The Imagined City: The Great Flood of 1997 as a Foundation Story of Wrocław

Introduction: “The Recovered Territories” as a Narrative Construct

In my study, I analyse Wrocław—one of the most important Polish cities in “the Recovered Territories” ¹ —the land granted to Poland after the Second World War as a result of the Potsdam Conference. The Polish state’s occupation of Germany’s eastern borderlands resulted from international agreements. Situated in these “Recovered Territories,” the city experienced a complete change of population in a very short time (1945–1948); from the German city of Breslau, it was to become the fully Polish city of Wrocław. However, these lands were foreign to Poles in terms of identity and local social perception. This issue involved various problems. For people who had experienced the horrors of war, the landscape of pre-war eastern Germany was downright hostile. It was also incomprehensible: the incorporated cities and villages were wealthier and more civilisationally developed than those from which their post-war inhabitants (the vast majority of whom were uneducated and from poor rural backgrounds) came. The Poles arriving in the Regained Territories were also deprived of a common platform of cultural references, experiences and memory, both with one another and with the land they had come to live on. Added to this was the psychological burden of taking over the property of Germans who had been forced to leave their land, goods, and homes behind. The state of alienation was exacerbated by the uncertain political context. Living in these areas was associated with lack of stability and security. It was verbalised in the slogan “the Germans will be back,” which was repeated in conversations.

One consequence of this rapid and complete transformation is that Wrocław, from its birth in the 1940s to today, has been deeply immersed in narratives ² supporting its Polish identity. In this article, I look at several such narrative identity frames—elements of local politics of memory ³ —developed by the city’s elite as anchor points to help the next generation of Wrocław’s citizens situate themselves in this “reclaimed” space. I compare these narratives with the way of thinking about the city which is visible in the discourses of the above-mentioned residents. Thus, the main thread of my analysis is the foundation story of the 1997 flood (the Great Water) constructed in contemporary urban elite discourse. However, the case study serves as a contribution to my broader reflections on this topic. This article is a voice in the discussion about the situation of the city, which, deprived of the possibility to draw on its foreign cultural heritage years ago, still struggles with the problem of defining its identity. ⁴

The content of the narrative of “the Recovered Territories” is reflected in the category of base (foundation) story proposed by Trutz von Troth, who states that:

the base story (Basiserzählung) [. . .] is as much as the construction of the history of a particular society and a particular culture, containing the dominant legitimacy of the construction of the past, which makes it an unavoidable point of reference in all conflicts over constructions of the past. ⁵

The following key components can represent the main elements of this narrative construct: “the initial difference was nationality (Germany/Poland), later expanded to include such concepts as Germanic/Slavic, invaders/liberators, National Socialism/Communism, and capitalism/socialism.” ⁶ Over the years, arguments justifying the (pre)Polishness of “the Recovered Territories” have been developed within the interdisciplinary “science of legitimation” ⁷ and “cultural crusade.” ⁸ This propaganda narrative frame shaped the reality of the people of these lands until the late 1980s.

The analytical material consists of fragments of Wrocław discourses concerning the flood of July 1997. The first group consists of excerpts from public discourse—fragments of scholarly articles, newspaper articles, and studies of the events of 1997. The second group comprises statements of the inhabitants of Wrocław. Here I draw primarily on the empirical material I collected: thirty in-depth narrative interviews conducted between May 2018 and January 2020. ⁹ My interviewees met two selection criteria. Firstly, they were born in Wrocław or had lived here for at least ten years; secondly, they were not professionally or as a hobby involved in the history of the city or urban issues in the broad sense. I wanted to reach people who primarily receive content from public discourse. In conducting this research, I wanted to find out how foundation narratives constructed and disseminated by urban elites are embedded (or ignored) by ordinary residents in their private narratives about the city. This was all the more important to me because the qualitative research conducted so far on the construction of the urban past or the relationship with Wrocław’s cultural heritage involves mostly leaders of memory (as Fran Tonkiss writes, urban explorers ¹⁰ ): local government officials, architects, historians, journalists, teachers, or activists, and not ordinary citizens of the city. ¹¹

Wrocław as a Never-Ending Story

In the difficult beginnings of post-war Wrocław, the most significant and most widely promoted Wrocław foundation story was the Piast narrative. ¹² It filled city discourses tightly—it was present, among other things, in historical studies, in street names, and in the decisions of the authorities to reconstruct, in the first place, Gothic-style churches in the destroyed city. ¹³ As Elżbieta Kaszuba notes, “As a result of this intensive and one-sided education, the phrase ‘the Wrocław of the Piasts’ circulated for several decades as nearly a proper name.” ¹⁴ All these activities made the Piast motifs permeate the imagination of the people coming to the city. They can be found, for example, in the works submitted to the contest “What is the city of Wrocław to you?” organized by the Polish Sociological Association in the second half of the 1960s. A sample excerpt from one of the submitted works holds that “First, there was an ardent search for all traces of Wrocław’s Polishness—the Piast eagles, the historic churches with their old chapels, sarcophagi, tombstones, portals, tympanums. It was to make sure we walk our streets and alleys.” ¹⁵

