| Popis: |
Our current knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Breslau and Silesia are largely tainted by the post-1945 border shifts in the wake of Germany’s war of annihilation to its East. Access to archives, not to mention academics and institutes in Poland, the USSR, Belarus, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, were restricted for decades. This created a historiographical bias towards cities within the newly constituted Federal Republic’s borders formed in 1949. One could be forgiven for thinking that, apart from obvious and repeated references to Kant in Konigsberg and degrees earned at the universities of Halle or Gottingen, the German Enlightenment towards the end of the eighteenth century was a Berlin-centred affair from whence its ideas emanated across Europe. The reality was far more complex. |
