President

My main task this evening will be to give you a feel of this extraordinary city, in which we’re meeting, to say something about its history, and the implications of its history. I do hope that you were expecting a historian to talk about history.

Before I do that, however, I should draw your attention to a nice irony. The theme for this year’s congress is ‘Science and Scholarship Looking Ahead’. Yet the Search Committee for the Erasmus Medal and the accompanying Heinz Nixdorf Memorial Lecture chose a person who still writes his books with pen and paper. Heinz Nixdorf, I gather, was a computer pioneer, and I wonder what he might have made of my pen-and-paper technology.

My argument would be that the quality of writing is higher if thoughts from the human brain can be transmitted directly to a pencil or quill pen without being channelled through an additional box of tricks. It’s not that I’m incapable of using a computer. I learned to touch type nearly 50 years ago, in a class of giggling girls, and I concede the computer’s superiority when it comes to editing. But the process of writing, and of composing as one writes, is rather special. The slightly flickering screen is a diversion; one stares at the screen instead of concentrating on the next sentence; and the facility for instant alteration and correction of the text is a serious barrier to the old habit of getting it right first time. What is more, people who imagine they can write well while having half-an-eye open for incoming emails, or half-an-ear cocked for their mobile telephone, are, in my view, seriously misguided.

As for the history of computers, which is the main focus of the Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, I used to assume that I was older than all of them. Now, I’m not so sure. What I do know is that the subject has been distorted by a heavy dose of nationalistic skulduggery. American websites on the computer’s timeline start with Hewlett and Packard at work in their garage in Palo Alto in 1939 (before they produced anything). British accounts of the Ultra Project, and of the decrypting work at Bletchley Park, which cracked Germany’s second- and third-generation Enigma Codes, either ignore or minimise the earlier Polish contribution to the story. As far as I can see, the founding pioneers of the story are a Polish mathematician called Marian Rejewski and his colleagues, who cracked the first-generation Enigma code in 1932, and who in 1938 produced an electric-powered computing machine, the Bomba Kryptoanalityczna that speeded up the calculations. If Rejewski’s Bomba is recognised as a basic single-task computer, the honour should be given to him. One of the many things that British accounts of Enigma don’t tell you is that, in July 1939, two months before the outbreak of the War, a Polish courier presented himself at the gate of the British Embassy in Bucharest, Romania. He was carrying in one hand a case containing a perfect working model of the Enigma Machine, and in the other hand, a briefcase containing Rejewski’s detailed mathematical instructions on how the Enigma Code could be de-cyphered. The courier was turned away, at least at the first attempt. As reported (although parts of this account require verification), he was dismissed by the historic words of a British official: ‘My good man, can’t you see that it’s after five o’clock?’

Ladies and Gentlemen

Welcome to Wrocław – vrots-laf. Please listen to the name carefully. Vrots-laf. It’s not Rock-law, as Ryanair would have us believe. Or vrots-love, as other misguided websites suggest. But vrots-laugh, jak śmiać, to rhyme with chaff, gaffe, laugh, naff, staff and the Welsh city of Llandaff. Only the Polish ‘el’ sound, either ‘w’ or ‘l’ is negotiable. Once you’ve been here, you’re not allowed to mispronounce it.

It’s quite interesting, I think, that many foreigners, especially the English, make no effort to pronounce Polish names accurately. It’s a subtle form of laziness, if not worse. Some of the names are difficult, it’s true. But many aren’t. Objectively speaking, they are not as difficult as the average English or French name. Yet foreigners habitually mangle them, and by so doing they send out a message which says they don’t take this country seriously. I can assure you that a little effort to say vrots-laf properly will reap rich dividends. In the same way, the decision of the Academia Europaea’s Council to bring their Congress to this city is also greatly appreciated.

