Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 2, Autumn 2019 | Page 31

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
In May 1945, four days after Berlin, the Breslau Fortress (Festung Breslau) finally surrendered.
An almost totally extinct population of the once a million-person city tried
to find anything to survive in a totally destroyed city that witnessed one of most cruel
sieges of World War II. “In May 1945,” as Davies and Moorhouse (2002) write in their
breath-taking story of Wroclaw “it was virtually impossible to imagine that the Flower of
Europe would ever bloom again.”
Today, in 2019, the Phoenix city blooms again. It is not a German city anymore. A whole
population was exchanged in a post-war migration. Today, the dominant language of the
city streets is Polish. But looking at the city life�from cafes and city walks to magnificent
and live concert halls, theatres and exhibitions�Wroclaw is again the Flower of Europe.
Polish, but at the same time open very cosmopolitan, tolerant and most imaginative
European metropolis. “Poland, once a backward agricultural country, is quickly becoming
an economic powerhouse in Central Europe. The Poles are strongly pro-European,
and even their relationship is no longer as tense at was just a few years ago. Nowhere is
the transformation easier to see than in Wroclaw,” notes in Spiegel a German journalist
Jan Puhl (2011).
How then was it possible?
For years, the new Polish inhabitants of the renamed city had lived under stress that
nothing was final and permanent. All that changed in three steps. The first was a declaration
of Polish Bishops with the new Wroclaw archbishop Kominek leading: “we forgive
and ask for forgiveness,” second the “Solidarity” movement to which Wroclaw was a major
stronghold and finally the year 2004�Poland accession to the EU.
Many would say, the wind of history, which, similarly to the meteorological phenomenon,
blows from the West. Perhaps true. But nothing could have happened without people,
all locals who decided that Wroclaw is their place�a final destination. They never
gave up, never agreed to a mediocre and gray mentality of a “real socialism.” Once the
opportunity appeared, they explored it to a full extent, and even more. Wroclaw for years
was ill communicated to the Polish capital�why should it be as a known defiant and
non-obedient community? Most of the new citizens were migrants from a former Eastern
Poland, but hopefully among them was the intellectual elite of Lwów, Vilnius as well
as those looking for a chance to develop themselves from all over Poland, bringing with
themselves the most valuable societal gene�the creativity, a fundament of the societal
engine�the creative class (Florida 2014).
And then came a real opportunity�the first free election in June 1989 and the most
revolutionary systemic transformation, namely a direct election of local authorities: city
mayors and the city council. The Solidarity-based movement took full power and full
responsibility. Wroclaw again became, as Jan Puhl noted, a symbol of recovery. All those
underground streams of freedom, entrepreneurship, goodwill, and just civic creativity
have surfaced, changing the grim fate of the city, hopefully forever.
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