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Whats in a name? Microcosm Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse 605 pp, Jonathan Cape The Polish city of Wroclaw, the capital of Silesia, has been, at various times in its history, German, Prussian, Austrian, Bohemian and Polish. Early on it was important because, like Prague or Paris, it was on an island in a river (the Odra or Oder); then it was the fact that it lay along east-west trade routes; then that it became a railway nodal point. Its wealth it was often, though not too much lately, a wealthy city was variously founded on brewing, wool, flax, madder, mining, rolling stock and heavy industry. In religion, it has been Catholic, Hussite, Lutheran; often tolerant of Jewish and other minorities, sometimes not. The province it was part of, Silesia, was fought over many times, regularly changing hands in wars or dynastic succession.
Sometimes (as under the Habsburgs) it seemed reasonably secure and enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy, swaddled among other central European smallholdings; at other times, it looked exposed, practically a frontier city on the edge of two bristling empires, the German and the Russian. Norman Davies, the author of histories of Poland and Europe, and his former researcher and now co-author, Roger Moorhouse, see the career or vicissitudes of the place as emblematic of Europe. Their subject happens to be Wroclaw / Breslau, but it could equally have been Strasbourg or Lvov or Trieste or Gdansk, other cities variously fought over and held. The city is a point that is defined by or, better, that has survived the various lines of demarcation (nationality, religion, language, culture, history) running now one side of it, now the other, and now through the middle. This produces, in our brief and shallow and (mercifully) EC-determined era, an oddly optimistic and rather colourless type of history, in some ways a kind of apr&# 232; s-history. Wroclaw is Polish, but that doesnt really matter, as Poland wants to be in Europe.
Basically, Vratislavia the name that Davies and Moorhouse have come up with to represent a sort of impartial, owner less, Platonic Wroclaw has seen off all the forces that would hold it. Mass seems to have defeated energy. The point has outlived the lines of conflict and division. Its no longer done to feel assertive about nationality, religion, culture; our sanctioned ties are smaller, narrower. We have the global village. Perhaps the days of the truly national city, the tribal city, are done.
Format Vratislavia, Davies writes in his foreword. There are various drawbacks to this approach. Most trivially, it makes for a rather restricted read like being given a legend of the life of Thetis, the shape-changing nymph and mother of Achilles, in place of the Iliad. It is full of pride and devotion, but it is local pride.
The things that make peoples hearts beat are still bigger than that, as developments only a few hundred miles south of Wroclaw continue to show. We may wonder why we are reading this particular, rather hefty microcosm, rather than another. A brisk tour of the middle ages takes us round some wonderfully named kings: Boleslaw the Bald, Ladislaw the Elbow-High, Ladislas the Posthumous. A list (28 -strong) of 19 th-century scientists is rather unctuously topped off with: One can only apologise for the many names that have necessarily been omitted.
Occasionally, the book topples into a school-magazine, all-shall-have-prizes tone: The arts, too, prospered mightily in Breslau. The 10 Nobel prize winners are proudly listed, and so are the names of some eight multinational inward investors. Microcosm has something of an official history about it. It ends with a gushing account of a civic do; simultaneous publication is planned in Polish and German; a gallery of civic and other sponsors are thanked at the outset. My guess is that those readers will be the most pleased to see it. Easily the most gripping part of the book is the last 200 pages, about Vratislavia in the 20 th century, especially following 1945.
Because the Soviet Union had already taken eastern Poland, including cities like Vilnius and Lvov, Poland was pushed west. To British readers, I imagine, this wholesale re assignation of great tracts of countries and parts of peoples must be particularly shocking. Breslau's remaining German population was expelled, its remaining industrial plant was put on trains east, many of its buildings were taken down, and the bricks later reused in Warsaw. Unless one has anything personally at stake in any of this, it seems merely cruel and absurd. Post-German appears as a euphemism in some of the testimony, to match pre-owned: We had a post-German croquet set and a post-German piano, which Father bought off a German in the next street. Davies and Moorhouse tell the story coolly and equably, pointing out the symmetry of the situation: what the Poles were doing was only what was being done to them a little further east.
Only the Soviets come out of it looking worse. Here, the book really is as fascinating as it promised to be.
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