Some of you may think that you have come to Breslau. Well, you’ve come to the right place. But you’re 70 years too late. The city ceased to be ‘Breslau’ in 1945, and most of the people who continued to call it Breslau, no longer lived here. There are linguistic issues at play, of course. But it’s not unimportant to use the right name, not only for the right place, but equally for the right period. This will be one of my themes this evening.

The change from Breslau to Wrocław resulted from the cataclysmic events of the Second World War. But it is not enough to say that it resulted from the war. It is important for everyone, I think, to understand what happened, and why. It was not caused, for example, by a savage Polish urge for revenge: although there were plenty of vengeful people on the rampage in 1945, and after the event some did argue that Poland’s so-called ‘recovered territories’ were obtained through a form of rough justice. Nor was it caused by dubious and long-standing Polish historical claims to Germany’s eastern lands, although such claims can be found if one looks hard enough in obscure journals. Before the war, Polish nationalist opinion, and the Polish Sanacja regime, were very exercised by the fate of Danzig, but said virtually nothing about the Oder-Neisse Line or the future of Stettin or Breslau. Prior to 1943−1944, Breslau was not an issue. And, as the war ended, the only group in Poland to start laying claim to the Oder-Neisse territories were the Communists, who were marginal in number and acting as the mouthpiece of their Soviet masters.

We will be here all day, if I plunge into the complex story of Poland’s frontiers. But the essential thing to remember is that the Poles themselves had very little to say in the establishment of their post-war borders. Poland’s Western Frontier, which separated Breslau from Germany, was only set up in August 1945 by the Allied Powers at the Potsdam Conference. Poland’s Eastern Frontier, with the Soviet Union, was fixed by Stalin with little interference from anyone else. And the two settlements, in West and East, were intimately connected.

Stalin was a stickler. Once he had the bit between his teeth, he wouldn’t let it go, and he had already sunk his teeth into Poland’s eastern territories in 1939. On 28 September 1939, as an annexe to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Third Reich and the USSR signed a Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Demarcation, and it was this border delineated with the Nazis that Stalin regarded ever afterwards as the Soviet Union’s immutable frontier in Europe. When talking to the Western Allies, of course he dressed it up as ‘The Curzon Line’, but it was essentially the same thing. He was still insisting on it in 1945, when the Third Reich and the Nazis had disappeared, and when Britain and America were resigned to his conquests. The territories, which he annexed from Poland, sheltered a population of more than 15 million – the largest group within which, the ethnic Poles, had no intention of staying under Soviet rule if they could help it. Two great cities, in particular, Wilno (now Vilnius, capital of Lithuania) and Lwów (now L’viv in Western Ukraine) had overwhelmingly Polish majorities, and were poised to feed hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming west.

The Potsdam Conference, therefore, met in the sure knowledge that Soviet territorial acquisitions in the East would require territorial compensation for Poland in the West, at Germany’s expense. But the details were not yet fixed. Churchill, for one, knew Breslau personally – partly from attending pre-1914 army manoeuvres, and partly through his mother’s second marriage, and he was adamant that Germany would only lose Breslau ‘over his dead body’. Yet in the event Churchill had no say. He left the Conference for Britain’s General Election and was defeated. And in the interval between his departure and Attlee’s arrival, the Americans and the Russians stitched up the Polish–German frontier as we know it today. Furthermore, it was decreed, with no reference to international law, that the entire German population living to the east of the Oder-Neisse Line, was to be expelled.

Talking of Potsdam, however, does not cover the whole of these tragic events. By far the largest expulsion of Germans from Breslau took place seven months before Potsdam on the orders of the Nazi Gauleiter, Karl Hanke. It’s not fashionable, I know, to list German civilians among the victims of the Nazis, but that is certainly appropriate in this case. In January 1945, as the Red Army advanced, the German Command designated Breslau a Festung or ‘Fortress’ to be defended to the last man; and as part of the plan, the Gauleiter ordered all non-military personnel, some 600,000 men, women and children, to leave with 24 hours’ notice. The weather was appalling – ice, snow, blizzards and the temperature of –18°C, and through all of that, a 30 km walk to the nearest rail head. Tens of thousands perished at the hands of their own authorities.

