Summer course of the ZEIT-Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius
in Cooperation with the Willy-Brandt-Center of the University of Wroc³aw
15-24 July, 2005

Announcement

“The historical memory of Europe is bound in a special way to places: history takes place. If there is a guardian spirit (Genius) of Europe, then it has crystallized itself not least in its cities. It has formed distinctive faces for each era. Europe revolves in a certain regard around its metropolises, which are points of maximal concentration of all that constitutes civilizations and their history. Life, fantasy, and memory revolve around them. Europe is also a landscape of memory.” (Karl Schlögel)

The ZEIT-Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Buceris will offer young humanities students from Europe and the USA the opportunity to analyze European sites of memory in a series of courses. These courses intend to represent the “spectrum of central and eastern Europe” (H. v. Keyserlingk) by reading its metropolises as topoi of memory and history. This course aims to internationalize and connect fields of the humanities with an interest in history and invites not only young historians, but also art historians, literary scholars, ethnologists, and sociologists working in history to summer courses on location – history takes place.

In 2005 the ZEIT-Foundation in cooperation with the Willy-Brandt-Center of the University of Wroclaw will make it possible for graduate students, Ph.D. candidates, and Postdocs to participate in a summer course in Wroclaw (Breslau) in the context of their summer course series, “History Takes Place: European Sites of Memory.” Wroclaw, which was subjected to a forced population exchange after the second world war, represents the fate of countless villages and cities of central and eastern Europe.

Wroclaw is an exemplary place for the “Century of Expulsions,” for the excesses of nationalism, for the experience of flight, expulsion, and new beginnings in a foreign land, for the loss of a homeland, and uprooting. If one looks for a place to experience in condensed form the drama of Europe in the 20th Century, one will find it in this city. But today’s Wroclaw also manifests serious efforts to remember the common ground of European history and thus to make a new beginning in the Europe that is growing together. The city on the Oder is, in this regard, a European site of memory par excellence.

This ten-day summer course, led by Dr. Gregor Thum (University of Pittsburgh, USA), will reflect on Wroclaw’s dramatic history in the 20th Century and follow its traces in the topography, architecture, and monuments of the city. The guiding themes of this interdisciplinary-oriented summer course are outlined in the attached report. Each topical presentation and city excursion will include presentations from eyewitnesses and specialists.

Dr. Ingmar Ahl
Area Leader for Patronage
ZEIT-Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius

Dr. Krzysztof Ruchniewicz
Director of the Willy Brandt Center at the University of Wroclaw

Dr. Gregor Thum
DAAD visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh

“History Takes Place”: European Sites of Memory - Wroc³aw/Breslau

Summer course of the ZEIT-Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius
in Cooperation with the Willy-Brandt-Center of the University of Wroc³aw
15-24 July, 2005

Requirements for Participation and How to Apply

The selection of participants will be based on individual applications as well as on recommendations of recognized scholars in the field.

Prerequisites for application are an advanced knowledge of modern Polish and German history, interest in the historical phenomenon of the city, as well as an interest in this topic that ties into one's own research outside the seminar (MA or PhD thesis, "second book"). Participants need not work on Wroc³aw in particular, but they should bring a thematic and methodological interest in new approaches and unusual sources. The languages of the course are Polish, German, and English. Reading knowledge in two languages is a prerequisite for application, and the knowledge of all three languages is advantageous. Detailed preparation with the help of course materials, recommended readings, as well as the responsibility to present a report and lead a tour are expected. In assigning the latter, individual interests and specializations will be considered. There will be a preparatory meeting for the course.

The ZEIT-Foundation will bear the expenses for travel and accommodation and will provide a lump sum stipend, commensurate with the respective financial situations of participants, for on-site cost of living. We intend to publish the results of this summer course.

Suitable candidates are asked to send their application dossier (CV, transcripts, and a proposed research topic) as well as one written recommendation from a scholar in their field to the ZEIT-Foundation (ZEIT-Stiftung, Feldbrunnenstraße 56, D-20148 Hamburg, Germany) by March 31st, 2005. Information is also available on the homepage of the foundation (web address shown below).

“History Takes Place”: European Sites of Memory – Wroclaw”
Summer course of the ZEIT-Foundation Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius
15-24 July, 2005

Guiding Themes

“Cities,” according to Joseph Roth, “survive the peoples to whom they owe their existence and the languages in which their architects and master builders communicated with each other. The birth, life, and death of a city depend on many laws that cannot be forced into a single pattern and that do not allow rules.” Wroc³aw appears to confirm this judgment, as Silesia’s capital did not founder even during the destruction of war and the expulsion of its citizens after 1945. Upon the ruins of German Wroc³aw, a new Polish city was built up. Its beginnings proved difficult, because the Polish settlers were hardly able to identify with the foreign place. Nevertheless, over the years they put down roots in Wroc³aw and so made possible the reconstruction and resuscitation of this city. Today Wroc³aw is one of the most dynamic cities in the new Poland.

