The basis for this slim, funny, yet at the same time wistful volume is a simple one: for over ten years now, as a writer
Andrzej Stasiuk has been making book tours of German-speaking countries. He gives a reading, answers questions, goes back to his hotel, then the next morning he gets on the train, travels to the next event, gives a reading, answers questions, goes back to his hotel...
Mistakes can be made with dates and places; the thinking, though, remains truer. Not necessarily true, but certainly less mistaken. For this reason Doytchland is more a record of impressions and reflections than a travel book.
On the basis of these reflections Stasiuk sets in order the cultural map of Europe, orienting the continent according to its own centre. Yet he does everything he can to ensure that after all these years of travelling, his homeland remains his original godforsaken country. He does not idealize Poland—well, perhaps a little.
His book is a kind of survival guide for all those who have experienced something similar—that is to say, a radical confrontation between their home country’s primitiveness and an alien modernity. This is an experiment from the domain of personality psychology rather than that of geography. As the author says: “Travelling to Germany is psychoanalysis”.
In order not to “become German,” in other words to become a believer in the superiority of Western over Eastern culture, it is first necessary to look at Germany as a country to which one travels for the earnings. There, there is money, work, conditions and so on; here, in Poland aka Romania, there are people to talk to, to be among, to share experiences with. Secondly, one needs to view poverty as an authentic relationship between people and things. In the world of poverty matters are different: here there are old, used Western cars, here people are capable of using objects no longer usable and they do not judge one another according to their belongings, because they understand that all objects are borrowed and transitory. Aside from that one has to long for something, and if we long for Poland aka Romania, then clearly no Bavaria or Westphalia is going to assuage our longing.
But Stasiuk occasionally winks at us and says that this text about the “Gypsies of unified Europe” is nothing but a coded note to a Western audience.
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