Lviv – Wrocław, Cities in Parallel?: Myth, Memory and Migration, c. 1890-Present 9633863236, 9789633863237

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Jan Fellerer is Associate Professor in Non-Russian Slavonic Languages and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University. Robert Pyrah is Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University and Member of Wolfson College, Oxford University.

Philipp Ther, professor of Central European History at the University of Vienna

Myth, Memory and Migration, c. 1890–Present

The myth and memory of a deeply connected and similar history of Wrocław and L’viv is certainly alive. The comparative volume tracks down the roots of this myth, the connections between the two cities through forced migration, and it shows the profound differences between them. The readers will better understand how Wrocław and L’viv have survived the devastations of the twentieth century and become buzzling cultural centers of Poland and Ukraine.

LVIV AND WROCŁAW, CITIES IN PARALLEL ?

ABOUT THE EDITORS

LVIV AND WROCŁAW, CITIES IN PARALLEL ?

After World War II, Europe witnessed the massive redrawing of national borders and the efforts to make the population fit those new borders. As a consequence of these forced changes, both Lviv and Wrocław went through cataclysmic changes in population and culture. Assertively Polish prewar Lwów became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assertively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn “recovered” by communist Poland as Wrocław. Practically the entire population of Breslau was replaced, and Lwów’s demography too was dramatically restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wrocław and most Jews perished or went into exile. The forced migration of these groups incorporated new myths and the construction of official memory projects. The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by focusing on lived experiences and “bottom-up” historical processes. Their sources and methods are those of microhistory and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture, and media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of the two sides of the same coin—loss on the one hand, gain on the other—in two cities that, as a result of the political reality of the time, are complementary.

ISBN 978-963-386-323-7

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edited by JAN FELLERER and ROBERT PYRAH

On the cover: Stencil graffiti in central Wroclaw, photo by Robert Pyrah Cover design: Tímea E. Adrián

Central European University Press Budapest – New York Sales and information: [email protected] Website: http://www.ceupress.com

2020. 07. 02. 13:59

LVIV AND WROCŁAW, CITIES IN PARALLEL?

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Lviv and Wrocław,

Cities in Parallel? Myth, Memory and Migration, c. 1890–Present

Edited by

Jan Fellerer Robert Pyrah

Central European University Press Budapest–New York

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©2020 by Jan Fellerer and Robert Pyrah Published in 2020 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-386-323-7 hardcover ISBN 978-963-386-324-4 ebook Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fellerer, Jan, 1968- editor. | Pyrah, Robert, 1976- editor. Title: Lviv and Wrocław, cities in parallel? : myth, memory, and migration, c. 1890-present / edited by Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah. Other titles: Lviv and Wrocław Description: Budapest : Central European University Press, 2020. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019047453 (print) | LCCN 2019047454 (ebook) ISBN 9789633863237 (cloth) | ISBN 9789633863244 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: L’viv (Ukraine)--History--20th century. L’viv (Ukraine)--History--21st century. | Wrocław (Poland)--History--20th century. Wrocław (Poland)--History--21st century. | Group identity--Ukraine--L’viv--History-20th century. | Group identity--Ukraine--L’viv--History--21st century. | Group identity--Poland--Wrocław--History--20th century. | Group identity--Poland-Wrocław--History--21st century. | Forced migration--Ukraine--L’viv. | Forced migration--Poland--Wrocław. Classification: LCC DK508.95.L86 L855 2020 (print) | LCC DK508.95.L86 (ebook) | DDC 943.8/52--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047453 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047454

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Table of Contents

Introduction Jan Fellerer  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

A Place Called Home? Nation, Locality and the “Parallel” PolishUkrainian Histories of Wrocław and Lviv Robert Pyrah  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

Population Movement and the Liberal State: The Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne and the Regulation of Labor Migration from Lviv’s Hinterlands Keely Stauter-Halsted  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

Jews in Lviv at the Turn of the 20th Century: On the Road to Modernization Łukasz Tomasz Sroka  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Beyond National: “Posttraumatic Identity” of Disabled War Veterans in Interwar Lviv Oksana Vynnyk  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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East Meets West: Polish-German Coexistence in Lower Silesia through the Memories of Polish Expellees, 1945–1947 Anna Holzer-Kawałko  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Tylko we Lwowie: Tango, Jazz, and Urban Entertainment in a Multiethnic City Mayhill C. Fowler  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

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Table of Contents

Impressions of Place: Soviet Travel Writings and the Discovery of Lviv, 1939–40 Sofia Dyak  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Imperfect Metropolis: The Evolving Projections of Wrocław in Polish Feature Films Mikołaj Kunicki  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 The Bu-Ba-Bu and the Reorientation of Ukrainian Culture: The Carnival City and the Palimpsestual Past Uilleam Blacker  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Memory, and Lack of Memory, of Others: The Image of the Jewish and the Polish Neighbor in Oral Reflections of Lviv’s Current Inhabitants Halyna Bodnar  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 City, Memory and Identity: The Case of Wrocław after 1945 Barbara Pabjan  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Contemporary Lviv: Facing the Past—Reinterpreting the Past Katarzyna Kotyńska  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Building Bridges Between Breslau and Wrocław: A Case Study from the European Capital of Culture Initiative, 2016 Ewa Sidorenko  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Afterword: Central European Cities as Laboratories of Memory… and Oblivion—Lviv and Wrocław Contrasted Jacek Purchla  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349

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Introduction Jan Fellerer

This collective volume of thirteen essays is about the making of history in the

two cities of Lviv and Wrocław. Both these East-Central European metropoles were forged in diversity and held for periods in their history by different dynasties, only taking a more defined national shape in the later 19th century, while still hosting ethnically mixed populations. Following the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements of 1945, they were then forcibly recast into radically different, monolithic and exclusivist ethno-national paragons.1 Both had lost most of their Jewish populations to the Holocaust, and now both saw most of their former majority populations expelled, deported or fleeing. Thus, assertively Polish pre-war Lwów transformed into Soviet Ukrainian, and after 1991, assertively Ukrainian Lviv; while Breslau, the third largest city in Germany before 1945, was in turn “recovered” by Poland as part of a propaganda drive to explain and legitimize that country’s enforced territorial shift to the west, serving as a beacon for the new Poland under communism. Much of the historical background and context has been well documented. There are new comprehensive surveys of the history of both cities. In fact, the volatile political fortunes to which the history of Wrocław and Lviv was subject ever since the Middle Ages, combined with a pronounced multiethnic past, have prompted a remarkable surge in renewed scholarly interest 1 

 e impetus for this volume came from collaborative research conducted as part of Th the AHRC project (AH/J00507X/1), ‘Sub-cultures as Integrative Forces in East-Central Europe, c. 1900-present.’ Versions of four of the essays in this volume, by Keely StauterHalstead, Łukasz Tomasz Sroka, Mayhill Fowler and Anna Holzer-Kawałko were presented at project-sponsored workshops.

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since the end of communism in Poland, Ukraine and beyond. Some of the present-day narratives approach the two cities’ past dynastic-national changes and multi-culturalism in a way that integrates difficult peripheries into the mainstream of national historiography. Others take the opposite route and bring to the fore the two cities’ particular location in the center of conflicting political interests and of intersecting ethno-linguistic groupings. The aim of the thirteen chapters of this volume is to document a novel, “third” perspective on the parallel historical processes in these two cities since the late 19th century. The imperial legacies, the cataclysmic events of the First and Second World Wars and their consequences necessitated the sustained use of myth, memory and migration to justify political and cultural programs of nationalization “from above.” A notional transfer of Lviv’s preWWII Polish population directly to Wrocław, for example, forms one of these myths. Recent research shows the real figure from Lviv to have been closer to just one third. The perspective “from above,” however, frequently competed with local identity-formation processes “from below,” for the lived historical experiences in Lviv and Wrocław did not square with national or, until 1914, imperial homogenization. This juxtaposition is the key topic of the contributions to this volume. They present case studies that pay particular attention to the individual, to ordinary people, and to lived experience. The aim is to shed light on how the people living in, or otherwise associated with, Lviv and Wrocław employed, and continue to use myth, memory and migration in order to navigate the contradictoriness of past and present in Lviv and Wrocław since the late 19th century. Rather than diachronic in nature, the chapters offer synchronic snapshots, at different junctures in time. They deal with communal practices at grass root level and with everyday-life experience and attitudes, rather than with large-scale political, military, cultural or economic history. The types of sources and methods are, therefore, those characteristic of scholarship in micro-history, evidencing the local, the ordinary and the individual, such as oral testimonies, memoirs, direct observation and questionnaires, manifestations of popular and popularized culture, the press and journalistic writing. The focus on lived experiences and “bottom-up” historical processes reflects an innovative stream in currently ongoing research in the modern history of Lviv and Wrocław. The present volume brings together scholars who share this agenda, in a quest to transcend well-founded, yet one-sided “top-down” narratives about nation, statehood and the political and economic order. How these played out at the local level is a  crucial research agenda,

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but it begs the complementary perspective from within individual localities. It is no coincidence that Lviv and Wrocław in particular attract this type of perspective. The modern history of both these cities is steeped in often abrupt reversals, from a multi-ethnic past to a relatively homogenous present, from a location on the border to one at the centre of a new constitutional project, and from scenes of violent clashes and destruction to places of accelerated construction and reconstruction. Generations who lived through, and continue to be affected by these radical historical changes, need to accommodate and make sense of them not only in social, economic and political terms, but also as individuals living in their time and place. In both cities, myth, memory and migration play a key role to that end. The present volume is a collection of essays that share a particular interest in these categories. Crucially, they explore them on the basis of the type of less commonly used source materials mentioned above. They offer privileged insights into the history of the two East-Central European cities as experienced and represented at grassroot level. The book brings together scholars—many from the region itself and representing a younger generation of historians—whose interests broadly converge on these topics, and on suitable sources to tackle them. They share an approach to these sources that critically investigates their value and status as textual and visual representations of people’s engagement with their particular locality in history. The result is a collection of articles that also brings to the fore that the residents of Lviv and Wrocław were not just subject to, but also agents in, the historical process of the period under discussion in this book. Looking at topics, such as migration, myth- and memory-formation, grass-root politics, cultural practices, and artistic representations of the city, bestows agency upon those who, otherwise, often figure as being at the receiving end of historical events. The contributions share this interest in how the populace of the two cities, which were at the center of the often brutal and volatile history of 20th-century Europe, did not only react to, but also shaped the historical trajectory. Leaving the place, and returning to it, forming a charitable organization, staging a theater show or poetic performance, filming and describing the city, remembering its past in one form rather than another; these are at first sight obvious representations of, and reactions to, the events of the time. Yet they shape them too, as they produce the facts and perceptions that inform future politics. Their constructive force is of particular significance in cities, such as Lviv and Wrocław, which had to accommodate radical political changes and reinvent themselves in short intervals throughout the 20th

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century. This becomes clear in all the chapters of this volume. The immediately pertinent topic of analysis may be cognitive in nature, as in the case of myth and memory; or it may be artistic, as in the case of theater, film and writing; or it may pertain to specific aspects of local history, as in the case of the activities of charitable and communal organizations. While this is certainly true on one level, these topics also acquire a larger historical significance, given the unprecedented political, economic and social changes that took place in Lviv and Wrocław between the late 19th century and the present day. The novel perspective that the chapters of this volume offer is that these topics are not ancillary to the “top-down” narratives of nation and state. They project “bottom-up” narratives of their own, which may contradict, confirm, or simply co-exist with, the main political currents of ethnically based statehood and the change to state-run economies. This shared perspective of investigation into the history of Lviv and Wrocław sheds light on important differences too. Lviv and Wrocław are often thought to be closely associated historically because many of Lviv’s pre-WWII Polish residents ended up in Wrocław. However, the destinations of the forced westward transfer were much more varied. They included all of the newly acquired western territories as well as other regions of post-WWII Poland. The special historical link between Lviv and Wrocław has, to some extent, become a  myth itself. On closer inspection, the almost proverbial parallels between Lviv and Wrocław do in fact often fall down or reveal themselves to be partial and largely structural only, thereby giving rise to a discussion of their mythic content, and occasioning an examination of the cities from sometimes divergent, rather than parallel viewpoints. For instance, the character, size and settlement patterns of the Jewish and Polish population segments in and around Wrocław differed fundamentally from that of the Jewish and Ukrainian constituencies of Lviv and its region. The population of Wrocław grew even faster than that of Lviv in the late 19th and early 20th century due to the economic developments in the two cities and the surrounding region. Lviv was a hub for large-scale pre-WWI emigration, which did not in the same way apply to Wrocław. The list of obvious differences is long and shows that any parallels between the two cities do not primarily pertain to the specifics in their historical development. They are rather structural and rooted in the large-scale population transfers that affected both cities, and in their similarly discontinuous and ruptured trajectory through four different constitutional orders over, roughly, four generations; from empire before WWI, via unstable and failed

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parliamentary democracies before WWII, to the communist regimes of postwar Europe, and newly independent nation states post-1989. The contributions of this volume reflect this juxtaposition. There are eight chapters on Lviv, as opposed to four on Wrocław. They deal with topics specific to each place, and are firmly rooted in its respective historiography. At the same time, their shared scholarly agenda outlined above invites comparisons that reveal underlying similarities and differences in how Lviv’s and Wrocław’s populace experienced, shaped and remembered their cities’ modern history. The aim is not to develop a systematic comparative survey with neatly matching contributions, say, on the treatment of returning WWI veterans in ‘Weimar’ Wrocław and ‘Second-Republic’ Lwów; or on the history of the Jewry of Lviv and Wrocław from the late 19th century to the Holocaust; or on the communization of the cities after 1945. The volume does not presuppose that Lviv and Wrocław present a privileged pair of comparison with respect to the specific topics, with which the individual chapters deal. What unifies them is that they employ these topics to reveal “bottom-up” processes of dealing with similar historical experiences, such as the urban multi-ethnic encounter, shifting borders, migration, and radical historical reinterpretation and reconstruction at various junctures in time. The volume presupposes that Lviv and Wrocław are uniquely linked in how people devised ways of shaping and remembering these experiences “from below,” at grass-root level, and it seeks to make a novel contribution to our understanding of the processes and outcomes involved. The order of the thirteen chapters is broadly, but not strictly chronological. Where it diverges from a strictly chronological order, it brings to the fore links between individual contributions that deal with a similar topic or take a similar approach in terms of sources or methodology. So far, scholars have rightly given precedence to the study of the increasingly brutal history of modern imperialism, national antagonism, totalitarianism and war, and the effects these have had on the two East-Central European cities under investigation. The first chapter, by Robert Pyrah, addresses this rich historiographical context. It draws attention to the notion of locality, and the specifics of the place, as a crucial element that has often been overlooked in the cities’ otherwise burgeoning historiographies. The emphasis on local urban history redirects our attention to the less frequently studied question of what people living in Lviv and Wrocław, or moving through these cities, made of this past. How they shaped and experienced it, particularly through migration or displacement, and how they remember and narrate it to the present day. These

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structural commonalities, argued for in the chapter, underpin the following contributions of the volume. The first three deal with Lviv in the late imperial and interwar periods. They showcase current research on the city’s constituencies that superseded the Polish and Ukrainian national perspectives, their development and mutual antagonism. Based on original archival research, Keely Stauter-Halsted shows how migrants setting out for America on the eve of World War I got caught up in the bureaucratic activities of Galicia’s “Polish Emigration Society.” Its attempts to stymie people’s efforts to reach the relevant port cities effectively produced corrupt and semi- or illegal migration practices. Lviv, where the first headquarters of the agency were set up in 1908, had been the place of an important international labor market for decades, establishing the city as a hub of migration. Migration was also an important dynamic among Lviv’s Jewry, who constituted approximately one third of the city’s population. It was, for example, an important destination for migrants fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire of the 1880s, and it was to become one of the main centers of the Zionist movement and a hub for emigration to Palestine. These movements were symptomatic of the shifting allegiances among Lviv’s Jewry, which Łukasz Sroka analyses in his contribution. Similar to other East-Central European cities, there were the conflicting strategies of assimilation, Zionism and communism in response to an increasing anti-Semitism and the imminent dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. At the same time, the chapter shows that, specific to Lviv, there also was an age-old and strong local urban identity among Jewish Lvivians, which continued unabated into the interwar period. The tension between transience and long-lived urban continuity, characteristic of the cities under investigation in this book, also returns in the third chapter by Oksana Vynnyk. Shifting the focus to the interwar period, it is a study of disabled war veterans who found themselves in post-war Lviv. By then part of the Second Polish Republic, the traditionally multi-ethnic city and its region were scarred by the deeply antagonizing Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Soviet Wars in the aftermath of World War I. Yet the shared experience of inadequate welfare provision for the injured transcended the marked national divisions, even though socio-economic unity in that respect often went hand in hand with growing anti-Semitism. During and after World War II, the multi-ethnic encounter was not only an important shared heritage of Lviv and Wrocław. It also remained, to some extent, a reality on the ground, despite large-scale war-time replacement and post-war forced mass migrations.

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Anna Holzer-Kawałko’s contribution takes up this crucial thread, with reference to post-war Polish arrivals in Wrocław and Lower Silesia. It is frequently overlooked that they still found many Germans present in the “recovered” territories. Memoirs testify to an encounter that is more complex than allencompassing hostility; one that is also characterized by a shared experience of loss, suffering and war, as well as by the reality of, albeit temporary, co-existence. In Lviv, the traditional multi-ethnic encounter became subject to an entirely new and hitherto extraneous influence in the wake of the first Soviet occupation of the city from 1939 to 1941. Mayhill C. Fowler explores the changing popular entertainment culture of interwar Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Lviv following the first wave of the city’s Sovietization. It led to entirely new fault lines, beyond the increasingly institutionalized ethno-linguistic divisions. A  crucial criterion was whether performers sided with the Soviet project and embraced a novel distinction between entertainment and highbrow, politically edifying theater. The Sovietization of Lviv is crucial to an understanding of the city’s recent history and the memory thereof. Yet, peculiarly, it often remains in the background, overshadowed by the imperial past and the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. To fill this specific gap, the early Sovietization from 1939 to 1941 is also the topic of the following chapter by Sofia Dyak. It discusses little-known travelogues by the Soviet Russian writers Viktor Shklovsky and Yevgeny Petrov and Soviet architectural literature of 1939 to 1940, as they re-imagined the distinctly non-Soviet pre-war Lviv as a future Soviet Ukrainian city. It laid the ground for a narration that would subsequently allow the city’s new inhabitants to re-interpret the historical urban space as a precursor to postwar, Communist Lviv. The process of appropriation and the difficulties it presented is also the topic of the next chapter. It takes the reader into post-Stalinist Wrocław. Mikołaj Kunicki analyses films from the late 1950s to the early 1970s from and about the city. They often show Wrocław as a dark or suspicious place, suggesting that the project of incorporating the Upper Silesian metropolis into the Communist Polish state remained difficult and contradictory. While the administrative, economic, and demographic integration progressed fast, dealing with the historical legacies of the city and the region was at first often elusive or met with silence. The relation between the physical environment and the historical legacies it represented remained an important issue in Lviv too, albeit its treatment

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changed considerably over time. The late- and post-communist era brought a  rediscovery of urban localism that could in fact be even larger than the newly independent Polish or Ukrainian nation. Uilleam Blacker demonstrates this with reference to the literary performance group Bu-Ba-Bu, which flourished in post-1991 Ukrainian Lviv. It staged the city center with its manifoldbuilt reminders of a pre-Soviet past in a distinctly local way, employing “Burlesque, Balagan, and Buffoonery.” It was not only the built environment that required fresh historical and artistic narratives. After World War II, Wrocław and Lviv were home to large numbers of newcomers. They and their descendants needed to forge their own local identity. It had to offer a way of incorporating the legacies of the inherited “Other” of the pre-war era, which was so obviously present in the form of foreign-language signs and inscriptions, unfamiliar architectural styles and objects of material culture. Halyna Bodnar takes up this thread with reference to Lviv: the post-war arrival of Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens in the city and their memory, or lack thereof, of its pre-war Polish and Jewish populations. The study is based on extensive qualitative interviews with present-day residents of different generations in one of the historical streets in the city center. Barbara Pabjan takes a  similar approach to local urban identity and memory in contemporary Wrocław. Based on quantified interview data, her chapter explores the attitudes of present-day residents towards their city’s changeable past, and the numerous traces this has left behind in the urban landscape. Similar to Bodnar’s conclusions, it seems that forgetting is in fact a more important feature of these attitudes than remembering in both Lviv and Wrocław. This is in contrast with recent official and commercial representations of the urban space and the enactment of its diverse historical legacies. Katarzyna Kotyńska focusses on contemporary Lviv and finds a multi-faceted penchant to employ its multi-cultural past in popular culture, in the tourism industry, and toward the promotion of the city. This creates a polyphony of discourses, one political emphasizing post-1990 national independence, and others reviving a partly imagined and nostalgic a-national, multi-ethnic past. Its promotion by the local authorities and by local business also creates an intriguing contrast with the residents’ own authentic and more selective memory of the city’s history, as Bodnar’s study had shown. A similar contradiction emerges in the chapter by Ewa Sidorenko. It examines the development and realization of one of the projects for the suc-

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cessful bid by the city of Wrocław to become the European Capital of Culture in 2016. The “Bridge Builders” project, located on and around the numerous bridges of Wrocław, engaged with the city’s multi-ethnic past, in a bid to link it to the present, and to reflect on the politics of collective memory. At first, the project was met with some reluctance on the part of those young Wrocław residents who took part in it, but it eventually came to open up the urban space to a more inclusive examination of the significance of memory and forgetting. Kotyńska’s and Sidorenko’s final chapters of this volume show how myth, memory and migration continue to pose cognate questions and similar challenges in Lviv and Wrocław to the present day. The purpose of this volume is to introduce readers to recent scholarship that applies to them a novel perspective from the “bottom up.” It shifts the focus to the experience and shaping of large-scale historical processes at the local level and, to that end, employs a range of fresh and often unusual sources. The juxtaposition of topics pertaining to Wrocław and Lviv shows that correspondences in the two cities’ 20th-century history are structural, rather than neatly parallel in demographic or political terms. Thus, rather than mounting a  comparative study, this book maps convergent processes and outcomes in East-Central European local and urban history. This must certainly not divert attention from the cataclysmic events that people in both places had to live through: Nazism, war, occupation, expulsion and totalitarianism. It is equally misplaced to approach the history of Wrocław and Lviv with a sense of nostalgia that may bear the danger of revisionism. The contributions to the volume put the two cities centerstage in a different way. They shift the scholarly focus to their residents and those passing through them, and investigate how people experienced and shaped the history of Wrocław and Lviv beyond large-scale categories, such as nationhood, statehood, and the socio-economic order. The afterword by Jacek Purchla is a concluding, summative reflection on these aims and approaches of the contributions to the present volume. Apart from their main purpose of offering fresh scholarly insights and perspectives, it is hoped that this volume will also make a contribution to historical understanding and, thus, reconciliation across borders. In that same spirit, it should be noted that places, including the two cities under investigation, are, throughout the volume, usually referred to by their names as adopted internationally today: Lviv and Wrocław. Where other names are used, this is to elucidate historic contrasts in context. It does not imply any potentially politicized interpretations of these names.

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A Place Called Home? Nation, Locality and the “Parallel” PolishUkrainian Histories of Wrocław and Lviv 1 Robert Pyrah

The ties between Lviv and Wrocław are of […] peculiar nature because they are profoundly based on [the] dramatic history of the twentieth century. At the end of World War II in 1945 Poland’s geographic centre of gravity was shifted towards the west. Needless to say, it was followed by population transfers. Many immigrants from the eastern territories, among them Lviv professoriate [sic] and artists were settled in Wrocław.  Thus, Lviv[’s] intellectual heritage, a sort of ‘genius loci’ of the city, was rooted in Wrocław.2

In 2016, Wrocław, together with San Sebastian/Donostia in Spain, was European

Capital of Culture (Polish abbreviation: ESK). As with all such top-down initiatives, the program, in its selectivity and chosen emphases, offers clues to how the elites responsible view and project their city’s cultural identity. That a key part of the program was the “Lviv month,” in the programmatic terms quoted, shows the ongoing sense (at least from a certain Polish perspective) that these

1

 Supplemental bibliographic research for this essay, conducted in Poland and Ukraine, was supported by a travel grant from the Research Fellows’ travel fund of Wolfson College, Oxford. I express my thanks. 2  Anon., “Lwów-Wrocław. Lwów Month.” http://www.esk2016.lviv.ua/en/pe-about/. Last accessed date, for this and all subsequent links except where marked: 12 June 2017.

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two cities remain fatefully linked.3 Indeed, the organizers explicitly claim that some essence of pre-war Lviv, that is, once predominantly Polish Lwów, was transplanted to Wrocław, where it remains preserved. The assertion is relevant because it combines what we know from the historical record, the fact of population transfers and a  change of regime at Stalin’s behest, affecting both cities in parallel, with an emotive assertion based on romantic projection. The latter is connected to the loss of a city often mythologized in the Polish canon as “forever loyal” to that country (motto: semper fidelis). Lviv, or Lwów in Polish and Lemberg in German, was a borderland town that, following its acquisition by Casimir the Great in 1349, even through the period of Habsburg control (1772–1918) while Poland was partitioned, attained a  majority population that, while mixed and fluctuating over time, by the 19th century predominantly defined itself as Polish. Control by their elites continued even under the Habsburgs, especially after the decentralization of dynastic rule from 1867 (the Ausgleich). The Polish national narrative was bolstered by historical events, some ethnicized ex-postfacto, including the city’s successful self-defense against sacking by Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648, and against the Ukrainian attempt to wrest control in 1918. The latter famously generated a narrative about the martyrdom of Polish “eaglet” children in the city’s defense—the eagle being the national symbol—one that achieved fame across interwar Poland.4 Much more can, of course, be said about this particular canon, which is rich and nuanced, if not always uncontroversial.5 But what it demonstrates for present purposes is the city’s rhetorical significance within a  (certain) 3

 In addition, the “month” was backed by a “Lviv Street” at the heart of the city: http://www.esk2016.lviv.ua/pl/pp-klub/. 4  Anna Veronika Wendland, “Post-Austrian Lemberg: War, Commemoration, Interethnic Relations, and Urban Identity in L’viv, 1918–1939?” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (2003): 83–102. 5  The list of the city’s cultural achievements, seen in terms of that national canon, includes such figures from popular culture as Szczepko and Tońko from the interwar radio program, heard across all of Poland, called the Wesoła Lwowska Fala; the poem “Polak mały” taught nationally to schoolchildren in school by Lviv-born Władysłąw Bełza; and contributions in mathematics (the Lviv School). To what extent the latter in particular is “national” is a discussion that exceeds the scope of this essay, and falls back on a different discussion around different definitions of Polishness, which are broadly speaking ethnically narrow or inclusive of historic minorities, and subject to ideological re-interpretation in a diachronic perspective. See the essay in this volume by Ewa Sidorenko.

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historicized view of Polish identity—one which Wrocław’s linked fate helps bolster and retain, despite the wholesale loss of “Lwów,” apparently even today. Telling is that this narrative survives against the grain of hard numbers: Gregor Thum, in his definitive work on Wrocław’s reconstruction as Polish after World War II, estimates no more than a third of the population came from pre-war Lwów, with larger populations coming from central Poland, that is, places like present-day Świętokrzyskie. In those terms, should not Wrocław have held a  “Kielce” month, or a “Płock” one just as readily (cities from inner Poland)? The answer is that a literal reading fails to account for the rhetorical and structural effect of the Lviv-Wrocław parallel, plus the emotional imperative it apparently satisfies for the ongoing shadow-presence of Lwów in modern Poland. Indeed, the parallel is concretized and channeled beyond the purely rhetorical in Wrocław’s urban space: by the fact that many of those who came from Lviv specifically were simply in visible or influential professions, e.g., tram drivers and university professors; also, that physical reminders were transplanted directly to Wrocław from Lviv, including large parts of the collections of the National Institute, the Ossolineum, with its formal reconstitution in Wrocław; the statue of poet and dramatist Aleksander Fredro (1793–1876); the iconic painting “in the round” from 1893–94, celebrating part of the Polish uprisings, the Panorama Racławice; and the “Panorama of old [18th-century] Lviv,” created between 1929–46, which had special billing as part of the Lviv month in the European Capital of Culture program of 2016.6 Whether the concept of an intrinsic link between the two cities is sustained from a Ukrainian perspective is, of course, moot, not to mention other “national” or ethnic perspectives, such as the Jewish (around a third of Lviv’s pre-war population) or Armenian. Certainly in terms of the “Lviv month,” the Ukrainian contribution was framed as a showcase for modern Ukrainian culture and identity, using Lviv as an artistic “window.”7 This in fact mirrors an established strand of Ukrainian historiography that views the city as pro-

6

 http://www.esk2016.lviv.ua/en/bus-stop-lviv-plastic-panorama-of-old-lviv/.  “The Lviv Month project aims not only to present contemporary Ukraine, but also to initiate and enhance the intercultural synergies between our countries […]. [We] treated Lviv to be [sic] a sort of a camera lens, through which we can look deep into the whole country; a city through which we were able to communicate with culture and art of Ukraine in its various and numerous dimensions.” Source: http://www. esk2016.lviv.ua/en/pe-about/.

7

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totypically Ukrainian by different measures, e.g., language use today (“the most Ukrainian city” by that definition, with Russian largely absent from the public sphere); and its place in the historical national canon in a structurally similar position to that of “Lwów” in the Polish one. That is: as the almost axiomatic Piedmont of each national cause, the place where, for Ukrainians, key institutions took root in the 19th century around which that national consciousness could be structured and expressed, and for Poles where less repressive rule operated during the partition of that country, for instance through a freer press.8 Here, then, the subject transcends “links,” as per a certain Polish perspective, to the realm of structural parallels, which is the starting point for this essay. What seems surprising is that, to date, despite a booming canon of academic literature on each city, there is very little comparative, critical work on both.9 My contention is that a closer examination of the parallels and differences can yield useful insights, particularly around varying notions and constructions of place, which might otherwise be masked by superficial structural similarities. These include, for example, how both cities, from a  presentist historical perspective, appear to situate local identity firmly within a version of the national narrative; how they in turn frame their significant “national” Others, as defined in 20th-century terms; and how both vacillate over integrating the Jewish aspects of their pre-1945 histories. I will begin, therefore, by looking first at parallels in their 20th-century histories from the prevailing Polish and Ukrainian perspectives, through the lens of how historians and elites with control over local institutional channels, e.g., the City Councils, have

8

 Including an increasingly “national” theater by the late 19th century: Philipp Ther, “Die Bühne als Schauplatz der Politik. Das polnische Theater in Lemberg, 1842–1914,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 52 (2003): 543–71.Various discussions of the parallel canon and rival claims can be found in: Lviv. A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture, ed. John Czaplicka (Cambridge, MA: HURI, 2005). 9  Currently in press is a comparative doctoral thesis on the two cities by Sofia Dyak, which notes this absence: “(Re)imagined Cityscapes: Lviv and Wrocław after the Second World War” (PhD thesis, SNS, IFiS PAN, Warsaw, 2010). The most sustained comparative work to date is by psychologist Maria Lewicka in Polish and English: “Dwa miasta—dwa mikrokosmy. Wrocław i Lwów w pamięci swoich mieszkańców,” in My Wrocławianie. Społeczna przestrzeń miasta ed. Piotr Żuk and Jacek Pluta (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 2006). She contrasts the historical memories of present-day residents in each city and draws conclusions to which I refer to in the closing section of the essay.

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written, shaped and propagated that history. I shall then attempt to shed light on instructive differences of detail within and beyond these apparent structural similarities. This is not, I should stress, by any means intended as a full historiographic survey, aspects of which are covered elsewhere: rather, it is intended as a spur to further investigation, and a conceptual provocation.10 The key differences, I  contend, pivot on the sense of “placeness” that emerges in each city. “Place” is a concept with popular currency in urban history, allowing us to posit definitions of a city’s cultural identity beyond the more standard national categories that have dominated in historiography.11 In short, “place” presupposes something more locally attuned, fusing national and other narratives into a construct that is sui generis—but this in itself, as even my thumbnail sketch shows, is far from unproblematic. For example, looking narrowly at place presupposes a  wider political context, including the politics of history and its implications for bilateral relations between the countries in question.12 This includes the EU framework for Polish-German relations, notwithstanding occasional controversies,13 which permits historical minorities free movement and certain rights; and the more challenging Polish-Ukrainian situation, which lacks that framework and appears to oscil-

10

 I provide a fuller survey of recent western (and local) historiography of Ukraine in “From Borderland via Bloodlands to Heartland? Recent Western Historiography of Ukraine,” The English Historical Review CXXIX (2014): 139–56; a summary of Polish approaches to Lviv in “Place, Borderland and Elective Affinities: Contemporary Polish Identity in Post-1945 Lviv, between ‘Minority, and ‘Subculture’,” Ab imperio 1 (2017): 263–92; and of German and Polish treatments of Wrocław in “Germans in Wrocław: ‘Ethnic minority’ versus hybrid identity. Historical context and urban milieu,” Nationalities Papers 45 (2017): 274–91. 11  For an overview and background, see Maria Lewicka, “Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years?” Journal of Environmental Psychology 31 (2011): 207–30. 12  A full examination of this is out of scope for this essay, but includes works by Timothy Snyder, such as his essay ‘Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory: Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, 1939–1999’ in: Jan Werner-Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 39–58, and various essays in the volume Past in the Making. Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, ed. by Michal Kopecek (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008). 13  The reemergence of old grievances towards Germany by the Law and Justice government in Poland ruling (for a second time) from 2015.

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late between official policies of reconciliation and occasional controversies.14 Further, the specifics of each “place” are of course rather different, with structural similarities yielding to insights with differing content. Furthermore, these structural parallels are predicated on exclusivist national perspectives, which tend to elide from view the “significant others” that once dominated each city before 1945: Poles in the case of Ukrainians, with respect to Lviv; and Germans in the case of Poles, with respect to Wrocław, formerly Breslau, which had been the third largest city in the Reich. The case of the Jews, no means exclusive among minorities, but by far the largest in each city until 1945, is a further complicating factor in terms of perceptions of place from these national perspectives. By definition, this is a complex and polyphonic discourse that includes views from Israel and ongoing or re-established local communities, and as such merits separate study. I shall limit myself in this essay to aspects from within and to some extent between the dominant national historiographies for Lviv and Wrocław, since how Jews or Jewish heritage, past and present, are approached, in turn reflects on their national constructions of place.15 Importantly, how “significant Others” are, or are not integrated, forms part of the different approaches to place in Lviv and Wrocław within ostensibly similar paradigms concerning the “locally specific.” This place-based approach therefore aspires to sketch how we might add nuance and texture to the broad historical impression of parallel fates: two cities that lost their majority popula14

 Timothy Snyder examined Poland’s early post-communist pro-Ukrainian “Eastern” policies and described the mutual agreements as “sovereignty over memory,” i.e., the attempt to rise above historical controversies at the official level. Notwithstanding any enduring popular enmities, controversies have also on occasion resurfaced at this official level, e.g., President Yushchenko’s attempt to award wartime leader of the radical Ukrainian nationalists, Stepan Bandera, the title of “Hero of Ukraine.” This official honor was eventually rescinded, but not before causing substantial uproar in Poland: Bandera was responsible, in Polish eyes, for the murder of many of their number in Volhynia. See: Snyder, “Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory: Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, 1939–1999” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. Jan Werner-Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 39–58. 15  As always when dealing with multicultural history, we operate within consciously defined perspectival boundaries: my comments pertain to official Polish and Ukrainian perspectives, thus I refer the reader via quoted sources for fuller coverage beyond. The subject is clearly worthy of separate treatment but exceeds the scope of this essay.

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tions and embarked on grand-scale projects of national reclamation, initially under communist regimes imposed on unwilling populations.

Structural Similarities and Beyond Turning to historiography, the older nationalist canons stressing the Ukrainian or Polish “ownership” of the city of Lviv, is structurally similar for reasons mentioned. So too is the “newer wave” of more critical work emerging internationally pertaining to both cities, using up-to-date methods and empirical research to interrogate persisting mythologies, sometimes in more than one language, and taking into account the perspective of their respective historical minorities.16 The key difference between approaches to the two cities from a Polish perspective concerns the fact that Poland lacks the deeper-rooted sentimental or practical claim to Wrocław that Ukrainians have for Lviv. In other words, historiographic claims to Lviv face equally strong and opposite forces, where for Wrocław there is ambivalence on the Polish side, and reticence on the German. Wrocław, after communism, certainly lacks the same sort of tenacious rhetorical claim, not least given the absence of tendentious German historiography on the city, for reasons that again are obvious—the taboo of Nazism and possible fears of taint by association in discussing “lost” territories. This taboo has gradually been lifting, with a range of works emerging in German that vary in tone between analytical and nostalgic.17 But short of old picture-postcard publications and photograph albums 16

 This includes recent works by Tarik Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015); Halyna Bodnar, “Zhitlo iak tiagar i privilei: do pitannia pro sposobi do radianizatsii Lvova u drugii polovini 1940-h rokiv,” in Lwów: miasto—społeczeństwo—kultura: Studia z dziejów miasta, vol. 9, ed. Kazimierz Karloczak and Łukasz Sroka (Cracow: UPP, 2014), 413–43; and William Risch, The Ukrainian West. Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). For further examples and a fuller bibliography: Pyrah, “Place, Borderland and Elective Affinities.” 17  On Germany’s complex memory culture, see for example, Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Bonn: Beck, 2007); for work dealing in terms somewhere between nostalgic and analytical/historical with the former Eastern territories, see the bestselling works by Andreas Kossert, including Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945, 2nd edn. (Munich: Siedler, 2009).

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with anodyne commentaries in German, aimed at the tourist market in Poland, and outside of circles such as the Bund der Vertriebenen (League of the Displaced) in Germany, a waning force by dint of demographic decline, or German minority associations in Poland publishing on a small scale their memoirs or else volumes on cultural practice,18 there is little in the public sphere staking anything like a public, historic German claim to Breslau. Polish works emerging after communism have largely been non-hagiographical and lay more emphasis on the region than the city, for example through examinations of “Silesian” identity or the German minority more generally.19 In contrast, beyond works of the more critical academic type, Polish publications focusing very specifically on Lviv, as well as on the wider socalled kresy (Poland’s former eastern borderlands) have emerged after communism and the lifting of censorship have been voluminous. They range from wistful nostalgia, also of the picture-postcard type; via richly-illustrated volumes reconstructing the social types, the urban toponymy, the dialect, the street-song and so on of pre-war “Polish” Lwów;20 to chronicle-style academic works that detail often minutely aspects of the city’s pre-war history and institutions.21 This output, taken together, does not neatly correspond with Svetlana Boym’s categories as outlined in The Future of Nostalgia, where she distinguishes between “reflective” and “restorative” forms.22 In

18

 Publications supported by the German Cultural Association of Poland, examples here: http://www.ntksWrocław.vdg.pl/pl/publikacje (last accessed 15 July 2017). 19  Various pieces of published research by Danuta Berlińska, including “Mniejszość niemiecka na Śląsku Opolskim w świetle badań socjologicznych,” in Społeczno-gospodarcze i przestrzenne problemy Górnośląskiego Okręgu Przemysłowego i Śląska Opolskiego, ed. A. Klasik and Z. Mikołajewicz (Warsaw: PWN, 1993): 77–87; and by Zbigniew Kurcz, including Mniejszość niemiecka w Polsce (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1995), and more recently by Irena Kurasz, Mniejszość niemiecka na Dolnym Śląsku. Studium socjologiczne (Cracow: Nomos, 2015). 20  E.g., the series Tamten Lwów by Witold Szolginia (Cracow: Wysoki Zamek, 2010-); Miasto Lwów by Wiesław Budzyński (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2012); Spacer po Lwówie by Sławomir Koper (Warsaw: Dziennik, 2008). 21  Including such works as Academia Militans. Uniwersytet Jana Kazimierza we Lwowie, ed. Adam Redzik et al. (Cracow: IPN, 2015); Agnieszka Biedrzycka, Kalendarium Lwowa 1918-1939 (Cracow: Universitas, 2012); Grzegorz Mazur, Życie polityczne polskiego Lwowa 1918-1939 (Warsaw: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2007). 22  Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

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effect these works sit somewhere between the two: one looks in vain for the explicit sentiment that Lwów should be restored to Poland, but the detail and degree of these works suggest something beyond neutral reflection or wistful melancholia. From a Ukrainian perspective, reconstructions of the past, for perhaps understandable reasons, mirror those of the exhibits at the city’s museum: that is, they focus on the national story to the exclusion of other perspectives, since Lviv “becoming Ukrainian” in a narrow sense fulfils a prescribed sense of national destiny. These are two sides of the same coin, and thus tonally similar: loss on the one hand, gain on the other. The “gain” sentiment is again mirrored by the communist approach to Wrocław and the “recovered territories,” with propaganda depending, as it did for Ukrainian “ownership” of Lviv, on a Faustian bargain between nationalism and communism (which we know ultimately favored the former over the latter).23 This once more underscores the “national” element in both cities’ histories as a core component of the identity created for them from above, even by the centralized communist-controlled states to which they belonged at the time. These were contexts in which to speak more explicitly about “locality” as opposed to the nation was fraught with potential contradiction, not least due to the historical presence of, and past “ownership” by, an ethnic Other, as well as (in Lviv’s case) an array of proportionally significant minority Other(s), and in Wrocław, of German Jews. Only today are these “mixed” historical backgrounds re-emerging as a subject of interest among intellectuals, historians and beyond in both cities, although again, despite outward structural similarities, there are significant differences in form and content in each case that merit closer attention.24

“Europeanness” and the Absence of Significant Others If Polish historiography of Wrocław under communism was dominated by the need to assert a  “return” to Polish ownership as a  way of legitimizing the takeover of the “Recovered Territories,” then today the picture is differ23

 This is the central theme of Amar’s book, the risky construction of post-1945 Lviv as simultaneously “Soviet” and “Ukrainian” (The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv). 24  For example: Eleonora Narvselius, The Nation’s Brightest and Noblest: Narrative Identity and Empowering Accounts of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia in post-1991 Lviv (Linköping: Linköping University Press, 2009).

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ent.25 Breslau in today’s Poland, and with it the city’s German heritage, no longer has the taboo status which led writer Andrzej Zawada to describe it as a “Bresław”: city that had “amputated [its] memory.”26 This taboo was propelled, as is well known, by propaganda asserting the city’s supposed UrPolishness through Piast origins, which, in practical terms, meant negating German traces, proscribing the use of the language and removing many outward signals of it including signage—but, curiously, deeming palatable the faithful reconstruction of much of the historic city center, including various churches, the main square and Ratusz / Rathaus.27 Nevertheless, one cannot speak of a  full and frank public embrace of Wrocław’s German past through official channels. There has been modest aesthetic interest in German heritage through the internationally successful crime novels by Marek Krajewski, all set in Breslau, and a straightforward, periodized account of the city’s history in exhibitions at the main museum, that is, one that makes no attempt to set up an overarching counter-narrative of “Polish” ownership, as under communism (or as the Lviv museum does with a Ukrainian narrative). However, there is nothing as comparably explicit as the Lviv month on the official level. Indeed, the ESK’s approach to German heritage, while not entirely absent, has been rather subtle, for reasons that others have discussed.28 Moreover, the population still appear overwhelmingly resistant to, or ignorant of, its German heritage.29 What is present instead is a vague discourse of “European multiculturalism” for the city, propagated through official channels including the City Council, which consists of emphasizing its multifarious “European” roots in generalized terms. The German past is a part of that, of course, but not one that is discussed with any separate emphasis. Rather, the approach is to “layer” the city’s historical elements, Piast, Habsburg, German, Polish and so on, as with an archaeo25

 This is the theme of a doctoral thesis being completed by Annabelle Chapman at the University of Oxford, focusing on the milieu of academic historians at the city’s post-1945 refounded “Polish” University, entitled, “Becoming Lower Silesian.” 26  Andrzej Zawada, Bresław (Wrocław: Okis, 1996). 27  Gregor Thum, Uprooted. How Breslau became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions. Translated by Tom Lampert and Allison Brown. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 28  See the essay in this volume by Ewa Sidorenko on Chris Baldwin’s artistic vision as part of the ESK. 29  See the essay in this volume by Barbara Pabjan on silences and ignorance towards German heritage.

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logical dig or a form of palimpsest, no one layer being given special privilege. This, for instance, is the impression conveyed by the officially commissioned volume Microcosm, emblematically subtitled: Portrait of a Central European City, by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse.30 It is further embodied in the city’s slogan, taken from Pope John Paul II’s description of Wrocław as “the meeting place” (Polish: miasto spotkań); in the council’s brief run-through of the city’s history on its website; and in the program of the ESK as described. Interestingly, in my 2015 study, this was a narrative that Germans living as a  minority in the city had themselves absorbed, one they internalized and repeated back as a way of expressing comfort with a hybrid identity that was neither exclusively “Polish” nor “German.”31 One can easily speculate that this “European” identity could be as much a reaction to communism as a conscious attempt to sublimate any German elements. However, it does take a particular structure, one that is mirrored by similar attempts from the City Council in Lviv to shape that city’s public image. Being “European” obviously holds special emotional appeal, not least given the ongoing conflict in Ukraine’s East with Russia at the time of writing (2017), but also for the city’s status within the Ukrainian canon: links with European heritage lend apparent prestige and authority to that western polarity with the country’s sometimes diffuse and fraught politics of identity. Accordingly, the “European” elements are played up, particularly its Habsburg heritage, again, having clear prestige. The City Council’s website mentions such elements as the invention of the gas lamp in the city during this period, amid a number of notable “European” firsts for Lviv.32 The Polish elements are not afforded special attention, analogously with the German ones in Wrocław; while the city’s official slogan, and also its logo, superficially carry a similar sentiment to that of Wrocław’s: “open to the world,” with the logo comprising the outline of holy buildings relevant to four of the city’s major faiths and attendant ethnic groups (absent is a synagogue, also absent in the physical landscape of the city after 1945, an aspect discussed below). The initial impression is of vague pluralism; Polish aspects are woven into a wider narrative, not spelled out, and the refrain is to emphasize a presentist definition of territory, as with the “firsts”—e.g., the Gazeta Lwowska is described as 30

 Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm. Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). 31  Pyrah, “Germans in Wrocław.” 32  http://www.lviv.ua/en/first_in_lviv/.

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the first newspaper in “Ukraine” (and Poland), the first football match having a Ukrainian player rather than the fact the teams were both “Polish,” and so on.33 Europe becomes a  cipher through which national history is filtered, with the intention to show that Poland and Ukraine respectively are assertively European, belonging to the mainstream of its history (note again the subtitle of Davies’ book, “Central” and not “Eastern” European). These cities stake a vocal claim to that heritage, through the narrative efforts of the City Council and historians, through grand-scale cultural initiatives like the ESK and the European Football Championship of 2012 (which included matches in Wrocław and Lviv), and other ones of a smaller scale taking place locally. However, herein lies the key difference: whereas Wrocław’s embrace of European heritage is rather generalized, on occasion looking eastward to Lviv, or by another definition, inwardly towards Poland’s past, Lviv tends to highlight the Habsburg elements of its history at the expense of others.34 Drawing conclusions about this a priori is difficult, but it does speak to differences of detail and degree at the local level. Dealings with Jewish heritage offer one example, although they present a complex case that clearly exceeds the bounds of this essay. However, one very visible, official and illustrative example may be adduced: the rehabilitation of important central synagogue sites in each city. In Wrocław’s case, the White Stork Synagogue was rebuilt and reopened in 2010 through the efforts of the Bente Kahan Foundation, which was established in 2006 to “[honour and preserve] the 800-year-old history of Jews in Wrocław and Lower Silesia.” The restoration project was funded directly by the City Council as part of a consortium including the foundation, a European Economic Area grant and the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland,35 while the council also co-funds the Cultural and Educational Centre attached to the synagogue. The synagogue in turn forms a central and arguably leading part of an offi33

 http://www.lviv.ua/en/first_in_lviv/first_newspaper/.  For a historical (non-presentist) view of the city’s Habsburg period, see Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg. Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2009). 35  Information leaflet, “Centrum Kultury i Edukacji Żydowskiej w Synagodze pod Białym Bocianem,” published by the Fundacja Bente Kahan and explicitly (in the document’s coda, in Polish and English) “co-financed by the City of Wrocław.” Undated [2010?]. From a British Library collection of documents pertaining to an exhibition from 2010 by the foundation entitled Historia Odzyskana [History reclaimed]. Shelfmark: YF.2016.b.1636. 34

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cially promoted “Four Denominations District,” conceived in 1996 with cultural walking routes, and themed architectural and culinary experiences. It was described [in 2018] on the city’s official tourist website as follows: The Four Denominations District hosts many cultural and educational events. The Synagogue is a  place of special meaning. It hosts many artistic events, every summer there are concerts and exhibitions organised under the name “Summer in The White Stork Synagogue.36

The language on one level befits the broad “multiculturalism” described, turning Wrocław into a theme park of layered European and, on this example, religious and denominatory histories within its officially curated built environment; but it also, potentially, shows a specific focus on the city’s specifically Jewish heritage—one which a strand of German historiography in particular over the last two decades has given relatively substantive airing (pertaining of course to pre-1945 Breslau, over different eras and aspects).37 Controversies over Jewish history and heritage projects in both Poland and Ukraine are familiar, and this essay does not seek to weigh or compare them in any normative sense. Nevertheless, notwithstanding occasional controversies over historical or other forms of alleged Polish anti-Semitism, efforts to progress with restoring Jewish heritage in West Ukraine, for a range of reasons, has certainly been markedly slower, and of a specific character. These reasons have not always been bureaucratic, to follow Omer Bartov’s analysis of areas beyond Lviv.38 In Lviv, heritage efforts revolve around creating memorial sites rather than reconstruction per se, and have proceeded largely through a  combination of external efforts and funding, plus civic and academic initiatives. Most notably, the “Spaces of Synagogues” project is run by the well-regarded international academic institute in the city, the Lviv Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, working in partner36

 Source: https://visitWrocław.eu/en/place/four-denominations-district. Last visited: 11 December 2018. 37  Examples include Katharina Friedla, Juden in Breslaw / Wrocław 1933–1949. Überlebensstrategien, Selbstbehauptung und Verfolgungserfahrungen (Böhlau: Cologne, 2015); Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer. Die Bezeihungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2000). 38  Omer Bartov, Erased. Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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ship with the German GIZ foundation, with the official sanction of the City Council. At least three sites were at the time of writing in various states of rehabilitation as memorials (conserving the remains of the Golden Rose Synagogue; memorializing the site once occupied by the Beth Hamidrash building; plus a  planned commemoration on the site of the former Great City Synagogue). Mayor Andrij Sadovy’s words in an official booklet used for Jewish audiences strike a highly engaged and conciliatory tone, highlighting the process while also acknowledging difficulties: Although numerous measures have been carried out to rehabilitate our historical city, there is still much to be done to acknowledge and preserve our Jewish heritage. […] That is why Lviv’s city authorities have initiated projects to commemorate sites of Jewish history. Together with the Lviv Center for Urban History and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, we have consulted experts and conducted studies to fund concepts for memorializing sites that were and are significant to Lviv’s and the world’s Jewish community, and which are now under the ownership of the municipality. I believe our actions and our approach towards this important but often-neglected part of our history will be an example to others in the rest of Ukraine.39

These examples of present-day Jewish heritage, and how it is integrated into otherwise nationally-bound narratives of the city, again shows the importance of local variance and context beyond the structural parallels.

Place: Between Local, National, and Specific Deeper differences, beyond the parallel use of national frames of reference for public identity construction under communism and subsequently, come to light at the micro level in both cities. In a partner study to the one I mentioned above, which asked the German minority in present-day Wrocław 39

 Uploaded scan of an official pamphlet authored by Sofia Dyak and Iris Gleichmann, “Space of Synagogues. Jewish History, Common Heritage and Responsibility” (published jointly by the named sponsors, dated 2015). Source: http:// jewish.lviv.travel/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Synagoge-Square-Projekt_ booklet_151013.pdf. Last accessed: 11 December 2018.

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how they perceived their identity, Poles in contemporary Lviv gave very different responses.40 In contrast to the Germans, who largely verbalized comfort with ethnic and cultural hybridity living in Wrocław, the Poles of Lviv tended instead to reproduce articulations of ethnic separation, even when explicitly (and unprompted) conscious of the fact that ethnicity in their borderland context, e.g., through frequent instances of intermarriage, was an unstable category. Indeed, the overwhelming tendency in mixed marriages was to make a strategic choice of ethnic group and then follow the attendant cultural practices, language and school of instruction, plus religion, as the primary route for their children. Not so in Wrocław. In short, ethnicity in Lviv remained subject to careful marking and separation. While broad conclusions are difficult to draw from single cases, the very fact these were so different highlights important divergences of detail beyond the structural parallels. To be sure, these are not identical cultural contexts, and the studies in question looked at differently freighted historical minorities: for instance, there are some several thousand Poles in Lviv, but just several hundred Germans in Wrocław, for cities comparable in size.41 However, the interviewees were also responding consciously to the subtly different narratives around identity for the cities in which they live, and how they as minorities fitted into the historical constructions imposed by authorities up to the present day. In other words, the content of how history has been framed and used is salient and varied. The findings, moreover, chime with those of psychologist Maria Lewicka, who concluded on the basis of interview material that, for both cities: collective memory showed a  powerful ethnic bias […], but with different underlying mechanisms: predictors of the bias were national identity in Lviv and demographic variables (age) and lack of place identity in Wrocław. Place (city) was constructed as national symbol in Lviv, and as an autonomous entity in Wrocław.42

40

 Pyrah, “Place, Borderland, and Elective Affinities.”  Wrocław’s population in 2016 was around 640k, Lviv’s 730k. Source: http://un.data. org. 42  Maria Lewicka, “Place attachment, place identity, and place memory: Restoring the forgotten city past,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 28 (2008): 209–231 (209). 41

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Historiography offers one basic explanation for the differences. As mentioned, the sentiments towards Wrocław from both Polish and German sides, albeit for different reasons, are relatively weak in terms of their expression through the historical canon. For example, contrast the manufactured claim to the recovered territories with the passionately held and much longer standing rival Polish and Ukrainian ones to Lviv. The rhetoric around Wrocław under communism may have sounded tough, but was long undermined by a sense of impermanence among Poles living there, indeed, one which right across the region led to the phenomenon of so-called unwanted towns.43 After the collapse of communism, this rhetorical construction of place, supported by weakly rooted national claims, appears to have collapsed, certainly to judge by Lewicka’s results. Rhetoric around Lviv, meanwhile, matched longstanding rivalry asserted by gun and sword, albeit not always defined in the modern terms of nationality, that was then codified into oral and cultural memory in families and respective their national canons.44 Moreover, such stereotypes to some extent persist in modified form up to the present. The “nostalgic” works in Polish, despite lacking direct restorative ownership claims, still project an emotional form of attachment, while some works in Ukrainian express a teleology towards the city’s history that, in effect, stresses all historical paths as leading to the national outcome we see today.45 To a certain extent, this teleology is mirrored by the ostensibly “European” narrative put forward for Lviv by the Council, notably through its emphasis on the city’s Habsburg heritage. To be sure, this prestigious legacy is highly visible in the city center’s UNESCO-listed architecture, and clearly offers Lviv an attractive calling card of international renown, as well as a ready invitation for locals and visitors to reflect on its multiethnic history, according to one view.46 Closer inspection indeed seems to tell a story of a place in variegated terms, since the architects were largely local (not “Austrian”), that is, Polish and other ethnicities. The Lychakiv cemetery also tells

43

 Zdzisław Mach, Niechciane Miasta. Migracja i tożsamość społeczna (Cracow: Universitas, 1998). 44  The long pedigree of mutual stereotyping between Poles and Ukrainians is discussed by Andrew Wilson in The Ukrainians. Unexpected Nation 2nd edn. (New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene, 2002), 105–6. 45  E.g., Istoriya Lvova, Yaroslav Isayevych, ed. M. Lytvyn and F. Stebliy (Lviv: Tsentr Yevropy, 2007). 46  See Lviv. A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture, ed. J. Czaplicka.

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a “story” that is ethnically very diverse, and through the presence of parallel and equally assertive Polish and Ukrainian military mausoleums, reminds us of ethnic conflict. However, the framing of the past tends instead to reinforce a Ukrainian narrative, namely, by lending any European prestige specifically to the national, albeit set up in terms of the city as a crucible of that nation. It also parallels a strand among local intellectuals in the 1990s to celebrate the “Galician,” that is, regional aspects of Lviv’s identity, in dimensions that were explicitly cast as “Habsburg.”47 In terms of any teleology, Lewicka’s interview results speak to this reading; as does the canon, which underscores the “nation-first” approach.48 Furthermore, as quoted, the City Council stresses the city’s past achievements as very much part of a presentist narrative about Ukraine: if large numbers of tourists were their main goal, they might consider narratives more explicitly tailored to the city’s Polish or Jewish history, for instance, but this is not the case. As with the city museum’s exhibits staying silent on non-Ukrainian aspects, the city’s political leanings are towards Ukrainian nationalism, albeit one that asserts a “European” dimension to shore up its own status within a fractured internal discussion. Here is the City Council once more: There is no false modesty when Lvivers [sic] express themselves loudly and proudly, stating that Lviv has always been the most civilized European city in Ukraine, and can even measure up to Europe itself. Moreover, anything and everything could be done in Lviv—the very first, the best, the biggest, the most progressive written works, publications, constructions, inventions, or creations.49

The school subject of Lvovoznavstvo, loosely translated as “Lviv Studies,” offers another illustrative point of difference from Wrocław. Its presence shows the extent to which official views of city history and identity in Lviv both matter to locals, and are channeled accordingly, again following a gently

47

 See Lidia Stefanowska, “Back to the Golden Age: The Discourse of Nostalgia in Galicia in the 1990s” in Contemporary Ukraine on the Cultural Map of Europe, ed. M. L. Larissa Zaleska Onyshkevych and Maria G. Rewakowicz (London: Routledge, 2014), 219–30. 48  On Lviv’s ethnic separations, see Marian Rybchak, “Ethnohistorical Construction of Identity: The Lviv Paradigm,” National Identities 2 (2000): 21–34. 49  Source: http://www.lviv.ua/en/first_in_lviv/.

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teleological approach. Nevertheless, however selective or partial the history teaching is, depending on one’s view, the presentation of longer-term history, from the city’s founding by Prince Danylo in 1256 onwards, offers a  clear framework for cultural memory and common points of reference for society within a set canon. This is something that people in Wrocłav, according to recent research, appear to lack, instead referring to grand-scale “shared experiences” that do not have specifically national points of anchorage, such as the devastating city floods of 1997.50

Summative Thoughts Here we reach a paradox: is the sense of place in Wrocław more “locally specific” than in Lviv, insofar as it depends less on being linked to a  national narrative? Or does Lviv’s official definition, in some people’s terms as both cradle and engine of the (Ukrainian) nation, offer an alternative kind of specificity that is no less “local”? Of course, to some extent the question is redundant, but the wider point in the case of any apparent parallels between their 20th-century fates, is that they are significantly different from each other in content. This being said, there is nascent evidence that official approaches to city identity, using history, have not fully excluded alternative vectors, in particular, the possibility of defining the city beyond national categories altogether, despite the efforts of those in control of official channels. Certainly, cited interview material contains responses that do consciously and actively pitch for the “center ground” of placeness as the sum of its historical peregrinations and different ethnic influences past and present, rather than one dominant element. In short, this is a pitch for place on its own terms. For Lviv, for example, this meant people asserting that its status above all is a historical “mix” of nationalities and remaining so underneath the surface today, including such minorities as Lemkos among others. However, these responses were few in number and typically from intellectuals or people working in the media, and so perhaps by exposure if not by definition they were more open to question national categories.51 Indeed, the overall trend was a curious inversion: people in Wrocław tended to overplay its generalized Europeanness

50

 See Pabjan’s essay in this volume.  Pyrah, “Place, Borderland and Elective Affinities.”

51

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and “mix of cultures,” in a situation that is relatively monoethnic, in contrast with more “mixed” Lviv, where ethnic categories were emphasized.52 These results by themselves are of course not wholly conclusive beyond telling us about these particular samples, drawn from present-day “historical minorities”; yet they do fit the patterns we see in historiography, and through official constructions of the respective cities’ identity as outlined. They also, I would suggest, give pause when considering the broad sweep with which we often characterize grand-scale events in East-Central Europe, especially from a western gaze.53 It suggests we might take a more granular approach to understanding the variegated ways in which “place” is constructed, construed and contested at a local level, beyond such processes as population transfers, communist control and the (re)emergence of sovereign nation-states, as well as the need for multiple perspectives wherever possible. Indeed, this essay has consciously focused on the two dominant national narratives in each city from a  present-day perspective, yet the briefly adduced example of Jewish aspects within present day City Council narratives points to the considerable scope beyond—taking into account “outside” angles and actors, and the interplay between narratives, across different languages. For this reason, collected volumes lend themselves well to comparative historical subjects such as the one under scrutiny, where single authors struggle to cover the range of bases to write a truly integrative history. The general histories of these cities, meanwhile, are by now well known through work in several languages, and especially in the case of Wrocław, through widely accessible historical accounts sold in mainstream bookshops. 54 One might consider the essays in this volume, therefore, as contributions to the wider narrative of place in each case; as ways of breaking apart and understanding that concept both within and beyond the confines of the national, and of the grand-scale processes to which each city, in parallel, was subjected. After all, place may be something understood subjectively—a place called simply “here,” as ethnographic researchers have pointed out when looking at non- or pre-national populations—or else just “home.” 52

 Pyrah, “Germans in Wrocław.”  This was one of the criticisms, for example, of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010). I discuss this fully in my article “From ‘Borderland’ via ‘Bloodlands’ to Heartland? Recent Western Historiography of Ukraine,” The English Historical Review, 129 (2014): 139–56. 54  See Thum, Uprooted and Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm. 53

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If this subjectivity matters as much as the adoption of, or interaction with, top-down narratives, then showcasing a kaleidoscopic range of ways in which place is construed, contributing to a polyphonic “story,” is at least one tentative way out of the heuristic trap of looking with a singular lens. It is also an invitation to investigate further the relationships between subjectivity, locality and nation, around which definitions of place coalesce in particular cities; and to probe other “parallel” cases that connect in ways beyond the national, for instance as types of historical urban center, or else as “European zones.” This might afford insight into the mechanisms used to construct and contest such identities. It also might, as is starting to happen for instance in Lviv today, give civil society the tools to form cohesive societies more at ease with their multiethnic pasts, and to question narrative absences or erasures (e.g., of Jewish history), while helping people of non-normative ethnic backgrounds also to call them “home.”

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Population Movement and the Liberal State: The Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne and the Regulation of Labor Migration from Lviv’s Hinterlands Keely Stauter-Halsted

Introduction: Lviv as a Nexus for Galician Labor Migration At the dawn of the 20th century, Lviv was the center of a vibrant international labor market. Dozens of employment agencies, travel bureaus, and shops teemed with every manner of goods designed to outfit the intrepid migrant for work abroad. Near the Jugendstil train station in the Krakowskie district, prospective emigrants could stock up on everything from starter seeds to “western” dress and rifles to defend themselves from hostile neighbors in the New World. Polish and Ruthenian peasants, along with their Jewish neighbors, came here in search of information about work abroad, to obtain documents for crossing the border, and to purchase rail and steamer tickets at the travel agencies and shipping company offices that lined Na Błonie and Grodecka streets near the station. The North German Lloyd Bremen Firm opened its doors next to the Hamburg-America Line. Just around the corner was Goldlust and Company, the agency with exclusive rights to book passage on Austro-American steamers out of Trieste.1 In addition to these official outlets, an underground world of informal and unlicensed travel agencies, employment brokers, “fixers,” philanthropic societies and religious associations crisscrossed the city, all promising the client safe passage, a swift border crossing, 1

 The North German Lloyd was at ulica Grodecka 93. I. Ettinger’s bureau was next door at Grodecka 95. Goldlust i Spółka, selling tickets on the Austro-American line out of Trieste, was on the adjacent street at ulica Na Błonie 2. Polski Przegląd Emigracyjny, 25 January 1908, 16; 10 February 1908, 15; 10 March 1908, 16.

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lucrative employment and the prospect of sending remittances home to their families. Fraud, corruption, and abuse were rampant in this emigration free-for all; peasant leaders, gentry landowners, Galician officials, and the clergy all cried out for government protection to aid vulnerable Austrian subjects en route to foreign shores. Not far from the rough and tumble world of the railway district rose the stately columns of the provincial parliament building, the Galician Sejm, whose elected representatives were also preoccupied with the spike in labor migration.2 Galician experts, concerned about the impact of a depleted population on the local economy, conducted studies on rural poverty, disease, shrinking landholdings, and the shortage of local industry in their efforts to trace the sources of the mass exodus.3 Yet for all their research and policy recommendations, the movement of people continued. New regulations limiting eligibility for departure and encouraging stricter enforcement at the border did little to staunch the flood of migrants. In desperation, officials trained their attention on the shadowy figure of the migration “agent.” Variously characterized as a “hyena,” a “kaftan,” and a charlatan, the malevolent migration facilitator soon became a  central trope in discussions about emigration. If authorities could find a way to limit the influence of these nefarious figures, they might be able to slow the tide of people leaving the empire.4 The Galician Sejm was not alone in its deliberations. Governments across the region imposed restrictions on travelers even during the golden era of human movement before the First World War. Tara Zahra has described emigration from Central Europe in the late 19th century as a process that European governments “manipulated like the steam valve on a teapot,” reflecting the growing belief that “people could be scientifically managed like any other 2

 Karl Baedeker, Austria-Hungary, with Excursions to Cetinje, Belgrade, and Bucharest: Handbook for Travellers (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, Publisher, 1911), 378–80. 3  See, for example, Stanisław Szczepanowski, Nędza Galicyi w cyfrach i program energicznego rozwoju gospodarstwa krajowego (Lwów: Gubrynowicz i Schmidt, 1888); Tadeusz Pilat, Wiadomości statystyczne o stosunkach krajowych (Lwów, 1881); and Leopold Caro, Lichwa na wsi w latach 1875–1891 (Lwów, 1893). Caro would later document the rates and implications of peasant migration in Emigracja i polityka emigracyjna (Poznań, 1914). 4  On representations of agents in contemporary Polish publications, see Benjamin P. Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Adam Walaszek, “Politycy, agenci i chłopi polscy w Kanadzie (przed 1914 r.),” Przegląd Polonijny 4 (2002): 41–60.

