REVIEWS RE VIE WS Acta Poloniae Historica 119, 2019 PL ISSN 0001–6829 Księga odpustów wrocławskich [The Book of Breslau Indulgences], ed. by Halina Manikowska, Instytut Historii PAN, Warszawa, 2016, CCXII + 222 pp. The Wrocław University Library collection features a book which, composed of a manuscript section as well as three incunabula, is presently kept under reference number M 1562. The manuscript section contains a structurally diverse list of indulgences for various churches, monasteries, hospitals, and chapels of Breslau (Pol. Wrocław). This is a rather unique source within what is Poland now. Examples of books of this sort are known from other European regions, Italy in particular. The list has recently been elaborated by Halina Manikowska. The publication opens with an erudite foreword concerning the indulgences, pilgrimages, cult of relics, and literature related to these phenomena. The author emphasises the recent change in the paradigm in the indulgence research. Indulgence is presently approached as a testimony of growing late-mediaeval religiosity rather than a manifestation of fiscal activities of the Church, which incited extensive criticism of the institution. The introduction to this edition contains a description of the entire Book, analysis of individual contributions and how they are arranged in the Book, an attempt at discerning the hands that have contributed to the source, analysis of the origin and chronology of the materials used in the writing and printing of the specified parts of the Book and, lastly, an extensive and minute analysis of the content of the individual indulgence records for the specified churches and chapels of Breslau (plus one confraternity and one Roman church). This section is followed by remarks on the chronology of compilation of the Book of Indulgences and the later, sixteenth-century entries, mainly of songs and other versed pieces. Added thereto are the editorial principles applied in the edition. As noted by the editor, the source in question is certainly not a complete set of indulgences issued for the respective churches. The lists of indulgences as we find them contain errors and even forgeries. The question thus arises whether a breakdown of this sort enables to outline a general picture of the local indulgence ‘market’. Aware of numerous weak points of the edited source, Manikowska admits that such a possibility does exist. All the better the picture will be if analysis of the indulgences the individual churches within the town dispensed and their confrontation against the other preserved 292 Reviews sources is possibly precise. Such an analysis is offered, to a significant extent, in the introduction to the edition under review. Pointed out have been the conditions informing the collections of indulgences for the individual churches of Breslau, indulgence privileges otherwise absent in the list, the similarities and differences in the character of the indulgences obtained by individual temples and chapels. One question that can be posed in this context is about the importance of individual temples, chapels, and altars in the endeavours for salvation of people in the late Middle Ages. The various sacral places in Breslau could differ in their attractiveness in terms of economy of salvation – not in the eschatological sense, defined as the assumed Divine plan, but rather, in the ‘mercantile’ aspect that consisted in figuring up the indulgence days: a practice possibly applied by people (particularly, burghers) of the late Middle Ages. Such a ‘mercantile’ mindset was probably practiced only to a certain degree among late-mediaeval people. Moreover, the use of the source edited by Manikowska in an attempt to assess the importance of the various temples ought to be done with considerable caution, and this for several concrete reasons, specified by the editor. Above all, what we have to do with is multiple sources which, although concerning indulgences, are definitely different in character. The edited manuscript takes account of twenty local churches and two Roman religious institutions. For many of them, indulgences are specified according to some hard-to-grasp rules. As pointed out by Manikowska, the list for the Franciscan Friars at St James’s is significantly different from the other Franciscan lists in the general conventual indulgence section: a number of known indulgence privileges are absent in it while those present are mostly otherwise unknown. The list for the Poor Clare Nunnery is completely local in character. One of the sections of the list for the ‘Corpus Christi’ Knights of St John monastery collects indulgences from the seventh century onwards, including those transferred onto the Knights from the Knights Templar, or privileges received in imitation of those for the Teutonic Order. The indulgences of the Holy Cross Collegiate Church were apparently targeted at the clergy rather than to all the faithful as they concerned participation in the Liturgy of the Hours. A considerable diversity of the catalogue in question and the difficulty in establishing whether all the indulgences quoted there were offered to the local faithful in the given period makes difficult the assessment of the importance of individual temples and chapels in the endeavours for salvation and for the possibility of influencing the soul after one’s death. In spite of all their identified weak points, the editor finds that registers of this sort offer a “possibility of ‘peeping’ on how indulgences functioned in the practice of the entire town’s religious life, how they set its rhythm and reflected the local hierarchy of holidays and saints, services, and prayers …” (p. XV). Let us then try and make an analysis along these lines. Reviews 293 Based on the source in question, the very enumeration of the years and days of indulgences obtainable is a rather breakneck exercise. Apart from a rather inventive way in which they were recorded and the aforementioned diversity of the indulgences, the task is made no easier by the ambiguous character of some of the records, which makes it impossible to precisely determine the number of days within the year concerned by the given indulgence. Hence, the numbers quoted below ought to be regarded as indicative or presumed only. In aggregate, the period covered by indulgences recorded in these lists was certainly in excess of 14,000 years, nearly 153,000 days (this being nearly 420 years) and, moreover, 4,709 quadragenes (188,360 days of indulgence – that is, 516 years). The list for the court chapel of Wittenberg, whose population was around 20,000 and thus comparable to Breslau, specified, on the eve of the Reformation, the possibility of receiving a total of 1,902,202 years, 270 days, and 1,915,983 quadragenes. St Mauritius and Mary Magdalene’s Church in Halle could offer 39,245,120 years, 220 days, and 6,450,000 of indulgence within a year.1 The sections of the Breslau register were made in various periods of the fifteenth century, while some could have dated to an earlier time – possibly, the thirteenth century.2 Whatever the case, one comes to the conclusion that, while referring to a number of churches, the catalogue seems rather modest and therefore, the potential of relieving the sufferings of souls through religious practices at local churches definitely fell short of the possibilities offered in other towns. However, as has already been emphasised, such comparisons should be approached warily as they are dependent not only of these hubs’ activity in acquiring indulgences over the years but also on the method of listing the sources. Moreover, as Manikowska points out, the Breslau list ignores Our Lady’s Church at Piasek, which was one of the major local churches. It has to be stressed that giving aggregate numbers of years and days of indulged sins is an oversimplification. Pilgrimage centres whose importance was pan-European were few; a number of other ones were important regionally, or just locally. Breslau was one such regional hub – even if one assumes that 1 Arnold Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien. Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom frühen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart (München, 1997), 161–2; Halina Manikowska, ‘Wrocławski liber indulgentiarum z końca XV wieku’, in E scientia et amicitia. Studia poświęcone Profesorowi Edwardowi Potkowskiemu w sześćdziesięciopięciolecie urodzin i czterdziestolecie pracy naukowej (Warszawa and Pułtusk, 1999), 131. For the population statistics of Breslau (Wrocław), cf. Cezary Buśko, Mateusz Goliński, Michał Kaczmarek, and Leszek Ziątkowski, Historia Wrocławia, i: Od pradziejów do końca czasów habsburskich (Wrocław, 2001), 207. 2 For more on the problems related to the dating of the entire book and its segments or parts, see Manikowska, ‘Wrocławski liber’, 136–7; ead., ‘Przedmowa’, CLXVII–CLXXI. 294 Reviews it was situated on the route from the north of Poland and Prussia to Rome. The attractiveness of local churches was primarily important for the locals of the town and region. Pilgrims might have compared Breslau’s ‘offer’ against those available in the other towns; yet, Breslau was essentially just a station on their way to Rome or other centres. What was important, also because of their indulgences on offer, the churches of Breslau offered a possibility to deepen the religious practices which were individual to a considerable extent. The possible quantitative comparisons probably cause that the findings about a larger or smaller attractiveness of the towns in regard of obtaining indulgences are ‘virtual’ rather than absolutely real. For such comparisons to be more to-the-point, the number of indulgences for the respective churches within the town’s limits should rather be taken into account, although one should remain careful in this case also. It has moreover to be emphasised that the indulgences received were related to diverse chronological categories. Alongside the specified years and days concerned, periods of time appear that refer to absolution for sinful days, leaving the decision which days were actually covered to the individual’s own conviction. At St Vincent’s Premonstratensian Convent, anni et dies criminalium et mortalium and anni et dies venialium were discerned; St Mary Magdalene’s Church used the categories described as tage vom almoßen and tage vom den zelen. The offer of alleviating Purgatory sufferings through, for instance, remitting a seventh of the iniuncte penitentie, which appeared with papal indulgences, completely escape any chronological category (the ‘seventh’ portion might have refer to a variety of things, actually). What is more, indulgences were afforded to certain specified categories of sins only. Lastly, quite frequent were so-called plenary, or general, indulgences (plenaria omnium peccatorum remissio), which additionally disturb the possibility of giving any concrete statistics. In spite of all these rather numerous doubts, let us try and compare the numbers of indulgences receivable from some of the Breslau churches. Definitely, indulgences could be obtained most numerously from monastic churches. The Franciscans from St James’s Church had on offer indulgences for slightly less than 8,000 years, including monastic and general Franciscan indulgences. Visitors at the Dominicans’ could obtain indulgence for approx. 2,700 years and 3,313 quadragenes. The Augustinian cloister had a lot on offer too, as it could dispense indulgences for a total of 1,184 years and 247 quadragenes. The ‘Corpus Christi’ Knights of St John monastery had, for certain, more than 844 years and 833 quadragenes of indulgence. St Clare’s Nunnery offered some 706 years of indulgence, while St Vincent’s Premonstratensian Convent had only approx. forty-for years of indulgence on offer for diverse categories of sinning. The church and hospital of the Crusaders with the Red Star had over 150 years to offer. The other churches were not as generous. St Mary Magdalene’s parish church, which had indulgences at its disposal earlier than the other non-conventual churches, certainly Reviews 295 offered more than 335 years and seven quadragenes for various merits; another parish church, St Elisabeth’s, had over six years of indulgence to offer; located in a suburb, St Nicholas’s had over eight. The editor notes that the conventual churches were dominant possibly because they had to solicit the faithful to join and attend, as they did not operate within specified parish districts. Of importance was probably also the central structure of mendicant orders, as part of which individual monasteries could make use of general conventual indulgences. As far as the liturgical year is concerned, with its Christian feast days and patron saints, it can be concluded (thus confirming the previous research) that indulgences for variously described religious practices – primarily, the recommended specified prayers – were most numerously bestowed on the major holidays, in praise of the Lord and Virgin Mary: namely, Resurrection, Nativity, Circumcision, Ascension, Corpus Christi; Annunciation, Assumption, and Purification of Virgin Mary. The entire Easter period was very important in this respect. These feast days were often mentioned one beside the other in the indulgence formulas; for example, the indulgence privilege from Pope Boniface IX for St Giles’s (Egidius’s) Church read: “in festo Natiuitatis, Circumcisionis, Ephiphanie, Resurrexionis, Ascensionis et Corporis Domini nostri Ihesu Christi et Penthecostes, necnon Natiuitatis, Anunctiacionis, Conceptionis, Purificationis, Visitationis et Assumptionis beate Marie Virginis …” (p. 107); another one had “Resurectionis, Ascensionis et Corporis Domini nostri Ihesu Christi, Natiuitatis et Assumptionis beate Marie Virginis” (p. 108). Another popular holiday was Pentecost, All Saints’ Day, and the days of St Elisabeth, St John, St Laurence, St Catherine, St Barbara, and a few others. All this was part of the Church’s liturgical order and was derived from it, and therefore reflected the general ecclesiastical trend and reappeared across regions and towns.3 Expectedly, appearance of significant indulgences on the days of order-related saints for the respective monasteries and on the days of patron saints for the other churches is noticeable. At the local Franciscans’, indulgences of significance could also be obtained on the feast days of St Francis, St Anthony of Padua, and St Clare. In St Clare’s church the day of its patron was important, along with feasts related to St Francis. For the Dominicans, the indulgence feast days were those of St Dominic and St Thomas Aquinas, as well as Peter of Verona. But the largest indulgences were not necessarily obtained on the feast day of the order’s founder: those issued at the Blackfriars’ on St Thomas Aquinas’s day out surpassed those received on St Dominic’s day. Holidays fixed on the church’s consecration anniversary day were important as well. 3 The breakdowns compiled for the Book under discussion are greatly convergent (in proportional terms) with, for instance, those laboriously prepared by Wiktor Szymborski, Odpusty w Polsce średniowiecznej (Kraków, 2011), 92–8. 