Post-Austrian Lemberg: War Commemoration, Interethnic Relations, and ban Identity in Lľviv, 1918-1939

Abstract

East and east centralEuropean cities are a neglected field of research in urban history. While a certain number of publications exist on select urban phenomena such as urban Jewry, only recently have attempts been made to focus research on entire cities. Studies published in the last decade have tried to discover the unknown urban world of multiethnic societies in countries such as Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. Researchers must cope with specific problems. General city histories are very rare, with the exception of several “city biographies” dating from the 1920s and 1930s. Archival sources are rather poorly documented in inventories, and holdings (especially on the territory of the former Soviet Union) suffered wartime losses and are often scattered. Multilingual skills and knowledge of “exotic” languages such as Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Yiddish are mandatory. And finally, the usual approaches do not lead to satisfactory results. “Traditional” urban history deals with Western European and North American urban societies that were shaped by a special set of social, economic, and juridical circumstances, in which longstanding city autonomy, rapid modernization since the eighteenth century, a powerful city bourgeoisie, and highly developed and differentiated public spheres played important roles. When one applies the standards of Western city development to the multinational Central and Eastern European cities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the latter appear to be underdeveloped and lacking in many of the institutional preconditions that make a mere urban agglomeration a city. Such considerations may even be applied to a city such as Lemberg (L'viv in Ukrainian, Lwow in Polish), which belonged to Austria-Hungary until 1918, and was always regarded as a stronghold of “Vienneseness” and “Europeaness” in the “East.”