Podcasts

Błażej Stolarski (1880–1939) was a social activist and Deputy Speaker of the Polish Senate in the interwar period. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, the Germans arrested him, deported him to the Third Reich and killed him. Stolarski’s grave is located in the cemetery in Berlin’s neighbourhood of Marzahn. His life, the circumstances of his death and the recent discovery of his burial place inspired Agnieszka Zawadzka to talk with her guests: Klaus Leutner, an activist from Berlin involved in commemorating Polish victims of German crimes, and Dr Paweł Perzyna, a historian from the Łódź branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and the author of Stolarski’s biography.

This episode is devoted to Lina Morgenstern (1830–1909), a writer, translator and social activist from Breslau, now Wrocław, and the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee where she was buried. Agnieszka Zawadzka talks to Dr Małgorzata Stolarska-Fronia and Dr Iwona Dadej about the 19th-century Jewish life in Berlin, why there are no flowers and candles on Jewish tombstones and how Lina Morgenstern became etched in Berlin’s memory.

The protagonist of this episode is Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801), the most famous graphic artist and illustrator of his time, born in Gdańsk and buried on the French cemetery in Berlin’s Mitte district. Agnieszka Zawadzka and her guest, Dr Maciej Gugała, discuss Chodowiecki’s multicultural origins, his spectacular career and his emigration experiences in Berlin, the traces of which can be found in his art.