Current Affairs Wroclaw: a city with roots in Bohemia
This week the Czech translation of one of the most fascinating and widely discussed books on the history of Central Europe to be published in recent years went onto the bookshelves. The book "Microcosm", by the English historians Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, looks at the history of Wroclaw, the capital of the southern Polish province of Silesia and one of the great cities of Central Europe. Wroclaw, known in German as Breslau and in Czech as Vratislav, is just a few dozen kilometres to the north of the Czech border and has had a long, often troubled and sometimes traumatic history, moving between the influence of different powers, dynasties and languages. That the Czech translation of the book has aroused a great deal of interest comes as no surprise. As the book's title suggests, Wroclaw's history is in some ways a microcosm of the history of the region, and its links with the Czechs are far deeper than mere geographical proximity. At the book's launch Norman Davies told David Vaughan more about this link.
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