Talk:Wrocław
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[edit] Tendentious language
I got the impression that this article is written in a tendentious language, especially when it comes to the 19th and 20th century.
Such statements as
In August 1920 Germans devastated Breslau's Polish School and burned its Polish Library, and in 1923 the city was a scene of antisemitic riots. Breslauers honoured Adolf Hitler with the title of honorary citizen of the city. and Most of the Polish elites also left during 1920s and 1930s, and Polish leaders who remained were sent to German concentration camps. By 1939 the city became almost entirely Germanised.
are tendentious language and show the intention to give a justification: the Germans deserved their fate and Poles had the right to take their land and property after the war. Hundreds of German cities honoured Hitler as honorary citizen in the Nazi era. I guess that many Polish cities honoured Josef Stalin as honorary citizen during the Gomułka era and many North Korean cities certainly have Kim Il-sung as a honorary citizen. This is not very astonishing in a totalitarian regime. Breslau was not a Nazi stronghold before 1933. Politics was dominated by the social democrats who supported the Weimar republic.
I think a "neutral" standpoint should clearly acknowledge the following: Breslau (as it was known before the war in the English and French-speaking world) was an undoubtedly German city with an only small Polish minority (I don't know where the number of 10% Poles at the end of WW I comes from). The Nazi crimes and their stupid suppression of other traditions regarded as "un-German" are beyond any doubt. The expulsion and killing of hundreds of thousand German civilians alone in Silesia at the end of the war were the results of Red Army war crimes, stupid and irresponsible Nazi fanatism and Stalins refusal to hand back the Soviet-occupied Eastern Polish areas to Poland and his attempt to try to inflame permanent hatred between Germans and Poles in the future. The thinking was: Germans will never acccept the Oder-Neisse line, so the Poles will always be forced to align with the Russians and stay a satellite in the Russian sphere of influence. Even for many Polish politicians at that time it was unimaginable that cities like Breslau and Stettin would become Polish because it seemed unthinkable that so many million people could be forcibly expulsed ("ethnically cleansed" in modern terms).
To put it shortly: Wrocław/Breslau is now a Polish city but the Poles should deal honestly with history. And this history was clearly a German history between the Middle Ages and 1945. And the mass expulsion, killing and raping of hundreds of thousand or million German civilians should be named that what it was: an immense war crime and crime against humanity. This is also one of many aspects of the history of Silesia. -- Furfur February 12th 2007
"killing of hundreds of thousand German civilians alone in Silesia" - an example of German type honesty. Poles praized Stalin under Soviet terror, what was the name of the country which invided Germany in 1933? The Naziland? Xx236 14:26, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
I have been following this and many other discussions about German/Polish historical topics. It's a real shame that there is so much nastiness and vindictiveness it them. I am a Silesian by birth, of a German (Ostpommern) father and Polish (Cracow) mother. My education has primarily been in Australia from an independent perspective, so I see myself as an objective viewer.
Discussing pre-19th century political history is very fraught since the notions of nationality didn't emerge until then - in medieval Hanseatic Cracow (eg) the majority of people may have been German ethnically and linguistically, but most likely saw themselves as Cracovites (i hope that's correct) first, and under the subjectship of whoever was the King of Poland at the time - even though the king was sometimes not Polish: Henry Valois = French/Swiss; Stefan Batory = Hungarian; the Vasas = Swedish etc. The same applied more or less everywhere. The Plantagenets were French, Tudors Welsh, Stuarts Scottish... Even to this day the British royals are actually ethnically a German family.
The point I'm making is that prior to the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, ethnic nationality didn't count for much. Calling a city whose national provenance is controversial (like Gdansk/Danzig) Polish as opposed to German in a particular historical period primarily refers to royal belonging, not ethnicity or language. That's because the people at the time would overwhelmingly identify with that belonging rather than ethnicity. This is contrary to present day when such identification is primarily ethnic. That's why critique of pre 19C history aling nationalistic lines doesn't make sense.
There are really 4 dimensions to calling a place German, Polish or anything else. Ethnicity, language, geography and political belonging. You can call (eg) Prague a German city in some of these dimensions, and Czech/Bohemian in others.
There is too much nationalistic fervour in these articles and discussions. It is true that Polish authors may be unsympathetic to the cleansing of Germans postwar - that isn't necessarily their fault since such historical facts were largely glossed over in the Communist teaching of history. Likewise German authors understanably resent the postwar border moving to the Oder-Neisse. Neither is automatically being deliberately biased.
The point of WP is to state those views in an objective way. There is nothing wrong with an article including a section on differing historical views of a city.
I for one hope that the continuing integration of European countries in the EU will slowly assign to the past these nationalistically-motivated views of OUR JOINT history.
-- Gabe76 February 21st 2007
After mass rapes of the female German population. Who did rape - Poles or rather Red Army soldiers?Xx236 13:52, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Nazi years
The article doesn't inform about the Nazi period - destruction of the Synagogue, concentration and forced labour camps, executions. At the same time the article suggests that pre-war terror was stronger than it was, maybe it's the result poor editing.Xx236 14:58, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] In the end, the only plane to use it was that of the fleeing Gauleiter Hanke
There are two other versions - the plane started near Jahrhunderthalle or Museum.Xx236 15:01, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Second ethnic cleansing
Thanks, User talk:136.199.8.42, for your changes of 26 March; I assume you meant them constructively and have a couple of questions.
It is not entirely clear (to me, anyhow) how the closing of the school and the “second ethnic cleansing in twenty years”—I assume this time of Germans—are related. As the sentence stands, the closing of the school and the cleansing seem to be in a cause-and-effect relationship, but I think it was more probably the other way around: Germans (or German speakers) had become too few to support the school. Could you tell me whether:
- the school was closed by the authorities to suppress use of German, or because Wrocław’s German-speaking community had become too small to support the school?
- the Wrocław’s speaking German community had shrunk because the remaining Germans had assimilated into the Polish population, left the city on their own (e.g., by moving to the GDR or FRG), left city because of oppression (perceived or otherwise), or been forced out of the area by the authorities or the local non-German population?
If you can, please provide a source for the information (including if the source is the one already cited). Thanks for your help, Jim_Lockhart 13:45, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
I see this has been entirely removed without comment... Jim_Lockhart 13:38, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
[edit] St. Vincent's Benedictine Abbey and Peter Włast
Can't find anything on this abbey and I'm not sure that it's even styled correctly. Is it the church and monastery covered by this and this article and shown at right? If it is, I can fix the prose. Also, who was Peter Włast and why was he important? The German Wikipedia article on Wrocław does not mention him, nor does it mention the two settlements referred to in the section of the English article under discussion. (Can't find his name in the Polish Wikipedia article, either; but then I can’t read Polish!). Any help would be appreciated. Best regards, Jim_Lockhart 13:38, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
