During the 1981 Census, the enumerator who called at my father's house was puzzled that, having given his place of birth as Poland, he expressed no great interest in the dramatic events then unfolding in that country with the rise of Solidarity and the shipyard strikes. But the Census requires you to give the country in which your birthplace now stands, not the country it was part of when you were born; and when my father was born there in 1919, the city of Breslau, as it was then called, was one of the great historic, cultural and industrial centres of eastern Germany.
His mother's family had lived there for at least a century: doctors, lawyers, journalists, furniture dealers, they were typical of the city's confident, secular, assimilated Jewish middle class. Although my father was still a child when he moved with his parents to Dresden (where he lived until he was obliged to flee to Britain on the eve of the Second World War), he retained links with Breslau as many relatives still lived there--at a family gathering a few years ago, an elderly cousin recalled being kept awake at night in the 1920s by the sound of the ice cracking in the river Oder, which their apartment overlooked.
Later, I acquired a couple of picture books that had belonged to my grandparents: Breslau Wie es War and Die Schlesischer Bilderbibel – post-war exercises in German nostalgia for the lost Heimat. The old photos were eerie: the Baroque churches and cobbled streets, so reminiscent of Prague or Cracow; the stolid burghers and Prince-Archbishops; the Jewish patrons of the arts, painted in their fussy drawing rooms or photographed in earnest conversation with Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss; the sleek Jugendstil department stores and Bauhaus-style apartment blocks.
This was Mitteleuropa – a world that has disappeared forever. The rise of Nazism crushed the civic autonomy and cultural élan so characteristic of the city, while those members of the Jewish community fortunate enough to escape were scattered across the globe. In the closing weeks of the war, the city itself was all but obliterated as the Wehrmacht made its last stand there against the Red Army. It then underwent a complete exchange of population. The remaining Germans were driven out and replaced by Poles, themselves expelled from the eastern areas annexed by the Soviet Union, and Breslau was henceforth known by its Polish name, Wroclaw.
Living in the West, where countries tend not to change their borders every century and streets their names every generation, it feels somewhat odd to know that your ancestral home is a city that cannot be found on any modern map, and that few people in this country have even heard of. So I was pleased that Norman Davies, the author of Europe, The Isles, and the acclaimed two-volume history of Poland, God's Playground, had chosen the city as the subject of this new work – and as a microcosm of Central Europe as a whole. The idea, Davies explains in a foreword, was suggested to him by the City President of Wroclaw, Bogdan Zdrojewski, who added that an objective history of the city could never be written by either a Pole or a German.
To preserve this balance, Davies and his co-author and former student Roger Moorhouse, have refrained from naming the city in the title of the book. Instead, the chapters take their titles from the various names the city has borne at different stages of its history: Wrotizla, Vretslav, Presslaw, Breslau, Wroclaw. And their thesis that the city stands as a microcosm for Central Europe is supported by the fact that, under its various names, it has been at the cockpit of virtually every major European struggle, and endured just about every vicissitude that history could throw at it: plague, pogroms, attack by the Mongols, the Hussite wars, the struggles of the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, Prussian expansionism, the Napoleonic Wars, Nazism and Stalinism.
Before embarking on a chronological account of the city's development, they begin, wisely, with a gripping, Beevoresque account of the 1945 siege, juxtaposing military history with personal testimonies to present an unflinching picture of total war between two dictatorships whose disregard of human suffering was absolute. Most of the civilian population was evacuated on 21 January 1945, travelling west on foot in temperatures as low as -20C. It is estimated that some 90,000 died on the journey.
The fanaticism of the city's Gauleiter, Karl Hanke, and the defenders' knowledge of the fate that would befall them if they surrendered, ensured that Festung (Fortress) Breslau was the last German city to fall. After two and a half months of artillery bombardment and savage house-to-house fighting, the exhausted defenders emerged from the rubble a week after Hitler's suicide to disappear into Stalin's Gulags – along with their Russian PoWs and the surviving inhabitants of the city's prisons and concentration camps.
After this description of the fall of Breslau Davies and Moorhouse flash back to the city's beginnings as a prehistoric island settlement in the Oder/Odra, at the point where the Amber Route from the Baltic to the Danube crossed the east-west Salt Route. Even this early history is contentious, however, as the national and ideological conflicts of the 20th century cast their shadow back across the Middle Ages and into prehistory. Thus, the region's early inhabitants were either proto-Slavs or Ur-Teutons, depending on whether you are reading the work of Polish or German scholars. The political manipulation of history forms a recurrent theme of the book: Marxist historians seized upon a plebeian uprising under the mediaeval ruler Henryk the Bearded (r.1231–8), while the Nazis dug up the remains of his successor Henryk IV Probus (r. 1267-90) in an attempt to prove his German ethnicity.
Davies suggests that the settlement of the Lusatian people, who inhabited the area in the fourth century BC, may have been similar to the fortified island at Biskupin (near Poznan), but strangely makes no reference to the fact that that site, uncovered by Polish archaeologists in the 1930s, was destroyed by the invading Nazis because the evidence it presented of a sophisticated early culture that was not of Germanic origin conflicted with their racial theories. (The event forms the background to Anne Michaels' Orange-Prizewinning novel Fugitive Pieces.)