The story of Festung Breslau is equally grim. The city was surrounded by the Soviets by late January, and the doomed garrison held out for the next 15 weeks. Some 80,000 German troops, aided by a still larger number of slave workers, fought for their lives hour by hour, day by day, under constant bombardment by planes and heavy artillery. My impression is that the Soviet command preferred to contain the enclave rather than conquer it at all costs, but in the meantime to pulverise it. After their temporary airstrip was closed in April, not far from here, the defenders lost contact with the outside world, but did not capitulate until 6 May, four days after the fall of Berlin. The survivors were marched off, mostly never to be seen again. Then, amid the mayhem of pillage and arson, came the trauma of the women. The Red Army’s practice of gang-raping all enemy females, is, in fact, an understatement. On liberating German camps for captured Soviet women, the Red Army men had no compunction in raping their own. By Stalin’s twisted logic all Soviet citizens who had fallen into enemy hands and had failed to die resisting, were, ipso facto, collaborators.

After May 1945, a proportion of German Breslauers began to trickle back to the ruins, but they came to a ghost city. Encouraged by Communist propaganda, Polish marauders and trophy-hunters also began to arrive; so, too, did so-called Polish ‘repatriants’ from Lwów and other Soviet-occupied towns. Prior to the Potsdam decisions, however, the Soviet Commandant who presided over this lawless free-for-all, refused to recognise Polish officials sent from Warsaw, and ruled with the assistance of a German mayor and hand-picked German Communists. It was only after Potsdam that arrangements were made for the German population to be evacuated in orderly stages, for planned transports of Poles to be brought in from the East, and for local government to be handed over. None of these arrangements were sanctioned by anything more than a private inter-allied conference, and the West German Government was perfectly correct in regarding the city to lie in the area – under temporary Polish administration. Thus was Breslau transformed into Wrocław, and, to use my vocabulary, it became a Vanished Kingdom.

My recent book in English, Vanished Kingdoms, explored this theme, rarely favoured by historians – namely the phenomenon that all political entities, like all human beings, have a finite lifespan. Kingdoms, republics, empires: they are all born at a particular moment, they exist for a period, long or short, and then they die. I confined my explorations to European history, but the phenomenon is universal. The longest-lived European organism, that of ‘Rome’ – republic, empire, and Byzantine Empire – lasted for 2206 years. The shortest-lived, the Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia, lasted in March 1939 for less than 24 hours. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘If Rome and Sparta perished, what state can hope to live for ever?’

One of the longest chapters in that book was devoted to the history of Prussia, or rather to ‘All the Prussias’ – for there were several of them. And German Breslau belonged from 1740 to 1945 to one of those Prussias; it started life as the so-called ‘iron kingdom’ of the Hohenzollerns. My good Australian friend, Christopher Clark, who works in Cambridge, recently published a wonderful book called Iron Kingdom, showing that there was much more to that state than the militarism of which we’ve all heard. Yet, equally there was much more to the Prussian story than the Hohenzollern Kingdom made famous by Frederick the Great. Before the Kingdom, there was a Duchy of Prussia, based on Königsberg, which merged in 1618 with the Electorate of Brandenburg to form Brandenburg-Prussia. Before the Duchy, there was a Royal Prussia, which included Danzig, and which formed a long-lasting province of Poland. Before both Royal and Ducal Prussia, there was the so-called Teutonic State of Prussia, that was run by a military order of crusader-knights and that lasted from the 1230s to 1525. And before the Teutonic State, there was the original Prussia – Borussia in Latin – the Land of the Ancient Prusai, whom the Teutonic Knights forcibly converted to Christianity and Germanised. It’s quite a catalogue, and it stretches out for 1000 years and more.

