Gregor Thum,Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions

Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions, trans. Tom Lampert, Allison Brown, W. Martin, Jasper Tilbury; Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011; vii + 507 pp.; US$35.00; ISBN 9780691152912

This is an English-language translation of the original Die Fremde Stadt, Breslau 1945, which had been published in 2003. A few years ago, the work also appeared in Polish translation. The original edition was a pioneering micro-study of ethnic cleansing and its long-term impacts on the history of a contested borderland city. It has inspired the appearance of similar works on other cities and localities, which had changed national belonging as a result of border re-drawings following the Second World War. ² To the best of my knowledge this translated edition of Thum’s work is the first of its kind to appear in English. Likewise it is the first extensive English-language study that treats the expulsion both of the Germans from east of the Oder-Neisse Line and of Poles from east of the Curzon Line, drawing heavily from both Polish and German sources. The book includes changes made to take into account more recent scholarship on the broader topics to which the author intends this edition to contribute, including: the rebuilding of war-destroyed cities, the history of forced migrations, German–Polish relations and the politics of memory. Parts of this edition have also been expanded to provide a more extensive historical contextualization of certain topics that are relevant to this work, for example, expulsion in twentieth-century Europe.

The focus of the book is on how the age-old Prussian and German city of Breslau was renationalized and both physically and socially reengineered to become the Polish one of Wrocław. According to Thum, this city ‘is a looking glass through which Europe’s self-destruction becomes manifest: nationalism and provincialization, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, the destructive rage of the Second World War, Nazi fantasies of Germanization and the murder of European Jewry, the total collapse of 1945, the shifting of national borders in Central Europe, forced resettlement, and, finally, the Cold War division of the continent and the intellectual paralysis inherent in the opposition of East and West’ (xv). In the first part of the book, Thum draws on memoirs as well as material from Polish archives to reconstruct everyday life in a war-destroyed and crime- and violence-ridden city undergoing population exchange (expulsion, in-migration, and resettlement) and property redistribution. He balances Alltagsgeschichte with a political and cultural history of the drawing of the Oder-Neisse Line, Poland’s annexation the Recovered Territories (the former German eastern provinces), and the coming of communism to power. In doing so, he contributes a cultural-studies-based approach to this fascinating topic, on which the most extensive English-language work thus far has been T. David Curp’s political and social history A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945–1960 (Rochester, 2006).

The sections of the book focusing on the rebuilding of the city are its tour de force. Thum argues that the renationalization of the city did not end with population exchange, which had been completed by 1950. He illustrates how the process lasted for decades into the postwar era, as the rebuilding and re-acculturation of the city served the function of cleansing the memory of its German past. He points out that this cultural politics aimed to re-root the city’s uprooted inhabitants, helping them to overcome the feeling of estrangement. It also functioned to symbolically legitimate the new Soviet-dependant communist system, which remained strongly tied to the nationalist ideal of creating an ethnically homogenous nation-state. Thum presents a superb analysis of how the communist government drew on nationalist ideology and even financed the rebuilding of churches, all for the sake of creating the myth of Wroclaw’s eternal Polishness. Nationalists and communists worked side-by-side to write a history of the city that marginalized and criminalized its German past, while blowing out of proportion an actually marginal Polish one. The most original aspect of Thum’s work is on how these ideological needs dictated the city’s rebuilding and shaped its architectural appearance. Priority was given to rebuilding the cityscape in Gothic style to symbolize the age of the Polish medieval Piast monarchical dynasty. Baroque structures and the town houses of the Wroclaw city center were for the most part historically reconstructed, though subtly reshaped to correspond to both class and nationalist rhetoric. Nineteenth-century historic structures were either destroyed or left to deteriorate as unwanted symbols of Prussian imperialism. Surprisingly, Nazi-era structures were left standing, leading Thum to argue that it was the erasure of symbols of the Prussian period that was the main concern. One of his overarching reflections on this cleansing of memory was that it deprived Wroclaw’s inhabitants of a local identity, thus in part countering the intentions of this cultural politics.

Overall, the contribution of this micro-history to the historiography of twentieth century Central Europe can hardly be overestimated. Its translation into English is bound to be of interest to an international and interdisciplinary community of academics and non-academics interested in topics, which, as this work shows, go hand-in-hand: nationalism and nation-building, totalitarian dictatorships, post-world-war settlements, the reconstruction of war-torn cities, the politics of architecture and urban development, border changes and political geography, and ethnic cleansing and social engineering.