A distinct smell scenery characterised the urban courtyards of the Polish city of Lublin in the interwar period. Pungent odours were a constant concern reflected both in the files of the municipality's Sanitary Commission as well as in articles in the local newspapers. In 1928 the main Lublin daily Ziemia Lubelska complained:
There are courtyards haunted by such a smell that you would risk fainting if you passed them without a handkerchief pressed to your nose. This stench stems from toilets, which are in a state of terrible neglect, as well as from waste bins without cover whose garbage ferments and rots for weeks under the windows of its unhappy dwellers.Footnote 1
Due to the dense living conditions, the main smell characteristics of Lublin's courtyards in the first half of the twentieth century were of the outhouse, with its notorious cesspool, and garbage dumps. This odoriferous scenery was frequently enriched by the keeping of poultry, pigs and dogs. Furthermore, the courtyard served as a spatial extension of small businesses and workshops: the backdoors of private butchers and ragmen, bakeries and other small enterprises usually opened into the courtyard, as did their garbage, chimneys and, thus, odours.
Smells are ubiquitous and they substantially influence how we perceive the atmosphere of a given place. We often, mostly unconsciously, evaluate persons, situations and our environment through the nose. By asking what smells and who smells, we can locate environmental conditions as well as inter-cultural sensitivities, since smells are particularly powerful in the transmission of cultural values and social classifications.Footnote 2 This article discusses selected urban scents and sensibilities, in particular what Lublin's courtyard smells tell us about the condition, development and mindset of a Polish city in the interwar period. Sniffing out what was in the air, here, provides insights not only into cultural practices of everyday life, but also into the motions and tensions of modernisation and the emotions of nation building. The way people perceive, react to and talk about smells reveals much about subtle sentiments. Although definitions of pleasant or unpleasant air seem to be a subjective, individual mode of perception, smell perception is very much culturally marked. Furthermore, smells have been used to advance various socio-political agendas. A sensory history approach provides (cultural) historians with a greater understanding of the embodied experience of urbanisation as well as of the dynamics of nation building and inter-ethnic relations. Focusing on the public efforts of the municipality and the private concerns of Lublin's inhabitants regarding smell issues, this article draws on local newspapers from the interwar period and archival records of the city of Lublin, including reports from the Sanitary Commission and complaints of Lublin's citizens submitted to the city's Public Health Department.Footnote 3 This hubbub of civic objections illuminates the intensive negotiations regarding the city's (olfactory) transformation in the interwar period.
After Poland gained independence in 1918 the city of Lublin emerged as an urban centre and the regional capital of a mainly agricultural area. Largely due to an influx of impoverished people from the countryside searching for jobs in the city, its inhabitants increased by over 50 per cent between 1914 and 1931. With about 35 per cent of city dwellers identifying as Jewish, Lublin enjoyed the typical ethnic structure of a city in the region at that time.Footnote 4 This article demonstrates how certain smell sensitivities reflect major infrastructural as well as ideological notions occurring in post-independence Poland. In this context, the prevalent smell issues range from decomposing garbage to olfactory resentments regarding fellow Jewish citizens.
The Prospects of Urban Smellscapes
The concept of smellscapes Footnote 5 implies that ‘smells may be space-related. Continents, countries, regions, neighbourhoods and houses’ each ‘have their particular smellscapes’.Footnote 6 So, too, do cities. Urban ‘smellscapes’ are influenced by the level of industrialisation, forms of habitation, sanitation practices, cooking customs and seasonal cycles, among other factors.Footnote 7 Certain parts of a city – markets, industrial zones, train stations – can be identified by the characteristic scents associated with the activities performed there as well as with people living there, especially ‘ethnic’ neighbourhoods.Footnote 8 Thus, ‘we see the city we hear the city, but above all we smell the city’.Footnote 9 Invoking the senses challenges the understanding of city life, as the perception of urban ‘smellscapes’ fundamentally responds to and reflects changing political, economic and social orders.Footnote 10 Sniffing out changes in urban space ambiances is rewarding because ‘sensual relations are most of all social relations’.Footnote 11 The ‘sensory turn’ in the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s prompted various theorists to open up the human sensorium to social and cultural analysis.Footnote 12 Urban ‘sensescape’ studies have become a fruitful avenue of research recent years.Footnote 13 The urban olfactory sensorium has been studied extensively in a range of different contexts, such as public health,Footnote 14 architecture,Footnote 15 literatureFootnote 16 and art,Footnote 17 and includes studies of cities, such as Paris,Footnote 18 Vienna,Footnote 19 Grenoble,Footnote 20 Frankfurt,Footnote 21 Bangkok,Footnote 22 Singapore,Footnote 23 St Petersburg,Footnote 24 Moscow,Footnote 25 Sheffield and Manchester,Footnote 26 Montréal and Brussels,Footnote 27 Chicago,Footnote 28 LondonFootnote 29 and England more generally.Footnote 30
Urban smell-studies have enriched our knowledge of urban experience, everyday city life and how the senses shape our perception of a city. However, few scholars have applied the sensory history approachFootnote 31 to the (cultural) history of East-Central Europe,Footnote 32 although that approach promises profound insights into the dynamics of specific local sensitivities as well as political and socio-cultural transformations. The city of Lublin in today's eastern Poland is highly representative of the shifting political and socio-cultural landscape of East-Central Europe in the twentieth century. It serves as a case study of how hygiene, health and odoriferous rhetoric started to matter in public discourse in interwar Poland and how one can understand certain socio-political transformations through everyday smell matters. Since health was of immediate relevance to the new state, odours played a crucial role, for example, in the process of raising public awareness about the importance of hygiene.Footnote 33 Odour discussions also contributed to people's growing awareness of urban living conditions, citizens’ rights and the definition of what was considered urban or rural. Thus, odours mattered greatly in the process of modernisation, but they also played a crucial role in the demarcation of what or who belonged to the city or was considered the ‘other’. Studying smells provides an alternative urban history, showing that everyday smell discourse is tightly related to the notions of urbanisation and civic emancipation, to the emotions of nation building and to the nature of interwar Polish anti-Semitism.
