From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994

Abstract

Long known as the “Polish Manchester,” thanks to its status as a gritty, rapidly growing textile city in the nineteenth century, Łódź continued to experience the major shocks of the twentieth century in East-Central Europe, including the dissolution of empire and the emergence of the nation state, the two world wars, the rise and fall of Communism, and de-industrialization. As a major industrial center for the Russian Empire, a textile city that drew German-speaking artisans, Polish-speaking peasants, and Jewish petty traders, Łódź exploded from a small city of 32,000 in 1860 to nearly half a million by 1913, half of whom identified as Polish (p. 41). By 1989, it numbered 850,000, nearly all of whom identified as Polish. A unifying theme amidst all of this change, the authors of From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź—Industrial City and Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994 argue, is the experience of “asynchronous modernity,” in which the city was at once “a vanguard and a victim of progress” (p. 20). As the authors observe, in areas where industrial capitalism arrives “as a ready-made, like-it-or-not package” (p. 76), inhabitants were bound to experience “technologies, radical ideas, cultural trends, consumption patterns and material aspirations . . . selectively, [and] not always in accord with each other” (p. 19). The numerically miniscule higher social strata, for example, wished to adopt the ideas and mores of conspicuous consumption and urban life propounded abroad, but the broad masses, and indeed the city itself, could not sustain such costs. The rapidly growing shock city was a site of class conflict and blight. “In Łódź, modernity forced its champions and victims alike to face its uneasy form, scattered, rapid and ruthless. At the same time, it offered the paradoxical promise of leaving itself behind” (p. 20). At each stage of its recent history, Łódź epitomized the messy complexities of asynchronous modernity.The authors of this sophisticated book, trained as sociologists or as historians, argue that the press was one of the most important purveyors of ideas about modern, urban life. They call attention to the “feedback loop” it created between “second-hand idea dealers and local populations” (p. 26). The book has a clear methodology, discourse analysis of the press from four distinct periods, and uses techniques from both fields of training, including attention to change and continuities over time, reliance on theory, and the presentation of findings in schematic charts in each section for ease of comparison across periods. The authors divide local press debates about the city into four periods: “(I) Rapid industrial growth in the framework of the tsarist borderlands; (II) State crafting in a highly antagonistic ideological setting after the First World War; (III) Socialist rebuilding of a structured city after 1945, and (IV) Hopes and disappointment of the transition and turbulent ‘Westernization’ after 1989” (p. 18). They analyze the perceived problems or obstacles of each era, and set up the utopian or dystopian responses typical of the press discourses surrounding each. In other cases, they set up opposing discourses side-by-side for easy comparison.Chapter 1 demonstrates how class mass movements often figured as nationalist politics, as Polish workers sought to challenge the economic and political strength of Germans and Jews, while imagining scenarios in which they assumed greater political power. Łódź in this period exemplified asynchronous modernity in its capacity as one of Europe's most industrialized areas and as one of its least healthy large cities. Dependent on its internal market within the Russian Empire, relatively isolated from the world economy, and lacking in autonomous municipal government and a viable sewer system, it had one of the highest mortality rates of all European cities. To Russians, conditions in Polish cities like Łódź seemed advanced, but to Polish journalists, whose comparisons were with the West, conditions seemed deplorable (p. 67). In this situation, it was easier for Polish journalists and their readers to blame Germans and Jews for the problems of capitalism in the Russian Empire, than to address the problems of the system itself.Chapter 2 explores the early years of the nation-state building project by highlighting two competing visions that predominated in the press: “‘national capitalism’ and ‘municipal socialism’” (p. 151). The former, espoused more by the right, shifted from anti-German to anti-Jewish rhetoric. At times this rhetoric overlapped with the municipal socialism of the Polish Socialist Party, which governed Łódź in the early years of the new state. The authors situate the conflict between the two visions for the city within the wider history of the “European civil war” of 1914–1945.Postwar reconstruction is the focus of the third chapter. Łódź was an industrial, but not a new socialist city (like Magnitogorsk or Nowa Huta). Paradoxically, the strength of the working class in Łódź made it unattractive to the new Communist Party elite. A natural division in the discourse arose between pre-war and postwar versions of the city. Journalists rarely referred to the city's multiethnic past, effectively erasing the Jews murdered in the Shoah who had constituted 35 percent of the population, instead focusing on the valence of social class and a future of rising welfare, social justice, democracy, and science (pp. 181, 187). The discourse of this era was hopeful, though citizens were soon disappointed that their metropolitan visions remained underdeveloped. The textile industry was not as important to the new regime as heavy industry elsewhere and Łódź failed to get the urban improvements its residents sought.By the time covered in the fourth chapter, the first five years after 1989, the textile industry was truly obsolete. The highly feminized workforce in textiles tended to be less revolutionary than the workforces of other Polish cities had been during the last decades of Communism, and once again, the new regime failed to reward the city as abundantly as other cities. In this disorienting period, Łódź sought new sources of identity. Journalists resuscitated the bourgeois history of the city, creating a discourse that was decidedly more entrepreneurial and male, while promoting re-branding, outsourcing, and privatization. Once again, the imagined future never arrived: neoliberalism hastened deindustrialization and social decline.All of these periods represent a struggle within the discourse of modernity. In each instance, predominant discourses presented a problem and called for harmonious resolutions, while positing an opponent—“a sworn political enemy, foreign yoke or long-term negligence”—as the reason for their belated fulfillment. Building on the work of Agnes Heller and Reinhart Koselleck, the authors argue that the discourse of the modern proffers imaginary diagnoses of reality, and indulges in both utopian and dystopian thinking as obstacles invariably confront these visions of progress. The inclusion of an opponent, the authors point out, “is necessary, as a harmonious modernity will forever remain an unfulfilled promise; the experience of reality always denies the illusion of its possible full realization. The modern condition, as a self-perpetuating movement, is exactly grounded in this paradoxical experience” (p. 31). In each of the periods analyzed and in its overall experience, twentieth-century Łódź typifies the vicissitudes of asynchronous modernity.Ultimately, this book illustrates the value of using the press and discourse analysis for a systematic study of conceptions of modernity over the longue durée. It demonstrates the value of urban history in Eastern European history for illustrating change over time by remaining fixed in a single locality. While the political borders or political unit to which the city belonged may have changed, its rootedness as a cityscape makes analysis of the effect of war, regime change, and sociopolitical systems such as industrial capitalism or global capitalism more pertinent. As noted earlier, the book also demonstrates the value of a co-authored and multidisciplinary study. In this case, numerous authors could divide the labor of textual analysis and share the work of theoretical positioning and honing the argument. The result is truly impressive. This reviewer has only one critique: in assembling the research team and source base, the authors should have included more primary source texts in German and Yiddish from the earlier periods in their analysis. There is something teleological about focusing on Polish voices from the earlier periods, precisely because those were the only voices by the end of the period analyzed. This omission aside, the book offers an invaluable history of the city, while elucidating a powerful theoretical construct, the notion of asynchronous modernity, which should prove quite useful to scholars of twentieth-century Poland, East-Central Europe or elsewhere.