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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2009
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid urbanization of Europe sparked a set of complex, often contradictory reactions to life in the large modern city. Europe's urban population grew sixfold from 1800 to 1910 as a result of overall population growth and considerable migration to cities, with the greatest expansion occurring in the latter half of this period. Adapting to the needs of industrial capitalism and the development of the nation-state, “central place” cities such as Vienna and Paris began building projects that destroyed old neighborhoods and tore down medieval walls to allow new construction. Growth of this magnitude created the sensation of constant change and instability. For many citizens the big city came to represent modernity itself, characterized by flux and spectacle.
1 Paul, Hohenberg and Lees, Lynn Hollen, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985),217.Google Scholar
2 I take the concept of “central place” cities from Hohenberg, Lees, Making of Urban Europe, 4–7Google Scholar. Marshall, Berman argues for the correlation between modernity and large cities in his wellknown book, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982).Google Scholar
3 Budapest, for example, went from a population of 280,000 in 1867 to 880,000 by 1910. John, Lukacs, Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (New York, 1988), 73.Google Scholar
4 For a comparative study of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague during this period, see Gary, Cohen, “Society and Culture in Prague, Vienna, and Budapest in the Late Nineteenth Century,” East European Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1987): 469–79Google Scholar. Jan, Matecki offers a similar comparison of L'viv and Cracow in “Lemberg und Krakau—zwei Hauptstädte Galiziens,” in Festschrift Othmar Pickl zum 6O.Geburtstag, ed. Herwig, Ebner et al. (Graz, 1987), 409–15.Google Scholar “Lwów i Kraków - Dwie Stolice Galicji,” Roczniki Dziejów Spotecznych i Gospodarczych (Social and economic history yearbooks) 50 (1989): 119–31, is the same article in Polish.
5 Jan, Mafecki and Janina, Bieniarzowna, eds., Dzieje Krakowa: Kraków w latach 1796–1918 (A history of Cracow: Cracow during the years 1796–1918) (Cracow, 1979), 355–62Google Scholar. Cracow's nineteenth- century growth had been hampered by the fact that it was a garrison town for the Austrian military, thanks to its location near the intersection of all three Polish partitions. In the same period, when other European cities, notably Vienna, were tearing down their medieval walls to incorporate growing populations and to make way for civic building projects, Cracow was hemmed in by new fortifications that kept its size to an astonishing 5.77 square kilometers. By 1900 it had the highest population density in the Austrian Empire and the highest per capita rental costs.
6 For more on Cracow'slate-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century urbanization, see Jacek, Purchla, Krakau unter Österreichischer Herrschaft 1846–1918: Faktoren seiner Entwicklung (Vienna, 1993)Google Scholar; Jacek, Purchla, Jak powstal nowoczesny Kraków (How modern Cracow arose),2d ed. (Cracow, 1990)Google Scholar; Jan, Matecki, “W Dobie Autonomii Galicyskiej (1866–1918)” (During the period of Galician autonomy [1866–1918]), in Dzieje Krakowa, ed. Matecki, and Bieniarzowna, , 3, 225–394; and Lawrence Orton, “The Formation of Modern Cracow, 1866–1914” Austrian History Yearbook 19–20 (1983–84): 105–17.Google Scholar
7 Lawrence, Orton, “The Stańcyk Portfolio and the Politics of Galician Loyalism,” The Polish Review 27, nos. 1–2 (1982): 55–64.Google Scholar
8 In this regard, Cracow's experience of modernization in this period fits well with the way Brower has characterized the modernization of the Russian city from 1850 to 1900 as a condition “between tradition and modernity.” Brower, Daniel J., Russian City between Tradition and Modernity (Berkeley, 1990).Google Scholar
9 Carl, Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; John, Lukacs, Budapest 1900 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar. The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultrual History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, 1998)Google Scholar, by the late Péter Hanák, is a collection of essays, clearly inspired by Schorske's work, on the cultural history of Budapest and Vienna. Significantly, it incorporates popular culture into its purview. In an innovative retelling of this story, Larry Wolff applies Schorske's concept of Oedipal revolt to fin-de-siècle Cracow, addressing the ways in which Cracovian conservatism and modernist decadence interacted following the 1898 assassination of Empress Elisabeth. Larry, Wolff, “Dynastic Conservatism and Poetic Violence in Fin-de-Siècle Cracow: The Habsburg Matrix of Polish Modernism,” American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (06 2001): 735–64.Google Scholar