The City of Lublin and Its (Odour) Nuisances
The city of Lublin has undergone substantial transformations under different regimes. A key place of trade at the crossroads between Warsaw and Lvov in the sixteenth century, Lublin lost its significance over the centuries. As a consequence of the partition of Poland between Prussia, the Habsburg Empire and Tsarist Russia, Lublin was incorporated into Congress Poland (or Russian Poland) in 1815, at which point the city finally lost contact with other important parts of the former Polish state. Located at the margins of this Russian-ruled territory, Lublin did have access to the large domestic market of Russia; however, the city also found itself peripheral and neglected by the Tsarist authorities when it came to infrastructure.Footnote 34 With Polish independence in 1918 Lublin moved from the periphery to the centre of the newly established Second Polish Republic. As the capital of a largely rural region it gained significance as an urban centre. By fighting ‘backwardness’ and striving to have a metropolitan air, Lublin perfectly reflects the troubled, yet ‘ordinary’ history of a city in the region. After the First World War Lublin developed a visible (multi-)cultural life, becoming the sixth largest city in Poland. It emerged as an educational centre and university town: the Catholic University was founded in 1918 (building on Lublin's traditional status as a centre of Catholicism), and Europe's largest Talmud School opened in 1930 (continuing Lublin's centuries-long tradition as a centre of Hasidism).Footnote 35 In 1914 Lublin had 80,000 inhabitants. By 1931 the population had grown to 124,600 because of migration from the countryside. The city hosted at least seven cinemas and two theatres, which offered not only the classical repertoire and movies but also a highly varied programme of cabaret and dancing events in both Polish and Yiddish. Lublin's interwar press was blooming with the relaxation of censorship since 1905. Besides the conservative Ziemia Lubelska and the rather nationalist Głos Lubelski (a daily newspaper supporting the National Democrats), Lublin had at least eleven other local dailies and several smaller satirical or literary journals. The four Jewish newspapers (three of them in Yiddish) reflected the wide range of political engagement among one third of Lublin's inhabitants, from the Bundist Unzer Expres to the assimilationist Myśl Żydowska in Polish. Lublin hosted several elegant coffee houses and their usual circle of poets and actors and well-stocked bookstores. Despite its blossoming cultural and educational life,Footnote 36 Lublin struggled with the usual issues of the time and region, such as postponed sanitary reforms, the influx of uneducated people from the countryside, overcrowding due to the lack of housing space (and with this, the spread of epidemics) and a dilapidated Old Town.Footnote 37
Over the course of the nineteenth century, housing in the neglected Old Town became increasingly unsuitable. The ‘better off’ Lublin citizens settled, instead, in the western areas, where a new part of the city was laid out along the main promenade (Krakowskie Przedmieście) with its coffee houses and hotels. Even so, in 1924 just 857 of 3,648 houses had running water. In 1928 only thirty-two houses were connected to the newly built sewage system;Footnote 38 in 1930, it was only 20 per cent.Footnote 39 Most of Lublin's inhabitants still used the outhouse in the courtyard and carried water in buckets from one of the numerous public wells. Soapsuds and dishwater, besides other everyday waste, were usually emptied into the open gutter (rynsztok) in the courtyard or onto the street. The stench of this wastewater – from herring marinade to kitchen refuse to human waste – led to increasing complaints about Lublin's ‘backward’ smell-scenery in the local press. Thus, it was the sense of smell, primarily, that motivated urbanists and social reformers to take action.Footnote 40 Smells are ubiquitous and have a pervasive and invisible presence that is difficult to regulate, and, as a result, have been a major concern in the process of monitoring, structuring and disciplining the ‘modern’ city.Footnote 41
Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, views about the ‘smellscapes’ of major European cities altered gradually. Miasmatic theory – with its strong awareness of (the menace of) smells, linking disease to both human and animal waste – raised a new public awareness and at some point lead to a ‘faecal crisis’ in the minds of many people.Footnote 42 In the second half of the nineteenth century, London (1858) and Paris (1880) fought their ‘Great Stinks’ caused by accumulated human excrement which stimulated a flurry of official reports and media articles.Footnote 43 For Lublin, this crisis became salient after 1918. Although miasma theory – which held that ‘bad air’ caused diseases – had been long since disproven by Pasteur's germ theory, bad smells were still considered a threat to health.Footnote 44 Moreover, ‘bad smells’ were also perceived as a threat to modernity in so far as ‘modernity’ was understood to include controlling putrid air as well as overseeing people and minds through public instructions.Footnote 45 The nineteenth-century trend of enforcing orderliness and hygiene was well received all over Europe; in East-Central Europe, though, it gained footing substantially after 1918 with the birth of nations.
