Following the end of World War II, Poland's borders shifted westwards: while losing eastern territory to the Soviet Union, Poland gained formerly German territories in the west. To transform the region into an integral part of Poland, an unprecedented population exchange took place. Up to five million Germans were transferred, and four million settlers from central and eastern Poland arrived in the western territories. Using Wrocław as exemplary case-study, Thum's book traces how a city can recover from an almost complete population exchange, and how an uprooted population comes to identify with, and care for, a city that is strange and foreign to them. Utilizing a rich variety of sources, Thum uses the method of ‘thick description’ in his attempt to make the cityscape ‘readable’ as a ‘cultural system’ (pp. 12–13).

The first part of the book is mainly concerned with the history of the post-war era between 1945 and the late 1950s. Thum describes the Soviet and Polish takeover of Wrocław and the gradual population exchange. The new Polish city administration was facing many difficulties such as war damage, a widespread decay of residential housing, the need to revitalize the economy, plundering, black market activities and looting. A major challenge to the reconstruction of Wrocław was posed not only by Soviet dismantling but also by Polish dismantling of, for example, bricks to be sent to Warsaw for the rebuilding of the capital. The book's second part focuses on the ‘politics of the past’ from 1945 to the late 1980s. Apart from the challenges described in Part One, the integration of the western territories was complicated by uncertainty about the future of the new Polish–German borders which would change only gradually after the 1970 and 1990 border treaties. The Polish settlers are described by Thum as a ‘society of the uprooted’ (p. 178): a society that had little in common besides a shared language and citizenship, which led to many tensions, particularly between Poles from the eastern territories and settlers from central Poland. Counteracting this sense of impermanence, the ‘invention of tradition’ served a double purpose: while it offered a legitimation for Poland's westward shift and the presence of Polish settlers, the process of ‘cultural appropriation’ provided the city's buildings with a Polish context and enabled the identification with the city that would contribute to its preservation (p. 372).

An important factor in the integration of the western territories into the Polish nation was the notion of the ‘recovered territories’, according to which Poland's westward shift was a ‘rebirth’ of the thousand-year long Polish territorial tradition dating back to the Middle Ages (pp. 202–3). The Polonization of places, streets and people (p. 244), the de-Germanization – the removal of ‘any visible evidence of a German presence’ – of inscriptions, monuments and cemeteries (p. 266), and the ‘Polonization of the cityscape’ (p. 327) played an important role in the construction of historical continuity (p. 266). This turn to Poland's great historical traditions would stabilize the country and restore people's faith in the country, which was complicated by the fact that prior to 1945, Wrocław had not been a Polish city.

Thum argues in the third and final part of his book, which looks into the post-1989 period, that while the Polonization of the cityscape and the mythicizing of history served the short-term purpose of integrating the western territories and the new settlers, the anti-Prussian attitude was also an obstacle to the long-term cultural assimilation of the western territories, something that would only change with the fall of the People's Republic of Poland and the subsequent ‘challenge to the “dark legend of Prussia”’ (p. 377). While Wrocław recovered from World War II and the population exchange after 1945, and is now ‘one of Poland's leading cultural metropolises’ (p. 381), it is also a city with a difficult relationship to the past with a ‘fragile local identity’ (p. 382).

The book's strength particularly lies with Thum's emphasis on contextualization. For example, he points out that the expulsion of Germans had already begun in 1933 with the expulsion of the Jews of Breslau. He also highlights how the city's destruction in the last months of the war was due to the German military leadership's resistance to the Red Army. Thum rightly emphasizes that the expulsions can only be understood by taking into account the context of Nazi Germany's war of extermination and conquest. Writing twentieth-century history from the perspective of ethnic cleansing and forced migrations, however, may risk the conflation and relativization of events of the Holocaust, Stalinist rule and post-war history. For example, the book was originally published in Germany in 2003 as Die fremde Stadt. Breslau 1945 (The Foreign City. Breslau 1945) (Berlin: Siedler Verlag); the English translation adds the subtitle framing the twentieth century as ‘the century of expulsions’, and the decade 1939 to 1949 is later described as ‘decade of forced migration’ (p. 54).

While the post-war years and the Cold War period are well covered, more attention could have been paid to the past two decades following the end of the People's Republic of Poland. It would have also been interesting to read more about the settlers’ perceptions of their new home, and the local press could have been utilized more for Part Two. These criticisms aside, Thum's thoroughly researched book makes a valuable contribution to an emerging field of study and sheds new light on the complex and sensitive issue of Polish–German relations, and the regional, national and cultural consequences of forced migrations over generations.