Microcosm : A Portrait of a Central European City

Rating:
Summary: Microcosm
Review: Norman Davies has a great knack for fantastic subjects. What can be better than a microhistory of Central Europe on an example of a city that was Czech, Polish, Czech, Austrian, German and now is Polish! Also Wroclaw/Breslau happens to be my home town and it was a great place to live in the 70's with just about everybody an immigrant, an America in miniature under communist rule.

Norman Davies also has a great knack for writing his books assuming that you already know a lot of history. Sometimes I do not and he leaves me there high and dry grasping for facts.

This book gives you a continuity in European history where everything changes and still stays the same.

Rating:
Summary: Understanding Europe History
Review: Norman Davies writes incredible books. The detail is overwhelming. This could be an outstanding text for someone wanting to learn European history. It is a volume for tourists to read before visiting Poland and Wroclaw.

Rating:
Summary: Fine Scholarship, yet flaws remain
Review: The joint venture between Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse has yielded some extremely fine scholarship that charts the history of one of Europe's more colourful cities, creuly exposed to the full weight of the twentieth century's barbarity. Indeed, as a piece of historical research, the book stands out as exemplary and can easily present itself as the standard text on an overall history of the "Island City" in either its English, German or Polish format. The authors should also be commended for providing an excellent synthesis, in an intelligible format, of Vratislavia between the Piast Dynasty to the Thirty Years War, not only in a regional, but also a European context. As the city, as the entire province of Silesia, has been subject to heated historical debates, the book succeeds, for the most part, in providing an even-handed account of the area's history.

In doing so, however, a major flaw of the book is exposed. In attempting to present the most multicultural side of the Island City to the world, the authors do not delve deep enough into the German roots of Vratislavia. This is exemplified in the rather paltry account of the Ostkolonisierung and the initial arrival of German settlement in Silesia. While mentioned in passing (and even accorded a map as an appendix), the city seems to just suddenly transform into a "German city". As this migration formed the basis of 600-700 years of the city's history, this pivotal migration could have been presented in much more detail. Second, German culture's unique Silesian expression is not delved into as carefully as one could hope for - especially in a book dedicated to its bastion. Very little is mentioned about local (German) traditions and culture. This is extremely unfortunate as the Silesian variant of German culture has been, through the 1945-47 expulsion, completely exterminated - a book about the history of Breslau should have chronicled its cultural idiosyncrasies given that they were so suddenly and inhumanely erased. Perhaps a more exact overview of Breslau as a city - for example, explaining the difference between each city district - could have given a true feeling of how life was like in the now extinct Breslau. In short, had Davies and Moorhouse, in their final version, paid as much attention to German Silesian culture as they did to its Polish and Jewish counterpart, a much more accurate picture of Breslau as a city, and Silesia as a region, could have been gleaned.

Finally, the authors also delve into some extremely dangerous "suffering comparisons" between Polish and German expulsions between 1945-47, with the book seeming to insinuate that Polish expellees had a "tougher time' - not only because of longer periods of transit during expulsion, but also because Polish expellees, in the ruins of Wroclaw, were deprived of organising expellee organisations. This questionable approach to a still painful chapter in European history, unfortunately, depreciates the book's otherwise fine record of portraying an even-handed history of the city. A fine historian such as Davies should have known better.

Despite such critique, however, "Microcosm" is an excellent historical survey that sheds some much needed light on one of Europe's more fascinating cities.