Children at Wedel’s Window: Chocolate Dreams in Old Warsaw

e._wedla_staroswiecki_sklep_polona_21.jpg, large, A woodcut illustrating Iza Kuźmińska’s short story Drogami Natchnienia (The Paths of Inspiration), Staroświecki Sklep (The Old-Fashioned Shop), 1938 /

#language & literature

#heritage

Wedel’s oldest shop has its own legend, in which the characters from Lalka (The Doll) meet, workers go on strike, and blue-and-pink enchantresses whisper from the ceiling. The story of the ‘old-fashioned shop’ began in April 1937 – though, of course, long before then.

‘Good morning, madam. I’m so sorry I startled you. Do I really look that frightening?’ Wokulski was perfectly calm, whilst Izabela was flustered – so terribly flustered that she couldn’t even hide it. He felt sorry for her, yet at the same time was amazed by his own composure. He had replayed this scene in his mind so many times, but had never imagined the roles would be reversed so dramatically. Now Izabela stood there, confused, unable to utter a single word, looking ridiculous, while he was amused by her embarrassment.

At last, Izabela calmed herself.

– If you gentlemen would allow me… My husband – Mr… Wokulski…

Wokulski turned halfway round – and almost burst out laughing. So this comical figure, a bald little man, blinking nervously and stammering slightly, was this his ‘successor’?

We know who Izabela and Wokulski were. It is harder to say where their dialogue came from, given that we know Łęcka never married – after Stanisław broke off their engagement and disappeared, she was supposed to have entered a convent. Could it be that I broke into the shop whose mock-up stood on Krakowskie Przedmieście until March and snatched the script for TVP’s daring film adaptation? Alas, no. It is neither a script nor a creatively filled-in A-level exam paper from 2010, 2015, 2016, 2018 or 2021, when The Doll appeared in them. I have an old book in front of me. I’m browsing through its pages in search of clues:

At first, he wanted to turn onto Warecka Street, but he changed his mind and walked straight down Szpitalna. At the corner of Hortensji, he paused again for a moment, unsure what to do. Two grubby street urchins stood in front of a large shop window, animatedly discussing something. Wokulski approached them and only then noticed that the shop on the corner was a chocolate factory. Struck by a sudden impulse, he pushed open the front door and stepped inside. He was greeted by darkness and the scent of vanilla. The shop consisted of two rooms set at right angles to each other, joined near the entrance. Wokulski’s attention was drawn to the grey-celadon ceiling, with its numerous gilded details, and to the allegorical female figure painted on it, with an angel blowing into a long bag. ‘Ceres, or what?’ he muttered under his breath.

We have found the setting. The chocolate factory on the corner of Szpitalna and Hortensji Streets – what a fantastic name Wojciech Górski’s street used to have – must be Wedel’s. Today, there is no scent of vanilla or a grey-celadon ceiling, but the rooms still meet at right angles.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

The Wedel Chocolate Parlour at 8 Szpitalna Street in Warsaw, photo © Lotte Wedel

Picture image

szpitalna_wedel_wedel_mp.jpg

Let us, however, be thorough. The townhouse at 8 Szpitalna Street was built in 1893. The story of The Doll, published between 1887 and 1889, is set in 1878 and 1879. Carl and Emil Wedel ran a factory built at the rear of the property on Szpitalna Street, but the confectionery shop remained at its original location – they would not sell it until 1879, as noted by Łukasz Garbal, author of the book Wedlowie. Czekoladowe Imperium (The Wedels: The Chocolate Empire). So, at most, it was Rzecki who, in a dark corner of the ‘confectionery on the corner of Kapitulna and Miodowa Streets’, ordered a frothy hot chocolate and, from behind his newspaper, eavesdropped on Szlangbaum, who visited Wedel’s – though the old one. Wokulski could not have met Łęcka on Szpitalna Street, as the book lying before me claims, on whose heavy, stiff pages ‘woodcuts were printed from the original blocks’.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

A woodcut illustrating Władysław Cykowicz’s Opowiadanie Wieczorne (Evening Tale), Staroświecki Sklep (The Old-Fashioned Shop), 1938 / drawn by Edward Manteuffel; reproduction: Jan Czempiński

