Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T06:04:31.105Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The ‘Polish Mecca’, the ‘Little Vienna on the Vistula’ or ‘Big-City Cracow’? Imagining Cracow before the Great War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2013

NATHANIEL D. WOOD
NATHANIEL D. WOOD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66049, USA
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

This article explores the tendency of citizens to liken their city to other cities in an effort to promote particular visions of their hometown. It examines three mythic visions of fin-de-siècle Cracow – the Polish Mecca, the Little Vienna on the Vistula and modern Big-City Cracow – as reflected in contemporary accounts and historical scholarship, demonstrating how they functioned to promote national, imperial and interurban identification. Most critical of the national vision, the article advocates a broader perspective.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , May 2013 , pp. 226 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Rodger, R. and Sweet, R., ‘The changing nature of urban history’, History in Focus, 13: ‘The city’, Institute of Historical Research (2008) www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/City/articles/sweet.html accessed 24 Nov. 2010Google Scholar.

2 Hohenberg, P.M. and Hollen Lees, L., The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, MA, 1985).Google Scholar

3 For an excellent collection of essays about nationalism and planning in central and south-eastern Europe, see Gunzburger Makaš, E. and Damljanović Conley, T. (eds.), Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe (London and New York, 2010)Google Scholar, and especially the Introduction, 1–28, which makes meaningful and insightful comparisons between the cities of these regions. Work by geographers, meanwhile, continues to compare cities, as can be seen in the work of the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, which ranks cities according to their global significance in categories of Alpha++, Alpha+, Alpha, Alpha- and so forth. See: www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/group.html accessed 25 Nov 2011.

4 Homola-Skąpska, I., ‘“Mały Wiedeń” nad Wisłą’, Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Prace historyczne, 121 (1997), 409.Google Scholar

5 Prokopovych, M., ‘Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv) archi tecture, 1772–1918: if not the little Vienna of the east, or a national bastion, what else?’, East Central Europe, 36 (2009), 100–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See, for example, Leo's speech celebrating the creation of Greater Cracow: Nowiny, 19 Apr. 1910, 1–3.

7 For the former see especially Dabrowski, P., Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington, IN, 2004)Google Scholar; and Purchla, J., Matecznik Polski: pozaekonomiczne czynniki rozwoju Krakowa w okresie autonomii galicyjskiej (Cracow, 1992).Google Scholar For the latter, see Homola-Skąpska, ‘“Mały Wiedeń” nad Wisłą’, 409–26; and B. Wilk, W ‘Małym Wiedniu nad Wisłą’ (Cracow, 2008), which, though it contains the ‘Little Vienna on the Vistula’ phrase in the title, is generally a confirmation of the national(ist) argument about Cracow as the heart of the nation.

8 Wood, N.D., Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (DeKalb, 2010).Google Scholar

9 Barthes, R., Mythologies, selected and translated by Lavers, Annette (New York, 1972), 11–12, 109–59Google Scholar.

10 Purchla, J., Cracow in the European Core (Cracow, 2000)Google Scholar, 10.

11 Ibid., 11.

12 Magdeburg Law or Magdeburg Rights, named for the city where it originated, was a set of laws that promoted burghers’ rights and trade and formed the basis of governance in many cities of the region.

13 See Stauter-Halsted, K., The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 2001), 79–81Google Scholar; and King, J., Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, 2002), 49.Google Scholar

14 Orton, L., ‘The Stańczyk portfolio and the politics of Galician loyalism’, Polish Review, 27 (1982), 55–64.Google Scholar

15 ‘Kraków nasz stary, to gród pamiątek! / Gród dawnej sławy, dawnej wielkości! / Stąd dziejów naszych snuje się wątek, / Tu królów naszych spoczęły kości. / Tu dzwon Zygmuntów sercem spiżowem / Pieśń ci minionej wyśpiewa chwały; / Tu każdy kamień żywem ci słowem, / Opowie przeszłość, synku mój mały!’, W. Bełza, Abecadlnik w wierszykach dla starszej dzitwy polskiej (1869), as cited in Grodziska, Karolina, Gdzie miasto zaczarowane: księga cytatów o Krakowie (Cracow, 2003), 96.Google Scholar

16 Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

17 A centennial commemorative volume about the Society by Wiesław Bieńkowski bears the telling title: Stażnicy Dziejów Miasta Narodowej Pamięci (Guardians of the history of the city of national memory) (Cracow, 1997).

18 As cited in Grodziska, ‘Gdzie to miasto zaczarowane’, 123.

19 Dabrowski, Commemorations.

20 As cited in Grodziska, ‘Gdzie to miasto zaczarowane’, 99.

21 P. Dabrowski, ‘Commemorations and the national revitalization of Kraków’, ece-urban

The Online Publications Series of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, 2 (2008), 6, http://www.lvivcenter.org/en/publications/ accessed 18 June 2010.

22 Grodziska, ‘Gdzie to miasto zaczarowane’, 104.

23 Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992).Google Scholar

24 Nowiny, 19 Apr. 1910, 1–3.

25 Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny (IKC), 6 Jul. 1915, 2.

