Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City
Encyclopedia
Norman Davies
Professor Ivor Norman Richard Davies FBA, FRHistS is a leading English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland, and the United Kingdom.- Academic career :...
and Roger Moorhouse
Roger Moorhouse
Roger Moorhouse is a British historian and author. Born in Stockport, Cheshire, he was raised in Hertfordshire and attended Berkhamsted School. Inspired to return to education by the East European Revolutions of 1989, Moorhouse enrolled in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the...
about the history of Wrocław.
Content
The book opens with a description of the siege and fall of German Breslau at the very end of the Second World War. Attacking Red ArmyRed Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
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
Revenge
Revenge is a harmful action against a person or group in response to a grievance, be it real or perceived. It is also called payback, retribution, retaliation or vengeance; it may be characterized, justly or unjustly, as a form of justice.-Function in society:Some societies believe that the...
-seeking Soviet military leaders allow mass murder
Mass murder
Mass murder is the act of murdering a large number of people , typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. According to the FBI, mass murder is defined as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders...
, rape
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
and looting
Looting
Looting —also referred to as sacking, plundering, despoiling, despoliation, and pillaging—is the indiscriminate taking of goods by force as part of a military or political victory, or during a catastrophe, such as during war, natural disaster, or rioting...
.
The opening chapter of the book contains a description of the prehistoric
Prehistory
Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...
island settlement in the Oder whose inhabitants took part in the amber
Amber
Amber is fossilized tree resin , which has been appreciated for its color and natural beauty since Neolithic times. Amber is used as an ingredient in perfumes, as a healing agent in folk medicine, and as jewelry. There are five classes of amber, defined on the basis of their chemical constituents...
and salt
Salt
In chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral...
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 pandemic
Pandemic
A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic...
s, pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...
s, attack by the Mongols
Mongols
Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...
, the Hussite Wars
Hussite Wars
The Hussite Wars, also called the Bohemian Wars involved the military actions against and amongst the followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia in the period 1419 to circa 1434. The Hussite Wars were notable for the extensive use of early hand-held gunpowder weapons such as hand cannons...
, the struggles of the Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
, the Thirty Years' War
Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was fought primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most countries in Europe. It was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history....
, Prussian expansionism, the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
, Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
and Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
.
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
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
and Soviet Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
.
Reception
Microcosm was well received by the reading public upon its release. Apart from the original English the book was also published in the PolishPolish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Czech
Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
and Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
languages.
The majority of reviewers were very positive about the book. Writing in the English Historical Review, Richard Butterwick wrote that: "Davies and Moorhouse set out to present the history of the city, a microcosm of Central Europe, as evenhandedly as possible, freeing it from the straitjackets of German and Polish nationalisms, and giving due weight to its Jewish and Czech components." He added that "Microcosm must be acclaimed as exemplary." In the Spectator, meanwhile, Antony Beevor
Antony Beevor
Antony James Beevor, FRSL is a British historian, educated at Winchester College and Sandhurst. He studied under the famous military historian John Keegan. Beevor is a former officer with the 11th Hussars who served in England and Germany for five years before resigning his commission...
noted the book's "scholarship and objectivity," adding that it "also makes a fascinating story." C.J. Schüler called the book "an impressive and timely history of one of the continent's great cities".
Winfried Irgang, director of the Herder Institute Marburg, criticized the book for a number of technical defects and even factual errors, especially in the sections about Middle Ages and the Habsburg era. Irgang moreover states that Davies is unfamiliar with the subject.
Historian Peter Oliver Loew
Peter Oliver Loew
Peter Oliver Loew is a German historian, translator and scholar, specializing in the History of Poland.- Biography :Loew was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied Eastern European history, Slavistics and economics at the University of Nuremberg, University of Freiburg and the Free University of...
, scientific Vice-director of the Deutsches Polen-Institut (German Poland Institute), stated that the authors are unfamiliar with the subject and have a tendency to overemphasize the multicultural aspect of the city in order to please the city council, the sponsor of the book. To Loew the work is "largely worthless as a scholarly source".
Hubert Zawadzki, writing in the Slavonic and Eastern European Review wrote that the book has "something of an epic quality", and that it manages to go beyond traditional German versus Polish rivalry in the historiography concerning the city. Furthermore Zawadzki praised the work for containing material of interest both for the specialist historians as well as the lay reader.
Historian Adam Zamoyski
Adam Zamoyski
Count Adam Stefan Zamoyski is a historian and a member of the ancient Zamoyski family of Polish nobility.-Life:Zamoyski was born in New York City, but was raised in England and was educated at Downside School and The Queen's College, Oxford...
also praised the work as remaining "above the national squabbles" and compared Davies and Moorhouse favorably to Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
, one of the greatest of the modern historians.
David Isaacson, in a review for The Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
stated that the book makes an "excellent contribution" to international understanding.