Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City by Christoph Mick (review)

In Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City, Christoph Mick uses the method of local history to unfold an interesting and complex thesis about the causes of ethnic violence in the former Habsburg crown land of Galicia. To explain what happened, he writes, we cannot merely credit historical differences among groups; we must likewise delve into how shifting regimes of governmental power reinforced, subjugated, or excluded certain populations along ethnic lines, and further, how cultures of memorialization and national remembrance (sometimes supported by existing political systems, sometimes not) valorized and inscribed particular historical episodes to the benefit or detriment of other indigenous groups.

Tracing in scrupulous detail the political and social interactions of L'viv's three main ethnic groups (Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews) between 1914 and 1947, Mick argues that "ethnicity and religion were the most important identity markers" in the city (2). Nevertheless, changing administrative regimes and wartime occupations also served to define those ethnic identities in new and often negative ways. At the end of World War I, "religious and social conflicts became nationally charged" (7), with Poles and Ukrainians competing to include L'viv in their newly independent states. Narrating this history through the actions and words of L'viv's city councilors, journalists, academics, and "ordinary" folk—people for whom "L'viv [was] to be both a site and object of contention" (76)—Mick's work is a visceral, often numbingly brutal account of the dreams, hatreds, and fears of L'viv's population during Eastern Europe's darkest hours.

The book's structure is informed by the seven "regime changes" that marked the city's first five decades in the twentieth century: Austro-Hungarian to Russian (1914), Russian to Austro-Hungarian (1915), Austro-Hungarian to Ukrainian (1918), Ukrainian to Polish (1918), Polish to Soviet (1939), Soviet to German (1941), and German to Soviet (1944). Mick's thesis relies on the interplay of ethnicity and economics to explain the relationships of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews during these political transitions. His method is that of local, descriptive history (what he calls Erfahrungsgeschichte, a history of how events are given meaning), allowing the sources to carry the narrative. Rarely does Mick engage with a broader European context. Instead, he lets Europe and its wars come to L'viv. In so doing, he has written a meticulous account of the interactions of L'viv's ethnic communities before, during, and after each regime change. The fourth chapter, "Reconstruction and Remembrance, 1920–1939," which covers the years after the successful establishment of L'viv as a Polish city following World War I, is perhaps the most theoretically stimulating. It traces the ultimately short-lived attempt by the Poles of L'viv to create a memory culture for their new state, the Second Polish Republic. These pages should be the starting point for a number of fascinating future dissertations.

Much of the book is devoted to chronicling successive administrative changes in L'viv—the seemingly mundane, even petty, details that mark political transitions. I remain somewhat skeptical that shifting governments did much more than exacerbate existing tensions, which, by starting the volume in 1914, Mick has little time to mention. Rather, one of the profound insights to be found here is how ethnic strife—and more specifically, the near-continuous eruption of anti-Jewish violence—predated not only the Soviet and German occupations, but the Russian one in 1914 as well. Though Mick seeks repeatedly to stress underlying economic motivations (75, 293), the sources make clear that wealth and class were often merely rhetorical devices serving to disguise other motivations for violence. This seems particularly true for the recurring anti-Jewish pogroms, which (before the arrival of the Soviets and the Germans) tended to erupt during periods of political transition, rather than as the result of...