296 Reviews With the catalogue like this particular one at hand, it is definitely hard to analyse, be it in estimate, the economic benefits drawn from the indulgences offered across the town, or in by-church terms. Given all the doubts indicated above, it would however be erroneous to conclude that the research value of the Book of Breslau indulgences is somehow limited. The register edited by Manikowska is certainly rather unique in the context of the other like sources produced at Central European urban hubs, which suffices to give it special attention. The Book will no doubt become instrumental in research into the churches of Wrocław, religious policies of the orders and secular clergy, manifestations of religiosity amongst local burghers and pilgrims visiting the town, and activities of the clergymen. Opportunities for diverse critical source studies related to the source in question have become apparent. The Book will certainly be used in comparative studies as research in other towns develops, taking into account the religiosity and religiousness in early periods; I would emphasise, in this realm, the possible research in the activities of individual religious orders in different towns or cities. trans. Tristan Korecki Piotr Oliński Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Dyskurs polityczny Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów [Political Discourse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth], Fundacja Nauki Polskiej, Toruń, 2018, 451 pp., bibliog., personal index, English summary The political culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth has been extensively studied for more than a hundred years by scholars from the region, and in recent decades also by Western specialists. Typically, these studies have focused on the relationship between political theory and practice, as determined by the constitution of the Commonwealth and shaped by the rise of parliamentarism in Poland in the sixteenth century and the arrangements regarding the status of the crown after the passing of the Jagiellon dynasty. More specialized studies on political discourse as such have only been initiated in the 1990s: by Edward Opaliński, Richard Butterwick, and Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz – the author of the present volume here reviewed. Her most impressive study examines the idea of liberty, fundamental for the self-image and identity of the citizenry of the Commonwealth. The present volume is a continuation of the trend, inspired by the classic history of ideas as well as by the tradition of the early-modern political discourse analyses in Britain and France and by the German Begriffsgeschichte. Clearly, however, the author does not blindly follow any of the abovementioned methodologies. Nor does she propose one of her own. Instead Reviews 297 of seeking a new approach, the book offers a new subject or, more precisely, a new configuration. It consists of nine key concepts and/or ideas which she defines as fundamental for the political culture of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility between the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment: the republic; law; liberty; mixed government; concord and consensus; virtue; patriotism; antiquity; and property. Manifestly, each of them constituted a remarkable segment of the then-contemporary political imagination and, perhaps less evidently, they all remained interconnected, as they all contributed to the functioning of an ideal which the contemporaries believed the Commonwealth was based on, or even epitomized. A happy citizen, it was assumed, could not live but in a republic under a mixed government; one resting upon laws, virtues, general consensus, and patriotism. The laws themselves also were based on virtues, consensus, patriotism, their antiquity, etc. The reading of this book resembles a tour in a pagan temple: the spectator is confronted with a family of nine deities who were supposed to secure a smooth functioning of the political community that worshipped them, if only they could live in harmony. However the harmony was, as our guide informs us, but an ideal. The author’s main efforts lay in her meticulous investigation of the genetic, semantic, and functional transformations of her nine key concepts and their mutual relations. It is visible that her erudition and careful dispassionateness make her relatively immune to any of the dominant theories of discourse. Moreover, they allow her to quietly dismiss some opinions of such eminent figures in the field as John Greville Agard Pocock, whose belief in the exceptionalism of some features of the English discourse she describes as ‘funny’ (see p. 145); or Quentin Skinner, whom she criticizes for overestimating the impact of Machiavelli on the Italian Renaissance discourse (p. 294). It may seem that the idea that organizes her image of the political discourse of the Commonwealth – perhaps even subconsciously – is more aesthetic than theoretical, or at least this is what her highly dispersed personal comments suggest. What she values the most is an elegant and precise formulation of political ideas, regardless of their content (she characterises the most absurd claims of the authors analysed as ‘quite bold’); and what she investigates most diligently are affinities and continuities between various political camps and periods. Moreover, as the book demonstrates, the concepts she analyses were not only interconnected in the minds of the early modern Polish authors, but they also determined the functioning of the political order of the Commonwealth in terms of their capacity to organize and structure the imagination of its citizens. The chapter regarding the republic, the first element investigated by Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, resembles the methodological approach of Begriffsgeschichte the most, and may therefore seem a little confusing as far as the entire volume is concerned. This is perhaps because the term rzeczpospolita, 298 Reviews genetically a literal translation of the Latin res publica, is probably the most equivocal and ambiguous of the concepts analysed in the book. The standard English translation of this Polish term in reference to the Polish-Lithuanian union established in 1569 is ‘the Commonwealth’, chosen so as to avoid the ‘monarchy-versus-republic’ juxtaposition and to emphasize the federative nature of the common state. However, as the author reminds us, for Polish authors of the time the term rzeczpospolita stood for any country governed by its citizens: be it a republic, like the Italian city-states (most notably Venice), or a parliamentary monarchy, like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth itself. Their most important inspiration in this respect, as in many others, was the Roman republic, as described by authors like Cicero. Seen in this light, the idea of rzeczpospolita was based on the participation of citizens in legislation, taxation, the execution of laws, and governing. Its embodiment was the king, the senate, and the sejm (the lower chamber of the parliament, elected by all nobles), acting in unison. However, in the broader sense it was a community of all citizens, that is the entirety of the nobility. As Grześkowiak-Krwawicz informs us, this strong identification of all nobles with the body politic proved fatal for the idea of rzeczpospolita in the time of reforms during the Enlightenment, when the idea of integrating other social strata into the sphere of policy-making prevailed. Rzeczpospolita thus seemed an anachronistic concept, to be considered as an ideal of modern citizenship and modern patriotism, embracing the entire nation; and so it was gradually replaced with the ideas of the motherland, or the nation as a more democratic formula, attractive for non-nobles as well. The second chapter examines the component of the law. It seems evident that jurisprudence formed the most international segment of the political discourse of the Commonwealth, even though, as the author observes, Polish authors approached it from a particularly politicized point of view. Of course, the analysed authors almost invariably believed that respect for and obedience to the laws was fundamental for a well-functioning polity, and for the well-spirited citizens as well. They also believed in the superiority of the republican legal systems over those imposed on populations by despots and tyrants. At the same time, this perfect legal construction was assumed to be more fragile, and its preservation and cultivation was considered to be the crucial challenge for the political community. Moreover, Grześkowiak-Krwawicz emphasizes that the Ciceronian idea that jurisprudence and liberty are strongly interconnected was particularly popular in Poland-Lithuania, and contributed to an easy adaptation of some ideas of the French Enlightenment philosophers. Liberty, the next concept discussed in the book, is the one GrześkowiakKrwawicz had studied the most extensively, and indeed it occupied a special position in the imagination of the early-modern Polish authors. Like Englishmen and the representatives of some other nations, the citizens of the Commonwealth liked to believe that their country was the freest in the world, Reviews 299 and the only one to guarantee political liberty in its purest form. However Polish authors were less sophisticated theoreticians of liberty than their Western counterparts: on one hand they idealized it beyond any limits, and on the other they saw it through the lenses of the practical and legal realities of the Commonwealth. Confronted with a choice – liberty or security – they typically favoured the former. Their most intense efforts focused on demonizing the actual and imagined enemies of their precious privilege: the monarchs and their desire for absolute power. No theories or treatises on the advantages of a strong monarchy, typical of the contemporary Western discourse, gained much attention from Polish readers. Moreover, Polish nobles notoriously associated a number of their privileges and rights with the idea of liberty: their equal rights as citizens, equality before the law, etc. The fourth chapter examines forma mixta – the idea of government composed of three elements: a monarch, aristocracy, and the people. To be sure, in the context of the Commonwealth the third element was actually reduced to the nobility. The idea, dating back to ancient Greece, was supposed to represent a perfect political order because it was based on the concept of checks and balances. Its impact was at its greatest in the late sixteenth century, when the political order of the Commonwealth was eventually formed. Its main advantage was that the formula was genuinely open: supporters and opponents of a strong monarchy or parliament could easily argue that their postulates aimed at preserving the balance within the triad. However, as the monarchical element became ever more demonized by advocates of the noble democracy, the discussions focused on the idea of limiting the powers of the monarchy. Moreover, since in Poland-Lithuania there was no aristocracy in the legal sense (and the idea of equality of all noblemen-citizens eventually won indisputable popularity), its role in the debate was typically marginalized. Like the majority of the concepts discussed in the book, this one also underwent a remarkable transformation in the last decades of the eighteenth century, when it was gradually replaced by the modern idea of the separation of powers into the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. However, the idea of forma mixta continued to have its admirers until the final days of the Commonwealth. The fifth chapter concerns the idea of concord – the Latin concordia, consisting of two elements: a unanimity of spirit, and a political consensus. Obviously, this concept was closely related to that of forma mixta, which could function properly only if its three components acted in agreement and conformity. Thus, it was a handy argument in political debates, whereby political opponents were frequently accused of undermining the alleged unanimity of spirit, or even more scandalously, of being partisans, i.e. of forming a party within the indivisible body politic. To be sure, political realities in the neighbouring countries, and particularly during the time of religious wars and other bloody internal conflicts, provided terrifying examples of the consequences of such 300 Reviews divisions. One of the remedies against such maladies, inherited after the ancient authors, was love: love for the motherland, and for fellow-citizens. The idea, quite compromised by the realities of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was reinvigorated by the propaganda of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, who sought to neutralize the opponents of his reforms by encouraging them to join what he presented as the majority program. The next chapter examines virtue, and is perhaps the most general and vague in the entire book. Early modern Polish authors, Grześkowiak-Krwawicz observes, liked moralizing, but it seems hardly believable they were exceptional in this respect. Indeed, like most moralizers they focused on vices more frequently than on virtues. However the latter did exist, and their favourite ones were bravery during war and prudence during peacetime. Like other early modern republicans, they believed that republics demand higher moral standards from their citizens, simply because they occupy a power position. As is the case with most moralizers, their diagnosis of the maladies of the Commonwealth was typically based on the assumption that the ‘ancient’ customs and virtues were subject to degeneration and corruption, and as the condition of the Commonwealth deteriorated, this sort of discourse gained ever more popularity. Perhaps the most interesting part of the chapter regards the elements of stratification in the moralizing of the nobility: the question whether citizens, and particularly aristocrats, were supposed to adhere to separate moralities that would justify their elevated social position and their claims for political power. Finally, an interesting and remarkably modern phenomenon is noted: In the last years of the Commonwealth the opponents of enlightened reforms – which were advocated as natural consequences of reason – eagerly presented their positions as based on the virtue of the common man, introducing an opposition between reason and virtue in the public discourse. Chapter seven concerns love for the motherland, i.e. patriotism – a virtue defined, once again, in the manner of the ancient Roman authors, and particularly Cicero. It was believed to have a special function in the republican order, and to have been based on a sort of calculation: one was supposed to love one’s country for one’s own benefit, because an individual’s fate was directly related to that of the motherland. As was the case with a number of other concepts, Grześkowiak-Krwawicz argues that this one was also notoriously present in its negative form: political opponents were accused of lacking patriotism. In her opinion, such a strategy had lamentable consequences: all the maladies of the Commonwealth were believed to have resulted from the immorality of some of its citizens, and so the discussion of the need for political and institutional reforms was successfully eliminated. Interestingly, she emphasizes the local dimensions of the patriotic discourse: in the imagination of the Polish-Lithuanian nobles their ‘motherland’ was not necessarily the Commonwealth, but the local provinces. This was especially Reviews 301 true in those provinces with a strong historical tradition, or with some sort of autonomy: in Lithuania, Royal Prussia, and Ruthenia. Their citizens were supposed to have two motherlands: the local one, and the Commonwealth, with the latter seen as the political community, and over time more and more often labelled as ‘Poland.’ This particular feature of the Polish discourse, Grześkowiak-Krwawicz claims, was the idolatry of liberty, which regularly replaced patriotism: one was considered a good patriot if one supported the ideology of noble liberty and opposed the alleged absolutist aspirations of the monarchs. This was mirrored by ambiguities in the vocabulary: if the country was often labelled as ‘the mother’, attempts at portraying the king as ‘the father’ met with stiff resistance. Chapter eight addresses the problem of antiquity as a highly desired aspect of all the above discussed ideas. This brings us to the realm of pure rhetoric – one which, however, had numerous consequences for the political practice. Early modern Poles, like their contemporaries all over Europe since the time of Homer, believed in the vaguely-defined golden age and the superiority of the old ways of doing things, sanctioned by tradition and proved by experience in all spheres of life. The most desired result of any political action, therefore, was preservation of the status quo; and if any changes were advocated, they were presented as a reversal of ‘corrupted’ practices to bring them in line with their origins. Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski was the first who broke with this tradition, as he tried to advertise his political program as a novelty; a strategy Grześkowiak-Krwawicz considers as a mistake, for the love of antiquity among Polish nobles remained unbreakable. Its important function, she argues, was therapeutic: it helped the nobles preserve their trust in the political order of the Commonwealth despite its deficiencies, as it suggested that all problems resulted from the corruption of the originally perfect principles. The final last chapter discusses some concepts which were ‘missing’ – or more precisely ‘underrepresented’ – in the discourse of the Commonwealth. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz names a few: sovereignty, the state, the delegation of powers, and property. She focuses mainly on the latter, as she assumes that the fact it was underemphasized in the Polish discourse constitutes a major difference in comparison with the West. She points out two reasons for this. The first was the dependence of the Polish discourse on ancient and Christian patterns; and the second was the absolute domination of the nobility in the political life of the Commonwealth. Both the ancient republicans and the Christian authors such as Thomas Aquinas viewed property, and individualism in general, with suspicion, and saw them as obstacles for the development and preservation of civic virtues. Following them, the Polish authors saw no relationship between property and liberty; a relationship that was crucial for the modern civic consciousness in Britain and France. According to the nobility’s popular dogma, and indeed the laws of the Commonwealth, it was 302 Reviews birth that determined one’s status. Consequently, it was the noble liberty that secured property, and not vice-versa. In theory, a good citizen did not care for material goods and was only proud of the sacrifices he made for the public good. It was only in the time of the Enlightened reforms that the idea that economic prosperity decides about a country’s potential and strength entered the Polish discourse, painting economic activities in patriotic colours. One evident impression created by this book, even though it is relatively underemphasized, is the self-flattering and self-congratulatory nature of large segments of the discourse. It is only on page 181 that the author observes, with a certain hesitation, that in the Commonwealth the advantages of the theoretical model were often confused with contemporary political realities. Generally, the book confirms what is popular knowledge about the history of the Commonwealth: that the political ideology of the nobility fuelled it with much vigour and determination when the political order of the Commonwealth was being formed in the late sixteenth century, but that later it became a burden when reforms were needed, as most reforms were viewed as a corruption of the ideal. A more detailed insight, however, demonstrates that the entire ideological construction was neither immune to nor hostile toward changes; one needed only to dress them in the vocabulary of restoring the ancient ideal and invent their genealogies. Yet perhaps such a formula did not allow for changes radical enough to save the country in the times of trouble. In short, one conclusion of the book may be that the ancient proverb ‘pride goes before the fall’ proved wiser than the modern idea that self-confidence is a prerequisite for success. On the other hand, one should not get confused by the aesthetic construction of the book. Its content shows that much of the early modern Polish discourse was actually not about virtue, patriotism, liberty, etc. – but about the lack thereof; about their corruption and the threats that endangered them. This brings us back to the question whether the contemporaries really believed that the political order of the Commonwealth was indeed perfect, or whether this entire discourse was a noble parlour game, which requires reading between the lines and/or through a diplomat’s spectacles. Certainly, the contemporaries could not have realized how fragile their world was; and one may ask whether all the apologists for the Commonwealth and its institutions defended it out of pride and self-confidence, or whether it was an act of desperation? However it is debatable whether historiography can answer such questions. The book manifestly lacks an introduction and conclusion, in the sense of origins and continuations. We are confronted with a structure fully developed at the moment of the Polish-Lithuanian union and the establishment of a political order that survived until the Great Parliament of 1788–92. One can wonder how this structure had developed historically. The fact that Polish authors copied so extensively from the ancients and the Renaissance Italian authors Reviews 303 may suggest that the entire constellation was imported in the mid-sixteenth century. If this was so, however, it needed a fertile soil on which to flourish so spectacularly as it did in Poland-Lithuania. As far as continuations are concerned, they are actually to be found in all the chapters: one by one each informs us that in the sixth and seventh decades of the eighteenth century the ideology of the nobility began to crumble, both under pressure from the French Enlightenment and the lamentable condition of the Commonwealth, which became manifestly visible in the first partition of 1772. What remains of the ideology and has been incorporated into the modern Polish political discourse (and the discourses of other nations that emerged from the ruins of the Commonwealth) is a question that awaits a separate study. It was perhaps natural for the author to look for English and French analogies; as political discourse analysis, and particularly that concerning the early modern period, is a discipline dominated by British and French scholars and methodologies. Interestingly, the German Begriffsgeschichte, and particularly its most famous prophet Reinhart Koselleck, focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in their analyses. Still, one feels tempted to ask whether English and French comparisons are the most instructive for this period, and whether the author should have paid more attention to Germany, Bohemia, or Hungary. To be sure, this is not the first and certainly not the last brilliant book by a Central-European author who compares his or her motherland with the most advanced countries of the West, neglecting some nearer objects of potential comparison. In the final analysis, this erudite and elegant study seems – despite some serious criticism of the earlier interpretations of the political culture of the Commonwealth, for example regarding its alleged conservatism – to be in a sense to their crowning achievement while, at the same time creating an opening towards an underrepresented research tradition. If it constitutes a challenge, I suppose the challenge rather concerns developing a more critical approach to the dominant Western tradition of analyses of early modern republican thought, both methodologically and in terms of confronting it with the discourse of what was once, after all, the largest, most populous, and, perhaps most committed republican polity in early modern Europe. Therefore, one should hope this book will be translated into English as soon as possible. proofreading James Hartzell Adam Kożuchowski 304 Reviews Henryk Litwin, Chwała północy. Rzeczpospolita w polityce Stolicy Apostolskiej 1598–1648 [The Glory of the North. The Apostolic See’s Policy towards Poland-Lithuania, 1598–1648], Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa, 2018, index of persons, genealogical tables, 432 pp.; series: Rodowody cywilizacji A critical discussion of the book in question should begin with the edition notice which tells the reader as follows: “The first revised [literally, ‘modified and complemented’] edition by the PIW [Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy]”: thus, in a rather unusual way, the Publisher pointed that a title-sake study by the same author was published in 2013 by the Catholic University of Lublin [KUL]. A question therefore appears, what are the actual differences between the two books?. The answer, nowhere to be found in the book under review, is that with the first edition’s structure virtually retained, the author has added an introduction and a chapter entitled ‘A portrait gallery’, plus twenty-three genealogical tables presenting the major dynasties ruling in Europe in the period concerned. An index of personal names is attached, too. Notable is the monograph’s elaborate artwork, which the 2013 edition lacked. Detailed tracing of the modifications made to the core, content-related part of the text would exceed the framework of a brief review. It ought to be noted, though, that footnotes have been modified the most, with new bibliographic items added. At the same time, a sizeable proportion of the core text has remained untouched – for instance, chapter 1.1 from Part 1; 2.2 from Part 2; 4.9 from Part 4 or 5. Three of the five chapters contained in the 2018 edition almost exactly reproduce the corresponding editorial units from the first edition. Litwin describes his purpose thus: “The following text attempts at identifying the main lines of the papacy’s policy toward the Commonwealth and at determining the place and role of Poland-Lithuania in the Apostolic See’s international activities and operations”. Presented is, we are told, a ‘story’ on the papal diplomacy (p. 9). The story is unusual, considering its formal aspect, since the author has created a structure that he calls a patchwork one, consisting in a “combination and blend of textual fragments made in various forms”. Thus, the core text is a scholarly monograph which is primarily based on the correspondence between the papal Secretariat of State and the nuncios to the Commonwealth. Some fragments are situated halfway through “between a monograph and an academic textbook”. Litwin admits that in writing them he used studies and sources that have appeared in print, particularly biographies of the popes and studies on Holy See’s foreign policies. Apart from these two forms, the dissertation provides portraits of the respective nuncios, based on the letters they exchanged; there are also portrayals, more popular in tone, of some rulers and ministers, forming the ‘Portrait gallery’. Reviews 305 The opening and closing chapters outline a political geography of Europe in the years 1598 and 1648, in a more general and coursebook-like manner. The way the content of the book under review is arranged is somewhat doubtful. The Holy See’s policies with respect to Poland-Lithuania is discussed in the rhythm of consecutive pontificates and their accompanying nunciatures. As a result, the events that absorbed the Polish-Lithuanian state for quite a long time, exceeding the timeframe of a nuncios’ diplomatic mission or a pope’s service, are discussed in various chapters and their sections. To give an example, the papacy’s attitude toward the Commonwealth’s war against the Muscovy in 1609–18 is discussed in three chapters of part one; those willing to get an overall picture of the relations with the Tsardom of Russia in the period 1598–1634 will have to look for relevant fragments dispersed across four (out of five) parts. This is true for the nuncios as well, in fact; analysis of the doings of Claudio Rangoni or Giovanni Battista Lancellotti is broken into two parts, since their mission began and came to an end under two different popes. In my opinion, such an arrangement leads to inevitable repetitions – as is the case with the doubled discussion of Gábor Bethlen’s policies and the actions of the imperial army against Enrst, Count of Mansfeld in 1626 (pp. 195–210). And, instead of facilitating, it makes difficult the tracing of the intricacies of the changing policies of the Apostolic See toward Poland-Lithuania and grasping their fixed components. The introductory chapter ‘A political map of Europe in 1598’ is, as if, placed before the brackets, which is not quite successful an idea. On the one hand, the author’s extensive erudition comes to the fore: Litwin deftly moves across the world of European politics of the baroque era. However, a dose of dislike becomes apparent for more general views which would have allowed to spot phenomena not directly linked to the history of the ruling houses. For instance, the description of the situation in the Reich turns at times into enumeration of dynasties’ representatives in larger and smaller duchies or principalities, specifying their subordinate territories, while certain problems that dogged the Reich as a whole are missing – to name the actions of the forensic authorities (the Reichskammergericht, Reichshofrat) or the consequences of religious splits within the Empire, including the restitution of ecclesiastical estates or the reservatio ecclesiastica. Interestingly, the latter question is mentioned, as a side thread, only as part of the ‘Portrait gallery’ (p. 291). Moreover, if my reading of the author’s intention is correct, the static depiction of Europe’s political situation, resembling a photograph in some way, is not satisfactory to the author himself: the description of the situation in England reaches far beyond the year 1598 (pp. 20–1), for example. Similar doubts arise with the closing chapter, entitled ‘Europe in 1648’. In the author’s concept, the year 1598 has been adopted as the initial caesura for the proposed considerations as it was then that Sigismund III Vasa lost the throne of Sweden, which led to a conflict between the dynasty’s 306 Reviews Catholic and Protestant lines and placed the Commonwealth in the Catholic camp, exposing the country to hostility from the Protestant countries. The year 1648, in turn, marks the verge of a crisis that irreversibly pushed PolandLithuania down to ‘third-rank countries’. The monograph draws our attention