The Lusatians were followed by Celts, who were followed by Sarmatians and Scythians in the chaotic migrations on the fringes of the crumbling Roman Empire. By the time it became the seat of a bishopric in the 11th century, Wrotizla was the chief city of Silesia and a part of the Piast kingdom of Poland. The intrigues between rival branches of this quarrelsome dynasty – who gloried in such names as Boleslaw the Wrymouthed and Wladyslaw the Elbow High – drove the last duke to seek the protection of the Kingdom of Bohemia, into which the Duchy of Wrotizla was absorbed in 1327.
Bohemian Vretslav was a flourishing place, with many churches, guild halls, and monasteries, and privileged trading rights. The city also had a sizeable Jewish community, until the Inquisitor General John of Capistrano arrived in 1453 to stamp out the Hussites and, finding few of them in town, incited the people against the Jews instead, all of whom where killed or driven out.
After the Bohemian throne passed to the Hapsburgs in 1526, Silesia and its capital became a part of the Austrian empire. By 1561, Presslaw was larger than Vienna; the fine cityscape of its main square, with its magnificent gabled Rathaus, had largely assumed its current appearance, and it was defended by an arm of the Oder diverted to form a moat, and state-of-the-art fortifications. Despite Hapsburg efforts to impose the Counter-Reformation on a predominantly Protestant populace, the city's lively circle of humanist thinkers made it a cultural centre of European renown. And, Against the grim background of the Thirty Years War – which reduced the city's population by 40 per cent – Presslaw became the seat of a major literary movement. The poets of the Silesian school, most notably Andreas Gryphius and Angelus Silesius, forged a literary language which, in its melancholy, linguistic tension, and intensity of religious feeling can be compared to the work of their metaphysical contemporaries in England.
It took the best part of the 17th century for the city to recover from the depredations of that brutal conflict, and it did not have long to enjoy its role as a provincial capital of the Austrian Empire before it changed hands yet again. In 1741 the province of Silesia was conquered for Prussia by Frederick the Great. His action triggered a dispute that drew in all the European powers and, as the fighting spread to their colonies, escalated into the first global conflict, known in Britain as the Seven Years War and in North America as the French and Indian War.
"On the head of Frederick," thundered Lord Macaulay, "is all the blood which was shed in a war which raged during many years and in every quarter of the globe… In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of America."
The city developed rapidly under Prussian rule, and by the time of German unification in 1871, it was the third largest metropolis in the empire, after Berlin and Hamburg. It was a bustling place, confident, cultured and brash, its prosperity resting on engineering, chemicals and the manufacture of railway carriages. Its university and polytechnic churned out Nobel prizewinners; its observatory was directed by no less an astronomer than Johann Galle, the discoverer of Neptune; its opera house launched the career of Wilhelm Furtwängler and staged the German premier of Verdi's Otello; its Musikverein was directed by Max Bruch; and Brahms wrote his Academic Festival Overture for the city.
It was a cosmopolitan place, too, with a significant Polish minority and strong Polish cultural links. The city's Jewish community was at the forefront of its cultural and civic life. It was, for the most part, highly acculturated and liberal in outlook; its energetic rabbi, Abraham Geiger, was one of the founding fathers of reform Judaism. Curiously, one notable individual whose life perfectly illustrates the energy, confidence and civic-mindedness of the city's 19th-century Jewish community is omitted from a book at times overburdened with minor personalities: Lina Morgenstern, the daughter of a successful furniture dealer, achieved considerable prominence as a feminist and philanthropist who organised Prussia's first soup kitchens, founded the League of German Housewives and edited Germany's first women's newspaper. While remaining both a practising Jew and a committed reformer, she was a regular guest of the imperial household, and wrote the official biography of the Empress Augusta.
This comfortable coexistence was shattered by the First World War and the economic depression, political extremism and civic unrest that followed. One story from this era is particularly haunting. Clara Immerwahr (1870–1915) was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate from a German university, In 1901 she married her fellow chemist Fritz Haber, who later received the Nobel Prize for discovering how to synthesise ammonia. On the outbreak of the First World War, Haber put his laboratory at the service of the German war effort, conducting experiments on animals with chlorine and ammonia. Immerwahr was increasingly disturbed by what she regarded as "a perversion of science" and, a week after Haber personally directed the first chlorine gas attack at Ypres in April 1915, Clara shot herself with his service revolver. Haber found himself another, less squeamish wife, and spent the post-war years pursuing a crackpot scheme to extract gold from sea water and thus pay off Germany's war reparations. He died in 1934, before the full horrors a of Nazism became apparent, but his earlier discoveries contributed to the development of Zyklon B, which was subsequently used to exterminate many of his relatives.
