Tag: Wroclaw

Nestling in the leaves at Pawła Włodkowica 10-12 is the reporter gnome which takes its name from the adjacent Kładka Radiowej Trójki (Radio 3 Footbridge) which crosses the former moat.

It took me a little longer to work this out than it should perhaps have done, but it marks when each country gave women the right to vote.

There was a group of people sitting around the monument at one end, so I focused my attention on the middle bit.

There’s the right for women to vote in Benin, Gabon and Comoros (all French colonies) as well as Egypt in 1956, followed by Lebanon, Mali and Malaysia in the following year.

It’s quite an understated artwork in many ways, but if it makes people have a think about what it represents, that seems sensible and actually quite positive. It’s located on Słoneczny Boulevard and the artwork (or monument, whatever feels the best description) consists of 162 paving slabs. It was installed in 2018 as part of a redevelopment of the area.

Although most of the famous Wrocław gnomes are male, there are also representations of females and this is the Advocate, or Attorney, gnome. It’s located at Bolesława Prusa 1/50 and it’s hear because there is a legal office (or advocate office) inside the building.

The last time that I was in Wrocław I visited the Browar Stu Mostów bistro in the city centre. This time I headed out on the tram to visit their taproom and brewery, located to the north of the city.

The taproom offers views over their brewery and it all feels modern and organised.

I was the only customer throughout the entirety of my visit and I thought it might be slightly busier on an evening, but at least that meant it was peaceful. Well, peaceful in the tap room, they were busy in the brewery itself which was quite loud, but that adds to the authenticity.

The beer list is on Untappd and it’s also displayed here behind the bar, although I found it easier to just look at the online list. It’s a very competent brewery and I’ve had their beers many times in Poland and the UK, although I confess that I only relatively recently realised that they were based in Wrocław.

I ordered a flight of beers from the brewery and these were from left to right:

• WRCLW Schops which was an intriguing beer as it had caramel and banana notes, but was a wheat beer with hints of being a brown beer. It’s not a beer style that I’ve tried before, but that’s not entirely surprising as this is an historical recipe which the brewery are using, bringing back something from the past and I found it very agreeable.
• Lush Lime which was a nicely balanced pastry sour with a lot of gentle lime flavour, even pushing towards being decadent.
• Coco Drift which was my favourite of the four, it was thick like a smoothie with tropical fruit flavours, it was quite a robust pastry sour with just a little tartness.
• The Pumpkin Spice Sour tasted of cinnamon and apricots to ne, it was smooth, rich and pleasant.

The four beers were excellent, all of them of a high standard and I was impressed at the broad range of beer styles that the brewery was producing.

I very much like tartare sauce, so this was an agreeable amount to serve with the fish and chips I ordered. The meal was fine, I’m not sure what kind of fish it was and it was a little bland, but the batter had a depth of flavour, the chips were fluffy inside and the coleslaw added texture. It went well with the beers and the pricing for the whole arrangement was reasonable.

It’s worth the trip out to visit this brewery, it’s a clean and comfortable little taproom and the staff were friendly and engaging. I thought that it would be busier, but I’m sure that it gets quite packed on weekend evenings as it isn’t that large. They also have Concept Stu Mostów next door which is open from 08:00 until 21:00 every day of the week and is more of a restaurant. I think they offer the same beers there, so this is another option for those who don’t want to visit the taproom.

This is from the British press in May 1933, so early on in the Nazi party’s attack on freedoms. Breslau was then part of Germany, but is now Polish Wrocław, and the warning signs of the terror are apparent very early on. The burnings were organised by Deutsche Studentenschaft, a Nazi controlled umbrella organisation for students, and there were around 34 of them across the country on the same evening.

The book burnings were attended by an alarming number of younger people, this wasn’t just a stage managed event, with the whole process being turned into something of an evening out with procession and nationalism along the way.

The Nazi Alfred Rosenberg apparently tried to save sections of Jewish libraries. He didn’t have motives of tolerance and understanding though, he wanted to seize them so that he could use them as research material for his ideological “studies” into why the Jews needed to be destroyed.

Rosenberg was executed by the allies after the Nuremberg trials, but there’s one interesting story relating to him which also took place in May 1933. Rosenberg came to the UK and tried to show that the Nazis weren’t a threat and he laid a wreath at the cenotaph with a swastika on it. James Edmond Sears, a Labour Party candidate for South West St. Pancras, cut it up and had it chucked in the River Thames. He was fined and Sears was widely condemned in the media for his actions. History perhaps now shows that he was one of the forward thinking heroes, one of the few to call Rosenberg and the Nazi regime out so early.

This article is from June 1933 and it’s a warning from history about how dictators begin their work. Putting to one side the suppression of the boy scouts into what became the Hitler Youth, there’s a story here about Hermann Lüdemann (1880-1959).

He was arrested in June 1933 and sent to Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) concentration camp, but the process was designed to be humiliating because he was a socialist and so somehow an enemy of the people in Hitler’s eyes. Lüdemann was ‘greeted’ at the concentration camp by the new Nazi chief of police for Breslau, Edmund Heines, who had formerly spent time in prison for murder. Heines was a thug by any measure and his political career was brought to an end by Hitler, who had him arrested and assassinated in 1934.

Lüdemann was ultimately treated very badly during the war, although perhaps on balance he was fortunate to survive it at all. His bravery and strength was rewarded after the end of the Second World War by political promotion and in 1947 he became the Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein.

But, it’s evidence that the actions of dictators shouldn’t be ignored early on. The marching through the city of men such as Lüdemann was part of a general policy of intimidation, attempting to intimidate the population and limit the opposition to the Government. He remained a stoic hero, many others sadly lost their lives. Perhaps the world should have done much more in 1933….

There’s something wonderfully noir about this mural in Wrocław, which celebrates the crime novelist Marek Krajewski (1966-). It’s painted on the side of an otherwise unassuming yellow building, yet it completely transforms the place into something atmospheric, cinematic and indeed distinctly Wrocławian.

Krajewski’s novels are largely set in Breslau, the old German incarnation of Wrocław. His detective, Eberhard Mock, apparently prowls through a 1930s world of corruption, decadence and decaying grandeur, although it’s not a series of books that I’ve yet read. The city is though evidently very proud of their crime novelist who was born in the city as he was given the title of an honorary citizen of Wrocław in 2023. I will try and get hold of one of his books now…..