10 Kazimierz, Wyka “Kraków stolicą Mìodej Polski”(Cracow, the capital of Young Poland), in Kraków i Młodopolska przez dzeije(Cracow and Malopolska [Little Poland] throughout history), ed. Celina, Bobińska (Cracow, 1970), 339–52Google Scholar; Czestaw, Miłosz, “Young Poland, inThe History of Polish Literature (Berkeley, 1983), 322–79Google Scholar; Artur, Hutnikiewicz, Młoda Polska (Young Poland) (Warsaw, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Piotr, Krakowski, “Cracow Artistic Milieu Around 1900,” in Art Around 1900 in Central Europe: Art Centres and Provinces, ed. Piotr, Krakowski and Jacek, Purchla (Cracow, 1999), 71–79Google Scholar; Harold, Segel, “Cracow: Little Green Balloons,” in Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; and Davi, Crowley, “Castles, Cabarets, and Cartoons: Claims on Polishness in Krakow around 1905,” in The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society from 1800 to the Present, ed. Malcolm, Gee, Tim, Kirk, and Jill, Steward (Brookfield, Vt., 1999), 101–17.Google Scholar
11 In their introduction to The City in Central Europe, Gee, Kirk and Steward State that the “shared experience of urban life [in Central Europe] transcended the political and even to some extent the ethnic and linguistic boundaries which divided the region”(3)Google Scholar. Katherine, DavidFox's recent article “Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech Modernism,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 735–60Google Scholar, finely illustrates an axis of interurban connections in Central Europe, that of the Czech modernists and decadents of the 1890s with Vienna and Berlin. During this period, aspiring representatives of Czech high culture reworked their relationship to other European centers, deliberately reducing Prague's role as the center of a microcosmic Czech world, while connecting it to broader cultural movements in Germanspeaking metropolises.
12 Illustrations in Cracow's popular press most often came directly from the foreign press, usually reprinted on the first page as a teaser to get people to buy the paper so that they could thenread the accompanying article inside, which naturally was a translation (usually with a few editorial comments) of the original article in the foreign paper. Local events were sometimes illustrated, especially sensationalist crimes or court cases. Photographs and sketches of important people were also included. The first issue of Nowiny (The news), for example, had a front-page drawing of a dead woman on an autopsy table, drawings of snakebite doctors from the foreign press, and sketches of the city presidents, among other illustrations.
13 Jerzy, Myślínski, “Prasa Polska w Galicji w dobie autonomicznej (1867–1918)” (The Polish press in Galicia during the period of autonomy [1867–1918]), in Prasa Polska w latach 1864–1918(The Polish press during the years 1864–1918), ed.Zenon, Kmiecik et al. (Warsaw, 1976), 165Google Scholar;Idem, Studio nad polską prasą spoteczno-polityczną w zachodniej Galicji, 1905–1914 (Studies of the Polish societal-political press in western Galicia, 1905–1914) (Warsaw, 1970), 105, 107.Google Scholar
14 Article and advertising content for Nowiny and Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny reveal a broad audience, whose backbone was the shopkeepers and artisans of the city and its surroundings. The title of a regular section begun in 1909, “Artisans and Shopkeepers,” lays bare one of Nowiny's main constituencies. According to a contemporary survey, Nowiny and IKC were the most popular dailies among joiners and furniture makers. In her study of young working-class men in 1912, Dr. Daszyńska-Golińska determined that almost all of her interlocutors read the newspapers, though sometimes irregularly and late. Most of the daily newspapers in Cracow were popular among artisans, except for the conservative Czas. Dr. Zofia, Daszyńska-Golińska, “Robotnicy Młodociani w rzemioślę i rekodzielach w Krakowie” (Juvenile workers in crafts and manufacturing in Cracow), Czas pismo Prawnicze-Ekonomiczne (Legal and economic periodical) 14 (1913): 28–139.Google Scholar
15 For an excellent analysis of journalistic construction and articulation of urban identity, seeRoshanna, Sylvester “Making an Appearance: Urban “Types” and the Creation of Respectability in Odessa's Popular Press, 1912–1914,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (winter 2000): 802–25Google Scholar.1 take the notion of a “cultural bridge” from Brower, Daniel J. “The Penny Press and ItsReaders,” inCultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Frank, Stephen P. and Steinberg, Mark D.. (Princeton, 1984): 147–67.Google Scholar
16 Pete, Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 10.Google Scholar
17 I use a variety of texts in this study, including daily chronicle commentary, statistical studies, reports of shocking crimes, and front-page headline articles. In general, the trope “great city” appears in articles that allow for commentary or reflection on the part of the author and often address, explicitly or implicitly, the question: Based on what we presume a “great city” to be, does Cracow qualify?
18 For some of the scholarship that points out these tendencies, see Judy, Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar; Peter, Stallybrass and Allon, White, “The City: The Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch,” in Idem. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, 1986), 125–48Google Scholar; and Felicity, Edholm, “The View from Below: Paris in the 1880s,” in Landscape, Politics, and Perspectives, ed. Barbara, Bender (Oxford, 1993).Google Scholar
19 Czesław, Lechicki, “Kartka z dziejów prasy krakowskiej XX wieku” (A page from the history of the Cracovian press in the twentieth century), Matopolskie Studia Historyczne (Matopolska [Little Poland] historical studies) 8, no. 1–2 (28/29) (1965), 119–33Google Scholar. Nowa Reforma was published from 1882 to 1926. Naprzód began as a bimonthly in 1891 and switched to a weekly (1895–1900) and then a daily (1901) format. Głos Narodu ran from 1893 to 1939. See Mirosław, Frančić, Kraków Kalendarz Dziejöw, (Cracow historical calendar) (Cracow, 1998), 179–80.Google Scholar Inexplicably, Frančić does not include Nowiny, the principal newspaper in the present study, in his list of “Cracovian newspapers and periodicals of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.”
20 Myński, “Prasa Polska w Galicji w dobie autonomicznej (1867–1918),” 125–27.Google Scholar
21 Irena, Homola-Skapska, “‘Maly Wiedertń’ nad Wisłaaogon;” (“Little Vienna” on the Vistula), Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagielloriskiego, Prace Historyczne (Scholarly notebooks of the Jagiellonian University), no. 121 (1997): 409–26.Google Scholar
22 According to the 1910 census, 75 percent of Cracovians (in the civilian population) were considered literate (able to read and write). Not quite 3 percent could only read, and the remainder of the population was illiterate. The percentage of men who could read and write (78.83) was slightly higher than the percentage of women (72.95). In older neighborhoods, literacy figures were higher. Dr. Kumaniecki, Kazimierz Władyslaw, Tymczasowe wyniki spisu ludności w Krakowie z 31grudnia 1910 roku (Provisional results of the census in Cracow from December 31, 1910) (Cracow, 1912), 36–37.Google Scholar
23 Myślińiski, “Prasa Polska w Galicji w dobie autonomicznej (1867–1918),” 117–28. Myśliński reports that the law forbidding street sales was increasingly ignored by the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. Nowiny regularly commented on its hard-working “kolporters,” and an anonymous painting from 1912 of the main square prominently displays a young lad peddling the evening news.
24 Cracow, 's first boulevard paperGoogle Scholar, Kurierek Krakowski (The little Cracovian courier), appeared on August 9, 1902, and lasted about nine months—until the appearance of Nowiny. Beginning in 1903, its editor was the popular city councilor, feuilletonist, and humorist, Kazimierz Bartoszewicz, who later contributed feuilletons to Nowiny. Kurierek Krakowski is all but forgotten in the literature on the press from this period. There is no mention of it in Myśliński's study. Bartoszewicz's editorship of an earlier local paper, Kurier Krakowski, from 1887 to 1889 gets a line, but his connection to its more sensationalist namesake of 1902–3 is not noted.
25 At least in Russia, most of the editors of the boulevard press tended to be of peasant or lower-middle-class origin—successful in business, but not too far from “the people.” See Louise, McReynolds, The News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991);Google Scholarand Brower, , “The Penny Press and Its Readers,” 151–52.Google Scholar
26 Lechicki, “Kartka z dziejöw prasy krakowskiej XX wieku,” 119–20.Google Scholar For more on the Szczepański family, see Krystyna, Zbijewska, “Saga rodu Szczepariskich” (The saga of the Szczepański family), Kraków - Magazyn Kulturalny (Cracow: A cultural magazine), 1991, no. 4: 45–46.Google Scholar
27 Ilustracya Polska, 1901, no. 1:1–5.Google Scholar
28 Ibid., 23. The journal cost thirty hallers per issue; a quarterly subscription cost three crowns, ninety hallers. The price of a cheap bread roll at the time was two to four hallers.
