Gregor Thum.

Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of

Expulsions. Translated by Tom Lampert, Allison Brown, W. Martin, and Jasper
Tilbury. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. In: Past Tense: Graduate
Review of History, University of Toronto Department of History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2015),
pp. 78-79.

Gregor Thum’s Uprooted is a comprehensively researched study in a rapidly growing

field of twentieth century East-Central European historiography: the forced expulsion of
millions of people as the result of intensive political change in the post-World War II
period. Thum uses the city of German Breslau, or Polish Wrocław, for his case study, as
he traces the complex historical, demographic, political, cultural, and architectural
processes that served to dramatically transform its physical and social makeup. Thum
takes the reader from the 1945 fall of the city to the Red Army, through to the post-Soviet
period. He examines the many ways in which the city was transformed through political,
demographic, and physical processes, while reflecting upon the challenges posed to new
generations of Polish inhabitants, who until recent years struggled in their attempts to
establish a new form of local identity.

Drawing upon a wide range of mainly Polish and German source material, including
Polish state archives, memoirs, and popular propagandist texts, Thum describes Breslau-
Wrocław as a microcosm of East-Central Europe: a city that witnessed the playing-out of
a long list of political, military, and cultural developments and conflicts during the
tumultuous twentieth century (xv). Between 1945 and 1948, the majority of Breslau’s
German populace was expelled and replaced by newly settled ethnic Poles. For Poles,
this period saw the loss of the economically poor but culturally rich Eastern Borderlands,
along with the gain of the industrially rich but culturally poor Western Territories. As the
result of the loss of a centuries-old German presence, there was a sharp decline in the
local memories, traditions, and knowledge of pre-war Breslau/post-war Wroclaw.
The opening chapters discuss the immediate post-war decades, which were marked by
civil unrest and conflicts between groups of settlers from different geographic, historical,
and cultural areas of Poland, and from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds.
In this “society of the uprooted” (178), regional antagonisms between Poles became
stronger (188). Wrocław was to be rebuilt and re-settled according to official propaganda
purposes, dictated from the top-down post-War Polish authorities, in order to legitimize
the Polish presence in the “Recovered Territories” (12). Chapter six onwards examines
the expunging of German presence and memory in the public sphere, through propaganda
and educational campaigns. The post-1945 Polish state approximated the same borders as
Poland circa 1000, a fact of major symbolic importance to authorities. Restored, re-
constructed, and re-interpreted Gothic architecture, in particular, signified official “proof”
of Wrocław’s medieval Polish origins, while Prussian buildings were allowed to decay.
All cultural institutions in Communist Poland, including the Roman Catholic Church,
followed similar processes of historical re-writing. This narrative selectively ignored
Prussian-German traditions and historical claims to the city. A massive process of
renaming took place throughout the “Recovered Territories” as some 30,000 place-
names, tens of thousands of natural features, and hundreds of thousands of street names

 
and squares were given Polish names (244). German inscriptions were removed from
buildings, and all of Wrocław’s German cemeteries were

destroyed (282-287). Many of Wrocław’s post-1945 monuments were built according to

a state-mandated cult, to honour Polish figures that had a tenuous or non-existent
historical connection to the city. The concluding chapters review the momentous changes
to post-1989 Wrocław. Despite decades of revisionist work, Thum argues that the
fundamental German-Prussian core of the city remained. This period saw a second wave
of re-naming and increased levels of Polish-German cooperation in historical recognition
and representation. In the 1990s a stronger form of local identity became discernible,
with Wrocław seeking to situate itself as a major Polish city and as a pan-European
metropolis.

Although this study is excellent throughout, Uprooted raises a few points of contention.
There is a limited sense of perspective in that Thum’s main narrative focuses upon Polish
experiences and understandings of the city. Although there are sections that reflect on the
difficulties and challenges faced by German survivors prior to their expulsion, and of the
psychological issues involved in the taking over of German apartments by Polish settlers,
Thum does not adequately consider German voices on the deportations, the loss of the
“Recovered Territories,” and the reconstruction of Wrocław. Also, there are no mentions
of return visits to the city by Holocaust survivors or their descendants. These
shortcomings are relatively few, however, and on the whole, Uprooted is a
comprehensive, masterfully researched and written case study that analyzes the many
complex processes involved in the re-writing of a city’s culture, ethnicity, memory, and
history. Uprooted should be considered required reading for both scholars and a specialist
audience interested in practices of population displacement and political and urban
change in East-Central Europe in the post-World War II period.

Michał Młynarz
University of Toronto