In The Polish Town

My first trip overseas was to Poland and I'd move there except my house is Polish already, with a flowering meadow across the lane, etc. Finding Sylvia Plath's grandmother's Polish home address I Google-Mapped it. Ernestine Kottke Plath died in an Oregon mental hospital in 1919 but her childhood home still stands: 12, Strozewo (a village).

I saw the address in Ernestine Plath's Oregon State Hospital record.

Just six miles away is a Plath landmark town, under German rule spelled "Budsin," today in Polish spelled "Budzyn," population 2,000. It's Plath's grandfather's hometown. Sylvia called it a "manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia." Theodor Plath married local girl Ernestine in 1882 and settled there. I think Ernestine gave birth to Otto in Grabowo because she had relatives there, but Otto grew up in Budsin, and tired of maps I wanted to see the place.

"Strolling" through the older part of Budsin I saw where the Plaths might have raised their children, not quite to their adulthood. The year Otto was born the German Empire's increasingly menacing army started cleansing the empire of Russians, Poles, and Jews. Masses of ethnic Germans like the Plaths were already leaving for the U.S., partly to escape conscription. Otto was 15 when he went to the U.S. His father, and then his mother and five siblings, ages 4 to 13, left Prussia the following year, 1901.

Traditional Polish houses are stone covered in paintable stucco. I learned Gmin means local government, and this is Budzyn's City Hall at the center of town.

Poles put flowers wherever they feel like it. It's a celebratory thing.

For the address of the Plath house in Budsin I'd need church or civil records not readily accessible. But I like Poland for itself and felt at home there. My mother's parents were Polish immigrants. They died when I was very small but I remember the Polishness of their house and ours. I hope you too grew up amid abundant cabbage-rose decor.

Johann Plath's Bastard

Train station at Budzyn, point of departure for three generations of ambitious Plaths.

The young couple whose parents wouldn't consent to their marriage could and did produce what was then called a bastard, shaming both sets of parents into giving the consent required by law.

The would-be bride and groom were not kids. They were both 26. The trouble was that she was Catholic and he was Lutheran.

Baby Theodor -- Sylvia Plath's future grandfather -- was ten months old when his parents Johann and Karoline Plath were at last married. The pious pair then argued about raising their children in this faith or that.

Station still stands at Budzyn (now in Poland).

Theodor's birth record in the town of Budzyn, Prussia, November 5, 1851, shows his mother's name, Karoline Kaczmarek, but in the space for his father's name is "ignatus" (unknown). When Johann, emigrant to the U.S., heard that Theodor's teenage son was super-smart, Johann generously paid for young Otto Plath to come to the U.S. and for Otto's tuition for Lutheran prep school and college, on the condition that Otto become -- a minister.

But when Otto told his grandfather he would rather teach than be a minister, Johann crossed Otto's name out of the family bible, an act of Christian righteousness sowing alienation and Otto's future bitter atheism.

It was meant to be a memorable scene, and Otto long remembered and told about that one selfish act, by which Johann Plath is remembered.

"argued about raising their children": Clark, Red Comet, 6. " "bitter atheism," The Bell Jar. Spelled "Budsin" in Prussia, the Plaths' hometown is now Budzyn, Poland.

Prussia? What Does It Mean?

Sylvia Plath’s father was born in 1885 in Prussia, in the German Empire, and those are two separate things, and “Germany” a third. Let this map explain Otto Plath’s Prussia and maybe Sylvia’s references to it.

 

Otto was born to German parents and grew up in the area the map labels “Posen,” territory Prussia had seized from Poland.

The component parts unified as the “German Empire” in 1871, and for 40-plus years the Empire looked like this (Prussia in green):

Prussia was the Empire's biggest, richest, most productive state because 1) Its government and military had long been organized while other states suffered the whims of kings and dukes, and 2) Rather than exterminate Jews, Poles, and other ethnic groups, Prussia had them work to build a better Prussia, with hospitals, industry, a thriving middle class, welfare and so on. Prussia hand-picked the best and made them bureaucrats and officers so none could fight Prussia without fighting their own.

 

When Sylvia referred in the poem “Little Fugue” to her father’s “Prussian mind” she meant strict, focused, righteous, keen and authoritarian. Her admiration included some fear. Otto yelled a lot. It was his way or no way. She called this “Prussian” and “German” behavior, as we might, but that is only partly correct.

 

The German Empire’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, decided to model the whole German Empire on successful Prussia and its values – with one exception. Because the Empire ought to be German only, non-Germans such as Jews, Poles, and Russians were to be Germanized or forcibly marched over the borders and out.

 

That’s not authoritarian; that’s totalitarian.

 

That wasn’t “Prussian”; rather, it was Teutonic, referencing the Crusaders who around 1250 C.E. – their flag was black and white – did God’s will and crushed the North Baltic pagan Prussians, and imposed their rigid, exacting, Christian monastic and male-dominated culture. Its advantage: Nobles were no better than anybody else.

 

Bismarck’s expulsions destabilized the new Empire and the rest of Europe labeled Germans evil and barbaric, and an estimated 1.5 million citizens and residents, including Prussian-educated Otto, fled the Empire for the United States.

 

You know the rest. The Empire within 40 years lost a war, shrank to an impoverished “Germany,” and Prussia (no relation to Russia) went extinct; it hasn’t been on a map since 1918. New borders made Otto’s birthplace, Grabow, suddenly a Polish town. On at least one document Otto gave his birthplace as Poland.

 

Understandable that Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar's “Esther Greenwood” and the speaker of “Daddy” had only a general idea of where their father came from.