When Austria annexed Galicia during the first partition of Poland in 1772, the province's capital Lemberg was a decaying Baroque town. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Lemberg had become a booming city with a modern, urban and, at the same time, distinctly Habsburg flavor. In the process of the ""long"" nineteenth century both Lemberg's appearance and the use of public space changed remarkably. The city center was transformed into a showcase of modernity and a site of conflicting symbolic representations, while other areas were left decrepit, overcrowded and neglected.""Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914"" reveals that behind a variety of national, and positivist historical narratives of Lemberg - and of its architecture - there always existed a city that was labeled ""cosmopolitan"" yet ""provincial;"" and a Vienna, but still ""of the East."" Buildings, streets, parks and monuments became part and parcel of a complex set of culturally driven politics. The modern architecture influenced the portrayal of the Lemberg populace as much more sophisticated than they actually were.
Markian Prokopovych is a cultural and urban historian focusing on Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. His areas of expertise cover architectural and art history, urban planning, monument restoration, and musical culture.
"Markian Prokopovych has written a much needed book on nineteenth-century Lviv. . . With the exception of several studies by Jacek Purchla, Habsburg Lemberg is the first book to go beyond merely discussing architectural styles in nineteenth-century Lviv and to integrate architectural developments with both the city's rich political and social history and current theoretical frameworks in urban studies and urban history. . . . It is recommended to everyone interested in Habsburg or modern Ukrainian history and can be used in specialized graduate courses." Austrian History Yearbook 41 (2010) Prokopovych, Markian. Habsburg Lemberg. Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914. Central European Studies. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2009. Pp. 357. doi:10.1017/S0067237809990233 Lemberg was the capital of Galicia, Crownland of the Habsburg monarchy between 1772 and 1918.period), L'vov in Russian (during the Soviet period), and L'viv in Ukrainian (since 1991)--was historically a multiethnic and multiconfessional urban society. This heritage presents challenges for every historian researching and writing the history of the city. The narratives of nationalist Polish and Ukrainian historians suggest that only a Polish Lwow or a Ruthenian L'viv existed in the past. Markian Prokopovych does his best to emancipate himself from the rule of the nationalist-committed historiographical tradition. He is, however, not alone in this endeavor. Harald Binder from L'viv, Anna Veronika Wendland from Leipzig, and Patrice Dabrowski from Harvard University are but a few representatives of this approach to the history of Lemberg and Galicia who assist Prokopovych in reinstalling the imperial past of the city. The main issue argued and justified in this book is not that nationalism or any nationalizing efforts have totally been absent from Lemberg's Habsburg past. The Austro-German cultural and political hegemony was unambiguously felt up at least to the 1870s, coinciding with the enforcement of an ambitious urban planning project, the most visible outcome of which manifested itself in architecture and infrastructural modernization. The urban development program, ordered from Vienna and carried out by immigrant German bureaucrats and professionals, transformed the provincial and backward town into a European-style metropolis. The concurrent reform of the local administration led in the long run to a Polish ruled city. This brought with it an ever-growing nationalization of al Historical quarterly Year CXIX, 2012, 2 PL ISSN 0023-5903 Will Lviv Become a Microcosmos? Remarks on the Margin of a Book by Markian Prokopovych: Habsburg Lemberg. Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772-1914 Is it possible to abandon nationalistic narration in the historiography of Lviv? Can one avoid contemporary cliches stemming from the needs of a national state? The answer is: yes, as exemplified by Wroclaw.Will Lviv become a Microcosmos? Is a Polish-Ukrainian history of Lviv possible? Here the answer: "rather not" is determined both by the state of university research and the fact that Lviv continues to be a domain of a confrontation of nationalisms, while the present- -day Ukrainianisation of the town opposes the essence of the phenomenon of Lviv (Lvov, Lwow) as the capital of a multi-cultural cosmopolitan metropolis whose success was co-created by Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and Germans within the civilisation borders of the Habsburg Empire. Polish and Ukrainian scholars represent fundamentally different questions generated by diverse perspectives of national historiographies. This holds true not solely for the question of complicated Polish-Ukrainian history; in the case of Lviv it also involves, e.g. the attitude towards Austria. The "Austrian nature" of Lviv is the basis of the book by Markian Prokopovych, which comprises, first and foremost, a bold methodological challenge formulated against the backdrop of the current state of the historiography of nineteenth- century Lviv. The civilisation power of the Habsburg monarchy decided about the space of the town at the turn of the nineteenth century and the appearance of the third largest city of Cisleithania, after Vienna and Prague. In this sense, the public space of the town, created at the time, remained Central European and not specifically Polish, while Habsburg Lviv could be interpreted 107 M. Prokopovych, op. cit., s. 275-276. 108 A. Chwalba, D Markian Prokopovych. Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital,1772-1914. Central European Studies. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008. 365 pp. $49.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55753-510-8. Reviewed by Nadine Zimmerli (Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison) Published on H-German (December, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher Identities Carved in Stone? Architecture and Identity Politics in a Multi-ethnic Habsburg Town Two centuries ago, the population of Galician Lemberg/Lw ow/L'viv met Polish Napoleonic andAustrian troops with grand mass celebrations as they entered the city. Traditional historiography has argued that the welcome to the Polish troops was of a spontaneous, improvised, and therefore more authentic" nature than the scripted procession, imposed from above," that celebrated the reentry of the imperial troops. In contrast, Markian Prokopovych points out the distinctly similar nature of both events and calls for a reexamination of the history of Habsburg Lemberg, previously written along national lines. In what he calls an urban biography" (p. 3), Prokopovych uses Habsburg Lemberg's architectural heritage and public spectacles as a means to investigate imperial and competing nationalizing projects in the city. He concludes that until the outbreak of the First World War, a sense of loyalty to the empire co-existed with ethnic and religious sentiments for most of Lemberg's inhabitants" (p. 288). This fi nding puts Prokopovych's study squarely in line with other research that points to the continued strength of imperial loyalty in ethnically mixed regions of the Austrian Empire, such as Jeremy King's study of the Bohemian town of Budweis/ Cesk e Bud ejovice.