29 “Styl polski” (The Polish style), Ilustracya Polska, 1902, no. 16: 364–66Google Scholar. This article features photographs of and commentary on Stanislaw Witkiewicz's large home, which was built in the Zakopane style. For more on the Zakopane style, see Edward, Manoulien, “Invented Traditions: Primitivist Narrative and Design in the Polish Fin de Siécle” Slavic Review 59, no. 2 (summer 2000): 391–405.Google Scholar
30 “Korespondencya redakcyi” (Editor's correspondence), Ilustracya Polska, 1902, no. 4: 80.Google Scholar
31 “Teatr Ludowy w Krakowie” (The People's Theater in Cracow), Ilustracya Polska, 1902, no. 4: 78. The idea of national culture is, of course, complicated, given Poland's nonexistence after the partitions. While its primary audience and focus was Galicia, Ilustracya Polska regularly reported on affairs in Prussian and Russian Poland, and it clearly sought to speak more broadly at times for the whole Polish nation.Google Scholar
32 Lechicki, “Kartka z dziejów prasy krakowskiej XX wieku,” 124Google Scholar. Szczepański had already sold the weekly a few months before its collapse. In the same year that Ilustracya Polska folded, another illustrated weekly appeared. Nowości Illustrowane (Illustrated novelties), which ran from 1904 to 1917, was a sensationalist publication in the best sense of that word. It hired a special photographer to rush to the scene of accidents or crimes and snap pictures of corpses. When photographs were not an option, graphic drawings illustrated brutal murders by Gypsies, accidents under the wheels of a train, or “lovers' dramas,” which were the magazine's standard fare.
33 I base this audience assessment on the price of the publication, the topics of its features, its advertising, and its negative stance toward Conservatives and Socialists. Yet based on my reading of Nowiny, I agree with Neuberger, who authored a study on hooliganism in fin-de-siécle St| Petersburg, that it is better to characterize the readership of the boulevard press in terms of respectability rather than class, because efforts to attract a mass audience tended to elide class distinctions in favor of perceived commonalties. Joan, Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley 1993), 15–24.Google Scholar
34 , Lechicki, “Kartka z dziejów prasy krakowskiej XX wieku,” 125–26.Google Scholar
35 In this regard, Nowiny approximates many other boulevard papers of the time, from Berlin to St. Petersburg or Moscow to Shanghai. In addition to the newspapers described in the aforementioned works of Peter Fritzsche, Louise McReynolds, and Daniel Brower, I have also found remarkable similarities between Nowiny and an interwar Shanghai paper discussed in Wen-hsin, Yeh, “Progressive Journalism and Shanghai's Petty Urbanites,” in Shanghai Sojourners, ed. Frederic, Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin, Yeh (Berkeley, 1992), 186–238.Google Scholar
36 Nowiny dla wszystkich, May 20, 1903. “Already,” the article informs, “there are people who keep their copies of the News with them all day.” Elsewhere in the same issue we find another sort of encouragement to read Nowiny: “Had a certain Mr. Legnitzer from Podgórze read the News yesterday, he wouldn't have gotten stuck under a bridge during the rain,” a seemingly omniscient article reports. In actuality, one would have been better off reading Czas or Nowa Reforma for a weather report. Nowiny was rather irregular in featuring this column over the years.
37 Nowiny, July 30,1903; Ibid., Aug. 14,1903. Nowiny's attacks on Glos Narodu were less ideological forays than tactical smears in order to attract the latter's readership. While Nowiny was generally not anti-Semitic, it never pressed this issue in attacking its potential rival. In this regard, it was very much a new sort of paper in Cracow, designed to attract the largest audience, not to press a political stance.
38 Nowiny, May 4, 1905; Czas, May 2, 1905.
39 Nowiny, Nov. 26, 1905.
40 Ibid., June 8, 1911. Inflationary costs were illustrated with differing sizes of meat or bread for 1906 and 1911. Other illustrations depicted churches turned into marketplaces, with vodka being sold at the pulpit; children being assigned numbers by a Socialist government instead of being baptized; and peasants receiving equal but miniscule plots of state-owned land. “Free additions” to Nowiny, May 28 and May 29, 1907.
41 Dabrowski's decision to launch IKC was seen as a betrayal by his former political associates at Glos Narodu, particularly because it was made financially feasible thanks to the editor's cooperation with some Jewish businessmen in real-estate speculation. See , Myśliński, Studia nad pol-skaprasaspoleczno-politycznaw zachodniej Galicji, 103.Google Scholar
42 Educated Cracovians today know about IKC, which went on to become a powerful press conglomerate in the 1920s and 1930s, while not even historians and scholars of literature whom I queried knew much about Nowiny, if they were aware that it existed at all. IKC's status as an emblem for interwar Cracow is evidenced by the numerous pictures and references to it in Michalik, Marian B. et al., Kronika Krakowa (The chronicle of Cracow) (Warsaw, 1996), including the full-page illustration of the paper's office building to introduce the section “Cracow in the Twenties” (296); see also 304, 313,323.Google Scholar
43 Lechick, , “Kartka z dziejów prasy krakowskiej XX wieku,” 126–27; Myśliński, “Prasa Polska w Galicji w dobie autonomicznej (1867–1918),” 127.Google Scholar
