Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940

4. Creating Polish Wilno, 1919–1939

4. Creating Polish Wilno, 1919–1939 Theodore R. Weeks In the interwar period newly formed (or resurrected, or expanded) Eastern European states were faced with a number of difficult challenges , among them the need to modernize and to nationalize their populations.1 While modern national movements had been developing here for decades or even generations, it is clear that even among relatively “advanced” nations like the Poles or Czechs, many individuals —especially in rural areas—continued to define themselves primarily by religion or locality rather than as members of a nation. Even in cities, the “nationalization of urban space” was primarily a phenomenon of the post-1848 period.2 In interwar Poland, where cities were almost inevitably populated in large part by non-Poles, the perceived need to Polonize urban space was particularly acute. This was even more so the case on the edges of interwar Poland where cities such as Poznań (Posen), Lviv (Lemberg, Lwów), and Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno) were claimed not only by Poles but by national movements in neighboring states.3 1 For the purpose of this chapter, “Eastern Europe” will refer essentially to the states east of the Elbe created or significantly enlarged by the peace treaties of Paris in 1919. Translations from Polish sources in the text are mine. 2 On the nationalization of urban space, see Rausch, Kultfigur und Nation; King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; and Czaplicka et al., Composing Urban History. 3 There is a large and growing literature on nationalizing urban space in East Central Europe. The example of Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv bears many similarities with Wilno/Vilnius. See, for example, Prokopovych, Habsburg Lemberg; Mick, Kriegserfahrungen in einer multiethnischen Stadt. 74 Theodore R. Weeks Polish cities before 1914 were seldom “modern” as understood from the perspective of Central or Western Europe. With the exception of Warsaw, Łódź, and to some extent Białystok, industrialization had barely begun to make a serious impact on Polish urban centers. To be sure, cities and even small towns were by 1914 connected to the railroad net. Modern conveniences such as gas lighting (and, to a much more limited extent, electricity), sewers, and public transport made their appearance in large Polish urban centers before 1914. Still, the proud but impoverished resurrected Polish Republic of the interwar period lacked capital to modernize the country’s urban centers as a whole and tended to concentrate on the capital. The city we will consider here, Wilno (present-day Vilnius) hardly progressed in an economic or technological sense in the interwar years. Neither the local university nor interwar guidebooks stressed modernity in the sense of technology or scientific breakthroughs . Modernity in interwar Wilno can be seen—if at all—in its exciting literary movements like Jung Vilne in Yiddish and Żagary in Polish. For Wilno, the past—its role as a bulwark of Catholicism and Polonism, the Ostra Brama Madonna, and the city’s association with the Polish national poet Mickiewicz—was far more important than modernity in a traditional sense. The reasons for this emphasis on the past can be debated, but certainly derived in part from a lack of alternatives: Wilno was an economically poor city, far from economic and political resources. While other cities might have been able to use their position “on the border” to economic advantages (for example, Breslau/Wrocław), this was impossible for interwar Wilno where the border with Lithuania was entirely closed (at least for legal commerce) and both political and economic factors precluded a significant level of trade with the neighboring USSR. Wilno is particularly interesting in view of the city’s very mixed population, its geographical position on the extreme northeastern frontier of the Polish state, and the overt claims on the city by the adjacent Lithuanian state. Obviously, I cannot present a comprehensive view of politics, culture, and national consciousness in Wilno in this period of twenty years in a short chapter.4 Rather I 4 For a stimulating point of departure on interwar Wilno as a multiethnic city, see Wendland, “Kulturelle, nationale und urbane Identitäten in Wilna.” Creating Polish Wilno, 1919–1939 75 describe certain specific examples and techniques by which Poles in Wilno tried to “claim” the city for their own nation in the hope that these examples provide some insight into the history of that city in the interwar period while also contributing to a larger discussion of how “a...