"Wrozby Kumaka" (The Call of the Toad) is an adaptation of the book "Unkenrufe" by the German Nobel Prize winner Gunter Grass. Although the film received lukewarm reviews and has a relatively low rating, I personally enjoyed it and believe it is worth viewing. The story is about the late love of the German writer Alexander Reschke (Matthias Habich) and the Polish conservator of monuments Aleksandra Piatkowska (Krystyna Janda). They have both been widowed and find out that they have a lot in common. The film is set in Gdansk, just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I have always respected Gunter Grass and read several books by him. It looks to me that Alexander Reschke is an "alter ego" of the writer himself, which makes the story even more interesting. "The Call of the Toad" has also another dimension, which is reconciliation between Poles and Germans. I liked the warm atmosphere of the film and the excellent performances of Krystyna Janda and Matthias Habich. The movie is also not devoid of some subtle humor. And finally, about the symbolic second dimension of the film. Gunter Grass was always a great advocate of reconciliation between the Poles and the Germans, and I can name a couple of similar, famous people on the Polish side, like Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Andrzej Szczypiorski, Krzysztof Penderecki, or Krzysztof Zanussi. "The Call of the Toad" has often been criticized for its weak ending. This is true if you take the literal love story side, but I think that the ending has a deep meaning in its symbolic side. To me the great German writer is saying this: I am showing you only the snapshot of Poland just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The reconciliation is already accomplished, and my story is over. Now it is the task for the younger generation to build the friendship between our nations. And I feel that I also played a tiny part in the sequel to "The Call of the Toad", because from 2002 to 2007 I was a single Polish co-worker in a German IT company. So we solved some tasks together, sometimes went out to eat or celebrate, and discussed books and movies, without our nationalities being the slightest issue. And there are probably thousands of stories like mine. The biggest setback to good Polish/German relations were the years 2015-2023, when Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his PIS party were in power. But it was also a setback to the progress of Poland in building a Western democracy and an open, civic society. For all its patriotic and nationalist,bombastic, meaningless slogans, its campaign of hatred against the Germans, EU parliament and other EU institutions, immigrants, Moslems, and gays, PIS was consistent in one aspect of its actions: Victor Orban in Hungary was copying the solutions of Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski was copying the Hungarian solutions in Poland. It was a clear path back to the East and the communist past, which was fortunately stopped. Adam Michnik, an icon of the Polish democratic movement and presently editor in chief of the influential newspaper "Gazeta Wyborcza" once said this about Jaroslaw Kaczynski: he can spit into the river, but he cannot turn back its flow. So if we lost several years and are now back in 2015 or even earlier, the friendship between Poland and Germany will flow again, because we are neighbors who are bound together by geography, our political systems, economy, and culture.