Picture image

IMG_4223.jpg

As I turn the pages, it becomes clear that we are in a story within a story. Bolesław Prus is the author of the deeper narrative, whilst Władysław Cykowicz leads the one closer to the surface. It is he who recalls wandering around the house and deciding to open a black, dusty trunk left by his grandfather. At the bottom, he finds a manuscript by Prus, a close friend of his grandfather’s, containing the continuation of The Doll! The narrator then gives the floor to the author of Chapter IV, titled How Old Friends Meet in New Circumstances. Wokulski is alive; he returns to Warsaw after many years, stays the night at the Wysockis’, goes for a walk, and pops into Wedel to buy sweets for the ‘little ragamuffins’ glued to the shop window. Inside, he meets Łęcka and her husband. The narrator devours a pile of tattered papers (Cykowicz speaks again) by the dim light of the falling dusk. The manuscript, which he ‘still keeps to this day with emotion’, is unfortunately incomplete and breaks off when Wokulski leaves the parlour to give the sweets to the children.

Nothing is known about Władysław Cykowicz, except that his Opowiadanie Wieczorne (Evening Tale) was published in 1938 in the collection Staroświecki Sklep (The Old-Fashioned Shop). It was included in the collection because the author had entered a competition run by the magazine Wiadomości Literackie for ‘the most charming memory associated with Wedel’s “old-world” shop’.

What was the story behind the Staroświecki Sklep?

That was not the plan. In 1937, Jan Wedel was 63, yet he remained a sprightly entrepreneur with an eye to the future. He used his own aeroplane to transport and advertise his products, had recently moved his factory to a building in Kamionek, and had invested in the construction of modern townhouses on Puławska Street. He understood that in a shop dating back half a century, ‘overloaded ornamentation might be jarring to the modern eye’. He ordered a refurbishment, and in April 1937, the shop windows on Szpitalna Street were boarded up.

Picture display

mały obrazek (568px desktop)

The Wedel chocolate shop at 8 Szpitalna Street in Warsaw, 1939, photo: fotopolska.eu

Picture image

kamienica_wedla_1343678_fotopolska-eu.jpg

Antoni Sobański responded. ‘Count Tonio’, the owner of the palace in Guzów, a well-known homosexual in Warsaw’s intellectual circles, a critic of Nazism and a supporter of the British constitutional monarchy. In a letter to the editor of the liberal Wiadomości Literackie titled O Zachowanie Sklepu E. Wedla (On the Preservation of E. Wedel’s Shop), he criticised the revolutions in the Polish language carried out blindly from the top down, leading towards linguistic ‘excessive levelling’, that is, uniformisation, and clearly demonstrating what was being done to Warsaw. The reason why it is astonishingly uncharacteristic is that tradition is not respected here. ‘How many flats do we know of, occupied by families who have lived in Warsaw for several generations, that would have a genuine “old-world” feel, even if only evoking the atmosphere of a period as relatively close to us as the era of Prus?’ (This sentence was spoken before the Second World War, not after it.) How many ‘shops with an authentic atmosphere’? Apart from three (unnamed) pharmacies, Sobański pointed only to the Wedel factory. That is why, not without the arrogance of a count accustomed to palaces, he asked that it be preserved.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Marszałkowska Street in the 1930s; on the left, a neon sign on the Wedel shop / photo: NAC

Picture image

3_1_0_9_6758_75638.jpg

The literary critic Karol Wiktor Zawodziński, who was even more at odds with the changes to the ‘pre-war’ order (beginning with the renaming of Saski Square to Piłsudski Square), joined in the ‘pestering’, as did Maria Kuncewiczowa, who had become famous the previous year for her novel Cudzoziemka (The Stranger). She now insisted that it was not a question of ‘preserving, out of courtesy to sentimental ladies, things like the rubbish bins that their deceased dogs used to love’, but of the residents as a whole, who need continuity. That is, places from their childhood, such as ‘Wedel’s shop with the giant black figures’ [puppets standing at the entrance], which they would like to show their grandchildren. Regardless of whether these places are particularly stylish.

It is worth noting that all three emphasised their distance from the shop’s décor. They knew it was bourgeois, and it was improper to praise the bourgeoisie. Jan Wedel was also aware of this. Moved by their words, a few weeks after Sobański’s letter, in the pages of the same Wiadomości Literackie, he made no secret of his delight that the ‘uninspired’ and ‘overly pretentious’ setting reminded others of old Warsaw. To ‘preserve this very warm sentiment towards the shop’, he decided not to modernise the interior, but instead to fund a prize and ask the editorial team to help organise the competition. Wiadomości… announced the rules, the prize money (a total of 1,500 zlotys, at a time when the average teacher’s salary was 200–300 zlotys), the deadline for submitting anonymous entries, and the composition of the jury: Antoni Sobański, Maria Kuncewiczowa and Julian Tuwim.