The ancient Prussians, the Prusai that I mentioned, were not Germans or Germanics. They were a Baltic people, kin to the modern Latvians and Lithuanians, and we know quite a lot about them. Their language, for example, lasted long enough for the Bible to be translated into it. And their unenviable fate provides strong clues about how the prehistory of Central Europe should and should not be approached. In the nineteenth century, the leading Prussian school of History, headed by names such as Ranke and Treitschke, combined advanced scholarship with nakedly political objectives, linking archaeology and early history to the present-day interests of the ruling state. They were greatly admired in other countries, not least in Great Britain, and they formed an important strand in the rise of modern Nationalism throughout Europe. Among other things, they painted a fixed, immobile and ethnocentric picture of early Europe, where all the territories within modern Germany had somehow been exclusively and eternally inhabited by Germanic tribes; and their methods were widely copied. In post-1945 Poland, for example, the Communist authorities introduced a highly artificial historical scheme, backed by Censorship, the Koncepcja Piastowska, in which all the territories of the People’s Republic had supposedly been inhabited by Slavs and ‘proto-Poles’ since time immemorial. In reality, the very idea of ‘Germanic land’ or ‘the historic Polish Lands’ is a fiction, a convenient oversimplification, a reductio ad absurdum. In reality, within the last two millennia, first Celtic tribes, then Germanic tribes, and behind them Slavonic tribes drifted slowly across the European plains, constantly on the move, and frequently living cheek-by-jowl with tribal neighbours belonging to different cultural groups and speaking different languages. Prehistoric peoples could not have behaved in accordance with the map of Europe that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Just outside Wrocław stands a small but distinctive mountain called ‘Ślęża’, atop which can be seen the ruins of a pagan temple. Under Prussian rule, the ruins were assumed to be Germanic. Under the Polish People’s Republic, those same stones were officially declared to be Slavonic. And I, as a person with Welsh connections, would like to know if they weren’t Celtic. Or perhaps, Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic in succession. Why not?

Which brings me to the origins of this city. The city’s earliest known name, Vratislavia, only exists in the Latin form, since all the scribes and chroniclers of the day wrote exclusively in Latin. We can only conjecture what the vernacular form may have been. But there can be little doubt that the name reflects the city’s foundation, or more likely its re-foundation, by Duke Vratislav I of Prague (r 914–925), the father of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ of Christmas card fame. All other explanations strike me as fanciful.

What is more, it is well documented that Cracovia, i.e. Kraków, as well as Vratislavia, lay within the realms of the Dukes of Prague for most of this tenth century. The earliest of the Polish chroniclers, Gallus Anonymous, states that they passed into the domains of the Piast princes in AD 990.

Also well documented is the establishment of a Catholic bishopric at Vratislavia in the signal date of AD 1000. This step resulted from the earlier creation of the Archbishopric of Gniezno, which in turn was connected to the missionary activities of St. Vojtek or ‘Adalbert’ of Prague (d 997), another Czech like Vratislav. Everything points to the likelihood that state-building and church-building went hand-in-hand under the auspices of the same elite circles.

In the nineteenth century, when national histories came into vogue, little attention was paid to the commonality of these developments. All events were squeezed into separate boxes labelled ‘Polish history’, ‘Czech history’ or ‘German history’; and this tendency was cemented after 1945 in Communist historiography.

Nowadays at last, scholars are questioning the national compartmentalisation of early history. The ninth-century Great Moravian Empire, for example, linked to Saints Cyril and Methodius, the ‘Apostles of the Slavs’, and long recognised as the earliest example of state-formation among the Slavs, was not thought to be relevant to Poland. New evidence is accumulating to suggest that it could have been the fount not only of the Premyslid realm in Prague but also of the nascent Piast state of Mieszko I. If so, Vratislavia would have been in the thick of it.

