Maps are sources of speculation and fantasy, difference and line-drawing alterity. Equal to the task of mapping homelands, Maciej Górny's book is the work of a genuine central European polyglot. Within the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and beyond, he attends to the tendentiousness of maps of all kinds, sources for claims in English, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, and Croatian. His coverage of periodicals, brochures, and secondary literature related to maps, generated also by Americans such as William Morris Davis, Isaiah Bowman, and Richard Hartshorne, is at once lively and comprehensive. Translated Hungarian and Romanian works occasionally fall away, but Górny does a truly impressive job with European and especially German and Slavic language sources. He integrates Viktor Dvorský, Count Pál Teleki, Simion Mehedinți, and Jovan Cvijić into the broader world of colonial specialists, imperials like Emmanuel de Martonne and Halford Mackinder who served states as experts. Górny's geography illuminates the shapes and turns of turf-obsessed men and the persuasive graphic art they drew, institutionally as academics and as part of lobbying groups or delegations, during the Great War and beyond.
Kreślarze ojczyzn is a communicative history—for maps assembled data and mapmakers skillfully managed disinformation. The multidisciplinary narrative is therefore one of political discord and rivalry. Górny combines biography and correspondence, the history of science, critical geography, and spatial history. He focuses on pop-national brochures and high scientific geographical journal literature. From Warsaw, he breaks down nations not just into their social constructions, but also as they were geo-coded into spatial models and growing personal feuds. What gave maps credence as data visualizations, in short, was the allure of geosciences. Demands for postwar peace conflicted with unitary needs for statistical demography, anthropology of a race-sorting and eugenic bent, geology, geomorphology, and hydrography among newly independent states. Principally, the battle of “ethnic” maps was among “democratic nationalities” in Europe—all problematic concepts, to be sure. The maps of 1919 were fictions in the archive.
Górny's monograph shows how maps forged worlds of knowledge. Travel was crucial for imperial and national geoscientists in contact. After 1918–19, however, Germans, Hungarians, and Bulgarians were banned from international organizations. Górny informatively shows how the optics of interwar states picked up where colonial empires left off. The key was the professionalization of geographers as experts, an aftershock of World War I. Inside national delegations, elites took what was useful; their geopolitical visions often competed. Victors set up patronage networks. Great-national dreams were manipulated with statistics; interwar states sharpened border disputes as plebiscites were overseen (quite badly) by the League of Nations. In the 1920s and 1930s, thematic maps emerged to depict settled areas by population density (a favorite, malleable unit of measurement), using new census data in contested German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian post-dynastic borderland spaces.
Experts who fancied themselves scientists corresponded and participated, if they could, in international congresses. When locked out, they claimed scientific status for the earth sciences, a common theme for Polish and Czech geographers, anthropologists, and ethnographers who held their own Slavic congresses by the mid-1920s, challenging German Ostforschung. They drew from the charismatic work of predecessors such as Paul Vidal de la Blache and the anthropogeographer Friedrich Ratzel. Even in climatology and geology, cartographic knowledge was embedded in settlement projects and civilizing missions. The historian makes great use of the Belgrade files of Cvijić; the papers of the Balkan Commission (held in Vienna); the files of the American Geographical Society's directors; and the records of the Polish peace delegation. Central Europeans such as Dvorský in Czechoslovakia and the Ukrainian Stepan Rudnyts΄kyi receive extensive treatment. The German-Polish conflict between Albrecht Penck and Eugeniusz Romer was notable. Jan Czekanowski, Stanisław Pawłowski, and Ludomir Sawicki lined up against Hans Mortensen, Ernst Nowack, and Wilhelm Volz over the corridor issue, a tension that persisted in cartographic journals.
In Kreślarze ojczyzn, Górny's method is a kind of postcolonial symbolic interactionism—a sociology of how geographical knowledge breaks apart into the subjectivities and prejudices of men in nationalizing contexts. This reviewer wished that the history of Judeophobia as well as institutional antisemitism, that is, the quota system against Jews for entering universities and professions in Hungary, was brought into stories of ethno-cartographic flurry. Wartime contexts were essential to the global shipment of the works of Romer (his influential atlas of 1916) as well as Cvijić and Teleki. Górny's bibliography and footnotes for the six chapters are very helpful for interdisciplinary researchers in pursuit of this topic. The book's strength is the author's analysis of “great geographers,” men who were far from heroic, immersed in the ultra-local, interwar turf wars of central, eastern, and southeastern Europe.
