Uilleam Blacker begins his book with the image and words by the Polish poet and writer Adam Zagajewski strolling through Gliwice with his grandfather, for whom that new city is morphed into memories of his native L'viv (then Lwów). Blacker sees Zagajewski's experience of uprootedness and construction of new place-based memories as common to millions of others in the post-World War II East Central Europe. Both during the war and in its immediate aftermath large population shifts created urban communities which faced the challenge of responding to the urban places emptied by others. Tracing the development of memory culture in L'viv, Wrocław, and Kaliningrad (with some examples from other locations) is a stated objective of Blacker's study.
Uilleam Blacker conducted his research as part of the Memory at War project at the Department of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of Cambridge, which allowed him to travel to the places...