Alongside many other cities in former Congress Poland,Footnote 46 in 1925 Lublin's city authorities launched a major sanitation project concerned with hygiene and de-odourising the city. Regulating the city's odours, mostly caused by the problematic sewage situation, was fundamental in the attempt to give the city a more refined appearance. Having gained independence from Russian rule, Lublin strove to catch up with other major Polish cities (with different histories of urbanisation under Prussian, Habsburg and Tsarist ruleFootnote 47) and to achieve a metropolitan air.Footnote 48
In 1925 the Association of Polish Town Planners (Towarzystwo Urbanistów Polskich) announced an ‘urban competition’ for ‘Great Lublin’Footnote 49 that occurred within a wider context of a Poland- and Europe-wide reform discourse on urban development and urban sanitation.Footnote 50 Lublin's municipality desired the city to undergo a ‘civilising process’, and its discourse was all about ‘hygienising, regulating and sanitising’.Footnote 51 The master plan foresaw the ‘revision, amelioration and orderliness’ of ‘Great Lublin’ to make it a ‘modern’ city of ‘new relevance’ and ‘representative character’.Footnote 52 Lublin's air would be relieved of the stenches of ‘backwardness’, embodied, among others, by organic smells. Urban planning has possessed a strong focus on odour control and odour management. Regulating the city's smells was a fundamental part of the attempt to give the city an ambience similar to other major (European) cities in the region. In 1924 Głos Lubelski lamented ‘how far we are still from Europe’,Footnote 53 describing the miasmas and unpleasant smells spread by Lublin's refuse service. Despite all efforts, in 1930 Ziemia Lubelska was still complaining that ‘Lublin, the Voivodship-capital, has theatres, cultural societies, universities and heaps of muck on its streets: can you imagine something like this in Warsaw, Lvov or Cracow? In Lublin, yes. The gutters and sinks draining into the streets are full of domestic filth coated with muck.’Footnote 54
The hygienisation and deodorisation projects performed by Lublin's municipality in the interwar period encompassed sewage policies, the regulation of the refuse service, the paving of streets, the re-routing of rivers and attempts to improve city parks and greenery.Footnote 55 Lublin was provided with a sewage system, water supply, a public slaughterhouse and a central electricity plant. ‘Great Lublin’ would become a sanitised, healthy and clearly structured Polish city regarding its infrastructure as well as, eventually, its social-ethnic structure. In this context, the Public Health Department was a major player in Poland's interwar politics and urban policies. The application of public health measures functioned as a site of emergence for the modern state.Footnote 56 Public health served ideological ends by setting normative values in terms of behaviour, consumption, physical fitness and relations of the majority toward minority groups.Footnote 57 Thus, the Sanitary Commission – a subdivision of the Public Health Department – tried to establish modern standards of hygiene, fighting epidemics and unsanitary conditions. The Commission regularly published ‘urban codes of conduct’, providing information about sanitary rules and sanitary obligations.Footnote 58 They passed strict prohibitions against polluting staircases, courtyards, sidewalks, streets and squares with garbage, kitchen waste, sputum or excrement.Footnote 59 Their directives reflect the actual, pressing sanitary problems typical for many medium-sized European cities at that time. Every paragraph of this ‘code of conduct’ testifies that emptying chamber pots into yards and onto the street, spitting in public and disposing various refuse in the courtyard was common. Regular inspection tours by sanitary commissioners served the purposes of litter and odour control. Newspapers were full of names and addresses ‘called to account for unsanitary disorder’.Footnote 60 This common measure of public accusations was aimed at disciplining people, but without much success. Even Krakowskie Przedmieście – where the nice coffeehouses, luxurious hotels and the well-provided general stores were located, and where elegant couples strolled on weekends – could not avoid having its courtyard secretions discredit the beautiful facades: ‘you only have to pass a few of the buildings on our “main” street to get vertigo from all these reeking exudations which the poor tenants have to smell day and night’.Footnote 61 This elegant boulevard was haunted by the effluvia of poor courtyard facilities, that is, from the notorious common outhouse. Newspapers increasingly complained about the smell and about the municipality's odoriferous refuse policies:
The sanitation carts are standing in front of house number 30 at half past ten. The stench on the street is unbearable! The passers-by, returning at this time from the cinema, are many, they hold their noses and hasten away. But the smells are spreading all around Krakowskie Przedmieście like poison gas. You would think that the city centre should in every case be an adornment, as it serves representative purposes. . . . Lublin must be worth belonging to the circle of Poland's ten biggest cities.Footnote 62
The smell of faeces on the prestigious Krakowskie Przedmieście did not fit into the picture of a prospering, Voivodship capital of the newly established Second Polish Republic. Judging by reports and newspaper complaints, violations of hygiene instructions were a daily occurrence.