As an eastern city, and the headquarters of the VI Army Corps, Breslau was especially susceptible to the "stab-in-the-back" myth – the idea that Germany's armies, victorious in the field, had been betrayed by the politicians, the socialists and the Jews. And, as the Treaty of Versailles awarded large tracts of the adjacent territories to Poland, the city filled with refugees, while the loss of the industrial centres of Upper Silesia caused massive unemployment.
The political mood turned ugly as the Freikorps patrolled the streets and a mob trashed the Polish consulate. The NSAP gained a firm foothold in the city, which returned several Nazi members to the Reichstag. After the Nazis took power in 1933, the civic authorities pursued an aggressive policy of "Germanification"; by the end of 1938, the Polish community had completely disappeared, while two thirds of the city's Jews had left. On Reichskristallnacht (9 November 1938), that "spontaneous" uprising of the German people against the Jews, a division of Wehrmacht sappers dynamited the great Moorish-Byzantine New Synagogue that had formed the hub of the city's Jewish life since it was built in 1871.
After the Second World War, it was the turn of the city's surviving German inhabitants to be driven out, and for the remnants of their culture – street names, institutions, even cemeteries – to be systematically expunged. The expulsion of the Germans from much of Central Europe remains a highly sensitive issue. The half-century of silence on the displacement of some 16 million people from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania between 1945 and 1947 is understandable: in Communist countries, criticism of Soviet policy was impermissible, while in Western Europe it was widely thought anything that might portray the Germans as victims would be tantamount to an apologia for the crimes of the Third Reich.
Only now, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and Poland's imminent membership of the EU, is the subject beginning to be discussed. With his unfailing instinct for probing Germany's unhealed wounds, the novelist Günter Grass – who was born in the former German city of Danzig – has dealt with the experiences of the expellees in his latest novel, Im Krebsgang (Crabwise). Yet the issue remains such a sore point that it recently sparked a diplomatic row when Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister, demanded a retraction from the then Prime Minister of the Czech republic, Milos Zeman, who commented that the Sudeten Germans had got what was coming to them for their support for Hitler.
And, although Polish fears were somewhat allayed when, in the aftermath of German reunification, Chancellor Kohl announced that Germany relinquished all claims to territory east of the Oder-Neisse line, people living in the former German territories are worried that German expellees or their heirs may make legal claims on property that was expropriated from them, as happened in the former East Germany after the Wende, or even that a reunited Germany could use its economic might to recolonise what its armies had lost.
Davies and Moorehouse do not shy away from this difficult subject - in fact they treat it with fairness and sensitivity, emphasising the parallels between the experiences of the Poles expelled from the eastern areas annexed by the Soviet Union and those of the Germans they displaced, with columns of impoverished refugees hauling their meagre belongings on mule carts into the city's eastern suburbs while their counterparts departed in similar fashion to the west.
The new arrivals – exhausted and brutalised by their forced journey – found a shattered city, with piles of rubble blocking the streets and concealing unburied corpses. Wroclaw was Poland's "Wild West", neglected by the new Communist authorities in favour of the reconstruction of Warsaw, a lawless place where gangsters and black marketeers preyed on the surviving Germans and refugees from the east alike. Here, the Communist UBP (Office of Public Security ) imposed a long night of terror on the population. Those who had fought in the Polish national army during the war were systematically imprisoned, tortured and killed in Stalin's drive to wipe out the Polish nationalist officer class.
Reconstruction was painfully slow, and did not get seriously under way until the mid-1950s. One early positive development was the arrival from Lwow (now L'viv in the Ukraine) of the remaining staff, and part of the library, of that city's venerable academic institute, the Ossolineum, which went on to form the backbone of Wroclaw's intellectual life. After Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, a new civic administration determined to end the "years of stagnation". Industry was revived, and gradually, the city began to regain its metropolitan verve. By the 1980s it was at the forefront of the Solidarity movement, and throughout the decade it was the scene of confrontations between demonstrators and General Jaruzelski's military government. When free elections were at last declared in 1989, Wroclaw voted overwhelmingly for the anti-Communist WKO that was to form the new government.
Despite the substantial reconstruction still needed to repair decades of isolation and neglect in Wroclaw, Davies and Moorhouse conclude their history on an upbeat note at the turn of the millennium, with the island city reconnected, as it were, to the European mainland, and its historic centre restored to much of its former beauty.
It's easy enough to find fault with this book. In the earlier chapters, the narrative flow is too often choked by a mass of distracting detail. I found the maps frustrating: whole pages are squandered on showing the city's size at each historical period in relation to its present limits (something that could have been achieved in a series of small insets), while insufficient detail of the street plan, main buildings and fortifications is given. Many localities and smaller Silesian towns mentioned in the text cannot be found on any of the maps. And, given how little is known about the place in the English-speaking world, a bibliography would have been helpful.
But the authors have made an apt choice in their European microcosm, and the book is an impressive and timely history of one of the continent's great cities. Since the melting of the Iron Curtain, Mitteleuropa has re-emerged as a recognisable entity, and with Poland's imminent entry into the EU, this lively, cultured metropolis, just a few hour's train journey from Vienna, Prague and Berlin, is poised to take its place once again at the crossroads of Europe.
Reviewed by C.J. Schüler