After 1989, the story of “the Wrocław of the Piasts” was labelled by academics as a product of Communist propaganda, not accepted by the citizens: “the whole mythology of ‘recovery’ failed to gain widespread public acceptance and was rejected as a legacy of the Communist regime as a result of the changes symbolised by 1989.” ¹⁶ However, the Piast motifs, primarily the perception of the city’s past through the prism of events, figures, and architecture of the (Polish) Middle Ages, are still subtly accentuated in the constructions of Wrocław’s past. As an example, let us take the words of the Mayor of Wrocław (2002–2018), Rafał Dutkiewicz, who claimed that:

Only by looking at the city’s centuries-long history does it show its great wealth and enormous potential. A city of meetings, a city of tolerance, in short, an open city. [. . .] we have prepared an educational path on Bishop Nankier Square, which presents the most important events in the history of the city in a nutshell. It is not uncommon to see groups with guides who tell visitors about our history, beginning in the Middle Ages, during a walking tour. It is a good introduction to exploring the city further. ¹⁷

References to medieval heritage as a justification for the Polishness of the city can also be found in the empirical material I collected. A good case in point is what one of my interviewees notes:

It means, what irritates me as a Wrocław resident, you know, is when Germans come here and call it Breslau. Or they come and speak German. [. . .] This is not Breslau; this is Wrocław. [. . .] Besides, this city used to be Polish, a thousand years ago, right? (13/M/70) ¹⁸

The second major post-war narrative that defines the city’s identity is that of the pioneers. Pioneers are people who came to the city in the immediate post-war period and who made an effort to build Wrocław on the remains of Breslau. The pioneers in this story are brave, relentless, and dedicated to saving a dying and, importantly, nameless city. In addition, an important motif is openness and mutual kindness, thanks to which all post-war newcomers find a place for themselves in Wrocław.

The pioneer story, in contrast to the Piast narrative, is clearly emphasised in the contemporary discourse of the elite, for example, by popularising the image of Wrocław as an open city, friendly to all comers, as one official of Wrocław City Hall put it:

Wrocław is known as the friendliest city in Poland. We are friendly because actually everyone comes from a different part of Poland. [. . .] We are called the United States of Poland because we are like the USA; we are not from here. ¹⁹

The slogans “Wrocław—the meeting place” or “Wroclove” promoted by local authorities also have pioneering connotations. For years, there have also been books presenting the memoirs and diaries of the pioneers, detailing the hardships of life in post-war Wrocław as well as their unconditional love for the emerging Polish city. ²⁰

The political and economic changes that began in 1989 transformed the narrative image of Wrocław. As a result, new narrations have emerged in elite discourse. The most important of these is the image of Wrocław as a European metropolis whose inhabitants are aware of the richness and diversity of its cultural heritage. This is evidenced by the following words:

the plethora of publications contributes to a new picture of the city’s history [. . .] the multicoloured European picture of the past was appealing to scholars not only because it was oppositional in its nature but, above all, because it was incomparably more interesting than the one-dimensional nationalist and Communist vision of history. ²¹

This identity theme of Wrocław emerges primarily through historical studies, ²² which emphasise the attachment of the citizens of Wrocław to the cultural heritage of their city, the illustration of which is found in the following quote:

The political turn of 1989 in Wrocław was marked by a new approach to urban space and its history. [. . .] In the following years, there was a growing interest in Wrocław’s urban landscape, architecture, and art objects, which the citizens tried to commemorate and include in their own historical consciousness. ²³

Since the 1990s, Wrocław’s public discourse has been filled with such assertions about the acceptance of the city’s German and Czech past by its citizens. However, empirical research conducted in Wrocław shows that this is mainly wishful thinking, focused primarily on creating a narrative layer of the city and ignoring the actual perception of Wrocław’s urban heritage. The gap between the inhabitants and the urban matter or, even more, the namelessness of the latter, has been noted, among others, by Katarzyna Kajdanek, who analysed the results of surveys concerning the identity of the inhabitants of Wrocław (as well as those of Gdańsk and Gliwice). She states:

The image of Wrocław emerging from the list brings to mind a glossy brochure, in which, from the first page, we see an aesthetic city, inhabited by young, open-minded people, vibrant with the energy of investments and new ideas. Historic buildings are part of this image but not subjected to in-depth reflection, accepted with a kind of unawareness of where they came from and what they mean. ²⁴

The weakness of this “European” narrative may be evidenced by the appearance in public discourse in the early twenty-first century of another foundation story supporting (or perhaps confirming) the relationship of the citizens of Wrocław to their city. This is the story of the Great Flood—the flood that hit the city in the summer of 1997. This narrative is built on the assumption that only when confronted with the cataclysm threatening the city did the citizens of Wrocław become conscious citizens, feeling a bond with themselves and with their city under threat of flooding, including with its “pre-Polish” heritage.

