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I approached Gdañsk with some trepidation, wondering if it could bear the weight of expectation generated by its glorious mercantile past and by the wonders I’d seen in other Hanseatic towns along the Baltic’s south coast – Wismar, Stralsund, even the down-at-heel but likeable port of Szczecin.

Gdañsk certainly has its architectural glories: it has, after all, St Mary’s, the largest brick gothic church in the world, its worthy companion piece the fourteenth century brick-built town hall. The main street, Ulica D³uga, is a magnificent parade of steep gables leading into the even more impressive space of D³ugi Targ, where the enchanting Neptune Fountain provides the foreground interest for a thousand tourist photographs. The architecture resonates with the prosperity and pride of the city’s seventeenth and eighteenth century commercial elite.

Yet Gdañsk lacks the palpable sense of antiquity to be found in other Hanseatic towns less devastated by the 20th century: Lübeck, say, or nearby Toruñ, birthplace of Nicolas Copernicus, in both of which the crumbly mellowness of the brick is testament to the extreme antiquity of the building fabric. In part, this is because Gdañsk’s real glory days came later. But the brute fact is that most of what you’re looking at in the heart of Gdañsk is the result of post-war restoration or reconstruction, and it will take centuries for it to regain a patina of age. Away from the set piece streets of Ulica D³uga and Mariacka, many of the reconstructions are only approximate, and there’s a certain uniformity to the windows and a 1950s look to some of the materials. One or two of the newer reconstructions – such as the social security offices on the Spichlerze island – are mere pastiche.

But this is to carp, for the rebirth of Gdansk is an astonishing achievement when set against the scale of the destruction as the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought over it in 1945; the photographs in the town hall museum leave the visitor in no doubt of the skill and dedication of the restorers. And no-one could accuse Gdañsk of lacking history. It was here that the opening shots of World War Two were fired, as Hitler sought to bring the Free City of Danzig home to the Reich. And it was here, in 1980, that strikes in the Lenin Shipyards gave birth to Solidarity, and the Warsaw Pact began, slowly, to unravel. That’s almost more history than one city can bear.

The guidebooks tie themselves in knots trying to unlock the conundrum of this unique city, linked politically with Poland for much of its history, and yet for much of that time – until they fled or were expelled in 1945 – dominated economically and culturally by German burghers. Their influence lingers not just in the architecture and art of the place, but in the name of the favourite local tipple: Goldwasser, a vodka liqueur with flakes of gold leaf, rather ostentatious yet entirely appropriate to a rich trading city.

Gdañsk’s history is a trap for the unwary. It can’t be edited comfortably into a simple progression towards the Polish present, yet to emphasize the German past alone is to flirt with revanchism: it’s a thoroughly Polish city now. Flag-waving nationalism is particularly inappropriate here. Gdañsk predates the creed and it was the forces unleashed by nationalism in Nazi form that brought about the old city’s destruction.

I found Günter Grass a more reliable guide. He shares with Lech Wa³eºa the twin honours of being Gdañsk’s most famous son and a Nobel prize winner. His novel, The Tin Drum, is an account of the madness that led up to the devastation of 1945. The book is famously earthy, but Grass gets the atmosphere right: Gdañsk is no saccharine tourist town, but a real port, and like many ports a little rough around the edges. On a Friday night in the old city beery groups of shaven-headed men set the tone, not the tourists lingering over a last coffee. The evening ends with kebabs, not cocktails. For chic nightlife, better head up the coast to the resort of Sopot, where Poland’s gilded youth and its celebrity set flock in search of sand, sun and style.

Grass grew up in the suburb of Wrzeszcz, known at that time as Langfuhr. The suburban railway heading out of Gdañsk north to Gdynia bisects the district; to the landward side of the tracks it’s rather elegant, but on the port side it’s a mildly scruffy working class neighbourhood of 19th century tenement blocks, the buildings the Germans call Mietskaserne or rental barracks. Here, at Ulica Lelewela 13, stands the grocery store where Grass spent his childhood, and which formed the basis for the store in Labesweg run by the narrator’s father in The Tin Drum: ‘a languishing grocery store ruined by credit’ is how it appears in the book. The building is grey and tough; a plaque (in Polish) marks the spot. A little distance away, in the small neighbourhood park, a bronze likeness of Oskar Matzerath, the boy who refused to grow up, taps at his drum, though grass pokes through the cobblestones beneath him and one of the drumsticks has snapped off. It’s that kind of neighbourhood: no slum, but no place for literary airs and graces.

One of the novel’s key scenes takes place at the Polish post office, a dignified building on the edge of the old town and somewhat off the main drag for foreign visitors. Polish tourists do come here in numbers, for one of the most tragic episodes of the opening hours of the war played out here as the Polish postmen defended their building against Nazi attack, paying for their courage with their lives. A rather florid modernist memorial, fashioned from shiny metal, tells the story of the defence of the post office in diorama form. As art, it is a little melodramatic for my tastes; like some of the old town it, too, lacks the patina of age. Given the enormity of what it commemorates, though, it’s perhaps better that this – unlike the reconstructed burghers’ houses – should stay fresh and raw.

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