Wroclaw in aerial photographs from the interwar years

The exhibition takes a look at the Wroclaw of the interwar period – a major city, pulsating with life and highly dynamic in terms of its urban development.
The Image Archive of the Herder Institute in Marburg contains a collection of 4,475 oblique aerial photographs mainly from the former Prussian provinces of 
Silesia
deu. Schlesien, ces. Slezsko, pol. Śląsk

Silesia (Polish: Śląsk, Czech: Slezsko) is a historical landscape, which today is mainly located in the extreme southwest of Poland, but in parts also on the territory of Germany and the Czech Republic. By far the most significant river is the Oder. To the south, Silesia is bordered mainly by the Sudeten and Beskid mountain ranges. Today, almost 8 million people live in Silesia. The largest cities in the region are Wrocław, Opole and Katowice. Before 1945, most of the region was part of Prussia for two hundred years, and before the Silesian Wars (from 1740) it was part of the Habsburg Empire for almost as many years. Silesia is classified into Upper and Lower Silesia.

Pomerania
deu. Pommern, pol. Pomorze

Pomerania is a region in northeastern Germany (Vorpommern) and northwestern Poland (Hinterpommern/Pomorze Tylne). The name is derived from the West Slavic 'by the sea' - 'po more/morze'. After the Thirty Years' War (Peace of Westphalia in 1648), Western Pomerania initially became Swedish, and Western Pomerania fell to Brandenburg, which was able to acquire further parts of Western Pomerania in 1720. It was not until 1815 that the entire region belonged to the Kingdom of Prussia as the Province of Pomerania. The province existed until the end of World War II, its capital was Szczecin (today Polish: Stettin).

Ostpreußen
deu. Ostpreußen, eng. East Prussia, pol. Prusy Wschodnie, lit. Rytų Prūsija, rus. Восто́чная Пру́ссия, rus. Vostóchnaia Prússiia

Ostpreußen ist der Name der ehemaligen, bis 1945 bestehenden östlichsten preußischen Provinz, deren Ausdehnung (ungeachtet historisch leicht wechselnder Grenzverläufe) ungefähr der historischen Landschaft Preußen entspricht. Die Bezeichnung kam erst in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts in Gebrauch, als neben dem 1701 zum Königreich erhobenen Herzogtum Preußen mit seiner Hauptstadt Königsberg weitere, zuvor polnische Gebiete im Westen (beispielsweise das sog. Preußen Königlichen Anteils mit dem Ermland und Pommerellen) zu Brandenburg-Preußen kamen und die neue Provinz Westpreußen bildeten.
Heutzutage gehört das Gebiet der ehemaligen preußischen Provinz überwiegend zu Russland (Oblast Kaliningrad) und Polen (Woiwodschaft Ermland-Masuren). Das ehemalige sog. Memelland (auch Memelgebiet, lit. Klaipėdos kraštas) kam erstmals 1920 und erneut ab 1945 zu Litauen.

, the 
Free City of Danzig
deu. Freie Stadt Danzig, pol. Wolne Miasto Gdańsk

The Free City of Gdansk was an independent free state under the protection of the League of Nations, which existed from 1920 to 1939. The state was a republic with German as its official language. In the Free City of Gdansk lived about 415,000 people, mainly Germans and Poles.

 and some cities and towns of the province of Brandenburg located east of the Oder River. The photographs were taken in the 1920s and 1930s by a commercial company, from which they were acquired in 1967/1968.

With over 770 photographs, the section on the city of Wroclaw forms the most extensive and densest part of the collection and is therefore particularly suitable for comprehensive image documentation. On the basis of the 34 photographs selected for the exhibition, it is possible, on the one hand, to illustrate the particularly dynamic urban planning phase of the interwar period and, on the other hand, to provide a final glimpse of the "Flower of Europe" before it was destroyed at the end of the Second World War.

The entire stock of the oblique aerial photographs can be searched in the <a href="https://www.herder-institut.de/bildkatalog/index/index?tree[Sammlungen]=16" id="1061" target="_blank" title="To the Image Catalog ("Bildkatalog") of the Herder Institute">Image Catalog ("Bildkatalog") of the Herder Institute.

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