The Great Water as a Foundation Story

The flood in question came in July 1997 and affected a large part of central and eastern Europe—eastern Germany, eastern Austria, north western Slovakia, the northern Czech Republic and southern and western Poland. It was caused by unusually high rainfall. During the whole of July 1997, the rainfall in the above-mentioned areas exceeded the monthly average by three or four times; in the mountains, it was even five times higher. The flood caused enormous damage. In Poland alone, material losses were estimated at PLN 12 billion, and over 40,000 people lost their possessions. Nearly, 700,000 households were disturbed and water damaged or destroyed 2 per cent of the country’s land area. ²⁵

In Wrocław, the flooding lasted from 12 to 15 July 1997. ²⁶ The water flooding the city came from the rivers flowing through it—both from the most powerful one, the Oder River, and from the smaller rivers Oława, Widawa, and Ślęza. At its peak, the flood wave reached two metres, and 26 per cent of the city was under water, mostly the city centre (mainly the nineteenth-century buildings located in the Przedmieście Oławskie district), located directly on the Oder River (and its tributaries), and in some northern districts. Although the flood did not directly threaten all of Wrocław’s residents, the flood waters brought destruction that made life difficult for the entire city:

The flooded areas of the Wrocław aquifer, the Water Production Plant, the sewage treatment plant, the water treatment plant, the combined heat and power plant, power substations, the city archive, fuel stations, electrical and gas installations [. . .]. Petrol and crude oil began to flow to the surface; gas also came out of unsealed installations. [. . .] Soon, many residents were deprived of water, telephones, gas, and electricity. ²⁷

The situation was aggravated by the fact that Wrocław was unprepared for this cataclysm; all institutional actions were taken chaotically and with delay. What is essential, however, is that the citizens of Wrocław responded to the authorities’ appeal to participate in strengthening floodbanks. Volunteers worked several hours per day, filling sandbags and erecting barriers to protect the city from water overflowing from rivers and city sewers. The efforts of cooperating strangers protected the city centre and the essential elements of infrastructure and public institutions (including the Main Railway Station, the Ossolineum Library, Ostrów Tumski, and the city zoo). On one hand, this spontaneous, grassroots community could seem to be something of a surprise in the post-socialist reality of the time, in which people tended to function in their private circles and treated the space of public life with distrust. However, looking from the perspective of the post-war experience of the citizens of Wrocław (undoubtedly shaping the perception of reality of those who stood up to defend the city against water in 1997), two narratives can be identified that may have influenced the actions taken (no in-depth research is yet available on this topic). The first strand is the aforementioned pioneer narrative, which was also largely based on self-organisation and dedicated action on behalf of the city. As one of the pioneers recalled years later:

Today we do not remember much about that past of our city, about the difficult reality, about the times of testing the organisational abilities of those who undertook the work of history. [. . .] To put it briefly, it was necessary to build Polish life here from scratch, and, in particular, to organise the links of the new authorities in the city, to protect what could still be saved, to secure and defend what could be saved, to take care of bread and food, shelter, transport, communications, health services, education, to secure cultural assets, to introduce order, to ensure security . . . ²⁸

Another narrative identity thread that may have influenced the reaction of the inhabitants of Wrocław to the threat of flooding was the fight against the Communist authorities, undertaken on a large scale in Wrocław in the 1980s. Wrocław’s anti-Communist underground was made up of people whose “activity, creativity and tenacity meant that ‘the Fortress of Wrocław,’ as the capital of Lower Silesia was called in the 1980s, belonged to the [Polish] vanguard of the fight against Communism.” ²⁹ The patterns of opposition activity developed at the time proved that “people can organise themselves without the help of the state and that such an organisation works better than state services” ³⁰ and that it is possible to fight “despite repression, fatigue and an understandable longing for normality.” ³¹

The events described above and the resulting actions of the Wrocław people became the basis for a new foundation story—the story of the Great Water—in which the flood of 1997 connected the citizens of Wrocław to their city with a strong bond incomparable to anything in the city’s previous (post-war) history. The making of the Great Water story began a few months after the events in question, in the fall of 1997, when the first studies were published. They not only visualised the cataclysm itself and the scale of destruction in Wrocław and Lower Silesia but also explained the social significance of these events. In this context, it is necessary to mention works authored by Wrocław scholars: a sociological study by Professor Wojciech Sitek ³² and a calendar of events prepared by Wrocław historians led by Professor Wojciech Wrzesiński. ³³ Furthermore, while Sitek’s work aimed, above all, to examine the mechanisms of spontaneous community formation in the face of sudden danger, the work prepared by the historians, apart from reporting on the consecutive days of coping with the flood, contained threads that formed the basis of a new urban foundation story (described by Wrzesiński as “the Wrocław legend”). The flood became “a test of attachment to the castle town, ³⁴ to Wrocław,” and “the bond of the Polish community in Wrocław with its city is as strong as it has never been.” ³⁵

The direction of thinking about the July flood, as indicated by Wrzesiński, was present in studies published in subsequent years. The names given to this natural disaster—“the Millennium Flood,” ³⁶ “the flood of all time” ³⁷ and “the Great Water” ³⁸ —define the importance of this natural disaster. ³⁹ In the literature on the subject, the flood of 1997 is also created as an unprecedented event in Polish history in the social context. It is an exceptional event in an exceptional city, one of “the largest common movements in the history of post-war Poland. [. . .] As most of those involved believe, such social mobilisation would be impossible in any other place in Poland.” ⁴⁰

The story of the Great Water consists of several coexisting threads. The first is the aforementioned integration of Wrocław citizens in the face of a natural disaster: “during the flood, the inhabitants, for the first time in history, felt mutual solidarity and trust, allowing them to look at Wrocław as ‘their’ city” ⁴¹ ; “an additional strengthening of the community bond took place during the Millennium Flood, which also proved the indispensability of erasing the white [blind] spots in collective memory.” ⁴²

The second theme is that residents turned to the city’s pre-war heritage. By standing up for the monuments threatened by the overflowing Oder River, the citizens of Wrocław were freeing themselves from the propaganda vision of the “Recovered” Piast city that had been in place for decades, breaking the aversion to the German heritage that had been instilled in them and assuming responsibility for it. The following words prove it:

the erasure of the city’s German history from memory was a result of the propaganda of the People’s Republic of Poland, which created images of German culture as antithetically alien or even mortally hostile. As a result, the inhabitants erased the city’s German heritage from their collective memory for many years. However, the situation began to change completely after the flood, when the inhabitants of Wrocław began to form an integrated community and when the descendants of the rural settlers felt themselves to be true citizens of the city. ⁴³

One more statement is worth quoting here:

The culmination of building the relationship of the inhabitants with their small homeland and the material substrate of the centuries-old heritage of the city took place in 1997. [. . .] the flood opened up new memory threads and, in defending the city, the residents also defended its past. ⁴⁴

The third important aspect of the constructed narrative image of the flood is the reference to the pioneer story. The state of emergency caused by the flood and the post-flood destruction became an after-image of the battle for the city in 1945. The following excerpt can confirm this:

During the flood, the city was destroyed. Rebuilt, however, it will be a different city. The Wrocław community, battered both physically and psychologically, nevertheless showed its attachment to “the closer motherland,” to the city on the Oder River, and confirmed its readiness to make far-reaching sacrifices in its defence. ⁴⁵

Just as in the depictions of the pioneering beginnings of the post-war city, the description of the events of 1997 emphasises dedicated work for the benefit of Wrocław:

the existence of a great emotional bond of the inhabitants with the city and their desire to protect its cultural values was proved by the great flood in July 1997. [. . .] Just as in 1948, so at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we can speak of another phenomenon related to the behaviour of the inhabitants of Wrocław. ⁴⁶

The pioneer narrative is also referred to in the description of the actions of the citizens of Wrocław, who, in this exceptionally difficult time, demonstrated self-sacrificing work, courage, and efficiency, which can be concluded from the following words: “As in wartime conditions, character traits such as decisiveness and readiness to make sacrifices became very important—everyday attributes that are often unnecessary, because institutions provide the average worker and citizen with a life of relative comfort.” ⁴⁷ “During the Great Water [. . .], the citizens of Wrocław were forced to act heroically. [. . .] The danger that was approaching Wrocław mobilised thousands of people to altruistic efforts.” ⁴⁸

Another interesting, though incidental, motif of the story is the treatment of the 1997 flood as the beginning of an understanding between pre-war and contemporary residents of the city. In other words, the dedicated efforts of the citizens of Wrocław to save the heritage of Breslau from the floodwaters make them accepted by the pre-war Breslau people as their rightful heirs. The following fragment shows this: “Echoes of the struggle with the Great Water also reached the pre-war inhabitants of Wrocław. From across the western border, one could hear voices finally sanctioning the moral right of the Polish inhabitants to the city they so devotedly defended.” ⁴⁹