to some important events taking place in the international arena, to mention the Edict of Nantes, the Treaty of Vervins (both of 1598), and the Peace of Westphalia fifty years later. One might find such a chronological arrangement disputable, particularly with regard to the year 1598, but at this point the author’s explanation is logical and convincing. The monograph is based on manuscript correspondence between the nuncios and the Apostolic See, together with the initial instructions and conclusive accounts of the papal messengers, complemented by printed materials related to the activities of the diplomats representing the Holy See in the area of the German Reich, the hereditary realm of the Habsburgs, France, Southern Netherlands, and Spain, as well as Danube principalities and Transylvania. The author has moreover used selected editions of letters and diaries having no direct association (as Litwin himself observes) with the relations between Rome and Warsaw but referring to the period’s international relations. Such a source base seems basically acceptable. Use has been made also of selected literature, especially the output of scholars who have done research into the nunciatures active in Europe in the period concerned and the history of international relations in the former half of the seventeenth century. To add some details regarding the aforementioned initial chapter, drawing a political map of Europe as of 1598, the “incessantly rebelling Ireland” (p. 20) was eventually subjected to the victorious sons of Albion after the defeat of the insurgents led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and the Spanish reinforcements he received in the battlefield of Kinsale in 1601 (as is mentioned on p. 71). Describing the last years of Elisabeth I’s reign, Litwin mentions the defeats in the fights against the Spaniards but neglects the war’s major success – the 1596 raid of the Anglo-Dutch fleet led by Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, on Cádiz. As for Genoa, a mention would be welcome that the local bankers remained until the 1620s one of the major creditors of Spanish rulers. Again, it is rather hard to perceive the Battle of Mezőkeresztes in 1596 in terms of an ‘overwhelming victory’ of the Turks, considering the losses incurred by both fighting parties. The subsequent five parts are constructed according to the same pattern. Each begins with a brief biography of the pope then on the throne, followed by a short description of the diplomatic services and the papacy’s actions in Europe. Next, analysed is the mission of the apostolic nuncios in PolandLithuania and a brief biographic outline of each of the nuncios. Consequently, the first part – ‘The Commonwealth in the European policy of Clement VIII in 1599–1605’ – begins with a biography of Ippolito Aldobrandini, Clement VIII’s Reviews 307 nuncio, which is followed by an analysis of his foreign policy; then the focus is on the mission of nuncio Claudio Rangoni in Poland-Lithuania and his biography. Litwin emphasises the papacy’s attitude to Jan Zamoyski’s policy toward the Danube region, the relations with Muscovy, and the struggle for the Swedish throne, which after 1600 turned into the Commonwealth’s war against its Scandinavian neighbour. Part two, dealing with ‘Poland-Lithuania in the European policy of Paul V, 1605–21’, contains a brief profile of Camillo Borghese (the later Paul V), a description of Paul’s foreign policy, and an analysis of the actions of the nuncios Rangoni, Francesco Simonetta, Lelio Ruini, and Francesco Diotallevi in the context of the main policy lines pursued by Sigismund III in the international arena – primarily, his endeavours to retrieve the Swedish throne, bestow the Prussian fief to the Brandenburg line of the Hohenzollerns, the campaign against Muscovy of 1609–18, and the Commonwealth’s relations with the Ottoman Porte. The basically reliable presentation of these issues proposed by the author needs a little correction: the Christian name of Maria de Medici’s favourite Concini was Concino, rather than Carlo (p. 96); the truce with Muscovy at Deulino was concluded on 11 (and not 23) December 1618;1 the warfare with Sweden in Livonia came to an end not in June but in November/December 1618.2 Part three, entitled ‘Poland-Lithuania in the European policy of Gregory XV, 1621–3’, opens with a description of the life and pontificate of Alessandro Ludovisi (Gregory XV) and the foreign policy of the Roman Curia in the said period. Subsequently, the mission of Cosimo de Torres is described, as are the beginnings of Lancellotti’s service as nuncio, particularly in the context of the wars waged at the time by Poland-Lithuania against Turkey and Sweden and nearing an end. Along with the early stage of the Thirty Years’ War, the problem of support extended by Sigismund III to Ferdinand II became increasingly topical. Again, I deem it my obligation to add a few minor corrections and polemical remarks. Naming the English and Scottish subjects of James I Stuart ‘Britons’ or ‘the British’ appears rather risky if left without appropriate explanation; Polish historiography customarily uses these names with respect to the union of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1707 onwards (cf. pp. 150–2). James I’ minion and companion in the Madrid escapade of Charles, Prince of Wales (mentioned on p. 152), was George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, rather than Charles of Buckingham – which the author is certainly aware of, as attested by the correct references on pages 191 and 287. Regrettably, the index of persons features the erroneous form again, referring the reader to an incorrect page number. Andrzej A. Majewski, Moskwa 1617–1618 (Warszawa, 2016), 202–8. Henryk Wisner, ‘Kampania inflancka Krzysztofa Radziwiłła w latach 1617–1618’, Zapiski Historyczne, xxxv, 1 (1970), 31. 1 2 308 Reviews The fourth (and longest) part, discussing the rule of Maffeo Barberini (Urban VIII) entitled ‘Poland-Lithuania in the European policy of Urban VIII, 1623–44’, completes the analysis of Lancellotti’s mission and the actions of the consecutive nuncios: Antonio Santa Croce, Onorato Visconti, and Mario Filonardi, until the moment the diplomatic relations between Rome and Warsaw were factually severed in 1643; a brief profile of each of these nuncios is offered as well. Inevitably, the author’s focus – following the one of the Holy See – is now on the war against Sweden for the Vistula River Estuary area, the interregnum after Sigismund III’s death, and the wars that accompanied the first years of Władysław (Ladislaus) IV Vasa’s reign – mainly in the context of Poland-Lithuania being used as an ally in the armed conflict going on in the Reich. It ought to be added that the statement whereby the French would have allowed the Swedes to seize Munich, thereby betraying Maximilian I, is overly categorical as it seems that France had no serious influence anymore on its recent ally’s actions. Litwin states that Sigismund III’s naval fleet was built since the autumn of 1626, whereas Eugeniusz Koczorowski’s findings have proved that the project had started at least five years earlier.3 And, contrary to what we can read in the book, the battle against the Swedes in Trzciano (Ger. Honigfelde or Königfelde) took place on 27 June 1629.4 The core thread of the author’s considerations is crowned by part five, entitled ‘Poland-Lithuania in the European policy during the early pontificate of Innocent X’, which describes the first years of Giovanni de Torres’s mission to the Commonwealth and the nuncio’s biography. The author emphasises a declined international importance of the Apostolic See as well as Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, followed by Rome’s declining interest in the plans of Władysław IV, which extended also to those plans whose implementation had been regarded by Rome a decade or two earlier as immensely desirable – just to mention the design to commence a war against the Ottoman Porte. Similarly, Rome seems not to have been overly concerned by the turn in the Commonwealth’s alliances – the Habsburgs were namely replaced by France, which was sealed by the king’s marriage to Marie Louise [Ludwika Maria] Gonzaga in 1645. The ‘Summary’ section reviews the central problems occurring in the Holy See’s relations with Warsaw; the fact seems interesting that in the opinion of papal diplomats, the main ally to papacy in the North were definitely the members of the Vienna Habsburg line, whose interests Rome was inclined to prioritise above those of the Polish Vasa rulers. 3 Eugeniusz Koczorowski, Flota polska w latach 1587–1632 (Warszawa, 1973), 78–9, 120–3. 1626 is an important year in the history of Sigismund III’s fleet owing to the appointment (on 9 Nov.) of a royal committee for war naval fleet. 4 Mariusz Balcerek, ‘Bitwa pod Trzcianem w 1629 roku – o dacie bitwy słów kilka’, Przegląd Historyczno-Wojskowy, 10/61 (2009), 4 (229), 155–8. Reviews 309 The criteria according to which the figures have been selected for the ‘Portrait gallery’ are not fully clear. Louis XIII, whose role in the shaping of the French politics has been increasingly appreciated in the recent years,5 is not represented, awkwardly enough; the same should be said of James I Stuart or the Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstierna. It moreover befits to be pointed out that in the light of Geoff Mortimer’s considerations proposed in his biography of Wallenstein, mentioned in the monograph’s reference list, naming Wallenstein an ‘Emperor’s traitor’ (p. 291) is a sheer exaggeration.6 The statement that the Battle of Lützen was Gustaf II Adolf’s greatest triumph (p. 295) is much disputable, particularly in reference to the battle’s description provided by Peter H. Wilson:7 suffice it to recall the Breitenfeld success of 17 September 1631. The English expedition to Cádiz was effected in October and November 1625 (p. 297). It does not seem that the decision to intervene in Moldavia in 1600 was made by the king on his own (p. 299); rather than that, he accepted (on an ex-post basis) the action taken by Jan Zamoyski. A negative assessment of the mediatory action carried out by Władysław IV in the course of the Thirty Years’ War seems to be exaggerated (pp. 300–1), particularly in the context of the study authored by Ryszard Skowron, Pax i Mars. Polsko-hiszpańskie relacje polityczne w latach 1632–1648 (Kraków, 2014), not mentioned in the book under discussion. Furthermore, this ruler does not deserve condemnation as he did not foresee that twenty years after the truce in Sztumska Wieś, the Swedish party would break the arrangement and embark on an invasion against Poland-Lithuania. In turn, Litwin’s evaluation of disastrous effects of the king’s Turkish plans is quite apt. As far as the bibliographical references are concerned, the author remarks at the beginning that, considering the extensiveness of the subject-matter and the related literature, he has decided to make a selection – not surprisingly at all, though the criteria behind his choice could have been made more precise. But even though, it seems that the proposed considerations would have been of a higher quality had the monograph had made use of the studies by Dieter Albrecht, Gregory Hanlon, Leszek Jarmiński, or Wojciech Polak.8 As for Philip II, reference should have rather been made to the most recent, 5 See Pierre Chevallier, Louis XIII, roi cornélien (Paris, 1979); Alanson Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII, the Just (Berkeley, 1991); Jean-Christian Petitfils, Louis XIII (Paris, 2008). 6 Geoff Mortimer, Wallenstein: The Enigma of the Thirty Years War (London, 2010). 7 Peter H. Wilson, Lützen (Oxford, 2018). 8 Dieter Albrecht, Die auswärtige Politik Maximilians von Bayern 1618–1635(Göttingen, 1962); id., Maximilian I. von Bayern 1573–1651 (Berlin, 2014 [reprint of the 1998 edition]; Gregory Hanlon, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies (Oxford, 2016); Leszek Jarmiński, Bez użycia siły. Działalność polityczna protestantów w Rzeczypospolitej u schyłku XVI wieku (Warszawa, 1992); Wojciech Polak, Trzy misje. Rokowania dyplomatyczne pomiędzy Rzeczpospolitą a Moskwą w latach 1613–1615 (Toruń, 2014). 310 Reviews gravely modified and revised version of the monarch’s biography penned by Geoffrey Parker. As regards Adam Szelągowski’s monograph on the war for the Vistula Estuary, the new, critical edition has escaped the author’s attention.9 It is the reviewer’s duty to mention certain editorial shortcomings and linguistic errors. For instance, the respective correct forms read: ‘Johann t’Serclaes, Count von Tilly’ (p. 98); ‘[the Collegium Nobilium Iurisconsultorum] Mediolanensium’ instead of ‘Medioilanensium’ (p. 121); ‘journée des Dupes’, and not ‘ jour de Dupes’ (p. 198); ‘[Henri de la Tour] d’Auvergne, [Vice-Count Turenne]’, rather than ‘a’Auvergne ’(p. 267); ‘etiam’, not ‘etami’ in the title of Acta Nuntiaturae Polonae, vol. xxii (p. 312); ‘Carilli’ instead of ‘Carlilii’ (p. 314); ‘Semiotics of behaviour’ rather than ‘Semiotics et behaviour’ (p. 331); and, ‘Prosopographie’ instead of ‘Prosopogaphie’ (p. 344). None of the above remarks should be allowed to obscure the fact that with the monograph in question, the keen reader has received an interesting and reliable presentation of the history of the relations between the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth and the Apostolic See. This richly documented book is written using an accessible and precise style, for which the author deserves cordial commendation. trans. Tristan Korecki Przemysław Gawron Cornelia Aust, The Jewish Economic Elite. Making Modern Europe, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2018, xxix + 217 pp. The monograph by Cornelia Aust analyses the networks of contacts between exponents of the Jewish economic elite that was active in the latter half of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century in the area stretching between Amsterdam and Warsaw. This leads her to defining the role of Jewish entrepreneurs in the building of economy in capitalist Europe. Although the research question is not new, this study is innovative and deserves mention. In considering the issues in question, Aust touches upon areas never researched before – and, even more importantly, undermines the formulaic historiographic schemes. This is the first study depicting the economic activities of East European Jews, including those once inhabiting the territory of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in a perspective of global and trans-cultural history. This makes the monograph part of a broader stream of research. It demonstrates that certain economic phenomena (more specifically covered below) were typical not only of the ‘developed’ Western Europe, as 9 Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (Yale, 2014); Adam Szelągowski, O ujście Wisły: wielka wojna pruska, ed., with an introduction and afterword by Andrzej Korytko (Dąbrówno, 2012). Reviews 311 has hitherto been assumed, but were also observable, though in a somewhat different form, in the East of Europe. Thereby, Aust emphasises the inadequacy of an arbitrary division into ‘the’ East and ‘the’ West. The chronological framework is no less important. The argument starts in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Jewish historiography traditionally, though not fully equitably, describes this