Christoph Mick's Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City tells the story of a city's transformation. By the mid-1950s only a fifth of the city's residents had lived there before the war (338). The multicultural hub had become ethnically homogeneous, the result of the violence accompanying no fewer than seven regime changes after the start of war in 1914. Mick recounts, in thorough but sometimes unrelieved detail, the Russian occupation in 1914, the return of the Austro-Hungarians in June 1915, the short-lived Ukrainian coup of November 1918 and the subsequent Polish rule, the Soviet occupation in September 1939, the Nazi occupation of 1941, and the re-Sovietization in 1944. Mick's focus here is appropriately on the negative, on the violence inflicted on the city's Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian residents by foreign occupiers, and on the violence that erupted among these groups, especially the conflicts between Ukrainians and Poles and the pogrom of 1918. It is important to note that readers will find here a history of violent actions and interactions, not a history of the city itself. In addition, Mick does not examine how women may have experienced this violence differently than men or discuss the consequences of the violence in terms of collective or individual trauma. Rather, he shows us how Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians viewed these events and how these views had consequences in later conflicts, particularly in the early years of World War II and the period of re-Sovietization.

Originally published in German in 1993, Mick's work, translated by Helen Schoop, is within the tradition of Erfahrungsgeschichte, the history of experience (2). He aims to describe how individuals perceived and interpreted events and to illustrate how these perceptions and interpretations existed alongside competing views. He writes, “An experiential historical approach could potentially have the ability to break the deadlock of petrified historiography” (377). The goal is noble, and, to a great extent, his evenhanded discussion of interethnic relations succeeds in convincing the reader of the complexity of differing views. Mick's tremendous strength is his exhaustive review of archival sources in Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Austria, and Germany. He carefully describes what happened to the city's residents, often considering varying descriptions of the same event. The heart of the story is November 1918, a date that at once recalls a dashed victory for the Ukrainians, independence for the Poles, and, for the Jews, a devastating three-day pogrom. Mick's impressive knowledge of the sources allows him to highlight the grim stories of this violence, including an account of the November 1918 burning of Jewish homes, observed by a laughing crowd (160).

Sources such as memoirs and oral histories appear much less often here than police reports and testimonies gathered in archives, and one wonders how other kinds of sources might have changed Mick's narrative. Similarly, while Mick's treatment of the experiences of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians is remarkably balanced, an absence of Yiddish sources is notable. This is less a criticism than an opportunity to point out that, in addition to such impressive and comprehensive studies as the one under review, Mick's topic demands a collaborative approach. His clarion call to examine the views of ethnic groups other than one's own should be answered by historians who, working together, can present this troubled history to the scholarly community and the public, increasingly interested in understanding the causes and consequences of this violence.

Mick is certainly correct that representatives of each of the groups described here must recognize the meanings of these events for others not like them. His work does much to outline the events in question and to encourage others to consider competing claims seriously, but the sprawling text can be more confusing than enlightening. For example, Mick's work often encompasses the towns and villages surrounding Lviv; he offers much information but at the expense of a greater emphasis on the city itself. Perhaps more significantly, the consideration of the memorialization of the events of 1918 draws attention to the lack of discussion of memorialization in the postwar period. Mick's brief conclusion is a model of clarity, but a more thorough review of postwar texts, including those from the Jewish community, would have served readers well.

Historians interested in L'viv are greatly in Mick's debt. He has offered us a challenging portrayal of the period and a helpful guide to the study of interethnic relations. Few scholars would have taken on such a daunting topic; even fewer would have produced such an insightful work.