Travel and the Terrifying Sublime

Friday 15 September 2023

I arrived as scheduled in Warsaw on Monday 11 September, and found the city to be quite different from what I remembered of it. It was a warm evening, and I went for a walk as soon as I dropped my luggage at my hotel. The streets were full of people, and there were many outside cafés filled with people drinking and dining. Where I walked in the historical center it was very clean, with no trash to be seen on the streets. I was last in Warsaw thirty-one years ago, in 1992. This was sufficiently soon after the end of the communist regime that the pall of being behind the Iron Curtain still hung over the city. What was most striking, however, was the block after block of gray concrete buildings in the most soulless kind of brutalism.

The city had been largely demolished at the end of the Second World War, and it was rebuilt in the most horrific Stalinist style imaginable. The effect of this was so powerful I count it as my one authentic experience of the terrifying sublime. This may sound poetic (or intended to be poetic), but it is a technical term from Kantian aesthetics.

Kant said that the beautiful charms while the sublime moves. Say you stand in front of a work of art and you are impressed by its beauty. You have been charmed. But say you stand in front of a work of art and you are genuinely moved by it, i.e., you respond to the work in some visceral way. That is the sublime, and it is distinct from the beautiful. Some of Kant’s examples are strangely specific, especially for a man who eschewed travel:

“The finer feeling that we will now consider is preeminently of two kinds: the feeling of the sublime and of the beautiful. Being touched by either is agreeable, but in very different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peaks arise above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or the depiction of the kingdom of hell by Milton arouses satisfaction, but with dread; by contrast, the prospect of meadows strewn with flowers, of valleys with winding brooks, covered with grazing herds, the description of Elysium, or Homer’s depiction of the girdle of Venus also occasion an agreeable sentiment, but one that is joyful and smiling. For the former to make its impression on us in its proper strength, we must have a feeling of the sublime, and in order properly to enjoy the latter we must have a feeling for the beautiful. Lofty oaks and lonely shadows in sacred groves are sublime, flowerbeds, low hedges, and trees trimmed into figures are beautiful. The night is sublime, the day is beautiful.” (The bold face text is in the translation; I didn’t check the original German text to see if it is there, too.)

Kant recognized three forms of the sublime, the terrifying sublime, the noble sublime, and the magnificent sublime. So when one experiences the terrifying sublime, one is moved in a terrifying way, by dread and melancholy, Kant says. This is the effect that horror movies seek to inculcate: they want you to respond viscerally to the action of the screen, whether a sinking feeling, or the hair raising on the back of your neck, or a chill down your spine. These are all hackneyed ways to describe familiar human reactions to terror (or something like terror), but precisely because they are hackneyed, they are based on very real experiences for which our language has an impoverished vocabulary, making it difficult for us to describe them; thus, we turn to clichés to express ourselves. (Last Year at Marienbad also fills the viewer with dread and melancholy, but I don’t think anyone calls this a horror flick.)

You might wonder if my response to Warsaw in 1992 was something peculiar to me alone; it was not. I will recount some of the circumstances so you can understand my account. At the time, one of sisters was employed by REI, a sports equipment retailer, and with the Iron Curtain lifted the company was organizing tours in Central European nation-states that were previously difficult of access. To do a dry run of these tours, they offered them to employees at a deep discount, and so it was that I signed up, along with my sister and three others from the Portland REI store, to ride bicycles across Slovakia. We met the group in Warsaw, were taken to the border, and spent two weeks riding across Slovakia from one border to the other, in a long, S-shaped curve that covered a lot of countryside. This bike ride across Slovakia was one of the peak experiences of my life. Once we were able to make clear to the Slovaks who handled the ground arrangements that we weren’t exclusively interested in biking, but were also interested in sightseeing, they took us to all kinds of out-of-the-way-places of the type that tourists usually don’t see. It was great.

In any case, I had spoken to my sister about Warsaw when we were there, and when we met the other members of the bicycling group we talked with them about it too. I can’t remember any exact descriptive phrases employed, but everyone had had a similar impression of Warsaw: that it was depressingly gray in an overwhelming way. With this vivid memory of the city, I had no reason to return. I didn’t think that the city could be transformed in any significant respect. When the ISCSC conference was made known to me, and I heard that it would be held in Warsaw, my first thought was my memory of the place from thirty years previously. I will admit that I was genuinely curious what it would look like, and only recently I was personally told that Warsaw looked pretty good now. That turned out to be true.

