LVIV - Wroclaw, Cities in Parallel?: Myth, Memory and Migration, C. 1890-Present

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In the 20th century, both Lviv and Wroclaw went through cataclysmic changes. Assertively Polish pre-war Lwow became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn ‘recovered’ by communist Poland as Wroclaw. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwow’s demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wroclaw and most Jews perished or went into exile. Migration entailed new myths and the construction of official memory projects. The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by focusing on lived experiences and ‘bottom-up’ historical processes. Their sources and methods are those of micro-history and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture and media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of the two sides of the same coin, loss on the one hand, gain on the other, in two cities that are complementary.