 new jobs were created, an impressive
achievement for a city with a population of 650,000. The vast majority of the new
jobs were created by local entrepreneurs, but the impulse for their creation came from
foreign direct investments, of which Wroclaw attracted a fair share, running in the billions
of euros. Before making their final decisions in favour of Wroclaw, the foreign investors
were interested in all kinds of issues, including ... the repertoire of the Opera House.
The idea behind our efforts to secure the title of European Capital of Culture is to create
a high quality of life by expanding our cultural offering, both in terms of infrastructure
and in terms of content, and to emphasise a broader concept: that the liberal (in terms
of business) and the social facets of a city must be closely interlinked because modern
times do not tolerate dichotomous contrasts between liberal and social approaches. This
is particularly evident in urbanised areas, which require a large degree of economic freedom
and high levels of citizen participation, including�perhaps primarily�in culture.
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