Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City
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Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City is a book by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse about the history of Wrocław.
Contents |
[edit] Content
The book opens with a description of the siege and fall of German Breslau at the very end of the Second World War. Attacking Red Army reduces many streets of the city to rubble, the remaining Germans gradually withdraw. The hopeless situation of the civilians, complicated by shelling, temperatures of minus 20 and food shortages, deteriorates still further as revenge-seeking Soviet military leaders allow mass murder, rape and looting.
The opening chapter of the book contains a description of the prehistoric island settlement in the Oder whose inhabitants took part in the amber and salt trade. The next chapters, named Wrotizla, Vretslav, Presslaw, Breslau and Wroclaw, give exhaustive accounts of the ensuing periods. The authors show the impact of natural phenomena and events such as pandemics, pogroms, attack by the Mongols, the Hussite Wars, the struggles of the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, Prussian expansionism, the Napoleonic Wars, Nazism and Stalinism.
The main premise of the book is to present the history of Wrocław as a microcosm of the history of central Europe as a whole. To this end, it is suggested that the city bears a complex of historical hallmarks that could be interpreted as being particular to the historical experience of that region. These hallmarks include multi-national settlement, the presence of a Jewish community, the development of dynastic rather than national polities in the pre-modern era and the exposure in the 20th century to both Nazism and Soviet Communism.
[edit] Reception
Microcosm was well received by critics and the reading public upon its release. Apart from the original English the book was also published in the Polish, German, Czech and Italian languages.
Fellow historians however criticised the book for a number of technical defects and even factual errors [1], while other historians noted his unfamiliarity with the subject, a tendency to overemphasize the multicultural aspect of the city in order to please the sponsors and considered the book largely worthless as a scientific historiography.[2]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Winfried Irgang, Herder Institut Marburg, Sehepunkte Ausgabe 2 (2002), Nr. 2
- ^ Peter Oliver Loew: Rezension zu: Davies, Norman; Moorhouse, Roger: Die Blume Europas. Breslau - Wroclaw - Vratislavia. Die Geschichte einer mitteleuropäischen Stadt. München 2002. In: H-Soz-u-Kult, 19.09.2002, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/NG-2002-090
[edit] External links
- Excerpt available at the page of the publisher
- Lecture The end of German Breslau - 1945 by Roger Moorhouse
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