This is a volume of preponderantly high-quality contributions. Jan Fellerer's introduction, however, simultaneously inflates its originality and undersells its significance. He claims it represents a third approach, next to national or multi-national narratives, namely—in essence—a bottom-up history that stresses the influence of agency from below. The implication of a gap in the existing literature on L΄viv and Wrocław is, unfortunately, strongly exaggerated and thus misleading.
The purpose of thinking in terms of this specific set of, arguably, inconsistently juxtaposed approaches remains unclear. Instead, histories that (still) seek to “nationalize” these cities are dated; histories recognizing their (former) realities of diversity and remaking are up-to-date; and the interaction of multiple agencies is not terra incognita, so that Fellerer's claim of novelty for treating agency from below as more than ancillary does not match the existing literature well. His assertion that “the Sovietization of Lviv… often remains in the background” (7) sits badly with the historiography, too; it is easy to look up a small handful of studies that have already addressed the Sovietization of the city explicitly and extensively.
Robert Pyrah provides a useful overview and acute discussion of “parallel” Polish and Ukrainian histories, combined with a cautiously hopeful argument about the making of “placeness” from other materials than national and nationalist narratives.
Focusing on a struggle over migration between late-Habsburg officials and informal agents, Keely Stauter-Halsted brings to bear cutting-edge scholarship on migration and a sense of Habsburg and Galician peculiarities. In this volume her essay also serves as an especially useful reminder of a history of migration beyond war, refugees, deportations, and forcible population transfers—and of the fact that this history is also pertinent for places such as L΄viv and Wrocław, even though they have suffered so much from the “weaponized” variant.
Through a study of war veterans and the welfare that they did or did not receive, Oksana Vynnyk shows the persistence of both World War I and the subsequent Polish-Ukrainian clash in L΄viv's interwar society. Anna Holzer-Kawałko's, Halyna Bodnar's, Sofia Dyak's, Mayhill Fowler's, and Mikołaj Kunicki's chapters are innovative, detailed, and deeply researched.
Holzer-Kawałko uses oral history sources and up-to-date conceptualization to explore a moment of disruption, transition, and encounter, when Poles replaced Germans in postwar western Poland. One does not have to agree with of all of her conclusions to welcome her explicit spelling-out of how they challenge not only historiography but also memory. Fowler addresses popular culture understood as (modern) urban entertainment in L΄viv in the long 1930s. Using Jazz and Tango as her pars pro toto and disrupting simplistic dichotomies of the “provincial” and the international, she shows us a central European metropole as a “an important artistic space” where the local, transnational, and even, ultimately, the Soviet interacted. Dyak offers a deep reading of Soviet perceptions, reshaping, and, last but not least, reimagining of L΄viv's space and buildings, using an efficient mix of sources from Soviet reportage, architecture, and city planning.
Bodnar's perspicacious essay presents us with the results of an extremely valuable oral history research project drilling deep into layers of memory (and forgetting) of those “others” that are no longer in L΄viv, in particular Jews and Poles, while combining well-chosen excerpts from interviews with acute analysis that pays due attention to social factors, such as residential space. Kunicki makes excellent use of the representations of Wrocław in postwar film to probe the challenges, insecurities, and changes involved in, quite literally, picturing the city as (mostly) Polish. Katarzyna Kotyńska adds a survey of projects affecting L΄viv's cityscape now, drawing on its many memories (and amnesias) in the cityscape, including the successes and limits of an international and local effort (full disclosure: the author of this review was among its initiators) to help recover its Jewish past, most centrally through the site of the ruins of the Golden Rose synagogue. Uilleam Blacker, relying on published literary texts and secondary literature, details a local literary avant-garde of the late-last century, making the case for its abiding effects, deploying the enduring categories of “carnival” and “palimpsest.”
In sum, some contributions are less eye-opening than others. Yet most of them epitomize the sophistication currently achieved in thinking about central Europe's “borderland” cities. While the volume is less pathbreaking than its introduction claims, it adds up to a rich and important work.