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natural resource.” 5 Adam McKeown has similarly shown that the flow of migrants was never entirely free, even as industrialization in the United States created a booming labor market.6 In the Habsburg case, officials sought to restrict emigration, reducing the dangers to travelers, while also protecting the needs of the state. Yet the pressure in peasant communities to seek employment abroad continued, driven by rural over-population, land shortages, high rates of indebtedness, crop failure and the absence of industry. Rather than mitigating these hardships, Habsburg officials chose to blame migration “agitators” and “speculators” for their exaggerated promises of the riches to be obtained overseas. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing until the outbreak of the First World War, the Austrian Reichsrat and the Galician Sejm imposed myriad legal restrictions on the activities of travel agents and ticket sellers. By 1907 these efforts resulted in the creation on the floor of the Sejm of a new partially public association, the Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne [Polish Emigration Society or PTE] dedicated to monitoring migrants from the moment they decided to leave home until their arrival on foreign shores. This chapter examines Galician governmental efforts to crush the authority of informal agents by introducing an official migration society designed to take over their activities. It draws on Pieter Judson’s recent insights about the dramatic incursion of imperial functions into the everyday lives of Habsburg citizens during the last decades of its rule. “Bureaucracy begat more bureaucracy,” Judson notes, “as popular expectations fueled the state’s expansion” into new realms of activity. But at the same time, as Judson observes, “mobilizing new people into everyday engagement with the empire was an unpredictable process.”7 My work suggests that one of the ways the popular classes made the state “their own” in this period was to challenge, adapt, and ultimately transform the very agencies introduced to help them. This is the story of the Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne. Established out of official concern for the mistreatment of migrants, the association’s peasant constituents quickly embraced it as a vehicle for challenging the regulations it was intended to enforce. The PTE evolved from an institution rooted in Lviv civil society and supported by imperial power 5

 Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2015), 6. 6  Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 7  Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 333–55.

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structures into one whose influence was diffused across the crownland and whose activities drew on the customary practices of rural migrants. Whether the PTE ultimately facilitated an improvement in the treatment of labor migrants is unclear. What is clear is that its practices mirrored many longstanding patterns of migrant behavior, including corruption, the production of false documents, and the facilitation of illegal border crossing, resulting in the association’s ultimate demise as an officially sanctioned institution. The process of bringing labor migration under government control formalized a  practice grounded in customary interactions and personal contacts. The rise of an “official” migration society threatened either to force the familiar figure of the local “fixer” out of the business of long-distance travel arrangements or to compel migrants to violate imperial laws as they exited the country. My research suggests that Galician travelers maneuvered around these increased restrictions and continued to work with migration facilitators of all kinds. They accessed official, unofficial, public, private, familial, philanthropic, and other connections to navigate their passage. Over time, the PTE itself turned to traditional practices (forging documents, smuggling clients across borders, employing subagents) to circumvent imperial regulations. Peasant complaints about the new organization increasingly echoed grievances lodged against private intermediaries, suggesting little difference between the behavior of bureaucratic personnel and private, local contacts. In the end, the Galician government struggled with the challenges of rationalizing the border, suggesting the limitations of controlling the free flow of human movement in an ostensibly liberal state. No longer at the center of the crownland’s regulatory universe in Lviv, semi-official associations such at the PTE were called upon to expand the breadth of their activities, encompassing practices of questionable legality and facilitating border crossings far from the provincial capital.

Migration in a Liberal State For most of its history, the Habsburg state made little effort to restrict the free flow of people across its borders, despite vigorously monitoring internal movement.8 Indeed, Austria was a net importer of migrants during the Abso8

 Andrea Komlosy, “Empowerment and Control: Conflicting Central and Regional Interests in Migration within the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United

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lutist period, recruiting skilled laborers and entrepreneurs from abroad as part of its mercantilist policy.9 The Constitution of 1867 explicitly guaranteed every citizen the right to exit the Habsburg Empire. Until the last quarter of the 19th century this provision was rarely challenged. In the Lviv area, most migration remained local and seasonal, with the city itself attracting high numbers of rural migrants toward the end of the century.10 Polish and Ruthenian laborers from the region also travelled annually to Prussia (“na Saksony”) to work the fields, but returned each year after harvest.11 Others relocated within the Habsburg lands, taking jobs on railroad construction crews, brick works, or mines. In the 1870s, however, a few dozen families from central Galicia began selling their holdings and heading to the Polish “colonies” of Brazil and Argentina. The pace of this transatlantic resettlement remained steady, increasing to about 1,800 individuals per year by 1876, most of them adult men bound for South America, with a few hundred venturing to the United States. That rate tripled in the 1880s, with an average of 5,000 Galicians leaving the crownland each year and a total of over 67,000 departing in the decade from 1880–1890.12 After the flow of peasants to Brazil and Argentina slowed, industrial enterprises in the U.S. and the prairies of Canada began to attract laborers from Galicia. In all, between 1890 and 1910, Galicia lost almost 800,000 people to migration.13

States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period, ed. Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 165. 9  Sylvia Hahn, “Inclusion and Exclusion of Migrants in the Multicultural Realm of the Habsburg ‘State of Many Peoples’,” Histoire sociale / Social History 33, 66 (2000): 307-24. 10  Only about half the residents of Lviv (52.4%) were native to the city in 1900. Hahn, “Inclusion and Exclusion,” 317–319. 11  Leo Lucassen, The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 50–73. 12  Leopold Caro estimated that 67,460 people left Galicia during the 1880s, 17,000 of them headed to other parts of the Empire. Krzysztof Groniowski, Polska emigracja zarobkowa w Brazylii, 1871–1914 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1972), 15–20. 13  Andrzej Pilch, “Emigracja z ziem zaboru austriackiego (od połowy XIX w. do 1918 r,” in Emigracja z ziem polskich w czasach nowożytnych i najnowszych (XVIII–XX w.), ed. Andrzej Pilch (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984), 263.

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Of Agents and Facilitators: Galician Migration before the PTE Awareness of tightening imperial restrictions helped encourage a burgeoning industry in illicit migration assistance. Informal agents were ubiquitous between Lviv and the western border of Galicia, the preferred route for those who wished to leave the state undetected. Travelers from around Lviv generally made their way west, crossing into Prussia and thence to the port cities of Bremen, Hamburg, or Rotterdam. Most avoided Trieste, the only port on Habsburg territory, because of the strict border control to which travelers were subjected before embarking there. Navigating the land border from Galicia into Prussian Silesia was by far the greatest challenge of the journey and migrants devised numerous schemes to avoid detection. Informal agents maintained contacts across the area to help guide their clients over the rough sub-Carpathian terrain. Those involved in this underworld of human smuggling were aware that the Austrian/Prussian border was strictly monitored and, as one confiscated set of traveler instructions noted, it was “difficult to identify a  permanent, specific place” for crossing without problems. Prospective migrants generally approached from the south, travelling through the Carpathian foothills of Nowy Sącz, Żywiec, or Biała, rather than using the northern route from central Galicia. They were instructed to avoid Cracow and its Podgórze suburb, circling the area on foot because authorities often recognized provincial emigrants in these well-patrolled urban areas. Once past Podgórze, migrants might head to the tiny hamlet of Zabiorzów by cart, and from there, travel by rail to the small town of Chełmek. It was essential that undocumented migrants crossed the border into Prussia on foot, thus they were told to exit the train and walk to the Dwory station, where for a fee of some nine złoty in 1892, a contact would conduct them across.14 At every stage of the journey a trusted guide was essential. Confiscated documents recommend that travelers have someone advise them and that they developed a “good understanding with [this] guide and rely on his opinion” of how to behave. Clandestine agents, for example, coached travelers to “have an answer prepared for every question so that your tongue does not get stuck in 14

 Letter from “Przemysław,” dated 10 February 1892, confiscated by the Cracow police. Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie (APKr), K.u.k. Polizei-Direktion in Krakau, 1852-1918, syg. 124 (DPKr 124), 59–60.

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your mouth” in the event they were stopped and questioned. Meanwhile, local experts familiar with the terrain and its risks would direct the migrant safely from one station to the next in this underground railroad of illicit movement. In Biała, we learn that Stanisław Kruszewski served as guide. In Radocza, just north of Wadowice, Wojciech Zieliński would likely conduct travelers to the border, where Marek Kmicki or his assistant Jakob Kęska would personally escort them into Prussia. Alternatively, migrants could seek out Władysław Zając at Tuchów. Finally, and riskiest of all, it was possible to make use of the services of Maria Przeszczbowska in Nowy Targ. Though Przeszczbowska was willing to escort travelers all the way through Kalwaria to Wadowice, and across the border itself, she was known to charge high prices for the service. Travelers were warned that they should “bargain” because the “baba [broad] can rip you off and provide bogus tickets for English steamers that do not exist…and then the money is lost because those tickets have no value at all.” The final alternative was to choose Tomasz Palka, who was deemed a “good guide,” but who lived on the Prussian side of the border. Palka regularly accompanied people from Kalwaria and Cracow personally and was reputed to provide them with sound advice about the border crossing.15 Who were these mediators guiding peasant travelers out of the Monarchy and how did they come to be experts in circumventing international borders? The above instructions from a guide named “Przemysław,” describe a migration network consisting entirely of Christian-sounding names; elsewhere ticket agents explicitly advertised their status as the “sole Christian agency in Lviv.” Habsburg administrators, however, tended to highlight the Jewish background of informal migration facilitators, often stressing connections between agents’ religious background and their presumed greed or untrustworthiness. The famous Wadowice Trial of 1889–1890 featuring sixty-five Jewish travel agents in the West Galician border town of Oświęcim helped establish the stereotype of the corrupt and dishonest Jewish handler intent on defrauding poor peasants out of their last grosz.16 Later, Austrian police were on the lookout for one Abraham Keller from Mielec in the early 1900s, claiming he

15

 “Przemysław,” 10 February 1892, (APKr), K.u.k. Polizei-Direktion in Krakau, 1852–1918, syg. 124 (DPKr 124), 59–60. 16  On the Wadowice trial, see Tara Zahra, “Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in East Central Europe, 1889–1989,” Past & Present 223, 1 (2014): 161–93.

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operated an “entire gang of illegal agents.” 17 Yet Keller’s activities likely did not challenge the peasantry’s expectations for how local contacts operated: he worked with his father and brothers, relying on “local acquaintances” to squire people across the sub-Carpathian countryside then over the German border en route to northern port cities. The authorities’ main complaint about Keller’s operation was that it focused on transporting “hundreds of military recruits” from the Mielec district to America, a service many peasant laborers no doubt welcomed.18 Jews also managed most formal travel bureaus and ticket agencies so peasants were accustomed to turning to them for help with their travel arrangements. The main agent for the Austro-American Shipping Line was Goldlust and Company, whose Lviv offices were staffed entirely by Jews. Even regional travel bureaus like that of Jadwiga Kronhelm, who arranged transport on the Hamburg-America line in Trzebinia, employed primarily Jewish subagents including one Dawid Kupermann.19 Police paid particular attention to these Jewish business people, but peasants may well have viewed their activities as a mere outgrowth of the traditional Jewish function as middlemen in the rural economy. Gazeta Lwowska, the newspaper of record for the Galician autonomous administration, complained of the profits Jewish kantors [currency exchangers] were making on funds sent from America back to Galicia. Though peasants could collect their remittances for a  lower fee at provincial exchange houses, the paper noted, operators such as the “Jew” Schellenberg helped drum up business by painting “colorful descriptions from across the Atlantic,” drawing “beautiful fantasies like a mirage.”20 Here and elsewhere, Galician authorities equated profit from migration transactions with fraud. Ticket agents, steamer companies, money changers, even those who wrote correspondence for illiterate peasants requesting information about travel arrangements—all were viewed with suspicion because they facilitated the exodus of crownland residents.

17

 C.k. Namiestnictwo do Starosty w Chrzanowie, “J. Schraub—Mielec, Abraham Keller—Kraków, agenci emigracyjni” Lwów, 11 April 1908, APKr StCh I 126. 18  Wysokie c.k. Prezydium Policyi w Krakowie, 4 November 1913, APKr, k.u.k. Polizei-Direktion in Krakau, 1852–1918 (DPKr 124), 439. 19  “Protokół spisany dnia 6 listopada 1913 w c.k. Dyrekcyi Policyi w Krakowie z Dawidem Kupermannem w sprawie biura Jadwigi Kronhelmowej oraz krakowskiej representacyi ‘Austro-Amerykany,’” APKr DPKr 124, 453–54. 20  “Sprawy krajowa: Emigracya włościańska,” Gazeta Lwowska, 21 March 1884, 1–2.

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For the most part, the function of migration facilitator evolved organically from personal connections in the village. As Grzegorz Kowalski explains, during the early years of labor migration, “emigration helpers were physical people, usually well known in their environment, such as innkeepers, merchants, or even petty officials,” rather than formal agencies.21 Prospective migrants turned to commune secretaries, mayors, priests, or schoolteachers to help purchasing tickets or arranging work abroad.22 They made use of family ties to complete travel arrangements. The customary nature of these interactions, growing out of longstanding relationships in the countryside, may explain why a 1910 request from the Lviv Governor General asking all district governors about migration agitators in their region was largely answered in the negative. “No one in this gmina has ever urged the population to emigrate,” reported one village mayor. “No agents have tried to recruit people to America,” recounted the head of gmina Kościelec, on the Bohemian border. Rather, those who were already working abroad “arranged things through an intermediary that already emigrated to America or through acquaintances,” without relying on a  formal “agent.” In gmina Młoszowa, near Oświęcim on the Prussian border, we learn that “there are no agents [here] who have recruited workers to America. […] The people here do emigrate for work but not through any agents, rather they go where someone knows them well.” And in the village of Brodia, those who left to work in the United States did so “through their family or other relatives, etc. who have already been in America a long time.”23 In the customary world of rural Galicia, the logistics of migration were experienced as an extension of other practices: correspondence with authorities, the search for non-agricultural jobs, the maintenance of family ties or the cultivation of patronage. 21

 Grzegorz M. Kowalski, “Instytucje organizujące wychodźstwo w Galicji w latach 1901–1914: Organizacja, działalność, propaganda emigracyna,” in Wielokulturowość Polskiego pogranicza: Ludzie—idee—prawo, ed. Adam Lityński and Piotr Fiedorczyk (Białystok, 2003), 381–82; Michał Starczewski, Agenci emigracyjni na ziemiach polskich przed 1914 r (Warsaw, 2010). 22  See letters written on behalf of Fedio Biabicz [also spelled Babec here], Skorodne, Lisko district, to Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne, January 3, 1912, APKr SKKKr 529, 1441–45; Mirel Leie Ringel of Komarno bei Lemberg wrote to ask that her ticket be issued to her agent, December 27, 1912, APKr Sąd Krajowy Karny w Krakowie (SKKKr) 530a, 1913. 23  C.k. Namietnictwo do wszystkich c.k. Starostw, Lwów, 31 January 1910, “Emigracya do Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki,” APKr StCh I Sig. 126.

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The Official Response Even as Galician laborers treated emigration as part of their life world, often returning to their native villages after a stint abroad and resuming their premigration activities, the government in Lviv intensified its efforts to limit movement out of the province.24 By the 1890s, the crownland administration was in full panic about the 300,000 residents who left the province during the last decade of the century, the majority of them Polish-speakers. The pace of departure quickened in the first years of the 20th century as Ruthenian peasants bound for Canada joined their Polish neighbors. In all over three-quarters of a million residents left Galicia between 1890 and 1910. This number hardly depleted the total population of the crownland, which grew from 6.4 to 8 million inhabitants in the same period, but the provincial government nonetheless felt called upon to respond.25 Galician officialdom and the rural population experienced this steady movement of people in contrasting ways. For peasant migrants, a sojourn abroad, whether temporary or permanent, helped sustain the family farm, introducing a modicum of financial stability into the otherwise fragile existence of family farmers. Far from draining the community’s resources, regular remittances from across the ocean underpinned the life cycle of subsistence farmers, permitting them to remain on the land. American dollars (or German marks or French francs) helped peasants construct houses, repair parishes, pay for schools, purchase arable land, establish dowries, or buy out the inheritance of siblings. From the perspective of many poor families, migration was a net positive.26

24

 On return migration from the United States, see Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 25  Polish Catholics predominated in the earlier migration waves to Latin America and the U.S. (170,000 Poles vs. 100,000 Ruthenians and 30,000 Jews), while Ruthenians were predominant in the decade from 1900–1910 after the Canadian-Pacific Railway opened up the interior of Canada for settlement (225,000 Ruthenians; 155,000 Poles; 86,000 Jews). Pilch, “Emigracja z ziem zaboru austriackiego,” 263. 26  This migration pattern may have contributed to slower economic development in the Polish lands as remittances from abroad helped maintain subsistence farming. Ewa Morawska, “Labor Migrations of Poles in the Atlantic World Economy, 1880– 1914,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 2 (1989): 237–272.

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Crownland officials saw the exodus in a different light. Administrators in Lviv struggled to gain control over the chaotic population movement, viewing it as a “sort of mass hysteria, a mob action, in which the individual participants were incapable of rational consideration or appraisal of the realities of their existence.”27 Newspapers referred to the “mysterious upheaval” unfolding in Polish and Ruthenian villages each spring as the population “stirred up” to go abroad.28 Economists and policy makers believed the loss of manpower meant a shortage of agricultural employees, untilled farmland, and rising labor costs. Sejm deputy and economist Leopold Caro claimed that local economies suffered when whole villages pulled up stakes and relocated. As a consequence, “crops are often left in the field, potatoes rot because of a lack of working hands; a shortage of farmworkers and girls to pasture cattle leads to general misery.”29 Galician Sejm Deputy Zygmunt Lasocki similarly campaigned to stop the flow of migrants, bidding local governors to “realize the harm this shameless exploitation is having on the local economy and try to put an end to it.”30 Even more urgent than the perceived damage to the local economy was the demographic imbalance the loss of Polish-speaking peasants portended. In the early years of transatlantic migration, Roman Catholics Polish speakers left the crownland in significantly larger numbers than their Ruthenian neighbors. This lopsided exodus threatened to upset power relations between Poles and Ruthenians. Galician authorities consequently sought to channel prospective migrants from over-populated areas of western Galicia to move to the eastern territories where “land is more available” rather than migrating abroad and encouraged Polish landholders in this area to sell plots to Roman Catholic migrants. In barely veiled racist tones, officials argued that importing Polishspeakers would replace “ineffective” Ruthenian farmhands in Lviv’s hinterland and bring about “the enrichment of the economy.” “Where there were once idlers or workers from the muck of proletarian peasants, who came from families that tended toward the more capricious and lazy,” the migrating “pigeons” from western Galicia would help “develop a new love of work and a renewed 27

 Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 133.  “Ludzie czy szakale: Emigranci a Towarzystwa przewozowe i ich agenci,” Gazeta Ludowa, 4 August 1912, 4. 29  Caro, Emigracya i polityka emigracyna, 7. 30  PAN KR, 4094, “Materialy Zygmunta Lasockiego dot. Emigracji Polaków do Kanady;” “Emigration parasites,” Gazeta Powszechna, 24 March 1910, 3. 28

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interest in the future,” perhaps even expanding the ethnic Polish footprint of the provincial capital to encompass the rural areas surrounding it.31 Not only did mass migration hurt the agricultural economy and upset the crownland’s ethnic balance, it also threatened to destabilize the Empire by undermining Austrian military preparedness. As heightened tensions with Austria’s neighbors increased the demand for military conscripts, the search for illegal emigrants intensified. In 1890 alone 212 conscription aged-men bound for the border were detained in Cracow.32 By 1912, war in the Balkans prompted thousands of young men to migrate abroad to avoid being called up. The crownland found itself short 80,000 men in the annual call up in 1913, most of them lost to emigration. The shortfall, according to the Governor General, was “catastrophic” for the imperial state and crownland alike. Police arrested an average of ten illegal migrants per day at the Cracow train station in October 1913, most of them laborers from farther east, bound for the border with Prussia.33 Galician officials treated these swells of emigration as irrational forces, labeling them “fevers” and marking the decision to leave as “contagious.” Once awakened, the frenzy was said to infect “ever-widening circles around it like an epidemic.”34 Peasants set out “blindly” in droves, “recklessly” picking up and moving. The process, as Benjamin Murdzek has described it, was presented, as mentioned above, a  sort of “mass hysteria, a mob action, in which the individual participants were incapable of rational consideration.” The emigrants themselves were thus “victims of mass suggestibility,” motivated by “emotion rather than rational self-interest.”35 The key to this irrational movement was the crafty migration facilitator, who painted life in the new world in such glowing colors that villagers were unable to apply reason to their decisions. These “agitator speculators” and their agents offered Galician residents “golden hope” and “exaggerated promises” of life on foreign shores. Fraudulent agents, government spokesmen asserted, “extorted from [the peasants] their last grosz and left them without the means to live…in a faraway land.” For the most part, “all of the promises

31

 “Sprawy krajowe: Emigracya włościańska,” Gazeta Lwowska, 22 March 1884 (nr. 69), 2. 32  Pilch, “Emigracja z ziem zaboru austriackiego,” 259–61. 33  Marcin Nadobnik, “Kronika Galicyjska: Emigracya w roku 1913,” Ekonomista 14, 1 (1914): 232–234; Zahra, The Great Departure, 55–59. 34  “Sprawy krajowe: Emigracya włościańska,” 2. 35  Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 133.

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of emigration agents about easy earnings in America turn out to be…false and unsubstantiated,” officials in Lviv warned.36 The prime mover of emigration for nearly every upper-class observer was the figure of the agent, “a Pied Piper who was leading the ignorant masses to their inevitable doom.”37 By 1913, the danger to the Austrian state and the stability of the Galician crownland was so great that Governor General Bobrzyński exhorted his district administrators to take every caution to shut down the abuses of migration agents. “There is absolutely no doubt that the cause of this movement is the increasingly intense agitation from agents,” Count Bobrzyński announced, “whether they are legal representatives of national and foreign navigation companies, or the so-called trusted men allegedly of welfare societies…or finally those acting on their own, they stop at nothing to attain their goal and fill their pockets with abundant profits, oblivious to the harm caused to individuals or the damage to the state.”38 As Galicia emptied of laborers, the government in Lviv enlisted the help of provincial administrators to help persuade the population to stay home. The Governor General’s office urged district governors (starosta), teachers, notaries, and even journalists “to use all possible means, both legal and moral […] to dissuade people from reckless emigration that is dangerous and will cause them harm, all of which is the result of the deceitful promises of wicked agents.”39 It targeted village schoolteachers to fight migration from the schoolhouse and urged Lviv notaries to “try to talk the population out of the idea of emigrating” when peasants appeared to process land sales. Nonetheless, the government was forced to concede after a decade that “attempts by government authorities, warnings by the clergy and by people of good will” had failed to check the “dangerous migration current” that was reaching “huge proportions.”40 Reports of diminishing job prospects in the U.S. had little effect. When migration from Austria to the United States spiked at 22,006 in 1886, the government turned to scare tactics, circulating news of “extremely 36

 “Wychodźtwo z Galicyi do Ameryki,” Gazeta Lwowska, 26 August 1873, 3; “Sprawy Monarchii: Ostrzeżenie przed wychodźctwem do Ameryki,” Gazeta Lwowska, 22 October 1887 (nr. 241), 3. 37  Murdzek, Emigration in Polish Social-Political Thought, 133. 38  Nadobnik, “Kronika Galicyjska,” 233. 39  “Wychodźtwo z Galicyi do Ameryki,” Gazeta Lwowska, 26 August 1873, 3. 40  “Emigracya ludu na Sejmie krajowym,” Przewodnik Handlowo-Geograficzny 2, 2 (February 1896): 9–11; “Sprawy krajowa: Emigracya włościańska,” Gazeta Lwowska, 21 March 1884, 12.

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large numbers” of emigrants from Austria-Hungary turned back because they lacked the means to support themselves.41 The Governor General bid local officers to “do what is necessary so that individuals who desire to emigrate to the United States are educated about the threat to their safety.”42 Local governors also passed on word of extortion schemes in the Americas. They warned of the high cost of life in big cities, of inadequate wages, and of the impossibility of finding permanent employment.43 Galician papers circulated reports of the 40,000 Austrian emigrants sent to the swamps of Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, where they suffered in the heat of the tropical climate. Workers reportedly lived “in slave-like conditions of peonage” because their employers garnished their wages to repay themselves for the journey.44 Similarly, a textile factory in Massachusetts reportedly sought Galician workers explicitly as strike breakers and then failed to pay them adequately.45 In all, during the period from the beginning of migration to Latin America in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I, the Galician Governor General’s office sent out hundreds of directives to local administrators, bidding them to prohibit the movement of people from their communities. Clearly these warnings went largely unheeded since the pace of migration continued to accelerate.

41

 “Wychodźtwo z Austro-Węgier do Ameryki,” Gazeta Lwowska, 20 April 1888, 3. The U.S. Congress excluded immigrants who were “likely to become a public charge” in 1882 and the Immigration and Naturalization Service began requiring aliens seeking entry to show they possessed at least $25 in cash, plus sufficient funds to purchase a ticket to their final destination. The INS later rescinded the requirement, but Immigration Service officers remained empowered to exclude persons who in their opinion were unable to support themselves and their family members. 42  Prezydyum c.k. Namiestnictwa, Lwów, do wszystkich Panów c.k. Starostów i Panów c.k. Dyrektorów Policyi we Lwowie i w Krakowie, 18 March 1905, APKr StCh I Sig. 126. 43  Prezydyum c.k. Namiestnictwa, Lwów, 9 December 1906, “Okólnik do wszystkich Panów c.k. Starostów i do Panów c.k. Dyrektorów Policyi we Lwowie i w Krakowie,” APKr StCh I Sig. 126. 44  “Emigracya do Ameryki,” Tygodnik Chrzanowski, 18 May 1908. This clipping was on file in the regional state archive, suggesting provincial officials were monitoring newspaper coverage of migration issues. APKr StCh I Sig. 126. 45  C.k. Namiestnistwo do wszystkich c.k. Starostw, Lwów, 31 January 1910, “Emigracya do Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki,” APKr StCh I Sig. 126.

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By the early 1890s, the population of Galicia was set on a collision course over the question of emigration. Gentry landholders continued to worry about the loss of labor in the countryside, calling the peasant exodus “reckless,” ill conceived, and caused by the “artificial agitation” of shipping agents. The Governor General refocused his anti-migration campaign on postal clerks, bidding them to intercept correspondence from previous émigrés lest the letters include positive descriptions of life abroad and encourage further migration. Some went so far as to visit the homes of prospective migrants or confiscate tickets mailed to them. Other local administrators imposed extra military taxes on male children or threatened them with arrest should they attempt to return. The starosta in Pilzno, Ropczyce, and Tarnów began simply refusing to issue passports to peasant migrants, forcing laborers to sneak out of the province clandestinely and redoubling the demand for illegal migration agents to escort them.46

Enter the Galician Sejm Conflicting perceptions of migration reached a boiling point on the floor of the Galician Sejm Krajowy in the early years of the 20th century. Debate pitted large landholders against peasant deputies newly elected to the Sejm, the latter stressing the centrality of labor migration in supporting rural families. “Emigration exists and must exist,” peasant leaders insisted.47 At the same time, Lviv businessmen, interested in capitalizing on trade with Poles in emigration, petitioned the Sejm for more information on colonies abroad.48 Sejm Marshall Stanisław Badeni sought to bring emigration within the bounds of “legal norms” and to stop its “irregular and haphazard” pattern. The solution to the impasse was the creation in January 1908 of a government-sponsored association to monitor population movement out of the crownland. Governor General Michał Bobrzyński authorized the establishment of the PTE as a neu-

46

 Pilch, “Emigracja z ziem zaboru austriackiego,” 298–300.  Aleksander Lisiewicz, “Powracająca fala,” Polski Przegląd Emigracyjny 2, 2 (25 January 1908), 1–2; “Emigracya ludu na Sejmie krajowym,” Przewodnik Handlowo-Geograficzny 2, 2 (February 1896), 9–11. 48  The Lviv-based Polskie Towarzystwo Handlowo-Geograficzne petitioned the Sejm in 1894, calling for more research on how trade relations with Poles in America could be useful to industry within Galicia. “Emigracya ludu na Sejmie krajowym,” 9–11. 47

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tral arbiter that would “represent all parties” in the emigration drama. The organization would not receive state funds, yet he insisted it would “fall under the close supervision and control of the central office of the National Council and with the understanding that it would cooperate with the Sejm.”49 The new society’s governing board included several members of the Galician Sejm, the imperial Reichsrat, and the Lviv City Council.50 Its headquarters were to be in Lviv, with branch offices in Cracow, Przemyśl, and Brzeżany.51 The main office would later be transferred to Cracow because of the city’s proximity to the border, but the Lviv office maintained its function as an employment agency and had the right to send a deputy to the Sejm Krajowy.52 The PTE was not the first state-sponsored organization to be tasked with guiding labor migrants out of Galicia. In 1904 the Sejm created an official Employment Bureau based in Lviv with offices in 23 other cities and towns to help workers locate jobs at home and abroad. But after three years of activity, a disappointing number of workers availed themselves of its services. Of the 63,000 positions the Bureau advertised, less than half (26,000) were filled. The others appear to have been for agricultural work in Galicia itself or in Germany—low paying and prone to frequent abuse from landlords. A report on the Bureau’s activities admits that it “encountered the distrust of the laboring population” and that workers continued to turn to “the huge number of private agents” and “representatives of steamer companies, both legal and clan-

49

 Quoted in Grzegorz Maria Kowalski, Przestępstwa emigracyjne w Galicji, 1897– 1918 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2003), 79–80. 50  The PTE’s first Advisory Board included Sejm deputies Dr. Alfred Halban, Father Kazimierz Lubomirski, Jan Stapiński (a leader of the newly formed Peasant Party), Count Kazimierz Szeptycki, Jan Wassung, and Franciszek Wójcik, who was also a  Peasant Party member. Lviv businessmen included Bronisław Laskownicki, a Lviv City Councilman and editor of the local paper, Wiek Nowy, Councilman Dr. Władysław Stesłowicz, and the director of the Bank Zaliczkowy, Władysław Terenkoczy. Polski Przegląd Emigracyjny, 10 April 1908, 13; PPE, 25 May 1908, 12; PPE 2, no. 12, 25 June 1908, 10. 51  The Governor General’s office refused permission to open a  branch office in Rzeszów, arguing officials there had violated the conscription ordinance. Kowalski, Przestępstwa emigracyjne w Galicji, 89–90. 52  The Lviv branch’s highest priority was locating work for girls from the district around Lviv. According to the Governor General, young women “seeking seasonal work abroad can find well-paying employment in Lviv as household servants.” His hope was to “alleviate the acute lack of female servants in Lviv.” Kowalski, Przestępstwa emigracyjne w Galicji, 89.

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destine” who advertised more highly paying jobs abroad.53 Even when faced with an “official” government agency intended to protect migrant laborers from abuse at the hands of agents and foreign employers, peasants continued to work with private mediators. The PTE soon faced similar challenges. The organization’s primary directive was “the salvation of emigrants from the exploitation of the ‘emigration hyenas’.”54 Yet the financial structure of the new association made this all but impossible since the PTE was forced to support its philanthropic activities through the sale of steamer tickets, placing it in direct competition with private travel agents. In its guise as a protector of peasant migrants, the Society launched a series of vicious attacks on competing associations. Director Józef Okołowicz used his new journal, Polski Przegląd Emigracyjny, to accuse the humanitarian association, Opatrzność [Providence], of selling steamer tickets through subagents and paying commissions, activities for which it was not officially licensed. The government shut down Opatrzność soon after the article appeared. Similarly, the activities of Bernard Weinfeld’s firm in Skala nad Zbrzuczem on the Galician border with Russia, came under the editor’s lens. Mr. Weinfeld’s inflated prices and fictitious labor contracts ostensibly garnered agents an income as high as 2000 to 5000 crowns per day. Weinfeld’s greatest abuse, the PTE paper noted, was his pattern of encouraging emigrants from across the border in Russia to travel through his Galician office by assuring them that those who come through his agency did not need a passport, a practice in which the PTE itself would later engage. “In this way,” Okołowicz claimed, “the poor are exposed to the bullets of the Austrian and Russian border officials and to the risk of breaking their necks on the steep, craggy rocks above the river Zbrzucz.”55 The PTE relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes to challenge the competence of other ticket sellers, attacking the “greedy Jews” working for Opatrzność, who searched “for speculators among

53

 Zbigniew Pazdro, “Sprawy krajowe: Trzy lata działalności publicznych Biur pośrednictwa pracy w Galicyi (1905–1907),” Przegląd Polski 63, 169 (1908): 502–507. 54  Kowalski, Przestępstwa emigracyjne w Galicji, 79–87; Józef Okołowicz, “Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne,” Polski Przegląd Emigracyjny 2, 2 (25 January 1908): 2–4. “Rozmaitości: P.T.E.,” Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Emigracjnego 1, 1 (January 1910), 24. 55  Józef Okołowicz, “‘Opatrzność’ w nowem wydaniu,” Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Emigracyjnego 1, 2 (February 1910): 46–49; “Z dziejów wyzysku emigrantów,” Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Emigracyjnego 1, 5 (May 1910): 165–71.

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the worst scum of Jewish towns.”56 It emphasized director Weinfeld’s Jewish regional staff: Chaim Weiss and Salomon Mangel in Muszyna, Mojżesz Zarwanitzer in Kałusz, Szmul Siegmann in Rozwadów, Baruch Neumann in Leżajsk and “in other small towns and villages […] a swarm of Israeli emigration hyenas.”57 Peasant migrants themselves appeared less concerned about the Jewish background of their travel agents than about the quality of the service they provided. Complaints of inflated ticket prices, poor travel conditions, and false advertising directed against the PTE itself began pouring in less than three years after the Society opened its doors. Police in Lviv and Cracow first became suspicious of the association after receiving a  letter from one Adolf Nowicki, a nineteen-year-old from the village of Szmańkowice, in the Czortków district of east Galicia, complaining about being overcharged for steamer and rail tickets at the PTE offices. Nowicki penned his lengthy lament from the port in Rotterdam, where he had been “wasting away” for some weeks waiting to embark on a steamer to Canada. In it, he described how he learned from fellow travelers that he had paid 150 crowns too much for his ticket. He complained about his long delay at the PTE headquarters and about having been stuck in “some filthy hole” in Rotterdam ever since.58 Conditions in his hotel were “worse than a stable,” full of “stench and filth,” and the food was like “swill.”59 He mailed his letter from Ottawa, Canada, where he had been forced to stop en route to Winnepeg because the inflated price he paid for his steamer ticket depleted his store of cash. There are several suspicious elements about Nowicki’s letter, not the least of which is the revelation from the migrant’s brother, Czesław, that Adolf had in fact purchased his ticket from a Jewish agent in Czortków and not from the PTE.60 Moreover, the ostensibly inflated cost of the ticket may have been related to Nowicki’s status as a  draft dodger. Adolf himself acknowledged 56

 Okołowicz, “‘Opatrzność’ w nowem wydaniu,” 46–49.  “Nagonka na P.T.E.,” Biuletyn Polskiego Towarzystwa Emigracyjnego 1, 4 (April 1910): 163–64. 58  “Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne,” Czas, 11 August 1911, 3. 59  Nowicki’s letter is dated 16 June 1911 in Rotterdam. It was originally printed in Father Stojałowski’s paper, Wieniec i Pszczółka, and later reprinted in several crownland papers, including “Oszczerstwa,” Polski Przegląd Emigracyjny 5, 15 (15 August 1911): 2–6. 60  Jan Piętka, secretary of the St. Raphael Society, to the State Prosecutor in Cracow, 6 July 1911, APKr SKKKr 475, 13. 57

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in his letter that he had not completed his military service and that he was issued a false passport in the name of Michał Germak to facilitate crossing the border. Finally, the letter was “mistakenly” delivered not to the PTE office itself, but rather to the address of a competing organization, the Towarzystwo św. Rafała [St. Raphael Society], managed by the populist priest, Stanisław Stojałowski, a bitter enemy of the PTE’s Józef Okołowicz. Regardless of the validity of Nowicki’s claims, the circulation of his letter opened up an extensive police investigation that uncovered a string of illegal practices. In the end, state prosecutors closed down the PTE’s main headquarters in February 1914 and barred it from further ticket sales. Father Stojałowski himself summed up the irony of the association’s transgressions, noting that though it was “responsible for protecting people from agents […] it actually delivered them into the hands of agents.”61

Traditional Practices and the State: The Institutionalization of Customary Behavior At one level, Father Stojałowski was correct. The PTE had very quickly adopted the habits of an informal migration agency, subjecting its clients to inaccurate information, primitive travel conditions, and extended waits. Workers from Knichynin, Stanisławów district, complained for example of sleeping on bare floors at the PTE headquarters while waiting in vain for labor contracts, eventually turning to other agencies to find work abroad. “I don’t understand how they could do this,” wrote one of the migrants, noting that “hundreds and even thousands of workers dying of hunger” remained at the PTE headquarters without work.62 Another group from Wygnanka in Czortków district resented being sent to a cement factory in Prussia rather than to more lucrative work building canals.63 Yet another cadre discovered their labor contract listed a lower monthly rate than they had been quoted

61

 “Stapiński—Hupka—Okołowicz,” Wieniec i Pszczółka, 9 July 1911, 737–38.  Letter from Jan Ilczyszyn, Hryniko Szypen, W. Kowerz, Michał Koromeć, Piotr Lusałowski, and Jan Mogocki to State Prosecutor in Cracow, 20 August 1911, APKr SKKKr 475, 105–107. 63  Stefan Bujak, Wyganka, Czortków district, to State Prosecutor in Cracow, 8 August 1911, APKr SKKKr 475. 62

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aloud, but when confronted with the error, PTE officials told them to “go to the devil” if they did not like it.64 Transatlantic passage was no better. Migrants faced filthy conditions and inflated prices at port cities and disappointment upon their arrival. Passengers landing in Brazil learned of lengthy delays to obtain land parcels while they “existed in misery and despair” in crowded barracks. Even then, the plots were such “wild and remote places, often in deadly climates,” that according to one Lviv newspaper, “the poor colonist loses his strength and health just clearing the forest and tilling the soil.” Nonetheless, the PTE continued to encourage migration to Brazil.65 Others complained about conditions on board ships themselves, comparing them to the atmosphere on slaving ships. “In this same exact way traders once transported poor black slaves from Africa to America,” decried a medical assistant, Ms. Hoyerówna, who traveled in a third-class cabin hoping to render aid to migrants. Hoyerówna complained that the Prussian doctor who examined her eyes acted like “a veterinarian who had only worked on horses and oxen.” She was overcharged for her steamer ticket in Bremen and waited in a “filthy and unbearably flooded” hall of emigrants. Once boarding the ship, she found her thirdclass cabin “like a prison dump for criminals, dirty and stinky.” Indignant at these conditions, she disembarked and returned to complain to her ticketing agent about the “jackals who are sending our peasants into misery, hunger and death with the singular goal of stuffing their pockets with dirty profit!” But her agent was unsympathetic, simply commenting that “the intelligentsia should never be permitted to mingle among the emigrants on ships.” Back at the PTE offices, she was “treated in a brutal manner and accused of lying,” leading her to believe that director Okołowicz was “guilty of all the harms caused to the emigrants.”66 But rudeness, delays, and exaggerated promises were hardly illegal. Pani Hoyerówna’s belief that the PTE director was guilty of “all the harms” migrants suffered did not make him a  criminal. Nor did the complaints scrawled on the backs of postcards in every language of the province (Polish, 64

 Anastazya Jurko, 8 August 1911, to State Prosecutor in Cracow, APKr Skkkr 475, 74–75. 65  “Karygodna działalność Polskiego Tow. emigracyjnego,” Głos Narodu, 30 August 1911, 5. 66  Małgorzata Hoyerówna, “Z bagna emigracyjnego,” Glos Narodu, 19 November 1911, 1–2.

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German, Yiddish, Ruthenian) bidding PTE staff to “please write back immediately” with steamer tickets or travel schedules.67 Clearly, the PTE was making few strides in alleviating the anxiety and dread most migrants experienced on the eve of their departures. Nonetheless, the association remained popular and its offices received dozens of letters each day from migrants desperate for help crossing the ever more closely guarded borders. In the end, it was the very normalcy of the PTE that led it to its indictment. As the Habsburg imperial government instituted increasingly rigorous controls on its borders in the months leading up to the First World War, desperate Galicians intensified their search for an exit. The Governor General alerted all crownland police and border guards in 1912 that “with the expansion of ‘war fear,’ there has been increased agitation among males…that they should escape to America before being called up to the army.”68 Josef Krochmal from Lviv attempted three times to cross the border, finally succeeding in October 1913 using a forged Russian passport.69 Seventeen-year-old Franciszek Hotys, a Greek Catholic from Lęki Górne in the Pilzno district of central Galicia, requested help from the PTE, admitting that he had not yet completed his military service. Stanisław Borecki from Sądowa Wisznia “wished to make it to Parana” although his request for exemption from the military had been denied.70 Michał Dzuba, from Kalnica near Baligród in Lesko district, was more explicit, writing in October 1912 that he had a “favor to ask of the Towarzystwo and it concerns getting a szyfkart because I may not leave since I am 21 years old.”71 After the assassination at Sarajevo and the looming war with Russia, imperial officials redoubled their search for missing military recruits, even interviewing family members about the whereabouts of their sons. Most, such as the parents of Mikołaj Łotocki from Zalesie in the east 67

 See, for example, Jakób Hittel, Ruska Wieś, Rzeszów district, 9 December 1912, APKr SKKK 529, 2711; Fedio Biabicz, Lutowiska, Lisko district, 3 January 1912, APKr SKKKr 529, 1441–45; Antoni Bednarz, Foust near Grzymałów, 29 February 1912, APKr SKKKr 529, 1471–1473. 68  C.k. Namiestnik, Lviv, 23 September 1912, APKr, K.u.k. Polizei-Direktion in Krakau, 1852–1918, Sig. 124 (DPKr124), 87. 69  Zahra, The Great Departure, 55–59. 70  Franciszek Hotys, Lęki Górne, Pilsno district, 16 December 1912; Stanisław Borecki, Sądowa Wisznia, Sambór, 19 January 1912, APKr SKKKr 529, 1433. Note that Greek Catholic Ruthenians along with Jews made regular use of the PTE, often sending letters in Ukrainian or barely passable Polish. 71  Michał Dzuba, Kalnica nad Baligród, 17 October 1912, APKr SKKKr 525, 407–09.

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Galician district of Czortków, insisted their sons were abroad temporarily and would return for the spring call up.72 Even non-conscripts turned to the PTE for help solving their problems. Bina Rosman had no passport but wished to travel to America to join her husband. Stanisław Rutkowski lacked funds to travel but asked to be sponsored by someone in Brazil, a violation of restrictions on indentured servitude. Even more ambitious, Feliks Ruczka from the village of Wiśniowa near Dobczyce, outside of the Prussian border town of Myślenice, wrote volunteering to work as one of the “clandestine agents scouring the countryside […] who transport people to America.” The “situation is urgent because masses of people are emigrating this way year in and year out,” he insisted.73

The Failure of Migration Control These were not mere idle requests tendered to the PTE headquarters. Evidence from the state prosecutor’s 1913 investigation shows the society established a clear pattern of sidestepping imperial regulations in order to accommodate the informal practices of the migrating population. Though it had been established in part at the behest of the Galician authorities in Lviv, the PTE quickly became more responsive to the pocketbooks of its founders and to the needs of its clients than to the legal structures it was designed to enforce. Created as an unfunded offshoot of the government, the PTE ended up becoming the object of official challenges for these transgressions. It regularly engaged in illegal forms of advertisement, employed subagents to sell steamer tickets and paid them healthy commissions, and transported men of draft age across international frontiers. Although investigations were ongoing when the World War broke out, the state prosecutor’s preliminary findings in 1913 noted that “without a doubt” the PTE had violated emigration laws.74 To a great extent, the increasingly shady activities of the PTE and other migration agencies can be explained not by changes in the ways intermediaries 72

 Investigation of Piotr Łotocki, 27 July 1913; Investigation of Wiktorya Wiatr, 9 July 1914, APKr SKKKr 525, 288–99. 73  Bina Rosman, Radyno, 16 July 1912; Feliks Ruczka, Wiśniowa near Dobczyce, Myślowice district, 30 April 1912; K. Rawski, Sambor, 12 April 1912 APKr SKKKr 530a, 1589, 1633, 1637–43. 74  Kowalski, Przestępstwa emigracyjne w Galicji, 108–125.

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serviced their customers, but rather by the continuities in their tactics. The imperial state, during a period of intensifying military demands and anxiety about loss of population made requirements for crossing international borders increasingly stringent. As the state formalized requirements for population movement, the people themselves continued to maneuver around each new regulation. Bureaucratization, formalization, and the institutionalization of migration networks had little influence on the behavior of labor migrants themselves. The peasants simply devised increasingly clever ways to vote with their feet. As imperial bureaucracy begot still more bureaucratic mechanisms to monitor existing agencies, the population of Galicia resisted restrictions on its freedom of movement. By making claims on the PTE that were in keeping with their customary use of migration guides, migrants forced the agency to adopt techniques that challenged the very government to which it owed its existence. The short history of the Polskie Towarzystwo Emigracyjne demonstrates the ways in which imperial bureaucracy often incorporated the informal patterns it was meant to replace. If the migration market around the railway district in Lviv was physically separate from and operated in opposition to the activities of the Sejm, the Galician diet’s attempt to replace that market with semi-official actors ultimately prompted it to adopt some of the characteristics of the labor market itself. Transatlantic travel in the early years of the 20th century was risky and uncomfortable in the best of circumstances. The function of the travel agent arose partly out of the migrant’s need for guidance before leaving home and to help navigate the shifting complexities of the trip itself. Complaints submitted to migration societies such as the PTE provide a window into this process, demonstrating the fears and anxieties many transplanted families experienced. The PTE case highlights the fragility of the migrant experience and the centrality of Lviv to this experience. At the same time, it marks the transformation of an official agency into a traditional migration entity willing to violate state law in order to serve its clients. Finally, it demonstrates the tendency of peasant migrants to look beyond the provincial capital in defense of their own interests and aspirations.

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Jews in Lviv at the Turn of the 20th Century: On the Road to Modernization Łukasz Tomasz Sroka

Introduction We can observe two distinct types of currents characteristic of the processes and events which occurred among the Jewish community in Lviv at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. One of them can be considered universal, as such phenomena as assimilation and emancipation of Jews were not characteristic of Lviv only. They took place also in other centers of the Habsburg Monarchy and Europe. However, both assimilation and emancipation, as well as other social and political currents had their special local face, which was a consequence of the specific location of the city. The uniqueness of Lviv manifested itself particularly in the case of Zionism. The significance of Lviv as an important center of the Zionist movement in Central Europe was not only due to the demographic potential of the city itself, but also its close surroundings, that is, East Galicia. It was further influenced by the academic character of the city, where intellectual elites of Jews were educated. The location of the city on the routes leading to two important Black Sea ports, which played a strategic role in the Jewish migration to Eretz Yisrael, Odessa, and the Romanian Constanța, constituted yet another factor. Lviv itself did not play any significant role in the Jewish social movement, as there were not sufficient Jewish members of the working class. Thus, from the perspective of Jewish history in the period analyzed, Lviv should be seen as a city of much, but not the highest importance. It seems justified to conclude that it was a city of second rank. Such metropolises as London, Berlin, or Paris, were definitely much more important. On the other hand, as far as

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processes and phenomena taking place in Jewish society are concerned, Lviv was much more relevant than Minsk, Bratislava, Brno, or Zhytomyr. This was mainly a consequence of the geopolitical location of the city. Lviv was located on the intersection of two strategic trade routes used since the Middle Ages. One connected Western and Eastern Europe, it reached from the Iberian Peninsula, going through today’s France, Germany and the south of Poland, including Cracow, to Lviv. It later split into two routes, one going to the north, to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and one to the south-east, including the Black Sea coast, Caucasia and the Caspian Sea region. The second large trade route led from today’s Turkey and the Balkans, mainly Greece, as well as Hungary to the north, reaching Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and later Scandinavia, too. At the end of the modern era the geopolitical location of Lviv lost its importance. Following political and military events, as well as the changes in national borders, traders from distant lands started to avoid Lviv. Still, the city stayed open to newcomers and to the influence of different cultures, as is evident mainly in its cuisine and language, and it continued to play a role in trade. In particular, it maintained intense relations with cities in Hungary and the Balkans, which is comprehensible as Hungary under the Crown of Saint Stephen was also part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Above all, Lviv was still a city situated on the intersection of different cultures and political influences.1 This is symbolically illustrated by the fact that the city is divided, more or less in the middle, by the border of two basins: the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Lviv was often described as a halfAsian city (German: Halb-Asien), as one could notice there the influence of the East and the West. In the period analyzed, the influences of Austria and Russia clashed around the city. In the period of autonomous Galicia, Poles and Ukrainians aspired to be called hosts in Lviv, and the national mosaic was further composed of Jews, Germans, Russians and Armenians. The city was therefore steeped in the rivalry or even confrontation of different nations, mainly Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. Eastern Galicia was the scenery of increasing conflict where Poles and Ukrainians were realizing their national aspirations, thereby often confronting each other. Lviv also had particularly dynamic relations with Vienna. Its influence on Lviv was greater than in the 1

 See John Czaplicka, “Lviv, Lemberg, Leopolis, Lwów, Lvov: A City in the Crosscurrents of European Culture,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 24 (2000): 13–45; Yaroslav Hrytsak, “Lviv: A Multicultural History through the Centuries,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 24 (2000): 47–73.

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case of any other Galician city. One of the reasons was the fact that Lviv was the capital of Galicia and, therefore, had intensive relations with Vienna, the political, scientific, and cultural center of the Empire. Lviv was visited by politicians, military men, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs much more often than other cities of the province. On the other hand, representatives of Lviv’s social and economic elites, mainly Jews, readily left for Vienna in pursuit of entertainment, knowledge and business partners. Jewish politicians from Lviv were very active in Vienna. As they often had to face rejection from Polishdominated city councils and provincial authorities, they tried to solve their matters in the capital of the state.2

The Jewish Community in the Face of Changes of Civilization In the second half of the 19th century the assimilation movement reached its peak popularity as well as a slump. Whereas in the first half of the 19th century Jews were willing to assimilate to German culture, at the end of the century they reoriented themselves towards Polish culture. This was due to various reasons, including the introduction of Galician autonomy and the rePolonization of the city and the whole province in the 1860s. Many influential and non-assimilated Austrian Germans left the city. Poles, to a large extent, assumed power over the province and the city. In such circumstances Germanized Jews lost their patrons, and further propagation of German culture lost its economic sense. Nevertheless, the cultural and political influence of Vienna in Lviv continued to be stronger than in Cracow, and it did not only affect Jews, but also Poles. The main reason for that was the existing close cooperation between Lviv, as the capital of the province, with Vienna, the imperial capital. Emancipation and the establishment of equal rights, complete with the Constitution of 1867, brought the Monarchy’s Jews the possibility to compete with Christians on an equal footing in the areas of trade, the crafts, science, culture, and politics. However, it also intensified the development of modern anti-Semitism, which was no longer based on religion only, 2

 Harald Binder, Galizien in Wien: Parteien, Wahlen, Fraktionen und Abgeordnete im Übergang zur Massenpolitik (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005); Harald Binder, “Polen, Ruthenen, Juden: Politik und Politiker in Galizien 1897–1918” (PhD diss., University of Bern, 1997).

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but increasingly on economic factors too. What is more, Lviv and Eastern Galicia became the scene of a political battle between Poles and Ukrainians, which turned into an open war in autumn 1918. At the same time, both sides watched the Jews carefully, accusing them of supporting their respective opponents. Undoubtedly, this was one of the reasons for a pogrom of Lviv Jews in November 1918. It was particularly bloody compared to other pogroms which took place within Poland. Seventy-three Jews were murdered in Lviv then, and many more were injured.3 Those dramatic events left the Jews of Lviv deeply traumatized. They made them realize that the end of the Habsburg rule was also the end of their “little stability,” as, even though they had to face aggression throughout the years, their physical existence was not threatened. Moreover, they had sought refuge in Lviv after the wave of pogroms in the Russian empire beginning in the 1880s. One of the refugees of the year 1905 was Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916), the famous Jewish Yiddish writer, who survived pogroms in Chișinău (1903) and Kyiv (1905).4 Therefore, it is not surprising that after 1918 many Jews still associated themselves with the Habsburgs. They represented a  world whose disappearance they regretted very much. In the interwar period, one of the most famous advocates of the Habsburg Empire was Joseph Roth, a well-known and highly-regarded writer and journalist in Europe. Hailing from Brody, Roth had numerous relations with Lviv, even though he lived in Western Europe after the demise of the Habsburg Empire. He portrayed the old Galicia, Vienna and their Jews who added specific color to those places depicted in many of his works.5 Prompted by external impulses and the Zionist ideology, Lviv Jews, similarly to Jews from other parts of Europe, felt the need to analyze the cultural patterns which they had been following for ages. Thorough education was still in first place. However, the typical figure of a delicate man reading books was no longer tempting for the youth and was becoming more and more anachronistic. It came to represent the helplessness of the Jews living in diaspora. Jewish traders and businessmen, who, as in other cities, consti3

 Konrad Zieliński, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na ziemiach Królestwa Polskiego w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej (Lublin: UMCS, 2005), 430. 4  Olena Arkusha, Konstantin Kondratiuk, Marian Mudri, Oleksi Sukhi, Chas narodiv: Istoriia Ukrainy XIX stolittia (Lviv: Litopys, 2016), 177. 5  Claudio Magris, Daleko, ale od czego? Joseph Roth i tradycja Żydów wschodnioeuropejskich, translated by E. Jogałła (Cracow, Budapest: Austeria, 2015).

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tuted an integral part of Lviv’s landscape, were scorned too. Criticism aimed at them came from various directions and had different motivation. Yet, it was hurtful each time. Anti-Semites accused Jews of unproductiveness and exploitation of other social and professional groups, mainly peasants and workers. For Jews who decided to assimilate completely, the path of Bernard Połoniecki was representative. Born Bernard Porder in Lviv in 1862, he was an antiquarian, bookseller, publisher, and the owner of Lviv’s famous “Polish Bookshop.” At first, he was fascinated with Polish culture, but he kept the religion of his ancestors. In 1896, he changed his surname to Połoniecki, and in 1903, he was finally baptized in the Lviv Church of St. Mary Magdalene.6 His memoirs, diaries and letters still constitute excellent source material to study the period of assimilation. They also provide evidence for the fact that assimilated Jews often separated themselves from the Jewish masses and despised them. Połoniecki, grown into Yiddish culture, started to describe the language as “jabber” at a certain point: “Relatives and friends used to come to the bookshop, filling it with their jabber,” he wrote on the 2nd April 1886.7 Later he forbade speaking “jabber” in his bookshop at all.8 Zionists realized that Jews could no longer concentrate solely on trading, banking and intellectual professions if they wanted to make their idea of rebuilding their own state come true. In the traditionally understood state, there also had to be representatives of blue-collar professions, such as workers, farmers, drivers, bakers, cleaners, etc. Following the Zionists’ call for action, farms were being created in villages, and small arable fields were set up within cities, even in the courtyards. Jews were supposed to learn how to plant and nurture fruit and vegetables, and how to breed animals. The Zionist movement wanted to turn Jews into a typical nation, which they hadn’t been since ancient times. Therefore, their activities were viewed as a  utopian attempt of “turning back history.” They wanted to popularize professions among Jews which were seen as passé in times of capitalism and consumerism. In the event, they needed to encourage them to leave their existing professions, even though desired by many. Moshe Rosman commented on the situation in a brilliant manner:

6

 Bernard Połonieki—księgarz lwowski: Dzienniki, pamiętniki i listy z lat 1880–1943, ed. M. Konopka (Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 2006), 17–19. 7  Bernard Połonieki, Konopka, 160. 8  Bernard Połonieki, Konopka, 161.

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While “everybody” in the modern world was trying to behave like “a Galut Jew,” political Zionism, born precisely at the time when Diaspora Jewishness was on the brink of revision, was like spitting against the wind of history.9

This situation was also present in Lviv, where Jews, similar to many other European cities, dominated trade and other services. However, they became hostages of their own success. First of all, tied to professional monoculture, mainly trade, Lviv’s Jews were particularly prone to negative results and failures. Secondly, in the period under investigation, they had to compete with each other. Consequently, while many East Galicians left Lviv in search of modern civilization, Zionists active there believed that it was high time to choose the opposite path and find work in more productive professions, such as agriculture and industry. Obviously, according to them, this should be done not in Galicia, but in Eretz Yisrael. They did not accept unemployment as a  solution to the new fierce professional rivalry and competition which became a key problem of the time. Instead, their main goal was the project of rebuilding Israel. Kibbutzim, where Jews worked the land, sharing production tools and revenue, were to become the avant-garde of the Zionist movement. However, it was assumed from the beginning that the target place for kibbutzim would be the rebuilt Jewish home land. At the end of the 19th century it was clear that the place where Jews would realize this project should be Palestine. That was where larger and larger migration waves of Jews headed. In 1921, the first Galician kibbutz was established in Palestine, about 30 kilometers south of the Sea of Galilee. It took the name of Kfar Stand. Initially, it was jointly created by 50 pioneers mainly from Lviv. The majority of them held higher education degrees, with mainly doctors and engineers.10 Apart from Jews lured to Palestine due to the idea of Zionism, there were also those encouraged by other obvious factors: growing anti-Semitism,

9

 Moshe Rosman, Jak pisać historię żydowską?, translated by Agnieszka Jagodzińska, (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego, 2011), p. 55. 10  Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Istorychnyi Archiv (CDIA), fond 701: Jewish Community of Lviv, opys 3, sprava 171: Correspondence of Keren Kajemet le-Israel: East Galicia Repository with the Jewish Community of Lviv: Supervision of subsidies (9 Feb. 1923).

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pogroms and anti-Jewish demonstrations, such as the above-mentioned pogrom in Lviv, and increasing unemployment. Lviv played an important role for emigration to Israel. This was the result of several factors. The city became one of the leading centers of the Zionist movement in Europe, which was a consequence of its geopolitical location and the significant number of important Jewish leaders present in the city.11 The fact that East Galicia constituted one of the biggest reservoirs of Jewish people in Europe was equally significant.12 Moreover, Lviv was a transit point for Jews migrating to Palestine. From Lviv, the journey continued to the port cities, notably to Odessa, and, most frequently, to Constanța in Romania. From there, Jews headed for Jaffa, and from the 1930s to Haifa. Trips to Palestine were very popular among Jews, as they made it possible for them to familiarize themselves with its living conditions in a non-committal manner. They travelled to places significant for Jewish history and culture, including Jerusalem, and they also visited kibbutzim and other settlements established by Jews. More and more journeys which were described as tourist trips took place at the beginning of the 20th century. This was not only due to political events and the economic situation. The development of transportation was equally important, especially improved railway connections and the emergence of steamers. In fact, the number of those who treated tourism only as a camouflage was growing, as they had no intention of coming back. Such practice met with the opposition from the British government which started to exercise its mandate over the territory in question after World War I. However, as the Polish government was well disposed towards the emigration of Jews, it encouraged various strategies. For instance, the authorities gathered declarations from the “tourists” stating that they would obey all legal regulations in Palestine (see Figure 2).

11

 E.g., Abraham Osias Thon was a prominent rabbi and Zionist politician from Lviv. There were also other Zionist activists known in Poland and active internationally, such as Herman Diamand, Michał Ringel, Alfred Nossig, Leon Reich, Emil Schmorak and Henryk Rosmarin (Rozmaryn); see Almanach żydowski, ed. Herman Stachel (Lviv, Warsaw, Poznan: “Kultura i Sztuka,” 1937). 12  See Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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Figure 1. A propaganda leaflet from the interwar period, encouraging Jews to leave for Palestine. The label at the bottom and on the side reads: “Go and get to know your country. 2 trips to Palestine.” 13

13

 From the author’s private collection.

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Figure 2. The front side of the declaration confirming that the trip to Palestine is touristic and will be limited in time.14

14

 From the author’s private collection. English translation: “I, the undersigned […] residing in […] declare my participation in the trip to Palestine organized by ‘Centralsjon’ through the Tourism Department of the ‘Unzer Welt’ Publishing House. Following that, I declare that I have no criminal record on any charge, either common or political. I commit myself to strictly obey the orders of the trip management, under personal responsibility for potential violations. At the same time, I waive any claims related to: a) the cancellation of the trip as a result of unforeseen circumstances; journey interruptions in transit countries; b) being forced to leave the destination country after reaching it and coming back to Poland; c) reaching Palestine and being unable to land. The Tourism Department of ‘Unzer Welt’ shall return 265 PLN from the amount paid by me. It is known to me that the trip is for the purpose of tourism, and all regulations applicable to tourists abroad are also known to me in detail. If I violate the regulations in question, this will be at my risk and I will not claim any rights is such a situation. I commit myself to submitting all documents required by the trip management to obtain passports and visas, and to guaranteeing their accuracy. All payments will be made by me by the date determined by the trip management. I can withdraw from the trip only on condition that I lose the deposit of 130 PLN paid for the trip. Any change to the declaration in question can be made only in writing.”

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Figure 3. The back of the declaration in Figure 2. It contains the following rubriques: item number, date of registration, surname and name, age, place of birth, place of residence, profession, names of parents, correspondence address, signature.15 Unfortunately, we do not have at our disposal precise statistics about the migration of Jews from Lviv to Palestine from the end of the 19th century until the outbreak of the Second World War. The most reliable findings are those of Stepan Kacharaba. The highly-regarded Ukrainian historian made an attempt at reconstructing the migration figures for the period between 1926 and 1938. According to his calculation, the following numbers of Jews emigrated from the Lviv region to Palestine: 1926—444, 1927—53, 1928—26, 1929—205, 1930—241, 1931—115, 1932—221, 1933—1041, 1934—1286, 1935—2196, 1936—949, 1937—288, 1938—259. The total number of Jews from the region who emigrated to Palestine between 1926 and 1938 was 7324.16 It is important to keep in mind that Jews from Galicia also left for Western Europe, to the USA and, in smaller numbers, to South America. It is not justified, though, to simply divide Jews into those who emigrated to

15

 From the author’s private collection.  Stepan Kacharaba, Emihratsiia z Zakhidnoi Ukrainy 1919–1939 (Lviv: Akademija Nauk, 2003), 312.

16

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the West for economic reasons and those who chose Eretz Yisrael for Zionist motives. Obviously, those Jews who did not support the Zionist idea avoided Palestine, but those politically motivated were not the only ones who went there. There were also those who left their homelands in search of a better life. Jews migrating to the West usually stayed there for good. They differed in that matter from Poles and Ukrainians, who usually came back after having saved enough money.17 This may have been due to the fact that Jews bundled off from Polish and Ukrainian lands to escape not only poverty, but also anti-Semitism. As a result, they did not see any place for themselves in their homeland.

Jewish Elites of Lviv Between the end of the 18th century and the turn of the 20th century, a major transformation of Jewish elites took place in Lviv. Initially, there were only two closely related elite groups in the community in question. On the one hand, rabbis and literates, on the other, wealthy traders, bankers and craftsmen. As long as literates sometimes became businessmen, the latter did not try to influence the religious message formulated by the former. At best, they aspired to providing their offspring with a good education and to having one son who becomes a rabbi. However, as a result of the emergence of the Haskalah and its influences, intellectual fermentation took hold, also affecting the religious sphere. It went hand in hand with the efforts of the Austrian government to assimilate Galician Jews to German culture. A deep discord was revealed. At least some Jews noticed that they were taking part in a strategic game, in which religion started to interfere with politics. The future of the Jews was at stake. They had to choose between remaining culturally autonomous, yielding to the influence of other cultures—Polish or German—and being open to new solutions of any kind, for instance as far as education and teaching religion were concerned. The prospect of this choice ushered in the emergence of a progressive Jewish community. They were inspired by devel-

17

 Dorota Praszałowicz, Krzysztof A. Makowski, Andrzej A. Zięba, Mechanizmy zamorskich migracji łańcuchowych w XIX wieku: Polacy, Niemcy, Żydzi, Rusini: Zarys problemu (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2004).

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opments in European cities, such as Berlin and Vienna, where the advocates of modern liturgy and Jewish culture triumphed.18 The first attempts at establishing the progressive Tempel Synagogue in Lviv were undertaken by the only Jewish lawyers working in the city: Drs Emanuel Blumenfeld and Leo Kolischer. They won over for the project Jakub Rapoport, a  doctor well-known across Europe.19 On 4th October 1840 an organizational meeting was called, which was attended by representatives of the medical, legal and artistic communities, as well as by people engaged in religious life. All of them expressed their eagerness to build a progressive synagogue, at the time called Deutsch Jüdisches Bethaus. Therefore, they started to collect money in order to realize their goal. However, donations turned out to be much smaller than previously assumed. This was true of support from Lviv and from the Galician province, and, to the same extent, it also applied to money coming from Vienna. Nevertheless, Lviv’s progressive Jews were determined and knew how to take advantage of the favorable political situation. An example of these conducive political circumstances can be seen in the fact that the City Council of Lviv was reactivated in 1870 and elected for the first time in 1871. The election was based on a statute which favored candidates who were well educated and well off. Consequently, progressive deputies dominated the City Council. This would not have been the case if it had been all representative of Lviv’s entire Jewish community and its non-progressive constituencies.20 The position of progressive Jews in Lviv also strengthened as a result of the death of rabbi Jakub Meszulam Ornstein in 1839 and the concomitant weakening of Lviv’s hitherto all influential group of Orthodox

18

 Jerzy Holzer, “Enlightenment, Assimilation, and Modern Identity: The Jewish Élite in Galicia,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 12: Focusing on Galicia: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians 1772–1918, ed. Israel Bartal and Antony Polonsky (London: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 79–85; Jerzy Holzer, “‘Vom Orient die Fantasie, und in der Brust der Slawen Feuer…’: Jüdisches Leben und Akkulturation im Lemberg des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Lemberg—Lwów—Lviv. Eine Stadt im Schnittpunkt europäischer Kulturen, ed. Peter Fäßler, Thomas Held, and Dirk Sawitzki, (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), 75–91; Maria Vovchko, “Sotsial’na intehraciia halits’kykh ievreiv u druhiy polovyni XIX - na pochatku stolittia: vykhid iz hetto ta rozselennia v mis’komu prostori,” in Judaica Ukrainica 4 (2015): 67–79. 19  Majer Bałaban, Historia lwowskiej synagogi postępowej (Lviv: Zarząd Synagogi Postępowej, 1937), 14–15. 20  Łukasz Tomasz Sroka, Rada Miejska we Lwowie w okresie autonomii galicyjskiej 1870–1914: Studium o elicie władzy, (Cracow: Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, 2012).

