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

1. Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940. An Introduction

1. Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940 An Introduction Jan C. Behrends and Martin Kohlrausch In his renowned “Iron Curtain” speech—delivered on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri—Winston Churchill evoked the “famous cities” of Central and Eastern Europe. Alerting the distant American public to the division of Europe, Churchill listed what he believed to be household names like Bucharest, Sofia, Budapest, and Warsaw to demonstrate that familiar places were besieged by Joseph Stalin. Indirectly, Churchill was echoing a process that had taken place in the decades preceding his speech, a process that had confirmed the metropolitan aspirations of these cities, their European appeal, and their global relevance. The growth of cities and urban life is at the heart of the modern experience in Europe. Metropolitan cities such as London and Paris were certainly forerunners in this development: their rapid expansion began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Large parts of Central and Eastern Europe underwent urbanization and industrialization with considerable delay. But beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the towns in the Romanov and Habsburg empires as well as in the Balkans grew into cities and metropolitan areas. They changed at an astonishing pace. This transformation has long been interpreted as an attempt to overcome the economic and cultural backwardness of the region and to catch up to Western Europe.1 The chapters published in this volume confirm the importance of the Western model as well as the influence of international 1 Berend, History Derailed, 228–34. 2 Behrends and Kohlrausch experts on city planning at the periphery of Europe. In addition, this volume presents an alternative perspective that aims to understand the genesis of Eastern European cities with a metropolitan character or metropolitan aspirations as a process sui generis. In order to analyze the history of Eastern Europe’s large cities, the contributors to this volume take into account the peculiarities of the region—that is, a wide range of factors that cannot exclusively be subsumed under the label of backwardness. The decades from 1890 until the beginning of World War II are a period of crucial importance because the Eastern European urbanization process—including the mass migration of peasants to towns and cities—did not end or slow down like in the West after 1918. Throughout the twentieth century, evolving metropolitan cities such as Moscow, Warsaw, or Belgrade remained moldable entities to a much higher degree than their Western European counterparts. Even if in some cities in the region modernization had set in earlier, it was now that the reflection of one’s own status reached new heights—in mediatized exchange, in numerous expert travels, or in placing the city within the discourse on national and imperial renewal. In this context, precisely the perception of one’s own backwardness led to recurring initiatives to recast the cities, while always keeping in mind Western European models. At the same time the emergence of modern urbanism in the years after 1900 held a particular promise in the eastern half of the continent. By using the terms modernity, modernization, and modernism, the research in this volume points to a specific European tradition that has in many ways rightly been criticized. However, it seems difficult—if not impossible—to analyze the great transformation, the profound changes that unfolded in Eastern Europe from the 1890s on without discussing the concepts that highlight the dynamics that led to the reshaping of Eastern European cities and society. This is not to imply, however, that a common goal existed or that the cities studied were on a linear path of Westernization. Rather, local conditions shaped the changes. Still, the process of change triggered in politics, society, and urban life can, for our purposes, be called modernization. The term modernization has often been associated with a reflection of change and the idea of a moldable future. The latter is a particularly significant idea in the eastern part Introduction 3 of Europe. While urban backwardness could be found also in large parts of Southern and even Western Europe well into the twentieth century, the idea of catching up to a “European standard” merged with general ideas of transforming the region politically and (re)establishing nation states. There is a general consensus in the field that modernization— globally, but also in the Eastern European context—accelerated during the fin de siècle. Thus, the end of the nineteenth...