One must equally question the validity of the binary division of the West Slavs of this region into Czechs and Poles. There is no written evidence from this period of the divergence of the Czech and Polish languages; and with dozens of tribes to be considered, a plurality of overlapping identities is much more credible than a simple, two-way split. Vratislavia came into existence several centuries before distinct Czech and Polish identities had crystallised.

Nor can it be taken for granted – as the Prussian School and, even more, the Nazis did – that German civilisation was far in advance of its eastern neighbours. When Vratislavia appeared on the map, Berlin did not exist, and the district that later became Brandenburg was held by pagan Slavs; it was still attached to the Archdioceses of Breslau/Wrocław as late as 1972. In 2013 I attended the investiture of the new Archbishop of Wrocław, AB Kupny. The chief guest was the Archbishop of Berlin, Rainer Woelki, and he made an astonishing statement. ‘We come’, he said of his delegation, ‘like a daughter to her mother.’ Those words, from the mouth of a German hierarch, showed great enlightenment.

The huge influx of German colonists, unkindly dubbed the Drang nach Osten, did not affect Silesia until the late thirteenth century, in the wake of the Mongol invasions and the Battle of Legnica, in which the flower of the Silesian nobility perished. But it had enormous implications for the future. It was one of the factors that in 1335, at the Treaty of Trencin, convinced Casimir, King of Poland to renounce his rights to Silesia and to hand it peacefully to the King of Bohemia.

The medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, into which our city, now Vretslav, was incorporated, is another political entity that should not be perceived through modern national categories. Built, of course, on its historic Czech base, it nonetheless formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, and under Charles IV (R 1346–1378) Prague housed the Emperor’s capital residence. In Charles’ reign, the Golden Bull made Bohemia one of the Empire’s seven electorates. Moreover, in that period, the Empire included many western provinces that would today be thought of as Belgian, Dutch or French: Flanders, Holland, Alsace + Lorraine, Franche-Comté, Dauphiné, Savoy and Geneva. At present, in Wrocław you can see an exhibition of the Brueghel Brothers, who were based in Brussels. In 1335, when Vretslav joined Bohemia and the Empire, Brussels was a fellow imperial city.

Thanks to its geographical and political location, Vretslav prospered mightily under Bohemian rule. Its multi-ethnic population doubled. It joined the Hanseatic League. And the city’s burghers enjoyed entrenched privileges. The superb city hall was constructed in stages between 1328 and 1480. In 1434, the city received the ‘ius praesidii’ or ‘right to refuse entrance to imperial garrisons’, thereby rendering it practically independent.

In the fifteenth century, however, Bohemia and Silesia were ravaged by the Hussite Wars. With Prague held by the Utraquists, and other parts of Bohemia by the rival Taborites, Vretslav became the natural headquarters of the Catholic and Imperial loyalists. Anti-Hussite fanaticism provided the background in 1453 to the mission of Brother John di Capistrano and to a notorious pogrom.

Fortes bella gerunt, ran the Habsburg’s slogan, tu felix Austria nube! (the strong wage wars, but you, happy Austria, arrange marriages). In line with this sentiment, the Habsburgs came into the possession of Bohemia as a result of dynastic marriages and the heirless extinction of the rival Jagiellonian dynasty. Silesia’s capital, whose name was evolving to Pressla or Presslav, was to remain under Habsburg rule for 215 years, from 1526 to 1741.

In the early sixteenth century, the predominant German section of the city’s population welcomed the Lutheran Reformation, and put the tolerance of the Catholic Emperors to the test. Yet Silesia, like Austria and Hungary, did not now form part of the Empire, and local accommodations were possible. The principle of Cuius Regio, Eius Religio did not apply, and the Protestant burghers were able to live in uneasy peace with their Catholic neighbours, surviving repeated attempts by Counter-Reformers to punish them.

In the early seventeenth century, the Thirty Years War devastated much of Central Europe. Generally speaking, Silesia backed the anti-imperial forces, but suffered as much from its allies, including the Swedes, as from its enemies. In 1648, by the Treaty of Westphalia, it returned to the status quo ante. Death by plague was more prevalent than death from fighting or wilful destruction.