Public health reform owes its origins to concerns about stench and the demand for fresh air.Footnote 63 Consequently, Lublin's Sanitary CommissionFootnote 64 was engaged in fighting bad odours by running inspection tours concerning the cleanliness of streets, buildings, grocery stores and, above all, courtyards. A district penal administrative advisor from the Sanitary Commission would hand out penalties on site if necessary.Footnote 65 On 1 June 1928 a Lublin newspaper announced that the Sanitary Commission was carrying out a three-day lustration of urban housing in the context of an all-Polish supervisory action.Footnote 66 Lustrations would include admonitions and deadlines for improving conditions.Footnote 67
Judging by the on-going number of penalties and complaints as well as accusations and interventions, the sanitary situation in Lublin did not significantly improve.Footnote 68 The protocols of the Sanitary Commission frequently mention that (olfactory) crime scenes were inspected repeatedly, however, often without improvement.Footnote 69 Property owners would often refuse to follow the rules.Footnote 70 However, the intensive discussion of these shortcomings in the local press was accompanied by a growing awareness not only of the ‘shameful’ condition of Lublin's ‘smellscapes’ (‘unbelievable facts of sloppiness and contempt’, as one local newspaper noted in 1931) but also of the relevance of hygiene and the notion of ‘public health’.Footnote 71
The urban courtyard or podwórko, characterised by wooden galleries leading to the outside entrances of apartments, was a major element of Lublin's urban architecture in the interwar period. A podwórko was a semi-public space where private activities and public policies interacted. Organ-grinders, cutlers and rag-pickers used to fill the courtyards with their advertising singsong.Footnote 72 Horse carts and stables frequently occupied the courtyards near market places together with laundry on the galleries and children playing in the yard.Footnote 73 In the house gate that connected the courtyard with the public space of the street, female vendors would sell their goods, and young men would gather on the lookout for gossip or trouble. The master of the gate was the janitor, who closed the gate for the night and was informally obliged to keep order in and around the house. All interwar courtyards had outhouses and open gutters (for emptying dishwater and other wastewater). The privies were a constant focus of the Sanitary Commission, as they were often dilapidated or overfilled to such an extent that dwellers would rather relieve themselves elsewhere in the yard than use the cabins, especially in the poorer neighbourhoods.Footnote 74 The odoriferous scenery of human waste and stagnating air was enriched by the smells of Lysol, carbol and lime employed by the municipality to disinfect gutters, cesspools, waste bins and apartments.Footnote 75 Furthermore, the urban courtyard also was frequently used to keep animals like pigs, cows and chickens, imbuing the courtyard with the smells of their various excrements. Finally, the courtyard, with its wooden sheds, served as a storage place for various goods. Among others, the Sanitary Commission frequently encountered ‘agglomerations of rags and bones of an unbearable stench’.Footnote 76 The Commission also received letters from tenants complaining about their courtyard's pungent smellscape. ‘There is an illegal tallow melting in our yard’, went one such letter; ‘I report that in our courtyard there is a clandestine storehouse for raw skin . . . the skins are exuding an unbearable smell’, noted another.Footnote 77 We find complainants reporting that ‘in our building there is a very filthy herring smokehouse, on top of that the staff empties the remaining offal and wastewater into the courtyard, wherefore the air is reeking. Furthermore, the low chimney blows its smoke through the windows into our apartments and poisons the air.’Footnote 78
These ‘smellmarks’,Footnote 79 which dominated sanitary discussions in the first half of the twentieth century, also reveal the activities conducted in Lublin's courtyards. A podwórko can be understood as a microcosm of urban cohabitation: besides being animated by children at play and women on their daily errands, the space of each podwórko was defined by intimate physical needs and the emanations of various common occupations – from bakeries, ragmen, the processing of raw products, storehouses up to animal keeping – and it also served as a dumping place for kitchen, human and workshop waste. Notably, by the late 1920s and early 1930s Lublin's citizens were lodging an increasing number of complaints to the Public Health Department or Sanitary Commission regarding olfactory nuisances. This increasing smell sensitivity was the result of a major urban sanitation initiative in the framework of establishing ‘Great Lublin’ in 1925, which, at the same time, reflects the ideological aim of establishing a ‘Polish city’ strongly driven by national health concerns.Footnote 80
Urban Scents and Sensibilities
The concentration of smell affairs in the local press coincided with a rise of individual citizen complaints to municipal institutions which intensified in the late 1920s (compared to the decades before and after). It is probably the raised awareness for regulation and hygiene in the context of Lublin's urbanisation efforts that generated this new (sensory) alertness. The late 1920s and early 1930s saw not only increasing odour measurements on the part of the municipality but also an emerging culture of odour complaints published in newspapers or directed to the Sanitary Commission. These citizens’ claims (podanie), requests (prośba) and complaints (zażalenie) regarding urban odour nuisances and air pollution reflect an increasing odour sensitivity and alertness.Footnote 81
