1st Edition
Urban Communities and Memories in East-Central Europe in the Modern Age
This edited volume studies the logic of community formation and common view of the past to show how various social bonds of communities functioned during the modern national era of East-Central Europe from the late eighteenth century until today, and how multi-faceted this group-building really was.
Through an overview of selected examples of communities in East-Central European urban centres, mainly the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its successor empires, the volume shows the potential of re-interpretation or adaptation of the past as a crucial tool for assuring social cohesion and for strengthening the image of group boundaries. It studies not only textual sources, but also the cultural construction of local historical writings such as oral tradition and municipal publications, as well as symbolic objects such as epitaphs, plaques, monuments, and public edifices. The contributors explore the actual creativity employed by these communities to envision their past and their future in homage to the ideals of centralized nation or regionalism, and how these strongly ethnically-marked historic spaces can be interpreted, celebrated, or neglected.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students of regional urban history and cultural diversities, memory cultures, and community-formation.
Introduction
Aleksander Łupienko
Part 1: Urban Communities and Memories in the Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries
1. Epitaphs and Memory in Royal Prussia Between the Premodern Era and Modernity: The Case of Nicolaus Copernicus and Memorials Dedicated to Him
Franciszek Skibiński
2. Faith, Self and Boundary: Christian Communities in Nineteenth-Century East-Central Europe
Aleksander Łupienko
3. The Memory of the Pre-Partition Polish State in the Jewish Culture Around 1900
Marek Tuszewicki
Part 2: Urban Communities and Memories at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
4. Forging Visions of a Polish Past in a Nationalising City: Memory Politics in Autonomous Lviv
Heidi Hein-Kircher
5. Commemorating Polish History in the Public Spaces of County Towns in Autonomous Galicia (1861–1918)
Tomasz Kargol
6. Between Local and National Memory: The Activity of Selected Polish Socio-Cultural Associations in Galicia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Adrianna Sznapik
7. Three Monuments in Russian Vilnius at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Repetition, Function, Meaning
Paweł Lesisz
Part 3: Urban Communities and Memories in the Interwar Period
8. Zamość (1918–1939): Myth, Legend and the Creation of Memory
Paulina Korneluk
9. Legions of the Phoenix: State-Controlled memory and the Rebuilding of Kalisz After 1918
Makary Górzyński
10. Regionalism and the (Re-)Construction of Subnational Communities: Chodsko and Kdyně in South-Western Czechoslovakia, 1918–1948
Jaroslav Ira
Part 4: Urban Communities and Memories After 1945
11. Forge, Cage, Spectre: The Bases of (Non-)Remembrance of the Town of Turčiansky Svätý Martin
Anna Kobylińska
12. Mediating with Memory: The Case of the Imperial/Castle/University Quarter in Poznań (1910–2021)
Piotr Korduba
13. Remembering as Unknowing: Limitations of the Category of Collective Memory in Studies of Jewish Spaces in Contemporary Poland
Konrad Matyjaszek
14. Unwanted Heritage or the Continuation of a City’s Modernisation?: The Problem of the Liquidation of Cemeteries in Gdansk After 1945
Klaudiusz Grabowski
Biography
Aleksander Łupienko is Associate Professor at the T. Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
