Gdynia and the dream of a maritime Poland

The penultimate point in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for peace negotiations to end the First World War was the most idealised of its goals. It called for an independent Polish state to be created, and not, as the eminent Polish-American historian Piotr Wandycz notes, resurrected – and certainly not ‘based on historical principles’, mapped on to the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had been erased from the European map in 1795. This would be a new Poland. Wilson called for it to include ‘territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations’ (this would become difficult to ascertain and haunt the future of the region); and the document called for ‘political and economic independence and territorial integrity […] guaranteed by international covenant’ (plans, again, which were difficult to put into practice). It was a puzzle.

There was another clause in the mix, too: that Poland ‘should be assured a free and secure access to the sea’.

Poles, who had pushed for this, saw the nautical sphere as a necessity for the country. As the historian Marta Grzechnik argues, Poles also wanted to shed the country’s image as a fragile land-locked nation. It was also essential if Poland was to become a modern nation – ‘far-sighted’, as Grzechnik puts it – and a global nation, even an imperial one.

The problem was that access to the sea in the interwar period had a German-shaped obstacle, or, rather, two of them. Poland had been awarded a small strip of land in the north to provide maritime links, but it was pincered between Germany proper and East Prussia, with no sizeable ports in sight; nor could it rely on the Free City of Danzig for any maritime ambitions, because although Poland had the right to use the port, Danzig was predominantly German in population, and hence tensions were frequent. In 1920, Poland decided it would have to build its own port in the region. In the end, experts selected a fishing and holiday village, Gdynia, as the best spot to put the plan into action due to hydrographic conditions and rail connections – and it was promptly overhauled as a modern port, fit for a modern nation.

Gdynia, more than any other city, might be seen then as a sort of microcosm for interwar Poland itself – it was an alternative Polish capital. Yes, Warsaw, the real capital, was the glorified location of the Miracle on the Vistula: the decisive triumph of Polish forces against the westward march of the Soviets in 1920, which pushed back the spread of communism into Europe. Warsaw was glitzy and glamorous, a true urban marvel, featuring revolving dance floors, Art Deco skyscrapers, prosperity, but also mounting tensions and poverty. Yes, Vilnius (then Wilno) was also a bulwark of patriotism, although to the chagrin of the newly independent Lithuania, which had broken ties with Poland because of Poland’s seizure of the city. Lviv (then Lwów), too, had a claim to be the nation’s capital of culture.

Yet Gdynia was a new city, symbolising the modernisation of the country, and its high hopes in the interwar period. Work on the port began in 1921; by 1926, 100 years ago this year, the once sleepy fishing village had been granted city rights and, by the end of the 1930s, it was a bustling maritime metropolis. Its construction into the jewel of modern Poland was matched by suitable architecture: functionalist buildings, sparkling in whitewash, with curves and perpendicular lines, and sweeping, grinning windows on every façade, wide to the hopeful Baltic Sea beyond. It was a Bauhaus fever dream.

Poets, writers and filmmakers celebrated Gdynia, too, in modernist art. Grzechnik notes that poets wrote of the city’s machinery and its modernist architecture, while the 1935 melodrama film Rapsodia Bałtyku (Rhapsody of the Baltic), about two navy officers, celebrated Gdynia for its military prowess as well as its maritime prosperity. By the 1930s, Gdynia was the hub of the Polish navy, and served commercial and passenger traffic.

It was also a place that illustrated the darker side of Poland’s burgeoning modernity. Tens of thousands used the new port as a point of departure for a new life across the Atlantic, from a modernist three-storey passenger hall, constructed at the port in 1933 for this very purpose. While the construction of Gdynia was testament to utopian ideas of a modern Poland, many did not see their future in the country, where modernity was still uneven and poverty rife. The building they departed from now houses the Emigration Museum, witness to centuries of Polish émigré history. Moreover, Gdynia was a stronghold of the Maritime and Colonial League – a mass Polish social organisation promoting the creation of colonies for Poland. The city’s construction was a political statement that spoke to a new Polish prosperity and self-confidence, but it could not escape the shadow of conflict with Germany, and the difficulties of creating a new Polish future alongside neighbours with expansionist designs.

Gdynia was the fulfilment of Wilson’s promise in part, but not in whole – it was a gateway to the Baltic, and a symbol of Poland’s freedom. It was also a place where, however much Poles tried, they were not able to guarantee the one element of the sea-life they thought indispensable for the future: security.