Lviv and Wrocław, Cities in Parallel?

Myth, Memory, and Migration, c. 1890-Present
Lviv and Wrocław, Cities in Parallel?  Myth, Memory, and Migration, c. 1890-Present, edited by Jan Fellerer and Robert Pyrah
ISBN: 
978-963-386-323-7
cloth
$79.00 / €69.00 / £63.00
Publication date: 
2020
364 pages

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 micro-history 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.

Jan Fellerer: Introduction

Robert Pyrah: A Place Called Home? Nation, Locality and the "Parallel" Polish-Ukrainian Histories of Wrocław and Lviv

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Katarzyna Kotyńska: Contemporary Lviv: Facing the Past—Reinterpreting the Past

Ewa Sidorenko: Building Bridges Between Breslau and Wrocław: A Case Study from the European Capital of Culture Initiative, 2016

Jacek Purchla: Afterword: Central European Cities as Laboratories of Memory... and Oblivion—Lviv and Wrocław Contrasted

"Der vorliegende Band hinterfragt die übliche Parallelisierung beider Stadtgeschichten anhand dreizehn spannender mikrohistorisch argumentierender Beiträge. Ausgehend von dem Umstand, dass in beiden Städten aufgrund der tiefgreifenden demografischen Umwälzungen und Migrationserfahrungen erheblicher Bedarf an neuen lokalen Identitätsangeboten bestand, spüren die Beiträge dem Wandel von Erinnerungskulturen beider Städte aus einer bottom-up-Perspektive nach. Der Sammelband führt aktuelle Forschungen zur Geschichte beider Städte zusammen, die bereits seit den 1990er-Jahren durch die weitestgehende Zugänglichkeit der Archive einen Aufschwung erlebt haben. Für diesen „Boom“ in der Forschung bildete gerade die multiethnische Prägung der ostmitteleuropäischen Städte einen wichtigen Bezugspunkt, so auch im Falle L'vivs und (in geringerem Maße) Wrocławs. In konzeptueller Hinsicht knüpft der Band an einen gegenwärtigen, produktiven Trend in der historischen Forschung an, der die... more
"The focus of the volume on the processes of memory in the localities of L’viv and Wrocław is an effective way to draw attention to the experience of large-scale historical processes at the local level, drawing on a repertoire of sources that would not otherwise be tapped. It will be of interest to students of a wide range of topics, including history, memory, urbanism, and mass population displacement in East-Central Europe and beyond."