Anna Piasecka

Autobiography, satire and non-fiction book combined
 

We are among the few who immediately understand the title of the book by Anna Piasecka, “BIGOS, ZOB und JOB”. The regional German-Polish Society invited the author to give a reading from her first book. Anna’s friends and fellow students from her uni days joined the society’s members at the reading. She has been friends with the society’s chair since a school exchange some years ago. But above all, the port city in the extreme north of Germany was where she studied. The book is about that time and about starting her professional career between Germany and Poland. In our town, people from 149 countries live together peacefully, with almost one thousand Poles among that number. The town has a reputation for being cosmopolitan, not least because of its close border with Denmark. It is twinned with the Polish town of Słupsk where Piasecka grew up. In her book, the name of our town remains a secret. Because of this, the author's experiences in other unnamed places in Germany and Poland can be applied more generally, and even data protection laws are satisfied.

Bigos is, of course, the Polish national dish made from steamed sauerkraut with sausage, various types of meat and plums that can be seasoned with wine. If you can't find or afford to visit a Polish restaurant abroad, then someone will bring this meal back from Poland with them so that you get a little taste of home. The ZOB is the Zentrale Omnibusbahnhof (Central Bus Station) in our town where all city buses meet, and where intercity buses to neighbouring communities and long-distance buses to Denmark and Poland leave and arrive from. It is the central square in this town which you cross to get to the eastern parts of the city or to the harbour from the west and where thousands of pupils and students at the university and technical college change buses every day. ZOB is one of the first terms that Anna had to learn in Germany. Everybody needs a job. According to Piasecka, you have to look for one until you drop or you won’t find one. Many potential readers will be unfamiliar with the first two words of the book’s title which are supposed to arouse your curiosity. But they also make it harder for booksellers to guess the contents of the publication, as the author knows only too well after trying it out for herself in a book shop.

Piasecka arrived in Germany around the turn of the millennium. It was the era of post-socialism when your education and professional life were still determined by deep-rooted mentalities and traditions and the economy of scarcity made everyday life harder. The country was still not a member of the European Union. A difficult childhood and a difficult adolescence had hardened the young woman. She had to assume responsibility for her poorly sister, her family and herself much too early in life. She had actually wanted to study law in Poland, but despite having the best marks and a high score in the admission procedure, she did not get a place to study. Other applicants, whose parents were lawyers, managed to get a place easily, even though their results were not as good. An advertisement in a magazine advertising study places in Germany and a positive email from the dean of the polytechnic in the far north gave her the courage to go abroad. She hoped to flee the “poisoned” homeland environment and find a new future in Germany.

The trauma of her childhood when she had to manage everything on her own had given her the ability to assert herself but she was also naive. Without money and without language skills, she decided to make her way to Germany to study business administration. A few sentences learnt off by heart would have to do for a start. The author tells so prosaically and frankly of her experiences at the German Embassy in Warsaw that you would think that her accounts were satirical if only they weren’t so true: The controls in the bus at which the jars of bigos and pierogi stowed in her luggage aroused the suspicions of the border guards, her arrival in a shared apartment at her place of study where she didn't know her housemates, who were helpful but who didn’t know where exactly Poland was, and finally the sometimes ludicrous procedures at the Aliens’ Authority in the medium-sized north German town.

Young readers could think that what she experienced was a long time ago when the Internet was still in its infancy for everyone, hardly anyone had a notebook and tablets were not yet available in the shops, when no social media platforms existed, mobile phones still had buttons and you rang home on the landline. Today, you would like to think that all foreign and German students can communicate easily in English, communicate with home via the Internet and find cooking recipes, transport connections or language modules in the worldwide web. However, anyone who has had a lot of dealings with foreign students or has themselves worked abroad knows that not a lot has changed in the psychological and financial situation, the language and learning problems or the experiences with agencies and authorities in foreign countries. It actually makes you want to tell the author a wealth of your own stories. This is because historical events and subjective perception form a very special combination in autobiographies and give cause for one’s own reflection.