period as one of economic collapse of the Jewry; hence, it tended to be mostly neglected by scholars. The author’s considerations end at the 1820s. From the standpoint of Polish historiography, this final temporal point is particularly interesting as it shows that in terms of economic history, the established division into pre-Partition and post-Partition history is not fully legitimate. What is more, it seems that there is rather little research in Polish historiography on the transition period of 1795 to 1815. The main characters of the study are Jewish entrepreneurs who maintained international contacts; members of the financial elite, they did not belong to the most affluent group (and so were not the Hofjuden). Analysis of their activities considerably broadens our knowledge on how the Jewish community functioned in the early modern era. The study is based on extensive historic records. The linguistic diversity of the materials used for the purpose deserves special mention. The archival resources Aust has examined were Polish (primarily, those collected at the Central Archives of Historical Records [AGAD] and the State Archives in Warsaw) and Jewish (in Hebrew and Yiddish), German and Dutch, along with contracts and accounts written down in French and English. The book’s content is arranged geographically: the narrative begins with the history of the Symons family, active once in Amsterdam; then, discussed are the activities of their partners – members of the Schlesinger family residing in Frankfurt an der Oder. The final chapters deal with the activities of Itzik Jacob Flatow, a native of the borderland area between Prussia and Poland-Lithuania, as well as with members of Szmul Zbytkower’s family, who were active in Warsaw and in Praga. The study is written in a very clear style; its well-thought-over structure makes the reading easier. Chapter one tells the history of the Ashkenazi family of Symons, who were active in Amsterdam in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The fact that the Ashkenazim pursuing business operations in Amsterdam have been noticed is worth emphasising in itself. Researchers have mainly described the Sephardic elite, since it was families of this particular cultural circle that ranked amongst the wealthiest and most influential in the city. Detailed analysis of Symons’ activities allows to revise Jonathan Israel’s proposition that an economic collapse of Amsterdam was visible already in the first half of the eighteenth century. Aust demonstrates that a weakening of the city’s economy only became noticeable toward the end of the eighteenth century, and shows how important the contacts with Eastern Europe were for the economic development – the aspect underestimated by Israel. The reconstruction of the 312 Reviews activities of the Symons family is based on analysis of 389 bills-of-exchange notarised by Symons family members and their relatives. The focus on documents of this sort as the basic source material is not quite typical. Authors have hitherto most frequently used correspondence as the basis for description of merchant contact networks. Not many letters have survived of the Symons enterprise, while the bills-of-exchange excellently ‘replace’ them. Trading primarily in such bills, the Symons acted as intermediaries between Jewish and Christian merchants, on the one hand, the Amsterdam bankers, on the other. We can learn from the chapter dedicated to the Symons how important trust was in the operations of Jewish merchants: the conviction that the business partner would be fair and honest and would meet his obligations. Fundamental to the building of international and inter-cultural networks of commercial contacts, trust is one of the central categories in the monograph. In the operations pursued by the Symons merchants, contacts with Danzig, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Königsberg, and Hamburg were of paramount importance. In parallel, they stayed in contact with the Ottoman Empire’s cities, Surinam, and Warsaw. The author interestingly describes the strategies which were applied to facilitate the family venture’s activities. While confirming the importance of family contacts in the Ashkenazic circles, already described by other scholars, Aust demonstrates that a considerate matrimonial policy was essential. The internal-market position was reinforced through allying with the local Ashkenazic financial elite: the connections with the Boas family of The Hague are described in detail. International contacts were strengthened by marriages contracted at the trade centres of highest importance to the Symons family. The kinships with members of the Frankfurt-based Schlesinger family (the central characters of the subsequent chapter) were key. Presenting the history of the Schlesinger family, the author discusses aspects determining the influences of state policies on the Jewish merchants’ areas of action and on the functioning of international markets. Being merchants, in the first place, the Schlesingers run their interests in the area stretching between Leipzig, Danzig, Königsberg, and Warsaw. The matrimonial strategy was willingly employed in building commercial contacts: parents endeavoured to have their sons or daughters married in the cities of importance to their economic activities (such as Königsberg, for instance). The argument demonstrates that the Prussian policy also had a say in the choice of where to expand and what abode to choose for the adult children. The Jews in Prussia had to obtain consent from the state authorities to settle in a town, whereas the relevant permit from the parents could only be inherited by one child; the other sons or daughters acquired their settlement permit through marriage. Active participation in the cyclical fairs was instrumental in building the networks of contact. The fair held in Frankfurt was of particular importance in this respect, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Regular appearance in Danzig and Leipzig was also highly important, since the law Reviews 313 banning settlement to Jews was in force in these cities; hence, efforts were made to enter into permanent cooperation with Christian merchants who readily took over the active role in the Jewish contact networks. The argument concerning the Schlesinger family’s business activities is complemented with an ‘intellectual portrait’ of some of its members. Aust points to the fact that most of them had a solid religious educational background. As opposed to the wealthiest Hofjuden, their attitude toward the Haskalah was somewhat critical, while their views were generally much closer to those of Polish maskils. The proposed analysis of the Schlesinger family’ activities has shown that in the 1770s many an exponent of the German-Jewish financial elite began making fixed contacts with Poland-Lithuania. The Commonwealth is dealt with in the monograph’s subsequent sections. Chapter three introduces the reader to Itzik Jacob Flatau, known from the earlier literature primarily as the founder of the private synagogue in Daniłowiczowska Street in Warsaw. Describing his economic activities, the author points to the fact that the Partitions of Poland-Lithuania and, subsequently, the Napoleonic wars offered excellent opportunities for the development of Jewish entrepreneurs’ careers. To be successful, however, one had to prove himself flexible, adaptive to the new economic and legal environment, and able to efficiently combine diverse sources of income. Flatau, whose native town of Złotów became part of the East Prussia province after the First Partition, had to adapt in the first years of his activity to the new legal environment and acquire the permit to settle down. Similarly to most of the Jews from the Commonwealth’s territory, this man combined a number of skills. He successfully made use of the opportunities offered by the wars of the second half of the eighteenth century and involved himself in supplying the army. Aust uses the example of Flatau to undermine Jonathan Israel’s argument that after the Peace Treaty of Utrecht a period of stagnation for Jewish entrepreneurs followed in Europe, which was caused, among other things, by no possibility to make money on supplies for the army. As the author rightly notices, the existing literature has overlooked the wars waged in Eastern Europe and no attention has been paid to East European Jewish suppliers and vendors. Apart from supplying the Prussian and, later on, French army, Flatau opened a banker’s house in Warsaw in the early years of the nineteenth century, leased inns and taproom licences, apart from his independent trading operations. His marriage was, originally, of key importance to the development of his career. In 1796, he married Ludwika Rebekka the younger daughter of Judyta and Szmul Jakubowicz (‘Zbytkower’); through cooperation with his parents-in-law, he could settle for good in Warsaw; moreover, he reinforced his contacts with Frankfurt. Of interest is also the chapter showing the functioning of the synagogue in Daniłowiczowska Street. The author argues that it was a typical prayer house, one of the many such venues functioning at the time in Warsaw; it was only nineteenth-century 314 Reviews literature that turned it into a ‘German synagogue’, thus making it clearly distinct from other such institutions in the city. The two final chapters deal with Flatau’s parents-in-law, Judyta and Szmul Jakubowicz. In line with the geographic categorisation adopted in the study, the years of their activity are divided into the Praga period (Chapter 4) and the Warsaw period (Chap. 5). Although both figures are known from the earlier literature and their activities have been discussed many a time, Cornelia Aust has managed to analyse a number of hitherto-unknown sources and present the Jakubowicz couple’s activities in a completely new research perspective – thus avoiding unambiguous assessments, as otherwise typical of the earlier authors. For example, based upon the pinkas of the hevra kadisha affiliated to the Jewish cemetery in Praga, she has demonstrated that Szmul Zbytkower did not wield an absolute power there, whereas the accusations of his abuse of the position, highlighted by the earlier authors, do not seem to be confirmed by the records. The author adopts a similarly critical approach to the earlier findings on Judyta, Szmul’s third wife. As she aptly points out, Judyta’s career did not begin with the death of her husband: we can be certain, instead, that she had pursued commercial activities together with Szmul before then. The description of Judyta’s cultural and social activities is very interesting: on the one hand, we can see a portrayal of an emancipated Jewish woman who sympathised with Enlightenment currents; on the other hand, her attachment to the tradition and religion is emphasised. The activities of the Zbytkowers are depicted against a broad background of the political history of the second half of the eighteenth century. Particularly interesting is the argument on the Warsaw Jewry’s combat for obtaining settlement rights in the city. A detailed analysis of their petitions has led to the finding that, in spite of the activities conducted by the wealthiest merchants – who must have come across, when abroad, the ideas of Jewish enlightenment and emancipation – their postulates were quite traditional, with no striving for emancipation discernible in them. The last chapter deals with the activities of Judyta Jakubowicz and Berek Szmul in the first years of the nineteenth century. Based on their histories, we can see how the political change related to the Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, with the instant appearance of new economic opportunities, influenced the activities of the Jews. Based on the author’s research, the Zbytkowers did really well under the new political and economic conditions. Aust shows that until 1815, supplying the army was the most profitable (and, the most risky) activity. At the end of the day, Jewish suppliers delivered much larger amounts of commodity compared to the Christian merchants. The most financially successful were those who made the best use of the earlier-developed network of co-workers or associates (Szmul Zbytkower and Judyta Jakubowicz being the cases in point). After the Congress of Vienna, some of the most affluent Jewish suppliers started banking operations; in this context, Aust discusses Reviews 315 the activities of Judyta in vast amounts of detail. She also shows that the collapsed importance of Amsterdam as the lending centre for Eastern Europe has contributed to the emergence of banks in Warsaw. In the same period, the Zbytkowers were involved in the lease of the salt monopoly in the Duchy of Warsaw; later on, after the Vienna Congress, they supplied the Kingdom of Poland with salt. Cornelia Aust has succeeded in showing the ways in which the networks of Jewish merchants’ contacts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century contributed to the emergence of the capitalist economy. Representatives of the Jewish economic elite in Eastern Europe, like the Hofjuden in the German Reich, formed the banker elite in the nineteenth century. Having read this monograph, one may ponder whether the contact networks connecting Jewish entrepreneurs operated basically within Warsaw alone, or perhaps the other – specifically, eastern – territories of Poland-Lithuania also played a role in the activities of well-to-do Jews. The fact that a brother of Judyta Jakubowicz settled down in the late eighteenth century in Grodno and pursued his business operations there, whilst some Jews of Słuck had contacts with the Schlesinger family, suggests that the entrepreneurs endeavoured to expand into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well. It however seems that follow-up research is necessary to accept or reject this hypothesis. Moreover, regional analyses may pave the way for a more nuanced approach to the subject-matter and for undermining a number of set historiographic stereotypes. trans. Tristan Korecki Maria Cieśla Mikołaj Getka-Kenig, Pomniki publiczne i dyskurs zasługi w dobie „wskrzeszonej” Polski lat 1807–1830 [Public Monuments and the Discourse of Merit in the Era of the ‘Resurrected’ Poland, 1807– 30], Universitas, Kraków, 2017, 420 pp., ills.; series: Ars vetus et nova, 45 The construction of historical monuments was a significant component of the emergence of national cultures throughout Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. Such monuments enabled elites to develop their own national consciousness while inscribing public space with national themes, thus bringing further social strata into contact with them. Historical research has thus far largely focused on the period around 1900 when the trend for national monuments and designs for entire memorial landscapes reached a peak. In this study, however, Mikołaj Getka-Kenig explores the early period of Polish national memorial discourse, focusing on debates on monuments during the short existence of the Duchy of Warsaw and the following period to 1830 when the Kingdom of Poland, established at the Congress of Vienna, 316 Reviews enjoyed a large degree of autonomy within the constraints imposed by the state’s personal union with the Russian Empire. As the introduction to the book outlines, the public celebration of service to the Polish nation provided, to a significant