Perhaps from a fruitful ferment of the Protestant and the Catholics, Habsburg Presslav’s chief claim to fame lay in the sphere of secular culture. Two successive Schools of Silesian Poetry gave rise to the label, in the history of German literature, of ‘The Silesian Century’. When we were selecting a title for the German edition of my book, Microcosm, we chose a phrase whereby the poet Angelus Silesius had described the city, Die Blume Europas, ‘the Flower of Europe.’

The Prussian Army laid siege to Presslav on New Year’s Day, 1 January 1741. And after the battle of nearby Mollwitz, the Austrians retreated, and most of Silesia passed to Prussia. Frederick the Great had to fight many more battles to hang on to his gains, but Bresslau remained in the Hohenzollerns’ grip as long as their kingdom lasted: that is, to 1918.

Outsiders may imagine that one set of Germans had merely replaced another set of Germans. But the transition from Austrian to Prussian rule delivered as severe a jolt as any previous changes. Language and national identity were not prominent issues, but religious freedom, local autonomy and the state ethos were. ‘Prussification’ meant subjection to the central government in Berlin, loss of political and financial control, and a strong sense of humiliation.

The Napoleonic Wars represent a distinct hiatus in the history of the Hohenzollern Kingdom. ‘Old Prussia’ collapsed from its defeat by Napoleon, and the ‘New Prussia’, which emerged from the ashes, was a very different state both in size and substance. Indeed, it was in Breslau in the spring of 1813 that the Prussians rallied for the decisive showdown. It was in Breslau that King Frederick William made his famous proclamation An mein Volk: founded the Order of the Iron Cross, and launched Germany’s national colours of black, red and gold. The Jahrhunderthalle was built in 1913 for the centenary of what the Prussians called their War of Liberation. 2013 saw the centenary of that centenary.

After the Congress of Vienna of 1815, the New Prussia was vastly extended territorially right across Germany to the Rhine, and greatly strengthened economically by the acquisition of the Ruhr, which grew into Europe’s largest concentration of heavy industry. Coal and steel plus Prussia’s old military tradition made a winning combination, and between 1864 and 1871 Bismarck’s masterly display of limited wars brought startling results. Prussia knocked out Austria as the dominant authority in the German world, and knocked out France as the strongest power on the continent. Bismarck travelled to Versailles to oversee the enthronement of the King of Prussia as German Emperor. Breslau participated enthusiastically in the excitement and celebrations of this Gründerzeit, the ‘Time of Foundation.’

I can mention just three features of Breslau in its late nineteenth-century prime. First, whilst carried along as a frontier town by the unstoppable wave of German nationalism, it was seriously stricken by the accompanying Kulturkampf or ‘Culture Struggle’, the state’s campaign against the Catholic Church. Dr Adalbert Falk, the Prussian Minister of Culture and author of the Kulturkampf legislation, was a Breslauer; and the Prince-Bishop of Breslau, Heinrich Forster, was one of the hierarchs forced from office.

Secondly, Breslau played a very special role in the assimilation and ‘Germanisation’ of Jewish migrants coming from the East. It was a laboratory for turning ultra-orthodox, Yiddish-speaking arrivals into ‘Good Germans of Jewish background’. The long-term Rabbi of Breslau, Jacob Guttmann (1845–1919) headed the Union of German Rabbis, and presided over a startling array of charitable and educational institutions. The Jewish community exercised an influence far beyond its number. Its self-confidence was self-evident in the grand New Synagogue, built in 1872 and burned in 1938. I strongly recommend a visit to the old Jewish Cemetery, which has survived.

