The broken heart of middle Europe

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In his masterwork, Europe, Professor Norman Davies used a broad brush on a huge canvas to produce one of the most important works of history of the Nineties. His latest technique is altogether different; if significantly less ambitious, on its limited scale, it is equally successful.

Davies, with his former student and research assistant Roger Moorhouse, has taken the story of one medium-sized city as an exemplar of a single theme of European history. Their thesis is that Wroclaw, Breslau, Presslau, Wrotlizla - or whichever of dozens of names the capital of Silesia has been called over the past millennium - is a true microcosm of Mitteleuropa.

Now one of Poland's largest cities, Wroclaw is one of those faraway places that we in Britain know little about. Geographically, it is just a few hours' drive from Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Budapest - physically and culturally, it is part of the so-called "lands between" that history is never entirely sure is East or West.

It has been the trophy of countless wars, fought over since the beginning of recorded time and the endless movement of peoples. At various stages it has been ruled by the Piasts of Poland, the Bohemians, the Habsburgs of Austria, the German Hohenzollerns, the Nazis and, most recently, through Stalin's Red Army, Poland again. In religion, it has been Catholic, Hussite, Lutheran and, latterly, Catholic again. For centuries it had one of the most vibrant and sophisticated Jewish communities in Europe - until the Holocaust saw to that. It has been wealthy in its time (the second-most important city in Prussia in the 19th and early 20th centuries) and, more recently, it has been extremely poor. It has been birthplace to two dozen Nobel Laureates and the setting for ghastly atrocities by both Fascists and Communists.

Every powerful nationalism and ideology that has ever influenced events in central Europe has been felt on this island city on a river (the Oder). This includes the current post-Cold War hand-wringing among the intelligentsia in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary that these between-lands, so desperate to belong to the EU and already members of Nato, have always been part of the West.

The book's idea is a neat one, though it sometimes stretches the point a bit. General readers might tire of the dryness of a few long passages that are peculiarly reminiscent of the history sections of some guidebooks (the municipality of Wroclaw part-financed the production of Microcosm). However, the final chapters describing the miserable history of the city since the end of the First World War are brilliant.

Middle Europe's suffering under the Nazis and the Stalinists is familiar, if ghastly, territory. There is another story of inhumanity seldom mentioned in postwar histories. The way that Wroclaw and Silesia's entire German population of nearly 1.5 million people was "ethnically cleaned" and forcibly moved west within just a few months in 1946-47 is told here with terrible power.