By Gregor Thum
With the stroke of a pen on the Potsdam convention following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the most important German urban east of Berlin, turned the Polish urban of Wroclaw. Its greater than 600 thousand inhabitants--almost them all ethnic Germans--were expelled and changed via Polish settlers from all elements of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long term mental and cultural results of pressured migration in twentieth-century Europe in the course of the reports of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants.
during this pioneering paintings, Gregor Thum tells the tale of the way the city's new Polish settlers came across themselves in a spot that was once not just unexpected to them yet outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German visual appeal and the large scope of wartime destruction. The fast effects have been an risky society, a very excessive crime fee, quick dilapidation of the development inventory, and financial stagnation. This replaced basically after the city's gurus and a brand new highbrow elite supplied Wroclaw with a Polish founding fable and reshaped the city's visual appeal to slot the postwar legend that it was once an age-old Polish urban. Thum additionally indicates how the tip of the chilly battle and Poland's democratization prompted a public debate approximately Wroclaw's "amputated memory." Rediscovering the German prior, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their urban for the second one time on the grounds that global conflict II.
Uprooted lines the complicated ancient method wherein Wroclaw's new population revitalized their urban and made it their own.
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Additional resources for Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions
Example text
A column of people pushes past ours, pushing carts and baby carriages, tired, plodding, miserable, never-ending: Poles from the Lemberg [Lwów] district. They don’t yet feel at home in this city in which we no longer feel at home. 48 xl Uprooted I ntroduction Today Wrocław is a city that at first glance reveals little of the dramatic rupture of 1945. It appears no different than any other major city in Poland. It is the seat of a voivodeship administration, a university town with important cultural institutions, a transportation hub, an industrial city, and also, increasingly, a magnet for tourists.
Courtesy of the Ossolineum (Marian Idziński). Government” (of the occupied Polish territories). As a “buffer zone” under German control it would serve as a kind of discretionary territory where future resettlement and Germanization policies could be implemented. Like the Soviets, the Germans eliminated all institutions of Polish statehood. Tens of thousands of potential dissidents were immediately shot or put in concentration camps. The rest of the population underwent a process of classification according to “racial criteria”: Hundreds of thousands were declared ethnic Germans, which meant that they could rise through the various stages of the so-called German People’s List (Deutsche Volksliste) and eventually receive German citizenship.
This requires a temporal focus on the years immediately after the war, but also takes into consideration the fundamental changes caused by the great political upheaval of 1989. Many important aspects of the local history not directly related to the border and population shift in 1945 could not be treated here. In the course of my investigation of Wrocław, however, I have become 5 I ntroduction convinced that the “demographic revolution” of 1945, through which a German city was made Polish overnight, has remained the central element in Wrocław’s city history ever since.