Thirdly, Breslau played a disproportionate part in the educational, scientific and academic prowess of imperial Germany. The fame of the University of Breslau and the Technische Hochschule spread far beyond the city. The ten Nobel laureates are but the tip of a very big iceberg. Please Google ‘Breslau’ and ‘Science’, and you will soon find your way to a dazzling list of names, especially in physics, chemistry and the medical sciences; it starts with Alzheimer, Max Born and Ferdinand Cohn, and goes on to Ehrlich, Haber, Neisser and Foerster. If I may quote myself: ‘It is clear that one is dealing here not with a succession of talented individuals, but … with a formidable scientific community that possessed the organisation, the resources and the intellectual climate to produce excellence.’ The achievements of that community could not be taken away, even by the Nazis or the Second World War.

Following the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, Prussia – and with it Breslau – remained a state within the Weimar Republic, and from 1933 the Third Reich. It was abolished by Allied decree in 1947, thereby completing its passage into my category of Vanished Kingdoms.

As usual, I have not found the time and space to sing the praises of post-war Wrocław, the ‘Phoenix’ that rose from the ashes. It is not a story of famous Nobel laureates collecting their prizes, but of obscure refugees digging in the ruins and of academics re-starting their subjects from scratch. It’s a heroic tale that deserves an hour’s lecture in itself; and after two whole generations it has reached its goal: a dynamic, self-confident municipality that is re-discovering its place in Europe. In this regard, I repeat the Latin tag inscribed inside the rebuilt St. Paul’s Cathedral in London after the Great Fire: Si monumentum requires – circumspice (If you seek a monument, just look around you).

Finally – I have raced through the history of Vratislavia, Wrotizla, Prezla, Presslau, Breslau and Wrocław: I have touched on science and scholarship, but one phrase, ‘Looking ahead’ remains to be considered.

These days I have been moving away from my original speciality in Polish History, and have been spreading my wings. The other day, I was reading about traditional Maori Culture in ‘The Land of the Long White Cloud’, i.e. New Zealand; and I discovered a fascinating aspect of human perceptions of the world. The ancient Maoris – and not only the Maoris – did not think of themselves as standing in the present and looking forward to the future, as westerners do. On the contrary they saw themselves standing in the present, but looking ahead to the past. Their word for History, apparently, means ‘the days in front’; their word for ‘the Future’ is ‘the days behind.’ Their mental orientation gave priority to gazing on the past, to learning from the wisdom of their gods and their ancestors. The future for them was less important; they had turned their backs on it. As one anthropologist put it, they were walking into the Future backwards, occasionally looking over their shoulder.

Now, I’m not advocating that we all emulate the ancient Maoris and look more backwards than forwards. But as a historian, I do think that people should look to the past, whilst also looking at the Present and Future. Examining the past of any subject is an essential prelude to defining the present state of knowledge and to determining the possible trajectories of future travel. If you are an immunologist, for example, is it not vital for you to know how the Breslauer, Dr Paul Ehrlich, devised the process of chemotherapy? If you are a historian, should you not know what the classicist Thomas Mommsen did to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902? And indeed, when the news is full of chemical weapons, should we not all click onto one of Breslau’s less savoury scientists, Fritz Haber, and learn how he earned the epithet of ‘Doctor Death’? So perhaps the watchword should not be look ahead, but rather circumspice – look around you on all sides.

Similarly, for the Vratislavians and the former Breslauers alike, it is not irrelevant to study their city’s past in order to understand the present. One thing that they see today is a strong movement in Germany to recognise the injustice and violence suffered by the post-war Vertriebener or ‘Expellees’ from the East. That’s perfectly fine. But if the leaders of that movement would study the Polish as well as the German experience, they would learn that Polish ‘repatriants’ formed one of the largest contingents of expellees. When the two parallel experiences are linked, there is a chance that lingering resentments could be replaced by empathy and friendship.

Finally, I leave you with a thought that might encourage anyone who might be tempted to explore Wrocław for traces of bygone Breslau, Presslau, Prezla, Wrotizla and Vratislavia. It comes from the final section of my chapter on Prussia: