Europe’s century-old battle to secure its world standing continues

HOTEL POLONIA is a depressing, Soviet-era hotel of cell-like rooms, high ceilings, camp-like beds and a security guard inside the front door. A short distance away is the Monopole, an elegant building despite its ground floor being leased to overpriced international clothes chains.

Journalists unable to find a bed in the city of Wroclaw in the south west of Poland paid four times the normal rate for a room with shared bathroom in the Polonia. EU finance ministers, the central bankers, the head of the ECB and the US Treasury were put up amid tight security in the Monopole.

Few, if any, knew of the connection between the two establishments. In the heady years before World War 1, when Wroclaw’s — then Breslau — elite were wealthy from the coal mines under their land, both hotels were owned by the same family.