[1] In contrast to King's subjects, however, the two major competing nationalizing factions in Lemberg{its Polish and Ruthenian inhabitants{were imagined as brotherly" Slavic nations rather than as German-Slav Nationalities Papers Vol. 38, No. 4, July 2010, 569-587 BOOK REVIEWS Habsburg Lemberg: architecture, public space, and politics in the Galician capital, 1772-1914, by Markian Prokopovych, West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press, 2009, xiii + 357 pp. + notes, maps, bibliography, index, illustrations (paperback), ISBN 978-1-55753-510-8 Urban history is hardly a new field of study but the intersection of cultural, social, political, ethnic-national, and urban history that has characterized recent work can fairly be termed a new - and very exciting - trend in the historiography of East-Central Europe. The work under review here is an excellent example of the best work being done today. This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in the history (and present) of East- Central Europe as a whole, or more narrowly Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg?), Polish, or Ukrainian history. By including several dozen excellent illustrations Purdue University Press has considerably enhanced the attraction and readability of this fine work. As his title implies, Prokopovych is interested primarily in the intersection between architecture, city planning, and politics. But "politics" here needs to be understood, of course, in the context of the Habsburg Empire and the diverse nationalities (Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans) resident in the city that Prokopovych calls "Lemberg." By choosing to emphasize the German (and Yiddish) rather than Polish or Ukrainian name of the city, Prokopovych stresses that his is a Habsburg history, not a national one. In other words, architects and city planners in Lemberg synthesized both broader, "universal" European traditions and styles as well as local "national" cultures in order to create an essentially Habsburg city - not one "belonging" to any one national group. Prokopovych argues that while national sentiments certainly did play an important role in the city, including among its architects, in the end Lemberg's publ HABSBURG LEMBERG: ARCHITECTURE, PUBLIC SPACE, AND POLITICS IN THE GALICIAN CAPITAL, 1772-1914. Central European Studies by Markian Prokopovych Review by: Larry Wolff Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1/4 HABSBURG LEMBERG: ARCHITECTURE, PUBLIC SPACE, AND POLITICS IN THE GALICIAN CAPITAL, 1772-1914. By Markian Prokopovych. Central European Studies. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2009. xvi, 357 pp., illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN (cloth) 978-1-55753-510-8. "Lemberg remained a Habsburg city where individuals held multiple identities until the outbreak of World War I" (p. 291). Thus concludes the book Habsburg Lemberg by Markian Prokopovych, and this conclusion is fully consistent with many other important recent studies in Habsburg history. Following upon the pioneering work of Gary Cohen and Pieter Judson, and including recent research both urban (such as that of Jeremy King, looking at the Bohemian town of Budweis) and rural (such as that of Keely Stauter-Halsted, looking at rural western Galicia), the Habsburg empire has come to be seen as far less, and much later, nationalized than historians once supposed. Indeed, one might even argue, taking Prokopovych one step further, that in many regards Lemberg remained a Habsburg city even after World War I, even after the abolition of the Habsburg monarchy. Prokopovych notes that Polish and Ukrainian historiographies still tend to impose Polish and Ukrainian characters, respectively, on the city that they refer to as Lw6w and Lviv (L'viv). He himself therefore denominates his Habs- burg subject under the German name of Lemberg, thus keeping his distance from both the Polish and Ukrainian perspectives. Indeed, individuals held multiple identities in Habsburg Lemberg, but the protagonists of this study are not, for the most part, human individuals: they are individual buildings, which collectively shaped public space and urban landscape. Behind s HABSBURG LEMBERG: ARCHITECTURE, PUBLIC SPACE, AND POLITICS IN THE GALICIAN CAPITAL, 1772-1914. By Markian Prokopovych. Central European Studies. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2009. xvi, 357 pp., illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN (cloth) 978-1-55753-510-8. "Lemberg remained a Habsburg city where individuals held multiple identities until the outbreak of World War I" (p. 291). Thus concludes the book Habsburg Lemberg by Markian Prokopovych, and this conclusion is fully consistent with many other important recent studies in Habsburg history. Following upon the pioneering work of Gary Cohen and Pieter Judson, and including recent research both urban (such as that of Jeremy King, looking at the Bohemian town of Budweis) and rural (such as that of Keely Stauter-Halsted, looking at rural western Galicia), the Habsburg empire has come to be seen as far less, and much later, nationalized than historians once supposed. Indeed, one might even argue, taking Prokopovych one step further, that in many regards Lemberg remained a Habsburg city even after World War I, even after the abolition of the Habsburg monarchy. Prokopovych notes that Polish and Ukrainian historiographies still tend to impose Polish and Ukrainian characters, respectively, on the city that they refer to as Lw6w and Lviv (L'viv). He himself therefore denominates his Habs- burg subject under the German name of Lemberg, thus keeping his distance from both the Polish and Ukrainian perspectives. Indeed, individuals held multiple identities in Habsburg Lemberg, but the protagonists of this study are not, for the most part, human individuals: they are individual buildings, which collectively shaped public space and urban landscape. Behind some of these buildings, of course, were individual architects, who might or might not have embraced a national identity, and Prokopovych poses the fascinat- ing question of to what extent it was-and remains-meaningfu