Within the framework of this summer course, the main objective will be to grasp the dramatic caesura of 1945 in its meaning for Wroc³aw, without losing sight of the continuum of urban development. Polish and German Wroc³aw have more in common than one might suspect. There appears to be a genius loci of Wroc³aw that survived all ruptures and that gives this city its persistent unmistakable character. The concern of this summer course is to follow its traces.

History on Location. City as Text
For the historian, the cityscape is a valuable document that can be read as a historical source. It offers information both about the history of the city and about how this history has been dealt with. Older layers were covered by newer, some things were lost completely or intentionally removed, much has only slipped into the background, and other things have been made visible again.

In addition, there are topographical constants, conditions of natural space and circulation that can hardly be changed and that thus lend cities their enduring individual contours. Cityscapes, created by generations, can tell the history of a city when read correctly. How do we read Wroc³aw? What does the city tell us? What must we know beforehand of its history, and what does the cityscape alone give away? What are the conditions of natural space in Wroc³aw that inhibit change?

“Wroc³aw in 1945” - War’s End, Shifting Borders, and Population Shift in Retrospect
2005 is the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war. For Wroc³aw, the year 1945 meant more than the end of the war. It marks the dramatic caesura in the history of the city: devastated by the battles for “Fortress Wroc³aw,” the city was ceded to Poland by the allied victors. Because Wroc³aw was designated to become a purely Polish city in an ethnic sense as well, the citizens of Wroc³aw, who had not yet fled west ahead of the Red Army, were driven out of their city. Polish settlers came in their place, many themselves expellees from the eastern Polish territories that had fallen to the Soviet Union. Only a few Poles, though, believed then that they would stay in Wroc³aw for a longer period of time. Most of them lived for years and decades with packed suitcases.

In communist Poland, the memory of the dramatic events of 1945 and their consequences for the city were obscured by historical myths. Yet the conditions of memory have changed fundamentally since 1989. After decades of repression, German history has become particularly interesting to the Polish Wroc³awians of today. Also of interest is the debate about expulsion, in which Breslau was named repeatedly as a possible central memorial site for events of European expulsion. How does one in Wroc³aw today remember the year 1945?

What testimonials of that year have been preserved in the cityscape? How does one view the expulsion of German Wroc³awians 60 years later? Does Wroc³aw conceive of itself as a city of migrants and expellees, or do the post-war myths of “originally Polish Wroc³aw” and its “return to the Motherland” still have an effect? Does Wroc³aw have, in view of 1945, the potential to be a European place of remembrance?

The Bourgeois City
Wroc³aw was built around a royal fortress and then won greater significance as the seat of a bishopric. But above all, the city owes its ascendance as a magnificent trading city to the skill of its citizens. They stretched out the net of extensive trade relations, fought successfully with princes and church leaders for political power in the city, and created the proud, autonomously administrated bourgeois city of the 15th and 16th Centuries. What remained of this bourgeois city in the 20th Century? To what degree did the long-term economic decline and the related undermining of the bourgeois way of life contribute to the tragedy of modern Wroc³aw? What was the status of bourgeois culture in the Wroc³aw of the People’s Republic of Poland? Did it experience a renaissance only after 1989 or did it already awaken to new life with the Solidarity movement of the 1980's? How does the bourgeois way of life define and present itself in Wroc³aw today?

Wroclaw as a Religious Center
Churches and monasteries belong to Wroc³aw’s cityscape. Before 1945, Wroc³aw was the seat of a Catholic archbishopric and the center of the national Protestant church of Silesia. The university in Wroc³aw was the first in Germany to have at its disposal both a Catholic and a Protestant theological faculty. In addition, the religious diversity of the city benefited from the large Jewish community and from the intellectual life surrounding the Jewish Theological Seminary, which, until its closure in 1938, was one of the most important places for training rabbis in Europe. After 1945, the Protestants shrunk to a minority, but the status of Wroc³aw’s Catholic archbishopric was preserved.

From the immigration of thousands of Polish Holocaust survivors, a rich Jewish life developed for several years in Wroc³aw. A new element was introduced with the arrival of Christian orthodox churches – a consequence of the forced settlement of Ukrainians in Silesia in 1947. In what relation did these religious groups stand to each other? In what way did this religious diversity shape the spirit of the city and the cityscape?