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Jews.21 Eventually, the progressive Jews fulfilled their plans on 18th September 1846, when the new synagogue officially opened.22 It was mainly Jews with a secular university education who supported the community of progressive Jews. They had mainly studied at the universities of Lviv and Vienna. Most of them were lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, architects and academic professors. This was a  new phenomenon as universities had only recently opened their doors to many Jews as a result of the newly granted equal rights. Before that, only individual, usually assimilated Jews enrolled. The establishment of the Independent Order B’nai B’rith was a  breakthrough moment in the history of Lviv’s Jewish elites. On 5th October 1899, the Lviv Governorship issued a rescript to register the statute of the Humanitarian Society “Leopolis.” The B’nai B’rith organization was first established in New York on 13th October 1843 by Heinrich Jones, an emigrant of German origin. The order derived from the freemasonry movement. Jews borrowed from it the conduct of meetings, symbols and ranks. Similar to freemasons, they started to call the basic organizational units of “B’nai B’rith” lodges, while their members named themselves brethren. The ritual based on the masonry tradition made numerous references to the Old Testament. At the same time, the masonry’s mysticism was abandoned, especially those parts of it that related to Christianity.23 Thus, initially, it was an organization closely modelled on Masonic Lodges. However, it soon evolved in a more humanitarian direction. At the beginning of the 20th century, the organization supported the development of Zionism. Thus, after the first half century of its existence, it started to evolve into a cosmopolitan organization, supporting Jewish communities all over the world. It was after all a creation of emancipated and partially assimilated Jews who wanted to cultivate their Jewish identity and to help those fellow Jews who found themselves living under worse conditions for various reasons. The members of the “B’nai B’rith” lodges can be, therefore, considered citizens who were aware of the social and material position of their brothers in faith and ready to take responsibility for them. The organization mainly developed among members of the urban intelligentsia and business communities. They were connected not only by common values, but also

21

 Bałaban, Historia lwowskiej synagogi postępowej, 23.  Bałaban, Historia lwowskiej synagogi postępowej, 43. 23  See Ludwik Hass, Wolnomularstwo w Europie Środkowo—Wschodniej w XVIII i XIX wieku (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1982), 416–417. 22

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by the typical need of the wealthy middle class to spend spare time in “a third place” outside home and work. The aims of “Leopolis,” as per its Statute, were the following: “intellectual and moral ennoblement of its members; promotion of the purest human principles of love of one’s neighbor; maintaining dignity and honor; raising the material and moral standards of the followers in the country; provision and help for members afflicted by ill-fated events and material support at critical times; care for the ill, widows and orphans of the members.”24 Furthermore, the Statute detailed the following measures to realize the abovementioned aims: “a) organization of enlightening lectures, distributing good books; b) the foundation of libraries; c) promotion of friendship and noble sociability; d) participation in emergency actions in case of general disasters.”25 As is was only possible for righteous and well-off people to handle such noble challenges, it was decided that “B’nai B’rith” should be an exclusive organization. Only select people, specifically invited and confirmed, should gain access. Candidates needed to fulfil the following criteria, as specified in paragraph 5 of the organization’s Statute: “a) 24 years of age, or legally authenticated emancipation of a  minor; b) an irreproachable character; c) good physical and psychological health.”26 Each candidate who wanted to become a member of the organization had to fill in a questionnaire that checked on the abovementioned criteria. Apart from that, the lodge delegated its brethren to confirm the candidate’s reliability. Finally, there was a runoff vote where voters used white and black balls or cards to express their support or rejection of the candidate. The sources do, however, not allow to determine the number of rejected candidates. In fact, as far as the moral conduct of “Leopolis” members is concerned, there is no evidence that any of them ever became embroiled in a public scandal or had problems with the law. We know that people with higher education and representatives of the free professions dominated the lodge. In the 1930s, there were 198 members of “Leopolis.” 90 of them were doctors, 17 engineers, and one engineer with a doctoral degree, constituting 55% of all members. The other brethren often had higher education degrees too. Among them, there were barristers (24%), industrialists (13%), bankers (12%), medical doctors (10%), traders (8%), 24

 CDIA, fond 701, opys 2, sprava 1022: Statut Towarzystwa “Leopolis” (B’nai B’rith) we Lwowie. 25  CDIA, fond 701, opys 2, sprava 1022. 26  CDIA, fond 701, opys 2, sprava 1022.

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teachers (3%), landlords (3%), judges (2%), architects (2%) and pharmacists (2%). The remaining members (21%) of “Leopolis” were representatives of other occupations, predominantly the free professions.27 Their work was based on daily contacts with people and required them to gain their clients’ trust. If they had not striven towards this goal, or behaved unethically otherwise, ultimately, they would have been marginalized in their respective profession, or they would have been excluded altogether. Thus, these were inevitably people of strong personality and with moral backbone. Joining “Leopolis” was a confirmation of their high social and professional rank; a crowning achievement at the height of their careers. Wiktor Chajes provides evidence of the high esteem that came with membership of “Leopolis.” He became the president of the lodge in 1927. At the time, he was already a well-known social and cultural activist and a city councilor. He was also the successful owner of the banking company Schütz i Chajes, which he had established with his brother-in-law. On 15th December 1927, he noted in his diary that “yesterday, I was chosen the president of ‘B’nai B’rith’ ‘Leopolis’. It is the highest honor that a Jew can receive in Lviv.”28 In 1930 he became vice mayor of Lviv, a role in which he served until the outbreak of the Second World War. Chajes was later murdered by the NKVD, effectively a branch of the Soviet secret police. The meeting that officially established “Leopolis” took place on 29th October 1899. There were guests from Vienna, Cracow, Bielsko and Prague,29 which shows the international character and significance of the organization and its members. If we look at the place of origin of the members of the “Leopolis” lodge, we notice that they were mainly residents of Lviv, with 164 people hailing from the Galician capital, constituting 83% of the lodge’s membership. The other brethren lived in Drohobych (9), Boryslav (4), Vienna (4), Ternopil (3), Romanian Chernivtsi (2), Warsaw (2), Gródek Jagielloński (2), Gdańsk (1), Kamitz near Bielsko (1), Korostów in Skole Oblast (1), Velyki Mosty (1), Stryi (1) and Tel Aviv (1). In total, 17% of the members

27

 Calculated on the basis of Książka adresowa członków Związku Żyd. Stowarzyszeń Humanitarnych “B’nai B’rith” w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w Krakowie, ed. Artur Górowski (Cracow: B’nei Brith, 1932), 69–88. 28  Wiktor Chajes, Semper Fidelis: Pamiętnik Polaka wyznania mojżeszowego z lat 1926–1939 (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 1997), 67. 29  Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie (ANK), Archiwum Związku Żydowskich Stowarzyszeń Humanitarnych “B’nai B’rith” in Cracow (1892–1938), sign. BB 387: Jewish Humanitarian Society “Leopolis” in Lviv.

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lived outside Lviv. It is difficult to assess the significance of this geographical distribution and draw any firm conclusion. However, it seems clear that it attests to a particular fact: Lviv exerted considerable influence mainly, but not exclusively, over smaller cities of East Galicia. In fact, West Galicia was under the influence of the “Solidarność” lodge in Cracow. For practical reasons, Jews from the western part of the province chose that branch. Members of “B’nai B’rith” needed to attend lodge meetings and take part in various initiatives. Thus, they associated themselves with the lodge located closest to their places of residence. For example, there were also lodges in the larger East Galician cities of Przemyśl and Stanyslaviv (today Ivano-Frankivsk). “Humanitas” in Przemyśl was founded on 18 March 1924, and “Achduth” of Stanyslaviv on 14th February 1928. The capital’s “Leopolis” brethren were instrumental in helping to set up these two provincial lodges.30 Their leading role in establishing the Przemyśl and Stanyslaviv lodges was not only because they provided organizational aid. Lviv was generally the dominant center of Jewish life, partly for the simple reason that its Jewish community was much larger than elsewhere. What is more, it was a university city, while Przemyśl and Stanyslaviv did not play the same role as academic centers. Also, Lviv, together with Cracow, were economically much more developed than other cities in the province. This facilitated the emergence and prosperity of Jewish entrepreneurship which was crucial for the development of the “B’nai B’rith” movement. The significance and impact of “Leopolis” are well reflected in its guests who visited the lodge. Until 1918, apart from people from East Galicia, they were mainly visitors of other “B’nai B’rith” lodges from the Habsburg Monarchy. After the dissolution of the Monarchy and the establishment of the Second Polish Republic, they were predominantly brethren from Polish lodges. This seems to reveal that the “Leopolis” lodge was rather poorly connected internationally. However, this was only superficially so. In fact, the lodge did also establish contacts with the USA and with Jewish communities in the Land of Israel. During lodge meetings, there were lectures on international affairs, for instance on the situation of Jews in Germany, the political situation in Russia, and the global development of the Zionist movement and Jewish settlements in Palestine. There was clearly growing interest among the 30

 See Łukasz Tomasz Sroka, “‘Achdut’ - B’nai B’rith lodge of Stanyslaviv in the light of documents found in the local archive,” Scripta Judaica Cracoviensia 9 (2011): 159–168.

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lodge’s brethren in re-establishing the Jewish national ancestral home in Palestine. This is in evidence from the number of journeys to the country, organized by Zionist organizations and professional travel agencies. When they returned, the brethren gave detailed descriptions of their trip to the Land of Israel and the meetings they attended there, including those with other members of “B’nai B’rith.” An interesting aspect of the activities of “Leopolis” was its openness to the needs of women. A clear example of that is the establishment of “The Association of Sisters” in 1927. It gathered women who were interested in activities similar to those conducted by men of the “Leopolis” lodge.31 Even before that, the brethren took an interest in social issues and matters relating to girls and women. It mainly concerned the problem of Jewish orphans, the education of girls from poor families and so-called human trafficking. From then on, not only did “Leopolis” work for women, but also with women. These were mainly the wives and the widows of late members of “B’nai B’rith,” usually with much experience in social work. Many of them worked simultaneously for other philanthropic societies and were members of the Zionist movement. These brief deliberations on the Jewish elites of Lviv and of its “B’nai B’rith” lodge “Leopolis” invite one important conclusion in particular: similar to other European cities, it was precisely these kinds of groups who constituted the strategic base and source of Zionists. The largest and most influential group of Zionist activists derived from the secular and progressive intelligentsia. Even though initially they were seen as incurable dreamers, unpleasant and sometimes violent events led Jews to take the initiative and seek an alternative to defeat assimilation. Soon, “converted” assimilated Jews strengthened their ranks. Contrary to what one might assume, there was nothing surprising in that, as two key leaders of Zionism, Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl, were also supporters of assimilation in the early stages of their lives. In Lviv, Zionists became very influential in “B’nai B’rith,” and many members joined Zionist groupings. Subsequently, Zionists assumed a generally strong position and started to dominate the Jewish Community of Lviv. The beginning of the 20th century saw a further weakening of the influence of assimilators. Meanwhile, the socialists in Lviv did not manage to come to 31

 ANK, sign. BB 387: Invitations to lectures and meetings, Wiktor Chajes’s speech (18th February 1928), press bulletin on anti-Semitism, correspondence; CDIA, fond 701, opys 3, sprava 679: Report on the activity of the Humanitarian Association “Leopolis.”

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power either. These traditional opponents of Zionism, socialists, as well as orthodox Jews, held a world view that was diametrically opposed to that of the Zionists. In that respect, Lviv did not differ from other European cities. However, unlike other places, during the interwar period, the Zionists came to constitute the main political power among Lviv’s local Jews. Various activities of the Jewish community reflected this directly. More and more Zionist organizations supported these activities both institutionally and financially. B’nai B’rith was particularly active in this respect. For a telling and symbolically significant illustration of the growing influence of Zionism one can refer to the payments which reached the institutions of the emerging Jewish state from the Jewish community of Lviv. Compare, for instance, the special certificates for donations to Keren ha-Jesod in figures 4 and 5.

Figure 4. A certificate confirming the payment made by the Jewish Community of Lviv to Keren ha-Jesod.32

32

 From the author’s private collection.

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Figure 5. Overleaf of the certificate of figure 4.33

Conclusion The process of modernization among Lviv’s Jews began at the turn of the 19th century. It was a result of the Haskalah, coming not only from Berlin, but also from Vienna, as important centers of the Jewish Enlightenment. Apart from that, the Habsburgs made efforts to Germanize Jews, providing them with secular education. In the second half of the 19th century, after Galicia had gained a considerable degree of political autonomy, the public life of Lviv was re-Polonized. Assimilation to German culture and language lost its significance, while the trend to send Jewish children to secular schools, both Jewish and general, continued and became established. The increasing affirmation of Polishness among Lviv’s Jews led to a change in many families who, once assimilated to German culture and language, now switched to Polish. Generations of young Jews were raised in the spirit of love for Polish culture. Many of them later became Polish patriots. As a result of being granted equal rights, Jews could enroll in higher education. Attendance at universities nurtured their intellectual potential and fostered the standing of Jewish representatives in the free professions. In the trading and banking sectors, they gained a position of primacy. At the same time, and similar to many other European cities, modern anti-Semitism emerged and spread. It led Jews to search for new and unconventional solutions. Initially, the Zionists’ proposition to abandon old models of lifestyle and to become blue-collar professionals sounded abstract for many Jews. In fact, their program was not an attempt at stopping the modernization of Jewish society. It was rather an answer to the risks posed by modernization which had resulted in growing anti-Semitism and tensions on the labor market. Thus, its limitations had become clearly visible. As Jews succeeded in various domains, especially in trade, they also started to compete with each other. This led to a reduction in revenue and a rise in unemployment. The idea of rebuilding a Jewish state equaled a new beginning for Jews. Enslaved by averse social and economic circumstances, they were looking for fresh opportunities for personal development. The Zionists’ antidote to the fear and dangers of modernity was to put forward solutions which seemed

33

 From the author’s private collection.

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utopian and surprising to many. However, they were effective. Ultimately, Zionists won the historical battle, even though their fight against the hostages of the projected new national state soon brought its own problems. From the Polish partitions to independent Poland in 1918, the Jews of Lviv were strongly influenced by Vienna as the political, scientific, cultural and economic center of the era. Lviv as the capital of the crownland had much deeper relations with Vienna than any other Galician city, including Cracow. As a result, Germanization took hold quickly among Lviv’s Jews. Lviv functioned as a transmitter of cultural influences from Vienna to smaller cities in Galicia. Fascinated with Vienna, Lviv’s Jews, Poles and Ukrainians alike often called Lviv “small Vienna”; a nickname which was also applied to Cracow.34 For Jews from smaller towns, Lviv was a substitute for and a promise of the great world. For some of them, Lviv sufficed to fulfil their ambitions and needs. Others migrated further, to North America and, rarely though, to South America, Western Europe and Eretz Yisrael. As a result, the Jewish community of Lviv benefitted from a constant stream of ambitious, brave and creative individuals. On the other hand, it was a brain drain on the province, making it more fossilized and conservative. While provincial Eastern Galicia closed in on its own small world and values, Lviv opened up to the influences of the modern world, to new phenomena in science, culture and economy. Its Jewish community was slowly, but steadily becoming more and more varied and dynamic. In the era of Galician autonomy, the Jews of Lviv became increasingly Polonized. Their previously close relation with German culture did not vanish instantly. It slowly subsided. After World War I, this became subject to further changes. At that point, not only did Lviv’s Jews reject Germanization but many of them believed that assimilation to the Polish language and culture had become equally outdated. As in other European cities, this was the result of the ever-growing popularity of Zionism. Important catalysts were World War I, rising nationalism, and anti-Semitism.35 In Lviv, there was yet another factor though: this was the growing Polish-Ukrainian conflict. The city’s Jews followed carefully as they themselves became involved and victimized, as both sides 34

 See Irena Homola-Skąpska, “‘Mały Wiedeń’ nad Wisłą,” in Z dziejów Krakowa, Galicji i Śląska Cieszyńskiego: Wybór pism historycznych, ed. Grzegorz Nieć (Cracow, Warsaw: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2007), 165–186. 35  See Konrad Zieliński, “O tułactwie inaczej: przymusowe migracje Żydów w latach I wojny światowej jako czynnik sprzyjający emancypacji,” Quarterly of the Jewish History 3 (2009): 300–311.

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accused them of favoring the other party. The two nationalisms prevalent at the time, Polish and Ukrainian, stimulated the third one: Jewish nationalism, which took an altogether different, milder form. All that resulted in the rise of Zionism. Zionists became the main political power among Jews. A similar situation obtained in other cities of the newly independent Second Polish Republic. However, in Lviv, the movement’s personnel and its organizational background were particularly strong. They encouraged Jews to migrate to Eretz Yisrael. A  facilitating factor was the closeness of two important ports which offered shipping services to Israel: Constanța and Odessa. Still, the majority of Lviv’s Jews felt attached to their city, as they were an intrinsic constituency of the city and its multicultural make-up. Therefore, it was ultimately not Zionism, but the Second World War, which led to the end of Jewish life in Lviv. In that respect, local Jews shared the same fate as millions of their compatriots across Europe.36

36

 See Jakub Honigsman, Zagłada Żydów lwowskich (1941–1944), translated and edited by A. Redzik (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2007).

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Beyond National:  “Posttraumatic Identity” of Disabled War Veterans in Interwar Lviv Oksana Vynnyk

Introduction After the Great War millions of demobilized soldiers returned home. Many carried visible and invisible wounds and their disfigured bodies served as constant reminders of the tragic consequences of four years of bloody war. States, including those established after the dissolution of empires in Eastern and Central Europe, adopted various approaches and established different systems to assist disabled soldiers. As a result, veterans had both similar martial experiences and similar experiences of adapting to postwar life mediated through their traumatic wartime experiences and posttraumatic identity, too. The First World War dramatically changed the routine of everyday life in Lviv. The Russian army occupied the city from September 1914 to June 1915. Unfortunately for Lviv, however, the war did not end in November 1918; rather, the city became a battlefield in the Ukrainian-Polish War of 1918–19. Street battles and fierce fighting cleaved the city. Serving as the conflict’s front line for three weeks in 1918, the city was also besieged by the Ukrainian Galician Army for four months afterwards. Yet, this was not the last time that violence would engulf the city. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, Lviv was again at the center of military operations. As a result of imperial legacies and several post-First World War conflicts, veterans of various armies lived in the same territory. Interwar Lviv lost its status as a regional capital, one of the central reasons for its “provincialization” during the interwar period. Though still an important regional cultural and educational center, Lviv was economically, politically, and even symbolically downgraded to the second tier. Like

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other parts of Poland, the city suffered from economic crises immediately after the Great War and during the Great Depression. One of the main features of political life in interwar Lviv was growing interethnic tension, which was caused by the Polish state’s policies towards minorities and brought about their gradual radicalization. The Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements also nourished anti-Semitic attitudes among the population.1 Complex Great War experiences did not cleanly fit into national narratives and were marginalized in memory discourses. In contrast, the memory of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict and the Polish-Soviet war became important foundational myths in new-born Poland. The ethnic-Ukrainian cult of the “defence of Lviv” was reflected in numerous commemoration projects, like the monumental Cemetery of Lviv Eaglets.2 Due to Poland’s military struggles in the immediate post-war era, Polish authorities gave preferential treatment to disabled soldiers of the Polish army, rather than World War I veterans, and only recognized disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician Army in March 1932. The state refused to provide the latter with either the material or “symbolic” support given to other groups of disabled soldiers.3 The majority of disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician Army lived in the countryside, but Lviv was the center for the organizations and institutions that provided assistance to them. “Disabled veteran” was a  category that especially in the case of former Habsburg soldiers did not have a definite ethnic or class profile. Unlike many others, this category bypassed almost obligatory ethnic descriptors and encompassed individuals of mixed background with different, sometimes conflicting loyalties and identities. Yet, it also united those with the shared “bodily” experience of being war victims. Despite differences, various groups of former soldiers had much in common: injuries and physical and mental diseases stemmed from a shared experience. Disabled veterans’ experiences of 1

 Andrzej Bonusjak, Lwów w latach 1918–1939: Ludność—Przestrzeń- Samorząd (Rzeszów: Wydawn. Wyższej Szkoły Pedagogicznej w Rzeszowie, 2000), 275–282; Grzegorz Mazur, Życie polityczne polskiego Lwowa 1918–1939 (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2007), 427–434; Christoph Mick, Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in Contested City (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016), 220–248. 2  Przewodnik po cmentarzu obrońców Lwowa (Lwów: Staraniem i nakładem Straży Mogił Polskich Bohaterów, 1939). 3  “Dim Ukrains’koho Tovarystva Dopomohy u L’vovi,” in Kalendar Ukrains’kyi Invalida 1937 (Lviv: Nakladom Ukrains’kogo Tovarystva Dopomogy u Lvovi, 1936), 23–26.

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post-war adaptation to civilian life were also remarkably similar. Through the analysis of Poland’s interwar welfare system, the disabled veterans’ movement, the personal and symbolic meaning of military service to injured veterans, and the public discourse surrounding the wounded, this article explores whether some common disabled veteran identity emerged; and if so, what factors shaped it and what kind of community did it create? This veteran community in Lviv serves as a model through which we can study interethnic relations and the construction of a national body politic in the Second Polish Republic.

The Welfare System for Disabled Veterans in Poland During and after World War I, Western European and North American countries established a welfare system in order to assist disabled demobilized soldiers. The Polish government also determined that such a system was its duty towards disabled veterans who struggled for independence. As a model, Poland learned from the German experience, but severe economic crises did not allow promises to be fulfilled. Despite the political polarization in Parliament in the early 1920s, most parties agreed on the necessity of establishing adequate assistance for disabled veterans. After two years of work, the first Invalid Act was passed on 18 March 1921. It provided state assistance not only to veterans but to their families and to the families of soldiers who died during military service.4 Legislatively, equal rights were granted to disabled veterans of the Polish and imperial armies. However, the severe economic crises and hyperinflation of the early 1920s did not afford the implementation of the Invalid Act. Budget short falls fuelled discussions about reducing benefits for disabled veterans of imperial armies. The Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic (Związek Inwalidów Wojennych Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej) organized a campaign against such an effort and was able to defend the rights of imperial disabled veterans. Some improvements to the welfare system for disabled veterans occurred during the second part of the 1920s but the Great Depression devastated state finances, which reduced social spending. The new legislation passed in March 1932 divided disabled veterans into three categories

4

 Sejm Ustawodawczy, Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 222 posiedzenia, columns 54–58.

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based upon where they lived, either in a city, a town, or a village. Such an approach was linked to an assumed higher cost of urban living. This allowed the government to reduce outlays for disabled veterans who lived in more pastoral environments.5 Benefit cuts continued in the year following the new Invalid Act. According to an order from President Ignacy Mościcki issued on 28 October 1933, disabled veterans who were less than 25% disabled were deprived of all allowances.6 In other European countries, however, the criteria did not change—in Germany, usually a model for Polish bureaucrats, a disabled veteran’s allowance was still paid to those with more than 20% disability.7 In midNovember 1933, another order further divided Polish veterans. Disabled soldiers of the Polish army and Polish Legions who were less than 85% able bodied re-gained the right to receive an allowance.8 Payments to eligible disabled veterans were reduced again by 10% on orders issued in October and November 1933.9 When authorities further differentiated the taxonomy of disabled veterans in 1933, they did so for economic, not political reasons. Edwin Wagner, the President of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic and one of the leaders of the Lviv disabled veteran movement in the 1920s and the early 1930s felt uncomfortable with such divisions. He considered the creation of hierarchies within the veteran community unfair and argued that Polish peasants died in different places and for different armies and that all veterans should be afforded equal benefits by the government regardless for whom they fought. Similarly, the former soldiers of Piłsudski’s legions stated that they did not want special rights because every soldier had struggled for Poland.10

5

 “Uderzenie pięścią w stól,” Inwalida, 26 June 1921, 1–2; “Pytania i odpowiedzi,” Inwalida, 3 July 1921, 3; “Zamach p. Michalskiego na ustawę inwalidzką,” Inwalida, 22 January 1922, 1–2; “Pan Michalski jako novelista,” Inwalida, 29 January 1922, 3; “Nowela pod obradami sejmowej Komisji Inwalidzkiej,” Inwalida, 5 March 1922, 1; Kik., “Pan Poseł Łypacewicz, a sprawa inwalidzka,” Inwalida, 8 June 1924, 1–3; Sejm II RP, 3 kadencja, Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 67 posiedzenia, columns 7–9. 6  Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej, Rozporządzenie 669, Dziennik Ustaw Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej 86 (1933): 1696–1700. 7  James M. Diehl, “Victors or Victim? Disabled Veterans in the Third Reich,” The Journal of Modern History 59, 4 (1987), 717. 8  Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej, Rozporządzenie 943, Dziennik Ustaw Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej 106 (1933): 2193–2194. 9  Sejm II RP, 4 kadencja, Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 15 posiedzenia, column 125. 10  Sejm II RP, 4 kadencja, Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 45 posiedzenia, column 11.

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Organizations of Disabled Veterans While the state tried to establish programs of social assistance, demobilized soldiers started to self-organize in various localities. The movement for the rights of disabled veterans grew rapidly. The first organization of disabled Polish soldiers was established during the First World War in Cracow, becoming the lynchpin of the disabled veterans’ movement. At the Congress of the Delegates of Disabled Veterans, which took place in Warsaw in April 1919, representatives of various organizations created the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic. The main purpose of this organization was to represent disabled veterans and defend their rights.11 The Union, however, had a fraught relationship with the government as Warsaw tried to exercise undue influence and control over its affairs. The Union’s first years witnessed a tense struggle to establish state assistance for disabled veterans, to accept special veterans’ legislation, and even to approve the organization’s statutes, which were delayed by authorities for twenty months.12 Lviv’s disabled veterans established the separate Union of Disabled Veterans in Eastern Małopolska in July 1919. Because of interethnic tension after the Ukrainian-Polish War this organization did not accept disabled veterans of Ukrainian origin. According to reports in Słowo Polskie and Gazeta Poranna, the leaders of the Lviv organization decided not to join the central, Warsaw-based organization in April 1920. One of the main principles of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic was the inclusion of all disabled veterans regardless of their ethnic or religious background. The members of the Union in Eastern Małopolska believed that such an approach would not work in Galicia on account of a large minority group of “Rusins and neutrals (Jews).”13 However, reports in the newspapers about the meeting of activists and the decisions of this organization contradicted each other.

11

 “Zwiazek Inwalidów Wojennych Rzeczypospolitej Polski,” Inwalida, November 1928, 33–37. 12  “Rzut oka w stecz,” Inwalida, 2 January 1921, 1; “Tajemnica przewlekania zatwierdzenia naszego statutu,” Inwalida, 13 February 1921, 1–4; “Cośmy zrobili?” Inwalida, 20 February 1921, 1–2; “Zwiazek Inwalidów Wojennych,” 33–37. 13  “Zgromadzenie inwalidów,” Słowo Polskie, 20 April 1920, 2; “Zebranie inwalidów,” Gazeta Poranna, 21 April 1920, 3; “Wieści z Czerwonej Rusi,” Inwalida, 3 August 1919.

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The Jewish newspaper Chwila published a  completely different account. It revealed that only National-Democrats were against the inclusion of Jewish and Ukrainian disabled veterans into the Union. The only group of disabled veterans excluded from the organization were veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army. In other words, according to the Lviv-based Jewish newspaper, the members accepted the main principles of the all-Polish organization and joined it. Chwila accused Słowo Polskie of a deliberate falsification of facts.14 Undoubtedly, various newspapers issued confusing and contradictory reports of the meeting. What is clear, however, is that the issue of national minorities in disabled veteran organizations became a contested ground between various political and ethnic groups. This issue turned into a struggle between competing narratives of “truth.” Regardless of the decision made by members of the Union of Disabled Veterans in Eastern Małopolska in April 1920, by early 1921 the Lviv organization became a branch of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic.15 This implied at least a tacit acceptance of the main principles of the central organization. A report from the Lviv branch published in April 1921 did not classify its members along ethnic lines. It indicated that 1000 disabled veterans served in the Austrian army, 104 in the Polish army, 14 were veterans of the January uprisings of 1863–64, and 16 were disabled veterans of previous wars. This report also highlighted the socio-economic profile of its members; the majority belonged to the working class. Only three members were former officers and five disabled veterans had a  university education. The majority of disabled veterans worked as tradesmen or artisans.16 According to the poorly preserved minutes from the general meetings of the Lviv branch of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic, the issue of national minorities was not discussed in the early 1920s. Rather, disabled veterans focused on debates about their material hardships and the failure of central and local authorities to establish adequate systems of assistance.17 Members proclaimed that they were against any differentiation between disabled veterans based on for whom they fought. Such division was considered an attempt to divide the united organization by the authorities. 14

 “Z wiecu inwalidów,” Chwila, 22 April 22, 1920.  “Z działności Koła Lwów,” Inwalida, 27 February 1921, 5. 16  “Lwów,” Inwalida, 10 April 1921, 7. 17  Derzhavnyi Archiv L’vivs’koi Oblasti (DALO), fond 1, opys 33, sprava 814, arkush. 3–6v., 12–12v., 16–16v. 15

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Moreover, the Lviv disabled veterans demanded similar rights for the preGreat War disabled veterans of imperial armies. However, there were categories of division other than ethnic origin or army affiliation that were rooted in the nature of one’s disability and in military hierarchies. Disabled veterans talked about the lack of solidarity between veterans with varying degrees of disability. Veterans with less serious disabilities had better access to various benefits. The traditional division between officers and enlisted soldiers manifested itself as well in the Union. Some members of the Lviv branch of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic asked officers to join with common soldiers and to work together for a common cause.18 Although the leaders of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic declared the equality of all disabled veterans regardless of their ethnic or religious background, the newspaper Inwalida Żydowski reported that a separate Jewish organization of disabled veterans emerged in 1924 as a result of the anti-Semitic atmosphere in the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic and other all-Polish disabled veteran organizations. Jews felt as second-class members and decided to create the Union of Organizations of the Jewish Disabled Veterans, Widows, and Orphans (Zjednoczenie Związków Żydowskich Inwalidów Wdów i Sierot Wojennych RP), which would defend their rights.19 In contrast to the leaders of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic who considered the Jewish organization a threat to the unity of the disabled veteran movement, representatives of the Jewish organization understood “unity” as a  union not of all disabled veterans in Poland but of Jewish disabled veterans.20 In the 1930s, the Union of Organizations of the Jewish Disabled Veterans publicly emphasized its loyalty to the Polish state. However, after Piłsudski’s death, the regime drifted to the right and anti-Semitism became state policy. The Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic mirrored this official ideology. In June 1936, Edwin Wagner, the leader of the disabled veteran movement from Lviv, played on vile anti-Semitic stereotypes and publicly talked about the links between Jews and communism. The newspaper Inwalida commented on his speech and underlined Wagner’s belief that the Jewish population had to reject its anti-

18

 DALO, fond 1, opys 33, sprava 814, arkush. 12–12v., 16–16v.  L. S., “Jednością silni,” Inwalida Żydowski, 1 December 1926, 1–2; J. B., “Sprawiedliwości,” Inwalida Żydowski, 1 February 1927, 1–2. 20  L. S., “Jednością silni,” 1–2. 19

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state policy in order to become a true part of Polish society.21 At the beginning of 1939, an article in the same periodical stated that the only solution to the Jewish question in Poland was a  reduction in the size of the Jewish population, in other words mass emigration.22 Thus, the organization that was created to unite disabled veterans regardless of their ethnic or religious background completely departed from its principles and did not recognize the right of this large minority group to even live in Poland, let alone receive disabled soldier benefits. Inwalida published the Union’s official positions, which closely mirrored those of Wagner who as the organization’s president was responsible for its policy. Unlike Ukrainians, Jews served only in imperial armies (a few soldiers of Jewish origin were in the Polish army, but this was the exception) and did not constitute separate national military units during the First World War (Poles created the Polish Legion and Ukrainians established the Sich Riflemen). Formally, Jewish disabled veterans had the same rights as ethnic Poles who served in imperial armies. Yet, the gap between legal rhetoric and the lived reality was visible in the treatment of national minorities and the organizations that represented them. Representatives of the Union of Organizations of the Jewish Disabled Veterans, Widows, and Orphans and the Jewish press frequently wrote about the anti-Semitism of Polish authorities and the Union of Disabled Veterans.23 However, sources suggest that despite a change in government policy, the attitude of Lviv Voivodeship officials towards Jewish disabled veterans hardly changed throughout the 1930s. Polish officials usually did not reject outright Jewish disabled veterans’ requests but, rather, granted them a one-time payment, similar to Roman Catholic or Greek Catholic veterans.24 The Voivodeship continued to make such payments even to those Jewish disabled veterans who were denounced as swindlers.25 It also investi21

 Edwin Wagner, “Spoleczeństwu żydowskiemu pod rozwagę,” Inwalida, 15 June 1936, 13. 22  “Sprawa żydowska na realnych torach,” Inwalida, 8 January 1939. 23  J. B., “Sprawiedliwości,” 1–4; DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 2065, ark. 19–19v.; “O byt inwalidów Żyd.,” Chwila, 17 November 1924, 7; “Stworzenia ‘Związku Żyd. Inwalidów, Wdów i Sierót Woj.’,” Chwila, 2 December, 1924, 3; L. S., “Jednością silni,” 1–2. 24  DALO, f. 1, op. 34, spr. 561; DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 3733; DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 4102; DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 4093; DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 4104; DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 4105; DALO, f. 1, op. 34, spr. 564. 25  DALO, f. 1., op. 33, spr. 3733, ark. 31–68.

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gated situations in which local bureaucrats were accused of anti-Semitism and reversed unfavorable decisions.26

The National Structure of Lviv-based Organizations before World War Two Tensions between various national and religious groups increased in Poland’s eastern borderlands in the years preceding the Second World War. How did the polarization of political life influence the organizations of disabled war veterans in Lviv? The Department of Assistance for War Invalids in Lviv Voivodeship gathered statistics from relevant organizations that indicated the national identities of veterans in early 1939. According to the reports, 2008 disabled veterans were members of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic in Lviv district and 57% of them were Poles, 41% Ukrainians, and 2% Jews. Only 30% of disabled veterans were former soldiers of the Polish army and the rest belonged to the Austro-Hungarian army. The Union of Blind Soldiers had 323 members of which Roman Catholics were 59%, Greek Catholics 34%, and Jews 7%. The report of this organization showed not only the religious but also the national affiliation of blind veterans, which did not match the usual categories of Roman Catholic—Pole, and Greek Catholic—Ukrainian. 22% of those surveyed reported their nationality as Ukrainian, while 78% identified as Polish. Jews were not represented as a separate group but were obviously added to the group of Poles. Only 10% of blind disabled veterans served in the Polish Army, one member was reported as a veteran of the “Ukrainian” army, and the rest were demobilized soldiers of the imperial armies. The Invalid Legion of the Polish Army was the smallest and the only homogeneous organization of disabled veterans in Lviv district. It consisted of 191 veterans of the Polish army, 188 of whom were Roman Catholic.27 The largest Lviv-based organization of disabled veterans represented those of various religious and ethnic backgrounds who served in different armies. Poles constituted the majority of members, but national minorities were also significant. Ethnic differences did not prevent disabled veterans from uniting

26

 DALO, f. 1, op. 34, spr. 561, ark. 95.  DALO, f. 1, op. 54, spr. 1585.

27

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in the same organization. A similar legal status, fighting experiences, and perspectives on disability overcame potential ethnic divisions even during the late Second Polish Republic, characterized by political radicalization and polarization. It must be noted that Jewish disabled soldiers had a separate organization and that they were not well represented in all-Polish organizations. By 1939, Warsaw had adopted a radical approach to the Jewish question; assimilation was considered impossible and the mass emigration of Jews from Poland was the only solution. Even though the leaders of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic supported this radical solution to the Jewish problem, Jews were still members of this, and other disabled veterans’ organizations in Lviv. Moreover, the Union of Blind Soldiers even “assimilated” 7% of its Jewish members and reported them as ethnically Polish.

The Image of the “Disabled Veteran” in Public Discourse: Jan Kos’ Suicide On 6 June 1924 members of the Lviv branch of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic gathered to meet. Tensions rose as attendees discussed the inadequate social welfare system for disabled soldiers and the neglect of central and local authorities, which in addition to various abuses tried to turn the state House of Invalids into a military hospital. A representative of the Union from Warsaw, Bolesław Kikiewicz, and the parliamentarian Czesław Mączyński (the Polish Commander-in-Chief during the “defence of Lviv”) were among the presenters. At the end of the meeting, one disabled veteran from Lviv, Jan Kos, delivered a bitter and caustic speech about the tragic fate of Polish disabled veterans. However, in contrast to other presenters, Kos not only spoke but he acted as well. He took his gun and shot himself in front of a  room crowded with disabled veterans.28 This was a shocking public spectacle that various groups of disabled veterans and the authorities tried to use to their favor. What sorts of discourses were created by this suicide and how did they function at the intersection of national identity and a common disabled veteran identity?

28

 Bolesław Kikiewicz, “Nad grobem ś. p. Jana Kosa,” Inwalida, 20 July 1924, 8–10; DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 1554, ark. 3–4.

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The interpretation of the suicide put forth by the leaders of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic was published in the newspaper Inwalida. The author, Bolesław Kikiewicz, participated in the meeting and witnessed the tragic event. He published two telegrams that he sent to Warsaw after Kos’ suicide. They were almost identical; the first was sent to the disabled Deputy Edmund Bigoński and the second to the executive board of the Union. Kikiewicz mentioned that the disabled veteran who shot himself was also the recipient of Poland’s highest military honor, the Order Wojenny Virtuti Militari [the order of military virtue]. However, his telegram to Bigoński started with a lament on the despair of demobilized disabled veterans and the failings of the state to care for them.29 Despite Kikiewicz’s admission that Jan Kos was a “defender of Lviv,” he presented this public suicide as a noble act of protest on behalf of all disabled veterans. Even though Kos had been well cared for, he could not accept how the Polish state treated disabled veterans: “[...] his honest soul thought that if Poland was not the country it should be, it meant that not enough blood had been sacrificed [...].” According to Kikiewicz his last words were: “Long live Poland, our beloved motherland. I fought for Poland and I would die for Poland!”30 A Warsaw representative emphasized the government’s responsibility for the suicide, and he tried to use it to benefit the broader disabled veteran movement. The issues discussed during the meeting in Lviv concerned disabled veterans in general and not a specific group. The House of Invalids hosted veterans of the various armies and its physical relocation could potentially negatively affect them. The tragic event in Lviv also coincided with the struggle of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic to prevent the reduction of the allowance for disabled veterans. In June 1924, the government decided to reduce the support given to war orphans, while a deputy from the left-wing Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe “Wyzwolenie” [Polish People’s Party “Liberation”], Wacław Łypacewicz, suggested cutting the allowance to disabled veterans instead. The indignant leaders of the Union persuaded him against such budget changes. However, they were disappointed that Łypacewicz repeated to them half-truths and clichés on issues of assistance for demobilized disabled veterans. For example, he mentioned that the veterans of the Polish army should have more privileges than the disabled veterans of imperial armies,

29

 Kikiewicz, “Nad grobem,” 8.  Kikiewicz, “Nad grobem,” 8–9.

30

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that veterans with a low percentage of disability should be deprived of allowances, and that the status of the disabled veteran should be granted only to those who have proof of their disability.31 In contrast, the equality of all disabled veterans was one of the main tenets of the veteran movement.32 The government tried to change legislation that would have split the disabled veteran movement and alter the minimum percentage of disability required for an allowance. Fortunately, parliamentary deputies, under pressure from the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic, voted against such a decision.33 In order to underline the consequences of governmental policy, Kikiewicz deployed a narrative in which Jan Kos became the symbol of struggle for the rights of disabled veterans. Kos became the victimized hero who was ready to die to ensure better care for his military comrades. Periodicals also emphasized the personal responsibility of some deputies, like Łypacewicz, whose attempts to reduce veterans’ benefits were the reason for the public suicide in Lviv. The Warsaw representatives admitted that another disabled veteran also tried to commit suicide following Kos’ example. Moreover, Kikiewicz threatened that the soon-to-be mass suicide of disabled veterans, emboldened by Kos’ example, would be due to neglect and mistreatment by the government.34 The local military authorities published the official account of the suicide. First, they argued that as Kos was the owner of a cigarette kiosk, he was well heeled and had no legitimate financial complaints. Moreover, they argued that his suicide was not motivated by grievances against the state but, rather, that he killed himself because of personal reasons. An investigation revealed his alleged philandering tendencies, which caused trouble at home. These personal complications, not any state actions, were the real reasons behind Kos’ suicide.35 That his widow published a letter so soon after his suicide that described him as an ideal family man clearly belied the official version of events.36 31

 Kik., “Pan poseł Łypacewicz,” 1–3.  “Dwukrotne zwycięstwo,” Inwalida, 20 July 1924, 1–3. 33  Ebi, “Dalszy etap walki,” Inwalida, 13 July 1924, 1–4; “Dwukrotne zwycięstwo,” 1–3. 34  Kikiewicz, “Nad grobem,” 8–10; “Co mówi P. S. L. o Wyzwoleńcach,” Inwalida, 27 July 1924, 3. 35  “Z powodu tragicznej śmierci Inwalidy,” Inwalida, 27 July 1924, 6–7. 36  “List wdowy po Śp. J. Kosie,” Wiek Nowy, 13 July 1924, 9; “W sprawie demonstracyjnego samobójstwa na wiecu,” Kurjer Lwowski, 14 July 1924, 4. 32

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However, Kos’ suicide did ignite a  broader discussion on the welfare system for disabled veterans, and local and central attitudes about disabled soldiers.37 Gazeta Poranna even suggested that society had a moral obligation to care for disabled veterans, especially as weak economic conditions undermined the ability of the state to provide.38 In contrast to Inwalida, Lviv-based newspapers did not construct the heroic image of a disabled veteran who died for a common cause. The Lviv press stressed that Kos’ speech was indeed very personal but that his reasons for suicide stemmed from the labyrinthine civic regulations that made it almost impossible for him to run his small kiosk and not from any grievances stemming from the broader treatment of disabled veterans.39 Kurjer Lwowski emphasized that disabled veterans also spoke about a system that gave preference to Jews and profiteers and not disabled soldiers who sacrificed for Poland and Lviv.40 Some newspapers refused to publish the official explanation as a sign of respect to the deceased veteran.41 Kurjer Lwowski even admitted that all accusations against the local and central government mentioned during the meeting of disabled veterans were true. As such, rumors and innuendos about Kos’ personal life were intended to obscure the simple fact that the state authorities failed to establish an adequate welfare system for disabled veterans.42 The representatives of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic and local newspapers interpreted this public suicide in different ways. Lviv-based newspapers considered the indifference of the local government towards this disabled veteran as the main reason for the tragedy. Kos committed suicide not because of his frustration with the failure of the state to establish an adequate welfare system for disabled veterans in Poland, but because of his inability to manage successfully his business due to the burdensome regulations of local authorities. Interestingly, the narratives constructed by the leaders of both the disabled veteran movement and the local newspapers 37

 “Tragiczny przebieg wiecu inwalidów,” Gazeta Lwowska, 8 July 1924, 5; “Demonstracyjne samobójstwo inwalidy na wiecu,” Kurjer Lwowski, 9 July 1924, 3; “Samobójstwo inwalidy na wiecu w Sali Sokoła Macierzy,” Wiek Nowy, 8 July 1924, 5; “Samobójstwo inwalidy na wiecu w Sokole,” Gazeta Poranna, 8 July 1924, 3. 38  “Samobójstwo inwalidy,” 3. 39  “Tragiczny przebieg wiecu,” 5; “Demonstracyjne samobójstwo,” 3; “Samobójstwo inwalidy,” 3. 40  “Demonstracyjne samobójstwo,” 3. 41  “Demonstracyjne samobójstwo na wiecu,” Kurjer Lwowski, 10 July 1924. 42  “Demonstracyjne samobójstwo,” 4; “W sprawie demonstracyjnego samobójstwa,” 4.

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eschew the category of national identity. Although Kos was a former member of the Polish army and was a storied “defender of Lviv,” neither the disabled veteran movement nor the press presented him as a Polish national martyr.

Affiliation with the Army: Habsburg Disabled Veterans in Poland Loyalty to one’s former armed forces was a key component of a veteran’s identity. Such differentiation between demobilized soldiers of various armies was visible not only in the political discourse of interwar Poland. It was also a crucial factor in the discourses constructed by disabled veterans themselves. Veterans who belonged to the same army accrued the same state benefits, which in turn created a similar experience of demobilization and reintegration into civilian life. Service in multinational imperial armies often caused the emergence of a common identity that blurred ethnic and religious fault lines. The welfare system for disabled veterans was one of the factors that reinforced the common identity of disabled veterans of the former Austro-Hungarian army. The Lviv Voivodeship refused to register the separate Union of Disabled Veterans of the former Austro-Hungarian Army in Małopolska at the end of 1934.43 This attempt to establish a new organization in Lviv was made less than a year after the benefits for disabled veterans from the imperial armies had been reduced in October 1933.44 In other words, this benefit reduction sparked the need for a separate organization more than fifteen years after the end of World War I. There is no evidence that disabled veterans of other imperial armies tried to establish a similar organization in other parts of Poland. At the same time, former soldiers of imperial Vienna constituted the largest homogeneous group of veterans in Lviv, which explains why such an organization was founded in the first place. This was markedly a  grass roots initiative whose founders, some illiterate, were clearly working-class and, apart from their involvement in disabled veteran organizations, were seemingly apolitical in nature. Most of the leaders of this new organization were Roman Catholic, but at least 20% of the founders of disabled veteran organizations were Greek Catholic. Further nuancing our understanding 43

 DALO, f. 1, op. 54, spr. 1571.  Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej, Rozporządzenie 669, Dziennik Ustaw Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej 86 (1933): 1696–1700.

44

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of disabled veteran identity, according to a police report, one of the Roman Catholic founders was also a member of a Jewish organization of disabled veterans. In fact, ethnic or religious affiliations seemed less important in identity construction than one’s general military service for Vienna. As members of pre-existing organizations, veterans often felt they needed to establish new collectives that would bring together disabled veterans with similar experiences and statuses. In contrast, the authorities were loath to see them as a separate group of disabled veterans and considered their activities suspicious. Administrators of the Lviv Voivodeship felt that the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic fulfilled the same functions and united all Polish disabled veterans, including Austrian veterans. The emergence of a new organization that would divide the disabled veteran movement and unite the less privileged group of veterans was undesirable. The founders of the organization appealed to the Ministry of Interior but Warsaw bureaucrats supported the decision of the Lviv Voivodeship.45 The failure to establish this veteran organization highlights the interplay between the local disabled activists of the Austrian army and central authorities that considered the local identity of disabled veterans as a threat to the state. Bureaucrats preferred to deal with an all-Polish disabled veteran organization, which united soldiers of various ethnic backgrounds as its main ideological characteristic and displayed loyalty to the central government.

Affiliation with the Army: The Case of the Ukrainian Galician Army The activities of disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army provoked the most scrutiny from the state, and they were the most excluded group of disabled soldiers among veterans in interwar Poland. Its soldiers fought against the Polish Army during the Ukrainian-Polish War of 1918–1919 and as a result, veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army were perceived as disloyal and were excluded from the nascent welfare system of the 1920s. The Ukrainian intelligentsia, therefore, decided that it was the duty of Ukrainians to organize a system to support veterans who sacrificed in the struggle for an independent Ukraine. Though most demobilized soldiers of the Galician

45

 Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej, Rozporządzenie, 669.

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army were peasants, Lviv, as the center of Ukrainian life in Poland, became the center of an ethnic-based disabled veteran movement. In 1919, the Ukrainian Citizens Committee established a special section to care for disabled veterans. Later, this initiative was transformed into the Ukrainian Association for Aid to Disabled Veterans. It financially supported the House of Ukrainian Invalids, organized workshops, paid pensions during the interwar period, and published periodicals for Ukrainian disabled veterans.46 Thus, this case illustrates the emergence of a civil society in which the Ukrainian intelligentsia replaced the state by establishing and managing a social security program for disabled soldiers. The official Polish attitude towards this group of disabled veterans was in flux throughout the 1920s. In 1927, Bolesław Kikiewicz, one of the leaders of the Polish disabled veteran movement, wrote that it was necessary to grant the status of disabled veteran even to the soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician Army.47 He believed that most disabled veterans were victims of circumstance who did not want to fight against the Polish army and who were forced to join the Ukrainian Galician Army. Those loyal citizens of the Second Republic deserved state assistance.48 Disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army usually did not discuss their relationship with Polish veteran organizations. However, in his interview with the journalist Anatol’ Kurdydyk, the Ukrainian disabled activist Semen Ukrains’kyi informed that in the past the Lviv Voivodeship branch of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic was also among the donors of the Ukrainian Association for Aid to Disabled Veterans.49 A new political climate in Poland in the early 1930s resulted in a considerable shift of perspective and the remodeling of official governmental policy concerning disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army. Changes to legislation passed in 1932 were motivated by economic concerns. However, at times political calculus did outweigh economic factors. In spite of a reduced allowance for some categories of veterans, the government decided to grant the status of disabled veterans to a new category of former soldiers. 46

 P. D., “Derzhavne zabezpechennia invalidiv U. G. A.,” Ukrainskyi Invalid, no. 4 (November 1938): 3. 47  Bolesław Kikiewicz, “W imię ludzkości,” Inwalida, 5 June 1927, 2. 48  Kikiewicz, “W imię ludzkości,” 2. 49  Anatol’ Kurdydyk, Dvi hodyny v Domi ukrains’koho invalida (L’viv: Nakladom Ukrains’koho tovarystva dopomohy invalidam u L’vovi, 1934), 19.

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After a period of so-called pacification, the violent punitive action in Eastern Galicia in 1930, the Polish authorities tried to find a compromise with moderates in Ukrainian society. These efforts resulted in the new Invalid Act that granted disabled veteran status to soldiers of the Galician army who were more than 45% disabled and who were loyal citizens of the Polish state.50 Some representatives of right-wing parties protested but a majority of deputies voted for the de-jure inclusion of disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician Army into the welfare system.51 The new Invalid Act signaled the cooperation between the government and minority groups. However, it was almost immediately clear that the change to the legal status of the Galician army’s disabled veterans would not actually result in their receiving more state benefits. Deputy Dmytro Wełykanowycz admitted that the requirements allowing Ukrainian disabled veterans to receive benefits were unjust. He suggested amending the Act; in particular reducing the percentage of disability and removing the caveat of state loyalty as this was nebulous and vague, at best. Specifically, he was afraid that local bureaucrats would interpret this clause capriciously—the fact that a person served in the Ukrainian Galician army would usually have resulted in a decision not to award benefits.52 The practical consequences of the Act were very limited. By March 1939, only 70 veterans of the Galician army were granted disabled veteran status. The issue of loyalty proved problematic—individuals with mental wounds, for example, were frequently found lacking in patriotism.53 A magazine for disabled Ukrainian veterans revealed that medical evaluators deliberately lowered the percentage of disability they assigned to Ukrainian disabled veterans in order to exclude them from government assistance. Additionally, the magazine cited cases where the recorded income of Lviv-based disabled veterans far exceeded their real income, further disqualifying or reducing the level of state provided assistance.54 The tensions between disabled Ukrainian veterans of the Galician army and Polish disabled veterans served as a microcosm of, and were influenced by the general deterioration of relations between 50

 Sejm II RP, 3 kadencja, Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 67 posiedzenia, column 41.  Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 67 posiedzenia, columns 12, 46–49. 52  Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 67 posiedzenia, column 24–26. 53  Sejm II RP, 4 kadencja, Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 45 posiedzenia, column 19; Sejm II RP, 5 kadencja, Sprawozdanie Stenograficzne z 12 posiedzenia, column 146. 54  P. D., “Derzhavne zabezpechennia,” 5–6. 51

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the Polish state and its Ukrainian minorities. The leaders of various disabled veteran movements voted in Parliament to grant benefits to disabled soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician army in 1932. However, at the end of 1938, the Lviv magazine Ukrains’kyi Invalid (Ukrainian Invalid) informed that Wagner, the president of the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic and Parliamentary Deputy from Lviv, demanded the cancellation of payments to the disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army until a time when Ukrainians changed their negative attitude about the Polish state. The author of the article stressed that it was unjust to place responsibility for Polish-Ukrainian interethnic discord on disabled veterans. At the same time, the number of veterans who actually received allowances from Warsaw was so low that Wagner’s threat had no consequences for the majority of veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army.55 Official legal status and participation in the welfare system were the lines along which Polish veterans and disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army were divided. However, other factors, like participation in different political rituals also divided them. The bodies of disabled veterans were “sites of memory” upon which national narratives were constructed. Disabled veterans of the Polish army frequently participated in state commemorations of war. For example, similar to other countries, the valorization of the Unknown Soldier emerged in postwar Poland—coincidentally, the soldier entombed at the national monument (Grób Nieznanego Żołnierza) died on a Lviv battlefield during the Ukrainian-Polish conflict. The exhumation and transportation of the soldier’s remains to Warsaw took place from 29–31 October 1925. It was quickly transformed into an elaborate political ritual that included the participation of Lvivians. The coffin was moved from the “Cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv” through the decorated crowded streets, to a cathedral, and then on to the railway station. Two disabled veterans, Grzegorz Strzelecki and Adam Gryglewski, along with two mothers who lost their sons, two widows, and two orphans were part of the “honor guard” that followed the coffin and stood guard in the cathedral. Representatives of disabled veterans’ organizations also participated in the procession from the cathedral to the railway station.56 Disabled veterans of the Ukrai55

 Invalid U. A., “Pos. E. Wagner ta ukrainski invalidy,” Ukrainskyi Invalid 4 (December 1938): 2. 56  Wanda Mazanowska, “Geneza symbolu nieznanego żołnierza,” in W obronie Lwowa i Wschodnich Kresów (Lwów: Nakładem Straży Mogił Polskich Bohaterów, 1926), 189–197.

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nian Galician army, however, participated in the creation of an alternative model of memory about the Ukrainian-Polish War. In June 1938, the former supreme commander of the Ukrainian Galician Army, General Myron Tarnavskyi, died in Lviv. His funeral became the solemn manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism and witnessed mass participation across Galicia. The former soldiers of the Galician army paraded in front of General Tarnavskyi’s coffin, which was placed near St. Iura Cathedral.57 Despite the similarities between the commemorative rituals, the veterans’ symbolic role in both was completely different. The Polish disabled veterans who were members of the “honor guard” during the exhumation and transportation of the Unknown Soldier’s remains represented the victims of war. As the other victims of war and members of the “guard” were women and children, disabled veterans were effectively emasculated. Contrastingly, Ukrainian disabled veterans marched with other former soldiers during the parade. They participated in this political ritual not as victims but as equal fellow soldiers, paying one last tribute to their former commander. A similar martial and post-war experience did not, however, guarantee a similar perspective among disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician Army. In December 1921, Dr. Ivan Kurovets, head of the section of care for war disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Citizens Committee, informed on a serious conflict between disabled veterans in the House of Ukrainian Invalids.58 One of them was a Bolshevik sympathizer and deliberately provoked other residents of the House. This situation, coupled with the indifference of the Ukrainian Citizens Committee, prompted Kurovets’s resignation.59 In 1929, two disabled veterans were expelled from the Ukrainian House of Invalids because of their communist views.60 Thus, at times ideology trumped army affiliation and ethnicity as a cause of tension within disabled veteran groups.

57

 Ch., “Invalidy UGA defiliuiut” Ukrainskyi Invalid 4 (November 1938): 2; “Gen. Myron Tarnavskyi,” in Kalendar Ukrainskyi invalid na rik 1939 (Lviv, 1938), 24–28. 58  In contrast to the state House of Invalids in Lviv, the House of Ukrainian Invalids was founded by Ukrainian activists for disabled veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army, who did not have the state benefits. 59  CDIAL, f. 462, op. 1, spr. 178., ark. 3–4. 60  “UNDO-fashystivs’ka klika i invalidy UGA,” Sel’rob, 26 May 1929, 2.

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House of Invalids The Ministry of Military Affairs established the state “Houses of Invalids” for those no longer able to work or look after themselves. The House of Invalids in Lviv was built by the Austrian authorities in the 1860s and could board up to 500 veterans. Officials, however, believed that there was no need for such a large House of Invalids and the Ministry turned the old House into an orthopedic surgical military hospital, a prostheses factory, and a school to re-educate and re-train disabled veterans.61 The right to reside in the House of Invalids was conditional: demobilized soldiers who were 75–100% disabled and veterans who were 47–75% disabled but who could not perform paid labor because of mental disorders and could not receive adequate assistance at home were allowed to stay in the House.62 Disabled veterans of different ethnic origins who served in various armies lived together in the Lviv House and it became the only such institution in Poland after the closing of the House of Invalids in Płock in 1929. However, it must be said that religious Jewish veterans did not usually live in the Lviv House as they were unable to keep kosher.63 The cohabitation of disabled veterans of different ethnic origin was not completely peaceful. Interwar political realities often heightened tensions. In July 1939, a Polish disabled veteran from Poznań, Franciszek Nowak, wrote a  letter to the Lviv Voivodeship about the unsavory intrigues of the Ukrainian disabled veteran Cyryl Kowalczuk. Both veterans lived in the House of Invalids and shared a room. A Uniate Ukrainian, Kowalczuk had previously denounced the Polish Nowak as an anti-Polish agitator. Kowalczuk said that Nowak had encouraged anti-Polish sentiment among Ukrainians. Kowalczuk wrote that Nowak promoted the idea that a German invasion would lead to the proclamation of an independent Ukrainian state. However, in response Nowak

61

 Zarys działalności Ministerstwa Spraw Wojsk. w przedmiocie opieki nad inwalidami wojskowymi przez Sekcję Opieki od początku jej istnienia aż po dzień 31 grudnia 1919 r. (Warsaw: Nakładem Sekcji Opieki Minist. Spraw Wojsk., s.a.), 12. 62  Minister Pracy i Opieki Spolecznej, Minister Spraw Wojskowych i Minister Skarbu, Rozporządzenie 659 z dnia 11 Sierpnia 1923 r., “W przedmiocie umieszczania inwalidów wojennych niezdolnych do samodzielnego zarobkowania i pozbawionych opieki w zakładach opiekuńczych,” Dziennik ustaw 34 (1923): 969–970. 63  DALO, f. 1, op. 33, spr. 4126.

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wrote that Kowalczuk’s comments came from a place of revenge as he, Nowak, often publicly mentioned the inferiority and disloyalty of Ukrainians in Poland. Moreover, he stressed that Kowalczuk visited St. Iura’s Cathedral every day, code for an affiliation with the Ukrainian national movement. Nowak acknowledged the constant tension between Ukrainian and Polish disabled veterans since former soldiers had long memories of the painful experience of the Ukrainian-Polish War. In order to solve the problem and stop Ukrainian intrigues, Nowak asked that Kowalczuk be moved to another room.64 Though the veracity of these claims and counter-claims is questionable, they demonstrate the role of ethnic tension in cleaving the Lviv House of Invalids. These denunciations also demonstrated that institutionalized veterans were not isolated from the rest of the society, but in contrast, were well-informed about the political climate several months before the beginning of the Second World War. Kowalczuk was not the only one who denounced Nowak as a German sympathizer. As Poznań was previously part of Prussia, fellow residents took this as de-facto evidence of Nowak’s German sympathies.65 Nowak returned fire denouncing a clique of Ukrainian disabled soldiers as inferior. This vignette is best interpreted as a personality conflict between Nowak and Kowalczuk, however sharp, rather than Nowak’s deliberate attempt to undermine other Ukrainian disabled veterans. Though the Voivodeship started investigations into these accusations and others, it appears that they were not particularly interested in separating fact from fiction. Rather, they were more concerned with the ability of House administrators to resolve such conflicts. The officials usually underlined in pencil the most important paragraphs of the documents. In this case, the only noted paragraphs indicated that Nowak informed the administration about the conflict, but that they had yet to move Kowalczuk from his room.66 As the only House of Invalids in Poland in the 1930s, the Lviv institution accommodated veterans of various backgrounds and from various regions, and it embodied the microcosm of the Polish state. At the same time, its inhabitants were deeply grounded in Lviv’s specific political and cultural reality that made inter-ethnic tension even more visible in the years immediately before the Second World War.

64

 DALO, f. 1, op. 34, spr. 3092, ark. 99–99v.  DALO, f. 1, op. 34, spr. 3728, ark. 4. 66  DALO, f. 1, op. 34, spr. 3092, ark. 99–99v. 65

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Conclusion Interwar Lviv was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious city that witnessed competing and antagonistic nationalist discourses. Both Poles and Ukrainians perceived Lviv as “their city” and politically and symbolically struggled for “ownership.” These competing national discourses, however, shared an antiSemitic outlook, especially in the late 1930s. Lviv was a community divided, most evidently on the memory of the Ukrainian-Polish War of 1918–1919. Because this conflict, and the Soviet-Polish War for Poles, became the foundation for Polish and Ukrainian national memory, memories and experiences from the First World War were marginalized. Service in imperial armies was more difficult to incorporate into nationalist discourses, except for the glorious struggle of the Polish Legions and the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. The return of disabled soldiers challenged new states and societies. Similar to other countries, the Second Polish Republic established a  welfare system for disabled veterans. Groups of disabled veterans were created based upon their ability to access the full array of veterans’ benefits. At first Polish army veterans had the same rights as veterans of the imperial armies and constituted a  united group of disabled soldiers. The disabled veterans of the Austro-Hungarian army in Lviv, for example, tried to form a separate organization only after their benefits were reduced in 1933. The foundational principles of the Polish disabled veteran movement also served to establish a common identity. The preoccupation of the organization’s leaders switched from questions of ethnic affiliation to concerns over the social welfare of disabled veterans, especially during times of economic crisis. However, the anti-Semitic atmosphere inside the Union of Disabled Veterans of the Polish Republic resulted in the establishment of a separate Jewish organization in the middle of the 1920s, which divided the disabled veteran movement. At the same time, according to statistical data, national minorities (mainly Ukrainians) constituted a large percentage of members of disabled veteran organizations in Lviv, even in the late 1930s. Disabled soldiers’ issues were frequently discussed throughout the interwar period. Politicians, activists, medical professionals, and journalists created a public discourse about disabled veterans and disability. I focused on one curious example in order to analyze how the image of “disabled veterans” was constructed in the public sphere by disabled veterans and Lviv’s broader society. The public suicide of a  disabled veteran was a  seminal event that

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resulted in deep reflection on the nature of the Polish welfare system. Warsawbased activists constructed the image of a  hero who died for the common cause of Polish disabled veterans. They used Kos’ very public suicide in their political struggle against the government in order to prevent the reduction of payouts to disabled veterans. In contrast, local newspapers stressed the local context and highlighted the responsibility of Lviv authorities who made life difficult for disabled veterans. The discourse surrounding Kos’ death was not ethnic in nature; rather, it focused on issues of social welfare and the state’s responsibility to care for veterans. Confessional and ethnic lines of cleavage, in this instance, were of secondary importance. The institutionalization of some disabled veterans meant their physical separation in special facilities. Highly disabled soldiers were cared for and lodged in the specially created state Houses of Invalids. In these facilities, individuals of various ethnic origins who fought for the old Empires and new states cohabitated. Occasionally this became a source of conflict and tension. Such separation from broader society did not mean isolation from the mainstream political trends that became an additional source of the conflict inside the institution before the Second World War. The only group that remained completely separated from other disabled veterans was soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician army. They fought against the Polish state and, consequently, were excluded from the welfare system. This separation deepened as the Ukrainian Galician Army became the central symbol of the Ukrainian national narrative, and as Ukrainian civil society created a  parallel social security system for its disabled soldiers that reinforced their identity. The attempt of the Polish government to include disabled veterans of the Galician army into the welfare system failed, as well as its minority policies in a broader scope. The fluid identities of Lviv’s disabled veterans were shaped by the welfare system, disabled veteran organizations, and institutions. Though ethnic identity was important to disabled veterans, it did not preclude the establishment of a collective identity based upon a shared experience of being a disabled veteran. Soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician army remained a separate group not because of their ethnic background but because of their previous army affiliation. Veterans shared both similar traumatic war experiences and feelings of “otherness” and a similar postwar experience of adapting to civilian life, too. As the welfare system, state politics, and the policies of disabled veteran organizations changed throughout the interwar period, these changes influenced the collective identity of disabled veterans in Lviv.

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East Meets West: Polish-German Coexistence in Lower Silesia through the Memories of Polish Expellees, 1945–1947 Anna Holzer-Kawałko

In September 1945, when Michał Sobków arrived in Gross Mochbern,

a small village situated several kilometers west of Breslau, he was enthralled by the place. The spacious, well-kept houses must have been a  welcoming sight to him after spending a whole month together with his mother, sister, a  horse and a  cow in an overcrowded and humid railway carriage moving slowly through the devastated landscape of postwar Poland. However, after this first moment of astonishment came a rather bitter reflection: [Initially] I felt content, but then I realized that Germans were living in the house I had found for us. [That] these people built it thanks to their effort and sacrifices. What should I tell them when passing the threshold? Get out of here, because I  am a  repatriate from the East? Should I ask for shelter? Who would ever agree to admit me with my flock into his house?1

In the postwar period of 1945–47 there were thousands of similar stories not only in Poland but also in other Central and Eastern European countries; the impetus behind them were the extensive territorial changes that fol1

 Michał Sobków, “Do innego kraju,” in: Osadnicy, ed. by Agnieszka Knyt (Warsaw: PWN, 2014), 45. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from non-English sources are my own. My gratitude to Galan Dall for proofreading an early draft of this paper.

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lowed the Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, and which would eventually lead to the emergence of homogenous nation-states, ethnic cleansing and the transferring of minorities.2 These changes brought Michał Sobków and his family to Gross Mochbern or “Muchobór Wielki,” as it was called later by the Polish authorities, when, as a result of the postwar peace treaties, Poland lost its eastern borderlands with the Soviet Union and was shifted about two hundred kilometers westward, having gained the eastern territories of Germany as compensation. During the first two years after the war, the vast majority of the German inhabitants in these areas were expelled and replaced by Polish citizens, including about 1.2 million of the so-called repatriates, that is, the former inhabitants of the eastern borderlands.3 These two

2

 Especially since 1989, a large body of studies that address various aspects of postwar geopolitical changes in Central and Eastern Europe has been published. For a comprehensive examination of nation-building and ethnic violence in twentiethcentury Europe, see Philipp Ther, The Dark Side of Nation-States. Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014). For numerous interesting micro-studies of displacement and population transfers in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany see Redrawing Nations. Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948, ed. by Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). For more on this subject see also Ethnic Cleansing in 20th-Century Europe, ed. by Steven Bela Vardy, T. Hunt Tooley (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 2003). A detailed analysis of the expulsion of Germans from Eastern European countries after 1945 has been recently offered by Ray M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane. The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). For a profound study of social, political and cultural processes influencing national self-determination in Polish-German borderlands in the twentieth century see John J. Kulczycki, Belonging to the Nation. Inclusion and Exclusion in the Polish-German borderlands, 1939–1951 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016). 3  There are no exact data on the number of expellees, but the scale can safely be called unprecedented, with Philipp Ther noting that between 1944–49, “displaced persons, refugees and expellees made up more than one-fifth of the populations of Poland and Germany” (Ther, “The Integration of Expellees in Germany and Poland after World War II: A Historical Reassessment,” Slavic Review 55, 4 (1996): 779). For a statistical estimation see Wysiedlenia, wypędzenia i ucieczki 1939–1959. Atlas ziem Polski, ed. by Grzegorz Hryciuk and Witold Sienkiewicz (Warsaw: Demart, 2008), 85. And on the term “repatriates”: this notion is ideologically convoluted, suggesting that Poles expelled from the eastern borderlands returned voluntarily. In this paper, they are called “Polish expellees,” to reflect greater historical accuracy. Poles who migrated to the newly annexed territories from central Poland are termed “Polish migrants.”

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large-scale population transfers—the first from the former Polish east and the second from the former German east—were not synchronized, and dissolved into a rather erratic and chaotic movement of people. Thus, during that period, many of the Polish expellees in the western territories lived together with those “verified” as Germans, according to a controversial official process. These were people who at that time were still awaiting deportation.4 In the first months of expulsion they significantly outnumbered the Polish residents of these areas—according to the population census conducted in Wrocław in August 1945, the city was occupied by some 16–17,000 Poles and 189,500 Germans, who became a  prominent component of the local landscape.5 While most of the historical studies on the post-war resettlement in western and northern Poland do report their presence, they tend to overlook the interactions between these two migrating populations. This is largely due to the fact that Polish-German relations were strikingly absent in the first testimonies collected from both the Polish and the German expellees in the 1950s.6 As noted by Matěj Spurný, German accounts of this period corresponded with the political strategy of national victimization, and thus focused 4

 As noted by Piotr Madajczyk, the transfer was forced upon “two quite different population groups. […] Polish citizens who had registered on the German Volksliste […] considered a voluntary declaration of German nationality. Secondly, on German citizens who were living in the territories annexed by Poland after 1945, excluding those able to prove their Polish origins during the ‘verification’ process.” Piotr Madajczyk and Danuta Berlińska, Polska jako państwo narodowe. Historia i pamięć (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2008), 239. For a comprehensive analysis of the verification process in post-war Poland see Jan Misztal, Weryfikacja narodowościowa na Ziemiach Odzyskanych (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo PWN, 1990). Furthermore, a valuable micro-study of national verification in Oppeln/Opole District has been recently offered by Hugo Service, “Sifting Poles from Germans? Ethnic Cleansing and Ethnic Screening in Upper Silesia, 1945–1949,” The Slavonic and East European Review 88, 4 (2010): 652–680. 5  Gregor Thum, Uprooted. How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 77–78. 6  For a popular and influential collection of German testimonies and documents: Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, Bd. I (1–3): Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus den Gebieten östlich der Oder-Neiße, ed. Theodor Schieder (Bonn: Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, 1953–1960). For a history and critical examination of this edition: Mathias Beer, “Im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Das Großforschungsprojekt Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 46 (1998): 345–89. For the first edition of memoirs of the Polish settlers in Western

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first and foremost on the experiences of violence, suffering and loss.7 In the same decade, but on the other side of the Odra River, the Polish government prepared carefully selected memoirs of the Polish settlers that did not confront the expulsions at all, but rather praised the successful construction of a homogenous communist society in the Western territories.8 When relying on these sources, which for many years were the only available materials on the subject, the resulting picture is, indeed, that of near complete isolation between the newcomers and the older residents, with sporadic moments of incredible hostility.9 However, a close reading of testimonies that in the past decade were collected from the Polish expellees by various archives and educational institutions reveals that in this two-year period there were multiple and diverse social contacts between both groups of neighbors, which should by no means be reduced to the simple characterization of a victim-aggressor relationship.10 These new accounts seem to be a valuable source to complement Poland: Pamiętniki osadników Ziem Odzyskanych, ed. by Zygmunt Dulczewski and Andrzej Kwilecki (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1963). 7  Matěj Spurný, “Czech and German Memories of Forced Migration,” Hungarian Historical Review 1, 3–4 (2012): 354–56. For more on this subject see Constantin Goschler, “Versöhnung und Viktimisierung. Der deutsche Opferdiskurs und die Vertriebenen,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 53 (2005): 873–84. 8  José M. Faraldo, “Materials of Memory. Mass Memoirs of the Polish Western Territories,” in Faraldo, Europe, Nationalism, Communism: Essays on Poland (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 39–56. See also Claudia Kraft, “Recollecting Expulsion: Locating German Refugees in Polish and Czech Memories,” in Restitution and Memory. Material Restoration in Europe, ed. by Dan Diner and Gotthart Wunberg (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 273–300. 9  See for example Claudia Kraft, “Ucieczka, wypędzenie i przymusowe wysiedlenie Niemców z województwa wrocławskiego w latach 1945–1950,” in Niemcy w Polsce 1945–1950. Wybór dokumentów, ed. by Daniel Boćkowski (Warsaw: Neriton, 2001), 221–22. 10  This paper is based mainly on the rich corpus of about 200 oral testimonies of Polish expellees held by the Pamięć i Przyszłość [Memory and future] Center in Wrocław. Most of these sources were collected by volunteers working in the Center in the years 2008–14. Currently, they are stored in the so-called Oral History Archive—a special department established and developed by the center, which aims to present the everyday life in Lower Silesia after 1945. Furthermore, I have consulted two volumes of written accounts that have been published in Poland in the last few years. The first one, entitled Osadnicy [Settlers], includes archival materials collected in the 1990s by the Karta Center in Warsaw, whose mission is to document and popularize the recent history of Poland and Eastern Europe. The

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existing literature on Polish history and memory. The purpose of this paper is therefore twofold. First, it aims to foster the local-level approach to the post-war population transfers, in which attention is focused not just on government policies and official regulations, but above all on the everyday experiences of expellees, or, as put by Alf Lüdtke, on “the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history—the ‘nameless’ multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations, their occasional outbursts or ‘dépenses,’ [their] everyday toil and festive joys.”11 Specifically, the proposed analysis offers an insight into shared Polish-German households and the complex relationships between its residents in the context of the post-war nation-building processes in the former Prussian province of Lower Silesia, a region which had the largest German population of all provinces incorporated into the Republic of Poland in the wake of World War II. For present purposes, oral history testimonies are particularly useful, as the domestic space had not been included in official documentation from that period. When approaching this kind of source, one should bear in mind that they have important limitations and present only a certain segment of post-war social reality. And yet, examining this fascinating Polish-German coexistence, which goes beyond simple ethnic and national classifications, may shed some light on the hitherto less discussed aspects of early Polish settlement in the western territories. Secondly, while the paper seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary history of Poland, it also aims to illuminate what this revisited portrayal of the relatively recent past may teach us about the Polish present. When juxtaposed with the communist discourse on post-

second, published in 2011 under the title Sami swoi i obcy [Friends and strangers], consists of testimonies sent to one of the leading Polish newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza, in response to a social campaign launched by its editors that called on the former ‘repatriates’ to share their memories of the early years in the western territories. To the best of my knowledge, these are currently the main repositories of new testimonies to be found in Poland. 11  Alf Lüdtke, “Introduction: What Is the History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?” in The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, ed. by Alf Lüdtke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–4. For more on this paper’s methodological background, see also Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. by Peter Burke (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 93–113.

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war Poland as one ethnic and cultural monolith,12 the individual memories analyzed in the following pages are significant indicators of the changing dynamics of the master narratives surrounding Polish national history in the course of last two decades. As such, they provide a  valuable interpretive framework for a wider study of post-1989 transition that took place in Wrocław and other cities in the western region.13 Before offering some conclusions on these developments, I will explore the earliest communist policies toward the German population in Lower Silesia, and then everyday relations between Poles and Germans as depicted in the memories of the Polish expellees.

Ghosts of the East: Germans under the Policies of Polish Authorities The encounter between expellees from the former eastern borderlands of Poland and the inhabitants of Lower Silesia took place in a very peculiar atmosphere, created by the contradictory policies of the post-war Polish authorities. Their effect was to make the German residents of the annexed territories a “ghost” populace, alternately vanishing and materializing on the new map of Poland. In a propaganda campaign launched by the government in order to promote the North-Western region as a “Recovered Territory,” it was depicted not only as originally Polish,14 but also as a completely depopulated 12

 For a skillfully written study of communist nationality policy in post-war Poland see Michael Fleming, Communism, Nationalism and Ethnicity in Poland, 1944– 1950 (London: Routledge, 2010). For more on this subject see also Hugo Service, Germans to Poles: Communism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For an analysis of the influence exercised by this policy on Polish society, see Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland. Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 13  Igor Pietraszewski and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Wrocław. Changes in Memory Narratives,” in Whose Memory? Which Future? Remembering Ethnic Cleansing and Lost Cultural Diversity in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe, ed. by Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 17–48. Also, Kamilla Dolińska and Julita Makaro, O wielokulturowości monokulturowego Wrocławia (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2013). 14  According to a popular story inspired by this campaign, the incorporated German areas had been part of the traditional Polish homeland during the medieval

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land, as one may see from the example in a statement published in May 1945 by the Central Committee for Resettlement:15 To all people of Poland! Nazi Germany has been reduced to rubble. Our territories—once stolen by the Teutonics, Bismarcks, and Hitler—are finally being returned to their homeland. Our enemy has already fled the country, leaving behind villages and towns, castles and factories, verdant fields, lakes and houses, which are waiting for their rightful owners. To all people of Poland! Go westward!16

The top-down reinscription of the former German provinces as an uninhabited “Recovered Territory” was to serve both domestic and foreign policies and had been intensified significantly on the eve of the Potsdam Conference. The Polish authorities were presenting the annexation and resettlement of the new territories as faits accomplis to the Western allies and therefore claimed that almost all Germans had already abandoned these areas.17 However, Poles who eventually did arrive in Lower Silesia not only discovered that, as opposed to the government declarations and promises, the province was very much occupied, but they were being constantly warned by local officials against numerous Nazi “Werewolves” still haunting the neighborhoods18 as well as the German population in general, then entirely identified as the perpetrators of genocide and collectively blamed for the recent war. As it may Piast dynasty. As the myth further explains, over the next centuries the western provinces were taken over by the aggressive German neighbor who managed to “Germanize” their inhabitants and control them until 1945 when Poland finally recovered its rightful territory. See Gernot Briesewitz, “Ludzie odzyskani? Polonia wrocławska—pomiędzy mitem a historią,” in: Błogosławiony kraj? Szkice o historii i pamięci Dolnego Śląska, ed. Dagmara Margiela and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (Wrocław: ATUT, 2011), 108. 15  In Polish: Centralny komitet przesiedleńczy. 16  As cited in Tomasz Szarota, Osadnictwo miejskie na Dolnym Śląsku w latach 1945– 1948 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1969), 80. 17  See Gregor Thum, Uprooted, 62. 18  See for instance “1945 lipiec 6 - Raport KC PPR Problemy Dolnego Śląska w chwili obecnej,” in Niemcy w Polsce 1945–1950, 287. On the history and legend of the movement: Alexander Perry Biddiscombe, Werwolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944–1946 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). See also Charles Whiting, Werewolf: The Story of the Nazi Resistance Movement, 1944–1945 (London: Leo Cooper, 1996).

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be seen in the instructions given to the newly appointed administration staff of Lower Silesia by the Government Commissioner of the region, Stanisław Piotrowski, the German threat—so strongly emphasized by the local authorities—was supposed to mobilize new settlers to support expulsion and the rePolonization of these areas: The German Nazis have already proved to the whole world that they cannot co-exist with any other nation, and therefore those Germans who still live here, have to leave the Recovered Territories. [...] I hope you will put all your effort to achieve the goals we are all striving for while taking those lands. [...] We are coming there as Polish pioneers and avengers to avenge the centuries-old suffering of Slavic peoples at German hands.19

Simultaneously, the displacement of the German population was supposed to be facilitated by appropriation of German property, combined with cultural cleansing that aimed at a complete eradication of German heritage in the incorporated areas. Even before assuming control in the region from the Red Army, the Polish government took legal measures to settle the issue of ownership rights to German property. As emphasized by the first vice-minister of the Recovered Territories, Jan Wasilewski, it was perceived as a precondition for successful resettlement and restoration of the “Polish soul” to the western cities.20 Therefore, in the years 1945–47, the Polish Parliament adopted numerous resolutions on the nationalization of German property— both public and private—that was to be found within Poland’s new borders.21 In addition, the Polish authorities rapidly engaged in the so-called deGermanization of Lower Silesia, which meant in practice erasing numerous material vestiges of the German presence in the region. This peculiar war against German material culture indeed posed an enormous challenge, as 19

 A decree by Stanisław Piotrowski issued on 2.4.1945: Niemcy w Polsce 1945–1950, 264.  A radio address given by Jan Wasilewski on 15.6.1946, in: State Archives, Warsaw. Archiwum Akt Nowych, Collection 196, file 67, 71. 21  See Dieter Gosewinkel and Stefan Meyer, “Citizenship, Property Rights and Dispossession in Postwar Poland (1918 and 1945),” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 16 (2009): 575–95. For one of the first accounts of the nationalization processes in the communist bloc, see Samuel Herman, “War Damage and Nationalisation in Eastern Europe,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 19 (1951): 498–518. 20

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German inscriptions were to be seen everywhere: on road signs, train stations and billboards, in stores, libraries, hospitals and official buildings, and finally also in private gardens and houses. Most of the inspections carried out by local branches of the Central Office for Property Liquidation,22 a government body that bore responsibility for the management of German property in western territories, not only required considerable funds, but often also led to severe damage to the infrastructure that was vital for the functioning of the regional administration. Consequently, as noted by Thum, “although the state authorities felt that such operations were important enough to justify the attendant expenditures of effort and money [...,] the local authorities [...] did not always demonstrate the requisite zeal in removing German relics.”23 It seems that the lack of a coherent policy towards German heritage in Lower Silesia only reinforced the general public awareness of the German origin of this region. One may find a skillfully written account of the tension between government propaganda and the everyday experience of Polish expellees in the testimony given by Stanisław Bereś, a post-war resident of Wrocław, who commented on the communist reconstruction of the city as follows: Although it was impossible to even mention the German name of the city, Breslau, without a strong fear of violating the taboo, I knew very well that I lived in a German house, in which generations of German children were born and generations of German elders passed away. I slept in a German bed, admired German paintings, took a shower in a German bathroom, ate on German plates, played with German puppets, wrote with a German ink pen, browsed through old German books […] I could continue this list for a long time. In the mornings, when I had to choose a  sweater before going to school, on every piece of clothing I  saw the word “Steuernagel” embroidered. It was the surname of a German doctor who used to live in my, and previously his, apartment.24

22

 In Polish: Główny urząd likwidacyjny.  Gregor Thum, Uprooted, 267. 24  As cited in Karolina Brzęk, “Rzeczy i ludzie w powojennym Wrocławiu,” in Do rzeczy! Szkice kulturoznawcze, ed. by Jacek Małczyński and Renata Tańczuk (Wrocław: ATUT, 2011), 84–85. For a recent academic analysis of various re-Polonization processes in Lower Silesia, see Andrew Demshuk, “Reinscribing Schlesien as Śląsk: Memory and Mythology in a Postwar German-Polish Borderland,” History & Memory, 24, 1 (2012): 39–86. 23

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As with the cleansing of German material culture, also with regard to the transfer of German expellees, the government struggled to find a  balance between several conflicting interests. In the light of a growing number of Germans returning to their homes after the so-called wild expulsions in the summer of 1945, the official policy urged that transports for deportation be organized as quickly as possible.25 In practice, however, local officials delayed the process since they were in great need of German specialists, as well as cheap labor, in order to revive and manage local industry, which was based on advanced machinery unfamiliar to the Polish engineers. Furthermore, a fierce power struggle between Polish civil and military bodies and the Red Army led to a significant delay in the organization of regular transports. Lastly, even though the authorities sought to separate settlers from expellees by limiting the German residence districts and prohibiting contact between Poles and Germans,26 complete isolation was impossible to achieve, especially in the areas where, due to housing shortages, Polish settlers had no choice but to dwell with local residents.27

From Shared Houses to Shared Lives: German Inhabitants of Lower Silesia in the Memories of Polish Expellees The Polish expellees were not prepared to encounter, and even less to live together with German residents of the new houses. For those who had recently lost most of their belongings in similarly oppressive and violent circumstances, moving to still-occupied places was a rather traumatic experience, which fundamentally affected their subsequent relations with German inhabitants in Lower Silesia.28 As opposed to the above-mentioned vision outlined by Piotrowski, the expellees emphasize that they did not arrive in the 25

 See Philipp Ther, “Wilde Vertreibung,” in Ther, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene. Gesellschaft und Vertriebenenpolitik in der SBZ/DDR und in Polen 1945–1956 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 55–58. 26  See Decree by Stanisław Piotrowski issued on 2.4.1945, in Niemcy w Polsce 1945– 1950, 264. 27  See for example Claudia Kraft, “Ucieczka, wypędzenie i przymusowe wysiedlenie,” 221. 28  On the transfer of Poles from the eastern borderlands, see Jerzy Kochanowski, “Gathering Poles into Poland: Forced Migration from Poland’s Former Eastern Territories,” in Redrawing Nations. Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944– 1948, 135–154.

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western territories as conquerors, pioneers, or avengers, but rather as expropriated and displaced victims of the recent war. Consequently, the majority of the transplanted Polish population failed to see the German families—usually consisting of elderly people, women and children—as perpetrators. This first encounter with German residents of Lower Silesia is a recurrent and rather dramatic theme in numerous testimonies, to quote one example from the memoir by Wiktoria Kwiatkowska: I saw an old German woman, wrinkled, bony, as white as snow. She fell to her knees before me, crying and kissing my hands. [...] I took her to the table and tears sprang to my eyes as well. [...] Suddenly, I understood everything. She was begging me to allow her to stay with us. It was her house! She had been living there for 40 years [...] and there she wanted to die. I was listening to her story and I knew that I could not stay in this place any longer. I had no right to take the house away from her, even though it was permitted by law.29

Despite their reservations regarding shared housing and due to a lack of any other alternative, the expellees did ultimately settle in the German households. Thus, these first difficult encounters were followed by the no less challenging days of adaptation to the new neighbors, land, and conditions. Both the new and the old residents of Lower Silesia had to struggle with various difficulties of post-war daily life such as food and water shortages, the spreading of infectious diseases, and finally the rampant banditry and pillage that made the whole region known as the “Polish Wild West.” In order to survive in this reality of violence and chaos, they had to combine their efforts.30 That cooperation created a common space of daily routines and joint practices, in which people had a chance to get to know each other, earn mutual trust and respect, and at least partly overcome the initial fears and suspicions fueled by government propaganda, whose representatives seem to have only been igniting further conflicts and resentments.31 29

 Wiktoria Kwiatkowska, “Obczyzna,” in Osadnicy, 73.  For an innovative study of post-war violence in Polish society, see Marcin Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga: Polska 1944–1947: Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2012). 31  See a report on the situation in Wrocław, written by Edmund Osmańczyk and Stanisław Sokolewski in June 1945, in Niemcy w Polsce 1945–1950, 272. 30

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One of the most prominent obstacles in this unique community was the language barrier that often impeded equal participation by Poles and Germans in domestic life. However, both the Polish and German expellees, as inhabitants of borderland areas where numerous cultures, religions and languages met and merged, were largely multilingual communities. Therefore, as recalled by Zofia Krzywonos, who in 1945 arrived in Seitenberg (in Polish: Stronie Śląskie), those who did speak both languages usually served as local interpreters and facilitated relations between the rest of the residents: Our neighbor, who had been living in Stronie for years and knew both languages fluently, was assisting all the families in communicating the rules for household work. [In our place we decided as follows:] Maria was responsible for cows together with a German lady, who also baked delicious bread for both families. Marian, of course, took over the workshop. All of the food products [...] were shared, half-half. 32

For the majority of Polish expellees from the East, the so-called repatriation was decisive evidence of defeat in the war rather than of a victory, as so enthusiastically proclaimed by the Polish authorities. However, in their relations with the German population, a sense of power imbalance seems not only to have been present but also acknowledged by both sides. In spite of (or, most probably, because of) numerous controversies regarding the status and the future of this region,33 the local administration was told to make it very clear to the German inhabitants of Lower Silesia that they were only unwelcome guests in the territory already incorporated into Poland.34 Thus, Germans found themselves at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, without any support or protection, while Polish expellees received much better treatment. And yet, this striking inequality was not a prevailing feature of their relationship as seen from the bottom-up, especially that once settlers arrived to the new areas, they were greatly dependent on the local residents, who had a pro-

32

 A testimony of Zofia Krzywonos is available at http://ladekzdroj.w.interiowo.pl/ czasocalony6.html [access: 25.8.2016]. 33  Debra J. Allen, The Oder-Neisse Line: The United States, Poland and Germany in the Cold War (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 39–100. 34  Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 125.

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found familiarity with this territory, and who knew how to repair any damaged infrastructure or where to find abandoned furniture, clothes or food, for example. Although in that period the tragic memory of the Nazi crimes in Poland was still very much alive, it appears that the tangible help received from the remaining Germans was valued higher than any gossip about their alleged misdeeds in the past, as it was in the view of Edward Głowacz, a resident of Lower Silesian Strehlen (in Polish: Strzelin): Germans were rather friendly to us. We lived together with Hans, a young boy around my age, who was helping make electricity repairs in the town. Thanks to him we had electricity installed in our house. Someone told me once that Hans’ father had been a  member of the Gestapo. [...] Then I realized that in fact it did not make any difference now, as I did not suffer any harm from him, nor from other Germans. I still could not say a bad word about this boy.35

Importantly, this testimony leads us to an additional factor, crucial for understanding the relations between the new settlers and German residents of Lower Silesia, which was the prevalent negative attitude towards the Soviet regime in general, and its military troops in particular, which was shared by both groups. Polish expellees were subjected to the Soviet violence not only during the post-war expulsion, but also in the two-year period of Soviet occupation in the former eastern borderlands of Poland in the years 1939–1941.36 Similar acts of robbery, rape and plunder were suffered by the German population from the northern and western territories; they were regularly attacked by the Soviet soldiers with the tacit consent and sometimes active

35

 A testimony of Edward Głowacz. Source: Pamięć i Przyszłość Center, file AHM260. 36  Interestingly, this period seems to have affected also subsequent relations between the Polish population and the German occupying forces. As emphasized by numerous Polish expellees, in contrast to the brutal Soviet rule over eastern Poland, the Wehrmacht soldiers who conquered this territory in 1941 appeared to its inhabitants as “quite elegant, clean and civilized people.” See for example the testimony of Maria Kawińska. Source: Pamięć i Przyszłość Center, file no. AHM391. For a study of the Soviet occupation of Poland, see Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad. The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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participation of the Polish authorities.37 Therefore, most of the German expellees chose to hide inside their houses and often even sought the company of Polish settlers, since their apartments were apparently less likely to be robbed. However, as suggested by Michał Sobków, even their presence not always prevented assaults: Emma [our German neighbor] has been staying in our apartment for a few days now. She is scared and seems depressed. A shadow of her former self. She is afraid of sleeping in her own place because of gangs hunting the streets night and day [...]. Once, in the middle of the night, after we all went to sleep, we suddenly heard a knocking at the door. No-one moved or said a  word. When the knocking grew louder, my mother got up, turned on the light and opened the door. The town’s mayor [...] came in and told Emma to get up and put her clothes on. My mother tried to stop him, but he ordered her to be quiet. The scared, deathly-pale woman started to collect her clothes. [...] Then, unexpectedly, he slapped Emma in the face and [...] pushed her out of the door. In the end, he came back and warned us against helping Germans.38

The increasingly violent and dangerous outside world, in which almost every expression of German heritage and language was both officially banned and in many cases being destroyed, pushed the expellees even further inside their Silesian houses. This relatively safe domestic space not only served as a shelter for Germans or a place to encounter various traditions, but also developed into a  unique microcosm, where people managed to establish a  form of normality. As opposed to the exceptions and anomalies, such moments of ordinariness tend to escape our attention. Nevertheless, in the reality of the immediate post-war period, which was still a reality of emergency and uncertainty, precisely these moments were of particular importance both to the new settlers and the German expellees. For this short, two-year period, PolishGerman homes in Lower Silesia became a space of routine and stability where people were able to reinstall somewhat their practices and traditions from before the war. After a  long, wartime hiatus, their lives seemed to be back 37

 S ome Polish officials even claimed the German women were not victims, but attackers who sexually abused and raped the Soviet soldiers. See ‘1945 lipiec 6 Raport KC PPR Problemy Dolnego Śląska w chwili obecnej’, 288. 38  Michał Sobków, “Do innego kraju,” 56–57.

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on a regular track: during weekdays the adults were working in the household or local factories, and the children played in the neighborhood, while on holidays all the families celebrated together, albeit often in different ways.39 As depicted in the testimonies, German and Polish customs rarely merged, but were rather kept separate, and existed side-by-side. This concurrence, while not lacking entirely a competitive dimension, was a unique opportunity not only to recognize differences but also to identify similarities between the two communities. The following account of the Sunday mass in Gross Mochbern (­ Polish: Muchobór Wielki) provides a good example of these singular cultural dynamics: On Sunday, we went to celebrate mass in the local school, because the church had been damaged [in the war]. [...] The classroom was crowded, as almost all German and Polish settlers came to attend service conducted by a German priest. I was pleased to notice that the liturgy was of the Catholic Church and in Latin, exactly as it had been in our eastern borderlands. It confused me so much that for a  brief moment I thought that I was back home, in Koropiec. The Germans seemed to be examining us carefully instead of paying attention to the prayer. There was a striking contrast between [traditional] headscarves covering our married women and hats worn by the Germans. They seemed to be rather surprised that we were familiar with the order of mass and knew when to kneel, stand up and cross ourselves.40

At this point it is important to bear in mind that for the Polish settlers from the east, such cultural heterogeneity was not an unfamiliar phenomena, since in the eastern borderlands they had been living for years together with various communities of Belarusians, Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, 39

 For a detailed depiction of the post-war restoration of social and cultural life in Wrocław, see Marek Ordyłowski, Życie codzienne we Wrocławiu 1945–1948 (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1991). A solid, archivally-based study of the Polish settlement in Wrocław after 1945 has been offered by Elżbieta Kaszuba in Między propagandą a  rzeczywistością. Polska ludność Wrocławia w latach 1945–1947 (Warsaw and Wrocław: PWN, 1997). Finally, for a  beautifully-written biographical account of a  Polish student who moved to Wrocław in 1945, see Joanna Konopińska, Tamten wrocławski rok. Dziennik 1945–1946 (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1987). 40  Michał Sobków, “Do innego kraju,” 47.

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Gypsies, Germans, or people who rejected any kind of national or ethnic identification and defined themselves primarily in terms of the local vernacular culture.41 Therefore, they were relatively well prepared to cope with cultural differences, and those awaiting them in Lower Silesia; this removed a  potentially serious obstacle in their daily contacts with Germans and a trigger for social isolation. Indeed, the first post-war celebrations of local festive events and anniversaries acquired new vigor and communal significance, and were often attended by whole neighborhoods and villages, Germans and Poles alike.42 From 1945 to 1947, the residents of Lower Silesia shared not only space, but also life, and became a community even though they were expected and encouraged to hate one another. The significance of day-to-day life for their mutual relations is well described in the testimony of Wanda Łyżwa of Wilhelmsdorf (in Polish: Sędzimirów): The very first memory I have [from the Recovered Territories]: I am playing with German kids. There were a lot of children [in our neighborhood]. We were playing football and chess. Our families were living together for almost a  year and in this period we were also traveling together and organizing small trips to pick some blueberries in the forest. Everything was good and very normal. I cannot recall any special arguments [...]. We shared all that we had, especially when it came to food for children. At that time, when people were able to share the last piece of bread, they became friends forever.43

Finally, this unexpected Polish-German community had developed amid deteriorating relations between settlers from the former Eastern Polish bor41

 For a fascinating portrayal of various eastern borderlands communities in the first half of the XX century, see Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place. From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Robert Pyrah and Jan Fellerer, “Redefining ‘sub-culture’: a new lens for understanding hybrid cultural identities in East-Central Europe with a  case study from early 20th-century L’viv-Lwów-Lemberg,” Nations and Nationalism, 21, 4 (2015): 700–720. 42  See the Testimony of Wanda Łyżwa. Source: Pamięć i Przyszłość Center, file no. AHM-180. Also: Stanisława Sękowska, “Złotowłosa Stasia i Batiar,” in Sami swoi i obcy. Prawdziwe historie wypędzonych, ed. Mirosław Maciorowski (Warsaw: Agora, 2011), 75–76. 43  Testimony of Wanda Łyżwa. Source: Pamięć i Przyszłość Center, file no. AHM-180.

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derlands and other Poles who had voluntarily migrated to Lower Silesia, mainly from Central Poland. Most of the expellees from the East struggled to understand this decision. They saw their Polish neighbors either as rivals, depriving them of the limited employment and economic resources, or as Soviet agents, representing the Stalinist regime, or else as violent plunderers, who wanted to profit from the tragedy of the local residents, and who did not care about their new hometowns at all. Zofia Krzywonos spells out the contrast between their perception of the Germans on the one hand, and that of their fellow citizens on the other: When we lived with Germans, everything was neatly organized and well kept; people had perfectly quiet and harmonious lives. Then, after these Poles arrived (I mean especially people from central Poland), our town just lost all its charm. Polish residents neglected their new houses and destroyed all the abandoned apartments, having looted everything they considered valuable.44

Further testimonies reveal that this antipathy was mutual, and the initial efforts of integration between Polish settlers from the central provinces and those from the eastern borderlands bore little fruit. Whereas the communist authorities paid little attention to differences between various groups of Polish citizens, it seems that the six years of war only deepened the gap between those who in September 1939 found themselves under the rule of the Nazi regime, and those who lived in territory occupied by Stalin. When they arrived together in the western territories, this discrepancy became particularly evident. As strongly emphasized by the Polish expellees, beyond relations limited to any obligatory collaboration at work or school, they conducted their lives separately, maintaining a certain distance from each other.45

44

 The testimony of Zofia Krzywonos is available at http://ladekzdroj.w.interiowo.pl/ czasocalony6.html (last accessed: 25 August 2016). 45  The complex relations between Polish expellees from the eastern borderlands and Polish migrants from the central provinces of Poland have not yet attracted significant scholarly attention. Nevertheless, some very interesting comments on this subject may be found in the micro-study by Anna Wylegała, Przesiedlenia a pamięć. Studium (nie) pamięci społecznej na przykładzie ukraińskiej Galicji i polskich „Ziem odzyskanych,” (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK, 2014), ­111–154.

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Friendship or mixed marriages were a  quite rare phenomenon.46 Furthermore, the so-called repatriates were often considered not entirely Polish, since their dialects, clothing, and traditions differed significantly from those cultivated by Poles in the rest of the country. Thus, they were often marginalized in public life and rarely accepted as equal members of Polish society beyond the western territories.47 When Zdzisław Żaba decided to move to central Poland after being expelled from Vilnius, he experienced at firsthand how strong the prejudice towards Polish expellees was: All of my attempts to re-establish myself in Warsaw or its suburbs failed all along the line. [...] I intended to join Społem, the Polish consumer cooperative, but “they”—elegant gentlemen in their stylish offices— did not want to have there a repatriate from the East, a half-Pole, halfRussian (as they thought of me), an orphan of the recent war. “You are a repatriate. You should go home, to the Recovered Territories!” If Poland had ever had any African colonies, I am sure they would have told me to go overseas.48

After this disappointing experience, Zdzisław Żaba arrived in the western territories, where he found a new home for his family among other “orphans of the recent war” who were not perturbed by his melodious Vilnius accent (formerly Polish Wilno). In Lower Silesia, such migrants encountered more favorable conditions for social advancement and the cultivation of an eastern borderlands culture. Indeed, as discussed elsewhere in this volume, the city soon began to play a symbolic role of post-war cultural substitute for Lviv

46

 See the testimony of Wanda Worsztynowicz. Pamięć i Przyszłość Center, file no. AHM-181. 47  The difficult and multilayered process of assimilation of the so-called “repatriates” from the East into post-war Polish society, as well as the long-term effects of forced migration on the Polish population, have not yet gained much scholarly attention. Some insights have recently been provided by Andrzej Leder in his Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenie z logiki historycznej (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo krytyki politycznej, 2014), which describes the period from 1939–56 as a “socioeconomic revolution” in Poland. But a comprehensive study of the role of western territories in the transformation of Polish society after 1945 has not yet been written. 48  Zdzisław Żaba, “Wrocław nasz,” in Osadnicy, 79.

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(in Polish: Lwów), disproportionate to the actual figures.49 This metaphorical continuity between the two cities was reinforced further by the transfer of cultural property in 1946 when some most important cultural artifacts— including the famous painting Racławice Panorama (Panorama Racławicka) and book collections from the Ossolineum Institute)—were moved from Lviv to Wrocław.50 Finally, it seems that precisely this social rejection by their fellow countrymen not only reinforced the relationship between the Polish expellees from the East and the old residents of Lower Silesia, but also encouraged their identification with this specific local homeland—a very particular socio-cultural space, which would remain neither German nor Polish, but rather, caught between East and East.

Conclusion: “The Germans are Back.” On the Dissonant Past and Haunted Present After the Germans had been finally expelled to Allied-occupied Germany, the Polish authorities redoubled their efforts to erase them from the post-war history of Poland, as exemplified by one of the largest propaganda events held in 49

 As we are reminded by Thum: although “the repatriates made up only 20 to 23% of the population in late 1947 [...] more than 60% of professors at the university and polytechnic were repatriates in mid-1948, thus comprising the most dominant group.” Furthermore, both the office of the first university president and that of the vice-president in the post-war Wrocław were assumed by former professors in Lviv. See Uprooted, 94–95. More on the myth of the special relationship between Lviv and Wrocław, see Julita Makaro, “Lwowskość Wrocławia. Rozważania o konstytuowaniu (się) pamięci w mieście,” in Sąsiedztwa III RP: Ukraina: zagadnienia społeczne, ed. by Marcin Dębicki and Julita Makaro (Wrocław: GAJT, 2015), 73–91. Also: Stanisław Kłopot, “Wielokulturowe dziedzictwo Wrocławia a tożsamość jego mieszkańców,” in Myśli społecznych splątanie: księga jubileuszowa z okazji 60-lecia pracy naukowej i dydaktycznej Profesora Władysława Markiewicza, ed. Krzysztof Czekaj et al. (Katowice: Górnośląska Wyższa Szkoła Handlowa im. Wojciecha Korfantego, 2011), 201–14. 50  See Nawojka Cieślińska-Lobkowicz, “Węzeł Poczdamski. O powojennych rewindykacjach dóbr kultury związanych ze zmianą polskich granic,” in Dobra kultury i problemy własności. Doświadczenia Europy Środkowej po 1989 roku, ed. Grażyna Czubek and Piotr Kosiewski (Warsaw: Trio, 2005), 221–222. For a detailed examination of the negotiations over the restitution of cultural treasures from Lviv: Maciej Matwijów, Walka o lwowskie dobra kultury w latach 1945–1948 (Wrocław: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Ossolineum, 1996).

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summer 1948 in Wrocław. The so-called Exhibition of the Recovered Territories (Wystawa Ziem Odzyskanych) presented the three-year reconstruction of this area without any reference to the German expellees or their contribution to its restoration.51 Furthermore, due to the following four decades of the Polish People’s Republic when this policy was consistently maintained and reinforced, the Polish-German coexistence I have sketched out above has been strikingly absent from public debates as well as scholarly publications on the westward shift of Poland until recently. Against this background, it seems that one of the most important historiographic contributions of the new sources presented in this paper is not only their actual content but rather their potential to call into question this top-down and politically inflected approach to the post-war history of Lower Silesia. They emphasize first and foremost the need for a more nuanced contextualization of the development of Polish society in the post-war period, and prove that this process should not be reduced to simple divisions, drawn along national, ideological, and ethnic lines. Instead, they offer new perspectives for the historical analysis of the region, which are based on the local communities that emerged in relatively marginal spaces such as particular cities, neighborhoods, streets, and even households. As demonstrated by the testimonies, the unique Polish-German community that developed in 1945–47 in Western Poland was based less on the traditional categories usually used to examine societies and cultures, such as language, religion or ethnicity, but rather on the common experience of violence and expulsion, and above all, on the shared intimate domestic space and various everyday practices such as work, leisure, and celebration. Interestingly, it seems that these foundations had been more meaningful to the settlers from the Eastern Polish borderlands than their national identification with other groups of Polish citizens living in the annexed territories. Furthermore, this essay suggests that the aggressive model of a homogenous culture and society, imposed by the post-war Polish government, led to results that were the opposite of those intended, and not only brought Polish and German expellees closer together, but also deepened internal divisions within the Polish population. Of course, all these varied socio-cultural developments that have been raised by the new sources need further investigation. For instance, the tes51

 For more on the exhibition, see Jakub Tyszkiewicz, Sto wielkich dni Wrocławia: wystawa Ziem Odzyskanych we Wrocławiu a propaganda polityczna Ziem Zachodnich i Północnych w latach 1945–1948 (Wrocław: Arboretum, 1997).

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timonies presented might ideally be interrogated comparatively in light of additional materials collected from different contexts: e.g., any extant testimonies of German expellees or migrants from central provinces of Poland.52 Therefore this essay is clearly not considered as definitive, rather as a spur to further investigation, and particularly, to reopen the discussion on the postwar settlement in the western territories at the grassroots level. Therefore, the wider questions these sources can help raise and frame might be even more important than the answers. Finally, such materials are of crucial importance in tracing the trajectory of the contemporary Polish memory. It seems that a complete reorientation of the European political order in 1989 not only brought a critical reassessment of the Cold War’s historical discourse, but also invoked a hitherto hidden memory of the initial postwar years—a memory that acknowledges the multicultural and complex heritage of the Polish western borderlands, as exemplified by the testimonies presented in this paper. The imaginary return of the Germans to the memories of Polish expellees reflects a transformation within the Polish culture of remembrance in recent years, in which two developments appear particularly striking. Firstly, after a  long, almost fifty-year period of collectivization and homogenization of the Polish past, an opposite tendency developed in the course of the first two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, namely, to reclaim the personal and the unique. While addressing such aspects of the post-war resettlement as private life, domesticity, and individual agency, Polish expellees have been confronted with the recollections of German inhabitants of Lower Silesia, who may have been expelled from the public sphere, but were inevitably encountered in these intimate spaces. Secondly, the analyzed testimonies reveal precisely the extent to which communist policy failed to reconstruct Lower Silesia as a Polish national space in social consciousness, which found its most spectacular manifestation in the discursive and to some extent physical cleansing of Wrocław from its German origins. And yet, it seems that the ghost of Breslau never left the city, hiding 52

 As far as I know, although such repositories have not yet been established, the German foundation Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung [Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation] is currently collecting both oral and written testimonies from the German expellees as well as developing its Documentation Center in Berlin, where they should be available to researchers from 2017. See: http://www.sfvv.de/de (last accessed: 18 November 2016).

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in some of its post-war restored architecture, but not only. Indeed, these memories clearly demonstrate that the Polish present is still haunted by the dissonant past, as held in memory, and concretized in testimonial images of post-war expulsion and violence. Significantly, while coping with this German phantom, the oral sources aim to bring about a reconciliation with the traumatic historical events by reimagining Lower Silesia as a  common local homeland, as it was postulated once by a Breslau-born poet, Heinz Winfred Sabais (1922–1981), in his Brief von Breslau nach Wrocław [Letter from Breslau to Wrocław], addressed to one of the post-war residents of this city, Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014): Dear Tadeusz Różewicz, we are both Cives Vratislaviensis, it’s God’s will. The city has taken us both into her history. The Heraclitic Oder enfolds your years and mine alike. We must bear with one another—or else we shall die.53 In this attempt at reconciliation, national myths and private memories become intertwined; “ownership” is constantly being (re-)negotiated. Finally, Lower Silesia and Wrocław come to occupy an increasingly important place in building a sense of belonging for their residents, while simultaneously being reinterpreted in light of these often ambiguous reminiscences of the postwar Polish-German coexistence. This narrative seems, at the time of writing [2016] to be re-entering the discursive space, thus creating the potential for new, complex, multi-layered meanings of the past and present of the region and its capital.

53

 As cited in Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 472.

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Tylko we Lwowie: Tango, Jazz, and Urban Entertainment in a Multi-ethnic City Mayhill C. Fowler

The 1939 Polish film Włóczęgi [The tramps], starring the beloved radio duo

Szczepko and Tońko, was an ode to the city of Lwów. The film’s central song, Tylko we Lwowie [Only in Lwów], became a  Poland-wide hit. Despite the fact that it was filmed in a Warsaw studio, the film was able to make use of local Lwów culture to make a film and a popular song for mass consumption. “Where does singing caress you and wake you from sleep? Only in Lwów!” sing the tramps, as they stroll past a backdrop of the city’s famous old market square where, indeed, everyone seems inspired to sing and dance together.1 The hit melody made a  second, lesser known, appearance in 1941. Polish matinée idol Eugeniusz Bodo (1899–1943) sang a Russian-language version of the song, called Proshchalnaia pesenka Lvovskogo dzhaza [A Little Farewell Song of L’vov Jazz] recorded in Moscow. The music by Henryk Wars (1902– 1977) is the same, but the lyrics are altered, urging listeners to travel south because, “We’re waiting for you in L’vov” The tragic irony, of course, was that

1

 For the film, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOEM8QRugXU

(accessed 28 April 2017): Konrad Tom and Emanuel Szlechter wrote the screenplay, Henryk Wars the music, Michał Waszyński directed; Tom, Wars, and Waszyński emigrated to Hollywood, Szlechter died in the Lwów ghetto; on the duo, see Marian Tyrowicz, Wspomnienia o życiu kulturalnym i obyczajowym we Lwowie, 1918–1939 (L’viv: Ossolineum, 1991), 191; Anna Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, ed. Teatr żydowski w Polsce (Łódź: Wydawnictwo uniwersytetskiego, 1998), 71–72.

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the recording was one of Bodo’s last; he was arrested by the NKVD and died in the gulag, never to return to Lwów-L’vov.2 Nevertheless, these performances and their performers offer a window into the city’s entertainment culture. A  film made in Warsaw advertised a “Lwów” culture of song; a song recorded in Moscow advertised “L’vov” culture as desirable. Between Warsaw and Moscow, then, stood this city, which became a meeting ground for many artists famous in the world of cabaret, popular song, and urban entertainment in the interwar and early wartime period. Lviv, Lwów, L’vov (as well as, of course, Lemberg and Lemberik) are all one city with a Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian population, a city that was part of the Habsburg Empire, independent Poland, and later, Soviet Ukraine (and of course, later part of Nazi-occupied Europe before once again becoming part of Soviet Ukraine). The multiple names suggest the ethnic, linguistic, and confessional multiplicity in the city itself, a  feature well explored by scholars.3 Yet somehow this city with its diverse populations inspired the notion of one local culture that was distinctive, a distinctive type of jazz (“L’vov jazz”) and a distinctive urban sociability of song and dance (“only in Lwów”). This chapter examines the changing cultural landscape of Lwów-Lviv through a particular lens: entertainment. It argues that local entertainment reflects the changing nature of the city itself, which shows how culture can be

2

 For the recorded song, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjNLz3jD0Gg (accessed 28 April 2017); on Bodo, Ryszard Wolański, Eugeniusz Bodo: Już taki jestem zimny drań (Poznan: Rebis, 2012); on the cabaret scene, Meir Melman, ‘Teatr żydowski w Warszawie w latach międzywojennych,’ Warszawa II Rzeczypospolitej, ed. by Emilia Borecka, Marian Drozdowski, and Halina Janowska, (Warsaw, Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1968), 381–400. 3  See, for example, Tarik Cyril Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); John Czaplicka, ed., Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “The Border as Pain and Remedy: Commemorating the Polish-Ukrainian Conflict of 1918–1919,” Nationalities Papers 42, 2 (2014): 1–27; Tomas Sajo, “Urban Space as Erinnerungslandschaft: The Case of Lemberg/Lwow/Lvov/Lviv,” European Review 21, 4 (October 2013): 523–529; Christoph Mick, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939–1944,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, 2 (2011): 336–363; Anna Veronika Wendland, “Post-Austrian Lemberg: War Commemoration, Interethnic Relations, and Urban Identity in Lviv, 1918–1939,” Austrian History Yearbook 34 (January 2003): 83–102.

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at once local and part of transnational flows. The entertainment of contemporary song and dance, the tango and jazz, reflected the changing political and social landscape of the city, as it transformed from a crucible of national projects to a laboratory for Soviet social engineering. My chronological lens is narrow—the 1930s and the first two years of Soviet occupation in World War II—yet that violent transformative moment highlights mentalities of cultural production and reception. My aim, too, is to bring Lviv into larger relief as an important artistic space in the development of urban entertainment culture. Larry Wolff wrote, “Galician identity was fundamentally provincial, and its evolution suggests the importance of the provincial as an ideological force overlapping with the forces of the national and the imperial.”4 Indeed, this hit song was a product of this “provincial” culture, one rich in cultural hybridity, marketing a particular Lwów identity throughout Poland. Although the Soviet cultural infrastructure imposed from 1939 profoundly transformed the local culture, still the notion of “L’vov jazz” was deemed powerful enough to market across the Soviet Union. A footnote or short paragraph in many biographies: the city belongs on the map of jazz and transnational tango. This article focuses on two milieus in particular—the first, the Ukrainian tango scene of the 1930s, and second, the popular jazz entertainments of Warsaw émigrés during the Soviet occupation of 1939–1941. Both milieus were spaces of popular culture, a concept notoriously difficult to define. Here, however, I am referring to urban entertainment.5 Jazz and tango ensembles were meant not to educate but to entertain. In a society where nationalism was becoming an increasingly important defining category, and where Soviet ideology circumscribed cultural production and

4

 For the city’s relationship with Habsburg Vienna and Cracow, see Markian Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space and Politics in a Galician Town, 1772–1914 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009); Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 6. 5  For an intellectual genealogy of popular culture, see Paula Backscheider, “The Paradigms of Popular Culture,” in The Eighteenth-Century Novel: Essays in Honor of John Richetti (New York: AMS Press, 2009), 19–59; and John Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 1–19.

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reception, the notion that music and performance could simply entertain an audience—as opposed to engage in nation-building or social engineering— was important.6 Lawrence Levine showed how cultural hierarchy emerged in 19th-century America, when Shakespeare suddenly became an elite and not democratic theatrical art form; in Eastern Europe the challenges of making and defending a nation, and building and maintaining socialism, privileged culture, but generally decreed that products serving “only” to entertain were lesser on the cultural hierarchy. The scholarship can reflect this hierarchy, with a  focus largely on the academic and dramatic theatrical and musical work considered more “important” by officials and cultural elites.7 Yet urban centers were fertile ground for entertainment, with eager audiences, potential profit, and diverse audiences coming together to create new sounds and performance styles. Meng Yue’s notion of an “entertainment cosmopolitanism” is apt here; although referring to Shanghai, her analysis of how new technologies and new social encounters broke barriers to create a Shanghai urban culture holds true for Lviv as well.8 Geographers have now taken on the landscape of music, focusing on how flows of capital and technology have shaped listening, sound, and musical belongings.9 Philip Bohlman shows how jazz milieus always reflected local particularities, yet jazz culture itself was transnational.10 Lviv was no exception. In a city marked with ethnic tension, it is easy to see the spaces of entertainment as spaces of tolerance separate from violence. Yet these spaces, with their audiences, their artists, and their performances, were not separate from social tensions, but rather reflected them. And in fact, that tension itself could prove culturally

6

 For Soviet jazz see, Martin Lucke, “Vilified, Venerated, Forbidden: Jazz in the Stalinist Era,” trans. by Anita Ip. Music and Politics 1, 2 (summer 2007): 1–9. 7  Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); see, for example, Hugo Lane on Ukrainian theatre, “The Ukrainian Theatre and the Polish Opera: Cultural Hegemony and National Culture,” in Czaplicka, ed., 149–170. 8  Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires (Minneapolis and London: Univesity of Minnesota Press, 2006). 9  S ee, for example, John Connell and Chris Gibson, eds., Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place (London: Routledge, 2003); Andrew Leyshon, David Matliss, and George Revill, The Place of Music (London and New York: Guilford, 1998). 10  Philip V. Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino, eds., Jazz Worlds / World Jazz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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productive. Tango and jazz may offer a lens into the mystery of what made Lwów-Lviv a culturally productive space.11

Ukrainian Tango In interwar Polish Lwów, urban Ukrainian-language musical and theatrical performance was minimal. Actor Volodymyr Blavatskyi wrote in his memoirs that Lwów in the interwar years was unable to support a permanent Ukrainian-language troupe; they simply did not have the audience, so Ukrainianlanguage troupes had to travel the countryside and perform in small towns and villages. By contrast, the city boasted a  rich Polish-language and Yiddish-language musical and theatrical culture. Polish theater had dominated in the city since the late 18th century, when it pushed out German-language theater (that is, theater in the imperial Habsburg language), and celebrated Polish directors had staged productions in the city’s theaters. Moreover, one of the most famous Yiddish stages throughout the world, that of Jewish entrepreneur Yaakov Gimpel (1840–1906), was a feature of the Habsburg urban landscape and contributed to the artistic education of Yiddish actors and audiences. Gimpel’s stage no longer existed by the interwar period, but multiple Yiddish-language theater companies still flourished. In addition, Lwów, like all European cities, was struck by the obsession with urban dances and variety entertainments, and provided, in both Yiddish and Polish. In 1933 Lwów natives Kazimierz Wajda (Catholic; 1905–1955) and Henryk Vogelfänger (Jewish; 1904–1990), better known as Szczepko and Tońko, created an Abbot-and-Costello style cabaret act for a radio program, Wesoła Lwowska Fala, Lwów’s Merry Wave, which entertained about five to six million radio listeners for each Sunday program. The duo starred in several films, including 11

 This productivity of ethnic tension is the argument made by Michael Pollack, “Cultural Innovation and Social Identity in Fin-de-siecle Vienna,” in Jews, Antisemitism, and Culture in Vienna, ed. by Ivan Oxaal, Michael Pollack and Gerhard Botz (London 1987); on cosmopolitanism, see Pnina Werbner, “The dialectics of urban cosmopolitanism: between tolerance and intolerance in cities of strangers,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 22, 5 (2015): 569–598; on “provincial cosmopolitanism” see Steven Hoelscher, “Conserving Diversity: Provincial Cosmopolitanism and America’s Multicultural Heritage,” in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, ed. Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen Till (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 375–402.

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Włóczęgi. Quite simply, Yiddish and Polish dominated the performance landscape in Lwów, from dramatic theater to cabaret and radio, and Ukrainian was hard to find.12 But there was another rarely-discussed phenomenon in interwar Lwów: Ukrainian tango. Like all cities in interwar Europe, Lwów was hit by the tango and dancing fad. Entrepreneurs, with city permission, opened locales for dancing to live bands.13 Three young students at the Lysenko Music Academy created an ensemble that played concerts for dancing and enjoyment by, it seems, a  Ukrainian audience. Bohdan “Bondi” Veselovskyi was the group’s composer, Anatol “Tatsi” Kos-Anatolskyi played the accordion, and Leonid Iablonskyi played the violin. Veselovskyi wrote the lyrics to several songs that became major hits. The 1937 tango Pryide shche chas [The time will come again] played throughout Poland, and not just for a Ukrainian audience, with universal lyrics that spoke of love and longing: “The time will come again when you will yearn for me / The time will come again when you remember our days / Maybe then you will understand my love / And maybe you will be grateful for this love.” The trio called themselves “Iabtso-jazz,” and were joined throughout the 1930s by various other Ukrainian students studying at the Lysenko Music Academy. Their soloist was a gifted young singer, Iryna Iarosevych. Her mother was Polish, her father was a Greek Catholic priest, and her brothers were in the Ukrainian nationalist movement; she sang at the Lwów

12

 Directors working in Lemberg-Lwów include Wojciech Bogusławski in the 18th century, Tadeusz Pawlikowski in the 19th, and Leon Schiller in the 20th, see Kazimierz Braun, Kieszonkowa historia teatru polskiego (Lublin: Norbertinum, 2003), Franciszek Pajączkowski, Teatr lwowski pod dyrekcją Tadeusza Pawlikowskiego (Cracow: Wydawnictwo literackie, 1961), Leon Schiller, Droga przez teatr, ed. by Jerzy Timoszewicz (Warsaw: PIW, 1983); Volodymyr Blavats’kyi, “Spohady,” in V Orbiti svitovoho teatru, ed. by Valerian Revuts’kyi (Kyiv, Kharkiv, NYC: Vyd. Kots’, 1995), 119; on the inability of Lviv to support interwar Ukrainian-language theater, see also Olena Bon’kovs’ka, L’vivs’kyi teatr tovarystva “Ukrains’ka Besida” 1915–1924 (Lviv: Litopys, 2003), 265–270; on the Yiddish theater and interwar cabarets in Lviv, see Tetiana Stepanchykova, Istoriia evreis’koho teatru u L’vovi: kriz’ terny do zirok (Lviv: Liga, 2005) and Llioca Czakis, “Tangele: The History of Yiddish Tango,” Jewish Quarterly 50, 1 (Spring 2003): 44–52; on the Fala’s 5 million listeners, http://www.polskieradio.pl/39/156/ artykul/888085,Wesola-Lwowska-Fala (accessed 25 April 2017). 13  See files in DALO f. 110, op. 4. Starostwo Grodzkie we Lwowie, Wydzial Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego, Oddzial teatrów, sztuki i kzialalnosci publicznej.

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Opera in Polish until Bondi scooped her up for his ensemble. The two young artists had a love affair, as well, which added to the allure of the jazz group.14 The ensemble seems unique in the Ukrainian-language culture of the interwar period in Poland. Biographer Ihor Ostash highlights their Ukrainian patriotism, arguing that they were determined to produce Ukrainian tunes in a largely Polish landscape. This motivation must have been there, of course. Yet there is another side to the story of Iabtso-jazz: namely, not only how did the group preserve and develop Ukrainian-language culture, but also how did the urban environment of Lwów shape that very culture? Ostash shows how new student organizations and clubs wanted the same entertainments as their Polish counterparts, which suggests that the ubiquity of jazz, tango, and radio contributed to Veselovskyi’s inspiration for writing a song in Ukrainian. Moreover, the Lysenko Music Academy was one of many institutes of higher education attracting students from all over the region, who were able to encounter and enjoy all the entertainment the big city had to offer. Why, after all, should Ukrainian-language entertainment not be one of the options in an urban multi-ethnic space? Olha Kharchyshyn shows how the melodies were inspired by Ukrainian folk songs from villages; but importantly, the young artists updated the melodies to make them resonant with the greater urban entertainment landscape of jazz and tango. Ukrainian-language culture became urban; urban entertainment became a genre for Ukrainian-language music and song.15 Why was “Iabtso-jazz” so unique? Perhaps, young Ukrainians simply enjoyed the more-present urban entertainment in Polish and felt little need to seek out or create such cultural products in Ukrainian. Perhaps, too, antiUkrainian government policies acted as a disincentive to create a specifically Ukrainian culture. However, the very presence of Iabtso-jazz also suggests ways in which the specific political and social realities of the city shaped the entertainment landscape. The prevalence of Polish-language musical culture, it seems, provoked a  response among young Ukrainian artists to create a product that would compete in the scene. The local ethnic tension 14

 Ihor Ostash, Bondi: abo povernennia Bohdana Veselovs’koho (Kyiv: Dulybi, 2013).  Ostash 54–78; Ol’ha Kharchyshyn, “Pisno tak zvanoho ‘lehkogo zhanru’ v ukrains’komu narodnokul’turnomu seredovyshchi L’vova pershoi polovyny XX stolittia,” Visnyk Lvivs’koho Universytetu ser. filolohiia 37 (2006): 207–231; there may, as well, have been some connection with Yiddish-language cabaret performances, but I have not found sources on this matter.

15

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between Poles and Ukrainians created a demand and possibility for Ukrainian tango; the global tango fad found expression in Ukrainian because of local conditions.16 Veselovskyi left Lwów in 1938 to support the briefly autonomous Carpatho-Ukraine; he was a trained lawyer as well as a musician. He did not stay in wartime Europe, but left for Canada, where he enjoyed a successful radio career and is warmly remembered by the Ukrainian diaspora. Yet he was not only a promoter of Ukrainian culture, but also of a  Ukrainian culture that included jazz, tango, and urban entertainment.17 Iryna Iarosevych would continue her work as a jazz singer, but in the milieu of Polish refugees, many of whom were Jewish, and all of whom were stars from the Warsaw world of cabaret and popular song. Newly Soviet Lviv became an incubator of entertainment talent, for a brief moment, as musical styles and talents converged in the city during a catastrophic period of war and violence.

Local Lwów Culture in Soviet Lviv Before discussing the second milieu of local entertainment—Polish jazz—I will explain why this local entertainment culture was necessary at all. After all, was there not a Soviet Ukrainian tango and jazz imposed by the new authorities? Quite simply, not at all. To understand the phenomenon of popular culture in Soviet Lviv, one must understand the phenomenon of “high” culture in Soviet Lviv. The Soviet cultural infrastructure imposed from September 1939 involved organizing all performances by ethnicity, and by genre. The state privileged theaters presenting full-length dramatic plays and operas (“academic” theaters), as well as performance in Ukrainian, the titular language of the republic. Although there had been little Ukrainian-language urban culture 16

 Bohdan Nahalyo has researched Bondi and Iryna, as per his unpublished paper at the 2013 Danyliw Seminar in Ukrainian Studies ‘All That Jazz in Lviv: Capturing the Best of Ukrainian-Jewish-Polish Predicaments in Western Ukraine in the 1930s-1940s’, and his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/HumanitarianEclectic (accessed 24 April 2017); Bondi has inspired an international festival as well, see, https://wesolowsky.jimdo.com (accessed 24 April 2017); on anti-Ukrainian policies, see, Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 17  On Carpatho-Ukraine, Robert Paul Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Sub-Carpathian Rus, 1848–1948 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

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in Lwów, Ukrainian-language culture was decreed to take center stage in Lviv, according to proper Soviet nationality policy. This was Soviet Ukraine, after all, and the titular ethnicity should be at the top of the cultural hierarchy. This meant that the republic-level Party-state administration was to manage the Opera and the Ukrainian Dramatic Theater. The newly created Polish State Theater, the Yiddish State Theater, and the Polish-language Theater of Small Forms were relegated to the regional administration. This cultural overhaul based on categorizing and hierarchizing theater by ethnicity was intended to change radically the city infrastructure—and it clashed with the reality of local artistic culture. The Opera, for example, was supposed to perform in Ukrainian, but lacked a Ukrainian repertoire, singers, and musicians.18 The genres and institutions privileged by the Party-state suffered. Academic theaters struggled under the new administration. The Polish theater was forced out of the Opera (now designated only for Ukrainian productions) and into a  small 500-seat space on Jagiellonian Street in Fall 1940. Polish writer and critic Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński (1874–1941) described the troupe as “condemned to existence in a little chamber theater.” The Polish company, in turn, ousted the new Yiddish State Theater, which had been previously performing in this space, and now moved to a different space nearby, the former Teatr Colosseum or Teatr Nowośći [Novelty Theater] on Słoneczna/ Soniachnia Street. In fact, before World War I, the Jagiellonian space had belonged to Gimpel’s famed Yiddish-language theater. So, the Poles, who previously had performed in the Opera, were now performing in the space of one of the premiere pre-war Yiddish theaters. These physical changes reflected the challenge of fitting the Polish-Jewish spatial layout of the city’s culture into the new framework of Soviet Lviv.19 And what of Ukrainian-language academic theater? The Lviv Arts Department allowed Volodymyr Blavatskyi (1900–1953), newly named artistic director, to select a space for the State Ukrainian Theater, and he chose the spacious Skarbek Theater, formerly the Polish Teatr Skarbkowksi, currently operating as a  cinema. The movie theater—as claimed by the paper Vilna Ukraina (Free Ukraine)—would be destroyed to make a great theater space 18

 Blavats’kyi 119; DALO, f. P-3, op. 1, s. 1, ark. 14; DALO f. R-122, op. 1, s. 189, ark. 50, K. Dneprov, “Teatr Malykh Form,” Vil’na Ukraina 252 (27 October 1940): 6. 19  Blavats’kyi, 168–169, 174; Stepanchykova, 194–195, 202; the Jagiellonian space is now the Teatr iunykh hliadachiv, the Theater of Young Spectators; Tadeusz BoyŻelenski, ‘O Polskim teatrze we Lwowie,’ Pamiętnik teatralny 12 (1963), 270.

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for the people. Later in the summer of 1940, the paper advertised the success of the project: workers “worked day and night,” there was “not a trace of the ‘bourgeois cinema’ remaining, and a great theater ‘comfortable for spectators’ outfitted with two balcony levels and two coat checks was on the horizon.” It was a “new theatrical palace for one of the best theaters in Ukraine,” boasted the paper.20 However, the newspaper articles were all wrong. Although the renovation was indeed announced in early 1940, a year later, in early 1941, nothing had been done. For all the Party-state privileging of this theater, the Ukrainian-language company never performed in Lviv before the Nazi invasion. Furthermore, no one seems to have complained. No documents point to angry audience members anxious for theater in Ukrainian; rather, it would take war and ethnic cleansing, that is, the removal of the Polish and Jewish populations and their culture, to create an audience for Ukrainian-language theater in Lviv.21

The Problems of Soviet Creativity and Lwów-Lviv More than construction crises, however, the arrival of the Soviets created creative challenges for local artists working in academic theatre and literature. The Soviet cultural infrastructure privileging academic theaters, Ukrainianlanguage texts, and separating entertainment according to ethnicity seems to have stymied local creative production. First of all, lumping actors together by ethnicity did not always lead to smooth working conditions. For example, the local Arts Department appointed Warsaw refugee Ida Kaminska (1899–1980) head of the new State Yiddish Theater. Kaminska was the daughter of celebrated Yiddish theater grande dame Esther Rachel Kaminska (1870–1925), and her family was celebrated throughout the Yiddish theater world. Despite her pedigree—or perhaps because of it—Kaminska encountered opposition to her work from the ranks of both local Yiddish theater actors and Yiddish theater actors who had been working elsewhere in Soviet Ukraine. She writes in her memoirs that members of the troupe claimed that she was “a 20

 K. Dneprov, ‘V teatri im. Lesi Ukrainky,’ Vil’na Ukraina 164 (16 July 1940), ark. 4; L. Krakovs’kyi, ‘Teatral’nyi palats,’ Vil’na Ukraina 187 (11 August 1940), 4. 21  DALO f. P-3, op. 1, s. 6, ark. 140; DALO f. P-3, op. 1, s. 8, ark. 31-33; DALO f. R-145, op. 1, s. 4, ark. 66–68.

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capitalistic director who exploited actors,” and that she had her “own theater building in Warsaw, and that they would go to the proper authorities and do what was necessary, even create a  separate state theater” in protest against her. Kaminska explains this distrust by the fact that she was a “stranger” to the locals, and they feared she might “do an injustice to the local actors.” Kaminska admits in her memoirs that the Warsaw contingent was indeed “of a higher intellectual and artistic rank.” As head of the theater, Kaminska was responsible for assigning each actor to a given salary rank, and her opinion of them mattered. The Soviet organization methods of categorizing actors by ethnicity, and therefore grouping together actors from different regions, created dissent, and not creative production. For these actors, “Warsaw” and “Lwów” were regions that signified a  real artistic hierarchy; Kaminska, in a sense, privileged Warsaw theatrical culture over that of the local Yiddish theater she encountered in the city.22 And what of Soviet content? The central artistic problem for all troupes was repertory. The State Polish Theater could perform classics, such as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Gabriela Zapolska’s staple of Polish stages, Moralność pani Dulskiej, [The Morality of Mrs. Dulska], or Polish translations of Soviet plays, such as the 1934 Civil War melodrama Zahybel eskadry [Death of the squadron] by Oleksandr Korniichuk, but what they really needed was “Polish Soviet” plays. To that end, Wanda Wasilewska, Stalin’s favorite and soon to be hack playwright Oleksandr Korniichuk’s wife, wrote Bartosz Głowacki (written 1940, produced 1941). Actor Jan Kreczmar (1908–1972) remembers how harshly the troupe criticized Wasilewska’s play after its first reading. Yet none of these plays, clearly, reflected any sense of “local” culture, or anything particular to the city itself.23 Moreover, despite the privileging by the Party-state and the new cultural hierarchy of Soviet Ukraine, Ukrainian language theater itself was not immune to the challenges of creating art under the Soviets. Blavatskyi, the new theater’s artistic director, experienced a creative crisis because of his encounter with Soviet theatrical practices in 1939. Vilna Ukraina advertised that the Ivan Franko Theater in Kyiv wanted to take patronage (sheftsvo) of the new Ukrainian Theater in Lviv, to help them in their “renaissance of people’s art.” Bla22

 Ida Kaminska, My Life, My Theatre, trans. by Curt Leviant (NYC: Macmillan, 1979), 115–117; Stepanchykova, 200–202. 23  Hryciuk, 110; Kreczmar, 238; Borwicz, 154, accuses Wasilewska of plagiarizing Wojciech Skuz, who had just recently been arrested.

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vatskyi objects in his memoirs to the fact that those artists coming from prewar Soviet Ukraine to Lviv considered the local actors “totally illiterate,” and took it upon themselves to re-educate and “raise their artistic qualifications with radical and not always efficient methods.” Early in the rehearsal process, for example, the administration would arrange for an early preview, which would be followed by episodes of intense criticism and self-criticism. The “creativity of an actor demands a certain time, it’s a process,” explains Blavatskyi, and “the very delicate and complicated, very individualistic creativity of an actor” was scrutinized. For the local actors such methods were “catastrophic.” Such methods of self-criticism were part and parcel of theatrical practices from the early 1920s in the Soviet Union, but were, of course, new to local actors. The Soviet state posed a problem for culture because even as it strove to promote culture, its practices hindered cultural production. 24

Transnational Soviet Jazz It would be easy, then, to dismiss cultural production and reception in the city under the Soviet Occupation of 1939–1941. Never mind the stymied creativity and focus on academic theaters, the terror and anxiety described by memoirists waiting to be sent to Central Asia, which would challenge any artistic landscape. Yet even so, wartime Lviv actually enjoyed and inspired a  fruitful collaboration between Warsaw and local artists, albeit not in the genre of literature and academic theater, but in urban entertainment. The Soviets did not import tango and jazz. The dilemma over forging an ideologically sound Soviet urban popular culture had challenged artists and officials in Soviet Ukraine for two decades. Theatre director Les Kurbas (1887–1937), for example, attempted to make a Soviet Ukrainian culture for the street and devoted time and resources to the first-ever Ukrainian-language revue show, 1929’s Allo na khvyli 477 [Hello from Radio 477] and its sequel, 1931’s Chotyry Chemberleny [Four chamberlains]. Part of the problem seems to have been internal dissent over what that local popular culture

24

 Blavats’kyi, 177–178; on Kurbas, see Irena Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

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should look and sound like.25 Plus, of course, Kurbas and most of his circle were murdered in Solovki, Moscow, and beyond. By the time the Soviets rolled into Lwów, officials lacked Soviet Ukrainian entertainers, and with the departure of Veselovskyi, the Iabtso-jazz ensemble seems to have dissolved. Where was entertainment for new Soviet Lviv? Soviet officialdom, for its part, loved entertainment. Kaminska’s daughter, Ruth, had recently married Polish-Jewish musician and bandleader Adi Rosner, dubbed the “White Louis Armstrong.” Rosner, now a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Warsaw, was performing at Lviv’s Café Bagatelle, a local dancing club. Ida Kaminska claims, “many Russians visited the club, especially groups of high-ranking government officials.” Rosner and his young wife were even given rooms in the Hotel Bristol, one of the new homes for Soviet apparatchiks, simply, one assumes, because of his popularity among officialdom. In other words, the Soviet cultural infrastructure crushed and wrangled the “high” spaces of theater and opera but allowed the spaces of jazz and entertainment to continue.26 Quite unlike other theaters in Lviv was the work performed under the auspices of the Polish-language Teatr Miniatiur [The theatre of small forms], which seems to have garnered the highest numbers of audience attendance, at least according to Arts Department reports.27 This was a troupe that was not organized along ethnic lines, but rather served as a catch-all for artists, many of whom were Jewish, who had fled Nazi-occupied Warsaw. They performed in a former movie theater, the Marusenka, on Akademicka Street, located off Smolka Square in an area well known in the interwar period for Yiddish cabarets. Run by Polish-Jewish songwriter Konrad Tom (Runowiecki), the company toured from August 1940 through early 1941 in the Soviet Union and returned in March 1941 with a variety show called Jarmark Wiosenny [Springtime fair]. Working with Tom at the Theater of Small Forms was Emanuel Szlechter. The two had collaborated on several hit Polish films in the interwar 25

 In 1930 the Arts Workers’ Union in Kyiv complained about the lack of Ukrainian entertainment: DALO f. 768, op. 2, s. 69, ark. 94-zv. 26  Ida Kaminska 114, 133; Ruth Turkow Kaminska, Mink Coats and Barbed Wire (London: Collins and Harvill, 1979), 20; 28–29; Of course, Rosner and Ruth Kaminska did not stay long in Lviv; the Party-state accorded him the honor of founding a jazz orchestra in Minsk, and from there the couple moved to Moscow, where they lived high in luxury hotels and ate at the best restaurants, even in wartime. Until, of course, they were both arrested. 27  DALO f. R-122, op. 1, s. 189, ark. 54; DALO f. R-145, op. 1, s. 46, ark. 1.