Olga Linkiewicz's Lokalność i nacjonalizm is a similarly well-conceived study of local knowledge: how scientists defined heterogeneous borderlands through the making of national communities in provincial societies of interwar Poland's Second Republic. She offers a valuable corrective to Polish (and Jewish) nostalgia about tranquil borderlands prior to September 1939. Communities on the scale of the village or district levels were flexible forms of coexistence, not reified as national; every subgroup endured changes in reciprocity and loyalty, in its contacts with and interest in others. She examines idioms of nationalism in settled spaces and homelands, to give us a closer reading of how progenitors of knowledge—including linguists, social anthropologists, and ethnologists—engaged in political separation. Covering eastern Galicia and the history of education and social movements therein, Linkiewicz looks at racial discourse and everyday ethnicity in the villages and towns within Lwów, Tarnopol, and Stanisławów provinces, seeking out stories jointly of tension and cooperation.
As a monograph, the book has revealing moments. Economic history is absent, and I am frankly surprised that Shimon Redlich's classic Together and Apart in Brzezany (2002) does not appear. The author's analysis covers three big themes: “localness” (lokalność), schools, and politics. It is divided into twenty-two short, readable chapters, with abundant visuals (some illustrating places by “ethnic” type), tables, and statistics. Designers of local Polish or Ukrainian narratives of history calculated histories and narrowed geographies toward mobilization by identity, set almost by default to a conflict mode in the (here, mostly Polish) periodical press through the 1920s and 1930s. Rural teachers were expected to be rooted and organic, to ground populations in place. Class-, language- and confession-based groups in Galicia usually meant place in a fabricated, totalizing, and too neatly separated way.
For the humanistic Linkiewicz, group solidarity was forged by schools and parties on at least three levels: from Warsaw, the seats of provinces (województwa), and by activists, ethnographic experts and teachers, who worked with and for associations. Plebiscites were conducted for the building of schools, notably for the increase of bilingual ones in Tarnopol province by the end of the 1920s. In-group nationalism's traces are found in reports by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW); Polish and Ukrainian press sources; the Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw; the Lwów district (state) archive; the Polish Ethnographical Society in Wrocław; the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and the archive of the Polish Order of Dominicans. Applying these, we see in Chapters 2 (on metryka and record-keeping) and 5 (on swojkość or emic identity) how categories made by statist optics break down. Linkiewicz makes fine use of collected interviews with anonymous female and male villagers, born in Galicia in the 1920s and early 1930s. In a fascinating Bourdieu-inspired Chapter 8, she further gathers subaltern “local stories” while deconstructing claims to ethnic difference. The scientific nation-civilizing task of joining ethnos to politics and working as an expert is a formative mode of postwar and post-conflict engagement.
Coeval harmonious space in rural climes proved illusory. Effects of Polish “pacification” from at least 1929–30 sharpened Ukrainian activists’ agendas from Lwów and Tarnopol. The non-belonging of communities remained imaginable (for nationalists, unimaginable!) in most aspects of institutional life. Linkiewicz's tone is cool and post-positivist, without diversity for diversity's sake, or apologetics for Polish pacification, the Piłsudski cult, or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). What connects Linkiewicz and Górny is a multidisciplinary approach to the mapping of knowledge by experts in borderlands. Their histories are self-consciously epistemic and sometimes a little too paradigmatic, but I think that both get beyond political elites into the messy random spaces of the local, despite their powerful analytic voiceovers. Linkiewicz and Górny convincingly illustrate how rival “scientific” processes claimed land and authority in nationalizing climes, and thereby shaped multilayered conceptions of place, locality, and identity. States squeezed minorities into problems for experts to solve, and academics and mobilizing activists alike have internalized this cottage industry. The project of mapping lines of interwar difference, one might say, was to remove indifference.
