Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City

Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City is a book by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse about the history of Wrocław.

The book opens with a description of the siege and fall of German Breslau at the very end of the Second World War. The attacking Red Army reduces many streets of the city to rubble, the remaining Germans gradually withdraw. The hopeless situation of the civilians, complicated by shelling, temperatures of minus 20 and food shortages, deteriorates still further as revenge-seeking Soviet military leaders allow mass murder, rape and looting.

The opening chapter of the book contains a description of the prehistoric island settlement in the Oder whose inhabitants took part in the amber and salt trade. The next chapters, named Wrotizla, Vretslav, Presslaw, Breslau and Wroclaw, give exhaustive accounts of the ensuing periods. The authors show the impact of natural phenomena and events such as pandemics, pogroms, attack by the Mongols, the Hussite Wars, the struggles of the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, Prussian expansionism, the Napoleonic Wars, Nazism and Stalinism.

The main premise of the book is to present the history of Wrocław as a microcosm of the history of central Europe as a whole. To this end, it is suggested that the city bears a complex of historical hallmarks that could be interpreted as being particular to the historical experience of that region. These hallmarks include multi-national settlement, the presence of a Jewish community, the development of dynastic rather than national polities in the pre-modern era and the exposure in the 20th century to both Nazism and Soviet Communism.

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