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period, including Włóczęgi. The artists who had contributed to marketing a culture distinctive to Polish Lwów were now back in Soviet Lviv.28 The Philharmonic, meanwhile, boasted a  “tea-jazz” division. “Teajazz” was a term coined by Leonid Utesov (a.k.a Weisbein) from Odessa to refer to his theatricalized jazz performances. Run by famous Warsaw composer Henryk Wars, the Polish-Jewish Irving Berlin who had written Tylko we Lwowie, the group was joined by stars from the Warsaw cabarets Qui pro quo and Morskie oko. One such was Bodo, with matinée idol looks and a silky voice, who would sing the new Soviet version of Wars’s song. Bodo and Wars, indeed, were frequent collaborators; Bodo’s and Wars’s pre-war hit, Umówiłem się z nią na dziewątą [I have a date with her at nine] was so well-known that it became a joke among literati in newly Soviet Lviv flummoxed by the new twohour time shift from Polish time to Moscow time: did that mean “meeting with her” at nine o’clock by the old time, or at nine o’clock by the new time? The lyric from a pre-war hit song became absorbed by the local city culture, shaped by the new Soviet realities.29 Wars’s ensemble was a magnet: young cabaret actor and singer Gwidon Borucki (Gottlieb) joined, and soon brought Iryna Iarosevych into the group. However, she was concerned about her family learning of her involvement with Polish-Jewish popular entertainment and she took “Renata Bogdanska” as her new stage name. As she had fallen in love with her co-star in Iabtsojazz, so did Renata fall in love with Gwidon and the two soon married. This Soviet jazz milieu then reflected a continuity with the pre-war city’s culture in the artists involved and the genre performed.30 Wars’s and Bodo’s ensemble also toured the Soviet Union and returned to do a show called Muzyka na ulicy [Music on the street] in Lviv. In early 1941 Vilna Ukraina [Free Ukraine] proclaimed, “Interesting theatrical experiment: in the Lviv Philharmonic an interesting theatrical-musical experiment is in rehearsal.” Lviv natives “Sondek and Shlengel” had written an original jazz

28

 Utesov, Spasibo Serdtse! (Moscow: Varius, 2003); Bogumila Zongołłowicz, Jego byly Czerwone maki: życie i kariera Gwidona Boruckiego (Melbourne-Torun: Oficyna Wydawnicza MJK Kucharski, 2010), 29–33; on Qui pro quo, Beth Holmgren, “Qui pro quo: Acting Out in the Context of Interwar Warsaw,” East European Politics, Societies, and Cultures 27, 2 (May 2013): 205–223. 29  For the joke, Borwicz 156–157; Bodo’s and Wars’s song can be found on YouTube, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xlKRtF9FkE (accessed 6 March 2011). 30  Jongołłowicz 33.

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comedy called Muzyka na ulicy. They conceived of it, apparently, not only “as a theatrical show, but also as Lviv tea-jazz.” Theater-jazz that was Lvivian—not just Polish, not just Jewish, but somehow reflecting the unique confluence of cultural layers that made “Lviv” culture. Yet the creators in question were not Lvivians, but Władysław Szlengel and Napoleon Sądek (born Feliks Rosenbaum), and apparently it was a variety show about unemployed Americans seeking work in capitalist Europe. Involved in the production were the pleiad of artistic Warsaw, including Wars, Bodo, and director Michał Waszyński (1904–1965), a prolific film director whose credits included the Polish film in Yiddish, The Dybbuk. Music on the street—I speculate here, since the texts and songs are long vanished—seems to reflect the paradigm for success of Tylko we Lwowie and Włóczęgi: non-ethnicized, local urban entertainment that somehow reflected a “Lviv” culture.31 Nor were these troupes the entirety of the urban entertainment landscape. It seems there was also another ensemble under the Philharmonic run by Feliks Konarski, whose artistic nom-de-plume was Ref-Ren. Konarski would end up founding Polish Parade for General Anders’ Army in Central Asia. Borucki and Iarosevych-Bogdanska would join Konarski’s troupe; Borucki would compose and Bogdanska would sing Red Poppies on Monte Cassino, a celebrated popular song honoring the Polish soldiers who fought at the famous battle.32 In short, while the Polish, Yiddish and Ukrainian academic theaters seem to have suffered from the imposition of the Soviet cultural structures, somehow the urban entertainment world seems to have oddly flourished. This may have been a question, partially, of a genre less regulated by the Partystate. It seems as though these artists continued the work they had been doing previously, but on a Soviet budget and, perhaps but not necessarily, with more “Soviet” themes (such as the unemployed Americans). More importantly, perhaps, the genre of small forms and the medium of jazz music may have been media able to maintain a  productive cultural hybridity. These were the only groups not categorized by ethnos, but by genre, 31

 Hryciuk 112; “Tsikavyi teatral’nyi eksperyment,” Vil’na Ukraina 37 (14 February 1941): 4; Jongołłowicz 36, note 56; Szlengel continued to create cabaret in the Warsaw ghetto and died at Treblinka in 1943, and Sądek continued to work in People’s Poland. 32  See Jongołłowicz; on the entertainment in Anders’ Army, see Beth Holmgren, “War, Women and Song: The Case of Hanka Ordonkowa,” Aspasia 4 (2010): 139–154.

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and so could create a theatrical culture not circumscribed by ethnic categories. Recent work on mobility and hybridity points to the productivity of multiple cultural influences in art. Stephen Greenblatt, arguing for the importance of studying cultural mobility, writes: “And the imagination works through metaphor, personification, magical animation, that is, it works by projecting voices, inventing genealogies, transporting and knitting heterogeneous elements together.” Jazz, jokes, songs, and comic sketches seem to have been genres that allowed more free rein to the imagination. Cultural difference, that is, “heterogeneous elements” coming together, seems to have stimulated the imagination.33 What might these shows actually have been? One genre was particularly characteristic of interwar Polish cabaret: szmonces. This was, essentially, “Jewish” humor; whether a perceptive comedy of manners, as performed by an artist like Krzysztof Krutkowski, whose stage persona “Lopek” resembled a Jewish Charlie Chaplin, or the broader żydlaczenie, using gestures and intonations understood as “Jewish” by Polish and Jewish actors and audiences— which could easily, it seems, veer into the anti-Semitic. Szmoncesowy cabaret used the tension between Jews and Poles in the Second Polish Republic to elicit laughter from its audience; such jokes would not have landed had audience members themselves—whether Poles or Jews—not have noticed friction in the definition of Polish. Szmonces, however broad, vulgar, and indeed often anti-Semitic, emerged from the hybridity between Jewish and Polish culture. Michael Steinlauf argues that in interwar Poland “despite the affirmation, indeed the fortification, of borders, particularly in the realms of high culture, cultural borderlands continued to expand; especially in the area of cabaret and small forms. Small forms, cabaret, song were somehow—in the hands of talented artists like Wars, Waszyński, and Rosner—able alternately to transcend the national paradigm, and make art inspired by its contradictions.”34 Moreover, these cultural borderlands existed here in borderlands that were all too real. Lviv, a city with a diverse population often in conflict, was itself 33

 Stephen Greenblatt, “Theatrical Mobility,” in Greenblatt, ed. Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 76. 34  Michael Steinlauf, “Jewish Theatre in Poland,” POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry vol. 16, ed. by Michael Steinlauf and Antony Polonsky (2003), 86–87; on szmonces, Ryszard Marek Groński, Kabaret Hemara (Warsaw: PTWK, 1988), 68–70; Tomasz Mośicki, Kochana Stara Buda: Qui Pro Quo (Warsaw: Łomianki, 2008), 122–125; on Lopek, Dorota Fox, “Teatralny rodowód Lopka: na marginesie szmoncesu,” in Żydzi w lustrze dramatu, teatru i krytyki teatralnej, ed. by Eleonora Udalska (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2004).

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on the border, first of interwar Poland then of Soviet Ukraine. The city’s position on the border made it a  mecca, however dangerous, for refugees. The crisis of war and occupation created the necessity for some, like Iarosevych, to shift national or political belonging in order to survive. Wartime Lviv was a city of liminal spaces, full of people on political or social “edges,” as refugees or those just classified into potentially dangerous social categories. As Philip Bohlman argues, jazz is the musical product of such edges. Jazz is a product of hybridity, of African-Americans in the United States, of Jews in the Russian Empire, of music transported, translated, and re-conceived by minorities and outsiders across the globe. The city of Soviet Lviv, then, was the perfect— quintessential—liminal space to produce liminal music.35 Ticket-buying audiences, it turned out, did not attend the academic theaters so privileged by the Soviet state, but these Polish-Jewish variety show performances. Productions, budgets, subsidies: everything was now planned. The problem was that the audience could not be planned. For example, the Theater of Small Forms was the only theater in 1940 to fulfill their plan in terms of total performances and spectator attendance, but not in terms of new productions—simply because the productions were so popular that they went for extended runs without changes. The Warsaw cabaret artists performing in Soviet Lviv drew enough crowds that they did not change the program according to plan. In contrast, the Polish and Yiddish theaters did succeed in fulfilling the plan for quantity of productions, but only because they frequently changed their repertory in order to keep attracting audience members. And they did not perform frequently enough or fill their houses enough. In 1940, for example, the Polish theater did 159 shows, but had 270 planned. The Jewish theater was on average only 51% full, but it was “planned” to be 75% full. There are no numbers for the Ukrainian Theater, because it did not perform at all throughout 1940. A different document summarizes the 1940 season by profit, which shows audience predilection even more starkly: the Polish and Jewish theaters only brought in just over half of their “planned” income, while the Theater of Small Forms overfilled its plan by about 150%.36 35

 Bohlman, 175–178.  Grzegorz Hryciuk, Polacy we Lwówie 1939–1944: Życie codzienne (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 2000), 110; DALO f. R-122, op. 1, s. 189, ark. 54; DALO f. R-145, op. 1, s. 46, ark. 1: The Polish theater had a planned profit of 571,7000 and actual 293,200 rubles; the Jewish Theater a planned profit of 720,800 and actual 446,310, while the Teatr Miniatiur had a planned profit of 584,000 and made in fact 863,700 karbovantsy (the Ukrainian word for ruble).

36

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The genre of urban entertainment seems to have allowed for more artistic inspiration. After all, the trials and tribulations of everyman, humor from the chaos of everyday life, and the longings of love, were accessible for audiences and artists alike. From official support for bandleader Adi Rosner, to the attendance numbers for the Theater of Small Forms, and the tours of Warsaw cabaret starts to Moscow, the wartime urban entertainment culture of Lviv shows that, whether Soviet or not, audiences wanted to laugh and hear a good song.

Conclusion This milieu of urban entertainment ended, of course, with Nazi occupation, but still some artists remained in the city. Kos-Anatolskyi stayed, for example, and with other artists played in a cabaret called Veselyi Lviv, also known as Wesoły Lwów. The cabaret operated during the war, and it is here that KosAnatolskyi survived the war. After the war, as befitted a Soviet composer, he stopped writing “light genres,” and produced classical pieces to be played by a  symphony orchestra. In fact, it was only after his death that his popular works were uncovered.37 Music entrepreneur and singer Oleh Skrypka has several years ago created a project of re-recording Veselovskyi’s 1930s works, as if to re-integrate interwar Ukrainian tango into contemporary Ukrainian culture.38 The lure of an entertainment culture “only in Lviv” still inspires. Yet what are the lyrics of these songs? In fact, they are hardly resonant of a unique place. Surely songs caress, love is remembered, and springtime is celebrated in many places, not just this one city on the borderlands. Yet somehow these universal songs acquired a geographic specificity and reflected the urban culture of this multi-ethnic city. Jazz and tango, urban song and dance, came to Lviv, as they came to many cities; yet those who practiced and enjoyed these styles created an urban entertainment culture particular to the city. The specific melody of the tramps may have changed, but their song remains the same. As the political and social realities of the city shifted, so, too did its culture. 37

 Orest Krasiwski, “Culture and Education in Lviv during the German occupation,” Studia Europaea Gnesnensia 7 (2013): 33–44; DALO R-1479, op. 1, s. 38, ark 89; s. 77, ark. 3, 12. 38  On Skrypka, see https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/oleh-skrypkas-jazz-cabaret. (Accessed 28 April 2017).

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Impressions of Place: Soviet Travel Writings and the Discovery of Lviv, 1939–40 Sofia Dyak

In late September 1939, two writers travelled to a new place, crossing a state

border that had just ceased to exist. Their goal was to tell stories about one state “disappearing” and another state expanding, by sharing their observations of the new territories with readers of the main literary journal of the Soviet Union, Znamia [The banner], published by the Soviet Writers’ Union in Moscow.1 Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) and Evgenii Petrov (1903–1942) were writers well known to Soviet readers. Both of them were established members of the Soviet cultural sphere and literary world, figures who shaped and represented the Soviet project from its very beginning.2 A year later, in autumn 1940 the main official architectural outlet of Soviet Ukraine published a series of “impressions from the architects participating in a visit to western

1

 Evgenii Petrov “Piat’ dnei. Putevye zametki” [Five days. Travelling notes], Znamia, 11 (1939): 10–37, and Viktor Shklovsky, “Rasskazy o Zapadnoi Ukraine” [Stories about Western Ukraine], Znamia, 2 (1940): 6–35. 2  Eugeny Petrov (pen name of Eugenii Petrovich Kataev) started working with Gudok [The whistle] where he formed a creative partnership with another writer Ilia Ilf (pen name of Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilberg), both natives of Odessa who moved to Moscow in the 1920s. On Ilf-Petrov in the context of making a Soviet Ukrainian cultural sphere, see Mayhill C. Fowler, Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge. State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), especially the chapter “Comedy Soviet and Ukrainian? Ilf-Petrov and Ostap Vyshnia.”

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regions of Soviet Ukraine.”3 Together with many others they were a part of official cultural task force to shape and propagate the story of “liberation” and “unification.” Thus, they followed the routes of the Red Army into new Soviet territories that were to be discovered and explored.4 These literary as well as architectural texts, published in Ukrainian for professional audiences interested in architecture, and in Russian for more general audiences throughout the Soviet Union, mediated an unprecedented state expansion. Although different in background, style, and language, both the writers and the architects were directly involved in envisioning place and contributing to its transformation, as part of the Soviet Union. As such they can be seen and analyzed as travel writing and attempts at literary representation of 3

 Two texts are discussed in this article: K[ostiantyn] Kunytsia “Planuvannia i blahoustrii L’vova” [Planning and well maintaining of Lviv], Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy [Architecture of Soviet Ukraine], 11 (November 1940): 7–10; S. Hulievatyi, N. Dudnyk, Yu. Korbin, “Misto chudovykh arkhitekturnych tradytsii” [A city of wonderful architectural traditions], Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy [Architecture of Soviet Ukraine], 11 (November 1940): 3–6. These two articles formed a separate introductory section of the issue 11 of the journal under the title “Deiaki rysy arkhitekturnoho oblychchia Lvova (Z vrazhen arkhitektoriv-uchasnykiv podorozhi o zakhidnykh oblastiakh URSR)” [Some features of architectural image of Lviv (From the impressions of architects, participants of a journey to western regions of the URSR)]. 4  Soviet Ukrainian and Belarusian, as well as Moscow-based, cultural figures came on official trips to “new territories” to present the Soviet state, ideology and culture. These trips were organized by the state. They resulted in a variety of media, including published texts, film, photo, speeches, to promote the new Soviet territories. Lviv was a major destination for prominent figures of the Soviet Ukrainian as well as all-Union cultural establishment in Kyiv. Both Shklovsky and Petrov mentioned in passing their colleagues, artists, writers and journalists whom they encountered during travelling in Western Ukraine. Shklovsky mentioned sharing a bus with the film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, hearing a speech by the major playwright Oleksandr Korniichuk at the university, meeting the poet Vasili Lebedev-Kumach in Ternopil, and seeing Mykola Bazhan reciting Pushkin. Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 10, 31, 35. Petrov describes a scene at gostinitsa Varshavskaia [Warsaw Hotel] as an “impossible” moment when a special correspondent of Pravda [Truth] newspaper shared a room with a special correspondent of Izvestia [News] newspaper, two major and seemingly rivaling media outlets in Moscow. Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 29. On ideological campaigns in newly annexed Western Ukraine, see Vladyslav Hrynevych, “Nepryborkane riznoholossia: Druha svitova viina i suspil’no-politychni nastroi v Ukraini, 1939-cherven’ 1941’ [Unbridled dissonance. The Second World War and socio-political identities in Ukraine, 1939-June 1941] (Kyiv-Dnipropetrovsk: Vydavnytstvo Lira, 2012), especially the part “Leitymizatsia pryiednannia: ‘misionery v pidkutykh chobotiakh,” 219–238.

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the city.5 These texts were translating this new territory into a “Soviet” place, for justifying moving revolution across the border, and affirming the exclusive right for communism as the project of the future. Far from being merely observers, these writers and architects were in the midst of remaking a social and spatial order, just as the Red Army was advancing into the eastern borderlands of the Polish Republic to expand geographies, politics and imaginaries of the “Soviet.”6 This article analyses the ways in which the city of Lwów, specifically, was approached, described, and communicated to Soviet audiences. It explores how its urban fabric was dismantled into elements that could be used to reassemble Lviv/L’vov on the map of Soviet space. These texts by Soviet writers and architects suggest how Soviet discourses of the “Other,” the “urban,” and of “development” were articulated and applied to accommodate and integrate

5

 Literary texts about cities and travel writings that focus on the descriptions of places attracted the attention of many researchers across several fields, including literary studies to cultural geography and anthropology as well as history. They often adopted postcolonial critical methodologies and focused on exploring power relations and inequality, analyzing the mechanisms of othering and imposing hierarchies. Such concepts as mapping, displacement, boundaries, transgression, re-location, and networking, to name just a few, were applied to and developed in analyzing travel writing. The analyzed texts were often produced by people travelling and gazing from the “West” and “Europe.” For postcolonial critical theory as applied to travel writing, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York and London: Routledge, 2008). The production of centrality and peripherality is one of the main issues in analyzing travel writings that often focused on texts about long-distance location. See, for example, Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds., New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Robert T. Tally Jr., ed., Literary Cartographies. Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). More generally, on cities in literature, see Robert Alter, Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel, (New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). On exploring the center-periphery issue within cities, see Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, and Markku Salmela, eds., Literature and the Peripheral City (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). On problems of defining travel writing in general, see James Buzard, “What Isn’t Travel?” in Hagen Schulz-Forberg, ed., Unraveling Civilization: European Travel and Travel Writing (Brussels: Lang, 2005), 43–61. 6  On ambiguities and implications of the term see Roman Szporluk, “The Soviet West—or Far Eastern Europe?” East European Politics & Societies 5, 3 (1991): 466– 482. For western Ukraine specifically in 1939–1941, see Tarik C. Amar, “Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission in the West,” in: Balázs Apor, Péter Apor and E.A. Rees, eds., The Sovietization of Eastern Europe. New Perspectives on the Postwar Period (Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2008), 29–45. About public and nonpublic experiences of conquest by the Soviets see the discussion on p. 38f.

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the biggest urban center of the newly conquered territories: the city of Lwów. Focusing on a short period between 1939 and 1940, this essay explores the ways of decomposing the urban environment of Polish Lwów, and how the city was reimagined as a Soviet Ukrainian city with ethnically diverse inhabitants.7 Taking a longer perspective, this essay argues that while this initial Soviet rendering was short-lived, key features of this first approach lasted into the post-war years, especially in the interpretation and integration of the city’s rich historic architecture.

The Journey Begins: Discovering a (not so) Foreign Land Discovery begins at the point of departure. Although neither of the two literary journeys to the West in September 1939 started explicitly in Moscow, Moscow was present in multiple ways, reflecting the decade of a centralizing turn in the Soviet Union’s political and spatial reorganization. Of course, both authors were residents of Moscow, started their trips there, and published their accounts there. They wrote, in a sense, for a Moscow readership. Whether from the town of Berdychiv in the case of Shklovsky, or a train en route to Kyiv in the case of Petrov, both writers’ accounts reinforced a crossing from within the Soviet space into a space that is to become Soviet, underscoring the centralized circles of Soviet symbolic geographies.8 Travelling is also enabled and influenced by infrastructural and political conditions.9 Both Petrov’s and Shklovsky’s accounts start while the authors 7

 Christoph Mick proposes to take a longer trajectory in the destruction of the city’s multi-ethnicity. See Christoph Mick, “Lemberg - Lwów—L’viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City” (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2015). For an examination of overlapping, and lasting effects of the violent destruction of the city’s inhabitants as a part of different political regimes and visions, see Tarik C. Amar, The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. A Borderland City between Nazis, Stalinists, and Nationalists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 8  On Soviet symbolic spaces and geographies, see Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism. The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003). On the spatial shift from periphery to periphery to center-periphery, see Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 9  On the invisibility yet crucial presence of infrastructure in travel writing, see Caitlin Vandertop, “Travel Literature and the Infrastructural Unconscious,” in Kuehn and Smethurst, eds., New Directions, 129–144. Vandertop emphasizes how travelling is

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were moving, one reporting from the train and the other observing the vastness of Soviet territory. Shklovsky travelled in a special train with other correspondents (poezd redaktsii) and reminded his readers that “fields in the Soviet state are wide,”10 referring explicitly to the first lines of the widely known, almost unofficial anthem of the Soviet Union from Grigorii Alexandrov’s musical Tsyrk [Circus] (1936).11 Petrov’s journey to discover new places opens with a scene signaling the extraordinary character of the moment: In the car [everybody] talked only about the advance of our troops. Usually making someone’s acquaintance on the train does not happen immediately. […] On this occasion everybody talked and talked immediately. Different suggestions were expressed, one more interesting than the other, Molotov’s speech was constantly commented upon, and vast strategic plans were built. The normal pace of acquaintance between passengers on trains was broken from the very first minute.12

The train was not chosen accidentally as a site to differentiate this situation from the “usual.” Trains were critical in transforming and representing the vast Soviet land to be embraced and connected.13 Here, Petrov juxtaposed enabled by existing infrastructure, including roads, train connections, available lodging, translators, drivers, who are often missing from other accounts. The political setting is also critical, making travel possible via passports, diplomatic support, or conditioned by political relations and agendas. Infrastructure and travel are thus interrelated and reflect on imbalances in the power situation. 10  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 6. 11  On spatial references in popular culture, including musicals, see Richard Taylor “‘But Eastward, Look, the Land is Brighter.’ Toward a Topography of Utopian in the Stalinist Musical,” in The Landscape of Stalinism, 201–215. 12  “V vagone tol’ko i govorili shto o prodvizhenii nashikh voisk. Obychno znakomstvo v poezde proizkhodit ne srazu […] Teper’ zagovorili vse i zagovorili nemedlenno. Vyskazyvalis’ razlichnye predpolozheniia odno drugovo interesneе, bez kontsa kommentirovalas’ rech’ Molotova, stroilis’ obshyrnye strategicheskie plany. Normal’nye poezdnye tempy znakomstva mezhdu passazhirami byly narusheny s pervoi zhe minuty.” This and all subsequent translations are my own. Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 10. 13  A symbol of modernity, dynamic development and to-the-goal movement, trains are omnipresent in the visions and politics of modernization. Petrov and Ilf, his co-writing partner, were closely observing and even participating in major infrastructural projects as contributors to the major newspaper for railway workers Gudok [The whistle]. See Matthew J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2001), in particular about Ilf-Petrov on p. 288f.

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two movements that he situated within the train car. One of the passengers, an artillery major, was on vacation from the Far East to Borjomi in Soviet Georgia. Petrov highlights the parallels between his fellow passenger’s itinerary on the Soviet map with the Soviet state’s movements on the global map: […] he had already been travelling for twelve days. In that time Poland had ceased to exist as a state, Germans moved to Warsaw and the San. But the Major was travelling and travelling. When he was passing Irkutsk, Kraków and Katowice were taken. He had not yet even passed through Omsk, as Łódż was captured. He departed from Novosibirsk, as the Polish government managed to nomadize into Romania. He did not manage to get to the Urals, as a passenger pushed into his car screaming: “Did you not hear? Soviet troops crossed the border!” The Major literally did not manage to turn around as Soviet troops were approaching L’vov.14

In the narrative of the communist state, it was possible to collapse different scales and combine the grand and the small, the mundane and the sacred.15 The route of revolutionary and military advance coexisted with vacation trips. In other words, this was the moment when the Second World War started and the Soviet Union occupied part of the “West,” and Petrov was taking a train to L’vov to witness and retell a story of “liberation.” Petrov stopped in Kyiv to change clothes from civilian to military and introduces himself to readers as “your special correspondent,” revealing his official duty to report on the front. His visual transformation signaled the rupture and transfer beyond casual, even if “Kiev looked as if there was no Ukrainian front.”16 The normal was interrupted, yet there was nothing abnormal in the country bringing revolution to the world or crossing the border to war. 14

 “[…] on nakhodilsia v puti uzhe dnei dvenadtsat’. Za eto vremia Pol’sha perestala sushchestvovat’ kak gosudarstvo, nemtsy podoshli k Varshave i Sanu. A maior vse ekhal i ekhal. Kogda on proezzhal Irkutsk, byly vziaty Krakov i Katovitse. Ne uspel on proekhat’ Omsk, kak uzhe byla vziata Lodz’. On eshche vyezzhal iz Novosibirska, a pol’skoe pravitel’stvo uzhe uspelo perekochevat’ v Rumyniiu. On ne doekhal eshche do Ural’skogo khrebta, kak ocherednoi passazhyr vorvalsia v kupe s krykom: ‘Vy slyshali? Sovetskie voiska pereshli granitsu!’ Maior bukval’no ne uspel oglianut’sia, kak sovetskie podkhodili ko L’vovu.” Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 10. 15  On delineating sacred spaces in the Stalinist Soviet Union, see Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in The Landscapes of Socialism, 3–18. 16  Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 11.

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The Path: Roads and Byways to the City The path to discovery included movement and crossing. Together they were the elements that made transformation into the imagined future possible, while marking the differences between here and there, before and after.17 Where Petrov narrated from the train, Shklovsky focused on the views. Thus, he invited readers to see the vastness of the fields in the Soviet country and wideness of the streets in Berdychiv.18 Shklovksy kept moving on, leaving this and other cities behind to reach the place, where “[f]or many years […] the road stopped,” where “nobody was walking and driving.” Yet, mastering the world was about movement as he pictured it from a car driving into new territories that were becoming a part of the vast Soviet space: The road advanced […] with thousands of the same Soviet cars. I have never seen such a number of cars in my life. Tanks were rolling, tractors, tracks with quadruple machine guns, emka cars joined by foreigners—trophy cars. The air was ours. Polish aviation did not count. The cars rolled like a demonstration. […] The city was in front of us.19

Driving further on to the city, Shklovsky continues defining the road as a  movement of Soviet cars, sharing with his readers his generically Soviet viewpoint and constructing it with the stillness of non-Soviet objects:

17

 On the importance of travelling and crossing borders for the Soviet project, see Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders. Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). 18  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 6. 19  “Doroga stremilas’ […] desiatkami tysiach odinakovykh sovetskikh avtomobilei. V svoei zhizni ia ne vidal takogo kolichestva mashin. Shli tanki, tiagachi, gruzoviki s schetverennymi pulemetami, emki i k nim uzhe pribavlialis’ inostrantsy— trofeinye mashiny. Vozdukh byl nash. Pol’skaia aviatsiia ne uchityvalas’. Mashiny katilis’ kak demonstratsiia. […] Gorod byl pered nami.” Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 7. “Emka” was a shortened name of Soviet GAZ M-1 car produced at the car factory in Gorkii (now Nizhnii Novgorod). Based on one of the Ford cars it was fashioned as a symbol of Soviet superiority over the West. More on designing and producing emka, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 54–62.

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On the fields, on roadsides, in ravines, Polish cars, colorful as Russula mushrooms, were lying around. Dark red, yellow, black, smeared in clay, interrupted in their run, lacking petrol, just abandoned […] diverse in their uniform fates, automobile-refugees variegated around. We saw only the beginning of their downfall. Undamaged cars were taken along into our column and walked with us. Completely damaged cars could not be on the road.20

In his narration, cars became protagonists. Polish cars, different in color, are dismissed. Derailed, they are fashioned as signs and symbols of weakness, symbolizing the Polish state, presented as a derailed country by the wayside. For Shklovsky, the car, a symbolic claim to modernity, belongs to the Soviet state. Only by having such a claim to modernity could it become a part of the grand mechanism of change, not only a means of transport. Of course, the allusion to people is clear, as they, like cars, had to be reforged and join the march to the future, or they would languish by the side of the road.21 In such a construction, mobility is reserved for Soviet actors and action, while immobility is what defines non-Soviet subjects and conditions.22 20

 “Na poliakh, na obochinakh dorogi, v kanavakh lezhali raznotsvetnye, kak syroezhki pol’skie avtomobili. Temnokrasnye, zheltye, chernye, vymazannye glinoi, zastignutye v bege nedostatkom benzina, prosto broshennye, […] raznoobraznye po svoim odnoobraznym sud’bam, avtomobili-bezhentsy pestreli vokrug. My videli eshche tol’ko nachalo ikh gibeli. Neisporchennye mashiny bralis’ v nashu kolonnu i shli vemeste z nami. Sovsem isporchennykh mashin v doroge byt’ ne moglo.” Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 13–14. The repetition and unexpected combination of words underlined both the moment and movement. For more on the writing style of Shklovsky, see Anne Dwyer, “Standstill as Extinction: Viktor Shklovsky’s Poetics and Politics of Movement in the 1920s and 1930,” PMLA 131, 2 (2016): 269–288 and Christina Vatulescu, “The Politics of Estrangement: Tracking Shklovsky’s Device through Literary and Policing Practices,” Poetics Today 27, 1 (2006): 35–66. 21  C ars allude to people and the topic of the new Soviet person forged through radical transformation. The topic of Soviet subjectivity produced many studies, including Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). For a comparative analysis, see Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective,” Slavic Review 67, 4 (2008): 967–986. 22  Mobility and immobility as interconnected conditions of modernity are discussed in Anthony Elliott and John Urry, Mobile Lives (New York: Routledge, 2010). In Petrov’s account mobility and speed are again on the Soviet side, while non-Soviet subjects live in the condition of slowness and immobility.

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Discovery implied not only movement ahead to cross the border but also its gradual disappearance. After the Red Army marched across the SovietPolish border on September 1939, rituals of “unification” meant that the new state border was put on maps and other printed materials. Yet its physical, emotional, and imaginary presence was there to stay. For both Petrov and Shklovsky, the “difference” was visible and sharp, important in mapping here and there, before and after. Constructing images of people and things as “backward,” “unjust,” a part of the past, was critical for announcing forthcoming change and outlining the horizon of the Soviet future. Crossing was a visual experience and message, turned by Petrov into a  dramatic story. What he lets his readers see first “on the other side” is “a deformed old man […] who can hardly carry a heap of woodchips.”23 A  Polish sign, “Miasto Podwołoczysk,” is visible next to a  landlord’s large estate. Another sign, “Tarnopol 42 km” is next to an “elegant small sports car [avtomobil’chik], lying wheels-up in a ravine.”24 These are signposts to establish coordinates and hierarchies, bringing the Soviet state and its readers into a direct encounter with the “Other.” What is found after crossing the border is scaled down by Petrov: The narrow sidewalks were crowded with people. It looked as if they had left their small homes on September seventeenth, but they did not leave the street any more. […] Too many things have happened since September the first. What could these merchants who spent their lives between their apartment and shop understand of them? Try to put yourself in their position. Imagine that your view of the world is limited to “the city of Podvolochysk” […]. When on the morning of September seventeenth, ordinary folk woke up in their stone houses and walked into the streets, they discovered the total absence of the Polish state, its bureaucrats and army. And here for

23

 Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 14. Petrov uses ethnographic descriptions to introduce people who are to become new Soviet citizens. They were circulated in academic, political and popular discourse on the peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union. On ethnographic knowledge in the Soviet Union, see Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of Nations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 24  Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 16.

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five days already on the main street tanks are walking, motorized infantry and artillery, in exemplary way.25

Both Shklovsky and Petrov move along roads in the eastern parts of the Polish Republic to see and transmit things that for them are powerful symbols of the failed state. Failures of the capitalist system and its ideological worldview came through in material artefacts and disfigured people. While Petrov focuses on people and then things that surround them, Shklovsky sets up the border as a constellation of objects viewed from a particular angle at particular moments. One such moment first appears as he and his two colleagues from the front newspaper arrive in Poland, at a place, where “[f]or many years […] the road stopped,” where “nobody was walking and driving.” This happened “[e]arly morning, with fog lying over the Zbruch River.” Not only fog, but also “lying on the very border is a big, destroyed Polish bus.” This brings another moment that highlights a bus that “was running away from Germans from Poznań.” Furthermore, “those who were running were the rich.” As “for the poor it is harder to run.” This staccato repetition of “run” stands for the entire Polish state and accompanies the road to Lviv, surrounded by fields and side roads. The immobility of Polish cars is juxtaposed with the movement of “thousands of similar Soviet cars,” the walking of tanks, machines that “rolled demonstratively.” Shklovsky assures his readers that the roads are “full of our cars.”26 Shklovsky and Petrov share with their Soviet readers an unfolding vision of a particular and historic moment. For Petrov the “liberation of Western

25

 “Na uzen’kykh trotuarakh tolpilis’ zhiteli. Bylo pokhozhe, chto oni kak vyshli iz svoikh domikov semnadtsatogo sentiabria, tak i ne pokidali bol’she ulitsy [...]. Uzh slishkom mnogo sobytii proizoshlo s pervogo sentiabria. Chto ponimali v nikh eti kuptsy, provedshie vsiu zhizn’ mezhdu svoei kvartiroi i lavkoi? Poprobuite-ka postavit’ sebia v polozenie. Voobrazite, chto vashe predstavlenie o mire ogranicheno ‘Miastom Podvolochiskom’ […]. Kogda semnadtsatogo sentiabria utrom obyvateli prosnulis’ v svoikh kamennykh domikakh i vyshli na ulitsu, oni obnaruzhili polnoe otsutstvie pol’skogo gosudarstva, ego chinovnikov i ego voisk. I vot uzhe piatyi den’ idut po glavnoi ulitse tanki, motorizovannaia pekhota i artilleriia, idut v obraztsovom poriadke.” Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 15–16. 26  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 6–7, 13. Both writers use verbs for movement that are usually used for people, not for machines, here specifically, tanks “idut, shli” [walking]. See Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 6, and Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 16.

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Ukraine” was a “colossal event,” one of a kind that “moves entire nations and reveals the stage of consciousness of the nation.” Thus, the road to Lviv was “one of the strongest impressions of my life.”27 This was not a simple statement, as Petrov and Shklovsky made clear to readers. Both of them saw and fought in the Great War and civil wars. This had to be different. Petrov claimed to see “something bigger [...]. The state falling apart.”28 The vantage point was poignantly constructed by both writers, a reportage from the place and time of state failure, part of an anticipated larger story of “western civilization” failing, and the coming victory of the Soviet state and way of life.

Impressions: Introducing the Place Narrating and creating the image of the city is a work of many actors. As becoming a part of a new state was an arena of contested and competing worldviews, transforming Lwów/Lemberg into Lviv/L’vov was a key site of conquest, encounters, and accommodations. The gaze of writers and architects was one of the instruments for imagining, experiencing and mediating the city. Through their perspective and engagement, we can see how the 1939 September military campaign and policies of what was officially named “unification” and “sovietization” blended elements of exploring and appropriating what was newly incorporated with the elements of articulating what was imagined as Soviet.29 Thus, writings about place show what was imagined to be possible and what constituted proper relations with a specific built environment, as a site where a transformation had to take place, and as a site that would enable such a transformation. Where writers, like Petrov and Shklovsky used their literary skills to get readers to learn about and imagine the city, architects focused in more detail on the specific buildings, but also used photos to visualize the city. Both writers and architects aimed to create a general impression of a perilous yet precious city. Looking at them together allows us to distinguish several dimensions that were crit-

27

 Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 17, 19.  Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 19. 29  Western Ukraine as a site of encountering the West and articulation of the Soviet is introduced by Tarik C. Amar in his “Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission.” 28

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ical for envisaging the city as a part of the Soviet space by bringing it into the Soviet media landscape.30 First impressions were crucial. The script that appears in both writers’ and architects’ accounts presents the place first as an exotic site featuring all the shortcomings and failures of the west. Shifting from introduction to integration produced a picturesque image of the city, accommodating its fabric into a new setting and system. Both ways of looking were hierarchical: from center to periphery, from top to bottom, from the past to the future. Lviv was noticeable even before being fully visible. That is: anticipation preceded the city, as both a culmination and a destination point for authors writing about western Ukraine and its Soviet future. Thus, Petrov and Shklovsky approached Lviv in the morning, marking a  symbolic line between the dusk of the previous phase and the dawn of new day; and as a symbolic context for the story of decay and the image of new prospects. “How did L’vov appear to your special correspondent?” asked Petrov, by way of introducing his first impressions. This immediacy conveys the urgency of a special moment from which he, as a special correspondent, reported. Wearing a military uniform, moving with the army, he is a  reporter from the front lines. His first image of the city is of war, destruction, and life that has ceased. This 30

 Periodicals, such as Znamia [The banner] and Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy [Architecture of Soviet Ukraine], were parts of a larger media system that included film, documentaries, newspapers, etc. The images of Lviv and Western Ukraine were distributed via various media, including Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s documentary fiction Liberation (1940), Mikhail Romm’s film The Dream (1941, released in 1943), with numerous entries in newspapers, from the newly established Soviet press in Lviv to the Moscow-based Pravda and Izvestia. “Mediascapes” is one of the “scapes” proposed and analyzed by Ajrun Appadurai as a crucial part of a globalization infrastructure together with “ethnoscapes,” “finanscapes.” Looking mainly at modern media, he defined “mediascapes” as available “capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.)” and “the images of the world created by these media.” Ajrun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society (1990): 295–310, especially 298–299. Appadurai highlighted interplays between modes, hardware and audiences in producing various scripts and inspired studies that also looked beyond contemporary globalization. For the Soviet Union, see Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Specifically on cities as mediascapes that combine the physical with the imaginary, see Scott McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008).

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is a city after “several serious German air raids, a city with broken sewage, a  collapsed electricity station, smashed tram rails, a  damaged gas pipeline, closed shops, the corpses of horses and weapons scattered around.”31 In other words, it is not only a place that had just emerged from war, as launched by Nazi Germany, but also a place saved from war misery, with the Soviet troops bringing liberation rather than war. Not only was the city saved from the danger of war, but also from the impossibility of the future, from a strange condition in suspended time. The future as a meaningful path was assigned to the space of the Soviet project. Everything beyond, including Lwów, was living in the past. Petrov pictures this through a detailed description of a large building of the regional authorities, the office of the former województwo. For him, this place became a museum of how the non-Soviet present is the past. Petrov goes on to share that he: […] had a feeling similar to when people visit museums. People were living here a moment ago. They were somehow dressing, eating something and sitting on these very chairs, and all these little things—ashtrays with dogs, paperweights with nymphs and binding machines for files—had been in their hands many times. It was only the day before yesterday that these people were here […] but chairs they were sitting on already looked as if there were in a museum.32

The metaphor of a museum not only allowed a line to be drawn between the Soviet and non-Soviet, the past and the future, but also framed the city as an exotic setting ready for selective usage or dismissal within the Soviet project.33 Precisely in this museum-like setting, Petrov stages a scene of encounter 31

 Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 22.  “Pri etom ia ispytyval chuvstvo, kakoe obychno ispytyvaiut liudi pri poseshchenii muzeia. Zdez’ vot zhili liudi. Oni odevalis’ tak-to, eli to-to, sideli na etikh samykh kreslakh, i vse eti bezdelushki - pepel’nitsy s sobachkami, press-pap’e s naiadami i mashinki dlia skorogo sshivaniia del—mnozhestvo raz pobyvali v ikh rukakh. Eshche pozavchera sideli zdez’ liudi […] a stul’ia, na kotorykh oni sideli, uzhe priobreli muzeinyi vid.” Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 23. 33  On selective appropriation and reinterpretation of the past in the Stalinist Soviet Union, see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). For a discussion focusing on Soviet Ukraine, see Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in 32

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with a door attendant in livery, “a comic personage […] expecting his world to collapse.” Transforming the comic past into the full-bodied future was a vision only the author could clearly see and share with his Soviet reader. In this vision, the doorman’s “daughter will study at university and jump out of a parachute, his son will become an engineer-inventor, his wife—an organizer of some wives’ council, while he himself will be a solid soviet manager or artel worker, annually making a trip to a sanatorium in the Carpathians.”34 Lviv was integrating into the Soviet space, and its inhabitants were to share the imagined life of Soviet citizens. The exceptionality of such new horizons was set against the awkwardness and even artificiality of life before this moment in the city. For Shklovsky, Lviv was a  proxy city, a  place where everything resembled something else. This look was both very familiar and very alien. Shklovsky announces it on the first page of his story, sharing a flash-forward impression from Lviv as a city with shops “full of stone sculptures of Christs and Madonnas […] differentiated from each other only by size.”35 This look not only recalls many cities within the Soviet realm that underwent radical forced secularization in the previous two decades, but puts the city on the same trajectory. When reporting from the city, Shklovsky directed the readers’ gaze to the iconic elements of the city image with his ironic comments creating an impression of similarity and distance. Thus he writes that, the “theater resembles the theater in any southern German city,”36 and that the whole city in fact “seems like a city in southern Germany,” which in turn “is reminiscent of Italy.”37 The city has “a Ukrainian museum on a quiet street” with “paintings made by Ukrainians in Paris […],

the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). On selective reinterpretation of the historical built environment, see Steven Maddox, Saving Stalin’s Imperial City: Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930– 1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015) and Catriona Kelly, Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016). 34  “[…] dochka uchitsia v universitete i prygaet s parashiutom, syn—inzhener-izobretatel’, zhena—organizator kakogo-nibud’ soveta zhen, on sam—solidnyi sovetskyi zavkhoz ili artel’shchik, ezhegodno sovershaiushchii puteshestvie v karpatskii dom otdykha.” Petrov, “Piat’ dnei,” 22. 35  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 6. 36  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 16. 37  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 17.

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very similar to the French [paintings].” Everything resembled something else, juxtaposed with the authenticity of the Soviet world. At the same time, Lviv was “a good city,” even a “beautiful city.” In the center, Shkolvsky noted the “town hall with an eighty-meter tower and cathedral, Dominican monastery and a  building carved in black stone housing a museum”; he appreciated the 16th-century buildings as “capital (kapital’nye) buildings,” that later were “emulated by European architects for three hundred years.”38 It was also a city of culture. Here the “poet [Mickiewicz] stands near high on a column. A sad flame in bronze crowns the column and a barefoot genius is screwed to it upside down.” Yet, “even in such company, Mickiewicz is beautiful.”39 In the regional authorities’ former województwo building, described by Petrov as a museum, Shklovsky directs the reader to a “small painting of a second-rate Italian” and invites a guard to comment that this “small picture [kartinka] [...] is a good one, probably from the seventeenth century. Needs to be preserved.”40 But the writer immediately darkened such appreciation with a sharp remark: “The city is poor.”41 Shklovsky arrives at a conclusion to share with his audience: We have got, after liberating Ukraine, a  confusing city, a  UkrainianPolish-Jewish city, almost entirely without industry, living on commerce. A city with a Polish-Italian opera, not visited by the majority of its inhabitants. A city with a Polish university—not admitting Ukrainians. With cinemas, better avoided by Jews in the evenings; with streets, where pogroms in November were the sign of Autumn’s end. [...] This stone city is like a sponge soaked with national grievances.42

38

 Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 18  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 16 40  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 17. 41  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 18. 42  “My poluchili, osvobodiv Ukrainu, putannyi gorod, ukrainsko-pol’sko-evreiskii gorod, pochti bez promyshlennosti, zhivushchii torgovlei. Gorod s pol’skoital’ianskoi operoi, v kotoroi ne byvalo bol’shinstvo gorozhan. Gorod s pol’skim universitetom, - v nego ne prinimali ukraintsev. S kinematografami, v kotorye vecherom evreiam bylo luchshe ne chodit’, s ulitsami, na kotorykh v noiabre pogromy byli znakom kontsa oseni. […] Etot kamennyi gorod—gubka, napolnennaia natsional’nymi obidami.” Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 19–20. 39

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Defining the present in such a way clearly helped construct but also conceal difference and support the Soviet claim for a better future. Both writers had to create narratives that would help themselves and their readers overcome their own unease in exploring the West. Petrov and Shklovsky, together with other Soviet citizens who came to the newly annexed territories, were agents who not only had to (re)locate themselves in space and time, redefined through conquest and expansion, but also to reshuffle boundaries of here and there, before and after, then and now, inside and outside, us and them.43 In no way clearly marked, these were lines in the making. The Polish state and the past, direct embodiments of the West, were omnipresent in descriptions of entities signifying failure, irrelevance and aberration. Shklovsky positioned such deviance in a longer chronological perspective by bringing in an experience of his previous encounter with the city and the region during the previous war, when he was a soldier in the Russian Imperial Army.44 He quotes his friend Velemir Khlebnikov, that “nothing executes order in such a perfection as the sun when commanded to rise from the east in the morning,” to elaborate further and accuse “old Russia” for attempting to “raise the sun from the west.” This connects the imperial fascination of the West with collapse.45 Similarly, Shklovsky presented Poland as a state that “wanted to raise the sun from the west,” yet located its failure not with its fascination with the West, but its own deficiency in not addressing or acknowledging reality, especially the Ukrainian presence in the countryside. This is constructed as a justification for the Soviet advance, namely, as acts of unification and liberation. Also, the Western version of modernity is presented as weird and artificial. In the city, it is flashy yet comic, pretentious but not serious: The sidewalks of L’vov are overcrowded with people. They speak all languages but mostly Polish. If you walk there, beyond the theater, the city changes: sad houses and squares, resembling the suburbs of old 43

 On imagining and mapping symbolic geographies, in particular the West by human agents from Eastern Europe, as a part of imagining and identifying the self, see György Pétery “Introduction,” in György Pétery, ed., Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 2f. 44  Shklovsky was a soldier in the Russian imperial army and based his Sentimental Journey on this experience. For more on his civil war writings, see Anne Dwyer, “Revivifying Russia: Literature, Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovsky’s Civil War Writings,” Slavonica, 15, 1 (2009): 11–31. 45  Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 14.

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Kharkiv. L’vov is international, it has many baroque buildings, statues of saints, in fluttering cloth. L’vov’s architecture is like candlelight, blown by the wind. The Polish government decorated these statues of saints with the ovals of electric lamps; it has modernized the city and changed it. There are colorful cinemas in the city, with American films, there are American and British cars of all models, shops with haberdashery, women in short skirts and sharp-ended hats, resembling the gnome hats in the Disney film Snow White.46

Thus, writers not only invited readers to explore the city through their eyes, but also to take a perspective of liberation and revolution. In their texts, the city was both beautiful and yet a joke. Moreover, these first impressions not only introduced the city to a Soviet audience and brought the city into the Soviet imagined realm, but also mapped non-Soviet symbolic geographies as weak and deservedly finished. And yet, flattering, even appreciative descriptions of some elements introduced ambivalences, which in turn created pathways towards new possibilities. For example, the urban built environment was assessed as an opportunity for grand re-imagination. In this process, writers were also joined by architects, who set to explore the possibilities and limits of such creative but also dangerous endeavors.

Elements for Incorporating into the City In August 1940, a group of architects arrived from Kyiv to survey and study the urban layout and architectural monuments of western Ukraine, specifically Lviv, but also Chernivtsi. As a result, in November 1940, three longer articles were published in the main architectural journal of Soviet Ukraine, 46

  “Trotuary L’vova perepolneny narodom. Govoriat na vsekh iazykakh, no bol’she vsego na pol’skom. Esli poiti tuda za teatr, to gorod meniaetsia: neveselye doma i rynki, pokhozhie na predmest’e starogo Khar’kova. L’vov internatsionalen, v nem mnogo barochnykh zdanii, statui sviatykh, odetykh v razvevaiushchiesja odezhdy. Architektura L’vova pokhozha na plamia svechi, razdutoe vetrom. Pol’skoe pravitel’stvo ukrasilo eti statui ovalami s elektricheskimi lampami, ono modernizirovalo gorod i izmenilo ego. V gorode tsvetnye ogni kinematografov, amerikanskie kinolenty, amerikanskie i angliiskie avtomobili vsekh marok, magaziny s raznoobraznoi galantereei, zhenshchiny v korotkikh iubkakh i v ostrokonechnykh shapkakh, napominaiushchikh shapki gnomov v lente Disneia ‘Belosnezhka’.” Shklovsky, “Rasskazy,” 18.

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Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy [Architecture of Soviet Ukraine]. Unlike the writers’ texts discussed above, these texts conveyed less the urgency of frontline reportage and focused more on Lviv as the primary urban center of Western Ukraine.47 They reaffirmed the statement published a year earlier in 1939, on the first page of the October issue of Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy. Appearing just after the annexation of new territories to the Soviet state, the article repeated slogans about a “new, happy and free life” for the “old Ukrainian city of Lviv.” Placed on the opening pages, it was an editorial statement of the Union of Soviet Architects of the Ukrainian RSR, which followed statements from Soviet daily media and reiterated them for a professional audience. Lviv was profiled as an exemplary case, “an urban center, […] the largest city of Western Ukraine with more than 300,000 inhabitants, and immense developmental possibilities, […] a place that was rotting and degenerating in a situation of permanent crisis in the capitalist order of things, complicated by the affront of landlords.” The possibilities for change were outlined immediately, pointing to the necessity of new social conditions, industry, reworking communal service, and lessening the “differences between the city center and its outskirts.”48 The celebration of the first anniversary of Soviet rule in the architectural journal focused, as one would expect, on elements of the city that were to be integrated into the recently expanded Soviet realm. Written about a year after the first encounters by Shklovsky and Petrov, these texts were directed to a more narrow audience of architectural professionals.49 Lviv, where proximity to the West was immediate, was presented as an illuminating case of the

47

 K[ostiantyn] Kunytsia “Planuvannia i blahoustrii Lvova,” Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy 11 (November 1940): 7–10; S. Hulievatyi, N. Dudnyk, Yu. Korbin, “Misto chudovykh arkhitekturnych tradytsii,” Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy 11 (November 1940): 3–6. 48  “Do novoho, shchaslyvoho i vil’noho zhyttia!” [Towards a new, happy and free life!] Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy no. 10 (October, 1939): 1. The rhetoric of decentralization was paralleled with the usage and importance of centrality. Thus, Lviv was fashioned as a “large cultural center” replicating the discourse of centrality most visibly embodied by Moscow. See Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 49  On shaping the professional field of Soviet architects and urban planning in the 1930s, see Heather D. DeHaan, Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

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ways in which the Soviet was both delineated and constructed, imposed and challenged. It offered architects the opportunity to explore the flexibility of Soviet discourse of transformation and incorporation. The selection of buildings to be evaluated positively or negatively was therefore a crucial instrument in defining a distinct offer for remaking the past and the future of the city.50 This selective approach followed a binary script of distinguishing between positive and negative, evaluating what to keep or eliminate, what could be preserved or what had to be changed. Positive evaluation could be given to specific elements, which allowed for partitioning the city into various parts and reassembling those elements into a city in Soviet Ukraine, within Soviet space and time. This was more than just relocation but placing within a movement of Soviet transformation. The city and its architecture could become a playground for an imaginary encounter, the defeat and appropriation of the larger West; a place where its objects could be incorporated; also, its people and legacies, while creating a distinctive trajectory for future development.51 A team of architects and architectural historians took on this challenge. A team of Hulevatyi, Dudnyk and Korbin presented the city as a reserve of “exceptional monuments of different epochs,” outlining a set of elements of value.52 They determined that the city was set on the path of becoming “in the nearest future […] one of the most beautiful cities of not only Soviet Ukraine, but also the Soviet Union [as a whole].”53 Such a perspective clearly demanded an appropriate past, yet assembling it required specific selections, evaluations, and narratives. Thus, unsurprisingly, the architectural descriptions and the 50

 Where reimagining the city was bound to specific sites, the selection and incorporation targeted its inhabitants in radically different ways that included deportations, arrests, promoting migration out of the city and settlement of newly arriving Soviet citizens in the city. For a more general overview of the demographic changes in Lviv and surrounding regions, see Grzegorz Hryciuk, Przemiany narodowościowe i ludnościowe w Galicji Wschodniej i na Wołyniu w latach 1931–1948 (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2005). 51  The city of Lwów and the former territories of the interwar Polish republic, associated with the capitalist West, provide a short glimpse into facing the West, before the large scale expansion of the Soviet Union westwards and globally at the end of the Second World War. See more in Amar, “Sovietization as a Civilizing Mission.” On the post-war incorporation of the West as a reference point of the Socialist imaginary and thus a failure to provide a distinguishably different model of modernization, see Pétery, “Introduction,” 11. 52  Hulievatyi, Dudnyk, Korbin, “Misto,” 3. 53  Kunytsia “Planuvannia,” 10.

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founding story merged to tell the story of the city’s origins.54 These writers thereby presented: Lviv is one of the oldest cities of Western Ukraine. It appeared in the 13th century on the trade routes between Western and Eastern Europe. History tells us that at the beginning a castle was built on the hill bordered to the east by a  picturesque valley containing the small Poltva river, where the city later grew. Today, here, there is the High Castle— one of the most interesting sites of Lviv.55

Spatially, the hill was the “origin site,” signifying the founding story of Lviv as a Ukrainian, that is: Rus’kyi, town.56 Chronologically, the hallmark period 54

 The stories of the foundation of the city reflected and still point to the contested vision of the city within the national narrative. The date of 1256, the officially adopted founding date, was highly promoted in the Soviet period, which included publications, celebrations and the renaming of one of the longest new prospects as the 700th Years Prospect to mark the anniversary of 1956. However, in 1939 large celebrations were planned, yet interrupted, for the 600th anniversary of the year 1340 as the founding year of the city, marking the date when the city became part of the Polish Kingdom as part of its expansion under king Kazimierz the Great. A renowned city model was prepared in the 1930s by a team of architects under Janusz Witwicki. For research on the City Panorama and construction project see Łukasz Koniarek, “Dzieje ‘Panoramy plastycznej dawnego Lwowa’ inż. Janusz Witwickiego,” Visnyk ‘L’vivs’koho Universytetu’. Seria mystetstvoznavstvo [Lviv university papers. Series of art studies] 16, 2 (2015): 209–222. For the post war loss of the panorama and the murder of its author, see Tarik Cyril Amar, “Zabójstwo we Lwowie. Koniec miasta wieloetnicznego, budowa sowiecko-ukraińskiego Lwowa i los modelowego miasta pogranicza,” Nowa Ukraina. Zeszyty historyczno-politologiczne, 1–2 ( 2007): 107–121. 55  “L’viv—odne z starishykh mist Zakhidnoї Ukrainy. Vono vynyklo v XIII vitsi na torhovomu shliakhu mizh Zakhidnoiu i Skhidnoiu Ievropoiu. Istoriia rozpovidaie, shcho spochatku tut buv sporudzhennyi zamok na hori, iaku z skhodu otochuie mal’ovnycha dolyna nevelykoї richky Peltvy, na iakii zhodom i vyroslo misto. Tut teper Zamkova hora—odne z naitsikavishikh misc’ L’vova.” Hulievatyi, Dudnyk, Korbin, “Misto,” 3–4. 56  Rus’ here stands for Kievan Rus’, a key element in the retrospective construction of the common past in the Soviet Union. Kievan Rus’, a medieval principality with its political center in the city of Kyiv, was a symbol of such a common lineage for Slavic peoples, and, in particular, the friendship between Russians and Ukrainians. Here, an emphasis on the city as Rus’kyi establishes a direct link to Kiev but also to Moscow. On the representations and usage of Rus’ in creating Stalinist historiography and memory politics, see Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory, 27f.

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of the past was the 16th to early 17th centuries as “the time of expansion of the Italian renaissance in eastern Europe.” Such a selection referred to two points. First, to the establishment of the Soviet canon of architectural history within the scheme of architectural styles assembled along progressive vs. reactionary lines. The Renaissance was defined as a progressive period and style.57 Second, any element of progressive character was linked to the expansion of a progressive, here: Soviet, regime. This frame for the city as a whole allowed the inclusion of specific sites and elements within the city. Positive evaluation was given to “such known Renaissance-style buildings as the Black house, the house of Korniakt (later, Jan Sobieski’s palace), Uspenska (Voloshska) church, the ‘Golden Rose’ synagogue, the Bernadine church, the Benedictine church, Campiani chapel, Boim chapel, and many apartment houses that have not survived.”58 Lviv’s historic past could be its Soviet future.

Incorporated: (Im)possible Appreciation Retrospective incorporation demanded creativity and could be risky. Some general signposts of how to integrate old into new and the shape of the approach of socialist realism were outlined in the professional press of the late 1930s.59 The vagueness and uncertainty in how to blend the national and the social in the right way, who would evaluate it and on what basis, was ultimately a product of chance, involving a chain of peer architects, critics, officials, and political figures, leading all the way up to Stalin himself. It was clear where

57

 See the outline of the key features of the Soviet architectural canon in Catherine Cooke, “Socialist Realist Architecture: Theory and Practice,” in Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor, eds., Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917–1992 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 98; Katherine Zubovich, “To the New Shore: Soviet Architecture’s Journey from Classicism to Standardization,” Berkeley Program in East European and Eurasian Studies Working Paper Series, Summer, 2013, http://escholarship.org/uc/ item/3k42j0g2. 58  Hulievatyi, Dudnyk, Korbin, “Misto,” 4. 59  A series of articles in 1938 discussed trajectories from old to new in cities of Soviet Ukraine, see P.P. Khaustov, “Kyiv dvorians’kyi i Kyiv sotsialistychnyi” [Gentry Kyiv and Socialist Kyiv], Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy 10–11 (1938): 13–17; G. Yanovytskyi, A. Sanovych ‘Pro Kharkiv staryi i novyi’ [About Kharkiv old and new], Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy 10–11 (1938): 18–21.

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the dangerous area was, as the arrests and executions of the 1930s showed. An article from 1939 reminded architects that there were three reasons for falling short.60 First was failing to understand the national: “some architects, in the rush to note the national character of the building, forget about its main, true content, its socialist essence.” Thus, instead of building a new socialist town hall building—a Soviet ratusha “in forms that speak a language understandable and close to the Ukrainian people,” buildings in Ukrainian shapes appear, housing the City Council. 61 Second was the lack of skills, defined as “knowing the laws, approaches and rules of architectural composition.” And third was the lack of knowledge about the monuments of Ukrainian architecture and works of peoples’ creativity. However, these were general statements and warnings. Selecting from a city such as Lviv implied a richness of choice and a panoply of risks in making decisions. What was the right dose of the “national,” and what was “national” anyway, in a city built by different nationalities? How should one interpret and blend them through architectural monuments? What examples of craft and skills were available? What kind of story was to be told concerning monuments and peoples’ creativity? Architects visiting Lviv in 1940 were trying to find answers to some of these questions and aiming to communicate them to their audiences in Soviet Ukraine. The case of the former Jan Sobieski palace, situated on the main rynok square, and its courtyard loggias, is illustrative. Not only was it cast as a “shining example of the Italian Renaissance,” but also as a result of “Italian, Ukrainian and Rusian builders (maistry),”62 a highlight of the “Lviv Renaissance.” Furthermore, this was not a story of expertise coming from the West,

60

 See, for example, “Sotsialistychna po zmistu i natsional’na po formi arkhitektura” [Architecture socialist in content and national in form], Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy 11 (October 1939): 4–6. 61  “Sotsialistychna po zmistu,” 6. On balancing and navigating the ‘national’ in architecture see, Greg Castillo, “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question,” in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 94, 3 (Summer 1995): 715–46. More specifically for the Soviet Republics in Central Asia, see Greg Castillo, “Soviet Orientalism: Socialist Realism and Built Tradition,” TDSR, XVIII, 11 (1997): 33–47, and on the case of Russian Soviet Republic see Catherine Cooke, “Beauty as a Route to ‘the Radiant Future’: Responses of Soviet Architecture,” Journal of Design History 10, 2 (1997): 137–60. 62  In Ukrainian “rus’kyi” that comes from Rus’ and is different from Russian “russkii.”

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“a phenomenon completely transferred from Italy, but possessing Ukrainian creative features.” Therefore, the authors deducted that “Lvivian—Italian and Ukrainian builders perceived the Italian Renaissance taking into account, creatively, local needs and conditions.” In short, a kind of 16th-century retrospective imposition or imagined pedigree for Socialist Realism’s formula of “socialist in content, national in form,” was transplanted onto the place and its past. Architects had to make the city legible in the urban vision of Socialist Realism. Again, the city had a “town hall, cathedral and Bernadine church, a theater and other [buildings], creating a complete silhouette [without] accidentally erected buildings in horizontal or vertical [perspectives].” The importance of squares was crucial for socialist urban reconstruction projects.63 Indeed, Lviv did not feature one single spacious square, and this was clearly a missing element to be introduced, as pointed out by architects involved in the city’s “socialist reconstruction.”64 Yet, city squares were singled out by visiting architects as “making good impressions [...] picturesque and monumental,” especially the centrally located Market square (maidan bazaru) and the Bernadine square (maidan bernardyntsiv). Finally, the emphasis was on thinking in terms of an ensemble, a key element in architectural Socialist Realism. In Lviv, “architectural ensembles of the central parts of the city were special in composition and thoughtful in their realization.” An important concept for Soviet urban planning of the time, the ensemble lens was imposed on the entire city of Lviv, which allowed for presenting it not as an assemblage of many styles, “from Renaissance to constructivism,” but for praising it as “even 63

 The template was provided by the plans for the socialist reconstruction of Moscow as outlined by Lazar Kaganovich. For his work translated into English, see Socialist Reconstruction of Moscow and Other Cities in the U.S.S.R (New York: International Publishers, 1931). On spatial implications in the cult of leaders before 1939, see Malte Rolf “Working towards the Centre: Leader Cults and Spatial Politics in Pre-war Stalinism,” in Balázs Apor, Jan C. Behrends, Polly Jones and E. Arfon Rees, eds., The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 141–157. 64  Proposals for the Stalinist reconstruction of Lviv were presented to the professional public by its first Soviet chief architect. See Oleksandr Kasianov, “Sotsialistychna rekonstrukcia m. L’vova” [Socialist reconstruction of Lviv], Arkhitektura Radians’koi Ukrainy 9 (September 1940): 4–12. On the square as a key element of Stalinist visions for Lviv, see Bohdan Tscherkes and Nicholas Sawicki, “Stalinist Visions for the Urban Transformation of Lviv, 1939–1955,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 24, Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture (2000): 205–222.

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more picturesque and graceful.” This evaluation allowed for incorporating the place into new systems of belonging. It clearly signaled the place as an object: to discover, describe, and accommodate. While desirable associations were established, undesirable links were cut off, as per the assertion: “Lviv’s Renaissance developed beyond official Polish culture and without its influences.” Severing such ties was straightforward: while the distant past was to be selectively incorporated, the more recent was neglected in a strikingly obvious manner, from today’s perspective. The building of the Black House, on rynok square, was appreciated and described in some detail, but the fact that it housed the Historical Museum of the City of Lwów, an important national institution in interwar Poland, was not even mentioned, despite the fact that the article’s accompanying image presented the plaque of the institution at its entrance. The caption described the building very baldly as follows: “Lviv. The so-called Black house. Detail of façade.” Yet the sign on the entrance was clearly readable as “Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Lwowa.”65 Distinguishing between “correct” and “faulty” in Lviv involved taking chances, especially in reinterpreting existing built structures. There was a price for being wrong, or rather: for being accused of being mistaken.66 But approaching and incorporating the city demanded this risk, and architects took up the challenge of drawing the outlines of the possible, with the chance they might find themselves beyond the line. Architect Kostiantyn Kunytsia could have been walking such line when he did not see a problem with the presence of many religious buildings in the cityscape of Lviv, as many others did.67 Instead, Kunytsia praised them as architectural monuments, simply relegating them to the past. He elaborated that “[it] seems to me that they should 65

 Hulievatyi, Dudnyk, Korbin, “Misto,” 4.  On threats for architects and urban planners in the 1930s, see DeHaan, Stalinist City Planning, especially the chapter “Iconographic Vision, 1935–1938.” On arrests and repressions as part of forging a Soviet cultural sphere, see Susan Reid, “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935–41,” The Russian Review 60, 2 (2001): 153–184, and most recently, Fowler, Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge, especially the chapter “The Soviet Beau Monde: The Gulag and Kremlin Cabaret.” 67  Kunytsia was working in Poltava, another oblast city in Soviet Ukraine. He was arrested there in 1941. See the entry in the database “Reabilitovani istorieiu” [Rehabilitated by history], entry no. 167287 at http://www.reabit.org.ua/ nbr/?ID=167287 66

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have the same impression on everybody: architecture of old churches as architecture of the past that does not object to religion as a phenomenon of the past.”68 The buildings were simply shells, ready to be filled with new meanings and life. Selectively interpreted, they were to house new functions and serve new purposes.69 Modernist buildings were usually dismissed symbolically as meaningless, which, however, did not lead to their destruction. An illuminating case is presented by Kunytsia who focuses on the “interesting” attempt to build Catholic churches (kostioly) in the “new spirit.”70 However unspecified, one of the probable examples could have been two realizations at Lyczakowska Street: the reconstruction of the church tower of the Monastery of the Order of Saint Clare (facing Mytna Square), and the Church of St. Mary Ostrobramska on the upper part of the street.71 He clearly marks this trend as inappropriate and contradictory, exemplifying the generally negative and negating attitude towards the Polish state and its architectural and urban artefacts. While some elements of interwar housing and public architecture received favorable evaluation for “good quality,” the most recent, meaning the Polish past, was a site of symbolic contestation, contempt and mocking. Modernist architecture and Roman Catholic churches together epitomized not only the worst combination of the non-Soviet world and the past, but also represented an abhorrent

68

 The architect uses the words “tserkva” for the Eastern church (Orthodox or Uniate) and “kostel” for the Catholic church, which also designates the difference between the Ukrainian and Polish churches. 69  On various approaches and strategies towards the church and church property, with reference to Leningrad, see in Kelly, Socialist Churches and Maddox, Saving Stalin’s Imperial City. 70  Kunytsia, “Planuvannia,” 9. 71  The monastery bell tower was finished in 1939 according to the project by Antoni Łobos and Władysław Witwicki. The Kościół Matki Boskiej Ostrobramskiej (Church of St Mary Ostrobramska) was built in 1932–34 as a symbol of the victory over the Bolshevik army and the city as a “bulwark of civilization” in the east. It also was the symbolically linked with the victory in the civil war over the city and the cult of Lwów Eaglets. On its symbolic reception, see the memoirs by a former Lwów resident in post-war Wroclaw, Zbigniew Domoslawski “Lwów we wspomnieniach solidacyjnych,” in Zbigniew Domosławski, Julian Habraszewski, Wspomnienia Solidacyjne (Ossolineum, Dział Rękopisów, 1995), 3. On architecture and realization, see Julia Bohdanova, Svitlana Linda, “The Sacral Lviv,” in Bohdan Cherkes and Andrzej Szczerski, eds., Lviv: City, Architecture, Modernism (Wroclaw: Museum of Architecture in Wroclaw, 2016), 217–249.