26 Małecki, J., ‘The Cracow municipal government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Purchla, J. (ed.), Mayors and City Halls: Local Government and the Cultural Space of the Late Habsburg Monarchy (Cracow, 1998), 35–43.Google Scholar

27 Purchla, Matecznik Matecznik Polski.

28 Wilk, W ‘Małym Wiedniu nad Wisłą’.

29 C. Geertz, ‘Deep play: notes on a Balinese cockfight’, http://webhome.idirect.com/~boweevil/BaliCockGeertz.html accessed 25 Nov. 2011.

30 Dabrowski, Commemorations, 212.

31 Ibid., 212–16.

32 Ibid., 219, 225.

33 Ploderówna, M., ‘Dzień 4-go lipca 1890 r. w Krakowie (Wspomnienie)’, Wiek Młody, 6 (20 May 1898), 87–8Google Scholar, as cited in Dabrowski, ‘Commemorations’, 16.

34 The University of Vienna Ph.D. candidate Simon Hadler has written brilliantly on the ‘speaking stones’ of Cracow. See Hadler, ‘Der urbane Raum als Medium der Image-Produktion. Krakau als kulturelles Zentrum um 1900 und heute’, (De)Konstruktionen Galiziens. Kommunikation – Transformation – kulturelles Gedächtnis, Universität Wien, Vienna, 28 Nov. 2008 (unpublished paper).

35 Homola-Skąpska, ‘“Mały Wiedeń”’, 416, 420, 422.

36 IKC, 7 Jul. 1915, 3.

37 Goetel, F., Patrząc wstecz (Cracow, 1998), 22Google Scholar.

38 Homola-Skąpska, ‘“Mały Wiedeń”, 409; see also Wilk's plagiarized version of this passage, W ‘Małym Wiedniu nad Wisłą’, 10.

39 Homola-Skąpska, ‘“Mały Wiedeń”’, and idem, ‘Krakowskie cukiernie i kawiarnie w XIX wieku’ (Cracovian sweetshops and cafes in the nineteenth century), Annales Universitas Mariae Curie-Skłodowska Lublin-Polonia, 51 (1996), 43–61. By stressing Cracow's connection to European civilization as refracted through the prism of fin-de-siècle Vienna, the American scholars Larry Wolff and Timothy Snyder fit loosely into this tradition. For them, an exploration of Cracow's place as part of Galicia, eastern Europe, or ‘the Bloodlands’ offers larger lessons about the ramifications of the Enlightenment. See Wolff, L., ‘Dynastic conservatism and poetic violence in fin-de-siècle Cracow: the Habsburg matrix of Polish modernism’, American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 735–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and idem, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, 2010); T. Snyder, ‘A core of European tragedy, diversity, fantasy’, New York Review of Books, 11 Nov. 2011, and idem, The Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010).

40 Wood, Becoming Metropolitan, 192–203.

41 Because Vienna was a large city, too, it could appear as a marker of shared imperial culture or as an example of big-city life.

42 Wood, Becoming Metropolitan, 57–64.

43 Ibid., 192–3, 202.

44 IKC, 2 Aug. 1913, 7.

45 See, for example, Nowiny, 9 Feb. 1911, 1.

46 Nowiny, 13 Jul. 1906, 4–5; 30 Dec. 1908, 1–2; 6 Mar. 1910, 2–3; 21 Mar. 1908, 2; 3 Apr. 1908, 2.

47 Nowiny, 31 Jul. 1910, 3.

48 Nowiny, 15 Oct. 1908, 1; IKC, 6 Jul. 1912, 4–5.

49 IKC, 8 Sep. 1911, 4–5

50 Nowiny, 2 Aug. 1907, 2.

51 IKC, 8 Feb. 1913, 4–5.

52 See http://krakow.gazeta.pl/krakow/1,44425,7109565,Krakow_znany_jako_magiczny.html accessed 30 Nov. 2011.

53 Homola-Skąpska, ‘“Mały Wiedeń”’, 426.

54 Czas, 293, 23 Dec. 1905, 7–8, evening edn.

55 In Russian Poland, strikes and bombs were indeed commonplace. For more on the Revolution of 1905 in Poland, see Blobaum, R., Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 (Ithaca, 1995).Google Scholar

56 Barthes, Mythologies, 11.

57 Judson, P., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA, 2006)Google Scholar; King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; and Zahra, T., Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, 2008).Google Scholar For a contemporary example of national indifference in the highly nationalized space of Cluj, see Brubaker, R., Fieschmidt, M., Fox, J. and Grancea, L., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton, 2006).Google Scholar

58 Prokopovych, M., Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 (West Lafayette, 2009)Google Scholar; Unowsky, D., The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (West Lafayette, 2005).Google Scholar

59 Hobsbawm, E., Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1991), 11.Google Scholar

60 Binder, H., ‘Urban landscape and printed press in Habsburg Lemberg: the Kotsko memorial of 1912’, East Central Europe, 33 (2006), 53–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 Nowiny, 16 Jul. 1910, 1; and 17 Jul. 1910, 5.

62 Dabrowski, Commemorations, 159–83.