degree, a way of legitimizing the newly-created political order established in 1807 and then 1815. In both cases, this study claims, these states did genuinely restore Polish community following the partitions of the late eighteenth century, even if their territory was much reduced, their sovereignty restricted and administrative and legal structures were imposed by external powers. However, the aim of Getka-Kenig’s study is not to reconstruct the development of cultures of memory during this period. Instead, it examines how particular designs for monuments embodied what the author calls the ideology of a “resurrected” Poland, a term the author says stems from contemporary archival sources, albeit without specifying which ones. Getka-Kenig draws significantly on the New Historicist theories associated primarily with the US journal Representations to argue that the discourses on monuments manifested the efforts made by individuals and institutions to define their own identities. While the introduction does mention international perspectives on Polish debates, they are largely overlooked in the rest of the work. Only in the case of emergence of Classicism does the author briefly point to analogous memorial projects in other parts of Europe and also consider how Polish efforts were perceived abroad. Likewise, the fundamental transformation of European political historical discourse around 1800 is hardly mentioned. Thus neither the shift in perceptions of past and future that Reinhart Koselleck, for example, presented in terms of a move away from Erfahrungsraum (space of experience) towards Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectation) in framing the meaning of the present, nor the emergence of ‘merit’ or ‘service’ as a significant value in place of ‘virtue’, ‘glory’ and ‘greatness’ is mentioned. Furthermore, the study approaches all the memorial projects as attempts to honour and popularize service rendered to the ‘resurrected’ Poland, thus assuming that a break from older forms of memory and tribute was a given. Getka-Kenig only mentions as an afterthought the different conceptions held by those initiating the memorial projects and those intended as their recipients, although this does at least permit some insight into continuities. Despite these limitations, this study does make significant contributions to knowledge. It begins with the designs for monuments developed during the reign of the last King of Poland, Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski. They foregrounded merit and service to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the intention of encouraging contemporaries to follow these examples. The study thus briefly mentions Izabela Czartoryska’s design for the Temple of Sibyl in the park in Puławy, erected after the partitions of Poland, which incorporated elements of national memory. The chapters in the main part of the book are arranged according to the state structures existing at the time Reviews 317 and the type of merits or service to the nation being honoured. This section impressively traces the dynamics of discourses on national monuments following the restoration of Polish statehood after 1807. Alongside the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, Getka-Kenig also examines the situation in the Free City of Cracow and the Grand Duchy of Posen (Poznań) in the first two decades of their existence. It is notable that only a few initiatives came directly from the state authorities, such as the rather modest commemorative plaque for Napoleon in the Senate Hall, the plans for monuments to Alexander I and the construction of obelisks as part of the development of urban avenues. The author demonstrates that the various designs for monuments primarily served to ensure the visibility of particular groups of elites in public spaces. It was thus primarily officers who had served in the Polish legions on the side of the French who campaigned for the construction of monuments to Napoleon in the Duchy of Warsaw, while it was relatives and military comrades of Prince Józef Poniatowski who ensured a monument of him on horseback was erected in the Kingdom of Poland. The construction of a memorial to the fallen soldiers of the 1809 war was a private initiative of Stanisław Kostka Potocki, while members of Stanisław Małachowski’s family funded his statue in Warsaw cathedral. Local clergy ensured that monuments to early Polish kings were placed in Warsaw’s Capuchin church and in Płock cathedral. The Jagiellonian University in Cracow erected a memorial plaque to Copernicus, while the members of the learned society Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk – primarily on the initiative of its long-standing head Stanisław Staszic – were responsible for a statue dedicated to the astronomer appearing in Warsaw. The main argument justifying this initiative at the time was that Copernicus’ Polishness needed to be stressed as the city of his birth, Toruń (Thorn), was under Prussian control. The authorities and local elites, who largely spoke German, were celebrating him as a German. It is thus somewhat irritating that Getka-Kenig describes the elites in Toruń during the period under investigation as ‘Germans’ rather than ‘German-speaking’ because his terminology thus overlooks the internal contradictions inherent to such ascriptions of nationality before nineteenthcentury nation-building processes had been completed. The author traces extensively the debates over the forms that monuments were to take, thus demonstrating how the public was incorporated into discussions after 1807. Central to these efforts were attempts to make the broadest possible cross-section of society aware of the values and models embodied in the monuments and memorials. There were thus plans for military veterans and the poor to be given accommodation in the vicinity of monuments, while the public also influenced the decision to build a church for the local community rather than a monument to Alexander I. Discussing the Poniatowski monument, the author comments on the different visions presented by ‘Classicists’ and ‘Romantics’, thus reflecting 318 Reviews how contemporary stylistic debates also revealed competition between different elite groups. Another aspect that the author particularly emphasises in his discussion of the growing efforts to incorporate broader spheres of society in such initiatives are the calls for public donations to memorial and monument projects. The continued need for special funding from monarchs, the authorities, aristocratic families or wealthy individuals demonstrates that while such activities raised awareness of memorial initiatives, they did not generate the required finances. One exception was the case of marking the memory of Kościuszko in the Free City of Cracow, where the rather original idea of constructing a memorial mound was subsequently repeated many times throughout the nineteenth century. Getka-Kenig argues that the approach adopted by governing circles in Warsaw, who were unwilling to take the initiative themselves thus forcing the Cracow authorities to the forefront, was a result of them anticipating that the call for donations would indeed generate significant resonance and thus become politically problematic. Finally, the author also examines a campaign launched in the Grand Duchy of Posen for donations towards a monument dedicated to the first Polish kings. Its success in the region is ascribed largely to the fact that the initiative quickly ceased to resemble an effort to honour the merits of a ‘resurrected’ Poland and instead came to be associated with the Greater Poland region, thus casting Polish monarchist traditions into the background. Overall, Getka-Kenig’s study offers extensive insight into the debates and discourses on monuments and memorials at a time when national memorial movements were first emerging across Europe. It is to be hoped that this work will encourage subsequent studies offering both temporally and spatially comparative perspectives on this subject. The author has laid strong foundations for further investigation with a study rich in material on partitioned Poland in the early nineteenth century. trans. Paul Vickers Karsten Holste Artur Markowski, Przemoc antyżydowska i wyobrażenia społeczne. Pogrom białostocki 1906 roku [Anti-Jewish Violence and Social Imagery: The Białystok Pogrom of 1906], Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa, 2018, 514 pp. The 14–16 June 1906 pogrom in Białystok that killed eighty-nine people, mainly Jews, was one of the greatest pogroms in the history of tsarist Russia. A lot has been written on this occurrence; yet, Artur Markowski sets it in a broader context of the processes of the shaping of social ideas of pogroms and attacks on Jewish people in the Empire. The author of the book under Reviews 319 review is a scholar of established academic position; he has a number of valuable studies to his credit, including those on pogroms and acts of collective anti-Jewish violence as well as the history of Jewish people in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.1 Markowski argues that the Białystok pogrom was an element of a persistent socioeconomic crisis that overwhelmed Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century. The choice of the topic and a multi-aspect analysis of what happened in June 1906 and of what has been written about it are extremely important, considering the fact that pogroms and their defining criteria is quite a complex, ambiguous and still disputed matter. Owing to their reach and scale, the riots, the pogrom and the military pacification that occurred in Białystok are an excellent point of departure for such considerations. The pogrom in question – or rather, its descriptions – became an interpretative benchmark as far as events of the sort are concerned; they have often been used and reproduced in descriptions of other pogroms. It is these descriptions, myths, distortions and concealments, well-settled in historiography that Markowski extends his criticism to. Written from the standpoint of social origins of violence and its historical reception, the study opens with an extensive introduction and is divided into two larger sections (‘Social ideas’, ‘The practice of collective identity’) and ten chapters (three and seven, respectively). The study would have been even clearer should the author have more visibly separated a section describing the course of the incidents, preceded by information on Białystok as the site of the pogrom (expanding on chapter four) and, possibly, by a chapter portraying the perpetrators and the victims (sections within chapters eight and nine). The adopted structure introduces some chaos into the argument; a less-aware reader would learn what actually happened in Białystok in June 1906 as they read on. The first part is largely a meticulous analysis of the source material. All the chapters contribute a lot of information unknown to the scholars. It is based on such information that Markowski reconstructs the course of the events, describes how the social ideas of the pogrom were formed, and to what extent the sources under analysis shaped their image; the analysis points to the military and the Russian authorities – or, possibly, extreme-rightist political circles – as the primary perpetrators. Mechanisms of social acquisition of knowledge are dealt with quite a great deal: an apt observation is made 1 Artur Markowski, ‘Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Kingdom of Poland’, Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry, xxvii (2015); id., ‘Okrzyki antypogromowe. Królestwo Polskie przełomu XIX i XX wieku’, in Konrad Zieliński and Kamil Kijek (eds.), Przemoc antyżydowska i konteksty akcji pogromowych na ziemiach polskich w XX wieku (Lublin, 2016); id., ‘Sprawcy, ofiary, świadkowie. Fotografie pogromów Żydów w Imperium Rosyjskim 1903–1906’, Przegląd Historyczny, civ, 1 (2013). 320 Reviews that in the case of the pogrom in question, historiography did not limit itself to such acquisition but was, in the first place, a (realised or unrealised) form of defence of the community (or communities) and an element of building their identity. The feeling shared by a part of the society that responsibility for the pogrom rested on the government, the army and the police was caused by a loss of social trust, alienation with respect to the doings of the authorities, and destruction of the traditional system of values (p. 464). The erosion of the Empire’s social system doubtlessly progressed; the Russo-Japanese War and, primarily, the period 1905–7 were a prelude to the collapse that followed in the years of the Great War and the revolutions; all this fuelled social conflicts, ethnic conflicts being part of the picture. Otherwise, it would be difficult to point in the modern Russian history to a period when a universally recognised system of values would have reigned unchallenged, and the social life developing relatively harmoniously. The author rightly believes that the conflict between the Jews of Białystok and the local Christians is the factor that has been neglected or downplayed in the existing historiography on the 1906 pogrom. As he points out, after the Russian revolutions, especially the Bolshevik upheaval, the argument of flagitious tsarist rule and its responsibility for all the maladies and tragedies appealed to most circles and hardly anyone was willing to argue against it, thus contributing to the shaping of the social ideas about the dramatic events that took place in Białystok (and elsewhere). The focus on this fact is certainly a remarkable merit of the author. Perforce, much of the book’s content is devoted to critical awareness of the source material. As the author remarks, every single account, testimony, description of the events in Białystok tells a different story – each somehow true but never fully credible, at least as far as the course of events is concerned. This multiplicity of attitudes and positions, conditioned politically, socially and culturally, makes up a comprehensive picture of the pogrom in question – with its origins, repercussions and social perception, and influence on historiography. Part two proposes an extensive critique of the hitherto-prevalent, or the most popular, research paradigm on the pogrom, whereby the ‘official’ or ‘military’ perpetration comes to the fore, and describes the responses to it on the basis of previously used and new sources. Markowski delineates the socio-political relations and the economic situation in Białystok, points to the sources of potential and actual conflicts involving the local groups and milieus or circles (authorities – the military – workers – Christians (incl. the Catholic and Orthodox communities) – Jews) in his attempt to determine the internal and external premises for the tragic events that were about to occur. “A pogrom is an act of mass violence that is basically associated with attacks on Jews, since it is Jewish people that most frequently tended to fell Reviews 321 victim of pogroms” (p. 440), the author observes. This argument is rather disputable; to my mind, pogrom does not automatically evoke the Jewish ethnicity (to mention the Armenians or the Roma/Sinti, for that matter). On the other hand, it is good that Markowski dwells more extensively on how pogrom is defined and what difficulties are involved in its defining. His own approach to the