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vision of development that did not fit the Soviet conceptualization of modernity and progress. Nevertheless, as noted, the city certainly offered plenty to select from. Within this matrix, architects focused on specific buildings. They supplied images to provide “additional facts and illustrations” and to acquaint their readers with glimpses of the present city and elements that were integrated into its future past: a  re-narrated history as a  Soviet Ukrainian city. While many details remained, the outlines were there: Lviv entered the Soviet present as a harbor of the always-present but suppressed progressive developments in the past that finally reached their full realization within the Soviet state. A set of positively evaluated urban features created a  foundation for promoting Socialist Realism as a progressive proposal, both coming from outside, and locally grounded. Such a combination further asserted Soviet claims to offer a distinctive yet universally applicable method for development. Thus, characteristics of positive historical urban forms in Lviv, unsurprisingly, echoed key statements from within the Soviet architectural and aesthetic canon. The reassembling of place proceeded not only by selective evaluation and reinterpretation into the Soviet canon of architectural history and urban planning, but also by connecting specific sites to other locations in the Soviet Union. Networking the past was crucial for weaving Lviv into a fabric of wider Soviet belonging. Thus, St. George’s Cathedral was a “renowned monument of Lviv’s Baroque” with a beautiful silhouette “easily visible from many points in the city.” Again, the historical use of the building as the seat of the GreekCatholic church was not mentioned. But its connection to another building in Kyiv, St. Andrew’s church (Andriivska tserkva), is in fact mentioned as a possible comparison with “the first-class creation of the great Rastrelli.”72 Thus, and in general, Lviv’s positive features were indebted to the influences of the Renaissance architecture that resulted, “unsurprisingly in a clear and explicit architectural organization that places it in this respect to our cities such as Leningrad, Odessa and others.”73 Lviv was becoming classified and networked into the system of Soviet historical cities.74 72

 Hulievatyi, Dudnyk, Korbin, “Misto,” 4. Rastrelli was fashioned as a great and progressive master of his time in the monograph Rastrelli by Aleksei Matveev, published in 1938 by the major publishing house Iskusstvo in Leningrad. 73  Hulievatyi, Dudnyk, Korbin, “Misto,” 6. 74  Travel writing was particularly instrumental in classifying objects and connecting them across spaces by detaching these objects from local relations and percep-

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Conclusions Referring back to the early encounters chronicled by Petrov and Shklovsky, we can see that architects took an even closer look at the city and engaged with the built environment not only to locate the place on the larger Soviet map, but also to explore the specific possibilities of locating the city within the Soviet space and story. Architects faced a difficult task, as demonstrated, yet showed great creativity in their selective appropriation of Lviv’s historic past, establishing connections between the past and the Soviet future in its built environment. This initial effort by writers and architects reflected and built upon a larger Soviet approach to envisage and shape a socialist city in place of already existing cities. Thus, selective recycling of the urban built environment by redefinition and reinterpretation produced a new version of the past and allowed for outlining a new future. Together these efforts not only reassembled the city within the Soviet Ukrainian framework but produced a version of the local by mixing ethnic and Soviet stories and meanings. Such an approach allowed for the integration of the built environment through a radical discursive reinterpretation, and not through radical destruction and renewal projects. However, as often the exact and specific guidance and outlines of what is Soviet and ethnic, here Ukrainian, and how to mix it were missing, this left the question of defining and balancing “old” and “new,” “appropriate” and “wrong,” “own” and “foreign” open to different actors to work with. Furthermore, this created a dynamic tension open to reinterpretation of redefining Lviv as both a Soviet and a Ukrainian city. The incorporation of the non-Soviet built environment through the reinterpretation of the past would continue after the war, when architects and city planners managed to preserve the city’s almost undestroyed built environment but transformed it into a story of “old and eternally young city” and “the youth of the ancient city,” where both the present with the future and the past were Soviet and Ukrainian.75 However, these first accounts described and

tions. On classifying as a part of creating imperial spaces and a European global system of knowledge, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes. On networking places through travel writing, see Vandertop, Travel Literature, 141. 75  Combining young and old was a frequently used tropes in discussing and representing the city. Such an image was even reflected in the title of the popular TV film Misto molode, misto drevnie [Youg city, ancient city] produced by Lviv regional TV in 1972.

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envisaged Soviet Lviv as a transformed (including with the means of deportations, arrests and killings), yet multi-ethnic Soviet Ukrainian city. Following the Nazi occupation and Soviet forced deportations left the post-war city with very few pre-war inhabitants. After summer 1944, new architects and writers would come together with many new Soviet cadres entrusted again with the task to envisage and transform the city into a Soviet and Ukrainian city with little or no presence of its pre-war inhabitants in official representation.76 Indeed, many contexts were different, but one important feature prominent in these first accounts stayed: an emphasis on incorporating the city through radical re-narration rather than through radical re-construction. Though new construction, especially of mass housing, would produce important sites of living the Soviet present, the city’s pre-war built environment would be turned into an integral and central part of Soviet Ukrainian Lviv, making it one of the most known and recognizable “historical cities” in post-war Soviet Ukraine and the Soviet Union.77

76

 On the distorted presence and representation of the Jewish victims of the Nazi occupation in post-war writings about Lviv, see Tarik Cyril Amar, “A Disturbed Silence: Discourse on the Holocaust in the Soviet West as an Anti-Site of Memory,” in Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander M. Martin, eds., The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 158–183. 77  This is the subject of my book project based on my PhD dissertation (Re)imagined Cityscapes: Lviv and Wrocław after the Second World War (Warsaw: SNS, IFiS PAN, 2010). It compares the post-war appropriation of the two cities, Lviv and Wrocław, into their new political and social contexts by their almost entirely new inhabitants.

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Imperfect Metropolis: The Evolving Projections of Wrocław in Polish Feature Films Mikołaj Kunicki

Introduction Before making his best-known movie, Sami swoi (Our Folks, 1967), a comedy about two farming families, the Pawlaks and the Karguls, resettled from Poland’s former Eastern borderlands (kresy) to the Western Territories annexed from Germany after World War II, Sylwester Chęciński (1933–) directed a very different film.1 Katastrofa (Catastrophe, 1965) tells the Kafkaesque story of a young architect accused of negligence, after the bridge he had designed collapsed killing several people. We can skip a discussion of the movie’s plot. However, what matters is that Catastrophe takes place in Wrocław, the capital of Lower Silesia and the largest city in the Western Territories. Chęciński and his script-writer, Zbigniew Kubikowski, were inspired by an actual construction accident, which took place in the city a few years earlier. Both were prominent figures in the local cultural elite. Initially the movie met with the enthusiastic response from local authorities and film critics, eager to publicize 1

 Recognized in Poland as the master of comedy and genre cinema, Chęciński has been largely unknown abroad. He is best known for the trilogy on the Pawlaks and Karguls, two feuding families of Polish settlers from the eastern borderlands lost to the Soviet Union to the Western Territories taken from Germany. Our Folks was followed by Nie ma mocnych [Take it easy, 1974] and Kochaj albo rzuć [Big deal, 1977]. Chęciński’s other notable films include Wielki Szu [Big Shar, 1983], a thriller about a con-artist, and Rozmowy kontrolowane [Calls controlled], a comedy on Martial Law in Poland. On Chęciński’s career see Rafał Bubnicki and Andrzej Dębski, eds. Sylwester Chęciński (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Gajt, 2015).

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a “Wrocław film.” City officials launched a bizarre promotional campaign in the form of a tram, which proudly displayed the title of Chęciński’s movie, scaring off potential passengers. One month after the premiere of the film in 1966, yet another disaster took place, when the hastily constructed building of the Agricultural Academy on Grunwald Square collapsed, killing ten workers. The authorities recalled the troublesome tram from the streets and suspended the distribution of Chęciński’s movie, which quickly sank into oblivion.2 The whole story reads like black comedy, but also underlines the dark aura of doom, which often accompanied films about Wrocław made in People’s Poland. From 1954 to 2011, Wrocław was the third center of the Polish film industry. The Wrocław Feature Film Studio (Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych) was responsible for one quarter of Poland’s film production output. Due to its distinct cityscape, which clearly distinguished it from more archetypically Polish cities and towns like Warsaw or Cracow, the city was also cast in the role of European metropolises such as Berlin, Vienna, and Amsterdam in Polish and foreign productions, the most recent at the time of writing (2016) being Steven Spielberg’s The Bridge of Spies (2015). But has Wrocław ever become the magnet for Polish filmmakers as a recognisable actor? Here the picture is blurred, oscillating between Stanisław Lenartowicz’s warm and lighthearted Zobaczymy się w niedzielę (We Will See Each Other on Sunday, 1959) on the one hand, and on the other, the dark metropolis of the criminal underworld in Stanisław Wohl’s Złote Koło (Golden Circle, 1971) and Andrzej Trzos-Rastawiecki’s Trąd (Leprosy, 1971), and the site of an epidemic in Roman Załuski’s Zaraza, (The Epidemic, 1971). All these cinematic projections of Wrocław offer a  puzzle rather than a coherent mosaic. Inasmuch as they reflect the convoluted appropriation of the city by its new Polish inhabitants, they also provide testimony to the symbolic and literary treatment of Wrocław by the Polish communist regime. From 1945 until its demise, People’s Poland aimed to eradicate traces of German culture, history, and identity by imposing historical amnesia and re-writing a history of the city along propagandistic lines. This ambitious project not only painted the annexation of the Western Territories from Germany as the “return” of the old Piast lands to the fatherland, but, above all, targeted Polish settlers. Like the expelled Germans whose households they inherited, new inhabitants

2

 Iwona Morozow, “Malarz pewnej Katastrofy, czyli Chęciński zaangażowany i zapomniany,” in Bubnicki and Dębski, eds., 157–66.

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of Wrocław were victims of forced re-settlement and ethnic cleansing, often traumatized by the war and the loss of home, be it the eastern cities of Wilno (now Vilnius) and Lwów, the destroyed city of Warsaw or villages of Volhynia. To quote the historian Gregor Thum, as they moved to the unfamiliar, alien and devastated environment of German Breslau they developed the “psychosis of impermanence” and suffered from a sense of uprootedness. The new rulers of Wrocław could not take such facts lightly and responded by building and instilling a new tradition, the myth of Polish medieval Wrocław, the antithesis of Prussian-Wilhelmine and Nazi Breslau. But these mnemonic foundations could hardly support and sustain a  formidable local identity.3 According to Andrzej Zawada, Wrocław became “a city with an amputated memory.”4 Thum argues that Wrocław’s new identity only materialized recently, with the 1970 West German-Polish mutual recognition treaty, the collapse of communism in 1989, the recognition of Poland’s western borders by a united Germany in 1990, the legacy of Solidarność, and the major flood being major milestones in this process.5 The cinematic projections of Wrocław both comply with and confront the aforementioned patterns. On the one hand, the architecture of 19th- and 20th-century German Breslau was so alien and unrecognizable to Polish movie audiences that Wrocław could be cast in the role of other cities, including Berlin in the legendary TV spy series Stawka większa niż życie (More Than Life at Stake, 1967–68) , and even Warsaw in Giuseppe w Warszawie (Giuseppe in Warsaw, 1964) by Stanisław Lenartowicz. On the other, the cinematic projections of the city repeatedly featured several objects popularized by newsreels of the 1960s such as Wrocław Cathedral, Ostrów Tumski (also known as the Cathedral Island), the University buildings, and two monumental landmarks constructed in the Wilhelmine period, Grunwald Bridge (originally Kaiserbrücke) and the Hala Ludowa (People’s Hall), previously known as Jahrhunderthalle (Centennial Hall), designed by the German architect Max Halle, plus the Oder river landscape of embankments, canals, and dams.6

3

 Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011). 4  Andrzej Zawada, Bresław: Eseje o miejscach (Wrocław: Okis, 1996), 52. 5  Thum, Uprooted, 386–408. 6  Inga Leśniewska, “Wrocław w dokumencie filmowym lat 60.—szkic do portretu miasta,” in Andrzej Dębski and Marek Zybura, eds. Wrocław będzie miastem filmowym… Z dziejów kina w stolicy Dolnego Śląska (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Gajt, 2008), 227–41.

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In her innovative essay published in 2008, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska contrasted the postcard-like images of cinematic Wrocław with the dark and ambiguous storylines of post-war Wrocław movies linking the prevalent themes of crime, youth, and escape from history to lost memory and an absence of local identity.7 The theme of the dark metropolis is particularly striking. Consider just the titles of three films produced between 1965 and 1971, as mentioned above, which focused on Wrocław: Chęciński’s Catastrophe, Załuski’s Epidemic and Trzos-Rastawiecki’s Leprosy. They all invoke destruction, illness, and degeneration. If we add Golden Circle, a police thriller dealing with murder, teenage gangs, and prostitution, Wrocław seems to be the epicenter of all possible plagues attacking Polish society in the twilight of Gomułka’s rule. While discussing Epidemic, Golden Circle and Leprosy, all released in 1971, Saryusz-Wolska explained this proliferation of crime movies on Wrocław by pointing to the 1970 treaty between the Federal Republic and People’s Poland. All of a sudden, she argued, as the threat of German revanchism had been lifted, some Polish filmmakers, acting with the blessing and encouragement of the authorities, decided to focus their lenses on the gloom of the Silesian metropolis. This was largely a red herring distracting viewers from the most important and pressing issue about post-war Wrocław that had been a taboo since 1945: its poniemieckość, that is, its former German character and identity.8 This is a tempting and feasible explanation, which, in my view, is also overstretched. First, it is not based on a thorough investigation, especially of the production of these movies and their assessing by the bosses of Polish cinematography during the meetings of film assessment commissions (komisje kolaudacyjne). For example, Golden Circle went into production in September 1970, three months before the bombshell of Willy Brandt’s official visit to Poland.9 Second, we should also pay close attention to movie genres.

7

 Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, “Wobec braku tożsamości: o powojennych obrazach Wrocławia,” in Dębski and Zybura, eds. Wrocław będzie miastem filmowym, 213–26. 8  http://www.akademiapolskiegofilmu.pl/pl/. 9  State Archives, Warsaw (Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie), Wielosobowe Stanowisko ds. Działalności Archiwalnej w Milanówku, Zespoły Polskich Producentów Filmowych, Catalogue no. 624, “Złote Koło,” 1971.

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The Polish cinema of the Gomułka period saw the explosion of genre filmmaking, including thrillers and criminal dramas. Wohl’s Golden Circle represents film milicyjny, that is, militia crime drama, which blossomed in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Trzos-Rastawiecki’s Leprosy, meanwhile, part thriller, part social commentary, engaged in a dialogue with the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s. Furthermore, while the year 1970 does seem to provide a useful departure point, I would argue that the salient factor is the fall of Władysław Gomułka. His departure was tainted by the blood of Polish workers shot on the Baltic Coast in December 1970, the Polish participation in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and, perhaps most importantly, the anti-Semitic campaign of 1967–68, the crushing of student protests in March 1968, and purges of Marxist revisionists. In the sphere of culture and cinema, the later years of Gomułka’s rule were marked by a series of confrontations with the artistic intelligentsia, decreasing quality of Polish films, and the promotion of compliance at the expense of experimentation. The majority of film and TV productions of the late 1960s reeked of boredom and mediocre scripts that complied with conservative tastes and the party line. They painted the complementary pictures of a benevolent government and a satisfied society, albeit one that was not ecstatically happy. The exit of Gomułka and his team brought more fresh air and freedom to discuss social issues which, prior to that point, had remained taboo. With its biting criticism of government officials, the local establishment and mass media, Załuski’s Epidemic would probably never go into production before 1970. The same applied to TrzosRastawiecki’s Leprosy, one of the bleakest pictures produced in the cinema of People’s Poland. The dark images of Wrocław these movies project are truly haunting. The thirteen years that separate the three films released in 1971 from the opener by Lenartowicz, We Will See Each Other on Sunday—the first feature movie about Wrocław in communist Poland—constitute a  huge gap. Here we have two contrasting visions of Wrocław, the city yet to be born, and the elusive, often dark metropolis. Using film analysis, primary and secondary sources, this essay now invites readers to reflect on the nature of the relationship between history and cinema, identity and memory, preconceived notions and empirical evidence within this specific context. Last, but not least, it portrays Wrocław as a cinematic metropolis.

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Lenartowicz’s We Will See Each Other on Sunday, or: What the Cow is Doing in a Garage Stanisław Lenartowicz (1921–2010) was a director connected to Wrocław like no other filmmaker. He spent the majority of his life and made all his films in the city. While most Polish filmmakers gravitated to Warsaw, Lenartowicz chose to remain in Wrocław, far from the hive of the capital. He occupied a prominent position in the milieu of filmmakers associated with the Wrocław Feature Film Studio and mentored younger directors, including Chęciński and Krzystek. “Nobody believed in Wrocław, this post-German city,” recalled Lenartowicz nearly 50 years after the shooting of We Will See Each Other on Sunday. “But for me this city was charming because so many people came here from the east,” explained the director, a native son of the former Wilno region who settled in the capital of Lower Silesia in 1946 after his release from Soviet captivity (during the war Lenartowicz served in the 7th Wilno Brigade of the Home Army, which was forcefully disarmed by the Soviets). What also drew him to Wrocław was the equality among new Polish inhabitants, in spite of their origins, professions, and nature. “I was enchanted by the fact that Wrocław was fully integrated with the river, very much like Wilno; there was this interplay between man and nature.” On the other hand, the presence of opera, ballet, and cinema were attributes of a cultural metropolis. 10 The three reasons listed by Lenartowicz in 2006, should also be supplemented by the director’s comments made in 1959. He wanted to capture the dying Wrocław from the first dozen or so years that had passed since 1945. In this respect, his movie would be the first and the last one about the city during the postwar period.11 Needless to say, Lenartowicz was not mourning or recording the end of German Breslau. Rather, his was a nostalgic portrayal of Wrocław in the first post-war decade, the one which saw an influx of people of different regional identities, class and educational backgrounds, and walks of life, all of them populating an unfamiliar urban space and trying to make the best of it. Of course, it was a foundational myth, just like the notion that all new citizens of 10

 Stanisław Lenartowicz, “Zawsze trzeba być sobą,” Interview by Adam Wyżyński. Kino 7–8, (2006): 37. 11  Agata Ciastoń, “Filmy wrocławskie 1945-1989,” Pamięć i Przyszłość 4 (2015): 6.

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Wrocław came from the eastern territories lost to the Soviet Union. But the film was Lenartowicz’s love letter to “his” beloved city. Not surprisingly, it did not have a lone protagonist, but a multitude of heroes and heroines whose stories added to the collective portrayal of Wrocław’s population. Another important characteristic of We Will See Each Other on Sunday is the portrayal of Wrocław as at some point “ruralized,” due to people trying to continue their village lifestyle, moving into the city with livestock, cows, goats, hens, ducks, and pigs, and raising them in gardens, city parks, courtyards, and even flats.12 The main plotline was rather thin. The adventures of two soldiers from local barracks, Kwiatek and Pietrek, who during their free time roam the streets of Wrocław, explore its landmarks, chase girls, and befriend locals, are neither particularly engaging nor funny. As noted by Piotr Czerkawski, Lenartowicz’s film had the potential to show the “mood, dreams, aspirations of the Polish youth entering adulthood in the late 1950s’. However, it failed to do so, partly because of the dull script, and partly due to casting mediocre actors in the roles of Kwiatek and Pietrek.”13 Still, the film proved quite popular in Wrocław, where it played in the city’s three largest cinemas for two weeks and elicited warm reviews in the local press.14 Perhaps Lenartowicz was not interested in conforming to a traditional plot and narrative. The two soldiers who were temporary inhabitants with limited connection to Wrocław served as messengers, which led viewers from the story of one character to another. We should note that we are dealing with a chimeric, inconsistent, but also outstanding filmmaker who authored such pioneering landmarks of Polish cinema as Zimowy zmierzch (Winter Dusk, 1956), one of the most underrated masterpieces of the Polish School; Pigułki dla Aurelii (Pills for Aurelia, 1958), an action-packed drama about Home Army soldiers; and Giuseppe w Warszawie (Giuseppe in Warsaw, 1964), a farce about wartime Warsaw and a conspiracy told from the perspective of an outsider, an Italian soldier returning from the Eastern Front.15

12

 This social phenomenon is discussed in more detail by Thum in Uprooted, 98–104.  Piotr Czerkawski, “Cichy buntownik: Stanisław Lenartowicz,” Pamięć i Przyszłość 4 (2015): 26–27. 14  Andrzej Dębski, “‘Film istnieje po to, żeby obserwować’—o wrocławskim filmie Zobaczymy się w niedzielę,” in Rafał Bubnicki and Andrzej Dębski, eds. Stanisław Lenartowicz—twórca osobny (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Gajt, 2011), 72–73. 15  On the life and career of Lenartowicz see Bubnicki and Dębski, eds. Stanisław Lenartowicz—twórca osobny. 13

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In We Will See Each Other on Sunday, Lenartowicz was, it seems, simply interested in casting the city in the main role. This focus is visible from the opening bird’s eye view and aerial shots of Wrocław that showed the city center, Grunwald Bridge, People’s Hall, Ostrów Tumski, and above all, the Oder with its islands, canals, dams, and embankments. As Andrzej Dębski observed, all these shots indicated “the actual protagonist of the film, focusing the viewers’ attention on images which are not just the sets of filmed events, but constitute the autonomous subjects of a  film fresco.”16 Later, Lenartowicz takes his protagonists and viewers to the old city, university buildings, parks, and meadows by the river, but also to the interiors of the city opera, philharmonic hall and the Gigant (Giant) cinema inside the People’s Hall. Unlike Communist newsreels, Lenartowicz’s film did not “favor” monuments that evoked the legacy of the Piast period. Instead, it picked 19th- and 20th-century buildings of high architectural value.17 Rural motifs in the portrayal of the city are both authentic and deliberately exaggerated. Mrs Gawrakowa (played by Jadwiga Chojnacka), a settler from the kresy and a mother of two, is an unreformed peasant. She and her two adult children reside in a villa located probably in the affluent suburbs south of the city center. Gawrakowa has a cow, which she keeps in the garage, while her son’s car is parked in the garden. The cow is Gawrakowa’s link to her previous rural life, but also a bone of contention with her ambitious, urbanite daughter. The purchase of Gawrakowa’s cow by another resident from the kresy causes a traffic jam, and much commotion in the closing scenes of the film. But there are other pieces of evidence demonstrating the ruralization of Wrocław signaled by Gregor Thum: a man picking up hay from a city park for his horses; a hen watching a young thug, Waldek, being beaten and apprehended by Kwiatek and Pietrek. But Lenartowicz also aimed to demonstrate how the repopulation of Wrocław provided its new residents with an opportunity to make a leap forward in modernity. “Wrocław is like a coat made of stones and tailored for a giant,” remarked the director. “All these people from small towns and villages [who settled here] are skipping tens and hundreds of years to wear it.”18 In this respect, Lenartowicz also wanted to show the process of the internalization of the city by its new inhabitants. 16

 Dębski, “‘Film istnieje po to, żeby obserwować’—o wrocławskim filmie Zobaczymy się w niedzielę,” 74. 17  Ibid., 75. 18  Quoted in Dębski, “‘Film istnieje po to, żeby obserwować’—o wrocławskim filmie Zobaczymy się w niedzielę,” 76.

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Lenartowicz cherished and idealized his city, downplaying its still-visible ruins, minimalizing such inconvenient facts as high level of crime, and “democratizing” city dwellers by connecting Pietrek to a  female harp player, and fireman Felek to affluent Wanda. He treats his subjects with affection, warm irony, and light-hearted humor. His Wrocław is full of life, friendly and open to newcomers.19 The movies on the Oder metropolis that would premier within the next dozen years would convey the total antithesis of Lenartowicz’s vision.

Wrocław’s Maladies of 1971 The premonition by Lenartowicz, that We Will See Each Other on Sunday would likely constitute the first and last movie made about post-war Wrocław, was not far from truth. The Wrocław Feature Film Studio experienced its golden years in the 1960s producing films by Andrzej Wajda, Wojciech Jerzy Has and other masters who used its ateliers, and shot on location in the city. But Polish filmmakers seemed to ignore Wrocław and its inhabitants as a subject. All this in spite of recommendations issued by the Communist party! The 1960 resolution of the Central Committee Secretariat of the Polish United Workers’ Party not only attacked the alleged “excesses” of the Polish School, but also demanded films which showed the “unification of the Western Territories with the motherland.”20 In fact, the 1960s experienced a boom in films portraying the incorporation and repopulation (if not colonization) of these lands after the war, including such popular titles as Chęciński’s Our Folks (1967) and Jerzy Hoffman’s and Edward Skórzewski’s western Prawo i Pięść (The Law and The Fist, 1964).21 To my knowledge, not a single one of these movies focused on or even featured Wrocław. What was the reason for this 19

 Małgorzata Kozubek, “Między Wschodem a Zachodem. Rozważania o Zimowym zwierzchu i Zobaczymy się w niedzielę Stanisława Lenartowicza,” in Dębski and Zybura, eds. Wrocław będzie miastem filmowym, 243–50. 20  “Uchwała Sekretariatu Komitetu Centralnego w sprawie kinematografii,” in Tadeusz Miczka and Alina Madej, eds., Syndrom konformizmu? Polskie kino lat sześćdziesiątych (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1994), 31. 21  On the portrayal of the Western Territories in Polish feature films see: Mikołaj Kunicki, “Pioniere, Siedler und Revolverhelden: Die “Rückgewinnung” der Westgebiete im Polnischen Spielfilm der 1960er-Jahre,” in Dietmar Müller, Lars Karl, Katherine Seibert, eds., Der lange Weg nach Hause: Konstruktionen von Heimat im europäischen Spielfilm (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2014), 190–210.

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absence? Nearly all films concerning the Western Territories take place in small towns (often portrayed by the Silesian town of Lubomierz) or villages, more often than not in fictitious locations. Their poniemieckość is obvious, with German architecture, prosperous households that still contain property of former owners, and names quickly reformulated into Polish; Graustadt simply becomes Siwowo (The Law and the Fist). Anonymous as they are, these towns are places where new settlers re-create or build their little homelands (małe ojczyzny in Polish). Wrocław, with its size, monumentality, metropolitan character, and long history simply did not fit this model. Władysław Gomułka (1905–1982) fell from power in December 1970, only days after signing the mutual recognition treaty between People’s Poland and West Germany. Three months earlier Stanisław Wohl’s TV crime drama Golden Circle went into production. The movie was ready in March 1971.22 In the meantime, People’s Poland acquired a new leader, Edward Gierek (1913– 2001), who soon launched an ambitious and ill-fated modernization program, put the brakes on ideological campaigns, relied on consumerism, and significantly opened the country to the West. The Polish-West German agreement was one of those events that ushered in a new era of détente in Europe. Wohl’s film does not address either of these groundbreaking historical events. This detective drama focuses on the investigation into the murder of a teenage boy on Złote Koło Street in Wrocław. As Captain Budny and his team begin picking up clues and put pieces together, they enter the repulsive underworld of teenage gangs, petty crime, prostitution, and random violence. They soon learn that the victim took part in a gang rape of a teenage girl. The movie praised the professionalism of People’s Militia (Milicja Obywatelska, MO), but also unmasked the dark secrets of a  big city. Wrocław in Wohl’s film is a bleak place, with shabby apartments located in decaying houses and inhabited by shady-looking individuals, mental hospitals, narrow streets and ruined buildings that invite violent assaults. MO officers must battle crime and confront the indifference of bystanders. Landlords do not know anything about their tenants, while school principals no longer pay attention to the whereabouts of their pupils. This is one unfriendly and cold world, for which Wrocław, with its dilapidated houses, old public buildings, and autumn aura provides a perfect setting. The geography of the city is frequently evoked, first, 22

 State Archives, Warsaw (Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie), Wieloosobowe Stanowisko ds. Działalności Archiwalnej w Milanówku, Zespoły Polskich Producentów Filmowych, Catalogue number 624, “Złote Koło,” 1971.

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by a city map located on the wall in the MO headquarters, then through the barrage of names of streets and districts mentioned throughout the movie. The film humanized police officers by showing them as ordinary people but did not stray from the paradigm of earlier “militia dramas,” in which perpetrators of a crime would always be found and punished. What distinguished Złote Koło from the pool of similar films was its portrayal of negative ingredients of big city life—and it is this urban motif that I would like to emphasize. With its architecture, numerous railway stations, suburbs, and “bad neighborhoods,” Wrocław had the attributes of a  metropolis, and an urban purgatory that attracted the dregs of society and served as a magnet for those filmmakers who focused their lens on crime. The script of Złote Koło was the work of Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski, a writer and filmmaker.23 Known almost exclusively for his contributions to Andrzej Wajda’s work, Ścibor-Rylski spent much of his career trying to introduce genre cinema, especially thrillers, action flicks, and detective films, to the Polish movie industry. Złote Koło was definitely one of his more successful projects and stood out from the not-so large pool of Polish crime dramas. Ścibor-Rylski also authored the script of Trzos-Rastawiecki’s Leprosy. If Wohl’s movie opened Pandora’s box, Leprosy was truly shocking. This feature debut by a veteran documentary filmmaker relied on a blend of cinéma vérité and its documentary filmmaking techniques, the British New Wave, and especially the combination of non-fictional and fictional content characteristic of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969). Borrowing from the true story of Kolorowa café in Wrocław, the movie deals with juvenile prostitution, pimping and depravation of teenage girls by the criminal underworld.24 At the center of the story stands Stanisław Czermień (played by Zygmunt Malanowicz), a railroad worker and ex-convict, whose younger brother, Witek, is mixed up in the murder of a teenage girl. While trying to find Witek, he conducts a private investigation, which leads him to the ruthless gang of pimps. Czermień is intelligent, brave, and strong. He acts alone in ignoring

23

 Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski (1928–1983) directed six features and authored nearly thirty screenplays that included films directed by such auteurs as Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Kawalerowicz, but also numerous action films, thrillers, and Westerns. He was largely responsible for launching a genre of crime thrillers, absent in the cinema of People’s Poland before the 1960s. 24  Arkadiusz Gajewski, Polski film sensacyjno-kryminalny, 1960–1980 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Trio, 2008), 148.

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the militia’s pleas for cooperation, and initially succeeds in rescuing his brother and Elżbieta, whom Witek procured for the gang. But Witek does not want to be rescued and betrays Czermień to the criminals. The protagonist loses everything: he is beaten to a pulp, witnesses Witek’s murder, and knows that the gang is after his own girlfriend who is sheltering Elżbieta. In terms of its bleakness and brutality, Leprosy possibly broke all preexisting standards in Polish cinema. The crime went unpunished. The gang’s hideous operations include home-made porn movies and rapes. They also procure girls for older, rich men like Sitko, a  dog breeder whose German shepherds are fit for Nazi concentration camps. But the pimps have a determined and ruthless opponent. Czermień knows how to use a razor and has karate skills. The film did not present the MO in a particularly favorable light, contrasting a good cop—the clever Captain Rzeszot (Bolesław Idziak), who tries to recruit Czermień—with the narrow-minded and distrustful Lieutenant Strzałka (Ryszard Kotys). It is worth noting that the authorities initially allowed the limited distribution of Leprosy to the network of film debating clubs rather than cinemas.25 However, the biggest novelty was Trzos-Rastawiecki’s use of documentary filming techniques. With the exception of a  few studio shots and one scene filmed in Katowice, the entire movie was shot on location in Wrocław. On several occasions, the director used a hidden camera and microphones, for example, in the hideous Pod Dębami beer garden, or at a  pub at the Wrocław main railway station where actors mingled with the crowd of intoxicated drunkards. The crew also filmed and recorded unsuspecting guests at the Narcyz music club, the real-life hangout of Wrocław’s hippie youth, and the Monopol Café, where middle-aged men picked up young girls. Other real locations included the MO’s headquarters, the city port, and the prosectorium of the Department of Forensic medicine.26 Exterior shots of dark courtyards, neglected river embankments, and a dilapidated tenement house, contained truly haunting images. The establishing shot of a young girl walking through the streets of Wrocław (in all likelihood, the future victim found in the Oder), and the closing shots of young women strolling in the city center, convey the atmosphere of anxiety, enhanced by the masterful jazz soundtrack composed 25

 Gajewski, 149.  State Archives, Warsaw (Archiwum Państwowe w Warszawie), Wieloosobowe Stanowisko ds. Działalności Archiwalnej w Milanówku, Zespoły Polskich Producentów Filmowych, Catalogue number 1068 “Trąd,” 1971–1972.

26

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and performed by Tomasz Stańko. Leprosy also contains visual motifs that evoke the Futurist celebration of machinery, industry, and speed: for example, a locomotive driven by Czermień, plus trams and cars. But while the Futurist manifesto endorsed the metropolis as the future of mankind, Trzos-Rastawiecki’s Wrocław is the metropolis of decay and moral sickness. Leprosy contains a  surprising link to the last movie discussed in this chapter. At the beginning of the film, Czermień is detained by two plain clothes policemen who pose as employees of the Center for Disease and Epidemic Control investigating Czermień’s contacts with the victim of an infectious disease contracted in Pakistan. Roman Załuski’s Epidemic is a  story based on the 1963 outbreak of smallpox in Wrocław. For two summer months, the city was sealed off from the rest of the country. Nobody could leave or enter the city without proof of vaccination. The epidemic resulted in 99 cases, 7 deaths, and the isolation of some 1,500 patients. All residents of Wrocław, more than 400,000 people, were subjected to compulsory vaccination. These extraordinary measures paid off, as the epidemic was stopped 25 days after its discovery.27 To a large extent, Załuski’s film faithfully outlines the course of the epidemic and measures taken by health services and authorities. However, the movie does not provide a  precise, documentary reconstruction of the 1963 events, even though it takes place in Wrocław.28 The director changed the names of real-life people and introduced fictional subplots and characters. The main protagonist is doctor Adam Rawicz (Tadeusz Borowski), the first person to diagnose smallpox against the initial protests of more senior colleagues. He alerts his boss from the Center for Disease and Epidemic Control, setting things in motion, and devotedly joins the medical team handling the epidemic. However, his efforts are not rewarded. When the dust settles, Rawicz and several of his colleagues are not among the people decorated by the government.

27

 Małgorzata Skotnicka-Palka, “97 dni grozy. Epidemia ospy prawdziwej we Wrocławiu,” Pamięć i Przyszłość 3 (2013): 21–30. 28  The opening credits contain the following information: “Although the film relates to authentic events, all characters, their names, and situations are fictional. Any similarities are accidental.” This is a highly debatable claim, especially considering the fact that one of the movie’s consultants was Dr Bogumił Arendzikowski, a physician who diagnosed the outbreak of smallpox in 1963, and played a prominent role in the struggle against the epidemic.

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Załuski claimed that he was interested in telling a  timeless story. “I wanted to show how we would react if it happened today,” he told members of the Film Assessment Commission in 1971. Hence the movie showed Wrocław A.D. 1971, with contemporary fashion, cars, and pop music. Evidently, some members of the Commission expressed reservations toward this approach, pointing out that particular songs introduced a specific historical time. “We all know that if the epidemic broke out in 1971, Comrade [Edward] Gierek would immediately fly to Wrocław,” said filmmaker Bohdan Kosiński. The boss of Polish cinematography, Czesław Wiśniewski, cautioned against the use of rhetoric and slogans that could be associated with the recent change within the regime. Obviously, he wanted to avoid any political subtexts and parallels between Gomułka’s and Gierek’s leadership.29 Indeed, Załuski’s portrayal of the authorities was less than flattering. He showed mindless bureaucracy at work, whether it concerned a minister, a cold and disinterested dignitary, who visits one of the quarantine centers, or a warehouse keeper refusing to issue much needed blankets without an official request. Bureaucrats made the city unprepared for the outbreak of a contagious disease or any other disaster. It is the devotion of people on the ground that secures the final victory over smallpox. However, it was not the film’s mild political subversion, but its success in projecting the omnipresent atmosphere of fear which left a  lasting impression. The film was shot on location in Wrocław and featured several sites that played a prominent role in 1963, including the emergency service on Traugutt Street and the palace in Szczodre, outside the city limits, which housed the first special hospital set up for infected and quarantined patients. The establishing shot is accompanied by eerie music. It is a  tracking shot with the camera moving from the line of horizon to the panorama of Wrocław, zooming in to the city center, and stopping with the busy intersection on Kościuszko Square. Following the cut, we see documentary shots of the Wrocław Flower Celebration (Wrocławskie Święto Kwiatów), an annual street carnival taking place in June and marking the beginning of summer. The soundtrack changes to dynamic fusion jazz as we see cheerful crowds and 29

 Wiśniewski lectured Załuski on the issue of personal modesty. He considered the young director too cocky, but above all wanted to know why the director of the Center for Disease Control asked people for help who had gathered outside during the meeting of the crisis staff. “Here we have some connotations that are unnecessary,” he said, referring clearly to Gierek’s famous line from January 1971 (Filmoteka Narodowa, Komisja Kolaudacyjna, A-344, 10 (4 November 1971), ‘Zaraza’).

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the colorful participants of the parade. This is a carefree metropolis, unaware of lurking danger. Later, on Saturday evening, we accompany Rawicz who entertains himself in the physicians’ club, meets a beautiful girl, and spends a night with her.30 On the next day he diagnoses the first case of smallpox. His morning drive to a hospital becomes a short Wrocław “road movie” with the most known sites of the city on display. Although hardly a masterpiece, Epidemic does contain riveting scenes, shots and subplots. Consider the night expeditions of medics accompanied by militia picking up or rather detaining people suspected of having contact with infected patients and taking them to quarantine centers surrounded by barbed wire. Indeed, the authorities took such measures in 1963, but in Załuski’s film they resemble roundups that occur in police dictatorships. “Why are you taking people away in the middle of the night?” inquires the wife of Dr. Olczak. “Because we are sure that we will get them at home,” replies Rawicz. Gradually, psychosis creeps in. Drivers of emergency ambulances sabotage orders to avoid contact with possible smallpox cases. Taxi drivers refuse to take passengers who do not have vaccination certificates; passengers reply in kind preferring to miss a cab if a driver cannot prove that he is healthy. Social order seems to be on the verge of collapse, conjuring images of the Black Death. One of the most shocking scenes takes place after the death of a physician in Szczodre. As workers of the municipal funeral service refuse to carry a coffin, it is up to three doctors, including Rawicz, to bring the body, cover it with lime, seal the coffin, and put it in the vehicle. They wear facial masks and rubber gloves; the protection clothes of funeral servicemen resemble diving bells. But Epidemic also contains a  substantial dose of dark humor. For example, Rawicz gets rid of a bailiff when he learns that the doctor works for the epidemic team. The movie was praised for its realism, its mixture of fear and laughter, and avoidance of pathos. Lech Pijanowski complimented Załuski for his ability to apply a perspective from everyday life, for his attention to detail, use of satire and social criticism without heavy handed didacticism or an accusatory tone. Epidemic was a successful attempt to portray contemporary 30

 This part of the plot convinced Czesław Wiśniewski that Rawicz was a “philanderer” (dziwkarz) who redeemed himself only after the outbreak of smallpox. Therefore, his absence on the list of decorated people in the movie’s epilogue should not come as surprising. Prior to becoming head of Polish cinematography in 1968, Wiśniewski was the boss of the trade unions.

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society with its dramas and trivialities alike—still a rare phenomenon in the Polish film industry.31

Conclusions Evidently, contemporary movie critics who commented on Załuski’s film did not view Wrocław as a city destined to be cast in the role of the center of an epidemic. Instead, critics complemented Załuski for making an engaging contemporary drama inspired by historical events. In a press interview conducted after its premiere, the director vehemently defended the portrayal of Rawicz, whose carefree existence before the outbreak of smallpox and after its eradication struck the interviewer as banal and disconnected with the rest of the movie. “You deem unnecessary these scenes which, in my view, express the joy of life,” retorted Załuski. “I used them to show life in a big city in all aspects, including drinking alcohol, dancing, and chasing girls. The protagonist behaves like a typical young and intelligent man.”32 Załuski’s comments underscore the optimistic message of his film: little suggests that he viewed Wrocław as incapable of offering happiness to its residents. Contemporary critics who assessed the other two “dark” Wrocław movies discussed in this chapter, also did not see the pervading spirit of this city as central. Writing about Leprosy on its release, Alicja Helman, a distinguished film scholar and critic, classified TrzosRastawiecki’s film as a hybrid of social drama (as with other movies focused on youth) and gangster movie. She even compared it to John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), another film showing a protagonist tainted by criminal violence rather than a detective, conducting an investigation and seeking justice.33 The question is whether the identity of Wrocław, the stigma of its illegitimate birth or “wrong origin,” to quote Andrzej Zawada, and its niemieckość, were factors taken into consideration by movie critics of the 1970s.34 This cannot be answered definitively, but clearly, these films were contextualized differently by their contemporary viewers than now. Perhaps critics from Warsaw were not able to relate to local contexts of cinematic Wrocław, or were unaware of the sense of uprootedness suffered by its inhabitants. It is doubtful that they always referred to the guidelines of communist censorship 31

 Lech Pijanowski, “Spojrzenie dociekliwe i krytyczne,” Kino 7 (1972): 5–9.  Bożena Janicka, “Jestem przeciw kompleksowi tradycji,” Kino 3 (1972): 16–22. 33  Alicja Helman, “Ułamki o wspólnym mianowniku,” Kino 4 (1972): 4–11. 34  Zawada, Bresław, 52. 32

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and scholarship, which downplayed the German chapter in the city’s history. Perhaps the communist period did not favor the internalization of Wrocław by its Polish inhabitants. But cinematic genres, filmmakers’ artistic DNA, and documentary evidence are key for decoding a film as cultural text. Presentday constructs that bypass these factors risk syncretizing past and present. I do not dismiss the interpretation given by Saryusz-Wolska’s, which opens this chapter; rather, I would like to complement and modify it. Indeed, what is absent in all four “Wrocław” films is history full stop, whether German, Piast or Polish in nature. But this escape from the past also reflects two interwoven themes projected by these movies. First, these are all contemporary dramas set against the Polish cinema of the 1960s, which was predominantly concerned with history, especially World War II. Lenartowicz rebelled against the Polish school and its exploration of the traumas of the war generation, of which he was member. Załuski and Trzos-Rastawiecki broke away from the “second School,” that of pro-regime filmmakers whose combat dramas and Germanophobia legitimized Gomułka’s “Polish road to socialism” and nationalist tendencies within the Polish party throughout the 1960s.35 Both directors focused their lens on contemporary society, albeit in a different manner and with different results. Second, the protagonists of these films are mostly young people, born or brought-up in People’s Poland. In other words, imposed amnesia and repressed poniemieckość alone are not sufficient for explaining the absence of history in the cinematic portrayals of Wrocław. The trend applied to Polish cinema as a  whole, particularly after the end of the fourteen years of Gomułka’s rule that relied on the politics of history. In this respect, there are some parallels between the exit from recent history in Polish mainstream cinema of the early 1970s and 1990s, when both filmmakers and audiences turned their backs on the experience of communism and the Solidarity movement. However, the subsequent socio-economic transformation of the country, European integration, and the advent of the generation born in the 1980s, who are too young to have experienced and remember communism, affected the dynamics of internalizing the past. In the case of Wrocław and Gdańsk, the largest metropolitan communities in the Western territories, local identities gradually absorbed and adopted parts of German heritage as their own. The restoration of historical monuments,

35

 On nationalist-communist cinema in People’s Poland, see Mikołaj Kunicki, “Heroism, Raison d’état, and National Communism: Red Nationalism in the Cinema of People’s Poland,” Contemporary European History 2 (2012): 235–56.

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the integration of German public figures into urban spaces, and the prose of such authors as Marek Kamiński and Paweł Huelle, who draw from the history of Breslau and Danzig, demonstrate how the German past ceased to be taboo and has become a cultural asset. Contemporary Polish history has also provided some inspiration, particularly for filmmakers who “rediscovered” and benefited from the specificities of Wrocław. Like Gdańsk, the capital of Lower Silesia was the bastion of legal and underground Solidarity and other opposition groups including the Orange Alternative, one of the most fascinating examples of cultural resistance to communism in the 1980s.36 Waldemar Krzystek’s 80 milionów (80 million, 2011) is a  powerful testimony to this part of the city’s history, but also an example of genre cinema. This action-packed, political thriller is based on the daring action by Wrocław Solidarity activists to retrieve the union’s funds before the imposition of Martial Law in December 1981. Krzystek’s movie does not create a new myth; nor does it legitimize any specific contemporary political formation using history. 2016 saw the premiere of Komisja morderstw (Commission of murders, 2016), a crime series produced by Polish state TV and co-financed by the local government of Lower Silesia. Influenced by such crime shows as The X Files, the series follows a team of police officers who investigate unsolved murders committed in Wrocław and Lower Silesia in the present day, and during the communist and German periods. So far, Komisja morderstw has only had one season, which ran from September to December 2016. It is unlikely to continue due to disappointing audience figures (some 800,000 viewers), problematic casting, and inconsistent screenplay.37 What is particularly interesting about this production, nevertheless, is the fact that it openly promoted the region with its convoluted history, beautiful nature, and rich culture. Once again, Wrocław and its surroundings are imaginary crime scenes hiding dark secrets of Nazis, Soviet troops, Communist security police, and contemporary criminals. Only this time it is Wrocław/Breslau, retro-style, showing that film (whether for TV or the cinema) once again reflects both its times, and the accordantly shifting cultural text of the city. 36

 On the Orange Alternative, see: Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 37  Karolina Mróz, “‘Komisja morderstw’. Nowa produkcja TVP,” Gazeta Wy­bor­cza, 9 September 2016. Web. 28 Mar. 2017. http://wyborcza.pl/1,90535,20597962,komisjamorderstw-nowy-serial-tvp.html. Last accessed 17 March 2017.

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The Bu-Ba-Bu and the Reorientation of Ukrainian Culture: The Carnival City and the Palimpsestual Past Uilleam Blacker

Introduction: The Bu-Ba-Bu, the Canon of Ukrainian Literature and Ukrainian Independence In 1991, Ukraine became a  fully independent state, fulfilling the dream of generations of Ukrainian nationalists. As in many Central and Eastern European countries, writers were foremost among those who had fought for Ukrainian statehood and promoted Ukrainian national identity over the long decades of statelessness. The significance of the great Romantic poet Taras Shevchenko in Ukrainian nationalist mythology is remarkable even by Eastern European standards, with similarly crucial roles being played by figures such as Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, and later writers like the dissident poet Vasyl’ Stus, all of whom dedicated their creative energies to the national cause, and some of whom suffered severe persecution for doing so. The duty of the Ukrainian writer to further the national cause has been regarded as something almost sacred and treated with the utmost respect and gravity. This aura of reverence is reflected in contemporary attitudes to and images of these writers: portraits of Shevchenko invariably depict him as a glowering, intense figure, and are displayed with the solemnity of icons, draped with traditional cloths. Indeed, the critic Marko Pavlyshyn has compared the Ukrainian culture of canon building and veneration of writers to the creation of an iconostasis of martyrs and saints.1

1

 See Marko Pavlyshyn, Kanon ta ikononostas (Kyiv: Chas, 1997).

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Given this tradition, it is striking that when Ukraine finally achieved its independence, some Ukrainian writers, instead of reveling in and consolidating the national triumph, rejected martyrological seriousness and commitment to the national cause, and began to laugh at themselves. Writers working in the late 1980s, when glasnost made open discussions of Ukrainian national identity and cultural autonomy possible, and the early 1990s, when those discussions came to the forefront of public discourse, did not accept political independence with somber thankfulness and reverence. Some of the most significant literary voices of the period reacted to the new openness and independence rather with an ironic smile on their faces, and a lewd joke on their lips. This attitude of irreverence led critics (and the writers themselves) to label this period as “carnivalesque.”2 This characterization, taken from Mikhail Bakhtin, is applied principally to the Lviv poetic group Bu-Ba-Bu, which was formed in 1985 by three western Ukrainian poets, Iurii Andrukhovych (b. 1960, originally from Ivano-Frankivs’k), Oleksandr Irvanets’ (b. 1960, originally from Rivne), and Viktor Neborak (b. 1962, Lviv). The group is widely seen as one of the most significant phenomena of its time in Ukrainian literature. The group’s name stands for burlesk-balahan-bufonada (burlesque, bedlam, buffoonery), which accurately reflects its carnivalesque poetic ethos. In many ways, the Bu-Ba-Bu’s work is textbook Bakhtinian carnival: The poets approach all discourses of authority, whether Soviet or Ukrainian nationalist, with irreverence and parody; the voice in their poetry is that of the Bakhtinian rogue, clown, or fool, whose mocking or naivety brings down authority and wrecks hierarchy. Their work is characterized by obscenity and slang, by the language of the marketplace, in Bakhtin’s terms; they were also attuned to the bodily aspect of the carnival, with grotesque scenes of sex and indulgence in feasting common in their poetry and prose. Importantly, their work was not confined to the page, but, to an extent due to limitations on publication imposed by the Soviet context, reached its audience directly, in poetry readings and performances, thus embodying the carnival principles of contact and communication, of being with and of the people. While these writers were the most explicitly and self-consciously carnivalesque, this ethos nevertheless spilled over and was embraced to varying degrees by their contemporaries and successors. The writers of the “Stanislav phenom-

2

 See Tamara Hundorova, Pisliachornobyl’s’ka biblioteka: Ukrains’kyi literaturnyi postmodern, (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2005), 119–153.

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enon,” for example, a group of writers based in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivs’k, who in fact counted Andrukhovych as one of their senior members, was strongly influenced by the Bu-Ba-Bu. At the same time, however, we see similar aesthetics and artistic ethos developing independently among writers from other parts of Ukraine, as in the work of Kyiv writers like Bohdan Zholdak or, most notably, the obscene satires (and the public performances thereof) of Les’ Podervians’kyi.3 In the years leading up to and immediately after 1991, the Bu-BaBu subjected Ukrainian national identity to self-mocking scrutiny, rereading and re-interpreting the national culture and the national past, and re-assessing the poet’s duties in relation to these. Valiant, self-sacrificial struggle was no longer a priority, and the nation-state and the securing of cultural survival that it would guarantee no longer the sacred, unattainable goal. Their alternative was an ambiguous, ironic attitude to the national culture and a refusal to follow in the traditional poet’s path. Yet at the same time the Bu-Ba-Bu did not reject Ukrainian cultural traditions outright. They parodied the self-indulgent solemnity of traditional literature, yet their mockery always retained a respectful nod, and the plentiful citations of these writers in the group’s highly intertextual work served both to celebrate and subvert their influence. Andrukhovych, Neborak and Irvanets’ also sought national cultural identity in less-celebrated, but equally native sources, for example in the work of Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi, a writer who predated Shevchenko, and who emerged from the traditions of Baroque and Renaissance literature, rather than the high Romantic nationalism of Shevchenko and others. His most famous work, Eneida (The Aeneid, 1798), a parody of Virgil’s text that places raucous Ukrainian Cossacks in the place of the mythical heroes, is reckoned to be the founding text of Ukrainian literature.4 With its parodic take on Ukrainian history, its vulgar humor and plentiful scenes of revelry, it is also a  highly carnivalesque text. Another important alternative source of Ukrainianness for the group was BohdanIhor Antonych, a  modernist poet who was originally from the Lemko 3

 See Hundorova, Pisliachornobyl’s’ka biblioteka, 197–207.  George Luckyj, Between Gogol and Shevchenko: Polarity in the Literary Ukraine, 1798–1847 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971), see chapter two; Marko Pavlyshyn, “The rhetoric and politics of Kotliarevsky’s Eneida,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 10, 1 (1985): 9–24. On the Bu-Ba-Bu’s rediscovery of Kotliarevs’kyi see Hundorova, Pisliachornobyl’s’ka biblioteka, 85–88.

4

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region in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands but moved to Lviv and made his career there. The Bu-Ba-Bu poets, and particularly Andrukhovych, who wrote a PhD thesis on the poet and also incorporated him as a character into his 2004 novel Dvanadtsiat’ obruchiv (Twelve circles), overturned what they perceived as a stiflingly traditional, nationalist vision of Antonych as a poet of nature and national culture and refashioned him as a decadent, urban poet, a Ukrainian Baudelaire.5 In his novel, whose title is taken from Antonych’s poetry, Andrukhovych laments the fact that: “the learned poetry scholars […] see Antonych first and foremost as a kind of Lemko Mowgli, immersing body and soul in deep, root-bound, ethnographic green” and for whom the city represented “gray-and-black rituals of Thanatos, marked by an overtly menacing technos.” This, for the narrator, has “very little in common with his real (and surreal) personality,” and is the product of conservative Ukrainian attitudes. The narrator informs us that “[i]n reality nothing attracted him with such a harsh and irresistible force as Lviv,” before detailing the multiple layers of Antonych’s urban sensibility.6

The Bu-Ba-Bu and the Carnival City Andrukhovych’s re-orientated image of Antonych as a  genuine Ukrainian urban poet is crucial, and characteristic of his and the Bu-Ba-Bu’s cultural project. The group embraced the city, rediscovering the roots of Ukrainian urban literature and striving to bring about its latest flowering. In a retrospective essay reflecting on the Bu-Ba-Bu, Andrukhovych states that: And we are urbanists. In our opinion, Ukraine must conquer its own cities. All “village mentality” [khutorianstvo] smells of the open-air museum. The city, however, we understand in the widest possible sense. The city is a complex, a historical-cultural fabric, it is “second nature,” it

5

 S ee Jurij Andruchowycz [Iurii Andrukhovych], “Metafizyka innego Lwowa: O mieście w poezji Bohdana Ihora Antonycza,” Krasnogruda 10 (2000), accessed 28 December 2016, http://pogranicze.sejny.pl/archiwum/krasnogruda/pismo/10/ zaulek/andruch.htm; Hundorova, Pisliachornobyl’s’ka biblioteka, 85. 6  Yuri Andrukhovych, Twelve Circles, translated by Vitaly Chernetsky (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2015), 145.

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is legends and myths, plots and great deeds, separations and drunkenness. The city is Lviv.7

This vision implied different spatial categories to the traditional Ukrainian coordinates of the land and the village, reverting from a generalized national scale to the idiosyncratically local and specifically urban environment of Lviv. The city is used in two ways by the Bu-Ba-Bu to re-imagine Ukrainian culture and identity. First, it functions as a space in which to carnivalize this culture, to insert laughter, mockery, and the body into it. As Andrukhovych puts it, the group aimed to “democratize” the Ukrainian literary language, and to break its taboos, especially those relating to sex.8 Second, the city functioned as a palimpsestual surface from which to read alternative narratives of the past, thus introducing an innovative spatiotemporal literary sensibility that would prove influential among younger Ukrainian writers. In this respect, the poets were attuned to Bakhtin’s insight, in relation to his concept of the chronotope, that space and time are fundamentally inseparable and configured in different ways at different literary-historical junctures.9 Carnival, too, is, for Bakhtin, a phenomenon that is created through a particular view of space and time and their interrelations. The theorist describes the carnival feast as constituting a “utopia” that is related to “moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man”

7

 Iurii Andrukhovych, “Apologia blazenady (dvadtsiat’ tez do sebe samykh),” in Iurii Andrukhovych, Oleksandr Irvanets’, Viktor Neborak, Bu-Ba-Bu: Vybrani tvory, ed. Vasyl’ Gabor (L’viv: Piramida, 2007), 23–24 (24). The tension between urbanism and khutorianstvo is one that has characterized Ukrainian literature since the modernist era, when the wave of avant-garde and modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to distance itself from traditional, rurally-based Ukrainian literature. The latter had associations with traditional nationalism, with the narodnytsvo movement, whose main representatives were dominant nationalist figures such as Ivan Franko. Writers of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Valerian Pidmohyl’nyi, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Mykola Khvyl’ovyi and others began to move away from this, seeking a more urban identity for Ukrainian literature that would bring it into line with developments in Western Europe. 8  Iurii Andrukhovych, “Ave ‘Kraisler’!,” in his Dezorientatsii na mistsevosti (IvanoFrankivs’k: Lileia-NV, 1999), 81–96 (84). 9  Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: Notes toward a historical poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 84–258 (84).

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and moments of “death and revival, of change and renewal.”10 It is precisely at a moment of cultural and social crisis, of change and renewal that the Bu-BaBu poets resort to carnival and to a carnivalesque spatiotemporal sensibility. In the context of the “breaking point” that was the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of independent Ukraine, literature builds around itself a utopian space in which fear is neutralized and renewal can be accomplished. Bakhtin’s utopian carnival space is not only an abstract, cultural state, but is historically and culturally locatable physically in the market square (specifically, in Bakhtin’s analysis, of the medieval European town). The market square is a space of spectacle, of the “theatricalization of life.” It is also “the center of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in the world of official order and official ideology, it always remained ‘with the people’.”11 Lviv’s market square is present in the Bu-Ba-Bu’s work and activities both as literary trope and—if we extend it metonymically to the public space of the city in general— as physical performance space. The poets were well known for their frequent readings and performances, as well as the major role they played in participating in and organizing the Vyvykh cultural festivals that were held in Lviv in 1990 and 1992. At these events, carnival forms of communication were adopted not merely on paper, but in performances that directly engaged the poets’ audience. The Bu-Ba-Bu’s activities were far from unique or isolated. In fact, the late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by an explosion of mass public events such as Vyvykh, or the famous Chervona Ruta song festival, which was inaugurated in 1989 in Chernivtsi. The Vyvykh festival of 1992 was probably the BuBa-Bu’s most prominent moment in this respect. The festival took the form of a multifaceted cultural festival and street carnival, taking over the center of Lviv for its duration and involving absurd and parodic events and performances, many of them masterminded by the Bu-Ba-Bu members. The festival’s finale was a “poezoopera” (poetic opera) that involved local rock and classical musicians and cabaret actors. The performance incorporated the group’s poems into a chaotic, absurd and carnivalesque show that parodied both Soviet and traditional Ukrainian culture, and took place in Lviv’s Habsburg-era opera house.12 10

 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), 9. 11  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 153–154. 12  For a detailed account and analysis of the festival see Alexandra Hrycak, “The coming of Chrysler Imperial: Ukrainian youth and rituals of resistance,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 21, 1/2 (1997): 63–91. Vyvykh means dislocation. For the wider

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The choice of venue for this decidedly non-serious event—the bastion of high culture, both of the Soviet and preceding eras—was in itself a carnivalesque inversion of cultural values, and reflected a general atmosphere in Lviv in the 1980s, in which the commandeering of public space by unofficial, semi-official or countercultural groups—from the Bu-Ba-Bu to the city’s hippies, who were fond of appropriating historical locations, or the Lion Society, a group dedicated to reviving suppressed Ukrainian cultural traditions and to preserving the cultural heritage of Lviv—was becoming a staple of the disruption and erosion of official Soviet political and cultural discourse.13 The Bu-Ba-Bu’s poetic and spatial practices were in part a  reaction against the prevailing, official cultural and political atmosphere of the era. They were also, however, a response to the poets who had preceded them, in particular the 1960s generation of dissident writers, whose work tended to be intellectual, nationalistic, moralistic and linguistically and culturally conservative, and thus confined to the narrow circle of nationalist intelligentsia who produced it. Spatially, of course, these poets were similarly confined: the stifling, repressive atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s meant that they had to retreat to private, domestic spaces because of lack of opportunities via official channels or, indeed, for fear of persecution. While in many ways admiring their predecessors, the Bu-Ba-Bu wanted to go beyond this narrow circle to reach a wider audience, just as they wished to physically inhabit urban spaces and mix with the crowd. They aimed for maximum accessibility through humor, spontaneity, provocation, performance, and liberal and playful language. Viktor Neborak states in an interview given in 1994: “From a  cer-

13

youth culture context of the festival and more on the Bu-Ba-Bu, see Mark Andryczyk, “Bu-Ba-Bu: Poetry in performance,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 27, 1/2 (2002): 257–272 (266). On music festivals of the period, see Catherine Wanner, “Nationalism on stage: Music and change in Soviet Ukraine,” in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Mark Slobin (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 136–156.

 See William Risch, The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in So-

viet Lviv (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 123–130; Bohdan Shumylovych, “Vidmovliaiuchys’ vid sotsializmu: Al’ternatyvni prostory L’vova 1970-x-2000-x rokiv,” Ukraina: Kul’turna spadshchyna, natsional’na svidomist’, derzhavnist’ 23 (2013) 602–614, accessed 18 March 2017, http://www.inst-ukr.lviv.ua/uk/publications/materials/ documents/?newsid=507.

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tain point of view, the Bu-Ba-Bu is an attempt to de-hermeticize poetry, it is poetry leaving its status as a purely internal, lyrical phenomenon and coming into contact with outer reality.”14 The group pursued this de-hermeticization both by engaging directly with audiences in public venues and through depicting urban space in their works. Their public readings became the stuff of local cultural legend, while they and their texts were central to the carnivalesque festivals outlined above; later, their works would also find wide public audiences through their adaptation as rock songs by hugely popular groups such as Plach Ieremii and Mertvyi Piven’ (several of the poems analyzed below became known to wider audiences precisely via this route, rather than primarily as poems), while both Neborak and Andrukhovych have dabbled in rock music themselves. The movement out into the world is also, of course, an important theme in the Bu-Ba-Bu’s poems, and is achieved through a  carefully constructed spatial dynamic. Thus, Andrukhovych, in his poem “Pisnia mandrivnoho spudeia” (Song of the wandering seminary student), orders his “chorteniata” (little devils—metaphor, it becomes clear, for poems), out into the world, onto the carnival square: Ahoy, my little devils! From under my cloak I release you into the world – to where blood and love mingle where there are passions and precipices by the bundle… I am your father, so be faithful to me (such unfaithful rhymes in my head!) but when poems enter the heart Beautiful, like the wings of a dove, Then what hope is there!... [...] From the rhetoric and the poetics of the academies – Go now! Onto the marketplace, as though to the bottom of a river! [...] So go, into the world, go about your business—enchantment! Ahoy, my little devils!

14

 Liudmila Taran, “Z vysoty litaiuchoi holovy, abo zniaty masku: Rozmova z Viktorom Neborakom,” Suchasnist’ 5 (1994): 57–63 (57).

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[Ahov, moi malen’ki chorteniata! Z-pid svyty ia vas vypushchu na svit — tudy, de krov z liubov’iu cherleniat’sia, de prystrastei i propastei suvii… Ia—vash otec’, tozh bud’te meni virni! (iaki nevirni rymy v holovi!), ale koly do sertsia vkhodiat’ virshi — prekrasni, nache kryla holubiv, iaki todi nadii!.. […] Z rytoryk i poetyk akademii — haida na ploshchu, iak na dno riky! […] Otozh,—na svit, za dilo—charuvaty! Ahov, moi malen’ki chorteniata!]15 Similarly, in the poem “Astroloh” (The Astrologer), the titular astrologer lives in a lonely tower, where he is closer to the stars, but can only look down at the city from a removed distance: He has no estate and peers into cleavages from on high and in the city eternity passes not quite as he imagines. (On the balcony wing, lacy and sentimental, like a tango, a baroque angel settles – a soft and carefree being) And taking his head in his hands, he cries to himself in despair: ‘Why am I wasting the years?! I’ll take the arm of Iuz’ka

15

 Andrukhovych, “Pisnia mandrivnoho spudeia,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 76. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Ukrainian are my own.

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and go to the tavern on Rus’ka, and forget the holy gloom! Forget the holy gloom...’ [U n’oho maietkiv nemaie — zhory v dekol’te zahliadaie, a v misti vichnist’ mynaie ne tak, iak vin zahadaie. (Balkonne krylo azhurne i sentymental’ne, mov tango, obzhyv barokovyi ianhol — stvorinnia pukhke i bezzhurne). I vziavshy holovu v ruky, vin krykne sobi z rozpuky: “Choho ia marnuiu roky?! Viz’mu popid ruku Iuz’ku, pidu v pyvnychku na Rus’ku, zabudu sviati moroky! Zabudu sviati moroky…”]16 The Astrologer is drawn down from his lofty preoccupations with the distant heavens to the city (to Rus’ka Street, which adjoins Lviv’s market square), the tavern and the pleasures of the flesh, and thus participates fully in the real, material world and in real life. The Bu-Ba-Bu’s insistence on the participation of the poet and poetry in real life, as exemplified above by Andrukhovych, has strong echoes of Bakhtin: [T]he basic carnival nucleus of this culture is by no means a  purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play. 17

16 17

 Andrukhovych, “Astroloh,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 77.  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 7.

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This idea of carnival existing at the interstice of art and life is clearly suggested in the two poems by Andrukhovych above, and is stated quite literally in Viktor Neborak’s poem “Shche odyn lyst (v Ukrainu—z pivdnia)” (Another letter (to Ukraine—from the South)): “Our business is literature, or to be more exact, life.”18 Andrukhovych expands on this in his essay on the BuBa-Bu period “Ave, ‘Kraisler’!,” which focuses mainly on the production of Kraisler Imperial at the Vyvykh festival in Lviv in 1992: It seems it wasn’t so much about aesthetics as it was about survival. Or maybe aesthetics as a way of survival. Or vice versa. In other words, an attempt to be maximally free in a generally unfree situation. To stand alongside one another, to feel the other’s elbow, and his heartbeat.19

Literature is not separated off from real life by an imaginary border, but lives in the public domain, on the public square as carnival communication based on real contact between people. This contact is achieved not only through verbal communication: it is reached also through the medium of the body, as Andrukhovych puts it, it is about literally feeling the “heartbeat” of the other. The body is imagined in carnival in a  very specific way, however. As Bakhtin states: “[the body] is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people [...] it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthly, or independence of the earth and the body.”20 This is precisely the dynamic seen in Andrukhovych’s “Astroloh,” in which the lofty and lonely philosopher is “degraded” to his desire for his lover and the pleasures of the tavern. Viktor Neborak’s poem “Mis’kyi Boh Eros (versiia vulytsi Akademichnoi 1987 roku)” (City God Eros (Akademichna Street version, 1987)) expresses a similar merging of the poet, the body and the city in its observations of street life around Lviv’s university quarter. It presents the city specifically as a “theater,” where the body is made public (a metaphor that Andrukhovych also uses in relation to Lviv in his description of Antonych in Twelve Circles). The poem begins with the imperative “Pochnemo z vulytsi” (Let’s start from the street), before continuing: 18

 Viktor Neborak, “Shche odyn lyst (v Ukrainu—z pivdnia),” Bu-Ba-Bu, 334–335 (334). 19  Andrukhovych, “Ave, ‘Kraisler’!,” 82. 20  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 19.

