Marek, many congratulations on the new book, The Stories Old Towns Tell. Why did you choose the seven cities (Frankfurt; Würzburg; Rothenburg ; Prague; Warsaw; Lublin and Vilnius) – did you use a set of criteria, or was it your own experiences of visiting them?

Thank you! Warsaw’s Old Town chose itself, because of its uniquely compelling story, its symbolic importance, and its place as a landmark in post-war European debates about heritage. Rothenburg ob der Tauber, the quintessential ‘fairy-tale’ Old Town, was also a must, as was Frankfurt, with its ‘new Old Town’ that opened in 2018. All my choices were shaped by my visits – especially to Lublin, where the story of the Brama Grodzka project, creating a ‘Theatre of Memory’ at the gateway between the Old Town and the space where the destroyed Jewish quarter used to be, became the moral heart of my book.

A question is posed in the opening paragraph of the book: “Do you have a favourite place in Europe? If so where is it and why do you love it?” What’s your answer?

The Old Town. It exists in my imagination and in the middle of many European cities. I love it because it is the heart of my Europe.

I remember visiting East Berlin, eight years or so after the wall came down, and there were bars set within the ruins of buildings destroyed in the fighting in 1945. It meant having a simple drink became a hugely powerful experience – for a visitor. If I lived there I would likely want the buildings rebuilt. Cities are of course nothing without their people.

In post-war Poland and Lithuania, listening to the population was a task assigned to the secret police. But I can’t help but feel that the planners in Warsaw didn’t need to consult the population about whether to reconstruct the Old Town, because there could never have been any doubt that the whole nation would approve. In Lublin, the authorities were concerned about the facades of the old tenement houses, but didn’t seem to care about the slums that lay behind many of them. It’s said that they did take on board the Party leader’s idea about building a grand staircase down from the castle, though.

Rothenburg, being a relatively small town with a strong sense of itself, readily achieved a consensus about reconstructing the bombed half of it to resemble the rest. In Frankfurt, by contrast, there was intense debate about facsimile reconstruction. Decades later there was plenty more debate, about whether to restock the former Old Town, then dominated by concrete, with old-looking buildings.

If a city is rebuilt to such an extent as to erase what was past, is that a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’ – will the town still have a story to tell?

A city will still have a story to tell if it erases its past. The story will be that its history began with its reconstruction, and that nothing worth remembering took place before then. Its story is about looking forward, and not looking back. In Germany, this kind of narrative belonged to the idea of ‘Stunde Null’, which corresponds to the English expression ‘Year Zero’. By rebuilding cities in modern forms, their new authorities affirmed that they were turning their backs on the past, because it had been radically compromised by its most recent phase, the Third Reich.

As time went on, though, many inhabitants of those cities came to feel that concrete central districts were poor replacements, soulless and alienating, for the streets lined with half-timbered houses that they nostalgically remembered. But perhaps they might have felt that modernisation was a good thing if it had been done differently.

You write about the Polish and Jewish Polish experience in the war. Having visited Kraków where the Jewish ghetto is preserved, it tells a vital but horrific story amid one of the most beautiful cities in Poland. Is there a Polish acceptance and facing up to its past that cities such as Warsaw, Lublin and Kraków demonstrate?  

The answer to that question has to start with a simple fact: that the ghettoes of Warsaw, Lublin, Kraków and other Polish cities were the work of the Nazi German occupiers, not of Poles. Beyond that, though, it gets complicated and fraught. There is a deep-seated resistance in many layers of Polish society to the idea that Polish Jewish history is part of a shared Polish history. But there are also many sites where more inclusive visions have appeared. If you asked me to pick a single moment that inspired me to write this book, I’d say it was when I saw the panel in the Brama Grodzka ‘Theatre of Memory’ at the gateway to Lublin’s Old Town, which says how they answer questions that assume histories are exclusive: ‘We explain patiently that it is our common, Polish-Jewish history.’ That simple statement was what they needed to start their profoundly successful project.

Slowness and reluctance to engage with Jewish history is a feature of Old Town stories across the region, though, not just in Poland. I’ve found it instructive to look at this broader picture in the book, and I hope readers do too.

Many cities in this country were rebuilt after 1945 in such a way that an opportunity was missed (eg Southampton and Coventry), and historic town centres became copies of each other. They have lost character. Is this a British thing, or simply an era post-war when resources were scarce and so the cheapest approach was followed?

It wasn’t just a British thing. Urban planners in different parts of Europe had come to see old central districts as obstacles to progress in cities that needed to accommodate expanding populations, growing economies, evolving technologies and the burgeoning volumes of traffic that went with all that. Contemplating the ruins after the Second World War, they saw opportunities to rebuild cities on rational, functional lines. They discounted the importance of less rational, more romantic stories.

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine now resulting in a new wave of city destruction, what can we learn from the seven cities of your book to help rebuild those destroyed in Ukraine if peace is to come (a big if)?

I think the stories in my book can help us understand the importance of cultural objects, from statues to entire urban quarters, and the hurt people feel at their loss. They are vital parts of the fabric of national and community identity. That kind of understanding might encourage us non-Ukrainians to support Ukrainians when the time comes to restore or replace cultural objects that have become the targets of attacks by an aggressor that denies Ukraine has an identity of its own.

I also think we can learn a lot from the ways in which many Ukrainians are thinking about their national identity. One of the main themes in my book – the moral of the stories, if you like – is the importance of enriching those stories by interweaving strands from the different communities that have had a presence in a place. That can be a difficult process. But Ukrainian intellectuals are emphasising its importance, working diverse ethnic currents into their accounts of cultural history in Ukraine.

You’ve explored many diverse subjects, including drug-taking during the 1920s, major scientists and trust. What are you exploring now?

Ukrainian culture, especially traditional culture, and history. It feels like a natural and imperative engagement for me, growing from my involvement with the new Ukrainian community in Brighton that formed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and my British-Polish background, which was also the basis of The Stories Old Towns Tell. I co-founded a project, Kupala Brighton [https://kupalabrighton.org/], inspired by the role of folk culture in the local Ukrainian community. Old Towns is about physical heritage; Kupala Brighton is about intangible heritage. A lot of the insights are transferable.

Marek Kohn is a writer and the author of The Stories Old Towns Tell, published by Yale University Press.