The sense of building the “Wrocław legend” based on the events of July 1997 is supported by quantitative sociological research conducted in the twenty-first century, which confirms that the inhabitants of Wrocław point to the flood in question as one of the most important events in the city’s past. ⁵⁰ However, it is unclear what significance the respondents feel this flooding has for themselves and their perceptions of the city. In other words, a question arises whether the story of the Great Water presented above, which so strongly emphasises a change in the inhabitants’ attitudes towards one another and towards the city’s pre-war heritage, reflects the way the citizens of Wrocław think about these events and their long-term social and cultural consequences. Therefore, in the following part of this study, I will present a contemporary discursive picture of the 1997 flood that emerges from the narrative interviews I collected. I treat the following analyses as a contribution to the recognition of the complex problem of the relationship between the identity discourse of the elite and its perception in the discourses of the ordinary inhabitants of a city with a difficult history.

Flood in the Colloquial Discourse of the Inhabitants of Wrocław

An essential feature of the empirical material collected is that none of my thirty interviewees suffered during the events in question. In other words, the flood directly threatened neither their lives nor the lives of their families; they did not lose possessions and they were not forced to evacuate. This makes their story of the flood a story devoid of the negative emotions that come from recalling their own difficult experiences. Perhaps for that reason we have a more common, socially shared story about the flood.

During the interviews, I asked all my interviewees three questions (with a graded level of detail) linked to the elite-promoted image of the flood: “Do you remember the flood?”; “Has the flood changed the attitude of the people of Wrocław towards the city?”; “Has the flood changed the attitude of the people of Wrocław towards the German heritage of the city?” My interviewees answered the first of the questions most fully (and most willingly), which may already be the first sign that the story promoted in public discourse about the long-term social consequences of the flood has not taken root in the colloquial discourses of Wrocław residents.

In my interviewees’ perceptions, the flood story emerging from the collected empirical material is constructed from the perspective of their own unique experiences. The repeated expression “I remember that . . .” that begins the flood threads is significant in this context. However, following the research findings on the functioning of stories in social circulation, the narrative structure is shared by most collected reminiscences about the flood. I will present its most relevant themes below.

First and foremost, in the memories of my interviewees, the 1997 flood was an experience that made daily life difficult. A symptom of this was the perception of overflowing water as preventing free movement: reaching the city (after returning from vacations shortened by the flood), setting off to work in the morning or simply moving freely around the urban space: ⁵¹

When the flood started, I was in Warsaw. [. . .] I turn on the TV and I see [Traugutta Street] being flooded. So the first thing I did, my first reaction was to grab, grab my phone and call the airport if there were any because I wanted to get back as soon as possible if any flights were there. In the end, I came back by train. It lasted nine hours. And I remember my reaction like this, my parents came out to pick me up and they had to leave on foot because it was impossible to get to the station by car. (15/F/75)

I remember that I didn’t go to work. [. . .] I remember that I couldn’t get to work because to cross the bridge it was flooded. [. . .] Well, it was hard to get there because you could only get by car up to a certain point and you couldn’t go any further because the basins in the city were already flooded. So everybody walked for a while, for a while, it was there, I don’t know, maybe a week around Wrocław on foot. [. . .] Well, the traffic stopped completely, both pedestrians and cars, streetcars and so on. (18/F/70)

Another important “everyday” memory associated with flooding is, paradoxically, the lack of water. Flooding of water-bearing areas and water production and treatment plants brought about a deficit of drinking water and the necessity of using barrel trucks provided by municipal services. Then there is the topic of uncollected rubbish that began to decompose in the heat. This situation introduced into the story of the flood not only the theme of the need to ration water but also the theme of the omnipresent fetor and the discomfort associated with it:

Well it was hard. My husband’s brother wanted something here [. . .]. I say come on, what am I going to do with you, where are we going to wash [laughs], what are we going to eat [laughs] and drink. Well, the water when the [flood] started, all the stores had water completely swept away. There was nothing. You have washed yourself, don’t pour it away, God forbid you should flush it down the drain, right? Well, you have to have water, without water you can’t move. (21/F/58)

And the first thing was this horrible stench, these bags of rubbish, to everyone, it all went away, they didn’t remove anything at all, the services didn’t work, there was no water. And we went in for a while and tried not to pee or anything [laughter] so that we wouldn’t, wouldn’t make it worse here. And it smelled everywhere and we went in and bought tickets, I think, at a kiosk. I also remember that this man is unclean and that simply well it’s not his fault, not that he’s a dirty person, but simply everyone stank, everything stank so, so it hit our nose, so to speak. And it was awful. (19/F/51)

