POLISH 
WRITING
WRITING
· Huelle on Castorp ·
Interview with Pawel Huelle 23.11.2004. Polish version here. Translated by Hanna Siemaszko.
Magdalena Walusiak: Castorp is a surname well-known to all those, who have opened the cover of “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. One sentence from “The Magic Mountain” inspired your newest novel: “Four terms of studies at Gdansk Polytechnic were behind him.” What was more tempting – the fulfillment of a certain undefined literary reality in Mann’s novel or the creation of a new myth of Gdansk?
Pawel Huelle: I wouldn’t like to create more myths concerning my town, because it is such an unrequited love. I caress Gdansk, but it doesn’t always caress me back. It is not that I claim anything, God forbid, though this is what this love resembles.
I didn’t want to create another literary myth. I assume that Gdansk has already got a dense enough literary topography; I wanted, though, to write a book about love, a little bit different from contemporary books about love. Today people write a bit like in a screenplay: a pair of lovers meets, they go to bed, and afterwards he asks her or she asks him: what’s your name? And I wanted to write differently, about love, which doesn’t necessarily have to be consummated. Of course it has an erotic background, because the main character’s fascination with a beautiful Polish girl is obviously erotic; searching though, aspiration, seeking, the desire to be under another person’s spell, this is what love is. It seemed also interesting to me that a German falls in love with a Pole. And it wasn’t a German from West Berlin 20 years ago with a woman from Warsaw or Gdansk , but a 19th century German and a 19th century Pole. I took this situation to be interesting, to talk about Germany a little bit indirectly.
Magdalena Walusiak:Your characters encounter each other during a very innocent time for our continent – at the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
Pawel Huelle: You probably know this term – Czesław Miłosz used it frequently, although it wasn’t he who coined it – la belle epoque, that is 'the beautiful era'. This belle epoque is associated with old postcards, on which fascinating cars, developing cities, the Secession could be seen – it looked similar in Warsaw, Prague, Vienna. And of course wonderful feminine hats. It was an era, where women didn’t go out, if they weren’t beautifully dressed. The gowns had to be wonderfully, appropriately ornamented. It is worth remembering that during la belle epoque people were optimistic, they thought that the 20th century would bring freedom, equality, justice, and that technology and medicine would solve all problems. It turned out that the 20th century was the most horrible bloody time and a time of dictatorship. But there are people who have forebodings and Castorp has forebodings, although he cannot tell what the catastrophe will be. He feels the darkness coming over Europe. Sensitive people have such forebodings. It is also a book about a person, who predicts a less optimistic vision of the future. We live also at the turn of the century. It should be noticed, that when communism ended, the Berlin Wall collapsed, Fukuyama wrote a book about the end of history, in which he predicted, that the free market and democracy will be everywhere; slowly creeping happiness. He have Iraq and we will have thousands more problems. Knock on wood, maybe not in Poland, but all over the world. And this is a book about that too: that you shouldn’t be an exaggerated optimist. One should be happy, entertain oneself and love, but one shouldn’t be so confident of the future.
Magdalena Walusiak: Castorp is a surname well-known to all those, who have opened the cover of “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. One sentence from “The Magic Mountain” inspired your newest novel: “Four terms of studies at Gdansk Polytechnic were behind him.” What was more tempting – the fulfillment of a certain undefined literary reality in Mann’s novel or the creation of a new myth of Gdansk?
Pawel Huelle: I wouldn’t like to create more myths concerning my town, because it is such an unrequited love. I caress Gdansk, but it doesn’t always caress me back. It is not that I claim anything, God forbid, though this is what this love resembles.
I didn’t want to create another literary myth. I assume that Gdansk has already got a dense enough literary topography; I wanted, though, to write a book about love, a little bit different from contemporary books about love. Today people write a bit like in a screenplay: a pair of lovers meets, they go to bed, and afterwards he asks her or she asks him: what’s your name? And I wanted to write differently, about love, which doesn’t necessarily have to be consummated. Of course it has an erotic background, because the main character’s fascination with a beautiful Polish girl is obviously erotic; searching though, aspiration, seeking, the desire to be under another person’s spell, this is what love is. It seemed also interesting to me that a German falls in love with a Pole. And it wasn’t a German from West Berlin 20 years ago with a woman from Warsaw or Gdansk , but a 19th century German and a 19th century Pole. I took this situation to be interesting, to talk about Germany a little bit indirectly.
Magdalena Walusiak:Your characters encounter each other during a very innocent time for our continent – at the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
Pawel Huelle: You probably know this term – Czesław Miłosz used it frequently, although it wasn’t he who coined it – la belle epoque, that is 'the beautiful era'. This belle epoque is associated with old postcards, on which fascinating cars, developing cities, the Secession could be seen – it looked similar in Warsaw, Prague, Vienna. And of course wonderful feminine hats. It was an era, where women didn’t go out, if they weren’t beautifully dressed. The gowns had to be wonderfully, appropriately ornamented. It is worth remembering that during la belle epoque people were optimistic, they thought that the 20th century would bring freedom, equality, justice, and that technology and medicine would solve all problems. It turned out that the 20th century was the most horrible bloody time and a time of dictatorship. But there are people who have forebodings and Castorp has forebodings, although he cannot tell what the catastrophe will be. He feels the darkness coming over Europe. Sensitive people have such forebodings. It is also a book about a person, who predicts a less optimistic vision of the future. We live also at the turn of the century. It should be noticed, that when communism ended, the Berlin Wall collapsed, Fukuyama wrote a book about the end of history, in which he predicted, that the free market and democracy will be everywhere; slowly creeping happiness. He have Iraq and we will have thousands more problems. Knock on wood, maybe not in Poland, but all over the world. And this is a book about that too: that you shouldn’t be an exaggerated optimist. One should be happy, entertain oneself and love, but one shouldn’t be so confident of the future.
