Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has joined the Flaming Hydra writing collective.
When I was a child in Gdańsk’s Old Town, I used to see groups of elderly German tourists walking through the streets. I would run into one of their little clusters, shout “Hitler kaput!”, and then run away as fast as I could. I remember the feeling very clearly. I was proud of myself. I felt morally superior.
Years later, that certainty became harder to maintain. One of my grandfathers had been imprisoned in the Stutthof concentration camp and was later forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht. My other grandfather was German and, after the war, changed his surname to a Polonised version.
In this part of Europe, moral questions do not stay abstract for long. They move quickly into private biographies, and private biographies are unstable things. They contain silence, contradiction, fear, shame, missing facts and facts discovered too late. Public language prefers clean categories. Family history usually refuses them.
As an adult, I spent years pressing the authorities of Gdańsk to mark the former site of the Jewish ghetto on Granary Island. Eventually the city installed a plaque there. I am glad it exists. But I later realised that many coach tours of elderly Germans stop in the nearby car park, and that one of the first things those visitors will see is that plaque. For a moment, I felt satisfaction. Something vindictive. Something like a small private reward. Then, almost immediately, I felt ashamed.
The shame did not come from the plaque. The plaque should be there. It came from the fact that another person’s burden had become, for a second, material for my own sense of righteousness.
I know that feeling. Not cruelty exactly. Not indifference. Something smaller and more common: the pleasure of standing above the guilty. The wish not only for justice, but for the private satisfaction of feeling cleaner than someone else.
That is why I keep returning to a short Brothers Grimm tale about a cat and a mouse. The story ends in the simplest possible way. The stronger animal eats the weaker one. There is no compensation, no moral uplift. It is flat, quick and cold.
That is why it remains useful. It strips away the language with which people decorate force. The strong devour the weak and then call it order, necessity, history, security, realism.
Europe built museums, monuments, memorial days and educational rituals in the hope that memory would make repetition less likely. But memory by itself does not improve anyone. It can become ceremony. The anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has passed, and the brief sharpening of attention that came with it is already receding. People learn facts, dates and names and still leave with the comforting belief that evil belongs safely to the past and to other people.
From where I live, Kaliningrad is close enough to remain a practical fact rather than a distant headline. The old Grimm structure no longer feels literary. A stronger state attacks a weaker neighbour and surrounds the attack with grievance, fantasy and imperial self-pity. There is never a shortage of explanations. There is never a shortage of language. But language does not alter the basic shape of what is happening.
I do not trust writing that divides the world too neatly into innocence and guilt. So I am interested not only in the cat, but also in the spectators.
We look at photographs and videos from Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and elsewhere. We are horrified. Then we continue with the day. This does not mean that we approve. It means that human beings adapt quickly. One of our darker capacities is the ability not only to inflict suffering, but to get used to its constant display.
That, too, belongs to the old story. The cat does what the cat does. The harder question is what happens around it. How long can people watch before horror becomes routine? How long before outrage hardens into language, repetition, posture? How long before the unusual begins to feel normal simply because it does not stop?
I include myself in that problem. As a child, I turned elderly German tourists into props in a little drama of my own innocence. Years later, while trying to do something just, I discovered in myself the cheap pleasure of symbolic revenge. None of this makes judgment impossible. It only means that judgment has to begin without self-congratulation. It has to begin with distrust toward the private sweetness that can attach itself to being right.
Denunciation can be necessary. It is often necessary. But it is also easy. It is easy to denounce and then feel cleansed. It is harder to examine the smaller pleasures that gather around denunciation: pride, vindication, relief, the sense of standing above the fallen.
So when I think about war now, I return to that old Grimm ending. Not because it offers wisdom, but because it offers no comfort. The strong still look for reasons to swallow the weak. The rest of us still adjust more quickly than we admit.
The cat is still there. The danger begins when it starts to look ordinary.
Grzegorz Kwiatkowski
www.flaminghydra.com/cats-and-mice