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Furies walk past with long, taut legs, Priestesses walk past, only just caressed by God, Schoolgirls walk past, carrying their bottomless loins. Hetaerae walk past, their passion—insatiable. College girls walk past—first year, second and third. Lovers walk past from future sideshows— artists, actresses, dancers— their faces are laid upon faces, their curves and temperaments mix... Green eyes shine. A cat’s. [Idut’ furii zi strunnymy nohamy. Idut’ zhrytsi, shchoino peshcheni bohamy. Shkoliarky idut’, nesut’ bezdonni lona. Hetery idut’, ikh prystrast’ — nevhamovna. Studentky idut’ — kurs pershyi, druhyi, tretii. Kokhanky idut’ z maibutnikh intermedii — khudozhnytsi, aktorky, tantsivnytsi — ikh lytsia nakladaiut’sia na lytsia, zmishalysia ikh vyhyny i vdachi... Zeleni ochi svitiat’sia. Kotiachi.]21 Bodies, body parts and blood appear in almost every line of the poem, as the narrator gives a panoramic view of the city making love. These bodies are not individualized, but merge into one “indissoluble entity.” Bodies become indistinguishable from the city, which in turn becomes a body itself, in a perfect exemplification of Bakhtin’s opposition to the “severance from the material and bodily roots of the world”: That labyrinth—in the heavens, in dreams, in bells, in eyes, alleys and doorways, a woman’s body benighted and fiery, the fragrant drunken body of the city.

21

 Neborak, “Mis’kyi boh eros,” 318.

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[Toi labirynt — u nebesakh, u snakh, dzvinkakh, ochakh, aleiakh i pid’izdakh — zhinoche tilo sponochile i palke, pakhke sp’ianile tilo mista.]22 Here and elsewhere in Neborak’s work the making public of the body takes place in an atmosphere of eroticism that is not strictly in line with the carnival’s much more grotesque corporeality. This latter aesthetic is strongly present in the Bu-Ba-Bu’s work, however, in the vulgar and humorous use of obscene bodily vocabulary and sexual allusions. Indeed, two of the group’s most famous “hits,” Neborak’s “Pisen’ka pro Lialiu-Bo” (Song about Lialia-Bo), and Irvanets’’s “Turbatsia mas” (Perturbation of the masses) rely on precisely this engagement with the body. Neither poem engages specifically with Lviv, though both are now considered classic texts of the city’s literary scene. The closing stanza of Neborak’s poem reads: Lialia-Bo wants total freedo and to fly over the ho rizon of stars witho ut a care, to the botto dono, uno and vino cos Lialia-Bo’s soul is Ukrainian ................. here legs are bu-bu her behind is obbo her back is bi-e her stomach—bo-ob her tits are its-its and her head—Bah! ................ UKRAINIAN!

22

 Neborak, “Mis’kyi boh eros,” 319.

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[Lialia-Bo khoche povnu svobo i letity za ob rii zirok bezturbo tno-na-dno dono uno i vyno bo dusha v Liali-Bo— ukrains’ka .......................................... nohy v nei—bu-bu duptsia v nei—obbo spynka v nei—bie a zhyvotyk—boob tsytsi v nei—yts’-yts’ a holova—BA!!! .......................................... – UKRAINS’KA!!!]23 The caricatured body of the poem’s object, Lialia, is depersonalized and made into a bawdy, burlesque public display. Her name, literally meaning “dolly” is telling in this respect. The use of words like “duptsia” and “tsytsi” (words approximating “bum” and “boobs,” the use of which in Ukrainian poetry was at the time new and shocking) makes the body comic, the focus for the carnival laughter. The refrain of “UKRAINS’KA!” (Ukrainian!), repeated at the end of each stanza, situates the poem in the carnival square, designed to be yelled along to by the audience. Not only does the use of the device of the refrain situate the poem physically on the carnival square, but the content of the refrain— “Ukrainian”—refers to the collective identity of the intended audience. The grotesque, exaggerated body of Lialia is not only exhibited in public, then, but is joyfully merged with the collective, appropriated and universalized. Irvanets’s “Turbatsia mas (Himn-oda Bu-Ba-Bu)” [The perturbation of the masses (Hymn-ode of the Bu-Ba-Bu)] goes even further in its vulgar collision of the public space with the bodily. The two words of the title encapsulate the whole poem: Inverted and then pushed together they would make “mas-

23

 Neborak, “Pisen’ka pro Lialiu-Bo,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 309.

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turbatsiia” (masturbation), while the second part “Himn-oda ‘Bu-Ba-Bu’” in the Ukrainian suggests the word “himno” (shit). The poem proclaims the mission of the Bu-Ba-Bu as the “turbatsia mas” —the rousing of the masses, and invites audience participation: The refrain “MASY TURBUVATY” (a whisker away from the Ukrainian verb “masturbuvaty” (to masturbate)), and in the last stanza “Nasha MAS TURBATSIA” (“our rousing of the masses,” though when spoken sounds exactly like “our masturbation”), are marked “repeat three times.”24 Bakhtin states that: In the sphere of imagery cosmic fear (as any other fear) is defeated by laughter. […] Cosmic catastrophe represented in the material bodily lower stratum is degraded, humanized, and transformed into grotesque monsters. Terror is conquered by laughter.25

Irvanets’s invocation of the bodily functions performs precisely this “degradation, humanization, grotesquification,” and though the poem at first seems like a shallow, puerile joke (which on one level it certainly is), the public function of the work also fulfills the Bakhtinian idea of defeating fear: the parody here is of populist, propaganda language, which could be Soviet or nationalist, and is also, of course, aimed at the “masses.” Irvanets’ reduces such manipulative sloganeering to “turbatsia mas,” to the ridiculous and discredited object of laughter through the invocation of bodily functions, and this is achieved using the carnivalesque voice of the masses themselves. This merging of the public space, the city, and the body has important implications for the vision of cultural identity presented in the poets’ work. The female body as metonym for the nation is common in nationalist discourse in many cultures, and takes on particular political resonance in oppressed or colonized societies.26 Ukrainian culture holds many examples of this: in an essay on the topic, the novelist and critic Oksana Zabuzhko traces multiple such images, from the many incarnations in literature and other art forms of Roksolana, the 16th-century Ukrainian girl sold into slavery in Turkey only to rise to become the powerful wife of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, to 24

 Oleksandr Irvanets’, “Turbatsiia mas (Himn-oda ‘Bu-Ba-Bu’),” Bu-Ba-Bu, 227.  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 336. 26  See Sara Mills, Gender and Colonial Space (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 25

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such canonical works as Taras Shevchenko’s poem “Kateryna,” a  critique of both colonial violence and the petty cruelty of the colonized society, in which a young Ukrainian woman is taken advantage of and abandoned by a Russian soldier, shunned by her own community, and eventually commits suicide, to images of women in the works of modernist writers like Mykola Khvyl’ovyi and Pavlo Tychyna.27 The Bu-Ba-Bu poets do not subvert this tradition: as Marko Pavlyshyn has pointed out, for all their deconstructive efforts, the Bu-Ba-Bu’s work does nothing to overturn the powerful gender hierarchies in Ukrainian culture, particularly strong in nationalist discourse.28 Indeed, in comparison to powerfully empathetic works like Shevchenko’s “Kateryna,” their works are remarkably unreconstructed in terms of their gender dynamics. Neborak’s ebullient claiming of the “Ukrainian” body parts of his doll-like female caricature as “Ukrainian” betrays a strong objectifying position, and this attitude can be found throughout the group’s work, not least in their evocations of Lviv. The space of the city, which, according to some feminist critics, represents both potential sexual threat and freedom from patriarchal constraints for women,29 for the Bu-Ba-Bu is largely a space of masculine gaze and the objectification of women, whether it be Andrukhovych’s astrologer peering at cleavages from his balcony, or Neborak’s excited narrator hunting schoolgirls and students on Akademichna Street. At the same time, however, it is important to underline that behind this failure to challenge what is patriarchal in traditional Ukrainian culture alongside their other deconstructive efforts, the Bu-Ba-Bu poets’ work does nevertheless represent a liberation from the traditionally prudish, virtuous body-nation configurations within Ukrainian national discourse— which, as Andrukhovych confirms in his essays, was a conscious aim of the group.30 The grotesque body and its placing within public space of the city, whether through representation in poetry or the bawdy jokes of their “poezoopera” during the Vyvykh festival, is part of the reconfiguration of Ukrainian identity as liberated, carnivalesque and urban.

27

 O ksana Zabuzhko, “Zhinka-avtor u kolonial’nii kul’turi, abo znadoby do ukrains’koi gendernoi mifolohii,” in her Khroniky vid Fortinbrasa: Vybrana eseistika (Kyiv: Fakt, 2006), 152–191. 28  Marko Pavlyshyn, “Ukrainian literature and the Erotics of Postcolonialism: Some modest propositions,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 17, 1/2 (1993): 110–126 (125). 29  See Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx and the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago, 1991). 30  Andrukhovych, “Ave ‘Kraisler’!,” 84.

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The City and Alternative Readings of the Past While the Bu-Ba-Bu’s treatment of the body in the context of their vision of carnivalesque, urban Ukrainian identity is ambiguous, representing a kind of continuity of certain patriarchal attitudes, their work in another sense pursues a more innovative direction. Their carnival city is also used to introduce new ways of reading the cultural history of the nation, which in turn facilitates the articulation of new visions of local and national cultural identity. The poets reject the linear, teleological view of a history of national struggle culminating in independence and the securing of a single, strong national identity. They instead revert to Lviv’s complex, palimpsestual urban fabric and the histories of multiple nationalities that are inscribed into it to ironically and self-reflexively read a national identity that is very much Ukrainian, but is also open and subject to multiple cultural influences and hybridizations and part of a wider, European cultural sphere. Again, the Bu-Ba-Bu poets were not alone in this: while Lviv in the mid- to late 1980s was very much the center of a Ukrainian national revival, at the same time its forgotten Central European, Polish, Jewish and Habsburg pasts were also being actively sought out and rediscovered in various ways by the city’s intellectual and artistic communities, who sought to reorient Ukraine and Lviv away from its past of Soviet-Russian domination and “back” towards its true European self.31 Indeed, this was a cultural-political move that was made by intellectual and cultural elites across the crumbling Eastern Bloc, as perhaps most notably expressed in the Central Europeanism of writers like Milan Kundera, György Konrád, Danilo Kiš, Czesław Miłosz and others in the 1980s (a discourse that Andrukhovych himself would directly engage with and adapt for the Ukrainian context in his later essays and novels).32 31

 See Andriy Zayarnyuk, “Lviv über alles, an Eden for Intellectuals,” in Floodgates Technologies, Cultural (Ex)change and the Persistence of Place, ed. Susan Ingram, Markus Reisenleitner and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 149–184. See also Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989; and Shumylovych, “Vidmovliaiuchys’ vid sotsializmu.” 32  For a discussion on this discourse in relation to Ukrainian intellectuals see Ola Hnatiuk, Pożegnanie z imperium: Ukraińskie dyskusje o tożsamości (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii-Curie Skłodowskiej, 2003), 45. Andrukhovych’s most notable texts in this regard are the novel Twelve Circles and his long essay ‘Tsentral’no-skhidna reviziia,’ in Iurii Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk [Andzhei Stasiuk], Moia Ievropa (L’viv: Klasyka, 2001), 69–127.

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Iurii Andrukhovych’s poetry makes frequent reference to Lviv’s history, presenting it as a colorful array of eccentric characters, rogues, fantastic creatures and extraordinary events, all of which build up a picture of the local specificity of the city and its Central European past that belongs to no particular nationality, while at the same time retaining an atmosphere of authenticity: Each of a trio of ballads on Lviv’s history, for example, begins with an epigraph from the renowned local historian Ivan Kryp’iakevych relating to remarkable events from the city’s 19th century history, including a visit by Emperor Franz Joseph in 1885, allowing the poet to meld historical concreteness with his characteristic flights of the imagination.33 Again, this approach represented a marked departure from the serious, realistic and nationally-oriented attitude to representing history that dominated in Ukraine at the time. At the same time, however, Andrukhovych’s poems are more than just historical fantasies. They also explore the complexities of the ways in which we engage with the spaces we inhabit, particularly convoluted, palimpsestual cityscapes like Lviv. A characteristic example can be found in the poem “Romans Martopliasa” (A Fool’s Romance): I grew weary. Like a horse, I bit the bridle— oh, leave me, bitter and gloomy misfortune somewhere my love is lost on the market square somewhere there, between the Renaissance and the Baroque... I grew weary. Oh, give me a hurdy-gurdy! I’ll play you a song of torment, of fatigue; somewhere my love is lost on the market square, among the swindlers, three centuries ago... [...] Ah, on the market square are all the temptations of the world... There you’ll see such things of which you’d never dreamed! Perhaps my pure and fair maiden has been tempted into the Black Tenement?

33

 Iurii Andrukhovych, “Try balady,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 85-86.

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Or perhaps she has turned to stone, and now stands there—Diana! And in the night sends stone arrows to my windows, she is lost and unknown. Tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la Tra-la-la, tra-la-la-la Tra-la-la, lele, dana-dana!... [Ia stuzhyvsia. Ia, mov kin’, pohryz vudyla — vidstupy, bido hirka i moroko: des’ liubov moia na Rynku zabludyla, des’ otam, mizh renesansom i baroko… Ia stuzhyvsia. O podaite katerynku! Pro hryzotu vam zahraiu, pro utomu; des’ liubov moia propala sered Rynku, mizh perekupkamy, try stolittia tomu… […] Akh, na Rynku — vsi spokusy svitu… Tam take pobachysh — ne nasnyt’sia! Mozhe, moiu divu chystu i svitlu zamanyly v Chornu Kam’ianytsiu? Chy i sama vona zakam’ianila, i teper stoit’ sobi — Diana! I nochamy shle kaminni strily v moi vikna, vtrachena i neznana. Tra-lia-lia, tra-lia-lia-lia, tra-lia-lia, tra-lia-lia-lia, tra-lia-lia, lele, dana-dana!...]34

34

 Andrukhovych, “Romans Martopliasa,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 78. The Black Tenement is one of Lviv’s best known historical landmarks and faces onto the city’s market square.

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The lyrical narrator speaks from the present, but longs for something lost in some indefinable time in the city’s past. The contemporary voice submerges itself in archaic imagery: the narrator adopts the old-fashioned pose of a heartbroken Romantic balladeer, then metaphorically becomes a horse attached to a carriage, he pleads to be given a hurdy-gurdy, he searches among the baroque and the renaissance buildings for his love, and gazes at the beauty of petrified Diana, one of the statues that adorn the Lviv market square. The poem is soaked in memories of Lviv’s past, which the narrator feels all around him but cannot grasp. Indeed, this is perhaps the true lost love of the poem. Andrukhovych’s aesthetic here goes beyond the carnival pose, and is used to explore the genius loci of Lviv, turning it into a space of simultaneous time, a space where the Renaissance and the Baroque exist alongside the hurdygurdy of the pre-war city, all of which exists in the now of the poem. The search for the genius loci of Lviv through the uncovering of the alternative city under the apparent one continues in Andrukhovych’s cycle “Lypnevi nacherky podorozhn’oho” (July sketches of a traveller). The following comes from the poem “Dukh” (Spirit), which takes as its central image the obscure figure of a 19th-century Lviv nun and poetess Iosyfa Kun, author of a collection of German-language poems on Lviv and its surrounds Lembergs schöne Umgebungen: I knew Iosyfa Kun, and I knew a few other women. The dogs’ marketplace greeted me with dogs’ barking, and the nuns from Sisters of the Sacrament Street hid in their niches. Makol’ondra never threw me out once, I always had money and sense. Show your city. I want to follow those girls in the red dresses. I want to make a call from these telephone boxes. I want to dial the number of Iosyfa Kun [...] [Ia znav Iosyfu Kun, ia znav shche kil’kokh zhinok. Pesii Rynok vitav mene pesim havkotom,

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a chernytsi z vulytsi Sakramentok khovalysia v nishakh. Ani razu ne vyhnav mene Makol’ondra, ia zavshe mav hroshi i rozum. Pokazhy svoie misto. Ia khochu ity za otymy divchatamy v sukniakh chervonykh. Ia khochu dzvonyty z otsykh telefonnykh kabin. Ia khochu nabraty nomer Iosyfy Kun […]]35 Among the characteristic carnival features of the poem (the marketplace, the roguish voice, the sexual motifs, the tavern) the poet makes the telling plea: “show your city.” This imperative implies the existence of the subjective city where multiple times can co-exist, alongside the objective city of the present. Andrukhovych’s poem performs this duality, in the narrative voice’s desire to call the poetess from one of Lviv’s telephone boxes: this leap of imagination makes possible the existence of the past city within the present one, provides an ephemeral yet tangible link to things that exist only in fragmented memory. Perhaps the most striking evocation of the past city under the skin of the apparent one is in the poem “Kolo” (Circle): A city like a constellation. How often, wandering, we went towards the lights of houses of which not a stone remained!.. And who will believe us that we went towards the light? How often we looked for the mouth of the river, a bridge or a pier

35

 Andrukhovych, “Dukh,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 97. Makol’ondra appears several times in the Bu-Ba-Bu’s work as the proprietor of a Lviv tavern.

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in the midnight deserts of the courtyards, who will believe us that there was a river here? Only through us cities pass into oblivion. We speak them and find them altered. And yet, in the morning you go out onto the square and you recognize everything: The linden trees in bloom stand golden, noiseless. [Misto nemov suzir’ia. Iak chasto, blukaiuchy ishly my na svitlo domiv, vid iakykh ne lyshylosia i kamenia!.. I khto nam poviryt’, shcho ishly my na svitlo? Iak chasto shukaly my hyrlo, i mist, i prychal v opivnichnykh pustyniakh dvoriv, ta khto nam poviryt’, shcho richka bula tut? Til’ky kriz’ nas perekhodiat’ mista u nepam’iat’. My vymovliaiemo ikh i znakhodymo inshymy. Vtim, vrantsi vykhodysh na ploshchu i vse piznaiesh: Lypy v chas dotsvitannia stoiat’ zoloti, bezhominni.]36 Andrukhovych here captures the elusiveness of the fragmented city of memory, which constantly falls into obscurity, which exists in words, in scraps of texts from the past (the nun’s poems) and yet when spoken changes unexpectedly.

36

 Andrukhovych, “Kolo,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 98.

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The city exists in our subjective memories, perceptions and enunciations, and yet it also disappears “through us,” passes into oblivion through our equally subjective forgetting. We see constancy in the city’s trees, which appear repeatedly in the cycle of poems, a fixture in shifting space and symbol of the circular time that counteracts linearity (and which is suggested by the poem’s title). Alongside the evocation of multiple, simultaneous cities, there is always uncertainty and the sense of illusion and irrecoverability. The poet would like to call the poetess, yet he does not, he has seen the ghosts of the past city, but asks “who will believe us?,” he longs for his love, lost in space and time in the city, yet cannot find her. There is a constant melancholy and a sense of loss in Andrukhovych’s Lviv works, detectable under the carnival laughter, in that sense of the irretrievable memories of the many urban worlds that poetry uncovers but can never quite grasp. The texts of the past cities are revealed but are never entirely legible. Viktor Neborak’s poem, “Litaiucha holova” (The Flying Head), one of the best known Ukrainian poems of recent years and a famous rock song by Plach Ieremii, involves the same sort of temporal layering of the city, but adopts a more overtly carnivalesque, performance-orientated stance than Andrukhovych’s subtler, more melancholy and lyrical works: She rises like a head, the chopped-off head of a vagrant. She speaks for the first, second, and third times her otherworldly words: I AM THE FLYING HEAD! Above the throng of the square hangs crooked her all-seeing flying baroque. Blood thickens in the air, a wide open wound casts a heavy, deep shadow; I AM THE FLYING HEAD! An invisible axe entered the city, to tear headless bodies down from their pedestals, gawkers drank their fill of cheap blood, and it scrapes a rusty mark from its head— THE GHOST OF THE FLYING HEAD! Do you guzzle TV melodramas? You peer at dragons behind glass! Your wall will be broken by the forehead

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of the bullet from Fellini’s ‘Orchestra’— I AM THE FLYING HEAD! Remember, there is nowhere to hide! The square will come to your hiding places, the square! The dark cobbles will be rinsed by the festival and in the heavens of the Renaissance appears A MASK—THE FLYING HEAD […] [VONA PIDNIMAIET’SIA, IAK HOLOVA, vidrubana holova volotsiuhy. Vona promovliaie upershe, i vdruhe, i vtretie svoi potoibichni slova: IA LITAIUCHA HOLOVA! Nad iurmyshchem ploshchi navyslo navskis ii vsevydiushche letiuche baroko. Krov husne v povitri, rozchakhnutyi zriz tin’ vidkydaie, vazhku i hlyboku: IA LITAIUCHA HOLOVA! Sokyra nevydyma v misto vviishla, stiahnuty z pomostiv tila bezholovi, rozziavy napylys’ deshevoi krovi, na zishkrebe slid irzhavyi z chola PRYVYD LITAIUCHA HOLOVA! Zheresh melodramy televiziini? Ty rozhliadaiesh drakoniv za sklom! Stinu tobi prolamaie cholom ozhyla kulia z Orkestru Fellini — IA LITAIUCHA HOLOVA! Zapam’iatai, ne skhovatys’ nide! Ploshcha prychodyt’ u skhovy, ploshcha! Brukivku temnu sviato poloshche i nebesa Renesansu hriade MASKA — LITAIUCHA HOLOVA […]]37

37

 Neborak, “Litaiucha holova,” Bu-Ba-Bu, 305–306.

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The meaning of the surrealist image of the flying head is ambiguous, though it seems to represent creativity, poetry and/or the poet himself. The head grasps the city space in its “all-seeing baroque” (the Ukrainian word “baroko” also containing the word “oko,” eye) and the Renaissance thunders overhead as it speaks to the crowds on the marketplace. The poet’s voice here speaks the architecture of the Baroque and Renaissance in contemporary language, mixing it with references to Fellini and soap operas. The fabric of the city is set in motion in the surrealist imagery, as the statues are dismembered and fly through the air and the architecture seems to speak. The city is taken over entirely by Neborak’s carnival poetic spirit, the symbol of which is not only the flying head itself, but also the market square, which is mobile and alive, and from which there is “no hiding place.” The poem describes the carnivalesque transformation of the city into a dynamic and active force, the release of its aesthetic potential and the invocation of its various temporalities. A more elusive image of the city also appears in Neborak’s poetry, as in the poem “Katastrofa (versiia vulytsi Akademichnoi zrazka 1993 roku)” [Catastrophe (Akademichna Street, 1993 model)], which starts with a glimpse of two Soviet-era hotels, then casts its gaze at the buildings of the conservatoire and the concert hall, which evoke the Habsburg era, and then states: The buildings become overgrown in the morphine stems of dreams, the buildings cast out lost souls onto the cobblestones. The coats of the buildings are grey, their wigs unkempt, the print on their calling cards is fresh. A few black words. The street (or avenue) with ghosts of trees incubates the eggs of offices and banks and brothels. Five dogs—a pack of punks— crossed the road. ‘Dog’s blood! [Psia krev!]’ they growled. Polishness sneaks out. Germanness betrays. Ukrainianness snores. Pirate films ‘in Russian’ build bridges in our heads. Galicia, like a sea of rails and roads, etc., etc. surrounds us. Homely, cosy as the alcohol in a bottle. This, gentlemen, is how we travel into the absolute between the Galician Market and the corridors of the Stefanyk library. Our mighty descendants will fire a salute right up our backside, I hope. Period. And we’ll have to get by without a monument.

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[Budivli obrostaiut’ morfichnymy steblamy sniv, budivli vykyduiut’ prybludni dushi na bruk. Pal’ta budivel’—siri, peruky zanedbano, druk na vizytivkakh svizhyi. Dekil’ka chornykh sliv. Vulytsia (chy prospekt) z pryvydamy derev vynoshuie v sobi iaitsia ofisiv, bankiv i bordeliv. P’iat’ psiv—zhraia pankiv— peretnulo vulytsiu. Vpalo, zatarakhkotilo “psia krev!” Pol’s’kist’ vylazyt’. Nimets’kist’ zradzhuie. Ukrains’kist’ khrope. Pirats’ki fil’my “na russkom” buduiut’ mosty u makitrakh. Halychyna, iak more kolii, shliakhiv i t. d. i t. p., ohortaie. Domashn’o, zatyshno, nache hradusam u pivlitrakh. Tak my, panove, podorozhuiemo v absoliut mizh Halyts’kym rynkom i korydoramy biblioteky Stefanyka. Nashi mohutni nashchadky dadut’ nam u zad saliut, spodivaius’. I krapka. I obiidemos’ bez pam’iatnyka.]38 The buildings of the city are personified, come to life as grotesque, embodied and monstrous presences that shift and grow, that chew and spit out their inhabitants. They are old and neglected, and yet also freshly painted. The city, in characteristic carnivalesque style, grows in an organic, fecund, grotesque way, “incubates the eggs” of banks and brothels, and yet is also ghostly and dead. The spatiotemporal experience of the narrator is multiple and simultaneous. The Soviet hotels coexist with the Habsburg concert hall and the conservatoire, echoing both Moscow and Vienna simultaneously. The various cultures of the city’s history collide in this single impression of a  contemporary city street, where Polish, German, Russian, and Ukrainian elements intersect. The poem reflects not only on present memories of the past city, but also speculates on potential future memories: Neborak reflects on the poet’s journey into the future, beyond his own death, and on the fear of not being remembered and inscribed into the cityscape with a monument, the obligatory gesture of thanks for the nation’s great literary sons and daughters, while at the same time undermining this lionization of the national poet with his ironic, irreverent tone.

38

 Neborak, “Katastrofa (versiia vulytsi Akademichnoi zrazka 1993 roku),” Bu-Ba-Bu, 328–329.

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Neborak’s Lviv is a disorientating, changing, simultaneous space that is rich in historical traces and cultural meanings. As the mention of the monument makes clear, it is also a space of dynamic memory. In this regard, the poet uses the image of Lviv as a scroll of texts to be read and deciphered, partly obscured and fragmented like memory itself. This is a common trope in writing about cities in general, and has been used in relation to Lviv by several authors, notably Andrukhovych in his novel Perverziia (Perversion, 1997).39 Of course, deciphering this text is no easy task, and Neborak’s poems are laced with the tension between a love for the urban text, and the memories inscribed in it, and an anxiety at that text’s illegibility and ambiguity, and the accompanying process of forgetting. Here, in the poem “Na vidkhid Pavla Poprots’koho (Trots’koho), l’vivs’koho alkonavta” (On the departure of Pavel Poprots’kyi (Trotsky), Lviv alconaut) the narrator calls Lviv a “[c]ity of nooks and gates, of doorway-toilets/rolled up into a scroll, sealed with the stamp of consumption,” and describes as follows: In the architectural recesses where you had your hidey-holes, in the dusky shining of heavenly wandering lights bottles were deflowered—the baroque plasterwork became covered in dew, and into the multi-storeyed interior streams babbled—and your soul fell into them. [V arkhitekturnykh vidbytkakh, de ie svoi zatyshni skhovy, v t’mianim svitinni nebesnykh svityl mandrivnykh tsnotu vtrachaly pliashky—liplennia barokove bralos’ rosoiu, v nutro bahatopoverkhove bul’kaly strumy—dusha prypadala do nykh.]40 Neborak creates a carnivalesque space of illicit revelry here, uncovering the underside of the city, the dark, stinking corners where the drunks lie. He

39

 The image also appears, for example, as the central premise of Roman Ivanychuk’s novel Manuskrypt z vulytsi Rus’koi (The Manuscript from Rus’ka Street, 1979). In another poem on Lviv’s Ianivs’kyi cemetery, the burial place of Antonych, Neborak refers to Lviv as “the green Book of the Lion”; see ‘Ianivs’kyi tsvintar’’, accessed 28 December, 2016, http://poetry.uazone.net/neborak/nebor21.html. 40  Neborak, “Na vidkhid Pavla Poprots’koho (Trots’koho), l’vivs’koho alkonavta,” BuBa-Bu, 337.

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does this through the combination of the images of the baroque architecture and heavenly lights with the filthy underworld of alcoholism, in a typically carnivalesque juxtaposition. The city and the addressee of the poem converge here: the dark insides of the city become one with the dark insides of Poprots’kyi-Trotsky, the image of the underground river of Lviv (the Poltva, which was covered over in the 19th century and incorporated into the city’s sewer system) merging with the image of the streams of alcohol into which his soul falls. Here again we see the carnival body merging with the world, through which another alternative city is revealed: the delirious, labyrinthine city of the drunk. Neborak’s aesthetics of Lviv are, in many ways, close to Andrukhovych’s: he carnivalizes the city through an emphasis on the body and revelry, references to the Renaissance and Baroque, his roguish characters and irreverent approach to respected symbols of culture. As in Andrukhovych, Neborak’s Lviv is also a complex city in which the relationship between cities present and past, and the exhilarating, yet bewildering experience of the contemporary inhabitant among them, is explored with depth and subtlety. At the same time, both poets are united by what they do not explore in their poetry, as well as by what they do explore. While hints of Lviv’s multicultural past abound in their work, neither poet directly confronts the difficult aspects of co-existence in the pre-war city, nor do they tackle the traumatic memory of how Lviv’s multicultural community was lost. While Polish literature of the 1980s, for example, made important strides towards discussing the difficult questions of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II, specifically in relation to cities like Warsaw, as in the brutally honest prose of Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, the essays of Jan Błoński, the journalistic work of Hanna Krall and others, Ukrainian literature remained silent in this regard, preferring laughter and parody to somber self-criticism. As the Ukrainian essayist and critic Iurko Prokhas’ko comments in relation to Austro-Hungarian nostalgia among Ukrainian intellectuals, it is easy to celebrate minorities who are long gone.41 Only much later would Andrukhovych turn to this problem, albeit relatively briefly, in his collection of urban essays Leksykon intimnykh mist (A Lexicon of Intimate Cities, 2011).

41

 Jurko Prochaśko [Iurko Prokhas’ko], “Kakania czy Cekania? czyli ‘misja Galicja’,” in Sny o Europie, ed. Ola Hnatiuk (Cracow: Nemrod, 2005), 131–152 (145).

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Conclusion: The Turn to the Local The Bu-Ba-Bu’s carnival manifested itself spatially in the utopia of the market square, both in terms of the imagery used by the poets and their activities as performers and revelers in the actual public space of the city; temporally, however, it also followed the carnival pattern, in that it ruled the literary space for a short, chaotic time, providing a period of the overturning of hierarchy and values, before fading away as Ukrainian culture reverted to slower rhythms and a  more subdued level of activity. While Ukrainian literature, and poetry in particular, has continued to connect to large young audiences in a way unthinkable in Western countries (as in the case of contemporary Ukraine’s most prominent poet, Serhii Zhadan, whose readings regularly gather huge, predominantly young audiences), it has never quite reached the carnivalesque peaks of the Vyvykh festival again (poets played an important role in the Maidan protests of 2013–2014, but were among the rank and file of participants, rather than primary organizers and stars of the events, as in the cultural festivals of the early 1990s). While the Bu-Ba-Bu’s existence was undoubtedly, in true carnival spirit, vivid, raucous but short-lived, it did facilitate, nevertheless, significant transformations in Ukrainian literature: it overcame taboos, liberalized the literary language, introduced a new consciousness of the body (albeit without challenging gender norms) and a new, ambiguous and inventive way of exploring the national and local pasts (albeit without exploring the more difficult aspects of these). The vision of Ukrainian culture that resulted from the Bu-Ba-Bu’s ethics and aesthetics was far removed from the established nationalist traditions, characterized as it was by the novelties of carnivalesque laughter and urbanity. In applying this combination to Lviv, the group’s poetry is seen both to rise from and serve as a tool to explore the experience of inhabiting the east-central European contemporary urban environment, with its fragmented, multiple and convoluted pasts. In this way, their work goes beyond the ostensibly shallow, temporary and destructive carnival aesthetic and serves to construct a sense of genius loci and local identity and provides a set of tools for reading the city that have had a significant influence on the subsequent generation of writers. Since the Bu-Ba-Bu, local identities have flourished in Ukrainian literature, as writers have turned away from the traditional nationalist spatial narrative based around the village, the earth and the borders of the dreamedof nation state to a multiplicity of local narratives that can be found on the

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micro scale of the urban-local, and through which national cultural narratives can be modified and hybridized. As Tamara Hundorova has noted, Ukrainian literature of the 1990s and 2000s, powerfully influenced by Andruhovych, Neborak and Irvanets’, developed into an “interweaving of ideal places, geographical maps, texts and discourses on the surface of the body of the national culture, with its own centers, peripheries, hybrids and nomads.”42 For the Bu-Ba-Bu, of course, Lviv is this local space, but they were not the only ones engaging with the city, even in the 1980s. They worked in the context of a flourishing of local sensibility in other cultural spheres—as in the legendary cabaret shows of the group “Ne Zhurys’” (Don’t worry), which were based around the specific, hybridized urban culture, humor and dialect of Lviv, and one of whose members, Iurii Vynnychuk, would go on to forge a career as a writer of both postmodernist and popular prose dedicated to his native city and its history. The same attitudes were manifest in the activities of groups like the Lion Society, mentioned already above, a youth movement that appeared in the mid-1980s and engaged in what Padraic Kenney has described as “micronationalist” activities—local initiatives aimed at preserving local heritage and cultural traditions of Lviv and its region.43 The BuBa-Bu were, then part of a wider trend, but their contribution remains unique and long-lasting, and developed in various influential ways in the work of all three writers. Andrukhovych’s novels and essays of the 1990s and 2000s focus on Lviv and his native Ivano-Frankivs’k in a more sober, reflective and sometimes politically charged way, while Neborak’s poetry and essays have come to form a body of work that represents a cultural chronicle of Lviv in the late and post-Soviet periods. Oleksandr Irvanets’, whose Bu-Ba-Bu poetry, as his relative absence from the analysis above suggests, is less urban than that of his colleagues, turned fully to urban prose in his novel Rivne/Rovno (2004), a dystopian vision of the author’s home city of Rivne split in two by politics. The group’s local sensibilities were also taken up by others: after the Bu-Ba-Bu’s demise, Andrukhovych was, as has already been mentioned, a key figure in the “Stanislav phenomenon,” a group of writers who formed their literary identities around the old name of Ivano-Frankivs’k, Stanislaviv, which was changed in 1962 by the Soviets in order to erase its Polish connotations (the city was named after the 17th-century Polish nobleman

42 43

 Hundorova, Pisliachornobyl’s’ka biblioteka, 21.  Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution, 123–130.

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Stanisław Potocki). The members of this group, such as Iurii Izdryk and Taras Prokhasko, are some of the most important writers of the 1990s and 2000s in Ukraine and wrote remarkable prose (no longer carnivalesque) about the local specificities of Ivano-Frankivs’k, Lviv and the Carpathian Mountains. While this loose grouping as such no longer exists, their local orientation continues in the prose of writers like Sofia Andrukhovych, in her highly successful historical novel about interwar Stanislaviv, Austria Felix (2012), which is remarkable for its descriptions of the Jewish and Polish sides of the city. The local sensibility pursued by the Bu-Ba-Bu can even be said to have influenced in an indirect way the development of more popular fiction that relies on a specific genius loci of Lviv for its appeal, such as detective novels of Andrii Kokotiukha. The focus on the local can also be seen elsewhere in Ukraine, most notably in the work of Serhii Zhadan, who takes the topography of his home city of Kharkiv, and the Soviet past inscribed in it, as the foundations of his work. While the extent of the direct influence of the Bu-Ba-Bu on these writers and others engaged in similar local urban explorations may vary, all of them pursue in one way or another the strategy that the poets pioneered in the 1980s, exploring cultural identity not in terms of the national, but of the urban/local, expressing in the process the complex relations between the two. Without the Bu-Ba-Bu’s spectacular turn towards the local specificity of Lviv in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is difficult to imagine that Ukrainian literature would have developed so markedly in this direction.

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Memory, and Lack of Memory, of Others: The Image of the Jewish and the Polish Neighbor in Oral Reflections of Lviv’s Current Inhabitants1 Halyna Bodnar

Introduction During World War II and the first postwar years, the population of Lviv changed radically in its ethnic composition and numerically. According to the census of 1931, almost half the city’s inhabitants (50.44%) were Roman Catholics (Poles), 31.9% Jews (Jews) and 15.93% Greek Catholics (Ukrainians).2 In 1939–1941, during the first Soviet period, the city experienced mass repressions (arrests, deportations and killings). As a result of four main waves of deportations, part of the population was displaced to distant regions of the USSR. The first two waves were predominantly Poles. After the German occupation and the destruction of the Jewish population in Lviv in 1944, less than 1% of those who survived remained.3 With the re-establishment of Soviet rule, Poles were deported to Poland in 1944–1946; in 1955 just 8,500 (2.3%) of the city’s inhabitants called themselves Poles.4 Some of the indigenous Ukrainians emi1

 Translated from the Ukrainian original by Annabelle Chapman. Research report from the project “Lviv in the 20th Century: The History of One Street,” accessed 18 December 2018, https://www.lvivcenter.org/en/ust/collections/bohomolcia-history/. 2  S. Makarchuk, “Evakuatsiia poliakiv zi L’vova u 1944–1946 rr.” in Lwów: miasto— społeczeństwo—kultura: Studia z dziejów miasta, vol. 4, ed. Kazimierz Karolczak (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2002), 401. 3  G. Hryciuk, Polacy we Lwowie 1939–1944: Życie codzienne (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 2000), 50. 4  V. Susak, “Etnichni ta sotsial’ni zminy v naselenni L’vova v 1939–1999 rokakh” (Master’s thesis, L’vivs’kyi natsional’nyi universitet im. I. Franka, 2000), 80.

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grated to the West or were repressed by the Soviet authorities in 1939–1941 and the second half of the 1940s. It is practically impossible to establish how many indigenous inhabitants of Lviv there were in Soviet Lviv; unofficially, it is said to be close to 10% of the city’s prewar population. In the middle of the second half of the 1940s, people from eastern regions, namely eastern Ukraine and Soviet republics, with Russia in the lead, were settling in the city. The new arrivals were, thus, Ukrainians, Russians as well as Jews. Thanks to rapid industrialization, Lviv also drew people from the villages and small towns of western Ukraine, who moved to the regional capital fleeing kolkhoz life and lack of money. Soviet Lviv became Ukrainian in terms of demography and language. Preserving the memory of Lviv’s prewar largest populations, Poles and Jews, did not suit the Soviet authorities. The official model of Ukrainian historical memory during the late Stalinist period was based on the formula of the “friendship of nations” and the idea of “everlasting brotherhood” between Russians and Ukrainians, rooted in mass consciousness. The liberalization of life during the period after Stalin’s death did not lead to going beyond the official Soviet narrative.5 The establishment of Soviet rule in September 1939 was treated like the liberation of Ukrainians from the social and national oppression of Polish masters. Official narratives of World War II did not mention the overwhelming Polish majority in the city during the German occupation, the Polish underground movement and the Poles’ role in reconquering the city from the Germans but were only about their unwillingness to leave for Poland. The Jews, exterminated in the Holocaust, were treated like victims on a par with the civilian population as a whole and not singled out among the people killed during the war.6 Contemporary culture of memory in Lviv, especially of World War II, is not, as it might seem at first sight, the replacement of a Soviet one with an exclusively nationalist one. The city creates its own memory with a significant local contribution to the public sphere. Yet this 5

 Iu. Kysla, “Konstruiuvannia ukrains’koi istorychnoi pam’iati v URSR vprodovzh stalins’koho periodu (1930-ti—1950-ti rr.),” in Mizhkul’turnyi dialoh vol. 1, Identychnist’ (Kyiv, 2009), 221–244. 6  V. Hrynevych, “Mit viiny ta viina mitiv,” Krytytka 91, 5 (2005): 2–8; T. C. Amar, “Different but the Same or the Same but Different? Public Memory of the Second World War in Post-Soviet Lviv,” Journal of Modern European History 9 (2011): 373– 396. Ukrainian version in Historians.in.ua, accessed 1 March 2017,  http:// historians.in.ua/index.php/istoriya-i-pamyat-vazhki-pitannya/183-taryksyril-amar-inaksha-ale-podibna-chy-podibna-ale-inaksha-publichna-pamyat-prodruhu-svitovu-viynu-u-postradyanskomu-lvovi.

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open production of historical images does not protect it from “closed, simplistic and ultimately false narratives.”7 In contemporary Ukraine’s politics of memory a monoethnic pro-Ukrainian approach prevails; one that “extracts the image of ‘the other’ from its own history, or stereotypically perceives only the ‘foreign’ in the image of the ‘Other’.”8 Memory is formed by official historical policy, public opinion and family memories. It is subjective and variable. People remember the very same events from the past differently and talk about it in different ways. Changes in contemporary life lead to a review of the past, to a change in emphasis on events that people were silent about before. Collective memory is a social construct that individual memory is built into. These two types of memory are interdependent and define each other. Memory inherently has group character; the memories of members of the community are determined by the group context, and in a society, there are as many variants of collective memory as there are different groups. Forgetting the past is explained by the disappearance of the carriers of this very memory, rather than just by the desire to forget.9 However, memory is also inherently and deliberately silencing, to forget the uncomfortable and to heroize the experiences of one’s own group. Each new sounding of memory gives it fresh content, while the reasoning of others, through their perceptions and frequent paraphrasing, can become part of one’s own history.10 Subjective testimony is never solely individual but also the superimposition of the experience of communicating with other people. What is relevant is how different, often antagonistic, visions of the past coexist; how different memories are perceived by society.11

7

 T. S. Amar, “Inaksha, ale podibna, chy podibna, ale inaksha? Publichna pam’iat’ pro Druhu Svitovu viinu u postradians’komu L’vovi,” Historians.in.ua, accessed 1 March 2017, http://historians.in.ua/index.php/istoriya-i-pamyat-vazhki-pitannya/ 183-taryk-syril-amar-inaksha-ale-podibna-chy-podibna-ale-inaksha-publichna-pamyat-pro-druhu-svitovu-viynu-u-postradyanskomu-lvovi. 8  A. Podol’skyi, “Ukrains’ke suspil’stvo i pam’iat’ pro Holokost: sproba analizu deiakykh aspektiv.” Holokost i suchasnist’: Studii v Ukraini i sviti 5, 1 (2009): 51. 9  M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory. Edited, Translated and with an Introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago; London: University of Chicago, 1992), 244. 10  D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: University Press, 1985), 412. 11  H. Hrinchenko, “Kolektyvna (sotsial’na) pam’iat’: krytyka teorii ta metodu doslidzhennia,” in Skhid-Zakhid: Istoryko-kul’turolohichnyi zbirnyk, vol. 13-14, Istorychna pam’iat’ i totalitaryzm: dosvid Tsentral’no-Skhidnoi Ievropy, ed. Bolodymyr Kravchenko (Kharkiv, 2009), 11–24.

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This article aims to examine the memory of Lviv’s contemporary inhabitants about the city’s former Polish and Jewish populations, which were the dominant ones until the middle of the 20th century. It looks at the images of the Pole and the Jew in their stories; what the sources of these are; which recollections do, or do not, operate in family memory, and are, or are not, passed on to future generations. The sources are 27 biographical interviews recorded with inhabitants of O. Bohomol’tsia Street in 2008–2009 as part of the project “Lviv in the 20th Century: The History of One Street.”12 The interviews are divided into three groups, based on the generation of the speaker. The first, eldest group (A) consists of people born between 1922 and 1938 (nine people). The speakers in the second group (B) were born between 1942 and 1958 (eleven people). The final, youngest group (C) is made up of people born between 1964 and 1978 (seven people). In five cases, representatives of two generations of a family were questioned; in three others, couples. The interviews were conducted with local Ukrainians, (including those originally from Lviv, ones displaced from Poland and others who moved from villages and towns in western Ukraine), as well as Ukrainians and Russians from eastern Ukraine who arrived in the city during the postwar years.13 The oral history project “Lviv in the 20th Century: The History of One Street” examined the residents’ environment with a focus on their own homes and the buildings on the street as historical evidence. This means that, rather than an imagined representation of Poles and Jews, people’s recollections were formed on the basis of life alongside and in contact with them as actual neighbors. The Polish neighbors are remembered as the prewar inhabitants of the street until their forced eviction to Poland in 1945–1946, and as those who for various reasons did not leave the city and tasted Soviet reality. With respect to the Jewish neighbors, the stories contained two different images: the prewar Jews who “disappeared,” and those considered “not genuine” who arrived during the postwar years. Whereas the Poles were either a monolithic group from before the war or their individual representatives in Soviet society, the image of the Jew was split, at times even conflicting. Given the (auto) biographical character of the interviews and the prioritization of the street’s eldest residents, people’s accounts were dominated by the Soviet period. In the context of interpersonal relationships with neighbors, its balanced pace of life and the relative stability of society were often remembered with nostalgia. 12

 See: https://www.lvivcenter.org/en/ust/collections/bohomolcia-history/, accessed 18 December 2018. 13  See the list of respondents in the appendix. Abbreviations: “f ”—female, “m”—male.

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“Polish” and “Other” Jews: Lack of Memory of the Holocaust In the minds of the city’s contemporary inhabitants, two groups of Lviv Jews arose: those from before the war and those who arrived from the eastern regions of Ukraine or the USSR after the war. The first group was mentioned by the oldest generation of locals and a  few of the newcomers. The Polish researcher Anna Wylegała studied the memory of the Jews in the town of Zhovkva near Lviv using Rosa Lehmann’s work14 on three categories of evidence of the Holocaust: the stories of victims, witnesses and outsiders, used, in particular, by later generations, including descendants of victims and witnesses.15 Wylegała also identifies three types of stories about the Jews up until their destruction: “political” (stories distinguishing our group from others), “mythical” (purely imagined stories due to a  lack of direct experience) and “sympathetic” (stories exemplifying good relations with Jews).16 Using Lehmann’s classification, the old Ukrainian locals’ memories of the city’s prewar Jews are “political” and, more rarely, “sympathetic.” Occasionally, for postwar settlers from the eastern regions, they are clearly “mythical.” Representatives of the second and third generations did not mention Lviv’s Jews, unlike its Poles. Local Ukrainians born before the war shared fragmented memories of Jews as neighbors and owners of buildings. They were part of their general biographical accounts, but respondents did not cite concrete examples of neighborly relations. They only remembered the Jews’ profession or, rarely, family name. They did not speak of the Holocaust. Only in rare cases did they mention the destruction of the Jews unemotionally and in passing, using standard phrases. In one and the same interview, stories about different Jewish neighbors and their shared fate would be almost literally duplicated, e.g. “the owner of this building was a Jew… The war came; they went to the ghetto; still voluntarily at first”;17 and “round here there lived predominantly Jews. 14

 R. Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town (Oxford; New York: Berghahn, 2001). 15  A. Vyliegala, “(Ne)pam’iat’ na ruinakh: Zahybel’ ievreiv Zhovky u svidomosti suchasnykh meshkantsiv mista,” Holokost i suchasnist’: Studii v Ukraini i sviti 10, no. 2 (Kyiv, 2011), 13–14. 16  A. Wylegała, Przesiedlenia a pamięć: Studium (nie)pamięci społecznej na przykładzie ukraińskiej Galicji i polskich “ziem odzyskanych” (Toruń, 2014), 269–70. 17  Here and henceforth the Ukrainian original of the quotations have not been included for reasons of length. A selection of the original interviews are included

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The order came, yes, like for our owner, all to the ghetto. And they went themselves at first, they thought […]” (1Аf). More often, they singled out “Polish buildings,” e.g., “N number was Polish,” “at N there was an apartment building, with this Polish woman as the owner,” whereas the “Jewish” ones remained unidentified, e.g., “round here there lived predominantly Jews.” The same respondent mentions the existence of two shops on the street (with exact addresses), but their owners were not specified (2Аf). Just three of the Ukrainians who lived in Lviv before the war mentioned the Holocaust; a woman who arrived from a nearby village while still a child, and a woman and a man born in the city. The two women’s stories about the extermination of the Jews came in the context of threats to their own families during the German occupation; hiding in the building’s bomb shelter, the killing of ten people for one German killed, separate places for Germans in trams, and so on. Just one of the three interviews mentioned helping Jewish neighbors in the ghetto. Subconsciously, the events of the Holocaust and survival during the war years were superimposed, intertwined. The extermination of Jews was lost among other misfortunes: The owner lived there on the right and the left side, the owner of that building, he was a  Jew […]. There was a  man and a  woman, he was a  hairdresser, they had two daughters… The war came, they went to the ghetto, still voluntarily at first. In our building there is still a bomb shelter, it was not there before the war, no, it was made as early as in 1939, when the bombs fell, we sat there […]. (1Аf) Well what can I tell you, the German authorities at first sort of flirted and then behaved very harshly. Firstly, they would destroy, you know about the Jews yourselves, they would catch everyone […]. In our building there was a Jewish family […]. They would bring us valuables […], but mother refused […] they were thrown in that ghetto, […] mother would go there, take them something to eat […]. And then they wiped them all out […]. If some German was shot, they would not look—they would grab ten people and kill them. What have I remembered [... is that] there were trams and inside the tram there was in the research report from the project “Lviv in the 20th Century: The History of One Street,” https://www.lvivcenter.org/en/ust/collections/bohomolcia-history/, accessed 18 December 2018.

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a division with something like string; people sat on one side, and on the other side Germans […]. No-one had the right to go over to that side […], schools were not operating […]. (3Af)

The third story is a standard one or two sentences without emotion about the fate of the prewar Jews and Poles, and with generally known facts: […] I know there was some owner of cinemas there […], there were lawyers there […]. Many Jews, who were then exterminated […]. Poles, who left in 1947–48 […]. And that is why we didn’t encounter any of them. We found those who arrived in the place of those displaced. (5Аm)

Mentions of the Holocaust prompted these respondents to emphasize the dangers for their own group. This way the material from Lviv confirms Wylegała’s conclusion that the people she questioned in Zhovkva “do not deny the Holocaust, but it seems that they are more consciously trying to highlight that suffering is universal and that their group went through no less than the Jews,” and, moreover, that “the peculiarities of these kinds of stories are guiding descriptive structures from someone else’s tragic fate in the description of one’s own, which is a  ‘substitution of frames’.”18 Both women cited above provided detailed stories of shootings in the prisons of Lviv in June 1941, a tragedy endured by their national group, the Ukrainians: On Lons’koho Street, in Zamarstyniv […] in Lychakiv I  remember trucks brought them, there were these tiny coffins, and that there was not a whole person inside, just the bones of those murdered in that prison from Zamarstyniv […]. Thus they buried them in Lychakiv right at the end of the cemetery; if you go straight, then on the left […]. (1Af) […] then in 1939 they took that yard […] on Mira Street, on Lons’koho Street […] they brought out all the prisoners and shot them all there […], because they were all political prisoners […]. And afterwards people, once the Germans had come, then people went and looked for their folk […]. (3Af)

18

 A. Vyliegala, “(Ne)pam’iat’ na ruinakh,” 31.

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At the same time, there occurs a positive image of a German—“they photographed everything […] But relatives of the arrested were let onto the grounds of this prison”—, and a negative one of a Jew: “they gathered the Jews to whom they had given gloves […] and they were pulling people out […] and loaded who they could onto high wagons” (1Af, 1Bf). This is just one fragmentary mention of abuse of Jews supposedly responsible for Soviet murders. Collective imagination associated Jews with everything Soviet for their active support of the authorities, and, thereby, they bore responsibility for their crimes. However, the Jewish pogrom itself of 1941 was not spoken of, nor was the participation of part of the Ukrainian nationalist forces in it, which corresponds to today’s distorted academic discourse about Lviv’s history during World War II.19 There was no conviction of Ukrainians for cooperating with the German authorities. Similarly, the theme of the cruel killing of inmates of the city’s prisons by representatives of the Soviet authorities continued to be discussed only among the descendants of the witnesses of this tragedy: “In 1944 they returned here to Lviv and interrogated all the witnesses who could have seen this. They kept my friend’s parents on Dzerzhinsky Street for three days” (1Bf). The passage of memories about the “voluntary” resettlement of the Jews to the ghetto quoted above ends with a story about Germans as managers and approval for German rule in Lviv: “The well works to this day, the Germans built it before retreating […]” (1Af). The positive image of the occupying authorities among local Ukrainians is seen in answers to direct questions and passed on to descendants. In the fragment quoted below the respondents, a mother and daughter, race to enumerate the advantages of life under the Germans, as opposed to the Soviets, in particular for Ukrainians: All theaters were open. The opera theater was for Germans, Maria Zan’kovets’ka Theater for Ukrainians and the one on Horodets’ka Street […] for Poles. (1Af) There were performances. The Germans strove to make life during the war continue as usual […]. At night there was a blackout, they were afraid of bombing, at night huge porcelain arrows were painted on street corners to know where to go. (1Bf)

19

 T. S. Amar, “Inaksha, ale podibna, chy podibna, ale inaksha?”

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[…] one didn’t have to fear walking, in this respect there was order. If you did nothing, the Germans never moved […]. We had ration cards, the markets had everything, only money, the ration cards we had for bread […] there were ration cards, well bread certainly, meat as much as was set out there, given for ration cards […]. A certain Dr. Mykytyuk was at ours and he opened a technical dentistry school on Akademitska Street, he recruited children, and mama signed me up too […], and then they came and threw him out […]. We had one hour for German and the rest for Ukrainian […]. On Horodets’ky [Steet] [... there was] a Ukrainian school […]. (1Af)

The sharp condemnation of the Soviet regime and the construction of a positive image of German rule by this family is explained by the arrest and exile after the war of their husband and father, as mentioned by neighbors, rather than by the respondents themselves. Another theme revealed by the Ukrainians’ experiences (along with the stories of the shooting of prison inmates in June 1941), by then in postwar Lviv, is repression by the Soviet authorities, the threat of sending families to remote regions of the USSR: Very many people from our street were sent away, local Ukrainian people who lived here, they were all sent away. At night, around two or three in the morning, you know how they sent people away to Siberia. Yes, they sent many away […]. It was around, insofar as I remember, 1947, 1948. Every night. We had bags at the ready […]. As soon as the car arrived, people were loaded onto it, but not us […]. Children go to sleep […]. I even remember their surnames, but they were all sent away […]. (2Af) […] on Maletskyy Street there were five rooms, which we left immediately in 1945 as then people with big flats were more likely to be sent to the East […]. It was very beautiful there, there were these little hooks for paintings […]. We travelled, so that it would be calm, to a  quiet place, so that nobody would see us, nobody hear us, because my father was a lawyer until the war and during the occupation too […]. (5Аm)

There was an impression that representatives of the prewar generation spoke cautiously, not saying on record things they would say in family circles. The

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younger ones were already more open; they made their parents’ and elder neighbors’ stories more concrete; they mentioned neighbors’ names and surnames and judged their actions. This can be seen in statements by representatives of the first and second generations. Here they are of different families, with the untalkative mother of second respondent below, speaking, as we will see, only in family circles. These statements are about traitor neighbors, whose nationality is not specified: At N (building) they sat in the window, only saying who should be sent away […]. (2Af) […] a blanket on Mrs L.’s window and full observation, she knew about everyone […]. On the ground floor of N building there was this woman M., supposedly a janitor […]. She denounced the Ukrainian intelligentsia […], the Germans came, she denounced the Jews […]. (1Bf)

As far as postwar settlers from Russia are concerned, those who had contacts with older neighbors spoke about the prewar Jews of Lviv. From them they heard various stories which they then recounted. However, contacts between arrivals from eastern regions and Lviv natives were not close enough to trust each other’s memories. As a result, the silencing of the Holocaust did not figure in these interviews. One female Russian settler retold the story of the departure of a prewar Jewish doctor that she had heard from neighbors, without details of when exactly (“during all that turmoil”): […] a doctor lived there at some point […] he occupied a whole floor […], he occupied it with his family, that is the best […]. That doctor was good. He had servants, and these servants lived in that flat […]. Well, during all that turmoil, these people left […], where to, I do not know […], but comments about them, there were old women, they knew them, comments about how the doctor was kind, good, they remembered it all: ‘Here there were doctors, here there were doctors […].’ This family was Jewish […]. The servants lived downstairs, they even had a horse, on that horse they would go to the theater […], the dacha outside town was very good […], now people say dacha, then it was an entire estate […]. And all these people lived there, downstairs […]. (7Af)

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Migrants from the eastern regions were closer to each other and retold each other stories with some imagined, fictitious additions. The transfer of stories heard from older residents changes them and gives them a new meaning. At the same time somebody else’s story, to some extent, becomes the respondents’ own experience. Further on in that conversation the narrator confirms the escape of Jews from Lviv based on a  story which she had heard from someone else, and who had obviously arrived from the east too. The woman cannot grasp how it was possible to drop everything and leave; the only explanation is the emigrants’ nationality, witout specifying why Jews could not stay: […] And throughout the second floor lived the owners of this house […] and everyone said the people were good, very rich […]. And there is one house, so one resident says, I was given this flat, they left everything in the house—gold spoons, ladles—everything, everything, everything […]. People left as it was, I don’t understand how they left like that […]. But they could not live here, Jews too […]. (7Af)

Examining the memory of Zhovkva’s postwar community, Wylegała writes about the Jews’ mythical departure from the town before the start of the war, thereby avoiding death, also widespread in her interviews. She is inclined to see this as the stereotype of the resourceful Jew, capable of saving himself in hard times.20 The story of the imagined emigration of Lviv’s prewar population was also discernible in later, second and third generations of people who arrived from eastern regions. However, these émigrés were generally, or even exclusively, deemed to be Poles. The fate of the prewar Jewish population was not mentioned: “They (the Poles) almost all left in 1939, who wanted to leave, they all left […] Here in our building, a Czech Jewish woman was the owner. The German started approaching before World War II, the whole building was hers […]” (14Bw); or “That’s how it was, everything here came to be populated after the war or after 1939, when the native inhabitants left” (13Bf). One female representative of the third generation—from a mixed family, with a mother from the east and a father resettled from Poland—spoke very generally about the extermination of the prewar population and mass emi-

20

 A. Vyliegala, “(Ne)pam’iat’ na ruinakh,” 29–30.

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gration, when postwar Lviv was uninhabited: “[…] all the same those were arrivals, postwar […] As far as I understand, Lviv was empty […] there were none here who survived the war, I just don’t know them […]” (18Cf). Among those who arrived from the eastern regions in the postwar years, none had witnessed the events of the Holocaust in their previous places of residence; or at least did not talk about it in their recollections. This meant that the fate of Lviv’s Jews did not move them, did not prompt sympathy. The interviews that do not mention Lviv’s Jews give the impression that the speakers did not know about them at all. In the stories of those who did mention the prewar Jews, they were wealthy people, owning entire buildings: “A lawyer lived here (second floor), with his father on the first floor, and servants downstairs […]” (9Af). At the same time, the Jews were seen as a separate group: “N building here in the corner on Bohomol’tsia street, that Mrs N. said […] that it was a Jewish building and that a  Jew built it, and a  Jew was the caretaker […]” (12Bf). None of the interviews mentioned the Jewish quarter or poor Jews. Just one elderly Ukrainian woman pointed out: “Our street, they said during the Polish years, was inhabited by the gentry. The worst district was behind the Opera theater […]” (1Af). Strikingly, none of the questioned residents of one of the buildings— four people—mentioned the Jewish family that arrived in the postwar years, having survived the Holocaust, and whose descendants live there to this day. The granddaughter of prisoners of the ghetto told the story of her grandfather and grandmother, which she herself did not hear until the 1990s, very superficially: Grandpa and grandma were from Vinnytsia region. There, underage prisoners of the ghetto [... in] Vinnytsia region, Bershad’ village […]. They were Jews […]. They were born in 1930, they were fifteen. I don’t know where they lived during that period, before they came here […]. They arrived in Lviv […]. There are video cassettes, the Germans arrived and took grandma and grandpa. They spoke of the ghetto […]. That was even earlier […]. The brothers of my grandma were […]. They too were, they were all in the ghetto. Two more brothers, yes, but they are in America, they are still alive. (20Cf)

Memory of the prewar Jews is not passed on to descendants. In one interview, listening to the mother’s very general words about neighbors, the daughter

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added details: “It was Poles who lived there” (2Cf). The mother took no notice of her daughter’s remark but gave the name of a Jew who lived nearby, emphasizing: “He was a Jew, but a Polish Jew” (2Af). Mentioning the postwar departure of the Poles, she does not explain what happened to the native Jews, who had been ascribed Polish identity: Upstairs there was this Polish Jew Hofman […], he was a  Jew, but a Polish Jew and they lived on the top floor, they were highly respected […]. There was a Tarhanova (inaudible), she was a Pole, then she left… It [the building] was entirely empty after the war […]. (2Af)

Alongside the “Polish” Jews, they mentioned the “Austrian” and “Czech” ones. Whereas a native Ukrainian woman characterized the Polish-speaking Jewish intelligentsia as “Polish,” a woman who arrived from Russia called the prewar owner of the building an “Austrian” Jew: “And overall this building belonged to an Austrian Jew, a lawyer […]” (9Af). Meanwhile, a descendant of easterners spoke of a “Czech” Jewish woman: Here in our building, the owner was a Czech Jewish woman. The Germans started approaching here before World War II, the whole building was hers, she lived in the flat next door and rented out the rest […]. My godmother told me she was already dead […]. She worked as a translator at the military command and knew all this […]. (14Bf) 

None of these women spoke of the fate of the Jews mentioned. However, it can be assumed that the first, a local, and the third, whose aunt “knew all this,” were aware of what happened. The son of the second woman cited above, talking about his interest in the history of the building’s prewar owners and their protracted identification, did not mention their nationality, while his mother spoke of the “Austrian” Jew: I was interested in the history of the street, I still have old Polish books in electronic editions […]. I spent a long time searching for who lived in this building and found it in an address book… found an address book for Lviv, about six hundred pages long, but listed by surname rather than address, so I spent two weeks searching who lived in this building […]. Even here there was already a  three-digit telephone number of some lawyer […]. (9Cm)

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“Jews Lived Here; They Left for Israel”: “Soviet” Jews Whereas Lviv’s prewar Jews were not spoken of, the Jews who arrived during the postwar years were separated from the backdrop of others in the memories of both natives and settlers. This can be seen clearly in detailed accounts about the neighborhood, in which some Jewish families are mentioned: N flat, that’s where Jews lived […], he was a butcher. She didn’t work, her parents were there. The Jews living there left for Israel […]. Another flat was taken over by the KGB, Ya., he was a colonel of that service and she a lieutenant colonel […]. And earlier, in the cellar too […]. At ours the whole cellar was occupied by inhabitants. On our side there was a cellar, a taxi-driver lived there, she was a janitor, there were also children, then P. lived there […]. The entire cellar was taken up by people […]. We lived harmoniously in the house […]. They lived on the second floor too, they left for Israel with those […]. He was an accountant at the base and she, as a Jewish woman, was at home […]. And then the public prosecutor moved in […] and T. lived there […]. On the ground floor, when I  arrived, there lived a  Polish lady […]. People from the prosecutor’s office lived there too […]. And on the courtyard side, too, there lived Jews […]. It’s all mixed up—some died, some left […]. (9Af) The neighbors have changed a lot. Some left… In practice we don’t have much contact with the neighbors […] Well we knew each other, but that we would have a lot of contact, there was none of that… The Jews left […]. (11Bf)

Describing the postwar neighbors, one of the local Ukrainian women from Lviv, born before the war, does not include her nationality. Instead, she juxtaposes two groups: the “local population,” with the “wartime” ones, “people from the prosecutor’s office,” “those who worked at the City Council.” The Jews were put in a separate group: There people were mostly wartime ones, there was no local population there, there were people from the prosecutor, […] they worked at the City Council, there was one family of Jews, they left afterwards. (2Af)

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Jewish children in postwar Lviv are also presented as a  separate group. According to the Ukrainian woman relocated from Poland, her children, born in 1944 and 1949, were friends with Russians in the 1950s. There were no Jews in their group: The children played on the street, there was no such thing that you are this and you are that […] Jewish children did not play. The Russian ones did, they didn’t understand that yet then, they were children. (4Af)

For the Ukrainian woman relocated from Poland, “members of the NKVD, judges, prosecutors” were synonymous for a Jewish background: “And in our street in the center, there lived only Jews, members of the NKVD, judges, a prosecutor still lives here […]” (4Af). Similar to the prewar inhabitants of Lviv who gave the former Jews a  Polish identity, the non-native Jews were considered “inauthentic” by the younger, that is, third generation; such as the daughter from a mixed family of a Ukrainian man relocated from Poland and a woman born in eastern Ukraine: On our street there were very many Jews, that’s the only thing. But in any case, they were displaced people […], we had already settled, because I had many friends, I know everyone […] they called one the Belarusian Jew, as there were no native ones […]. (18Cf)

Not all accounts of life on one of Lviv’s central streets during the Soviet era emphasized the inhabitants’ (Jewish) nationality. Yet it cannot be overlooked either. A woman from prewar Lviv, describing her neighbors from the Soviet intelligentsia, was ultimately struck that almost all the people living around her in the building were Jews. Another woman, born in Russia, said she went through a personal drama when she saw the empty flats after her neighbors had left. She did not emphasize the families’ nationality, but used the phrases “also Jews,” “there also lived a family,” creating the impression that the vast majority of the neighbors were Jews: Our building was highly intelligent […]. After the war, he lived on the third floor above us, the chief doctor at the Railway hospital. A highly cultured person […]. There were also intelligent people living above us, he was a lawyer […]. And those on the second floor, and those above us were Jews […]. They arrived from Odessa after the war […]. But

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both moved abroad […]. I also know who lived by the yard […]. In our building, I don’t know why, almost all were Jews […]. (3Af) […] B. lived on the second floor […]. Here lived B., head of the clinic […] at K., also Jews, Jews, and they were good people […]. There downstairs lived S., a distinguished boxing coach […]. Downstairs lives D., a  pensioner […], and on our side downstairs there also lived pensioners, they also died […]. Beneath us there also lived a family, a university lecturer, of Russian language […], in Ukrainian […], they left for America […]. When they started leaving, we felt sorry for them all […], they would leave, I just could not sleep at night, it was somehow dark, no light from the windows […]. (7Af)

They felt sorry for the Jewish families; a few respondents said they were good people: “Jews lived there, afterward they left for America. After that a millionaire lived there with his family […]. The Jews were good […]” (12Bf); “There was a flat nearby too. Already in my 80s, they left, it was a very pretty family, but it seems to me that they were Jews.” (13Bm). Most of the respondents’ memories of those who arrived after the war from Eastern Ukraine and Russia are neutral or positive. Against this background, one sharply negative assessment of the Jews’ and Russians’ privileged position in Soviet Lviv stands out. It is by a Ukrainian woman resettled from Poland. Worse flats on the ground floor and semi-underground rooms were inhabited by Ukrainians who had been there for a long time or settled there during the postwar years: When I came here in 1947 […], the center was all Jews and ‘Muscovites’. Where there was a better house, better in every respect, it was for them […]. They fought […], and wherever they went, it was for them […], and our people lived in cellars, among the rats; these people lived there, they came from the countryside and came to live in this cellar […]. A woman with two children lived here […], in this building in the cellar […]. (4Af).