Apart from the various exudations of workshops, food processing, outhouses and gutters shaping the ‘smellscape’ of Lublin's interwar courtyards that increasingly offended noses, there were frequent complaints about the keeping of animals. The proximity of animals and humans in the urban context was increasingly criticised as inappropriate for urban living and perceived as a threat to health. In 1919 the city's code of conduct prohibited the keeping of animals, particularly birds, pigs and goats, in housing space.Footnote 82 In 1921 there were still hundreds of horses and thousands of cows and pigs living within the city limits.Footnote 83 In their letters of complaint, people justified their sensitive sensory disposition through hygiene and health issues:
I would like to report to the Sanitary Department, that M. B., living at ul.Dolna Panny Marii number 22 is keeping three cows and a number of pigs. It is known that the keeping of pigs in the city centre in unsuitable wooden huts is not allowed for hygiene and health reasons, but M. Bieniek resists these prescriptions and not only keeps cows and pigs . . . but is also burying dead pigs in his garden (and I would like to add that over the last couple of weeks his pigs have been dying on him quite often). Because of the unpleasant smells coming from this cowshed and pigsty and the accompanying flies, it is impossible to sit in the neighbouring garden and it is likewise not possible to open the window to air the apartment.Footnote 84
Lublin's Panna-Maria Street attracted the highest number of complaints regarding sanitary transgressions. Although located not far from the main Krakowskie Przedmieście boulevard, it retained a rural character (as it does to this day). A few houses down the same street from the complainant above, came the following report:
Honoured Doctor, I ask for understanding of the poor woman that I am, unhappy and constantly suffering from a bad headache and any pollution of the air is very harmful to me. Because I am in such a critical condition and cannot go out, I at least would like to have a little bit of fresh air from the yard, but this is difficult, because the janitor F. B. is keeping two big pigs and leaves the pigsty open all the time. . . . I ask you, honoured Doctor, if you could do something about that, at least to decide that this stinking pigsty, which is located opposite my flat, at least should be kept closed, so that I could breathe at least a little bit more of a clean air.Footnote 85
These complaints point to a new understanding and perceptions of what would be (olfactorily) tolerated and reflect a newly acquired or heightened odour sensitivity and odour consciousness. Smelling is an inherent bodily experience, strongly connected with ideas, beliefs and (changing) mindsets. The complaints provide insight into how recent urban changes and city authority's policies were influencing people's self-conception as urban dwellers and their role as decision makers.
It is striking that Lublin's inhabitants increasingly referred to hygiene and health and demanded ‘fresh air’. The impact of public hygiene measurements, the frequent appeals in the daily press and the operations of the Sanitary Commission seemed to have raised public awareness for the regulation of the noxious and for a concept of ‘public health’ that included a new sensitivity for personal wellbeing, affecting the whole social spectrum of Lublin's dwellers – men, women, Christians and Jews –, as reflected in the handwriting, language style, home addresses and names on these complaints. The urban competition from 1925 also presented a significant public issue. For the first time, the question of the development of the city became a topic of public discussion.Footnote 86 On their way into a ‘modern’ era, Lublin's citizens began to complain about rural elements interfering with the urban ‘metropolitan’ character of Lublin. The complaints show how the city's inhabitants both shaped and were shaped by processes of urban change. A new understanding of what was (in)tolerable boosted civic engagement. People developed a concern for ‘fresh (urban) air’. Submitting complaints about odour nuisances to the press and to municipal departments indicates a turn: the municipality stepped in to regulate Lublin's (mostly organic) ‘smellscapes’ to shape and to create a modern city with decent infrastructure. In this atmosphere of sanitary officers instructing and penalising Lublin's inhabitants on odours, journalists and media reported on the city's smelly characteristics and urban dwellers started to claim a right to fresh air and open windows without chicken and pigs roaming about and stinking up the yard. Organic smells no longer fit the urban context. Thus, the observed increase of individual complaints alongside the demand for modern infrastructure and ‘urban air’ indicates the emergence of a new urban consciousness of being a ‘city-zen’ – a confident city dweller in contrast to coming from the country. The feeling of revulsion and disgust towards organic odours can be understood as a claim to a form of civility.Footnote 87 These complaints, based on old ‘scents’ but new sensitivities, were generated by a new awareness of civic participation that reflects changing attitudes rather than changing ‘smellscapes’.