The above-mentioned difficulties in moving around the city were connected with another important theme, showing the grassroots practices of the inhabitants of Wrocław in their preparation for the impending flood. It was leaving passenger cars on elevated ground in the city. Wrocław inhabitants assumed that this could protect their vehicles from flooding:

And there was very much solidarity among the residents. I took some of my things upstairs to my neighbour, I took the car to my friend in Krzyki, because I said it won’t flood there. Here, near the tower, whoever could, put his car there, because it’s the highest point in the district. [. . .] So we sat with our neighbours by the battery-operated radio and drank. Well, because what else? It was such a period, just like probably every situation, or like during wars, people joined together. Then there was this vision of some kind of danger, and misfortune, especially all the part-timers, so we were afraid that something would happen. (8/F/61)

I remember when we were standing downstairs, some guy had a little TV in his car and he turned it on and we watched the whole report right there. The whole Partisans’ Hill was all cars, car by car, because everyone ran away and put their cars there. (21/F/58)

The above statements about “cars on the hill” also contain another motif relevant to the remembered portrayal of the flood—neighbourhood support in situations of danger and uncertainty. Being together—spending time with neighbours and talking in stairwells and backyards—was, in addition to a hindered existence, the second central theme of the flood story emerging from the collected empirical material:

And later I remember I also drove some family in my car. They, I don’t know what it was, but they also wanted to get into town on bicycles and with children so small. And I remember I put all the seats in the car, I put in these two bicycles, I took these children and this mother, and this father, and I say you can get there on your bike, and I’ll take my wife and kids here. That was the solidarity. What I said earlier but also people were selflessly helping each other. It wasn’t a problem to stop, I remember a moving car to give a lift somewhere because there was no communication here either. (8/F/61)

There was no water, of course, from water intakes from these municipal ones. I had a well in the garden so I helped my neighbours, we connected the hydrophore, I mean I had this hydrophore, I used this well to water the garden and so on so when there was a flood, we pulled all the neighbours’ water through the fence, we connected his outside tap to mine and we also had water in the home network. Somehow people helped each other in this flood. (25/M/54)

The third theme, closely related to the aforementioned theme of offering help and, at the same time, closest to the story of the Great Water created in public discourse, encompasses the memories of working on floodbanks, primarily filling and placing sandbags in vulnerable areas:

When it started, we were able to organise ourselves very well. Here I made it only to the nearest bridge, so about, “and I’ll see what’s going on.” So I was immediately enlisted to help because the masonry fives were working. Because that’s how one man would load a bag, two women would hold it for him and two women would pull the other bag back at the same time. We also knew how to organise ourselves back then. Nobody imposed anything, only that it was known that someone had to bring sand and the rest of the people knew what to do by themselves. (24/F/58)

I remember solidarity, right? Although we weren’t flooded, I remember that the men, yes, the neighbours went there to place sandbags, the ladies went there to make sandwiches. I remember this solidarity that you rarely, rarely see and meet, but somewhere like that we all felt threatened and we somehow tried to support each other, help each other, and it was so cool, to be honest, because we don’t experience that every day. (6/F/75)

What differentiates most of the “sandbagging” memories I have collected from images in the propagated story of the Great Water is the point of view of these activities. My interviewees focus on descriptions of physical exertion, fighting fatigue, sacrificing personal time, and emphasising cooperation among strangers. In most cases (except one, which I will discuss below), there are no references in the analysed material to the long-term, macro-sociological consequences of the flood—that is, the lasting transformation of the attitudes of the people of Wrocław towards themselves and towards the non-Polish urban heritage. It is also worth mentioning that the descriptions of levee activities are present in the statements of people who were threatened with the flooding of their own house or flat when the levee broke.

The story emerging from the material collected also has a universal dimension. The interviewees focus on means of coping with a difficult life situation, frustration, and a state of uncertainty. Such a story could take place in any other place threatened by a natural disaster. However, the question remains open to what extent this support for one another in the face of the flood, as emphasised by the respondents, results from a Polish auto-stereotype. In this stereotype, the solidarity that characterises the actions of Poles in a situation of danger is an essential element. For example, Krzysztof Kiciński, in a publication discussing the social contexts of the 1977–1978 floods in Poland, quotes the following words from a flood victim:

If there is a calamity, people like one another; poverty and fear can reconcile. It is such an instinct. In emergencies, such as war or flood, people are better. Yes, they are not very good but when there is poverty, it is different. ⁵²

This view of the flood is also directly expressed by my interviewees:

Anyway, I guess Poles are like that, when they need to mobilise, they mobilise and they will do anything. Well like even this Great Orchestra ⁵³ or those others. Well how is it you need something to help even though they don’t have it, they will help, and it was the same here. (21/F/58)