defining potential is sceptical in this particular respect as he ascertains that the name ‘pogrom’ mostly describes the attitudes of the perpetrators rather than describing the given event.2 In order to justify such an attitude and the unpurposefulness of an attempt at constructing a functional definition of what is customarily referred to as ‘pogrom’, a chapter entitled ‘The Białystok pogrom in the context of the other pogroms’ has been included in the book: a somewhat misbegotten concept, to my mind, at least as far as this particular study is concerned. The problem in itself does deserve a separate analysis, but while an attempt to compare the Białystok events against the pogroms within the Empire in the beginning of the twentieth century may be justifiable, juxtaposing the 1906 occurrence with the incidents in Prussia or in Pomerania in the first half of the nineteenth century, in East Galicia in 1898, or with the non-Jewish pogroms in St Louis w 1917 or in the Indonesian village Kot Radha Kishan in 2014, may seem somewhat risky and not-quite-comprehensible. Obviously, one can point to similarities between all these incidents and disturbances (crowds perpetrating the violence, ambiguous attitude of the authorities, tense internal situation, and so on), dissimilarities stand out too (to mention the legal status of the Jews in Austrian Galicia and in Russia, development and influential power of the peasants’ movement in Russia and in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the development of parliamentarianism in both countries, etc.); but, such categories are discernible for a number of other cases as well. Hence, it is not quite understandable why such considerations are conducted, especially that Markowski declares that “every single pogrom calls for individual approach from historians”, whereas “attempts at developing a uniform pattern of the course of such a violent act are condemned to failure, in spite of the similarities” (p. 431). All the same, Markowski has successfully reconstructed the course of the events that took place in Białystok in June 1906, taking into account, as far as possible, all the parties involved; he moreover describes the mechanisms of building the social ideas about the pogrom and the tools used to this end. This is an innovative, if not outright pioneering, approach to the problem under research, one that will no doubt contribute to a broader scientific 2 Cf. David Engel, ‘What’ s in a Pogrom? European Jews in the Age of Violence’, in Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal (eds.), Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington, 2010), 20–33. 322 Reviews discussion. Markowski has proved that the existing knowledge on acts of mass anti-Jewish violence owed much to the research and, primarily, ideological and programmatic assumptions that took shape in the early years of the twentieth century. As a last point, it is worth mentioning that the author has made use of a very extensive set of sources, based on his search done in the archives and libraries at home (Central Archives of Modern Records [AAN], Central Archives of Historical Records [AGAD], the Archives of the Capital City of Warsaw, State Archives in Łódź, State Archives in Białystok, Archive of the St Nicholas Orthodox Parish in Białystok, the National Library) and abroad (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Sankt Petersburg, Minsk, Vilnius, Amsterdam, U.S. and U.K. archives). The collection of sources, in various languages, used for the purpose is impressive indeed; it extends to published records and studies, and a selection of daily and periodical press – Polish, Jewish and Russian, also British, American, Austrian (Austro-Hungarian), Belgian, Italian, French, and German; an Indian periodical which published a mention on the Białystok incidents has moreover been included. The author has found editorial material that was confiscated by the Russian censorship. Memoirs and diaries have been included; iconographic material and epitaphs have been analysed in detail. I believe that the relevant materials not retrieved by the author (most likely scarce, if any at all) would not have altered the overall image of the events and responses shown in the book. While the value of the records used by Markowski is not to be underappreciated, a definite majority of them were previously unknown to the scholars, or rarely used by them. Rather sparse in illustrations, photographs, charts and maps (a map of Białystok is added) this book will probably meet with interest among experts in Jewish studies and things Jewish, as well as regional history researchers. The study under discussion is a complete work whose value, let me repeat, lies not only in its reconstruction of the course of the pogrom and proposed description of its origins but also in a proposal of a new, all-contextual research paradigm in the scholarly discourse focusing on the phenomenon of pogroms and anti-Jewish violence. trans. Tristan Korecki Konrad Zieliński Reviews 323 Ota Konrád and Rudolf Kučera, Cesty z apokalypsy. Fyzické násili v padu a obnově střední Evropy 1914–1922 [Out of the Apocalypse. Physical Violence in the Fall and Reconstruction of Central Europe 1914–22], Academia, Masarykův ústav a Archiv, Praha, 2018, 364 pp., indices, ills.; series: České moderní dějiny, 5 Double authorship is nothing out of the ordinary and, as such, deserves no special mention. In the particular case of the book under review, co-written by two (fairly) young Czech historians, the co-authorship stands for more than just an instance of cooperation. Duality stands out repeatedly in this book: at some points, as a clash of two different views of social history and two historiographic schools; elsewhere, as a juxtaposition of two historical periods; or, at times, as a comparison between two contradicting narratives. Ota Konrád specialises in cultural history of interwar Austria,1 while Rudolf Kučera has recently been involved in social history of Czech lands during the First World War.2 Both these perspectives repeatedly encounter each other in their book, along with two historiographic traditions: research on crime and underclass, and history of war-related violence. The authors follow the process of entering the war by the Habsburg monarchy’s society and the subsequent emergence of the new nation-states out of the warfare, based on three exemplary regions: the Czech lands, Vienna, and South Tyrol. An interesting choice indeed, for each of these areas entered the post-war period in a completely different situation and in quite different moods. Bohemia became the major part of the new Czechoslovak state, which was considered a victorious state and an ally to the Entente powers, contrary to the obvious wartime experiences of its citizens. Vienna got immersed in the chaos of political conflicts between the ‘Blacks’ and the ‘Reds’; the sense of defeat was reinforced by the omnipresent poverty and the rampant inflation. South Tyrol, which – contrary to the other two territories – was an agricultural, traditionalist and indigent area, became part of Italy and, together with the whole of Italy, experienced first-hand the initial episode of the fascist experiment in Europe. In the first of the two parts of the book the war is a background against which forensic techniques and the jurisprudence are analysed. The professionalisation of this particular area of state’s activity is a fascinating Konrád’s monograph Némecké bylo srdce monarchie. Rakušanství, němectví a střední Evropa v rakouské historiografii mezi válkami (Praha, 2011) is worth special attention. 2 Kučera’s study Život na příděl. Válečná každodennost a politiky dělnické třídy v českých zemích 1914–1918 (Praha, 2013) has also been published in English as Rationed Life. Science, Everyday-Life and Working-Class Politics in the Bohemian Lands 1914–1918 (New York and Oxford, 2016). For a review of the latter, see Acta Poloniae Historica, 115 (2017). 1 324 Reviews phenomenon in itself; its portrayal in Cesty z apokalypsy is illustrated with excellently matched criminal stories – most of them bloody and appalling to the public opinion. The Great War implied reduced crime involving direct physical aggression; the volume of theft soared, for a change. Once the hecatomb ended and millions of soldiers resumed their civilian life, crime of all sorts, murder included, significantly increased. Courts-of-law did not however respond commensurately to the growing threat but clearly differed by region. Judgements passed in Czech lands differed from those passed in Vienna or Tyrol. In German-speaking countries, the perception of crime was medicalised before 1914. As a result, courts frequently resorted to commutation due to the perpetrator’s mental strain or psychological stress, temporary or permanent mental incompetence. Psychiatrists, who assessed the mental and nervous condition of the defendants, had the key role in the procedure. During the war, the direct as well as indirect influence of the worldwide bloodbath on individual violence was taken into account. In some cases, instead of putting an assassin in prison, involuntary residence in a mental health facility was commissioned. In Czech lands, the penal policy developed in a completely different direction. Local psychiatrists were not inclined to seek mitigating circumstances in one’s psychical degeneration; if ever, such qualification would have rather been associated with the perpetrator’s social and material situation. As a result, the same act committed (before 1918) within the same country might have been evaluated and punished in two entirely contradictory ways – based on whether a Czech or a German-Austrian court was involved. How crime was represented in the press is the other aspect of the issue, discussed in the same section of the book. Initially, during the war years, descriptions of outrageous crimes were used to help mobilise the public. Prisoners-of-war, those employed behind enemy lines, deserters and other aliens were the ‘suspects at hand’ whenever a crime of any sort occurred. Journalists sometimes exaggerated with the scaring, which made the censors intervene and inspire articles that would alleviate the increasing panic. Representations of crime in the press changed rapidly immediately after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, becoming a tool in new party or faction fighting. In Vienna, torn at the time by a deep conflict between Social Democrats and the Right, almost every single crime could have turned into an argument in the dispute – as if the social background of the perpetrator and the victim might have predestined them to assume exactly such roles. The authors have identified an interesting variant of this polarisation in South Tyrol where the local German-language press used the criminal columns to criticise the Italian occupation and incorporation of the area – which could not be overtly covered in the headlines. At the same time, in Czechoslovakia, instances of such instrumentalisation of crime for purposes of political propaganda were definitely rarer. Instead of internal struggling, the Reviews 325 press harnessed such stories to support a ritual breaking with the Habsburg past. The new state was expected to amend all the social pathologies and injustices. The improvement was epitomised by Tomáš G. Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia; except that the amnesties generously granted by the President in the Republic’s early years sometimes aroused doubts among journalists. Collective violence, incidental to the East Central European transition in the aftermath of the war is the focus of the book’s second section. Rebellions and riots usually broke out spontaneously and occurred due to social problems, propelled by a deep sense of injustice. Initially, almost no unrest turned into an ethnic or national conflict. At the end of the war and in the earliest interwar days, protests against soaring prices, supply shortages, and war beneficiaries turned anti-Semitic at times, and had to do with resentment against refugees from Austrian Galicia (most regrettably, the authors have not used the study by Katarzyna Sierakowska where the phenomenon is interestingly described3). After 1918, also the Germans became an object of commoners’ aggression in the Czech territory. Seen against the commons’ protests in the Czech Republic and in Vienna, Tyrol is a specific case. A rather poor, mostly peasant and closed community, situated in the direct rear of the front, on the Isonzo River, discharged their frustrations not in rebelling against the authorities but in aggressive acts targeted at comers from the outside. Young, armed Tyrolians organised regular hunts for runaway POWs, deserters (actual and alleged), spies and bandits. Violence was employed to consolidate the local community around their own symbols and rituals shortly before the province was subdued by Italy. Occurring in the public space – at court, in the press, and in the streets – violence played quite an essential part in the East Central European transition. The authors show, in a compelling and convincing fashion, the ways in which the different traditions in criminology prevalent in German-Austrian and Czech territories influenced or affected the interpretations of criminal acts. The effects of these differences were visible not only in the penal policy but also in the language of politics. The medicalisation of crime in Austria implied explanations of criminal acts in terms of degeneration, which in the throes of political struggle was ascribed not only to individuals but to whole political formations. Lack of such medicalisation in Czech lands (putting it in rougher terms, the backwardness of the Czech psychiatry) fostered sincerely optimistic interpretations of individual violence as a malady left over by the former system but removable in the new and just Czechoslovak state. Also, the collective violence that had appeared in the streets of Czech and Austrian towns before the monarchy fell down carried an essential message. Konrád 3 Katarzyna Sierakowska, Śmierć – Wygnanie – Głód w dokumentach osobistych. Ziemie polskie w latach Wielkiej Wojny 1914–1918 (Warszawa, 2015). 