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Uprooted : how Breslau became Wrocław during the century of expulsions / Gregor Thum ; translated from the German by Tom Lampert and Allison Brown ; translation of Polish sources by W. Martin and Jasper Tilbury.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Thum, Gregor, 1967-
- Standardized Title:
- Fremde Stadt. English
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- World War, 1939-1945--Influence.
- World War, 1939-1945.
- World War, 1939-1945--Deportations from Poland.
- Forced migration--Poland--Wrocław--History--20th century.
- Forced migration.
- Social change--Poland--Wrocław--History--20th century.
- Social change.
- City and town life--Poland--Wrocław--History--20th century.
- City and town life.
- Collective memory--Poland--Wrocław--History--20th century.
- Collective memory.
- Wrocław (Poland)--History--20th century.
- Wrocław (Poland).
- Oder-Neisse Line (Germany and Poland).
- Wrocław (Poland)--Social conditions--20th century.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (544 p.)
- Edition:
- Core Textbook
- Place of Publication:
- Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2011.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- 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.
- Contents:
- A note on names
- Prologue: A dual tragedy
- The destruction of Breslau
- Poland's shift to the west
- pt. 1. The postwar era : rupture and survival
- Takeover
- Moving people
- A loss of substance
- Reconstruction
- pt. 2. The politics of the past : the city's transformation
- The impermanence syndrome
- Propaganda as necessity
- Mythicizing history
- Cleansing memory
- The pillars of an imagined tradition
- Old town, new contexts
- pt. 3. Prospects
- Amputated memory and the turning point of 1989
- Appendix 1: List of abbrevations
- Appendix 2: Translations of Polish institutions
- Appendix 3: List of Polish and German street names.
- Notes:
- Description based upon print version of record.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 9786613163837
- 9781283163835
- 1283163837
- 9781400839964
- 1400839963
- OCLC:
- 744588454
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