One thing I will say is that in such difficult situations, Poles are really that organised. That’s when it’s irrelevant whether I like you or this one, there’s a need for help, well there are exceptions, but it’s really, for so many people that I was with in those hard days. (12/F/60)

What should be highlighted is that my interviewees could not point to any long-lasting social consequences for the city and its inhabitants that would result from the 1997 flood. Although the theme of community integration and solidarity in the face of flooding is commonly present in the material collected, an equally important aspect is my interviewees’ emphasis on the fact that this community ended its existence with the normalisation of the situation after the flood:

Have [residents] changed [their attitudes] towards Wrocław? No, I think not. They were able to test themselves then just that they were together, yes, that they were a group, that they could work together. Well, because in everyday life we are not that open. So I think we are not so very open and neighbours with each other are not so comradely. (16/F/77)

Such things pass very quickly, and as far as our children are concerned, so to speak, twenty or twenty-five-year-olds or people who didn’t experience it at all because they were too young, well, they have no idea about it at all. (18/F/70)

Among the thirty interviews analysed, only one makes a direct reference to the foundation story of the Great Water present in public discourse, most notably its “pioneering” aspect of acting on behalf of a city that one loves and that is under threat:

But of course I remember the flood. I’ve been harping on those levees myself [says through light laughter]. Well, I can’t imagine it any other way. [B: Why?] Well, this is my city. The most beautiful places I like to wander were threatened. Well, how do you figure that? Most simply, I defended, I didn’t want the water to take away what I love. (11/M/64)

To conclude the discussion of the image of the 1997 flood that emerges from the analysed colloquial discourse, I would like to present the statements of the citizens of Wrocław who were not in Wrocław at the time in question. Instead, they spent their time on a holiday trip, from which they returned after the situation had become normal:

At that time I was in France, I left when no one was talking about the flood, I came back when it was already over and I only saw the mess that was left afterwards in person, and the flood, well, from stories, from TV. (16/F/77)

I don’t remember the flood because I wasn’t there, also I can’t remember because I left. But not that I escaped from a sinking ship. I left before it happened, and I was in the Greater Philadelphia area. So I only know the flood from my parents’ description and from the video. When I arrived, there was no more water. Just those three weeks, I think it was 12 July, sometime July beginning, maybe the first half. I was carefree sailing in the Lake District so I missed it 100 percent. (22/M/82)

Those who did not personally experience the flood emphasise that they were not indifferent to the flood in Wrocław. They learned about it from family members or reached for information in the media. Still, their answers to the flood question are brief, distanced, and general. Importantly, my interviewees do not attempt to obscure the lack of their own “flood” experiences with images of flooding perpetuated in public discourse. This is a clue to the strength of the impact (viability) of the Great Water foundation story propagated in public discourse. It is not recalled either in any form by people who have not directly encountered the events in question.

Concluding Remarks

The leading thread of my considerations was the analysis of one of the most recent Wrocław foundation stories (about the Great Water) and the parallel forming memory of the flood of the city’s ordinary inhabitants. One point of contact between the two presented narrative images of the 1997 flood is the image of the citizens of Wrocław working together and persistently on the floodbanks. However, this spontaneously formed urban community is viewed differently in the elite and resident viewpoints I have sketched. From the perspective of public discourse, this community continues to this day. For my interviewees, it ended with the clean-up of the flood damage and a return to predictable everyday life. The other threads of flood memory are already conducted in both discourses in parallel, however, with no chance of meeting.

On one hand, what is developed in an exalted vision of scholars and politicians combining the fight against water flooding the city with the acceptance by the citizens of Wrocław of responsibility for the historical and still troublesome (dissonant) heritage of their city. On the other hand, at the level of private discourses, the memory of the mundane but acute impediments of daily life, neighbourhood support, and post-flood waste is maintained. For this reason, it can be assumed that the foundation story of the Great Water in public discourse did not penetrate the memory of the flood of Wrocław citizens, who still perceive the events of 1997 on the level of individual experience (though represented in a repetitive fashion).

