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
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
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
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes
Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on March 19, 2019)
