The main explanations are three.
1. the general displacement of Breslau's Germanness—a completely understandable part of the process of adapting a foreign city to Polish needs. No wonder people of the 1950s and later concentrated on rebuilding the ruined city and building a new identity within it. The traumatic past then simply had to be left behind, masked.
2 The unheard-of theft committed by the Russians in 1945. We know that the Russians stole everything that could be exported, but about the spectacular theft of a fleet of more than three thousand ships—Odessa barges and tugboats—I simply did not know. This is a classic branch of real history, cut off by superficial popular history. Imagine this spectacular, though easily executed, theft of the entire fleet at once! It wasn't difficult—the Russians simply floated this whole cloud of ships to Stettin, then along the Baltic coast they sailed to Leningrad, and then, across Lake Ladoga, the barges and ships splashed all over great Soviet Russia, and, as I know life, many of them are still floating there today.
3 Post-war Poland did not pay much attention to all this for several reasons: there was no strong industry in our country like the inland freight shipping in Germany. There was no adequate infrastructure in our country, no know how, but there was also simply no need for it. In the 1920s, Poland solved its coal export problem by building a railroad coal trunk line from Silesia to Gdynia. And so it was after the war that shipping on the Oder River declined several times, completely changing the character of the entire river and its hitherto port metropolis, Wroclaw. For me, this situation is not only a spectacular example of how interesting secrets history hides from us. It can also be an interesting inspiration for the future. After all, today the number of private vessels on the Oder is growing dynamically, there are already three marinas in Wroclaw, which are filled with various yachts, motorboats—perhaps life will return to the river on a similar scale as before?
Such a newly-discovered Wrocław from my perspective pleases me immensely: Breslau like Berlin, Breslau like Stockholm, Breslau on the scale of the old, powerful Breslau, the archipelago of Breslau on islands, flanked on all sides by waters to which life is slowly returning, the port city of Breslau; once the largest city of the Regained Territories, tomorrow, perhaps, the Capital of Young Poland, the one voting for theEuropean Union, the alternative and orange capital of that Poland which is younger in soul, enterprising, creative, open, with a fresher approach, a witty culture with fairy-tale and dwarf roots, shrouded in the Great Mystery. Because a cool country should have several capitals, it has the historical one in Krakow, the formal one in Warsaw, the maritime one in the Tri-City, let it also have some in Wroclaw. Which one specifically? That's what would have to be figured out now.
Like any great and interesting city, Breslau remains ambiguous: its grandeur tries to balance its many negatives. The endless crooked cobblestones do not only please cyclists, cars are also hard to navigate. The perceived lack of a strategic vision for development is at odds with Wrocław's communicative and creative dynamism of the 1990s; back then, Wrocław set the tone among Polish cities, was the most well-liked, and had naturally good PR—this was lost somewhere later. Other problems? Typical of the whole of today's Poland, one big ubiquitous construction site, the empty Oder River—a clinging person would go on for a long time listing what he might not like about Wroclaw.
Also part of Wrocław's soul was Solpol, for many an iconic postmodern building designed in the 1990s by Wojciech Jarząbek and his team from Studio Ar-5—in the photograph—on the next section of Kolejków; one of Wrocław's nooks and crannies portrayed in Wrocław Kolejków (which is a must-see!).
© Wroclaw City Hall
I myself have a big problem with Wrocław's ultra-right-wing environment, with the racist Śląsk Wrocław football fans, those who hang portraits of politicians on gallows, burn an image of a Jew, and protest against Ukraine. Unfortunately, in Wroclaw this problem is bigger than elsewhere, which is a pity, because it does not fit the image of this city, it spoils it a lot.
To defeat the enemy, you must first recognize it, find out where it came from. This, fortunately, we know: Breslau was affected by a socio-historical process natural to the Recovered Territories. A resettlement element poured into the empty post-German spaces, which did not include only the Lvov elite, but also the most poorly educated part of the Polish nation. After all, the batiars also migrated. The descendants of serf peasants, illiterate rural population from the eastern borderlands migrated—they felt the least secure in this new Poland, in these social revues one felt most the lack of roots, the premonition „that the German will return”. In a foreign city, in such conditions, unfortunately, it is easiest to create numerous pathologies, the effects of which we can see today in Wroclaw's stadiums and streets....