44 Lechicki, “Kartka z dziejów prasy krakowskiej XX wieku,” 127.
45 Fritzsche, , Reading Berlin 1900.,18.Google Scholar
46 For an illuminating commentary on “browsing,” see Fritzsche, , “The City as Spectacle,” chap. 4 in Reading Berlin 1900,127–69, esp. 147–61.Google Scholar
47 As early as 1881 Henry William Challis offered explanations of reading that are remarkably similar to the semiotics of the twentieth century, maintaining that the subjectivity of the reader precluded authorial intention. For a discussion on Challis and newspaper reading, see Aled, Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot, England, 1996), 82–85.Google Scholar
48 Wolfgang, Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction (Baltimore, 1974); I take this succinct summary of Iser's “actualization of potential meaning” from Brower, “The Penny Press and Its Readers,” 149.Google Scholar
49 Neuberger, , Hooliganism, 20.Google Scholar
50 Nowiny, Feb. 24, 1907.
51 Indeed, at times it seems that the “imagined communities” to which scholars should pay more attention are cities rather than nations. Civic identity, like national identity, requires an imagined sense of community, though its reference points—streets, parks, buildings, sports teams, and other citizens—are more plausibly held in common, more proximate and palpable, than “spacious skies” and “purple mountain majesties.”.
52 Nowiny, May 16,1903.
53 Ibid., Jan. 5,1904.
54 Often the serialized fiction featured along the bottom of the first page, “based on actual crimes in Cracow,” depicted characters walking down the same streets and attending the same exhibits or theatrical performances mentioned in other parts of the paper.
55 Nowiny, May 16,1903.
56 Ibid., Apr. 13,1907. Very few articles in Nowiny were ever signed, with the exception of occasional pieces by Szczepański and the fiction found at the bottom of each front page.
57 Nowiny, Jan. 21, 1908.
58 Ibid., Jan. 17, 1908. Regarding Cracow's preponderance of servants and porters, the author rightly points out that having the most servants does not signify the city's wealth but rather the extent to which it was customary to have servants.
59 Nowiny, Feb. 16, 1905; Ibid., Feb. 2, 1910.
60 Ibid., June 7, 1904. Nowiny's introduction of the two criminals indicates that they had “taken in theories from here and there” and, having joined the Socialists, “lost their faith in God.” “Misunderstanding the true principles of socialism,” they lost their sense of respect for others' property and then, having committed a few crimes, they decided to try a murder-robbery to see if they could do something really big. The fate of the poor family was reported in Nowiny, Apr. 9, 1905. This article, one of many about a family in the city that was down on its luck, well illustrates Nowiny's populist, progressive streak.
61 Nowiny, June 8,1907.
62 Of course, this is a common response to something shocking—“I never thought it could happen here”—though this does not seem to be the stock response of a person in a place like London or New York City. Also significant is the fact that Warsaw bandits were the assumed villains. Whether by word of mouth or by reading the sensationalist press—or, more likely, due to a combination of both—the explanation of Warsaw bandits was also a stock response. For example, several articles under the title “Banditry in Warsaw” in May 1906 could have helped form this impression (Nowiny, May 15,1906; Ibid., May 29,1906).
63 Stallybrass, and White, , “The City,” 125–48.Google Scholar
64 Nowiny, Jan. 24,1907; Ibid., May 19,1910.
66 Ibid., Dec. 4,1903. This statement, hyperbolic and humbling at the same time, suggests that while Cracow cannot compare to the archetypical great cities of London and Paris in size, its poverty was bad enough to give it some “great city” characteristics. Of course, this was primarily sensationalist bombast. Readers who hoped to find something as exotic as a Parisian gangster's hideout in the article were bound to be disappointed with Cracow's rather boring “holes and dens.”
67 Jacob, Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York, 1891).Google Scholar
68 Nowiny, Feb. 23,1906.
70 Ibid., May 24,1907. Marytkówna's more advanced age presented a slight problem for the standard narrative about young girls who make a momentary mistake and fall from virtue. Nonetheless, the newspaper reported, “Despite her mature age, Marytkówna did not resist depravation and fell, becoming the victim of her own carelessness and the infamy of her seducer.”
71 Nowiny, Jan. 9,1908.
72 Ibid., Jan. 10,1908.
73 Ibid., Jan. 11,1908.
74 IKC, Dec. 22,1910. “lle mieszkańców będzie liczyl Wielki Kraków 31 Grudnia?” (How many inhabitants will Greater Cracow have on December 31?) informed its readers that it wanted to help them with the contest designed by the paper by telling them statistical figures for Cracow in the past, along with the population of other cities.
75 IKC, Dec. 28,1910.