City of Intellect
Modern Wroc³aw is unthinkable without its universities, libraries, and archives. Wroc³aw also made a name for itself as a city of art, literature, and theater, and, since the 1960's it has become a center for Polish film. With names such as Max Born, Hans Poelzig, Alfred Kerr, Jerzy Grotkowski, and Tadeusz Rozewicz, the trading and industrial city of Wroc³aw was also a place of great intellectual and artistic creativity. How did this come to be, what made Wroc³aw so attractive for artists and intellectuals, what inspiration did the city offer? How did they see the city and what influence did they have on its destiny?

City and State Power
Wroclaw was always more a bourgeois city than a royal capital or place of power. And yet, particularly in the century of totalitarianism, the city could not escape the clutches of the state. During both National Socialism and Stalinism, Wroc³aw became a stage for the self-representation and power productions of the state. In 1938 Hitler’s motorcade paraded through Wroc³aw on the occasion of the German Gymnastic and Sport Festival; ten years later Boleslaw Bierut opened the “Exhibition of the Western Territories” in Wroc³aw, the largest propaganda display that the People’s Republic would experience. The “German bulwark” in the Slavic East became the “Capital of the Polish Western Territories.” How did the city and the power of the state relate to each other? To what degree was the city able to maintain distance from the state cult of the Imperial period, the Third Reich, and Stalinist Poland? And to what extent did the power of the state register itself in the cityscape by means of representative buildings and national monuments?

The Modern Industrial City
Germany’s industrialization began in Upper Silesia. In its wake, the urban center of Silesia became an important industrial city. Wroc³aw was most significant for its machine construction, and foremost among this was the production of train cars by Linke-Hofmann, a tradition continued by Pafawag after 1945. One should not forget, in addition, that the workers’ movement has one of its roots in Wroc³aw in the person of Ferdinand Lasalles. How did Wroc³aw change in the wake of industrialization, both in regard to the composition of its inhabitants and to its cityscape? What influence did worker and industrial culture have on the culture of the city as a whole? How radical was the break when Wroc³aw, in communist Poland, was supposed to become first and foremost a workers’ city, as symbolized by the erection of workers’ quarters in the traditionally bourgeois city center?

Minorities: Jews, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians
The existence of confessional and ethnic minorities has always been one of the distinctive traits of Wroc³aw, which lies in the borderlands of Siliesia. Before 1945 Jews and Poles were the exception to the Christian, German majority; in Catholic Poland it was the Jews and the orthodox Ukrainians. And in a certain sense, the expellees from Lemberg and other areas of eastern Poland also comprised a minority with its own culture in Wroc³aw after 1945. How did the majority behave towards these minorities and what space did they allow them in urban life? How did Wroclaw’s minorities organize themselves, and what influence did they have on the city’s culture and the cityscape? How does the city treat its minorities today? Does the often invoked tradition of Wroclaw’s tolerance and multi-culturalism truly exist after the nationalistic and antisemitic excesses of the 20th Century, and could it be a model for the “European” city of today?

Wroc³aw and its Memories
Due to its exposed position in a border region between Germans and Poles, Wroclaw’s collective memory was subjected repeatedly to abrupt transformations. Again and again its components were written over, partially erased, invented anew. With the expulsion of the German Wroc³awians, memory divided itself into a German branch and a newly formed Polish branch. Thus, many ways of remembering are bound with Wroc³aw: German and Polish, official and unofficial, majority and minority. After the epochal shifts of 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1989, historical testimonials disappeared from the cityscape, for they contradicted the ideal conceptions of the history of Wroc³aw in each period. Is Wroc³aw a palimpsest of varied memories or are these memories related to each other? Is there a resistance in this place and its historical character to the “invention of tradition”? Can one speak of a convergence of the Polish and German city memory after 1989? Is the local memory today emancipating itself from the national expectations of the past, or does “European Wroc³aw” still fulfill these expectations, only from a transformed political background?

Points of Departure and Visions of the Future: 1920's, 1950's, 1990's
During the 20th Century, Wroc³aw constantly battled the problems of a city on the periphery. Yet from this situation grew again and again the will to push the city forward by means of bold designs for the future. In the 1920s, Wroc³aw was among the first cities in Germany to announce an international contest for a general urban development plan. In the 1950s, city planners and architects made ambitious designs for the total reconstruction of the city destroyed in war. In the 1990's, the contest for the World’s Fair of 2010 was to be used for the great leap into the future. What visions were there for the city at these various times? Which plans were realized, and which ones remained plans? And what do all these plans for the future have in common? Has the new formulation of spatial relations in a Europe that is growing together emancipated Wroc³aw from its peripheral position?

Dr. Gregor Thum Pittsburgh, December 2004
University of Pittsburgh / USA