The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture by Larry Wolff (review)

Galicia is one of the polities that Norman Davies resurrects in his Vanished Kingdoms, a history of a “half-forgotten Europe” that ranges from the Visigoth state of Tolosa (AD 418–507) to “the ultimate vanishing act” of the USSR (1924–91). Many of Davies’s vanished kingdoms are located in the vicinity that Wolff ’s earlier book Inventing Eastern Europe argued was a projection of the Western imagination, seeking a foil for its own Enlightenment to shine the more brightly. But fluidity of borders has not been unique to Europe’s “backward” east. Inhabiting the territories of Lothar’s “Middle Kingdom,” which separated future France from future Germany after the Treaty of Verdun in 843, “all the Burgundies” have at one time or another meandered from the Baltic down to the Mediterranean and squatted most everywhere in between. “Erasmus of Rotterdam,” Davies reminds us, “was a Burgundian.” Wolff chooses the altogether less heimlich figure of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave masochism its name, to symbolize the difficulties and delicacies of Galician identity. Be warned.

The “revindicated, invented, and recast” Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (to give the province its official title) was born out of the first partition of Poland in 1772. The name was redacted from the one-time Habsburg possession of Galicia in northern Spain as a Latin approximation for Halych, a principality of medieval Rus. Maria Theresa’s queasiness about aggrandizing her territories at the expense of a legitimately crowned monarch was assuaged when her chancellor, Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, unearthed a twelfth-century Hungarian claim to Halych, which Poland had acquired only in the fourteenth century. Her successor Joseph II regarded the newly acquired province as an object for enlightened improvement, a trope used to justify Habsburg rule throughout Galicia’s existence. Imperial modernity was contrasted with the feudal barbarism of the ancien régime, which contemporary German travelers exemplified by Polish lords’ fondness for sexual humiliation and profligate use of the whip. Though Metternich considered partitioning Galicia following the massacres of 1846, the region remained a single province throughout the 146 years of its existence. It dissolved into a restored Poland in 1918. Following the latter’s territorial migration west in 1945, what had been Eastern Galicia became part of Soviet (now independent) Ukraine.

Galicia lasted twice as long as Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia—not to mention the Soviet Union—which is more than long enough, Wolff suggests, to have become a locus of identity and focus of loyalty. “The idea of Galicia,” he argues, “acquired meaning over the course of its historical existence; indeed, it accumulated multiple and shifting layers of meaning.” It is Wolff’s grasp of these multiplicities and mutations that make The Idea of Galicia so fine a book. The story, which is told over ten substantial chapters, is too intricate to be summarized here. The devil, of course, lies in the rich detail. Wojciech Boguslawski’s Krakowiacy i Górale (The Cracowians and the Highlanders)—for instance—has been regarded as a model of Polish “national opera” since its first performance in Warsaw in 1794. But when, with a few politically expedient changes to the libretto, the same work was performed in Lviv two years later, the geographical setting of the opera allowed it equally to appear as “a representation of Galician provincial unity.” Krakowiacy i Górale was performed in Lviv again in 1817, after Galicia had been restored to the Habsburgs at the Congress of Vienna. Emperor Franz was visiting the city and a cantata in his honor was sung between acts. “Thus the Polish ‘national opera’ of the 1790s, twenty years later, could be entirely domesticated as a Galician drama, even interposing the ceremonial celebration of Habsburg loyalty,” as Wolff comments.

Wolff convincingly shows that a Galician identity was (differently) real for many who lived in the Habsburg province between 1772 and 1918. But it was seldom exclusive. Identity with place...