With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the
Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of
Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six
hundred thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic
Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all
parts of prewar Poland. "Uprooted" examines the long-term
psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in
twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's
Polish inhabitants.
In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the
city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not
only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's
Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime
destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society,
an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building
stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's
authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a
Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the
postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows
how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered
a public debate about Wroclaw's "amputated memory." Rediscovering
the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the
second time since World War II.
"Uprooted" traces the complex historical process by which
Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their
own.
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