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Part VII: Poland
To understand Poland, you must understand Frederic Chopin. First listen
to his Polonaise and then to his Revolutionary Etude. They are about
hope, despair and rage. In the Polonaise, you hear the most
extraordinary distillation of a nation’s existence. In the Revolutionary
Etude, written in the wake of an uprising in Warsaw in 1830 crushed by
Russian troops, there is both rage and resignation. In his private
journal, Chopin challenged God for allowing this national catastrophe to
happen, damning the Russians and condemning the French for not coming
to Warsaw’s aid. Afterward, Chopin never returned to Poland, but Poland
never left his mind.
Poland finally became an independent nation in 1918. The prime minister
it chose to represent it at Versailles was Ignacy Paderewski, a pianist
and one of the finest interpreters of Chopin. The conference restored
the territories of Greater Poland, and Paderewski helped create the
interwar Poland. Gdansk (the German Danzig) set the stage for Poland’s
greatest national disaster when Germany and the Soviet Union allied to
crush Poland, and Danzig became the German justification for its
destruction. Read more »