‘Polluting Elements’
Discussions about health helped to regulate the city's ‘smellscapes’ and to define private space and individual smell borders, but they also played a crucial role in the development of political and social order. Growing smell sensitivity was partly the effect of a major urban sanitation initiative. Yet smells also tend to appear threatening because they subverted ‘the regulation of emotions and behaviour supposedly necessary to societal organisation’.Footnote 88 After 1918 the Second Polish Republic, as well as the city of Lublin, became obsessed with cleaning up, establishing order, moralising and freeing Poland's politics, as well as its inhabitants, from foul odours. Interestingly, in the public debate about urban infrastructure, the woeful legacy of Imperial Russia was hardly an issue. The interwar decades were, instead, dominated by a Polish nationalist discourse. There were fewer complaints about past smells or about stirring up old anti-Russian sentiments, but, instead, an eager push towards a future sanitised from offensive exudations and ‘polluting’ elements that were unsettling the atmosphere of the Second Polish Republic. This effort ranged from surveilling backward infrastructure (cleaning up the city, sanitising Lublin's courtyards and streets mostly from its pungent sewage smells and implementing major infrastructural improvements) to defining and thus deodorising ‘Polish space’. Where the state had implemented more moderate and gradual reforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – as was the case in Habsburg Lemberg or Dubrovnik – civil society would emerge gradually and thus more smoothly.Footnote 89 In Lublin, in contrast, the emergence of civic rights after 1918 was tied up with nationalist aspirations and fierce anti-Semitism.
Just as Lublin's municipality fought the bad odours of city courtyards which symbolised the poor state of urban infrastructure, various political parties were competing to clean up and restructure the newly born Polish Republic in terms of the foul odours of incompetence. Józef Piłsudski, Chief of the State (1918–22) and de facto leader of the Second Polish Republic (1926–35), aimed at ‘cleansing’ Polish politics of corruption and infighting. He complained about the ‘Cloaca Maxima’ of the Polish parliament with its atmosphere of nationalism and hatred, ‘spreading its smells to every corner of life in Poland – a smell characteristic of the current state of the country’.Footnote 90 ‘Go away, you moral filth’, wrote the newspaper Ziemia Lubelska about one member of the right-wing National Democrats, ‘wash yourself so you don't poison the air of another city with the stench you emit’.Footnote 91 Smell-rhetoric has always been a popular mode to articulate what is foul in the country. The language of cleansing was useful to define political stenches and for the conflation of ‘foreign’ elements in interwar Poland. The attempt to ‘clean up’ both Poland and the city (of Lublin) can therefore also be seen in the context of Piłsudski's ‘Sanation’ movement (Sanacja),Footnote 92 as well as the National Democrats’ platform to purge Poland from perceived threats.Footnote 93 Here especially, sensory history can help to examine the way in which the senses have facilitated particularism and nationalism.
Several notions of what constituted ‘polluting elements’ arose in the context of defining what a Polish city should and should not look (and smell) like. General liberalisation led to more intense public debates, which intensified traditional animosities and led to more stark definitions of what constituted ‘ours’ and ‘foreign’. The National Democrats and their daily organ Głos Lubelski, in particular, actively spread foul odours and poisonous ideas.
In the post-First World War era, health played a significant role in the formation and re-conception of nations.Footnote 94 The question of health spurred nation building, as it served to integrate and exclude people, define borders and forge identities. Health and hygiene assisted the evolving political and social order of interwar Europe. As Lublin tried to establish itself as a major city of newly independent Poland, intensified Polish nationalist discourse followed.Footnote 95 Here, the case of a Jewish butcher, as reported in Ziemia Lubelska, sheds light on another aspect of problematic courtyard air:
The motive for this article is by far not anti-Semitism, but the feeling for health, and views of a pure humanitarian nature. . . . Imagine this picture: blood on the sidewalk of the small street, when we cross the gate, muck mixed with blood and feathers, this is the content of the yard. Inside, everything is sticky with filth, blood and feathers, everything drops to the floor which hasn't been cleaned for a long time and a rotten smell of decay spreads. . . . This is a plea to the municipality as well as to the Jewish community, who should care not only for the health of their co-confessionals, but also should not risk losing their reputation!Footnote 96