The need to translate the experience of the 1997 flood into an uplifting story about the identity of the people of Wrocław is also underscored by the fact that the Wrocław story of the Great Water is a strictly local phenomenon. In 1997, flooding affected many other Polish cities, for example, Opole, which, like Wrocław, is located in the Oder basin and whose fabric, like Wrocław’s, is largely shaped by its “pre-Polish” heritage. The difference between the two cities is that Opole did not suffer as much during the Second World War and, later, it maintained at least some generational continuity. Perhaps this is why scholars studying the Opole flood have focused on the social and cultural contexts of the natural disaster without attempting to make it an identity stimulus (finally) triggering a bond between residents and the city. ⁵⁴

Although (most probably) the story of the Great Water has not become part of the colloquial memory of the flood, it has become deeply embedded in scholarly discourse, in the descriptions of the residents’ relationships with the city. Scholars dealing with the past and identity of Wrocław cite the example of the changes that occurred in the way the citizens of Wrocław think about the city thanks to the flood of 1997 as evidence of the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the city at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This way of looking at the events of 1997 is reiterated by experts writing about Wrocław—by specialists in architecture:

For many decades following the war, the non-Polish heritage of the city was disregarded. The shift of perception started by the architects in the 1980s was strongly reinforced by the Great Flood of 1997. Forced to fight with the forces of nature for their city, its inhabitants finally developed a strong emotional bond with Wrocław. ⁵⁵

or urban historiography:

A collective experience that united the citizens of Wrocław, like no other, was the flood of summer 1997. [. . .] This experience evoked in the inhabitants of Wrocław a strong sense of solidarity and mutual trust. [. . .] However, the impact of this community experience was even deeper. [. . .] So they reached deep into the city’s pre-war history and found more than anti-Polish Prussianism in old Breslau. ⁵⁶

Of course, the social construction of the past, including that of a city, is always a choice based on the needs and demands of the present. Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, for example, write:

The creation of historical memory is rarely a simple attempt to formulate a ‘truthful’ reconstruction of the past; it is usually about creating a specific vision of it for instrumental reasons. In other words, the purposive use of selective remembering and forgetting shapes a group’s historical memory. ⁵⁷

In the case of Wrocław, however, we face also a different problem. Contemporary sociological analyses show that there is often no coherence or dialogue between the images of Wrocław’s (past) proposed and promoted by the elites and the images of the city constructed by its inhabitants. Igor Pietraszewski and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, analysing the actions of mnemonic actors participating in the construction of the space of local historical memory in Wrocław, ⁵⁸ also note that:

Having been a feature of the city development strategies for well over a decade, Wrocław’s new memory narratives are seeping into the residents’ consciousness, but the process is not as fast as the city’s authorities would like it to be. In their political calculation (political efficacy and cultural significance), Wrocław’s authorities in fact failed to appreciate correctly two fundamental factors in the field of memory politics: the cultural and instrumental-political. ⁵⁹

The gap between the vision of the city proposed by the authorities and its perception by the inhabitants was also noticed by Kamilla Dolińska and Julita Makaro (who analysed the myth of multicultural Wrocław), who say that “it seems that the local elites sometimes overestimate the competences, possibilities and willingness of Wrocław residents concerning the reception of various identity projects.” ⁶⁰ Similar conclusions are also reached by social leaders who took part in focus interviews conducted by Katarzyna Kajdanek and Tomasz Nawrocki. Based on those interviews, Kajdanek and Nawrocki stress:

The invisibility of this [German] heritage for ordinary city dwellers is, according to experts, related both to the low cultural competence of the inhabitants and the passivity of the authorities, who do not undertake the educational tasks but only the promotional ones. They do not educate the inhabitants as regards the ability to read the complex cultural heritage of their city but in the spirit of “an event,” they sell simplified, easily understandable, Disneyfied elements of the past [. . .]. ⁶¹

However, I would like to end my reflections and analyses on the difficulties of building a bond with a city with a broken structure of long duration on an optimistic note—with a description of the “grassroots” activities of the inhabitants to protect and disseminate knowledge about what is left of Breslau in the public space of Wrocław. An example of such activity is the project “Spod tynku patrzy Breslau” [“Breslau looks from behind the plaster”], in which urban activists, with the support of Wrocław City Hall, ⁶² collect and place on an interactive map of the city information about all material remains of Breslau: these are graphic signs (e.g., signs or epigraphs) as well as border stones or German tombstones found in the public space of the city. ⁶³ By spreading knowledge of the project among Internet users, the map is constantly being enriched with new information and photographs uploaded by local residents. What is more, the project has led to the awareness among Wrocław inhabitants that the graphic traces of Breslau are becoming (albeit slowly) an asset to be cared for rather than covered up or covered over with layers of paint. Actions such as the initiative described above mean that there is a good chance that, in the future, Wrocław will fully implement the vision of a Central European city “after the transition” presented by Uilleam Blacker in the following manner:

There is a reason, then, for anxiety, but there are also grounds for hope. Over the last four decades or so, writers and intellectuals, mayors and councillors, entrepreneurs and activists, have with increasing participation and interest among ordinary people, worked to uncover the traces of lost urban others and to inscribe them anew into contemporary cityscapes, and thus into contemporary memory cultures and contemporary identities. ⁶⁴