Epicenter of History.

Once it was the third largest city in Germany. It boasted an ancient university and a tradition of German scholarship that produced eight Nobel Prize winners. That was before the cataclysm of World War II. Don't look for Breslau on any of today's maps of eastern Germany. When the Great Powers redrew the borders of postwar Europe, the city and its German past disappeared into folk memory.

Breslau became Wroclaw. For the first time since the Middle Ages the Poles were back in control; the city was in "recovered territory." Any German civilians who'd survived a devastating 14-week Russian siege were expelled to find new homes in the West. In their place came Polish refugees, themselves ousted from territory grabbed by the Soviet Union hundreds of miles to the east. German street names vanished, German statues were toppled, priceless German books from the university library were destroyed. Bricks from its few remaining monuments were carried off to Warsaw for use in the capital's reconstruction.

For the people of Central Europe, such stories are dismally familiar. The region's borders have rarely proved stable. Memories are long, and each of the many ethnic groups in the rich local mix has its own conflicting version of history. Old resentments have a nasty way of resurfacing. It takes an outsider with plenty of patience to unscramble the evidence and compose something like an objective account.

That's where Oxford history professor Norman Davies can help. At a private dinner back in 1996, Wroclaw's city president suggested a radical project. The city needed a new history that might reconcile the modern place with its past. Such a book, he said, could never be written by a German or a Pole. Would Davies be interested? The result is "Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City," co-written with Davies's former student Roger Moorhouse, a study of all that made the region such a hapless muddle.

The title proclaims the theme. This is no straightforward civic history: it's an attempt to examine the idea of Central Europe through the experiences of a single city. Even for a historian of Davies's skill, that's some challenge. The very notion of Central Europe as an independent region is ...