Gdansk

“Even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings,” says protagonist Oskar in Guenter Grass’s acclaimed 1959 novel, later an academy award winning film, the Tin Drum.

I’m in northern Poland, an area drenched in so much history that it would be hard for any human being to forget. Grass was born here. So, too, his fictional character Oskar Matzerath, brought into the world in Grass’s book in 1924, the year Hitler went to prison for treason and started work on Mein Kampf. The experience of this part of Europe should remind us just how fluid and unkind history can be if you’re born at the wrong time and place. Today’s turmoil in Ukraine relates to this. But first, Gdansk.