Breslau became Wroclaw. For the first time since the Middle Ages the Poles were back in control; the city was in “recovered territory.” Any German civilians who’d survived a devastating 14-week Russian siege were expelled to find new homes in the West. In their place came Polish refugees, themselves ousted from territory grabbed by the Soviet Union hundreds of miles to the east. German street names vanished, German statues were toppled, priceless German books from the university library were destroyed. Bricks from its few remaining monuments were carried off to Warsaw for use in the capital’s reconstruction.
For the people of Central Europe, such stories are dismally familiar. The region’s borders have rarely proved stable. Memories are long, and each of the many ethnic groups in the rich local mix has its own conflicting version of history. Old resentments have a nasty way of resurfacing. It takes an outsider with plenty of patience to unscramble the evidence and compose something like an objective account.
That’s where Oxford history professor Norman Davies can help. At a private dinner back in 1996, Wroclaw’s city president suggested a radical project. The city needed a new history that might reconcile the modern place with its past. Such a book, he said, could never be written by a German or a Pole. Would Davies be interested? The result is “Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City,” co-written with Davies’s former student Roger Moorhouse, a study of all that made the region such a hapless muddle.
The title proclaims the theme. This is no straightforward civic history: it’s an attempt to examine the idea of Central Europe through the experiences of a single city. Even for a historian of Davies’s skill, that’s some challenge. The very notion of Central Europe as an independent region is controversial. All that’s clear is that a shifting buffer zone has always existed between “Western Europe” and the all-Slavic east. In fact, what binds it together, says Davies, may not be geography. Rather it’s the common experience of fast-changing overlords, repeated invasion and mass migrations from east and west. In particular, the region attracted a vast population of Jews, unwelcome in the west and shut out of Russia. Further shared hardships followed in the 20th century, bringing a double dose of totalitarianism at the hands of the Nazis and then the communists.
Wroclaw neatly makes Davies’s points. It may be within driving distance of Vienna or Berlin but it somehow belongs to a distinct frontier zone. It has lived under the rule of Bohemians, Poles, Hungarians, Austrians and Prussians, not to mention a brief occupation by the French. According to various dictates it’s been known as Wrotizla, Vretslav, Presslaw, Breslau and Wroclaw. In religion the prevailing faith has been Roman Catholic, Hussite, Lutheran and Catholic again. And as elsewhere in Central Europe, the 20th century proved especially cruel. Under the Nazis even use of the Polish language on the street was forbidden. Only 160 Jews out of a prewar population of 30,000 survived. Under the Stalinist regime that followed, prisons were filled with Polish patriots accused of “fascist Hitlerite” crimes.
It’s a past that Wroclaw is working hard to leave behind, with considerable success. Since 1989, it has developed a lively tourist trade. The city is noted especially for its carefully restored medieval and Gothic architecture and international music festivals. Thanks to history and proximity, most foreign visitors are German, including many who arrive these days with the same commercial purpose as their forebears–and they are welcomed back. Among the leading investors in post-communist Wroclaw are such big-name German firms as Siemens, DaimlerChrysler and Deutsche Bank. With luck, past tensions could be a matter for scholarship rather than smoldering grievances. There’s even talk of establishing a German-backed study center for research into the mass expulsions that followed the 1945 settlement. What better site than the epicenter of that history?