Only further on in the story, in the context of describing the chaotic market in Lviv, does a sharply opposite view of the settlers who came “to us from Russia for food, it was poor there” emerge:

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There was a flea market where the Krakivs’kyi market was, where the Opera (theater) is now […] There whoever had any bottles brought them out, people still had old supplies, scarves, some fabric, some boots or shoes […] They walked among people carrying what they had, there were no stalls […]. The militia did not disperse it, only when it was there longer did they disperse it […] They came to us themselves from Russia for food, it was poor there […]. (4Af)

A migrant of the third generation from a small town in western Ukraine got a  negative impression of “Soviet” Jews after she moved into a  flat that had been left by them, without knowing them personally. The negative image was formed indirectly, only after the respondent got talking about the redevelopment of the flat: […] we did not find them there, I know that they left, to Israel, I think […]. I know that it was a man and a woman, and two children […]. We found it as they lived, the previous owners, the kitchen stove, [...] and the pot still full […]. All rubbish, all the toilets covered in these photographs of Lenin, these photographs, cut-out of newspapers […]” (19Cf).

Memories of Poles: “Gentry,” “Polish Buildings,” “Ancestors” The image of the prewar Polish population, which was repressed by the Soviet authorities or left, is not fully developed. The oldest generations of respondents mentioned the Polish state and authorities. They spoke of the Poles in the context of privileged-subordinate relations between Poles and Ukrainians, such as lady and servant, and about the lack of funds compared to the postwar Soviet reality. Poles, like Jews, are always presented as rich people, as “gentry” owning real estate, property. The residents’ high social standing and wealth is portrayed by way of reference to maids, various household appliances and other images. Life was particularly full of fantastic, fairytale wealth in the descriptions of the second and third generations, gleaned from neighbors who had lived there a long time: He, the owner, had both a locksmith and a janitor. And each inhabitant during Polish rule, L. would say, had a  maid. He occupied an entire

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floor, except N and N flats. The gentleman lived and worked here. He had servants […]. In the corner, how can I tell you, a sort of partition was made, a kind of enclosure. And that’s where the maid slept. (12Bf)

The Ukrainian families’ lower social standing was not specifically emphasized, but it transpired from the context. The nationality of the servants was implied, rather than explicitly defined too. The reasons why Ukrainians settled in the city center during the interwar years were not made explicit. Nobody spoke about how their ancestors worked as caretakers in the families of Poles and Jews. In this study of a small community, the advantage is that pieces of information withheld by one respondent may be revealed in statements by another. For the respondents born in prewar Lviv, and even more so for those who arrived from eastern regions after the war, the fact that the Ukrainians lived in ground floor and semi-basement rooms did not trigger any protest, in contrast to the woman resettled from Poland. They had no particular reservations about the perceived shift from a privileged Polish-Jewish group in the prewar years to a Russian-Jewish one during the Soviet period: “Practically all Ukrainians lived on the ground floor or in the cellar. Nobody occupied the first and second floor because there were mostly army people there” (2Af). The woman emphasized that her Ukrainian family lived in a  semi-basement room and did not move to any of the better rooms in the building even though it was “all empty after the war”; nor did they occupy the worse rooms on the ground floor (2Af). Another Ukrainian woman from prewar Lviv did not even contemplate the possibility of occupying a deserted home on her own account, and spoke of how her family did not take advantage of it (1Af). No interview directly mentioned that Lviv belonged to the Polish state, let alone the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. Remembering September 1939, the long-term residents related meetings with Red Army soldiers—either their own or from other people’s stories—but they did not speak about the change in state authority. While the establishment of Soviet rule was clear from the context, Poland’s defeat was not mentioned. One foreign power had simply been replaced by another. Wylegała concluded that people did not speak of “aristocratic Poland” so as to not imply that they placed Soviet rule above it.21 Lviv-born Ukrainians’ recollections of Poles are neutral or positive and contrast markedly with the harsher reflections of the woman resettled from

21

 A. Wylegała, Przesiedlenia a pamięć, 322.

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Poland. People from Lviv, children and adolescents, did not have memories as negative as those of Ukrainians from the surrounding regions who had the added experience of resettlement.22 The Ukrainian woman resettled from Poland did not mention the prewar Jews. Asked about who lived in this or that building, she replied curtly, referring to the Poles of Lviv: “There were Poles […], they were arrested […].” (4Af). This distinctly unemotional reflection must have been marked by Ukrainian-Polish confrontation and resettlement. Despite the general price rises during the first years of Soviet rule, the woman paints the picture of a tough financial situation during the Polish years: After the war the city was not very damaged. But everything was very expensive […]. I had a son, then another, it’s not like I went anywhere […]. The trams travelled along Franko Street, 3 kopeks, 20 when it was Poland, back then few people treated themselves to a ride […]. Then, with the arrival of Soviet rule, they gave people soap […], bread […], they shoved all that into Western Ukraine […], so that people would see how they developed it […], because the border was close, to have some kind of resistance. (4Af)

Another woman, born in a  village near Lviv, emphasized the difference between “Polish” and “Austrian” architecture, saying that “the building is Austrian, it is not a Polish building.” From her contradictory reasoning, it follows that Austrian is better than Polish: It seems to me that the building is Austrian, it is not a Polish building, because Polish and Austrian ones differ in something, there you go. And this building, as I see it, even compared to some buildings, is in quite good condition […]. It is an architectural monument, our N building, I don’t know about the others. Well this building, they say, has already become a bit damaged in recent years […]. But if you compare other buildings with it, it really is in good shape […]. (6Af)

22

 Studying the memory of Poles in the wartime years—those resettled to the Polish Western Territories and those who remained in Ukraine—Anna Wylegała reached the conclusion that memories of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict were the most emotional among people who lived in villages at the time, regardless of their fate during the postwar years; see A. Wylegała, “Polacy w Galicji podczas drugiej wojny światowej: Doświadczenie i pamięć,” Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej 4 (2014): 58–59.

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In her memories, the woman who migrated from Russia constructs a  picture of the Russian “descendent” as an equal owner of the “ancestors’” prewar property. This may be based on the idea of common Slavic roots, which was cultivated by the Soviet authorities: The houses are strong […]. The whole street is built as some historic ensemble […]. There […] there was a well […], they still took water […], that was also left by the ancestors[…], the water was good, and then they destroyed it all. (7Af)

The prewar Polish owners were mentioned in the context of descendants who these days come over as tourists to see their family buildings. However, this was in just two interviews, and with a married couple at that. The accounts were very similar: brief and without emotion, while describing the buildings: The building opposite is exactly like ours, except it has three floors. It was not extended. The architecture is exactly the same […]. Identical buildings, just built on other sides. Not long ago a man come over from Sweden, of Polish origin, aged fifty I think, he came specially to take a look at that building […]. The building really is their ancestral one and his grandfather built this building. I  think the building is from around the start of the 20th century. Well I don’t know the date […], but I know that this building was built as a private one and I know that this is an Austrian construction […]. (13Bm) We accidentally met a  Pole who asked to be photographed near the building […], and he started saying that he came here from abroad, neither from France nor America, but his parents live in Cracow, and he said that these buildings were built by his grandfather. And his father asked him, his father lived here in the building opposite […]. He photographed the state of the building […]. He himself said that these two buildings were identical, built from a single plan. (13Bf)

Members of the younger generation equaled the eldest Ukrainians born in prewar Lviv to the people who arrived from the East during the postwar years. At this stage, the eldest residents left on the street are only those who arrived immediately after the war, and it is these residents who members of the younger generation remember:

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There were two Polish families on the second floor […], the rest had already all died. There was effectively no-one left here. […] We have a neighbor downstairs, she is also from some year 1946–45, she comes from Russia, but nobody else, all the rest were new settlers […]. (14Bf) Those downstairs left before my eyes. Those opposite also left for Germany. Those below left for Israel. That flat was bought seven years ago. The one opposite on the first floor was also bought three years ago, lots of owners have changed there […]. Those who left for Germany, there the owners are also changing for the fourth time. That D. on the ground floor, opposite I., has really lived there for a long time, a general’s widow who arrived from Leningrad […]. (19Cf)

“Close Others”: Polish Neighbors in the Communal Apartment In the memories of life in the communal apartment we learn about a lonely Polish woman who grew old and eventually had her room annexed by the neighbors. It is striking how lightly owners of apartments that were once communal now speak of annexing rooms after the death of neighbors, without mentioning a thing about them: “Then one woman died, so we took one room […], and later one more woman died, so the neighbor took one room”. (2Af). The interview extract below describes in detail the space of the communal apartment and its alterations, merely mentioning the lonely neighbor “who lived there a  very long time ago.” One can only guess that she was Polish; she was mentioned as a Pole in another interview: That means a three-room apartment with a bathroom, toilet, kitchen along with two rooms […], one leading to the other, the second was reached through the kitchen […]. Off the kitchen there lived our neighbor from the communal apartment, who lived there a very long time ago. And we were there, well I  was a  young person then […]. I  didn’t have time for conversations, especially since she lived there alone […], I had no contact with her, there was mama, two neighbors by the kitchen […]. And we were the ones who tried […], we made the corridor into a kitchen, gave her the kitchen, but took the bathroom for

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ourselves. That was the agreement, later they were going to swap, they wanted to swap almost at the same time […]. (5Аm)

As it turned out further on in the conversation, they were in close contact with this solitary neighbor; from her, they found out the fate of the prewar residents and spent time in her room. However, we do not have any additional information, apart from a  surname. It can be assumed that the narrator’s mother did not share her conversations with the neighbor with him, a  young and anxious man, or that he was simply not interested in them. Contacts between two solitary women, who were also prewar residents, were closer given their shared living space, origins and loneliness. The fact that other nationalities were completely ignored can be observed in the recollections of a woman born during the interwar years in one of the villages outside Lviv. Asked about the former owners of the building, she appealed to the fact that she did not meet them personally and was not interested in rumors. From her own stories, and from other interviews, it emerges that they were of different nationalities: Poles, Russians, Ukrainians. The impression was that she did not want to speak aloud about Poles or Jews, and that she had herself cut off from the prewar and wartime history as a period that was alien to her and did not concern her. In these cases, psychological factors to avoid memories about the wartime years dominate. Yet, the woman’s memories of how these neighbors were addressed—as Mr or Mrs, or by name and patronymic—already clearly testified to their different origins: Opposite lived family […] F. [surname], Mr M. and Mrs I. lived there. In the courtyard there lived Ye. A., [name and patronymic] that is, then the Bs [surname] lived there too. There were still effectively three apartments opposite us. One more family lived in the cellar […], they had three children […] oh and behind the wall there lived N. F. (name and patronymic), she still does […] On the first floor there were people, but they have all died already […] It was literally these tenants […], N. F., we found her […] L. (name) that is. Mrs M., she arrived a little later […], and otherwise there are no more of these old tenants. (6Af)

Those born during the postwar years, that is, the second generation, considered communal apartments an incomprehensible, unnatural and temporary phenomenon of Soviet times. Usually they did not identify neighbors from the communal apartment by their names. First of all, they mentioned their nation-

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ality as Poles, and that these were elderly people whose rooms, after they died, were “annexed” by neighbors. A pattern can be observed in these interviews; namely that prewar Ukrainians did not mention the nationality of their solitary female neighbors, unlike the second generation, both local and settlers: […] there lived an elderly Polish woman […] and with her lived this nun, two elderly women […]. They were rich people, they somehow imposed them on us […], then they died, and we annexed that room […]. (1Bf) Right in one room lived Mrs Ch., a Pole, then she died, and they united her room with ours. (10Bm) Three families lived here. An elderly Polish woman […] and there also lived neighbors, who recently moved out. And, as we had a big family, the elderly woman died, and they added that room to our area […]. The kitchen had three gas hobs, but that Polish woman did not use them, she already lived here earlier, they fell out with those neighbors. (10Bf)

There was brief mention of prewar neighbors in the communal apartment in the interview with a representative of the third generation whose mother was from a family who arrived from the eastern regions, and a father who was a Ukrainian resettled from Poland. The respondent expresses incomprehension of why all the Poles did not leave immediately after the war and were “then forced to leave.” Obviously, the postwar deportation of Poles was seen as forced and total, and those who did not leave straight away had to do so later. It looks like the woman, born in 1965, arrived too late to meet the Polish neighbor and information about her, and the deportation of the Poles, was passed on by the older generation. There was no mention of the possibility of leaving voluntarily if one failed to adapt to Soviet reality and to the difficult cohabitation with neighbors in the communal apartment. In the communal apartment, prewar residents were seen as a temporary phenomenon: […] in a  room on the side there lived some kind of professor, and a Polish woman, who, for some reason, did not leave, lived there, but she was later forced to leave […]. The professor simply grew old, he was Ukrainian, insofar as I remember, because he grew old, he, I think, then also died. Whereas the Polish woman simply left […]. (18Cf)

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Another Polish family of neighbors was considered Ukrainian by the same respondent, citing their right to refuse to emigrate: I know that during the war there was only the neighbor downstairs, Mr B, they were Polish Ukrainians […], the only thing is that they were, I think, native […], but, evidently, they were not deported, because they were Ukrainian Poles […]. (18Cf)

Two interviews with descendants of people who arrived from the East spoke of an imagined total emigration of Poles even before World War II, as well as of Jews, as seen above: “Poles left, leaving everything behind […] They almost all left already in 1939, those who wanted to leave, so all left […].” (14Bf) Poles stood out noticeably for the people who arrived during the postwar years, and who constituted the dominant majority. In the eyes of migrants from Russia and younger generations of locals the Poles were “lords,” “ladies,” even when they were not high up in the social hierarchy: There lived one Polish lady […]. (9Af) […] the old lady in N building died [... and] the neighbors took it over. She was a lady. There were six rooms on that floor and a kitchen, they later divided it up. […] K., well she was called something else in Polish […], she was alone, had no children, grew up in an orphanage, her relatives all died, she became a servant, her brother put her in an orphanage when it was still Poland […]. (12Bf)

In just one of the twenty-seven interviews a woman from the second generation of respondents said that an elderly Polish woman did not use the kitchen in the communal flat. In the other conversations, the tacitly implied separateness of the prewar Poles is very discernible. Of course, the prewar generation could not adapt to life in an apartment inhabited by several families. Their existence was turned into small everyday battles. There was an atmosphere of constant lack of both psychological and physical privacy when members of different generations had to live in one room. The communal apartment perfectly suited the mutual supervision encouraged by the authorities. Soviet reality left its strong mark on these recollections. It was the distortion of the private and public spheres of life in Soviet society. In public, things that were

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considered untrue were said, while the truth was discussed in the private sphere. Introspection and self-control were integral parts of Soviet everyday life. Even so, Soviet society had its “own face and own world of thoughts”—it was neither “loyal” nor “silent.” 23 Life in the communal apartment was spoken about with reluctance, with little more than the reallocation of the kitchen recounted. Only some respondents talked about conflicts between neighbors in depth: There lived a war colonel who was not very good. I don’t want to say anything […]. We had that shared kitchen. Then there was fighting, quarrelling, even, one janitor told me, someone put poison in the borshch. And he, the colonel, separated himself, there was a  pantry. He changed the glass door in the bedroom and put up these wooden boards here. With that he made himself rooms and a kitchen, and that’s it […]. In 1967 they reallocated this kitchen, made out of plywood. (12Bf)

The second generation of respondents placed longstanding Ukrainian residents on a par with Poles, as unusual neighbors who stood out in terms of their appearance and way of life. The following quote comes from a man who moved to Lviv from a western Ukrainian village: On the ground floor there lived a family, Mrs N., these elderly people […]. They still lived there from the prewar years. They had their own understanding and their own arrangement […]. There was an old janitor […], he somehow more or less looked after this road and tried to do for what he was responsible, he was a remarkably decent man, of the old sort. Mrs N., who sang in the choir on Rus’ka street. Her husband was remarkably interesting—an ordinary cobbler, but with this remarkably intelligent look, a small beard. And their peculiarity was that even though there was definitely gas in this building, he did not recognize gas and specially kept wood and burnt wood for himself and considered it healthier. (13Bm)

23

 E. Iu. Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost’: 1945– 1953 gg. (Moskva, 1999), 223.

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Beyond Memory: “Unidentified” Neighbors Prewar history, as per previous owners of the buildings, always interested today’s residents to a greater or lesser extent, especially younger generations. Even so, there were respondents who did not mention any of this at all. They had heard in conversations that “some gentleman lived here,” but for them, these were merely conversations not confirmed by their own memories: Well they generally said here that some gentleman lived here, this was his, fully his, building, but who he was, we certainly cannot know, because we didn’t find anyone, effectively all the residents had already moved in after the war […]. Nobody stayed here until the war. That is, this building was inhabited until the war […]. Don’t know who actually lived here, some gentleman, like in many tenement buildings […]. (6Af)

They do not know the inhabitants of the apartments in their building, apart from one or two families with whom they maintained closed contacts because they lived close by, or due to various other circumstances linking them. The impression is that they speak little of their neighbors, or if, then positively. The following impersonal recollections about neighbors in reply to a more specific question by the interviewer are typical: The neighbors upstairs […]. As a  musician, I  know that there was a clarinet player there, whom we talked to from time to time, he served in the military and in the army orchestra, I  don’t remember his surname, later, as far as I know, he has already died […]. They lived there in the cellar, not a janitor I think, there in the cellar they lived. (5Аm) […] they lived here, but they have already all died or left […]. There they all died, they are not there any longer […] there was a teacher, they gave her a house, she left […]. And there further along I don’t know […], there upstairs I don’t know either whether they came earlier or later […]. I did not have any contact […] with the neighbors […]. (8Af)

Further in the first speaker’s story, about the state of the building and any renovations, we find out that “at ours, the gates […] did not close at night, but insofar there were not many apartments […], there were eight apartments

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and two lived in the cellar […]. It seems good people came together” (5Аm). It appears that the respondent knew the neighbors of the small building with eight apartments but did not reply to direct questions about them so as not to provide any detail. In memories of the second generation of respondents, one perceives the official Soviet narrative of the “friendship of peoples”24: mentions of neighbors during the Soviet period provide more detail, but they are neutral and cosmopolitan. They were frequently referred to by name, but eventually the conclusion is reached that contacts were not maintained: “It was not like in Odessa, that the whole courtyard knows everyone. There wasn’t that. There were some neighbors whom we saw rarely.” (10Bm) Details about neighbors’ surnames and/or first names do not reveal much by themselves—what these people were like, how they related to each other, what their nationality and social status were. Of course, relations between people were not formed through their nationality or social status: “We had little contact with neighbors, it was ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’. […] There were both Russians and Jews and Ukrainians here […].” (10Bf) These thoughts were confirmed by representatives of the second generation of respondents, who settled in apartments on the street in the 1970s and 1980s, and viewed the residents’ established environment from the side: I believe that this building was already in such a state of neglect. Renovations were not carried out. The people who lived here, I do not want to insult them, but they did not take care of the apartments […]. That is, I  cannot say that this building somehow attracted me. The apartments themselves had many cracks, not looked after, some other family lived in each room. Here lived one family, there another one, next door, in the apartment on the right, one family, a second, third, and fourth one. Four families in a shared corridor […]. There, the apartment on the right, was a communal apartment there, and there lived two families […]. At that time there was no tendency or desire to bring the building into some sort of proper condition […], some sort of different crowd lived here […]. The impression is that these people lived here temporarily […]. (13Bm)

24

 Iu. Kysla, “Konstruiuvannia ukrains’koi istorychnoi pam’iati v URSR,” 221–244.

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The neglected state of the building was spoken of in practically every interview. This is the imprint of Soviet reality with its collectivism, its reliance on the state as represented by the housing department, which is supposed to deal with putting the space outside the apartments in order. Yet as most of the residents were new settlers during the postwar years, it can be assumed that the neglect was also due to a feeling of living there temporarily. The housing was given to them, it was not private property, so they did not look after what was someone else’s. It also reflects the mentality of the people who arrived from the eastern regions, who, unlike the locals and especially people from the villages of western Ukraine, were not used to keeping houses. Both the older and younger generations remember the residents of the neighboring buildings in general terms: […] a good family lived opposite in the building on the second floor […], those who lived on the first floor worked at the prosecutor’s office […], the Ps. lived where there’s that big balcony on the first floor, some superior lived there too […]. (9Af) […] visually I know all the street’s inhabitants, roughly which building they live in, but to make contact in that way, we don’t have something like that. (10Bm) Overall many of the residents on the street have changed […], they did an exchange, some of the apartments were merged… Opposite there, lived people whom we saw when we arrived, and they live there now. We say ‘Hello’ to each other […]. (13Bf)

Apart from being very general, these memories of neighbors are tangled up. The Soviet period is projected on the previous ones, the Austrian and the Polish periods. Without clarification, it is often unclear which period of time the respondents speak of: On this floor lived the chief judge of the city of Lviv, and later the director of the Lviv opera lived here […]. Unfortunately I cannot tell you his name […]. I don’t think it was one of those directors who left a mark on the history of Lviv’s culture […]. It was one apartment, he occupied the entire floor. And in that room on the left he had his study. (13Bm)

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For readers of these recollections unfamiliar with the history of Central and Eastern Europe during the mid-20th Century, it often remains unclear why the respondents speak of deserted apartments, and what happened to the prewar population. Both the older and younger generations of respondents may simply state that “the native inhabitants left,” as, e.g., the case with a woman born in Lviv and a descendant of people who arrived from Eastern Ukraine: The building was interesting, the neighbors were very beautiful, I was little, I remember it was probably after the war. I remember that this building was entirely empty, that we children ran and played, there were dolls there […]. (2Af) We knew the neighbor closest to us best of all […], they were Russians perhaps, they arrived, perhaps, after the war […] And there were no longstanding residents here at all. That’s what it was like, everything was settled after the war or after 1939, when the native inhabitants left […]. There were very many families here, different in terms of both nationality and age. (13Bf)

In the tales of the younger generations, the longstanding residents were undisputed authorities who knew prewar history. One respondent was mistakenly convinced that an older neighbor was born in Lviv and had always lived at her current address. Such impressions could only have been the result of conversations between neighbors which were not entirely open, including the embellishing of past facts: There is this lady N., she knows everything about the street, she recounted how the buildings on the street were built, and whose they were. She was born here, her mother worked as a janitor […]. On the first floor at N building […]. She can tell you everything, who built what, which building was there earlier, which one later. (12Bf) The longstanding residents—locals and those who moved there— remembered interpersonal relations during Soviet times, when people were poorer, they had no luxury, and people liked each other more, one respected the other […]. (4Af)

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Yes, we are all longstanding residents on this street. Though everyone has already died […]. And I have already been in this building since 1960. We were once like one family here, like a village. And now you go out and there is nobody to say hello too. Everything has changed. (9Af)

For older people the total change of the inhabitants of the building and the street, and moreover the new political and economic conditions, is a heavy emotional and personal experience. The second generation of respondents notes these changes objectively: “Many people on the street have changed. Some of them left, some died, and some sold […].” (13Bm). But that only applies to the generation that arrived here as adults and fully formed people. The people born on the street during the Soviet era also display nostalgia for their childhood: With more than half, you no longer know who lives opposite, everything changes […] Not how it was earlier. [In what place do you feel that you are still at home?] Now it is certainly the apartment, earlier it was the street […] One knew the other, it was already one’s district, one’s environment […]. (9Cm)

Memory and Forgetting: Moving into the Apartments of Others Moving into the apartments during the postwar years is generally not spoken about. Sometimes, enthralled, representatives of the second generation of respondents defined the original purpose of this or that place/room. While talking about their private daily space, members of the second generation sometimes mentioned the prewar inhabitants, and what they knew about them from their parents’ or neighbors’ stories. However, they never told the story of how their family settled there (1Bf). Any information about how the apartments came to be occupied during the postwar years remains untold. In these families, this should not be spoken of in front of strangers or not spoken of aloud at all. It is clear that this theme, like many other stories of the (pre)war years, was shrouded in taboo. Only neighbors’ memories reveal that, for some reason, the janitor’s family lived in a sold apartment on the ground floor, which was subsequently turned into a communal apartment, and that her husband was repressed by the Soviet authorities (12Bf).

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The recollections of one of the women, who did not know how her husband obtained his apartment before they got married, seem untruthful. If the circumstances in which they occupied the apartment during the postwar years were never spoken of between husband and wife, it really was a taboo, or not important enough to mention, which is unlikely: I came here, he (the husband, a widower) was already older […]. He got it, he was also from Poland […] and thus whether he bought this home, or they gave it him, I do not know […]. He had a room and a kitchen to himself, there in the corner […]. (8Af)

The street’s current inhabitants, who settled or were born here during the Soviet years (until the 1990s), can be divided into a few groups, based on how they got their homes. In most cases, their parents occupied the apartments during the postwar years, or the state provided them through the workplace or other circumstances. One other way of getting an apartment was usually exchange. In the interviews conducted for this study, this was, however, mentioned in only five cases: We came to L’vov around 1958, we lived on Kopernik Street. And then we swapped apartment, father was in the military, in the service, and since 1966 we have lived here […]. I was born […] in Novosibirsk […], mother was Siberian […], also from Novosibirsk, father was Belarusian, […] and so they met, married after the war […]. (7Bf) […] I  was born in Eastern Ukraine, in Sumy region, in the town of Romny […]. At first we lived on Leningrands’ka street […], that’s the Pryvokzal’nyi district (near the railway station). And in 1980 we came here, to this building […]. After an exchange and a very big exchange, eightfold, it seems […]. The exchange was very difficult. Very difficult, very hard to find something that would suit us […]. (13Bf)

Forced eviction from apartments in central Lviv, albeit not the best, was practiced in the post-Stalinist period too. We do not find out anything about the forcefully evicted previous inhabitant, apart from the fact that she supposedly settled the apartment unlawfully:

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We arrived on this street in 1964 […]. We lived on the ground floor […]. Well we arrived at the ground floor, where one young girl lived, two apartments, as you know after the war she perhaps occupied that apartment or something, but my husband, as they say, worked in the organization, and those, to whom the apartment belonged, gave it us when our turn came […]. This girl was given something somewhere as a single person, and we received this flat […]. A single girl lived here […], she worked in the picture gallery […], she had no connection to this apartment, how she occupied it is unknown […]. (6Аf)

Those who mentioned the circumstances of how they occupied the apartment after the war emphasized that they and their relatives acted lawfully.25 One female respondent, talking about how relatives moved into the same apartment in 1939 and 1945, did not say a  word about the fate of the previous inhabitants. The same is also true of the neighbors in the communal apartment during the Soviet period (“they settled people there”): I got married, came here as a bride. My husband’s parents came here in 1939. My husband’s dad was given this wing, on this floor in 1939, he was a soldier, a major of some rank. And they gave him five rooms here, but they shrank it—first big, then smaller, smaller and even smaller. Then Soviet rule came, already after the war [... in] 1945, they gave it them in 1939, and they had three children, he was at the front and she evacuated to Kharkiv […]. And already after the war they came back and the home was on her […]. There was a lot of space, they started to seal it. And they left her this room and that, two rooms. And they settled people, and we have a communal apartment […]. (9Аf)

25

 On everyday housing in Lviv of the second half of the 1940s see: H. Bodnar, “Zhytlo iak tiahar i pryvilei: do pytannia pro sposoby radianizatsii L’vova u druhiy polovyni 1940-kh rokiv,”  in Lwów: miasto—społeczeństwo—kultura: Studia z dziejów miasta, vol. IX, Życie codzienne miasta, ed. Kazimierz Karolczak, Łukasz T. Sroka (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2014), 413–443. There is a shorter version of this article: H. Bodnar, “Rozkish i zlydni povoiennoho L’vova, abo realii zhytlovo-pobutovoho povsiakdennia v omriianomu misti,” Ukraina Moderna , accessed 6 March 2017, http://uamoderna. com/md/bodnar-postwar-lviv.

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People spoke comfortably of the rented home that was “passed on” to them after the owners emigrated. Unlawful occupation can be spoken of so fearlessly when it was a mass phenomenon: A neighbor told me […] her sister lived here at once and gave it to her before the war, they left for Germany. L.’s sister had married a German, they rent two rooms and a kitchen […]. When the war began, she said: ‘I don’t even know when he (the building’s owner) left. And my brotherin-law fled too.’ And she, L., came here with her husband and lived here like that […]. When she came here, she did not see that gentleman any more, everyone had started to flee […]. (12Bf)

Even so, the feeling of unlawful, unauthorized occupation of Lviv’s apartments after the war can still be sensed among the second and third generations of respondents. Two women began telling their life stories by emphasizing that they were born in their current apartments, and that relatives moved into them when there was an abundance of housing: “the floor was free”; “they let people choose […] an apartment, one chose whichever one wanted.” For both respondents, Lviv was empty during the postwar years: I was born here […]. After the war, my parents stayed here, the end of the war met them here […]. Mama was an army doctor and they stayed here like this, they assigned her a job here accordingly […]. My parents are originally from Eastern Ukraine […]. They wrote out warrants then and people occupied whichever house they wanted. The Poles were leaving, and everything was left behind […]. The Poles almost all left in 1939, who wanted to leave, so they all left […]. They let people choose […] an apartment, one chose whichever one wanted […]. (14Bf) […] I  was born here, fully in this house. My parents were resettled: mother from Eastern Ukraine, my father was resettled from Poland […]. And here with the house it turned out that my grandmother’s brother fought when he was returning from the war. Well, this floor was free, he settled it, brought over the wife […], brought over his sister. And well, everyone settled here […]. And I don’t know what happened here during the war, because the toilet was covered with papers, like some documents […] But as far as we know, this is an Austrian building […]. That family, that is neighboring relatives, shout to this day that the maid

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lived here, that we as servants should have helped them all their lives for the fact that grandad V. brought us over here […]. (18Cf)

It is interesting to note that the descendants of the people who arrived from the East did not share the apartment in Lviv between themselves and lived in conflict. The family that initiated the move to postwar Lviv lived in a better part of the apartment and considered the relatives who joined them and lived in the servants’ part as lower than them and beholden to them.

Summary Using oral history to study memory of Lviv’s prewar Jewish population shows silence about the Holocaust among witnesses of it, namely the oldest generation of respondents. With three exceptions, it did not become part of their biographical account. The theme of the Holocaust does not feature in family memory, just like memory of the prewar Jews is not passed on. Even in a Jewish family, this experience was not spoken of until the 1990s, prompted by external interest from foreign researchers. The postwar generation does not know about the prewar Jews of Lviv. They only associate the city’s prewar population with Poles. People who arrived from the eastern regions and younger generations of locals lacked living memory of the Holocaust. They could not obtain this information from Soviet sources, but only from private conversations where there was trust. Even so, none of the respondents from the younger, that is, second and third generations mentioned the Holocaust, with the exception of one woman, and with vague evidence at that. The daughter of a mixed marriage between a woman from the east and a man resettled from Poland said that “Lviv was empty […], there were none here who survived the war, I just don’t know them […].” (18Cf) Contemporary documentation or Jewish visitors do not provide a source for the younger generations’ memory. This contrasts with Wylegała’s findings in her study of memory among Zhovkva’s inhabitants. In Lviv, unlike in a small town such as Zhovkva, the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust and Jewish tourists are lost in the urban space. In the memory of Lviv’s current inhabitants, Jews who arrived after the war stand out sharply against the backdrop of the others who moved to the city at that time. They were not linked to the prewar Jews. Instead, they were treated as different, as “not genuine.” Residents of the street in central Lviv,

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which has been the subject of this study, said a considerable amount about the “Soviet” Jews. They were said to constitute a privileged group and to occupy better housing. Yet this was said without reproach. “Soviet” Jews were qualified professionals and in general considered good people, who, however, often moved abroad. Overall, they spoke well of their neighbors, or they did not speak about them at all. Closer contacts were maintained with a few, while most others formed an “unidentified” majority. As far as the memory of Poles is concerned, there is a clear generational divide: older respondents were reserved and less inclined to use national characteristics. Their descendants felt freer, as they lacked memory of living within the past Polish-Jewish majority. The same applies to the people who arrived from Eastern Ukraine and Russia. It is also significant whether the Ukrainian-Polish conflict took place within a family’s history: the woman resettled from Poland and the third-generation man whose parents were resettled from the East and from Poland were more abrupt when they mentioned the Poles. Overall, the prewar Ukrainians kept silent about their lower social status in prewar Lviv. Long-term residents, both locals and settlers, were more likely to refer to Austrian times when they talked about a building or apartment. People who lived there before or during the war featured much less. While long-term residents of Lviv mentioned the Poles in a piecemeal and unemotional way, Ukrainians resettled from Poland and villagers spoke of them in a neutral or negative tone. They compared Polish and Soviet daily life but kept silent about conflict between nationalities. Meanwhile, settlers from the East considered themselves full heirs to the property of their prewar “ancestors.” The research has shown just how alien the memory of “others” can be. In the case of this study, this concerns Lviv’s many Poles and Jews of the prewar years. Memory of them, or lack thereof, was subject to the fact that, except for individual cases, Poles did not physically exist during the postwar years. Meanwhile, the numerous Jews who occupied better buildings in the city center were perceived as different, as “non-genuine,” and they were therefore not identified with the prewar Jewish population. The collective memory in contemporary Lviv society, and Ukrainian society in general, as outlined in this article, stems from various sources, and is subject to how recollections were passed on to younger generations. These sources and avenues of their transmission range from private family memory to forms of official memorialization of the past.

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APPENDIX: LIST OF RESPONDENTS 1Аf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1928 in the town of Horodok in Lviv region who moved to Lviv in 1936. According to another respondent, her mother worked as a janitor and her husband was repressed by the Soviet authorities and exiled to remote regions of the USSR. 1Bf—A Ukrainian woman, the daughter of 1Аf, born in 1953 in Lviv. 2Аf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1938 in Lviv, a doctor, with her husband born in a western Ukrainian village. 2Cf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1969 in Lviv, a pharmacist and translator. Unmarried. The daughter of 2Аf. 3Аf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1935 in Lviv, a lawyer. The husband arrived from the eastern regions. 4Аf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1922 in a village in Lubaczów district, Poland, who moved to Lviv in 1946. The husband is a Ukrainian resettled from Poland. 5Аm—A Ukrainian man born in 1931 in Lviv, a conductor. Married to a local Ukrainian woman. 6Аf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1935 in a former village in Yavoriv district in Lviv region, which was evacuated in 1940 and 1947 when the Yavoriv military range was created. The husband was born in Smolens’k region, Russia. 7Аf—A Russian woman born in 1922 in the city of Barnaul, Russia. In 1958 she moved to Lviv when her husband was sent there for work. The husband is Belarusian. 7Bf—A Russian woman born in 1949 in the city of Novosibirsk, Russia. She worked as a design engineer at the “Polyaron” factory. Unmarried. The daughter of 7Аf. 8Аf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1925 in a village in Peremyshliany district in Lviv region, living in Lviv since the 1970s. She spent sixteen years looking after a child in a Soviet official’s family. The husband is a Ukrainian resettled from Poland. 9Аf—A Russian woman born in 1930 in Russia, a pediatrician, living in Lviv since 1954. The husband arrived from the eastern regions. 9Cm—Born in 1967 in Lviv, an electrician. The son of 9Аf. 10Bm—A Russian man born in 1957 in the town of Priozers’k in Leningrad region, Russia, a plumber. Living in Lviv since 1966. The wife is the daughter of a settler from the eastern regions. 10Bf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1958 in Lviv who works as a janitor in one of the higher education institutions in Lviv. The husband is Russian. 11Bf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1956 in the town of Stryi in Lviv region, an engineer. The husband was born in Lviv into a family from the eastern regions. 11Bm—Born in 1956 in Lviv. The wife is Ukrainian, born in a small town in western Ukraine. 11Cf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1981 in Lviv. The daughter of 11Bf and 11Bm. 12Bf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1950 in a village in Drohobych district in Lviv region. Living in Lviv since 1973. She was a worker at a cannery and a sewing factory. 13Bm—A Ukrainian man born in 1949 in a village in Zhydachiv district in Lviv region, an opera singer and professor at Mykola Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy. His wife was born in Eastern Ukraine.

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13Bf—Born in 1946 in the town of Romny in Sumy region, a professor at Mykola Lysenko Lviv National Music Academy. Her husband is Ukrainian, born in a western Ukrainian village. 14Bf—Born in 1957 in Lviv in a family from the eastern regions. 15Bf—A Ukrainian woman born in a  village in Stara Syniava district in Khmel’nyts’kyi region. She worked as a civil engineer. The husband was born in Khabarovsk krai, Russia. 17Cf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1964 in the town of Vynohradiv in Zakarpattia region, a pianist. 18Cf—Born in 1965 in Lviv to a Ukrainian man resettled from Poland and a woman born in Eastern Ukraine. The husband is Ukrainian, born in a western Ukrainian village. 19Cf—A Ukrainian woman born in 1972 in the town of Stryi in Lviv region, an anaesthetist. Unmarried. 20Cf—Born in 1978 in Lviv into a family from the eastern regions.

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City, Memory, and Identity: The Case of Wrocław after 1945 1 Barbara Pabjan

Introduction In the City Council-commissioned monograph on Wrocław, Microcosm, Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse relate in the introduction to the Polish edition a  conversation with the President of the city, Bogdan Zdrojewski, writing: the President talked about Wrocław’s difficulties with its own past and identity. He has been taking care of the city, which for half a century was completely Polish, but before the year 1945 was for many centuries in the German cultural sphere and inhabited mainly by Germans [...]. A new history of the city would be very helpful in deepening the current climate of agreement [...].2

This passage shows at least three phenomena: first, that in Wrocław the issue of relations with Germans is still an unresolved problem; second, that the identity of the city is from this point of view problematic; and third, that 1

 This article quotes quantitative research conducted as part of the grant The Memory of Vanished Populations, financed by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and carried out in collaboration with Bo Larsson of CES Lund University in 2012–15. 2  Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 11–12.

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the current politics of history in Wrocław are oriented towards improving Polish-German relations. Where German history in Wrocław is concerned, this means attempting to change the obligatory negative narrative from communist Poland and make a positive connection to the past, which of course is associated with Poland’s geopolitical and economic situation, the fact of being a member of the European Union, with trading, financial and tourist contacts, and funding from the EU. As the above quotation highlights, the concepts of “the past” and “identity” emerge as clearly related. The aim of this piece is to analyze the phenomenon of the city’s identity as a  function of the local community’s collective memory. The empirical base is a study of Wrocław representing the case of a city which changed nationality more than half a century ago and experienced a total exchange of population. The case’s complexity is further enhanced by the multi-dimensional nature of ‘identity’ itself as a  concept. The essay consists of two parts. In the first I discuss the problematic nature of the concept of collective identity and the identity of the city. I present a brief overview of the concepts and definitions of identity, and outline the approach behind my research. In the second part, I  analyze empirical data from my own research and compare it with previous studies of Wrocław’s identity. The relationship of memory and identity of the city as presented comprises three aspects: (1) cognitive, relating to the city’s public image and biography; (2) behavioral, concerning commemorative practices and (3) normative-axiological, a model for the politics of memory, that is, a set of norms and values which indicate how and what we should/should not commemorate. I refer to two models of city identity: discursive-intellectual and symbolic-emotional. These models explain the relationship between the accepted politics of memory and the construction of the city’s identity.

Conceptual Background There is no universally accepted definition of the concept of identity; nevertheless, this is far from atypical in the social sciences. The city, meanwhile, is a complex entity, making the use of categories of identity to describe it problematic. One can distinguish at least several components of the city pertinent to sociological analysis: the material urban substrate, the community of residents, the residents’ activity and the effects of those actions

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(“city life”).3 Unfortunately, there is no space here to disentangle the various threads fully. Suffice to say that typically, “city identity,” which has generated its own sub-literature in sociology, is generally approached through the lens of individual identity and psychology extrapolated to the collective, which is clearly problematic.4 Identity itself, meanwhile, as a contested concept, tends to be examined in the realm of the theoretical, with a substantial literature ranging from Eriksson’s studies of individuals in social context via Cooley’s “looking-glass self ” to Bauman’s “liquid modernity” of unstable elements in a postmodern reading, and many more.5 In addition, when it comes to collective identity at the local level, national identity remains the key point of reference for constructing collective identity in many studies, and to a lesser extent, for assessing belonging within local communities.6 The other primary lens for studies of identity connecting to place concerns minorities (ethnic, 3

 On structures, social relations and patterns of culture, see Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984): 4–5, 27; on the concept of “city life”: Marichela Sepe, Planning and Place in the City: Mapping Place Identity (London: Routledge, 2013); on symbols associated with a given space: Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960), 8; Thomas A. Reiner and Michael A. Hindery, “City Planning: Images of the Ideal and the Existing City,” in Lloyd Rodwin and Robert Hollister eds., Cities of the Mind (Cambridge, Springer: 1984), 133–147 (134); suggestive images of space and group identity: Reiner and Hinderty, “City planning,” 155. 4  Hollister and Rodwin, Cities of the Mind; Harold M. Proshansky, “The City and SelfIdentity,” Environment and Behavior 10, 2 (1978): 147–169; Reiner and Hindery, “City planning,” Müge Riza, Naciye Doratli and Mukaddes Fasli, “City Branding and Identity,” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 35 (2012): 293–300. 5  Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 168–210; Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers (New York: International Universities Press, 1959); George Herbert Mead, Umysł, osobowość i społeczeństwo (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1975); Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Lawrence Grossberg “Identity and cultural studies: Is that all there is?” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 2011), 87–107; Ruth Wodak, The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Cerulo, Karen Cerulo, “Identity Construction: New issues, New Directions,” Annual Review of Sociology 23, 1 (1997): 385–409; Zygmunt Bauman “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity,” in Hall and Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity, 18–20. 6  Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1991); Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead, Philadelphia: McGraw-Hill Education, 2003).

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racial, sexual, etc.) who define their situation as oppressive.7 Looking at city identity in this case, however, I aim to combine the often separately treated vectors of space/perception/ethnicity in the wider theoretical landscape by using the lens of memory, while offering a clear rooting in the specifics of place through an empirical case study based on a  large dataset (interview material).8 In this essay, I am applying Szacka’s definition of collective memory as: a collection of the members of the collective’s imaginings about their past, about the characters and past events that figured in it, as well as ways of commemorating the transfer of knowledge regarded as obligatory for a member of this community to possess.9

As Szacka has further noted, “common territory and history are the two most important elements in the identification of human groups.”10 In terms of how identity and collective memory are related, their close connection is largely taken as a given across most of the relevant sociological literature.11 Collective 7

 Anya Peterson Royce, Ethnic Identity: Strategies of Diversity (Indiana University Press, 1982); Misztal, Theories, 132–138. 8  The PAPI method of direct interviews using the random route sampling technique, 547 respondents, conducted in 2012; research on elites (64), school pupils (512) and students (329) in 2012–14. Note the relatively high overall number compared with other studies on Poland. 9  B arbara Szacka, Czas przeszły, pamięć, mit (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2006), 19. 10  Szacka, Czas przeszły, 111. As Tinbergen underlines, territoriality is a feature of the human species, so it can be assumed that it is a universal phenomenon and manifests itself in giving meaning to the symbolic space (another is language): Nico Tinbergen, 1968. “On war and peace in animals and man,” Science 160: 1411–18. 11  Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg, eds. Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999); John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Lyn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press 1997); Ron Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the formation of African American Identity,” in: Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (California: University of California Press, 2004), 60–111; Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, 65 (1995): 125–35; Sydney S. Shoemaker, “Personal Identity and Memory,” The Journal of Philosophy 56, 22 (1959): 868–82; Diane L. Barthel, Historic Preservation:

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identity and memory form a biography referring to the past, that which happened in a given community and that which creates the community. Collective memory is a set of shared ideas about the past, expressed through social rituals of commemoration, in which a common heritage of the past “comes alive.”12 Collective memory creates collective identity as it unites the community through a  common “framework of interpretation,” “collective stories,” which are also an intermediary plane between the individual and the collective. Narratives are objectified in social life through various types of media, which combine collective memory with the process of forming identity.13 Media, and mediated public representation of memory, are treated as an arena of production for collective experiences and meanings.14 The formation of identity is relative to the formation of memory through specific, negative, traumatic experiences, interpreted as an existential and cultural threat.15 Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity and Ethnic Conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002); Benjamin Forest, Juliet Johnson, and Karen Till, “Post-totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia,” Social & Cultural Geography 5, 3 (2004): 357–380, Carolyn Kitch, “‘Mourning in America’: Ritual, Redemption, and Recovery in News Narrative after September 11,” Journalism Studies 4, 2 (2003): 213–224; Belinda Davis “Experience, Identity, and Memory: The Legacy of World War I” Journal of Modern History 75, 1 (2003): 111–131; Bernard Knapp “Monumental Architecture, Identity and Memory,” in Apostolos Kyriatsoulis, ed., Proceedings of the Symposium: Bronze Age Architectural Traditions in the East Mediterranean: Diffusion and Diversity (Munich: Verein zur Förderung der Aufarbeitung der Hellennischen Geschichte, 2009), 31; Paul A. Shackel “Local Identity, National Memory, and Heritage Tourism: Creating a Sense of Place with Archaeology,” African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter 8, 5 (2005): 2; Mark Nuttall, “Locality, Identity and Memory in South Greenland,” Études/Inuit/Studies (2001): 53–72; Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman, Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997). 12  Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Growth and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso, 1983); Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma,” 60–112. 13  Eyerman, “Cultural Trauma,” 161–162. 14  Alexander, ed., Cultural Trauma. 15  Neil Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Alexander, ed., Cultural Trauma, 31–59.

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Memory as a representation of the past is embodied in symbols and history.16 The relationship between identity and memory is a result of common experiences in a community which is connected by common history, creating a cultural community and thus gaining identity through shared biography. To conclude this brief overview, it should be noted that the constructivist approach fundamentally questions the meaning of the concept of identity, wherever applied. The fluid concept of identity is most suitable for mental forms of identity, but inadequate when it comes to city identity as urban structure, since it sits outside the individual. City identity, as an object of study, therefore, needs to combine the urban factor with community, through empirical study. In this work I  refer to research concepts which assume that the city’s identity is a socially constructed form of knowledge (the image of the city, the reception of the city). This in turn is a vital component of the interpretation of the past and the biography of places and communities. Collective identity also has empirical corollaries, for example material symbols (monuments) and commemorative rituals. Interpreted history as a  collective memory is “material” out of which “stories about identity” are constructed. In the case of the city’s identity, this applies to its history and communities living in the given space. The past is a framework defining the construction of identity. The population selectively “chooses and forgets” events and people, “invents” myths, distorts facts. Here, identity is reconstructed by three types of factors: narration about the past (biographical stories), normative models (accepted models of the politics of memory), and social practices. The content of beliefs concerns social imagery of the city and its past, and knowledge of the city’s history. In the case of Wrocław, the main characteristic in the biography of the city is its dramatic change from German to Polish after 1945. This historical context thus informs the following research problems: the approach to the city’s history after more than half a century since Wrocław’s re-settlement by Poles and the results of the process of assimilation; the consequences of contemporary and past politics of history, consisting of “de-Germanizing” Wrocław and maintaining a  negative relationship with German symbols; 16

 Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Barry Schwartz, “Collective Memory and Abortive Commemoration: Presidents’ Day and the American Holiday Calendar,” Social Research 75, 1 (2008): 75–110.

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finally, the way the city’s identity functions in the case of a city where a total change of population occurred with the erasure of the previous identity. Germans created the material substance of the city which Poles took over, from people who were not simply strangers but the “enemy.” Having sketched the conceptual background, I will proceed to analyze three main dimensions: cognitive, behavioral, and axiological-normative. 1. The cognitive dimension: knowledge about the city, comprising characteristic features, among its inhabitants. Due to the form and content of statements we can distinguish two components within it: (a) the biography of the city, narratives of its history and the state of knowledge thereof: remembering (and forgetting) specific events and important figures, the presence of mythologization of history; (b) the image of the city and patterns of reception through identifying the cultural identity of objects in urban spaces; how objects are interpreted; and the specific features of certain objects. To investigate the patterns of reception of urban space, the technique of test images was used. The respondent was presented with a series of 22 photographs which included those of old and contemporary Wrocław, each presenting the same objects and places from the pre- and post-war periods by way of comparison. The reception of selected objects was assessed according to visual knowledge, knowledge of the period of their creation, and the ability to assign them to a specific cultural identity, as well as any wider associations and interpretations. 2. Behavioral: here referring to commemorative practices. It can be assumed that participation in such practices is a good indicator of the importance of the city’s history in the everyday life of inhabitants as well as their relationships to the city. Commemorative practices increase the strength of social ties because they stimulate a sense of belonging to an urban community, and thus the feeling of distinctiveness and identity. Commemorative practices have differentiated forms and thus may, in various ways, influence the perception of identity. 3. Axiological-normative: the accepted model for the politics of memory. It consists of beliefs that express acceptance of the politics of memory, and how the memory of the city’s past is built. With normative beliefs we can deduce to what extent and how the contemporary identity of the city is linked

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with the past. The German past of Wrocław is an “objective fact.” From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge it is therefore interesting to assess how the German past functions in the biography of the city. Is the identity of Wrocław built in opposition to German identity? Has the German past and identity of the city been forgotten?

Research Results Content related to identity formation can be ordered according to two aspects, and this is where I shall begin: beliefs about the city creating the socalled image of the city, its stereotype, and convictions about the city’s history, that is, remembering events of the past that make up its biography. My own research as presented here addresses the reconstruction of the biography of the city, and thus directly analyzes the relationship between identity and collective memory. Similar research on Wrocław was conducted previously by Jacek Pluta and Maria Lewicka.17 Pluta researched identity in terms of an autostereotype with the past analyzed as one of its components, whereas in research by Lewicka, the relationships between memory and identity were tested directly through declared interest in the history of the city, and place memory. In these studies, identity is treated as a form of knowledge.

The Cognitive Dimension Let us start, then, with the notion of identity as biography and the city’s image. The scope of knowledge about the past of the city is often regarded as a basic component of memory, which is part of identity. That which is remembered creates the biography of the city, because what is remembered creates the specificity of the history of the city, in turn constituting its identity. The 17

 Maria Lewicka, “Place attachment, place identity, and place memory: Restoring the forgotten city past,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 28 (2008): 209–231, Jacek Pluta, “Tożsamość i lokalność. Uwagi o związku wrocławian z przestrzenią miasta,” in Piotr Żuk and Jacek Pluta, eds., My Wrocławianie. Społeczna przestrzeń miasta (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 2006), 59–74; Jacek Pluta, “Studium wrocławskiego autostereotypu,” in Żuk and Pluta, eds., My Wrocławianie, 227–60.

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present study was conducted to measure knowledge of the history of the city through the knowledge of its historic architectural objects, events, and important people. It used a set of questions to form a scale measuring knowledge of the city’s past. The items of the scale18 form four synthetic indicators of the cognitive component of identity: 1. knowledge of architectural objects (K1), 2. knowledge of their time origin (K2) and 3. cultural identity (K3), as well as 4. knowledge of events and people (K4). The conclusion is that knowledge about the city’s past is negligible. The general result of the test of knowledge (K) is very low, the mean score being M=0.31 (SD=0.12) points. Most people in the test scored a result of mean value under M=0.4 points, and the highest mean result scored M=0.73 points on a scale with the maximum value reaching 1. The median value was Median=0.3 (Mode=0.17), with a standard deviation of 0.12 points, showing that weak knowledge among the population is widespread (see Table 1). Among the four dimensions of the biography of the city examined, visual familiarity is best, and the fixed image of individual objects (K1 Mean=0.46, Median=0.45), worse is knowledge about the period in which these objects originated (K2 Mean=0.32, Median=0.32). Worse still is the knowledge of the cultural identity of architectural objects (K3 Mean=0.27, Median=0.29). Interestingly, the test showed that Wrocławians usually ascribe German-Prussian architectural identity even to those objects that do not have such origin. However, worst of all is knowledge about the identity of individuals and events from Wrocław’s past (K4 Mean=0.17, Median=0.13), half of all respondents could not give any information at all. The majority of the sample obtained poor results. Sixty-eight percent received 0.19 points (see table 1 and chart 1).

18

 The scale has altogether 83 items: 8 items for behavioral components (BEHAV), and 75 for knowledge, including 8 items for knowledge about historical figures, events and monuments in the city (K4), 66 in the photographic test [22 for visual familiarity of urban objects (K1), 22 for knowledge about the period of origin of urban objects (K2), 22 for the knowledge of the cultural identity of urban objects (K3)]. The scale has 83 points (min=0 and max=83, everyone could get 1 point for each question). In order to compare results, the scale has been transformed (min 0=0 and max 83=1).

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N TABLE 1

Mean

Median

Std. Mode Deviation

Minimum

Maximum

Valid

Knowledge test

Total K1-4

547

0.31

0.30

0.17a

0.12

0.00

0.73

visual familiarity of urban objects

K1

547

0.46

0.45

0.41

0.16

0.00

0.95

knowledge about the period of origin of urban objects

K2

547

0.32

0.32

0.27

0.19

0.00

0.86

the knowledge of the cultural identity of urban objects

K3

547

0.27

0.29

0.29

0.15

0.00

0.81

historical knowledge test

knowledge about historical figures and events

K4

547

0.17

0.13

0.13

0.15

0.00

0.88

behaviors

commemoraBEH tive practices

547

0.26

0.22

0.00

0.21

0.00

0.94

visual test: knowledge about the architectural objects

a. Multiple modes exist. The smallest value is shown.

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Chart 1. Knowledge of the city’s past and the level of commemoration practices

BEH commemorative practices K4 Knowledge about historical figures and events K3s knowledge of the cultural identity of urban objects Knowledge about the period of origin of urban object K1 Visual familiarity of urban objects 0.0

0.1

0.2 0.3 MEAN

0.4

0.5

Source: own research on Wrocław’s population (N=547).

Although Wrocławians do not have extensive knowledge of their city and its history, and the majority of Wrocław’s inhabitants (65%) say that they are not interested in the history of the city, at the same time, the vast majority (80%) say that the history of the city is very important. The relationship to the history of Wrocław can thus be described as follows: Wrocławians indeed do not have rich factual knowledge about the history of the city but respect the importance of history as a symbolic value. In the case researched, knowledge of history has no meaning for the construction of identity. The history of the city is mainly a symbol. This has been submitted to further investigation, to clarify in what sense Wrocławians consider the history of the city important. I propose to distinguish three types of approach to the history of the city (see chart 2): 1. Combining history and identity: 17% of respondents answered that “history determines our national, regional, and local identities.” Another 13.4% said that “history is important for the duration of the nation,” which could also be interpreted as an indicator of the perception of the connection between history and identity. Almost 32% associated the history of the city with identity, often combining local with national identity.

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2. Attachment to the city: 15% of respondents referred to place attachment; that is, a bond with place as a part of the biographical experience. This creates identity in a somewhat different manner, by way of establishing personal ties in the framework of individual biographies. 3. A utilitarian approach to history: 15% of respondents treated history as a tourist product. This way, the history of the city is treated as an element of the city’s image, which relates to a marketing approach to the city’s identity. Chart 2. Why is the history of the city important? N=418

15%

23%

32%

15% 15%

General meaning of history Combining history and identity Utilitarian approach to history (tourism) Place attachment Other

The next set of results, which reveal gaps in memory, shed more light on the manner in which Wrocław’s biography is constructed; namely, mainly from the experience of the respondents, that is, orally transmitted memory. This has particular implications for collective memory. Recent history tends to be best remembered because it relates to what the respondents experienced personally. Research into the way in which history is interpreted shows that official, “textbook” history, seen from the perspective of individuals, is typically entangled with people’s personal experiences.19 The collective memory of “normal people” is built on the basis of their private perspectives on the past. The official transfer of history is remembered less well. 19

 Szacka, “Czas przeszły, pamięć, mit”; Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, Presenting the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

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TABLE 2 Type of event

Frequency of answers

%

Floods of 1997

175

47.7%

European football championships in 2012

115

31.3%

Visit of John Paul II in 1997

69

18.8%

Post-war reconstruction of the city

43

11.7%

Martial law (1981)

41

11.2%

Solidarity strikes of the 1980s

39

10.6%

Other incorrect answers

38

10.4%

‘Festung Breslau’

26

7.1%

Eucharistic Congress in 1997

19

5.2%

First visit of John Paul II in 1978

13

3.5%

Other correct answers

12

3.3%

Different cultural events

10

2.7%

World Congress of Intellectuals in 1948

8

2.2%

Orange Alternative (a counter-culture and political movement in the 1980s)

8

2.2%

Riots in the bus depot at ul. Grabiszyńska in the 1980s

8

2.2%

Construction of a new stadium

7

1.9%

Exhibition of the Reclaimed Territories in 1948

7

1.9%

Epidemic in 1963

7

1.9%

Winning the championship by local football team Silesia—Wrocław

6

1.6%

Connecting Wrocław to Poland

5

1.4%

Local elections

4

1.1%

Construction of the Millennium Bridge in 2005

4

1.1%

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TABLE 2 Type of event

Frequency of answers

%

Opening of Panorama Racławicka in 1980

4

1.1%

End of WW2

3

0.8%

WW2

3

0.8%

Construction of the ring-road

2

0.5%

Resettlement of the population to Lower Silesia

1

0.3%

Improvement of the city infrastructure

0

0.0%

WW1

0

0.0%

total N >100% open question answers

677

As many as 65% of people are not interested in any epoch, nor any specific period in detail. According to Lewicka’s research, the second-best remembered period is the Piast one in the Middle Ages. In my research, this tendency was not visible. The Piast beginnings of the city are not especially distinguished from others. Moreover, the Prussian-German period and Piast ones are comparable. Among the group—a third of respondents—interested in the history of the city, 22% focus on the postwar period, 6% on the Prussian-German one, and 5% on the Middle Ages. The Czech and Habsburg eras are not at all present in the consciousness of the Wrocławians interviewed. Accordingly, the epoch that they best remember is the most recent, the war and postwar period. Events after 1939 were named by 51% of respondents, but for the period before 1939, this falls to 20% when asked to name an important event, and just 14% can name important people. This suggests an absence of distinctive, commonly cited individuals that would help form the city’s identity from the past,20 while the overall diversity of responses, lacking strong characteristic patterns, held true across categories. In terms of

20

 Wrocławians basically do not remember many people from the prewar period: only 14% of respondents in the sample were able to list individuals. Most frequently mentioned were Edith Stein (4.5% of cases) and Max Berg (2.5%), with a tendency overall for respondents to mention very different people from each other (in response to open-ended questions).

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events, the most frequently mentioned occurrence was Wrocław’s change of nationality (6.5%).21 Of the best remembered period overall, post-1939, the most frequently mentioned events were the floods of 1997 (47.7%) and the European football championships in 2012 (31.3%), the visit of John Paul II in 1997 (18.8%), martial law and the Solidarity strikes in the 1980s (11.2%, see Table 2). Note that several of these are of “national” rather than specifically local significance. The older events that are best remembered are the post-war reconstruction of the city (11.7%) and “Festung Breslau.”22 This chimes with patterns revealed by Pluta’s research on a similar question.23 However, a wider comparison between my results and those of Pluta and Lewicka show differences, especially insofar as I find no overriding pattern that could confirm the thesis that characteristic threads constitute the biography of the city and its identity at the same time. Whether for pre- or post-1945 Wrocław, there are no clearly overarching or linking biographical elements. Looking at the results in more detail, although certain events repeat themselves, a  seasonal or generational variability in the distribution of responses is visible, e.g., the Congress of Intellectuals reached 7% when the question was asked in 2006. In 2012, it was cited in only 1% of cases. As is known, the Congress of Intellectuals was intended by the authorities as a symbolic event inscribed in the Polonization process of the city which could thus become part of the foundational myth. However, as Thum points out, this did not happen.24 In our study there were new current events that “took the place” of older ones. For example, the European football championship replaced the Eucharistic congress. A further interesting example are Nobel Prize win21

 Following this: the city’s architectural changes (3%); about the same goes for cultural and educational institutions (3%), the city’s beginnings in the middle ages (2.5%), changes in its ethnic structure (2%), the persecution of Poles and Jews (2%), infrastructural and technical development. 22  The World Congress of Intellectuals in 1948 was mentioned just 8 times (1.5%), and the “beginning” of Polish postwar history, i.e., the city’s incorporation into Poland, in just 1% of the cases. 23  Most frequently mentioned events: the floods (35%), the Eucharistic congress (25%), the “retrieval” of Wrocław after the war (21%), cultural festivals (8%), the attempts to organize an Expo (8%), renovations to the old town (7%), the Exhibition of the Recovered Territories and the Congress of Intellectuals (7%)—in general events from before the Second World War were mentioned by just 4% of respondents. Pluta, “My Wrocławianie,” 234–240. 24  Gregor Thum, Obce miasto Wrocław: 1945 i potem, translated by Małgorzata Słabicka (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Via Nova, 2008), 258–327.

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ners from Wrocław. If any individuals could create local identity, Nobel Prize winners would be strong candidates because the social role of the scientist is viewed positively and may be easily kept outside the political context.25 However, Wrocław’s Nobel Prize winners were not promoted as a source of pride. In fact, the Polish, as opposed to the pre-war German, university had no such achievements. Perhaps the current citizens treat the Nobel laureates from Wrocław as “alien,” and their promotion would be a  reminder of the city’s German past. Such a  phenomenon occurred, for instance, when attempts were made to commemorate prewar Wrocław’s modernist German architects in the naming of streets in a newly built housing estate, WUWA II, or the German mayor Georg Bender, who contributed to the dynamic development of the city. Many of Wrocław’s residents, including the political elite, reacted negatively to such attempts simply because of their German connection. Building on these observations, several studies have demonstrated how memory and identity are changeable according to generation and social structure.26 Varied generational memory forms an argument in favor of the idea that the identity of the city is a cultural construct—more attached to people than to place, while the identity of the community of the city is separate from the identity of its material substance.

25

 Some names were cited, but not uniformly: Alzheimer, Nankier, Hitler, Bender, Włodkowic and others. 26  Szacka, “Czas przeszły, pamięć, mit”; Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering; Howard Schuman and Jacqueline Scott, “Generations and Collective Memories,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 359–381; Martin Conway “The Inventory of Experience: Memory and Identity,” in James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez and Bernard Rime, eds., Collective Memory of Political Events (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 21–45; Amy Corning and Howard Schuman, Generations and Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Howard Schuman, Robert Belli and Katherine Bischoping, “The Generational Basis of Historical Knowledge,” in Pennebaker et al., Collective Memory, 47–78; James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Howard Schuman and Cheryl Rieger, “Historical Analogies, Generational Effects, and Attitudes toward War,” American Sociological Review 57 (1992): 315–26. See also three publications by Howard Schuman and Amy Corning, “The Conversion of Generational Effects into Collective Memories,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 29, 3 (2016): 520–532; “The Roots of Collective Memory: Public Knowledge of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson” Memory Studies 4 (2011): 134-153 and their “Generational Memory and the Critical Period: Evidence of National and World Events,” Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (2012): 1–31.

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It is apparent that, in the collective memory of Wrocławians, there is yet no specific biography of the city. A place-specific historical identity, or indeed biography, does not normally form spontaneously. It must be created and propagated by the elite and the institutions. It seems that in the case of Wrocław, the biography of the city was created through spontaneous processes, including the course of events, e.g., the floods of 1997, and propagated through the media as well as educational institutions. One of the mechanisms supporting the development of a sense of identity is the so-called principle of “urban hints” mentioned by Lewicka. People after whom streets and squares are named have a chance to settle in the collective memory.27 It is obvious that the existence of memory in the form of street names, monuments, commemorative plaques is conducive to developing knowledge and maintaining memory, just as education can serve the formation of a city identity. Nevertheless, in the urban space of Wrocław, traces of the German presence were often removed,28 and the research presented here does not confirm the role of Lewicka’s hints, suggesting that they have a weak influence. Rather, memory is shaped by events experienced personally by inhabitants, not clues in the urban landscape to a past that was, in any case, often erased. Thus, another research problem concerns whether historical buildings and objects from the urban fabric in the city create its identity, and how. For this purpose, the reception of the city as a medium of memory was tested, looking at urban space, architectural objects, which are material correlates of identity. Although in all studies the objects used are historical representations, only some were interpreted as carriers of historical memory. In collective memory, particular objects in the city are attributed special importance. Do the residents “read” the city as a  medium or carrier of memory? According to the data for this study, only to a  small extent. This type of response appeared mainly in the case of monuments, e.g., to the first Polish King, Bolesław Chrobry (967–1025), which are assigned a function of symbolic significance. Yet in other cases, the meaning was interpreted through contemporary functions instead, as with the statue to the Lviv-born poet, Aleksander Fredro (1793–1876) on the main city square, which a fifth of the respondents saw simply as a meeting place.

27

 Lewicka, “Place Attachment, Place Identity, and Place Memory: Restoring the Forgotten City Past,” 209-231. 28  Thum, Obce miasto, 232–327.

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Looking beyond these cases to the broader criteria used by residents in assessing urban objects, the primary one—chosen by around a  third of respondents—was their aesthetic appearance, including how the object is presented and maintained. The second most frequently mentioned criteria were architectural style (16%), and the symbolism and meaning of objects (16%); while some people declared that they did not pay attention to the historical meaning of historic buildings at all (17%) (see chart 3). Chart 3. The way of perceiving the historical space in the city Integration into existing buildings

8

Present function

12

Architectural style

16

Symbolism and meaning

16

Do not pay attention

17

Apperance and technical condition

30 0

10

20

30

40

%

Source: own research, sample of Wrocław’s population (N=546).

People’s utilitarian approach was also revealed through another question, in which the autotelic ​​ importance of monuments was measured against its utility value. The vast majority (73%) of the respondents (N=547) were in favor of the latter, but it is the former which creates the symbolic image of the city through its history. ​ The data obtained in the reception of objects suggest the following conclusion: residents do not perceive the city as a historical space per se. A  minority “look” at the city as a  medium for memory. The main dimensions of reception are functional and aesthetic qualities. The data confirm the hypothesis that the meaning of the urban space and the city’s identity are constructed without any a priori schema. Rather than leaning on symbolic interpretations, people opt mainly for utility.

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Chart 4. The comparison of different indexes (Knowledge of the city’s past and commemorative practices) by education level 0.6 Indexes

0.5

K1 K2 K3 K4 BEH. K.

Mean

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0

Primary

Secondary The level of education

Tertiary

K1 visual familiarity of urban objects; K2 knowledge about the period of origin of urban objects; K3 knowledge of the cultural identity of urban objects; K4 knowledge about historical figures and events BEHAV commemorative practices; K (Total index)

source: own research, sample of Wrocław’s population N=547.

Chart 5. The comparison of different indexes (Knowledge of the city’s past and commemorative practices) by social status 0.6 0.5

Indexes K1 K2 K3 K4 BEH. K.

Mean

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0

Very low

Low

Low medium

High medium

High

Very high

Social status K1 visual familiarity of urban objects; K2 knowledge about the period of origin of urban objects; K3 knowledge of the cultural identity of urban objects; K4 knowledge about historical figures and events BEHAV commemorative practices; K (Total index)

source: own research, sample of Wrocław’s population N=547.

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Chart 6. The comparison of different indexes (Knowledge of the city’s past and commemorative practices) by age group 0.5 Indexes

Mean

0.4

K1 K2 K3 K4 BEH. K.

0.3 0.2 0.1 0.0