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A little over a year ago an old Bechstein baby grand arrived in my home, its journey from a factory in 19th-century Berlin to 21st-century London a long, complex and only partly understood saga. I lifted the lid to discover the dealer’s mark: ‘Aus dem Pianoforte Magazin von Louis Falk in Posen’ – from the piano store of Louis Falk in Posen.

Posen, I knew, was the name by which the Polish city of Poznan was known in the 19th century. From the partitions of Poland up to 1918 Poznan was first Prussian and then a provincial capital of the German Empire. Shortly after the piano arrived, a find in an Amsterdam flea market put flesh on the bones of this phantom city. It was a 19th century street map of Posen, the street names asserting Hohenzollern dynastic power – Kaiserin Viktoria Strasse, Wilhelmsplatz, Friedrichstrasse – but the outlying districts suggesting a more ambiguous identity: Berdychowo, Schrodka, Wilda.

The earliest known depiction of Poznan refers to ‘Poznan, a beautiful city in Poland’. It’s certainly still that – a revelation to anyone who arrives here on expenses with only business in mind. When I finally arrived in Poznan I made for the Stary Rynek, the old town square.

Most sightseeing tours of Poznan focus on it. Quite right too, for it’s one of the great city squares of Europe, every bit as picturesque as the tourist posters suggest, but a good deal grander in its proportions than the camera can quite capture. The beautiful renaissance town hall, which houses a museum of the city’s history, acts as the focal point. It’s probably the most magnificent sight in the city, its only real rival the elegant, twin towered cathedral on the island of Ostrow Tumski. In the shadow of the great cathedral stands a tiny, 15th century brick gothic chapel designed by one Heinrich Braunsberg, a venerable reminder that Poznan’s cultural links beyond Poland to the Germanic world did not begin with Prussian occupation.

The streets leading off the Stary Rynek are atmospheric and quintessentially Polish. South of the square looms the opulent, baroque form of the parish church, the Italian influence clear, the interior dark and mysterious. Behind it the vast former Jesuit college now serves as the city hall.

I spent the morning exploring the old town and then, sated with its loveliness, climbed Marcin street, leaving the renaissance and baroque city behind me and heading west into the nineteenth century.

This Poznan of the industrial revolution is a very different place, for it was here that the battle for Posen/Poznan’s national identity took place. A row of hotels with pretty Jugendstil details would not look out of place on the Kurfürstendamm: the university library resembles a smaller cousin of the one on the Unter den Linden; further west, apartment buildings along the former Grosse Berliner Strasse would sneak unobtrusively into the streetscapes of Schöneberg or Kreuzberg. To say that much of Wilhelmine Poznan has a German look is simply to note the accumulated evidence of so many architectural details.

Prussia, however, never had things all its own way. Though the former German theatre is a handsome, white classical building the nearby Polish one is just as handsome, just as white and just as assertive of national identity. On Wolnosci square the classicism of the Raczynski library is as patrician as its founder, Count Edward Raczynski, who established it in 1829 as a beacon of Polish culture. It must have infuriated the Prussians, a colonnaded counterblast to imperial pretensions.

In purely architectural terms this clash of competing nationalisms served Poznan well, for it has left an impressive legacy. The Prussians, too, built with pride: a vast post office, a fine concert hall, a commission for the colonization of the east and, looming above everything else, the Kaiser’s schloss, a little heavy in style as well as in symbolism, but built solidly and well. Complete with clock tower, it would make a marvellous railway station, though these days it’s an arts centre, the Zamek.

I headed back down to the history museum in the town hall, anxious to fill in the historical gaps. Unlike many a European city, the Poznan of old photographs is often an easily recognisable version of its modern self. Pictures of old shop fronts revealed a bilingual town: J Gierlowski, Apteka or Apotheke; the tobacconist J Neumann aus Berlin, not so nationalistic as to ignore the needs of his Polish customers, with Polish signage alongside the German. Business, after all, is business. The names above most shops sounded neither German nor Polish, but Jewish: Adolf Glaser, Nathan Marcus, Lewin Reinstein.

The battle fought in stone and brick on the city’s streets was reflected in the era’s postcards, which variously depict Poznan, Posen, or both. One card dated 1907 showed the large and imposing synagogue, a ubiquitous feature of urban life in Wilhelmine Germany, from Essen to Breslau.

Imperial Posen was surely always more aspiration than reality, for as the exhibition moves beyond 1918 it is notable how completely the Polish identity re-emerged once Poznan became part of an independent Poland, and how the German one melted away. There were cosmopolitan touches, like the glamorously neon-lit art deco frontage of ‘The Gentleman’, a popular store of the day. The trade fair grounds display the same Bauhaus modernity as Poland’s purpose built 1930s seaport, Gdynia, and the Polish ocean liners that departed its quays.

A few short years later everything was laid waste by the Nazi invasion, and the exhibit, like that of any Central European history museum, takes a dark turn.

But you can’t keep a good town down forever. Post-communist Poznan is in fine shape. In the evening, I returned to the Rynek. The lovely square glowed with soft light and buzzed with contented chatter from the smart pavement cafés that ring its perimeter. Their occupants had a businesslike air, the elegantly dressed group on the table next to mine conversing in French. Poznan’s location halfway from Berlin to Warsaw has been both its curse and its fortune. Visually a blend of the two, it’s more handsome than either.

Now part of the European Union, Poznan seems a dynamic and worldly place, a Polish Turin, Düsseldorf or Lyon. The struggles of the 19th century seem a thing of distant memory, Prussian Posen a mere legend. Except, of course, beneath the lid of my Bechstein. Though its hammers are worn, the tone is rich and warm. As good for Chopin as it is for Schubert, I would think.

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