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

365 Pages·2020·4.933 MB·English

by  Jan Fellerer (editor), Robert Pyrah (editor)

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ABOUT THE EDITORS LVIV AND WROCŁAW, After World War II, Europe witnessed the massive redrawing
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N of national borders and the efforts to make the population fi t
Jan Fellerer is Associate Professor in Non-Russian Slavonic
D those new borders. As a consequence of these forced changes,
Languages and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University.
W both Lviv and Wrocław went through cataclysmic changes
Robert Pyrah is Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University R CITIES IN PARALLEL ? in population and culture. Assertively Polish prewar Lwów
and Member of Wolfson College, Oxford University. O became Soviet Lvov, and then, after 1991, it became assert-
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M Ł ively Ukrainian Lviv. Breslau, the third largest city in Germany
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t before 1945, was in turn “recovered” by communist Poland
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as Wrocław. Practically the entire population of Breslau was
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The myth and memory of a deeply connected and o IT restructured: many Polish inhabitants migrated to Wrocław
similar history of Wrocław and L’viv is certainly alive. ry IE and most Jews perished or went into exile. The forced
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The comparative volume tracks down the roots of this an I migration of these groups incorporated new myths and the
myth, the connections between the two cities through d N construction of offi cial memory projects.
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forced migration, and it shows the profound differences
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between them. The readers will better understand grA The chapters in this edited book compare the two cities by
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t focusing on lived experiences and “bottom-up” historical
how Wrocław and L’viv have survived the devastations ioR
of the twentieth century and become buzzling cultural n processes. Their sources and methods are those of micro-
centers of Poland and Ukraine. , c.A history and include oral testimonies, memoirs, direct obser-
18L vation and questionnaires, examples of popular culture, and
Philipp Ther, professor of Central European History 90L media pieces. The essays explore many manifestations of
at the University of Vienna –PE the two sides of the same coin—loss on the one hand, gain
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e on the other—in two cities that, as a result of the political
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ISBN 978-963-386-323-7
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Budapest – New York
Sales and information:
On the cover: Stencil graffiti in central Wroclaw, photo by Robert Pyrah [email protected]
Cover design: Tímea E. Adrián Website: http://www.ceupress.com
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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: [phone] 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” Polish-
Ukrainian 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 .......................................................................... 55
Beyond National: “Posttraumatic Identity” of Disabled War Veterans
in Interwar Lviv
Oksana Vynnyk ................................................................................... 77
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 Multi-
ethnic City
Mayhill C. Fowler ................................................................................ 123
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vi 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
T
his 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 cen-
tury, 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, assert-
ively 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 docu-
mented. 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 multi-
ethnic past, have prompted a remarkable surge in renewed scholarly interest
1 The impetus for this volume came from collaborative research conducted as part of
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 Stauter-
Halstead, Łukasz Tomasz Sroka, Mayhill Fowler and Anna Holzer-Kawałko were
presented at project-sponsored workshops.
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2 JAN FELLERER
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 sus-
tained use of myth, memory and migration to justify political and cultural
programs of nationalization “from above.” A notional transfer of Lviv’s pre-
WWII 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 contri-
butions to this volume. They present case studies that pay particular atten-
tion 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 eco-
nomic history. The types of sources and methods are, therefore, those char-
acteristic 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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Introduction 3
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 con-
tinue 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 mate-
rials mentioned above. They offer privileged insights into the history of the
two East-Central European cities as experienced and represented at grass-
root 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 par-
ticular 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 poli-
tics, cultural practices, and artistic representations of the city, bestows agency
upon those who, otherwise, often figure as being at the receiving end of his-
torical 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 organi-
zation, 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 polit-
ical changes and reinvent themselves in short intervals throughout the 20th
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