Uprooted : : How Breslau Became Wroclaw during the Century of Expulsions / / Gregor Thum.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Thum, Gregor,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2011]; ©2011
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Edition: Core Textbook
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (552 p.) :; 90 halftones. 2 maps.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Names -- Prologue: A dual Tragedy -- Introduction -- PART ONE. The Postwar Era: Rupture and Survival -- Chapter One. Takeover -- Chapter Two. Moving People -- Chapter Three. A Loss of Substance -- Chapter Four. Reconstruction -- PART TWO. The Politics of the Past: The City's Transformation -- Chapter Five. The Impermanence Syndrome -- Chapter Six. Propaganda as Necessity -- Chapter Seven. Mythicizing History -- Chapter Eight. Cleansing Memory -- Chapter Nine. The Pillars of an Imagined Tradition -- Chapter Ten. Old Town, New Contexts -- PART THREE. Prospects -- Chapter Eleven. Amputated Memory and the Turning Point of 1989 -- Appendix 1. List of Abbreviations -- Appendix 2. Translations of Polish Institutions -- Appendix 3. List of Polish and German Street Names -- Notes -- Sources and Literature -- Map of Poland after the Westward Shift of 1945 -- Simplified Map of Wrocław Today -- Index