Out of more than 50 entries, 10 were shortlisted. The prize was shared by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Zofia Krzepkowska. The manuscript of the sequel to The Doll took third place. Shortly afterwards, it was announced that the shortlisted texts would be published in a book illustrated with the authors’ own woodcuts. The chosen title, Staroświecki Sklep, was by no means an obvious choice. Wedel did not use this name; it was the editorial team who promoted it, announcing a ‘competition for the most beautiful memory associated with E. Wedel’s old-fashioned shop in Warsaw’, and later turning the phrase into the title. The foreword to the book, written by Julian Tuwim, speaks of the creative power of sentiment.

I don’t know whether the current generation of ‘sweet kids’ feels the same way. A toddler in 1938 doesn’t deign to look up when he hears an aeroplane whizzing overhead; seeing a rainbow, he asks: ‘Mummy, what’s that an advert for?’, and when a cuckoo calls in the woods, he calmly remarks, ‘Vilnius’... [This refers to the signal from Polish Radio’s Vilnius Station]. But for us, who indulged in chocolate delicacies around the year 1900, the wonders of legends and fairy tales have not yet been lost, so we associate ‘Wedel’s’ with Grimm and Andersen. And that is precisely what this lovely little book is about, in which Grimm and Andersen are often joined by a third wizard – Bolesław Prus…

In 1937, a year when people longed for the life of old, as they usually do, regardless of whether they are ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’, and thus a year when plaques were unveiled on Krakowskie Przedmieście in honour of the heroes of The Doll (they still hang there today), it was clearly impossible not to write about Prus.

Myth

The competition’s winner, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who, by the way, was a contributor to Wiadomości..., did not overlook Prus either. In Wspomnienie (Memoir), he recounts how, as a child, he used to visit the shop on Szpitalna Street to buy chocolate with kopecks he had secretly saved up (without his mother knowing). Inside, he marvelled at the satin-lined chocolate boxes, the pieces of golden pineapple and the pyramids of red caramel, no less than at the painted blue-and-pink ‘good fairies’ who whispered to him from the height of the shop’s ceiling.

It is said that he once met Henryk Sienkiewicz at the counter, and the shop assistant then told him that ‘Mr Prus comes in almost every day, because he lives opposite [...] he just takes a few lots’ worth of sweets to put in a packet and takes them to the editorial office… though he usually gives them away to children on the way…’. Iwaszkiewicz’s love letter to old Warsaw seems authentic, but that does not mean he was reporting facts. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Prus lived nearby, but not ‘opposite’, since he lived on Grzybowski Square. Having grown up in the Kyiv region, Iwaszkiewicz gives clear indications in the text that the account was, at least in part, fictional.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

A woodcut illustrating the short story A’la Proust by Jadwiga Piasecka (pen name of Jan Piasecki), Staroświecki Sklep (The Old-Fashioned Shop), 1938 / drawn by Tadeusz Cieślewski Jr.; photo: National Library of Poland – Polona

Picture image

staroswiecki-sklep_wedel_polona.jpg

The authors perfectly grasped the intention behind the competition. They submitted memoirs that easily veered into personal fairy tales. Sometimes, the ‘most beautiful memory’ never strayed from the realm of fiction. An example is Iza Kuźmińska’s Drogi Natchnienia (The Paths of Inspiration), yet another text in which Prus appears. The author depicts the Kurier Warszawski chronicler as he devises the plot of The Doll, strolling through Warsaw with Rzecki and Wokulski (we understand this is taking place in his mind).

When he shakes off these imaginings, he heads to Wedel, because ‘his charming little neighbour is celebrating her seventh birthday and he owes the girl her favourite chocolate to mark the occasion’. The hustle in the shop, which immediately envelops the guest in the ‘mysterious atmosphere of the dim interior’, once again leads him into contemplation. Mr Klejn, the shop assistant, and Wedel’s young assistant, Ignaś, who is looking up at the ‘principal’, catch his attention. Mr Prus listens to Mr Wedel’s stories about his former confectionery on Miodowa Street and the company’s general traditions. Upon returning home, he has his own Mincel, where Ignacy Rzecki will be apprenticed.

As for the facts, we already know that when Prus was creating his characters, the shop on Szpitalna Street did not yet exist. It opened in a newly built tenement house in 1894. The real-life inspiration for Jan Mincel was a merchant from Lublin with that very name. However, the writer did indeed visit Szpitalna Street later on, and there is no need to take Iwaszkiewicz’s word for it, since we have the account of Jan Wedel, who remembered ‘from behind the counter of that shop [...] the old dear guests, such as the strangely modest Bolesław Prus’.

