Breslau drain covers

A couple of days ago I was in correspondence about the rebuilding of the main roads of Leipzig under Soviet supervision after the second world war. This prompted a memory of reading about how when Breslau, for a long time a major city in eastern Germany, was rebuilt as Wrocław in western Poland, after being very badly damaged in the closing stages of that same war, they didn’t bother to replace the drain covers in the roads, all clearly labelled in German – whereas all the above ground German labelling and signage was carefully erased or covered.

Bing was able to turn up pictures of what purported to be German drain covers in Wrocław and I made use of the memory before I was able to check it properly. But I did try to complete the checks after the event. Where had this story about drain covers come from? 

I first thought of reference 4, a memoir of a Breslau Jew who had emigrated to East Africa at more or less the last possible moment before emigration was stopped before the war. Who went back to Breslau, then Wrocław, many years later. Nothing doing. Then I turned to reference 5, the story of Breslau from its very beginnings, at about the time of our own Battle of Hastings. Lots of material here about Breslau at the end of the second world war and about what happened to it afterwards. It seems that the immediate aftermath of the war was pretty dreadful, not least because of the expulsion of the German part of the population of Silesia west into Germany and the arrival of a replacement Polish population expelled from the eastern part of Poland which had been taken into the Soviet Union. Quite apart from the misery and worse occasioned by these rather rough expulsions, there must have been more misery at the margins, in those parts where everything was all mixed up. All of which went on for years. But nothing about drain covers.

No Breslau in the index of reference 1. Nothing relevant in reference 3.

But then, for some reason I thought to ask the blog, which came up with the answer at reference 2. That is to say in reference 1 after all. For some reason, the memory, when activated, had relocated from Königsberg to Breslau. At least I had the excuse that Königsberg was another once important German city, now in foreign hands, now called Kaliningrad. 

Along the way I turned up various websites of interest, including references 6, 7 and 8. From which I learn first that there are still German drain covers in Wrocław and second that Poland’s heritage people have now started unearthing all Wrocław’s old German signage. So while I might have abused my information, the result was not that wide of the mark.

There was also something variously called the ‘Tramway song’, the ‘Wrocław waltz’ or the ‘Wrocław song’. A famous feel-good song from the early 1950’s, composed by Jerzy Harald and written (in place called Katowice, maybe 100km to the southeast of Wrocław) by Eugenia Wnukowska. At a time when things were pretty grim, even for the Poles, and people needed cheering up. See references 9 and 10. 

Noting in passing that the authors of reference 5 take a pretty dim view of the Soviets and their activities in eastern Europe after the war.

One might have thought that the story would stop here, but no. This morning I had a waking dream in which all these drains got mixed up in an important way with some rigmarole involving sea birds, long beaks and the tiling of the plane, this last in a mathematical sense. Nearly awake, I reduced this tiling to an implication: if you can find pattern P in your plane, you replace it by the pattern Q. Carry on for as long as you keep finding instances of P – a process which might easily be infinite. And it gets more interesting if you allow more than one implication. Rather like Wolfram’s cellular automata and capable of all kinds of complicated behaviour.

A simple example with two rules is snapped above. Starting from one red circle top left, they will rapidly fill the space, working down and to the right.

Oddly enough, the second such dream recently. A few days ago, I woke up from some terribly important dream about mending holes in front teeth with baking powder. Or perhaps borax. It seemed to take ages to wake up and work out that this was all nonsense. No connection, in this last case anyway, with the real world at all.

PS 1: perhaps I should submit drain covers to the boring people at reference 11.

PS 2: another instance of the same model of drain cover, turned up by Bing from Flickr on the search key 'Fernheizwerk Breslau', with, as far as I can make out, the Fernheizwerk bit being something German to do with power and heat, possibly district heating, rather than drains and waste water. So confused, yet again. At least the road surface looks old enough.

References

Reference 1: Germany: Memories of a Nation – Neil MacGregor – 2014.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/history-by-enumeration.html. 

Reference 3: Germania – Simon Winder – 2011.

Reference 4: No Fixed Abode: A Jewish Odyssey to Africa – Peter Fraenkel – 2020.

Reference 5: Microcosm: Portrait of a central European city – Davies, Moorhouse – 2002.

Reference 6: https://urbanlabsce.eu/remnants-of-a-complicated-history/. Some urban history.

Reference 7: https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/fascinating-new-map-of-pre-war-wroclaw-uncovers-long-forgotten-german-signs-15077. Some more urban history. 

Reference 8: https://breslaudrainers.blogspot.com/. Drain enthusiasm.

Reference 9: https://www.wroclaw.pl/en/wroclaw-song-returns-documentary-by-michal-majeran. Report of the return of the Wrocław song.

Reference 10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLVfKf6uHo. The song itself.

Reference 11: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/boring.html.