I came to live in the Polish city of Wrocław about eighteen months ago. I had been to Poland several times before, but significantly, never to Wrocław. Before arriving here I did the usual things one does before moving to an unfamiliar city , including some extensive reading about the history of the city and a detailed look at its architectural and cultural monuments. Everything seemed to fit together quite well and promised to provide a stimulating city in which to live. Upon reflection I now realize that I failed to take into the reckoning a very significant fact : everything I had learned from my researches was about the German city of Breslau and certainly not about the Polish city of Wrocław!
It might well be argued that any European city one could name is a palimpsest of those events in its history which gave it its present character and ethos, and this more particularly for the cities in Central Europe. The seeming fluidity of frontiers which came as a result of different periods of suzerainty ( Bohemian, Austro-Hungarian, French etc) and culminating in the excesses of the Third Reich have all left their distinctive marks in areas of architecture , language and culture generally.
Wrocław, and the present region of Lower Silesia was affected by these historic shifts of power, but exceptionally by the two most recent episodes, Nazi Germany followed by integration into the Soviet sphere of influence. Whereas prior to 1945 the situation of Wrocław could be regarded as broadly similar to other cities in Eastern Europe, in so far as the power shifts were concerned. Changes were more akin to gradual assimilation. Rulers changed, customs were modified , but the people remained the same, and they kept their sense of attachment to their towns and cities. After 1945, as a result of the post WWII agreements by the victorious allies Wrocław, and to a lesser degree the other formerly “german” towns in what the Polish people referred to as the “Recovered Territories”were put into a totally different situation from previous dominations by foreign powers. The predominantly German population was required to move into the newly formed socialist German Democratic Republic and their places were taken by Poles and others from all over Poland and particularly those who were also “moved” from the area around the city of Lvov, which found itself outside of former frontier of Poland, in Ukraine.
No small wonder then that the new population of Wrocław had something of an identity crisis! Polish citizens with widely differing,( even if all Polish) backgrounds thrown together in what was formerly a very prestigious German city. Not just any city, but one that was regarded as a gem in pre war Germany: a city with a great cultural tradition, but predominantly a German cultural tradition.
In the period of Soviet domination, Wrocław grew into what was to become Poland’s fourth largest city, but it was rather out of touch with the predominant heartland of modern Poland centred around Warsaw and Kraków. Post war reconstruction saw a steady reconstruction of the heavily damaged city centre but what was being rebuilt was essentially a German city. It must have seemed odd that the rebuilt heart of this beautiful German city was so at variance with what was being built on the outskirts: the drab concrete slabs of a modern communist state. Furthermore its out of the way location did and still does hamper its progress as a modern city, situated as it is nearer to the capitals of the Czech Republic and the re-unified Germany than to Warsaw.
I think this isolation is still very much present in the Wrocław of 2010 a good ten years after the fall of communism. The changing of the German street and place names after 1945 did not transform Wrocław from a German city into a Polish one. Stand on Rynek and look around you and you see replicas of wonderful pieces of Germanic Gothic Architecture, walk down to the Odra and the University. Yes, it is today one of Poland’s premier centres of learning, but go inside and you enter the great spaces of the Baroque University of Breslau for which Johannes Brahms composed his wonderful Academic Festival Overture which quotes the famous student song “Gaudeamus Igitur” The ghosts of former German glory still pervade this city whatever the current Polish population may do to assert its Polishness. This situation is not helped by the stiil existant antipathy towards anything or anybody not Polish: and more particularly even if understandably, against anything German. Most of the great cities of Europe have had their city names “translated” by usage into other languages, but with Wrocław it is a little different in the case of German. All major routes leading into Poland from Germany still refer to Wrocław as Breslau although the latter ceased to exist as a place name in 1945! I still hearGerman speaking Poles refer to their city as Breslau!
What then is the future to be for this frontier city in Poland? It is not to belittle Wrocław’s efforts to be recognized as a major centre of European culture, but it seems to me that other cities around the fringes of the former communist central Europe have done far more to assert or even celebrate their internationality. They did not have to endure the same sort of problems that faced the people of Wrocław in 1945, and it could be argued that their eyes and attitudes were always directed towards the west. Perhaps Wrocław needs to finally shake off its past animosities with its western neighbours and take up a position to rival Prague, Bratislava or Budapest. In the Polish language the word for the German language is niemiecki – a corruption of nie mówić meaning “Not speaking” referring to the fact that in past times people from Germany did not speak the Poles language ( it was non-slavik, as opposed to the languages of all the other countries that bordered Poland). Wrocławians must get away from this old myth and look outward to their EU partners and stop living in the past.
