This English translation of Gregor Thum's 2003 book on how the German city of Breslau was transformed into Polish Wrocław is most welcome. Now a much broader body of readers than those who could read the German original can profit from Thum's compelling account of the political, demographic, social and cultural processes by which Polish officials and intellectuals transformed the wreckage of the historic Lower Silesian city after 1945 into the major metropolis of Poland's so-called ‘recovered territories’. Well-researched in a great body of Polish archival sources, periodicals, memoirs and scholarly studies, Thum's book offers much persuasive analysis of the multifarious changes in government administration, settlement patterns, local economy, architecture, everyday life and the mentality of the residents. Graced by a lucid, fluent translation, the book offers a vividly told narrative that sustains the reader's interest throughout the lengthy study.

Thum begins with a succinct prologue which presents the experience of Breslau and its population during the Second World War and its horrific final weeks, when the Nazi determination not to surrender the city turned it into a scene of massive devastation. The Polish authorities that moved in soon began steps to make the territory east of the Oder River Polish, but they had no blueprints for this process. Polish settlers had to be recruited and moved in even while more than 4.5 million Germans remained in what had become Polish territory east of the Oder–Neisse line by the time of the Potsdam summit conference in late July 1945. Thum outlines neatly the processes of expelling the German population from the city, but readers interested in more thorough analysis of this ‘ethnic cleansing’ need to look elsewhere. This book focuses on the Polish transformation and reconstruction of the city. Throughout, the author is candid but scrupulously fair and non-accusatory in his analyses of the changes which followed, many of the measures at first hastily improvised, shortsighted and even contradictory.

In Thum's account, the new Polish authorities in Wrocław saw their work as a project of thorough transformation from nearly the outset. They faced manifold obstacles to creating a Polish city, and the solutions they found included many ironies. The devastation of Poland by the end of the Second World War and uncertainties about the ultimate fate of the newly claimed western territories made it difficult initially to recruit Polish settlers. A number came from the eastern and southeastern territories of pre-1939 Poland that were taken by the Soviet Union, including in particular a number of professionals, scholars and artists from the city of Lwów/Lviv, several of whose cultural institutions, such as the great Ossolineum Library, were transplanted to Wrocław. Thum shows, though, that despite the widespread belief in the importance of transplanted Polish inhabitants from Lwów and surrounding parts of eastern Galicia, the reality was that less than 10 per cent of the settlers actually came from the Lwów area. The majority derived from central Poland, and more than half the settlers were natives of villages and lacked prior experience of urban life.

The latter reality, along with elaborate efforts by Polish government officials, historians and publicists to propagate a continuous Polish history and identity for Wrocław, lays the basis for the major theme of the book, that it was a city of uprooted people through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. The Polish inhabitants of the city were prepared to make a new start and needed new local and regional identities, but creating a sense of place and belonging proved to be a slow and notably difficult process. In the early years the authorities changed not only German place and street names to Polish ones but also pressured the Polish population to give up German-sounding first and last names, provoking much resentment and resistance. Rule over the city and its environs by Piast dukes around 1000 CE became the touchstone for a narrative which asserted the continuous Polish history of the region, but Piast rule had left few local physical remains and no real legacy for the popular imagination. Local officials refurbished and rebuilt the surviving bits of Gothic architecture, claiming them as symbols of the Piast era; and they eventually restored a number of Renaissance and Baroque structures as well to help give back to the inner city an historic character. They tore down, however, many structures that were the product of Prussian and imperial German rule, while saying as little as possible about the Prussian and German history of the city in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Thum sensitively describes how the communist government's nationalist memory politics eventually backfired. The assertion of a Polish history of the city stretching from the medieval Piasts to the present and the official suppression of the German past left an obvious void, when many physical remains of that past were everywhere to be seen, including the furnishings of many older dwellings. The officially sponsored history was yet another of the public fictions in communist Poland which attracted increasing public criticism and complaint after the late 1970s. With the growth of civil society thereafter, public voices began to call for a recovery of the lost German pages in Wrocław's history. Thum concludes his fascinating study with an insightful discussion of how the end of communist rule and the signing of a new treaty between Poland and Germany in 1990 which guaranteed the present national borders took the history of Poland's western territories out of the political realm and thereby removed nearly all remaining barriers to an open treatment of the city's past. That many residents of Wrocław have apparently embraced a fuller treatment of that history suggests that they are more comfortable with an open discussion of their city's historic relationship to Germany than they were with the politically contrived narrative of the communist era. There is much to be learned here about the limits of manipulation of historical narratives by authoritarian governments.