For the author as a student, the ZOB became a place of longing for all departures. Every four to five weeks, she travelled back to her family in Poland taking her dirty washing with her, even though there was a washing machine in the shared apartment. She simply wanted to have a feeling of belonging with her homeland. Back in the town where she was studying, she had to face her first exams. Accounting, investments and business information systems were on the timetable. She compensated for her still sizeable language deficit by learning books off by heart, without understanding their contents. In the end, she realised with embarrassment that this tactic had helped her achieve one of the highest scores amongst her fellow students. The author has enough self-irony to not see this as a model for future generations of students. It took Anna two years for her German to become reasonably reliable.

She also had to stand on her own two feet financially. She found work on the assembly line of a global mobile phone manufacturer located in the city. Along with numerous other foreign students, she was able to work in the factory for the maximum permitted period of six to eight nights per month. It is at this point, if not before, that students reading Piasecka’s book will realise that there is a lot more to studying abroad than just a light-hearted student life. But that was not all. Business English was on the timetable and Anna had to tackle it without prior knowledge of English and with even more chutzpah. She only managed to compensate for this deficit years later when she took a three-month intensive course in business English at a college in London.

By chance and quite unprepared she witnessed a dramatic event in global politics. On the night before Poland became a member of the European Union on 1 May 2004, she was once again in the bus to Poland waiting at the border of the despised passport and customs control. After hours of waiting, at midnight the bus was simply waved through. Cheering broke out. From this point onwards, residence and work permits were no longer required in Germany. Anna found a new temporary job, completed her intermediate diploma, carried out her internship semesters at a drug store on a well known island in the North Sea, and finally finished her studies. She is one of only three graduates to have managed to do that in the standard study period.

The young woman stayed in Germany. She found her first job with an agricultural company, also in northern Germany, which had a Polish subsidiary. She was offered her second and more significant job by an agribusiness which was pursuing a joint venture with a Polish agricultural trade business. Piasecka was sent to Poland for a few years to get the project off the ground and to merge the two companies. At this juncture, under the chapter heading “Project Poland”, Piasecka’s essay becomes a work of non-fiction which provides information about a typical career outline from the field of International Management and which can be used as specialist reading material for students. The author reports on intercultural problems, the completely new view of the country where she came from, on different work mentalities and consequent changes to the personnel and organisational structure of the Polish company, the drafting of articles of association, communication in two languages which she had to manage single-handedly for the entire company, the different legal and administrative systems in both countries, the training of employees and the development of a new distribution system in Poland, and finally on the introduction of modern forms of controlling and reporting. However, she describes everything so clearly and intelligibly that non-technical readers can still enjoy it.

The naive student who came to Germany without any previous experience, became a manager with four mobile phones, one hundred and fifty telephone calls to be dealt with every day, and a 16-hour day. She acquired a lot of her knowledge by learning by doing and can now hold her own in all areas of international management. Back in Germany, she supported subsidiaries and affiliates in operational, personnel, strategic, commercial and organisational issues. Piasecka’s book has reached the present day.

But the author now has a different goal in life because this exploitation of her own self has not simply passed her by. With the aim of finding herself again, she handed in her notice and left for South Africa to teach children. With a wealth of new experiences under her belt, she returned to Germany to face the grind of German bureaucracy in the job centre and looking for a job. These experiences are also so typical and strange that they can be seen as a satire of our modern society without the author having to exaggerate even slightly. She has yet to find a new professional career.

Tough and likeable, there is no other way to describe the author, even on the evening of her reading in our town in the far north of Germany. She brought slides of her project in South Africa for the members of the German Polish Association to see because many of those attending have given donations and can now see what their money has been used for. Her next book is going to be called, “Teacher Anna. Eine Polin in Südafrika”. [“Teacher Anna. A Pole in South Africa”] It can be assumed that, like the previous book, it will be full of personal experiences, detailed information and humorous incidents.

 

Axel Feuß, June 2018

 

 

Anna Piasecka: BIGOS, ZOB und JOB. Eine Polin in Deutschland, Oberhausen/Oberbayern: NOEL-Verlag, paperback, 126 pages, ISBN: 978-395493-184-2, €13.90