Off The Beaten Track: The underground punk wave at war with the Soviet Union
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Wisława Szymborska: The writer who survived the war and inspired the European music scene
“After every war, someone has to tidy up.” – Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012).
What use is art in the face of war? This was a question that pained many creatives in the 20th century and, sadly, continues to do so. What on earth can a pen or a paintbrush do to quell or reconcile something as absolute as the horrors of the holocaust?
During the First World War, Marcel Duchamp answered by hanging a urinal in an art gallery. He was scoffed at by critics for the utter pretentious absurdity of it. How on earth can that be art? What the hell does that represent or have to say? Duchamp dispelled this, in a roundabout way, by saying, how else, exactly, could I represent the utter insanity of men who have never met, slaying each other in their droves on the battlefield in the name of nothing much?
A mere 20 years later, the same horrific question would be posed to the next generation of young artists as unrest broke out in Europe and soon the most damning chapter in human history would be upon us. In 1939, when German forces invaded Poland, a 16-year-old aspiring writer would place herself at the forefront of the battle of art against absurdity; it was all unfolding before her eyes and sixty years later the fruits of her defiance would help form the soundtrack that toppled the Berlin Wall. This is the story of Wisława Szymborska.
Living in Kraków when World War Two broke out, Szymborska was forced into underground education classes. Nazi racial theories deemed that the citizens of their invaded Eastern territory would become uneducated serfs for the German race. As Heinrich Himmler abhorrently declared: “For the non-German population of the East there can be no type of school above the four-grade rudimentary school.”
Defiance, however, was forthcoming, and many Polish educators organised covert underground courses all around the country. Although death and deportation were a constant threat for the educators and pupils alike, a network of ‘Flying Universities’ was borne, and it was here that Szymborska’s passion for art thrived.
She avoided deportation by working as a railroad employee and began writing stories and poems in secret. Spawned from these horrific circumstances came her influential style. Her defiance was not only in her actions but in her prose, as she once penned: “This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.”
In 1945, as the horrors of the Second World War were drawing to a close, her first poem was published. Looking for Words speaks of how feeble language can prove in the face of reconciling an atrocity. “The bravest—coward,” she writes of the various words at her disposal, “The most disdainful—Still saintly, The cruellest—too merciful, The most hated—little trust, This word must be a volcano, which hits, drags, and shoots down, like the fearful God’s ire.”
Although the surface may speak of word’s futility in the face of all they have seen, the message underneath is one of measured reconciliation. This became a paradigm of her work thereafter—of the ironic power of diminutive, little words. Her poems are laden with doubt but a doubt worth celebrating in place of foolhardy folly, or as she put it herself: “They think as long as it takes, and not a second more, since doubt lies lurking behind that second…”
In its own oddly uncertain way, her voice was paradoxically unflinching. Her actions followed suit. She left university in 1948 without finishing her degree because she couldn’t afford to go on and thought she could continue writing all the same anyway. Soon, she began she was working as a secretary for an educational biweekly magazine as well as an illustrator. Her first book was then published in 1949 but did not pass censorship as it failed to “meet socialist requirements”.
She remained a literary dissident, nevertheless, and continued to tackle themes as she saw fit throughout. In the wreck and ruin of the divided Europe that surrounded her, she likened the position of the youth to that of a cat in the empty apartment of its recently deceased owner. This is how many felt, and this is why her words were delivered with such ironic precision—she brought the hammer down on society but realised mid-swing that there was nothing to hit.
This had a huge impact on pop culture in a direct sense as many of her poems were set to music like Kora’s cover of ‘Nothing Twice’ or ‘Buffo’ being transposed over classical pieces, and even ‘Love at First Sight’ inspiring the film Three Colours: Red. However, her greatest impact on culture was the subversive way in which she influenced the European music that came from the fractured East.
She sought to reflect the society around her, in part, to try and heal it. However, she didn’t go about this in the brutalist way that you might expect. Despite her fortitude, she was not stern or dogmatic. Later, this would inspire the likes of Kraftwerk who took her lead in many regards. “We are not artists nor musicians,” the German band exclaimed, with a line that could’ve been plucked straight from a Szymborska poem, “We are workers.”
Although Szymborska’s work was far from prolific it turned heads amid the youth in Europe for its fresh avant-garde and daring style. In truth, despite its elegance, it was poetry of the underground, and the music of the East would soon follow it down to the basement.
She once said, “Poets, if they are genuine, must … keep repeating ‘I don’t know.” Adding that the phrase “I don’t know” is “small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.” When Soviet punk moved underground and began slowly shaking the wall that divided the world, this same notion would be uttered by many of the literary bands. The kids were clearly in the knowledge that they didn’t know all the answers, but that shouldn’t stop the march of progress and liberation that they were defiantly espousing, just as Szymborska had in the decades before them.
In Europe, at this time, rock ‘n’ roll came over like a benevolent gift from America after the horrors of the war and the ripples that were still wreaking havoc, but in many ways, a cultural revolution was already underway thanks to bold creatives like Szymbroska who made sure that youth had a voice and women had a place in art and politics.
Her work had a quality that all musicians seem to crave, and indeed all of them lapped up when exposed to her work: it was ahead of its time. The sheer caustic force of her words calls out for the vicious violence of a searing guitar. Szymborska’s emboldened stance and innovative way with words was key to experimental European genres like Krautrock and electronic music. In ‘Maybe All This’, she even likens the world to the sort of lab that the likes of Kraftwerk would inhabit as they looked boldly into the future, trying to somehow assimilate it into their music, but clinging to the experimental licence of ‘I don’t know’.
Her poetry didn’t skirt around the issues of the war and subsequent terrorism; she eviscerated the subject with a pure brute forcefulness that the European rockers who followed would have to attempt to catch up to. Her poems infiltrated the culture of Europe and revitalised it after the war with a musical sense of catharsis and all the experimental sounds that followed are indebted to her fortitude in the battle of art against absurdity.