This courtyard in Browarna Street was certainly neither the only Lublin courtyard nor the only butcher suffering from disastrous hygienic conditions and the ‘rotten smell of decay’. Yet the article links its cry for hygiene and humanity in the name of public health to the question of ‘Jewish reputation’, which raises issues beyond those of smell and hygiene. Eventually, the article touches on the question of ‘national health’ and social order and aligns cleanliness with hygienic standards, moral rectitude and social credibility. The underlying purpose of the article is soon revealed by another note in the same newspaper just a few pages further:
For about eighty thousand Christian dwellers, Lublin does not have one Christian butcher for poultry. . . . On the market they sell poultry alive. . . . In some shops, but not too many, you can buy a slayed chicken; however, only a whole one which usually is too expensive. So, there's only the Jewish butcher left – with kosher poultry. But the price here is even higher.Footnote 97
The proximity of this second article reframes the first as an inter-ethnic matter. Its grievance is less about the reeking courtyard and filthy butchers and more about Lublin's Christian dwellers being forced to bring their chickens to the Jewish butcher.Footnote 98 It is no coincidence that these two articles appeared in close succession. Their proximity shows a tendency to denounce Jewish spaces as putrid and smelly. Anti-Jewish discourse of the time frequently introduced filth and smell to denounce the Jewish presence in the ‘Polish’ city.Footnote 99 Here again, the author of the article engages less with the actual ‘smellscapes’ of interwar Lublin or smelly Jewish butchers than implements smell demarcation in order to generate images of the ‘other’. Concerns about smells were at the forefront of national policy. After 1918 the idea of the nation state in East-Central Europe implied something clean, pure and homogenous. Beyond ‘cleaning up’ imperial legacies like infrastructural backwardness, ‘cleaning up’ social and political structures or ethnic plurality became more prevalent during Piłsudski's ‘sanation’ from 1926 onwards.Footnote 100 In this process of nation building, contamination discourses around filth and contagion entailed efforts of regulation and purification.Footnote 101
The idea of the East European Jew as dirty, foul-smelling and disease-carrying has long been prevalent in Western as well as Eastern European discourse.Footnote 102 With the emergence of a blunt nationalistic mindset,Footnote 103 Lublin's newspapers – and not only the National Democrat Głos Lubelski – increasingly addressed urban sanitary issues as well as putrefaction rhetoric. Those accused of causing ‘inhuman pollution’ were mostly inhabitants of the Jewish neighbourhood.Footnote 104 Anti-Semites complaining about ‘Jewish smells’ is perhaps unsurprising, but it demonstrates olfactory codes classifying selfhood and otherness.Footnote 105 Smell helped elaborations of class and race,Footnote 106 and Polish National Democrats’ discourse proves the concurrence between highly emotional national politics and the re-implementation of old olfactory stereotypes. This period of nation building and political tension coincided with heightened sensory sensitivities.
The general public health threats in the region – epidemics due to lack of hygiene – were commonly considered ‘Jewish diseases’.Footnote 107 Podzamcze – Lublin's Jewish quarter – was indeed frequently prone to outbreaks of typhus and cholera. The noticeably poor neighbourhood was located in the marshy lowlands of the city. Comprised of mostly narrow streets and flimsy, dilapidated houses, Podzamcze was the outlet for sewage that poured through the gutters from the upper town and from the city prison located on Castle Hill. But in its attempts to improve the hygiene and infrastructure of the city, the municipality neglected the Jewish neighbourhood. Lublin's Jewish community enjoyed a relatively democratic self-administrative structure and, thus, was expected to solve local problems on their own.
As suggested in another article from 1929 in Lublin's otherwise moderate Ziemia Lubelska, the ‘battle against filth and slobs’ was fought not only ‘in the name of health’ but also ‘in the name of culture and everything that we need to protect from decay, stink and infection’.Footnote 108 The smell metaphors allude to miasmas of various kinds polluting and infecting the air of independent Poland. ‘Foreign elements’ and problematic neighbourhoods with poor infrastructure threatened Poland's, and in this case Lublin's, health and culture with stench and contagion. The notions of ‘cleansing’, ‘sanitising’ and ‘hygienising’ spawned urban reforms as well as nationalist prejudices. Maintaining a healthy body of a ‘new nation’ was a major concern of the time, reflected, for example, in the foundation of major health care societies.Footnote 109 Those in power have long wielded the rationale of hygiene as a tool for social engineering and/or exclusion.Footnote 110 Hence, one can interpret the issue raised in the Ziemia Lubelska article about the butchers as vocalising ‘national health’ by way of Jewish pollutants and the protection of Christian-Polish citizen's health.
