Footnote:
Translated from the German. - This edition also issued in print: 2024. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource and publisher information; title from PDF title page (viewed on January 24, 2024)
Description:
It was where World War II began on September 1, 1939. Its wartime experience was immortalized in Gunter Grass's 'The Tin Drum'. Later it attracted worldwide attention as the site where workers' strikes led by Lech Walesa and the ensuing Solidarity movement led to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Proud Hanseatic port, heart of the Baltic Sea trade, twice a 'Free City,' present-day liberal, cosmopolitan centre: Gdansk's story between Germany and Poland is rich and fascinating. As Peter Oliver Loew colourfully shows, Gdansk, also known as Danzig, is incomparable not only because of its recent past but also in how it has so uniquely embodied the tensions of the European continent over the last millennium. Situated geographically and culturally within these tensions, the city has developed a fascinating identity amid frequent conflict and shifting national affiliations.
"Gdańsk: Portrait of a City tells the story of the city of Gdańsk, from the prehistoric origins of its Baltic surroundings on the Vistula and Motława Rivers and its entry into written history in 997 CE, through its more than seven centuries as the German-speaking city of Danzig, and on to the city's position in present-day Poland. The book explores Gdańsk's political, cultural, religious, and economic history as an important, oft-disputed Baltic port city greedily sought by surrounding powers. At times, Gdańsk has stood at the center of modern European history. It was the site of the beginning of the Second World War, as well as the cradle of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity" (Solidarność), which would play a key role in the fall of European communism. Gdańsk has seen revolts and sieges, and it has suffered nearly total annihilation more than once. Yet although subject over the centuries to local dukes, Teutonic Knights, the Polish crown, Prussia, the German Empire, the Third Reich, and the USSR, and while these powers, particularly those informed by the nationalist paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, frequently rewrote the city's history and identity in order to fit it into their enforced narratives, the city still developed its own distinct identity that eschews such oversimplifications. Gdańsk: Portrait of a City examines such tendentious interpretations as it traces the development of a distinct municipal identity created through the city's unique geography, population, and history"--