This year the main award – the title of Honorary Citizen of Wroclaw (Civitate Wratislaviensi Donatus) – went to the writer Olga Tokarczuk. The author of such books as Primeval and Other Times, House of Day, House of Night, Flights or The Books of Jacob is the winner of many literary Polish and foreign awards.
In 2018, she was the first Pole to receive The Man Booker International Prize for Flights (originally published in Polish as Bieguni). This year she was again among favourites for this award for her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
Speech by Olga Tokarczuk
Ladies and Gentlemen,
if we have any internal maps of the space that we deem our own, then certainly my map depicts Lower Silesia. I have lived in Wrocław for thirteen years, but even before that I had stayed here for longer or shorter periods of time. Already after my high school graduation, when I was going out into the world leaving a small town in the Opole region, that natural gravitation of Wrocław, with its artistic avant-garde and mighty academic scene, numerous friends who chose to study here and also a feeling of closeness, was placing me within the orbit of this city. Paradoxically, however, I wanted to fly away as far as possible into the world. That “as far as possible” meant Warsaw, where I found myself in 1980 as a first-year student of psychology, leaving behind all that was familiar, friendly, domesticated and close. It threw me in the middle of history. When I was moving into my student hostel, the August strikes had already begun and the entire Warsaw stood still in traffic jams split in four parts by striking trams that formed a giant cross along the Marszałkowska and Aleje Jerozolimskie Streets.
Thus, I was not here, when many important things were happening, when the deepest acquaintanceships and friendships were being made, when common positions were being agreed on and paving of the favourite streets was treaded on. Due to romantic reasons I came to Wrocław for one year after university, and then I settled for a while in Wałbrzych and Nowa Ruda. But always – willingly or not – I was moving on the sweeping orbit around the planet Wrocław.
I saw Wrocław for the first time as a child, it must have been – counting in my head - probably in 1968, when I was six. The car drove into the space which I had not seen before, but I remember it surprisingly well, especially that for some time now I have noticed a remarkable memory of childhood events (sometimes I simply feel that I remember my childghood better than what happened yesterday and this is an obvious sign that I am starting to get old).
The streets were empty, squares overgrown with grass, houses far away from each other, scattered. This is Wrocław, my mother said, and explained that those empty squares were once filled with buildings and people, that it used to be a city. She also said that this terrified her. I remembered that word and the experience tied to it – that a place can be terryfying, that the void, that resulted from previous war destruction, is paradoxically binding us with the past and commanding us to remember what had happened here.
Today in Wrocław there are no empy places that remained after the rubble had been removed. After the war this city was founded on a great hisoric paradox: declared a fortress and doomed by its German defenders, it was then lovingly rebuiltby newcomers, immigrants, new settlers.
I am a federalist and regionalist, I believe in Europe of united regions and I dream of Poland that is decentralized, strong with its diversity. I also believe in the movable arrangement of various layers of our identity, which do not cancel each other but are mutually complementary. One can be at the same time European, Polish and Lower Silesian, as well as Wroclawian.
Our country is not a clear-cut monolith, it has always consisted of many stories, experiences, communities, dialects and cultures, and – sadly, as it is more a thing of the past - languages. After the Second World War, the communists in some unbelievable way adopted national-democratic vision of Poland as an ethnically and culturally homogeneous country.Together with modernization, language varietes and dialects started to die out, country regions turned into administrative terms, differing from each other by – if anything at all - folk costumes, which were so eagerly presented worldwide by the State Folk Group of Song and Dance „Mazowsze” and „Silesia”. And yet the experience history by the Lower Silesian people is different than the experience of highlanders from Podhale or people from Podlasie. What is more, after the war, Lower Silesia became a friendly place for all kind of immigrants and newcomers: Greeks, re-emigrants from France, Jews, and above all the so-called repatriates from the former Eastern Borderlands and numerous restless souls who were looking here for a new life, shelter, adventure or wealth.
At the same time, Wrocław is the capital of a large European region of Silesia, but above all, the capital of the area that we call Lower Silesia - a region of unique history, where unparalleled anywhere in Europe, almost complete exchange of population after the Second World War took place, which makes it an absolute phenomenon on the world’s map. Its history and specificity is constantly fascinating and inspiring me. In the history of my fellow citizens of Wrocław and Lower Silesian, I can see the story of my own family and I admire the ability to build a society from scratch, even on rubble and empty squares. For me, Wrocław signifies the courage of the settlers, the pioneers’ gift of assimilation to new conditions, openness to what is different, understanding history as an unceasing continuum, as well as a certain Eastern serenity and hospitality. It is a privilege for me that I can to live and work here.
I became an honorary citizen of one of the most beautiful, most important cities in Europe, a worldly city and one that is recognizable in the world. I treat this title with pride as a great honor and at the same time as my duty as a writer.