This, however, says nothing about Prus’s sentiment. Growing up before the January Uprising, he had a different perspective from the ‘chocolate connoisseurs of 1900’. He rented his first flat in Warsaw in the 1860s, in the Old Town, not far from the ‘original’ Wedel confectionery on Miodowa Street. It is more likely that he had a fondness for it than that he saw an old-fashioned shop in its successor on Szpitalna Street.

The chronological order is blurred here, for from the outset we are immersed in stories that carry the reader into a timeless realm and transform the characters into bearers of transcendent attitudes. Along the horizontal lines of the myth’s structure, two motifs recur particularly frequently: a dark but richly decorated and furnished chocolate factory shop, and children who lose their heads inside it, and even more often in front of it. Large-scale trade and social inequalities closely link the chocolate manufacturer with The Doll.

The Wedels, the Mincles & the socialists

The Wedels could have been characters in a Prus novel. As a merchant family of German origin, thrifty and thoroughly bourgeois, they resembled the Mincles. They shared a social conscience with their heir, Wokulski: ‘a list of the Wedels’ charitable deeds, reported in the newspapers, would be as thick as a telephone directory,’ writes Łukasz Garbal. We learn from his book that they donated substantial sums to charitable causes. Here we face a problem very much in the spirit of The Doll: the issue of short-term charitable initiatives that do not solve the problems of the poorest but allow the bourgeoisie to improve its image and, paradoxically, reinforce the existing class structure. Wokulski realises what is going on, but takes part in it nonetheless.

Picture display

mały obrazek (568px desktop)

Woodcut illustrating Anna Krause’s short story Bez Tytułu (Untitled), Staroświecki Sklep (The Old-Fashioned Shop), 1938 / drawn by Bogna Krasnodębska-Gardowska; reproduction: Jan Czempiński

Picture image

ilustracja_z_antologii_wspomnien_o_sklepie_e._wedla_staroswiecki_sklep_autor-_tadeusz_cieslewski1938_fot._biblioteka_narodowa_polona_3232.jpg

This brings to mind Jan Wedel, the founder of Staroświecki Sklep. He is highly regarded today not only for his civic generosity but also for the great many things he did for his employees. At the new factory in Kamionek, he built houses for them, as well as doctors’ surgeries, baths, a canteen, a gymnasium and theatre hall, a credit union and loan fund, a crèche and a kindergarten. If we allow ourselves to be a little more inquisitive, however, it turns out that the owner’s motivations were more nuanced than the circulating online image of the ‘Polish Willy Wonka’ who was ‘ahead of his time’.

Under the last of the Wedels, the company had expanded to include nearly thirty shops across Poland and one in Paris. Jan could easily have replied, just as the angry Wokulski had said to Rzecki: ‘I alone [...] have earned ten times more than two generations of the Mincles.’ He also resembled the protagonist of The Doll in his scholarly disposition – a doctor of chemistry by training, he travelled the world in search of new solutions and developed recipes for delicacies himself. At the same time, he ensured the company retained its family character: just as Mincel did with his shop assistants, he would have lunch with managers and master confectioners, and new employees were taken on through the recommendation of their elders. However, this was not always successful. When a long-serving factory worker asked that his daughter, who had completed evening business school, be taken on in the office, he was told: ‘You would like your daughter, a worker’s daughter, to work in the office, but where will our children work?’ The refusal did not come from Wedel himself, but he was at the top of the company hierarchy established in the early 1900s.

Picture display

mały obrazek (568px desktop)

Jan Wedel before 1945 / photo: Wikipedia

Picture image

Jan_Wedel_portret.jpg

At that time, the staff were still working at the rear of the tenement house on Szpitalna Street. The factory operated in stuffy, dimly lit rooms in the outbuildings, and workers in the caramel-making room had to work without protective gloves. There was a significant wage gap: office staff and shop assistants earned several times as much as male blue-collar workers, who in turn earned twice as much as female blue-collar workers. It was not until the trade union strike in 1928 that pay rises were secured, after which the factory became renowned as the best-paying in the industry.