How has the city been so completely transformed, or is it my perception of it that has been transformed? Given that the very fabric of the city had been reconstructed in concrete blocks, and given that most of the historical built environment was destroyed, one would think that a changed look would require a complete rebuilding. And parts of the city are being rebuilt. Taking a taxi from the airport I passed an enormous construction site with no fewer than six construction cranes. One could see that a significant section of the city had been demolished and was being rebuilt. Further along, there were a good many steel and glass office towers that were definitely built since I was last here. This was the futuristic modernism that communism was supposed to deliver, but which it could not, and which was then eventually delivered during the post-communist period.

There is an excellent film about post-war Poland, Cold War (2018), that depicts some of the tensions of the period between the promises of communism and the reality it delivered. I stated above that communism had promised a future of modernity, especially for a part of the world (or, more specifically, a part of Europe) that seemed to have been left behind by modernity. (This mirage still persists, though now in the form of fully automated luxury communism.) The gleaming, new modern world that communism was supposed to provide to impoverished, backward peoples would have meant the abandonment of folk traditions. There is a history to his idea that precedes communism. The modernist architects of the early twentieth century wanted to tear down old buildings and old houses, which they saw as cramped and crabbed and unhealthy, and replace them with steel and glass structures that would be healthy and filled with light and air — like a cathedral of labor (which I believed was once said of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building, though my memory may be faulty on that score).

The film (i.e., Cold War) follows the creation and later touring of a traditional Polish musical and dance company. At one point in the film, one of the characters who is more-or-less reconciled to the communist regime tells another character that he is uncomfortable with the way in which they are showcasing tradition. He may not be a true believer in communism, but clearly he shares the communist vision of building a modernist future and is a little disappointed that he has to be involved with this traditionalist exercise (which nevertheless serves as propaganda for the communist regime). The characters in the film who defect to the west have their own problems and disappointments: their lives are not rosy because they escaped; on the contrary, they are perhaps all the more tragic than those who remained in Poland.

The modernist project for the built environment was not only a colossal failure, its aggressive disdain for tradition, and its desire to raze the historical past and extirpate its memory, caused untold harm to the historical textures of cities. This is now being recognized, although much of the damage has already been done. With increasing recent interest in traditional architecture, especially as it relates to cityscapes and urban design (Cayalá and Le Plessis-Robinson being two of the best known examples), one might wish that Warsaw would take this path, and that may yet happen. Yet the modernist district is certainly far more attractive than the Stalinist monstrosities that formerly predominated.

My hotel was close to the historic center, and I can recall from my 1992 visit that there was a small section of the historic center that had been meticulously restored after the war — from photographs, since the building themselves were reduced to rubble — but it felt like an island of color and life and human-scale architecture stranded in a sea of gray concrete. So there was that. Without having a detailed knowledge of Warsaw I assume that there were some remaining historic structures that were overshadowed by the Stalinist architecture on my previous visit to Warsaw, so that I simply didn’t notice them. I mentioned above that in my first walk about the city on the evening of my arrival that there was a lot of street life: this is the most obvious way to humanize a city. I don’t think that this kind of street life had yet taken on this form in 1992. But with a proliferation of cafés and businesses, the streetscape is livened significantly.

I assume that my changed impression of Warsaw from my previous visit was a combination of several things that I have mentioned above: some rebuilding, some restoration, a changed emphasis in the fabric of the city through revived street life, and the relegation of the communist period to the status of a distant bad memory. In any case, I can now wholeheartedly recommend Warsaw. I could easily stay here a week or more, wandering around and visiting more museums, and not be bored.

Not long ago I had another opportunity to see a city after thirty years, when I visited Milan in 2019 it was exactly thirty years since my previous visit in 1989. (I mentioned this visit to Milan in newsletter 37, though I didn’t go into any detail about Milan.) Milan, too, had changed dramatically, and in this case it definitely cannot be attributed to the end of the Cold War. Milan in 1989 was a chaotic mess, whereas Milan in 2019 was a clean, functional, and obviously well-run city. Milan did not suffer from the Stalinist brutalism of Warsaw, but it was quite run down, and city services were obviously inadequate to the needs of the population. Somehow, the Milanese managed to get their act together. No doubt there is an interesting story yet to be told about the transformation of the city.

Part of my original plan for this current trip was to cross over into Germany and visit Dresden, which, since the end of the Cold War, has been rebuilding its historic center, including the famous Frauenkirche which had been preserved as a ruin during the communist period, and some of the stones from the ruin were used in its reconstruction. I don’t plan to do this now, but, had I the time (and had I made this a priority), it would have been the perfect complement to my contrasting experiences of Warsaw. I did not previously visit Dresden in its post-war state, but I did read many books about the city before and after the war, and especially about its destruction on Valentine’s Day in 1945. I hope that I can someday see the degree to which the “Florence on the Elbe” has been restored to its former glory.