Teatr, synagoga, więzienie i parking. Jedno miejsce, cztery opowieści

Abstract

There are four threads of memory that relate to the concrete place, where the headquarters of the Prussian police was built at the start of the twentieth-century. Moving forward in time, the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theater was built a century later on this same spot; going back in time to the seventeenth century this was the same place where performances were held in the only building in Europe modeled on London’s Shakespeare Theater. The third and unusually strong component of memory related to this place is the no-longer standing Great Synagogue, erected by the Jewish community in Gdańsk at the end of the nineteenth-century next to the foundation of the theater, which had by then been demolished. Impressive in its size and the richness of its decor, the Synagogue was destroyed by the Germans in May 1939. After the war and before the new theater was built, there was a parking lot next to the police station, invariably serving the special services of one new authority after the next. This essay reconstructs these four threads and the complicated connections between them based on literary texts, memoirs, academic texts, and journalism, as well as on the basis of iconography, such as prints, postcards, photographs, as well as such cartographic documents as city plans and drawings that document archeological studies.