For Wedel, this was likely an investment in his peace of mind and the company’s reputation. He respected the workers—they said so themselves—but he detested the trade union they had formed. He shared decision-making on company matters at most with managers and foremen (who did not subsequently take part in strikes). He believed that trade unionists were acting to the detriment of the company, which he loved like a father, wielding authority over a family he did not trust. Whenever, during his rounds, he came across evidence of shoddy work or wastefulness – as Garbal recounts – he would fly into a rage, throw his hat about, and shout, ‘I don’t want this, I don’t want this; they want to destroy me, they want to destroy me; sack him, sack him.’ Some reacted with horror; others stifled their laughter. Some lost their jobs, whilst others were remitted. If that old Mincel (though, unlike the character in The Doll, he did not resort to ‘cane’) had transformed into Wokulski, one could speak of this more in the context of the 1930s. Following further strikes and a boycott of the company, called for by Robotnik (the newspaper of the Polish Socialist Party), the complex at Kamionek was indeed ahead of its time.

The final story from Staroświecki Sklep that we shall mention here serves as an indirect testament to this transformation. Lena Sölm’s Historia Sentymentalna (A Sentimental Story) is a single, one-breath reproach directed at the privileged world of chocolate. Completely different from the other texts, it is written in Brzozowski’s style and is arguably the best in the collection in terms of form. We are guided smoothly through the inner struggles of a narrator growing up in a Śródmieście family, who has had enough of her bourgeois pigtails, is captivated by revolutionary literature – though she does not really understand it – and longs to bond with the working class. She meets Majka, an impressive fourteen-year-old, who tells her about her father on strike at the factory and about how, out of hunger, she recently ate potatoes from a cat’s bowl left in the stairwell. However, the teenagers are driven apart by Wedel’s chocolate, which Majka spots on her friend and, to her dismay, calls her a ‘bourgeois’. The author concludes wryly: ‘That is my prettiest memory of the Wedel shop.’

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

A woodcut depicting the heroine of Lena Sölm’s short story Historia Sentymentalna (A Sentimental Story), Staroświecki Sklep (The Old-Fashioned Shop), 1938 / drawn by Jadwiga Hładki; reproduction: Jan Czempiński

Picture image

majka-ilustracja-do-antologii-wspomnien-o-sklepi.jpg

It is unclear whether the inclusion of the story was due to the founder’s kindness, his commercial acumen, or perhaps pressure from the jury. Thanks to it, however, most of the children of pre-war Warsaw, who had never set foot in Wedel’s, were given a voice.

After the war, once again

Neither the progressive factory in Kamionek nor Lena Sölm’s short story, in which the characters call for a ‘People’s Poland’, could save Wedel from the nationalisation of his company in the Polish People’s Republic. Years later, history proved Klejn right; he had argued to Rzecki that Bonapartism was over and that power lay with socialism. The Wedel House on Puławska Street was now occupied by representatives of the new regime. Jan was also stripped of the tenement at 8 Szpitalna Street, and only with the consent of his former caretaker, he continued to live there until his death, occasionally popping downstairs for some caramels.

Local residents kept frequenting the café of the ‘22nd July Confectionery Industry Factory.’ Mrs Halina (born in 1923) recalled that, in the early post-war years, the café on Szpitalna Street was an oasis of elegant living, attracting old-timers from Warsaw. They enjoyed the red, plush-upholstered chairs, but noted with sadness the sloppily fitted windows. In the decades that followed, the venue was refurbished and made accessible to the general public. Yet for Ms Ela (born in 1943), it still brought to mind the sleigh in which her grandparents used to glide down Aleje Ujazdowskie on their way to the ball at Dolinka Szwajcarska. We have come across a scene like that somewhere before.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Wedel’s Old-Fashioned Shop at 8 Szpitalna Street in Warsaw, photo: Adrian Grycuk/CC BY-SA 3.0 PL

Picture image

staroswiecki_sklep_wedla_szpitalna_8_warszawa.jpg

After 1989, the company was acquired by foreign investors, and Ms Ela is saddened by this. She also says that guests’ manners have changed these days, and that a sort of ‘anything goes’ attitude has taken hold. Every sentiment, as we can see, has its own truth, rooted in its own frame of reference and its own heroes. The fact that there are no longer any fairies on the ceiling of the café on Szpitalna Street today, dressed in robes ‘very blue, as if made of cream [...] or pink like lipstick’, does not mean there are no fairies elsewhere. Perhaps someone is writing a story about them right now, whilst someone else is preparing the illustrations. In a hundred years’ time, this will become a book with heavy, stiff pages, on which ‘woodcuts have been printed from the original blocks’.

Translated from Polish by Agnieszka Mistur

Language English

boleslaw prus

The Doll