Growing Polish self-confidence and nationalism was at odds with a multicultural and therefore multi-odorous city. Post-independence, debates about who was supposed to linger on the streets and breathe the air of ‘our’ ‘Polish’ city became prevalent in local Lublin newspapers. ‘Foreign’ elements, such as the Russian Orthodox cathedral and Jewish citizens strolling the streets of Lublin beyond ‘their’ neighbourhoods, were accused of taking away (Polish-Catholic) citizens’ space to breathe.Footnote 111 Jewish butchers and retailers, in general framed as potential health threats, also implied a national health threat. Nationalist animosities – and the question of who belonged to the community – were at the centre of the discourse on hygiene.Footnote 112 The foul odour of decomposition, associated with backwardness in general and the Jewish neighbourhood in particular, was not welcome in an atmosphere of modern urban living or as part of national standards. One facet of democratisation and ‘citizenisation’ was the fact that more Jews were leaving their (cramped) neighbourhoods to walk on the prestigious Krakowskie Przedmieście with its coffeehouses and pleasant stores or in the city park – spaces that were now defined as explicitly ‘Christian’.Footnote 113 Some fellow citizens perceived Jewish civic and spatial emancipation as a form of ‘contamination’. Polish newspapers repeatedly complained about ‘smelly Jews’ that would congest the streets of ‘our city’, or remark that the city park – ‘our beautiful reservoir of fresh air’ – was ‘jammed with the “chosen people”’ wherefore ‘a bad smell of sweat, garlic and onion hovers in the air’.Footnote 114 Complaints about ‘the Jewish domination of the city with their extreme sloppiness and enormous screaming’Footnote 115 invariably carried the notion of sensory ‘contamination’. Sensory impropriety (someone talking too loudly, cramming the streets or public benches or emitting odours) could be perceived as a social violation and, in the Polish post-war context, as a violation of the clean body of the Polish nation state (as envisioned especially by the National Democrats).
Exploring smell discourses, smell rhetoric, the wording around olfactory matters also requires an exploration of the history of mentalities.Footnote 116 Ideological and ethnic demarcation or ‘othering’ can be a profoundly sensorial process. The Second Polish Republic was striving for the air of independence and saw itself fighting ‘suffocation’ and ‘odoriferous elements’ in the name of the ‘modern’ nation state. In this case, the call for a Christian poultry butcher in the name of (national) public health and cleanliness, as opposed to the Jewish one – a smelly, filthy and pricy place – indicates a quest for general (olfactory) cleansing. One can also read laws and regulations as attempts ‘to foist disciplinary regimes to control the foreign, the poor and visible minorities’.Footnote 117 The discussions about the kosher butcher and the ‘inhuman pollution’ of the Jewish neighbourhood and about turning up noses at Jews contaminating Christian space encapsulate the contemporary mindset of regulation and disciplining methods to clean up ‘Great Lublin’ also in terms of social or ethnic smells and/or filth and national health threats.
Conclusion
By focusing on the air and odours of Lublin's interwar courtyard, we can observe what was regarded as part or not part of a ‘modern’ city of independent Poland after the First World War. Disciplining the urban smellscape was a major issue for the emerging city of Lublin in the interwar period. Odour-free cleanliness in the name of public health served as an argument to discuss neighbourly relationships, standards of urban (co-)habitation and definitions of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ space as well as air. The modern urban dweller claimed his right to fresh air without organic odours interfering with urban lifestyle.
The battle evolving around open windows and foul animal smells, resulting in a flood of citizens’ complaints directed to city authorities in the late 1920s, also highlights the emergence of a new civic self-conception of Lublin's urban dwellers. By complaining about various stinks and claiming fresh air, they were making use of civic rights in the wake of ‘citizenisation’ in the Second Polish Republic.
Additionally, claiming air and space was a main feature of civic and national public discourse in the years following the First World War. Lublin municipality's drive to clean up the city dovetailed with national aspirations, deploying old stereotypes (‘smelly Jews’) in the new context of a modern ‘clean’ city and ‘well-aired’ Polish Christian space. Hence, Lublin's courtyard also became a battlefield of interethnic and national sensitivities.
In this context, one can understand public health as a major ideology and condition for a new functioning (national) state maintained by municipal actions as well as by city dwellers’ claims. The ‘new’ (olfactory) sensitivity of interwar Lublin shows that hygienisation and deodorisation in the realm of urban reform discourse and urban regulation also contained a strong element of national health discussion and interethnic ‘regulation’. In the process of gaining independence, the question of who belonged to the community was reasoned through order and odour.Footnote 118 This odoriferous sentiment is not exclusive to the city of Lublin but characteristic of a dominant discourse of the time and region.
In general, smells became increasingly politicised: this odorous atmosphere involved political parties spreading foul ideologies and mindsets about ‘polluter-Jews’. Modernisation went alongside aspirations towards a ‘clean’ Polish nation and raised awareness about urban (odour) nuisances. Public organs like newspapers made prevalent discourses more visible and prone to broader dissemination and public awareness. Exudations of neglected infrastructure or of ethnic plurality were not welcome in the process of setting modern urban living standards and national standards.Footnote 119 Literally and symbolically, references to bad air and foul odours informed political, ideological and ethnic distinctions. Smells remained authoritative and deeply implicated in iterations of class, race and ethnicity in twentieth-century conversations about who and what smelled and why.Footnote 120 This combination of embodied experience and emotionalised discourse regarding smells holds an important key to understanding historical change generally and reconfigurations in cultural attitudes specifically.Footnote 121
Acknowledgements
This article was written in the framework of a “POLONEZ”-Fellowship (National Science Centre, Poland) at UMCS Lublin, Poland. The project (2016/21/P/HS3/04063) has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No.665778. Open Access funding was provided by the University of Vienna/Institute of East European History.
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