Microcosm: A Portrait of a Central European City Book

Before the popular success of his two general histories, Europe: A History, and The Isles, Norman Davies was best known as a specialist on the history of Poland. His 1981 two-volume God's Playground remains the best and most searching study in English of the fluctuating fortunes of that country. Microcosm, written in collaboration with his researcher Roger Moorhouse, is an in-depth account of a city now in Poland and presently called Wroclaw. The city has only been Polish since the Second World War. Before that it was the very German city of Breslau. And before that it was, at various times, part of the kingdom of Bohemia, the Hapsburg Empire and the Prussia of Frederick the Great. In different centuries it has been known as Wrotizla, as Wretslaw, as Presslaw and as Bresslau. Its Polish, German and Jewish communities intermingled to produce both a unique city and one that reflected and embodied all the different currents that have flowed together over a millennium to create the story of Central Europe. Davies and Moorhouse intend their account of what is today Wroclaw to illustrate the history of one particular city but also to illuminate the general history of Central Europe through this one microcosm. They don't always succeed in their aim. At times the task of yoking together the minutiae of the city's life with its place in a broader history seems an impossible one. It is likely that the general reader will not be as interested in, say, lists of great alumni of Breslau's 19th-century university, as he or she will be in the narrative of Breslau in World War II. The book works best for the general reader when it most justifies its title; it works much less well when it seems most like some kind of official city history.--Nick RennisonRead More