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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
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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

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References

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30 Dabrowski, Commemorations, 212.

31 Ibid., 212–16.

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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 Kommunikation – Transformation – kulturelles Gedächtnis, Universität Wien, Vienna, 28 Nov. 2008 (unpublished paper).

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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.

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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.

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

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

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