Gregor Thum's Uprooted began as a doctoral thesis written, fittingly, at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder, just steps away from the German-Polish border. It was published in 2002 in German, in 2005 in Polish, and now, in a fine translation, in English. As its title indicates, Uprooted takes as its starting point the postwar expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Germans from the city they knew as Breslau; rather than follow them, however, Thum stays in place and examines how the Polish authorities rebuilt, repopulated, and remade the city they called Wrocław. Uprooted thus offers not only a nuanced history of “ethnic unmixing” in western Poland at the end of World War II, but also an original investigation of the many consequences of these events in the decades that followed.

The book opens with what Thum terms the “dual tragedy” of 1945: the Nazis' senseless, scorched-earth defense of Breslau in 1945, which led to the physical destruction of large parts of the city, and the westward transfer of Poland in the same year, which earned Breslau the dubious distinction of being the largest German city transferred to Poland and the largest to experience the near total expulsion of its permanent population. In a prologue, Thum provides a lucid overview of the events that led up to 1945, noting, for example, that the expulsion of German Breslauers in fact began in 1933 with the Nazi persecution of the city's sizeable Jewish population. The remainder of Uprooted looks at the cataclysm of 1945 and its aftershocks. In this it joins a growing literature on the displacement and movements of millions of Europeans in the wake of World War II. What makes Thum's book especially valuable is its demonstration that in Wrocław the violent population transfer exercised a powerful influence over postwar architecture, local history, public space, and the collective psychology of the residents, even though nearly all of them were newcomers after 1945.

The year 1945 thus stands as a rupture in the history of this city. The first part of the book documents the destruction and chaos of the late 1940s. It contains fascinating sections on looting, black markets, vandalism, Soviet “trophy brigades,” and Polish dismantling, which included the millions of bricks hastily (and often senselessly) taken from Wrocław to Warsaw, whose needs always took precedence over those of other Polish cities. The Polish government was in fact deeply ambivalent about Wrocław: although it wanted the rebuilt city to be a showcase of the new regime's accomplishments, it also feared that the German-Polish border might again be revised and the city returned to Germany.

The second part of Uprooted examines how local leaders worked to justify Polish control of the city and to make the process of Polonization irreversible. The story Thum tells is one of erasure and exorcism, of silences and self-censorship; its protagonists are local historians, architects, philologists, and art historians. These Polish “pioneers” oversaw the removal of German-language inscriptions, the demolition of “Prussian” buildings, the renaming of streets and squares, and the leveling of German cemeteries. Thum makes several pointed comparisons between the postwar campaign of Polonization and the Germanization measures pursued under National Socialism, observing, for example, that both regimes approved of population transfers, employed similar propaganda about borderlands, and attempted to “expunge the traces of multiethnic settlement in the Slavic-German borderlands” (p. 248).

The remaking of Wrocław required creation as well as destruction. Uprooted shows how Polish elites attempted to prove that the Polish presence in Wrocław was much older and deeper than the German one. This led to local histories with the Germans effectively left out and an obsession with Gothic architecture, which was seen as a visual reminder that the city had once been part of the medieval Kingdom of Poland. Thum is generally critical of this cultural work. But he makes the interesting argument that this propaganda served an important psychological function for the postwar population, which otherwise must have felt little connection to the city. Thum also observes that because there were relatively few local Polish heroes to celebrate, propaganda drew upon the wider pantheon of Polish luminaries; this was part of a wider process by which Polish society, which had once been defined by great regional and cultural diversity, became increasingly homogenous, at least in urban areas.

Uprooted is even-handed in its analysis and impressive in its chronological sweep. Yet its emphasis on the immediate postwar years suggests areas for further research at both ends of the twentieth century. For the earlier period, Thum's brief account stresses that as a borderland, Silesia was “particularly susceptible to the pathological nationalism of the twentieth century” (p. xvi). But scholars such as Til van Rahden and James Bjork have also documented different traditions in this region, including multicultural liberalism among elites and national indifference among the masses. A full understanding of 1945, then, requires a clearer explanation of why and how extreme nationalism came to dominate this region.

Uprooted also helps us think about nationalism's role after 1989. In the closing chapter, Thum praises Wrocław for embracing a diverse, shared, local identity. In Thum's telling, the reemergence of the German past—the “return of the repressed”—was all but inevitable: “In the end,” he writes, “repressing this foreignness was a hopeless enterprise” (p. 383). Thum's appeal to collective psychology is satisfying in this case. But it leaves unanswered the question of what specific factors encouraged the residents of Wrocław “to work through the past.” Not all cities and states in central and eastern Europe have been so broad-minded in the decades after 1989.

A test of Wrocław's continued commitment to openness about its past will come in 2016, when the city will be a European Capital of Culture, one of only several dozen European cities so honored. One can only hope that the planners of the year's events—as well as some of the many visitors who will come to Wrocław—will read and reflect upon Gregor Thum's book. Their appreciation of the city will be much richer if they do.