Christoph Mick. Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv, 1914–1947

Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City is an English translation and revised edition of Christoph Mick’s German book on the subject, based on his Habilitation thesis at the University of Tübingen. For the most part, it is a captivating, if very dense, account of the seven regime changes that occurred in and around L’viv/Lwów/Lemberg/Lvov from the start of the twentieth century to 1947: from Habsburg to Russian, from Russian to German, from German to Ukrainian, from Ukrainian to Polish, from Polish to Soviet, from Soviet to Nazi German, and from Nazi German to Soviet once more. Mick informs us at the outset that he is not attempting a complete history of all these regimes, only the reaction to violence and war that occurred in each, especially as a result of the intersecting ethnic, national, and religious divides of the population: Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian. We follow the rise of ultra-nationalist movements among the Polish and Ukrainian populations of the city and its surroundings. These movements were largely fueled by incendiary hatred of one another and an equally vicious hatred of the Jews, which resulted in horrific pogroms throughout the decades and, of course, culminated in the murder of the Jewish population of L’viv. At times, Mick tries to pull back from his endless dissections of nationalist struggles and persecution to tell his audience that what really counted was class rather than national/religious identities. More specifically, he contends that the working class of the city often behaved differently from the various national elites; or that really, though he is focusing on conflict, the various national and religious groups mostly lived in a peaceful, if tense, coexistence between the wars and regime changes. But his overarching narrative undercuts these attempted caveats, and the national, ethnic, and to a lesser extent religious divides are analyzed in minuscule detail.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Economic history · Ethnic group · German · Hatred · Judaism · Nationalism · Nazism · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Ukrainian · Demography · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Philosophy · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies