A step into the past and a glimpse into the future?

During my holidays this year I paid a visit to Wroclaw, Poland's 4th largest city (and an underrated gem in terms of Polish city breaks). This was a personal as well as a touristic visit for me as I have some historical ties to the city. It was a trip that really got me thinking about some of the things happening in the world and how the history of this city could provide a little context, and perhaps also, an alarming warning about the direction that Europe and the USA is heading in.

A little about Wroclaw

Wroclaw today is a pleasant city with impressive historical architecture in its centre (especially impressively well maintained as we'll come to see later). It has a vibrant modern feel with a large student population and feels both old and new at the same time.

Wroclaw is a city with a complicated past however. Firstly, it hasn't always been called Wroclaw, despite being founded under this name. This is as the city has been the possession of numerous powers over the years including the Poles, the Czechs, the Austrians, the Prussians (later the Germans of course) and arguably the Soviets (depending on your view of how free the Polish People's Republic of 1945 - 1989 was). Under the rule of the Germanic people of Europe, Wroclaw was known as Breslau, which is going to be important during this discussion.

During the last years as a German possession, Breslau, as it was still called, was a German city very close to the border with Poland (the 1918 - 1939 Western border of Poland). During the time of the Third Reich the city was arguably a stalwart supporter of Nazi politics (despite having been a much more left wing city during the time of the German Empire), with 44% of the city voting for NSDAP in 1932, the third highest proportion in all of Germany.

However, just over a decade later in 1945 Breslau fell to the Red Army in spectacular fashion.

As the Red Army advanced towards Germany in late 1944, Hitler himself declared that city was to become a "Festung" (or Fortress city) which was to be defended without surrender to the last man. The city and the Silesian region, was overseen by one of Hitler's sycophants Karl Hanke, who took the Fuhrer's order quite literally (even after Hitler had bravely committed suicide in Berlin), unfortunately for the residents of the city.

What happened next was a disaster as the German army didn't have the manpower to stop the advance, whilst people attempting to flee before the bombing started were either prevented or shot at by their own defending army. Hanke was adamant there was to be no evacuation despite the hopelessness and pointlessness of the situation, so as not to undermine illusion that all was well in the area. Eventually (and probably too late) he relented and evacuated the city in early 1945 during winter, leading to the deaths of thousands of Germany's own civilians in the freezing cold. 

About 80 percent of the city was destroyed in the bombings, with Breslau finally surrendering 4 days AFTER Berlin. What happened next wasn't much better for the people of the city. Those who had escaped the attack and siege, were basically displaced and unable to return to their homes (what may have remained of them) as part of the Potsdam Agreement was that Breslau was to become part of Poland and the German citizens were to be expelled from the region. This effectively wiped out an entire dialect of German from the Silesia region. Many Poles from Eastern Poland which had become part of the Soviet Union in the many border changes mandated by Potsdam agreement arrived and repopulated the city, which was once again known as Wroclaw after centuries of Germanic rule. 

Way to go guys! You sure made Germany great again!

My personal connection to the city

All this is important to me as it actually ties into my family history as my grandmother was one of those Germans expelled from the region in 1945. 

From what I know about my family from that time, they were farmers living on the outskirts of Breslau. The area around Silesia and Southern Poland is mostly farmland. I think in many ways the rural population of Breslau was traditional in lifestyle, religiously catholic (at least in my family's case) and not particularly interested in education (based on a story I heard from my grandmother that one of her friends boasted that "she had never read a book before"). They were not the most politically engaged people I think it's fair to say.

I don't know many of the in depth details about how they left the area and at what particular point of the evacuation it was but I know it happened in a hurry. I know that one day they were living there and the next, soldiers came and told them to get out. No one in my immediate family died in the fighting there and during the escape (one Great Uncle was in the army and captured by the Soviets and encountered the horrors of their POW camps, no exaggeration when I say horrors). However, their lives were uprooted and I'm pretty sure they encountered hard situations on the road to the newly created West Germany where they eventually settled and still remain in the Hamburg area to this day.

Why what happened then is a fantastic cautionary tale

The story of the fall of Breslau as a microcosm has a little bit of everything. It has victims, it has demagoguery, it has hubris, it has a madman and it acts as a warning to those who don't take their vote seriously.

To a certain extent the people of Breslau voting for the Nazis in 1932 can be compared with the disruptive votes of Brexit and Trump in the UK and USA respectively in 2016. There are a lot of parallels. There is a lack of faith in the establishment, economic paranoia after a major financial crash, nationalistic identity paranoia based on the feeling that one's country is no longer as "great" as it once was, demagogic appeals to the restoration of traditional identities with regards to gender and nation and a frustration with the political system that can be seen in play in all three votes. 

Whilst with Brexit and Trump we can feel a bit of relief that the story hasn't yet played out. Visiting Wroclaw for me made me realise just how badly things could go and I have to wonder if we can pull out of it at this point. Now I think it's fair to say that the people of Breslau voting in the German Federal election is not quite as extraordinary as Brexit (given that it was a very different kind of vote to a normal general election), although the times were similarly fraught and the appeals to the idea of voting against the establishment for a greater nation were also worryingly similar.

Of course however, we know how things ended for the many people who voted for NSDAP in the 30s and helped Hitler into power. It may sound callous to say this but what went around came around. It ultimately led to the ruin of the nation they were trying to restore, their subsequent expulsion from their homes and the destruction of their specific regional culture. They voted selfishly and overlooked the very problematic elements of the Nazi rhetoric (i.e. extreme antisemitism) and got carried away with warped nostalgia. They were won over by dubious promises of simple solutions to difficult problems and whether they voted with malicious intent or just in self interest or neither, they paid a very heavy price all the same.

Why what happened in Wroclaw then matters today

We hopefully won't have to encounter another situation as extreme as the Second World War or the partition or annexation of any lands but the current climate we live in is cause for concern. Brexit and Trump have happened as a result of the politically disengaged being mobilised by people promising the population an easy way out of their problems either by using race or nation to win them over. 

This is almost worse as that mobilisation took place and succeeded despite a strong feeling of a votes not mattering as much as they actually did. This also combined with very problematic rhetoric used against minorities and a very clear lack of detail in the feasibility of key promises to the people by the likes of the UK's Leave EU campaign or Trump's presidential campaign makes me wonder if it's already too late to stop things before they really get out of hand. 

Brexit and Trump have already done damage to some people's lives although one hopes that they can be carefully guided away from this before any much more serious harm is done and countries literally tear themselves and each other apart like in the 30s and 40s. 

Overall however, I can only reflect on this. Then as now, what you do in the ballot box matters and voting is not a frivolous decision that doesn't have real world impacts. Politics may be boring and may feature odious people who you'd rather block out from your day-to-day life but politics still affects you whether you like it or not. 

You need to pay attention to what people are saying or you may end up hurting scores of people or perhaps ultimately yourself. The German people of Breslau were ultimately punished for their lack of attention to the darker elements of Nazism and I have to wonder if they ruminated on that as they trudged through the snow as refugees in early 1945, never to return to perhaps the only place they'd known as home.   

This article is based on a Twitter thread I wrote earlier this month while in Wroclaw.