326 Reviews and Kučera show how the social rebellion in the streets of Vienna turned political, becoming part of the interwar Republic’s landscape and expressing its permanent crisis. In Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, the enthusiasm supporting the new form of government conduced to pacification of spirits and more benign forms of articulating the ideological differences. With all the differences between the Austrian and Czech territories, in none of these instances did violence become autotelic: rather than becoming a dominant ‘language’ of public communication, it functioned as a radical means of expressing the crisis of the legitimacy of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. After the war and a temporary increase in physical and verbal violence, the situation settled down. In some (particularly interesting) cases, attacks on individuals alien to the national community did infringe the prevalent social norms but contributed to the post-war integration. All the same, the situation was turning normal; the wartime mobilisation and the revolutionary ‘carnival’ of violence were gone for good. To what extent the image depicted by Konrád and Kučera might be extended to the whole of East Central Europe, is not assessable without reliable research based on records. The book under review provides inspiration for such considerations, as well as specific pieces of information related to a unique case of post-war violence – namely, Slovakia. This is the only section in this book that eludes the dual pattern. As opposed to Vienna, Tyrol, and Prague, the scenes that occurred as the Czechoslovak army was deployed in the provinces and during the fights against the Hungarian Bolsheviks in 1919 were not a momentary transgression of a social order but constituted a new quality. Former Czechoslovak legionnaires, now in an ethnically alien environment, often reluctant toward the new state, perceived their service in Slovakia as the Russian civil war continued, and boldly crossed the borders they would have never infringe in the west of the country. It was in Slovakia that acts of completely uncontrolled violence against civilians occurred – executions under made-up charges or completely without trial, or similar incidents, well known to scholars focusing on the same period in Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Byelorussia, or Poland. Of course, order finally prevailed in Slovakia, but the way to it appeared to be much longer and tougher than in any other case analysed in the book. We can ponder whether the brief excursus on the First Republic’s ‘Wild East’ reflects a certain standard that actually prevailed in a larger part of East Central Europe. Ethnic conflicts, a sense of extraneousness in respect of the new state, the personal experience of the warfront during the Great War and the later struggles for the borders, bolshevism and extreme-rightist violence – all that appeared in Slovakia as well as in the territories covered by the new and transformed states such as Poland, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, or Romania. Perhaps, from the standpoint of each of these countries, the pretty violent history described by the two Czech historians will seem to be an unattainable ideal Reviews 327 of quiet and peaceful coexistence? Although the Czech and Austrian pathsout-of-the Apocalypse were winding and bumpy, they finally turned out to be unobstructed and driveable. trans. Tristan Korecki Maciej Górny Jochen Böhler, Wojna domowa. Nowe spojrzenie na odrodzenie Polski [orig. title: Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921. The Reconstruction of Poland], trans. Robert Sudół, Znak Horyzont, Kraków, 2018, 399 pp., bibliog., indices, ills. The book by Jochen Böhler, an exquisite German historian of warfare, associated with Jena-based Imre Kertész Kolleg, astonishes the reader moments before s/he reads its first sentence. The book was published in 2018; on the reverse side of the title page, you can read that it is a translation of an English publication from the year 2019! A translation, then, that came ahead of the translated original. This seems to have something to do with a different working culture prevalent in Polish publishing houses and their British counterparts. Yet, it can also relate to the importance of this particular book for the way Poles see their own history. Given these peculiar circumstances, haste has made no waste at all: the book has certainly benefited from a historical boom related to the centenary of Poland’s independence. The English-speaking reader did not need the haste, though. As suggested by the Polish title (which literally reads: “… A new glance at the rebirth of Poland”), Böhler has on offer a completely new interpretation of the critical period in which the reborn Polish state assumed a shape. Is it really a novel glance? If so, what does it consist in? To answer these questions, one should start with certain fundamental matters: the structure and the sources and studies upon which the narrative is founded. Written with flair, using at times an overly journalistic language, the book is composed of only four chapters, introductions (one dedicated to the Polish edition), briefly presented conclusions, an epilogue, and an afterword. The first two chapters are introductory, providing basic information on the history of post-war conflicts in the whole of East Central Europe and the history of post-Partition Poland. Chapter three, the longest (subdivided into three sections), describes the major warfronts: in the west, in the east, and in the centre of the country. Chapter four, the most poignant part of the book, deals with acts of violence against civilians. An extensive bibliography complements the main text. As it seems, Böhler has not neglected any of the important archival collections within Poland, although he had to fight long and fiercely to get access to some records. (The Afterword tells a story of his problems with obtaining consent for photographing the material kept 328 Reviews at a library ironically representing itself as ‘public’ – the one at Koszykowa Street in Warsaw. I will confine myself to mentioning that such remarks are embarrassing to a Polish historian). Understandably, a vast majority of the archival sources are stored at the Central Military Archives in Warsaw. The author has made use of foreign collections as well – including Lithuanian, American, British, and French. He has proved no less conscientious in selecting the relevant Polish literature, drawing generously from it and not omitting any important study. Noteworthy is the context in which Böhler places the findings of Polish scholars. While his book focuses on the Polish territory only, he often refers to the rich literature concerning the same period across Europe – mainly, the very recent studies, some of them quite fresh (such as William W. Hagen’s most recent book on the attacks on Jews in Poland in the period 1914–20).1 Most of these studies deal with violence, in different configurations: the state’s violence against a group of citizens, violence between feuding ethnic groups, the majority’s violence against a minority, or revolutionary violence. Such internationalisation of the Polish cause deserves attention as it is a rather rare approach amongst historians. It moreover gives a clear signal that Poland is one of the case studies of a broader phenomenon. The phenomenon I am referring to is highlighted on the book’s cover: it is, namely, a concept of civil war applied to the occurrences customarily referred to as wars for borders, ones that are usually (and intrinsically) waged against external enemies. Böhler gives a commonsensical justification of the term. First, he clearly differentiates between the conflicts after 1918 and a regular warfare which occurred earlier in the same territory, involving the imperial armies. Second, he points to the fact that a definite majority of such wars were unconventional, will all the burdensome effects of such soldiering for the civilians. Third, this unconventional fighting was pursued by extremely unprofessional soldiers. Böhler follows the life-histories of some of those warlords, Roman Abraham and Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz among them; their attitude towards the military hierarchy or discipline left much to be desired, putting it mildly. The High Command and all the other levels of command did exist, but their control over the activities of such troops was thoroughly illusory. From the Polish reader’s standpoint, probably of primary importance is yet another, thoroughly original, characteristic of this book. Although it discovers no facts that would be unknown to Polish historians, the author (unlike his Polish counterparts) is capable of drawing far-fetched conclusions based on the gathered material. If almost all the wars waged after 1918 on the borders of the Polish Republic were irregular and their protagonists had a permanent problem with subordinating themselves to the military discipline, then this entire process should, in Böhler’s opinion, be treated in terms of a ‘dirty 1 William W. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 (New York, 2018). Reviews 329 war’. In other words, chaos and violence that accompanied the struggle for the frontiers were nowise an ‘accident at work’ but rather, a necessary and inherent feature of such method of fighting – which otherwise was the only method the yet-unsettled East Central European countries could then afford. In Böhler’s words, It was not lack of authority which generated deviant behaviour, but the example of their respective commanders who themselves would not obey the rules of warfare. Commonly executed forms of violence and criminal acts would serve two additional purposes here: to terrify the enemy and to strengthen the group’s coherence. The German Freikorps functioned exactly along the same lines, and we can rightly assume that similar mechanisms were at work in Czech, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian paramilitary units between 1918 and 1920. (p. 185 of the English edition) The armed spin-off groups (as Böhler names them) were used by all the parties to the multipartite conflicts in this region of Europe. None of the states could possibly do without them; none was powerful enough to extend effective control over them in the initial years of its existence. The soldiers fighting for independence and frontiers posed a threat not only to the enemy but also to their own country. What is more, crimes against the civilians – the victims in this part of the world were mostly Jewish – were mostly never punished. This observation is exemplified by a series of accounts reporting instances of violation of discipline – especially in the army’s attitude to the civilians. Where the jurisdiction of military courts appeared theoretical, Jews, in particular, became the hunted game. Stealing, battering and killing were commonplace, whereas some formations earned their infamy as extremely consistent anti-Semites. While Böhler refrains himself from astounding the reader with descriptions of crimes, he draws our attention to some instances that elude stereotypical knowledge. Incomprehensible things occurred amidst the chaos of the war. At times, it was the notoriously anti-Semitic soldiers of the Greater Poland’s Army [Armia Wielkopolska] who protected the Jewish people against pogroms inflicted by other Polish military units. Sometimes, the formations that ‘just’ did the stealing and humiliating extended protection onto their victims against more serious misfortunes. With all these nuances, there is no doubt about the fact that the Polish Army (as well as its opponents) was not a messenger of orderliness and stability. It was only when the fighting faded out and the soldiers dispersed to their barracks or houses, that the people, tormented with years of warfare, gained a tolerable peace. The three aforementioned original aspects of the Böhler book (literature and source base; the civil war concept; and, paramilitary character of the struggle for borders in East Central Europe) vary as to weight in the perception of the undersigned. The first of the aspects appears welcome and satisfactory. 330 Reviews The chaotic time that followed the Great War calls for a comparative depiction; Böhler has met the challenge, having expertly selected the sources. It is with more reserve that I am inclined to approach the title metaphor of ‘civil war’. As it seems to me, it only refers to some of the conflicts covered in the book, and in limited timeframes. The belligerents normally strove to keep their armies disciplined and render the method of fighting ‘civilised’, which sometimes ended up in success indeed. The Polish-Ukrainian war, which in Böhler’s concept was a typical civil war, went through phases of quite a regular combat, with a clearly marked front line, with the artillery preceding the attacks of infantry and other elements of the craft which Polish and Ukrainian soldiers had been mastering for years, wearing Austro-Hungarian army uniforms. In turn, the Polish-Bolshevik war – the only war denied the description ‘civil’ by Böhler – turned into a multilateral conflict in which, apart from the Poles and the Bolsheviks, armed peasants got involved (among others), whose attitude was equally hostile to both parties. At some points, the terms proposed by the author raises no serious doubts. The Silesian Uprisings, or PolishCzechoslovak struggles in Cieszyn/Těšín Silesia area, were clashes between locals, supported by volunteers (including the aforementioned warlords) from outside the region. However, if the consistently applied description in question is not fully adequate, maybe it had better be regarded as irrelevant: all the more that ‘European civil war’ is a metaphor that has successfully been used for some time now to describe a somewhat broader phenomenon – namely, the unsolvable political conflict between the Left and the Right in the interwar period.2 From the viewpoint of the Polish reader, the most weighty is the proposed innovative depiction of the fights for frontiers. Not because Böhler discovers or unveils the unknown: on the contrary, even the most tragic and most embarrassing episodes from the years 1918–21 have already been described by historians. The thing is, though, that so far such occurrences have been approached as some anomalies or exceptions that naturally must have happened in a country overwhelmed by several wars at a time. Having reshuffled the hitherto available data, Böhler reverts the perspective, showing that violence was a standard practice that tended to be rarely and uneasily restrained by the military or administrative institutions. Such a switch in the perspective on phenomena of paramount importance to collective identity might sometimes alter a community’s idea of the past. Being a historian, there is not much more to achieve. trans. Tristan Korecki 2 Maciej Górny Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 2000), 27. Reviews 331 Olga Linkiewicz, Lokalność i nacjonalizm. Społeczności wiejskie w Galicji Wschodniej w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym [Localness and Nationalism. Rural Communities in Eastern Galicia during the Interwar Period], Universitas, Kraków, 2018, 362 pp. In the studies on the interwar period, nationalism among the rural population in eastern Galicia has not received much attention so far. Olga Linkiewicz’s work takes up this rather neglected subject and is thus a very welcome addition to the existing research literature. In the introduction, she challenges the assumption that the strong Polish-Ukrainian conflict in the region also shaped relations among the villagers in a fundamental way. She argues that it is not possible to conclude from the fact that Ukrainian nationalists were very active in the region that the villagers supported en masse Ukrainian nationalism or a Ukrainian state (p. 9). The aim of Linkiewicz’s study is to explore the impact of both Polish and Ukrainian nationalism on the rural communities of the former eastern half of the Austrian crownland of Galicia. In the interwar period they became the voivodships of Tarnopol, Stanisławów, and the eastern part of the Lwów voivodship as part of the Polish Second Republic. The author’s initial hypothesis here is that the reception of nationalism in the villages can be properly understood only by exploring its relationship with other and older perceptions of societal differences among villagers. She emphasizes that the peasants’ distinctions between different groups in society had many more dimensions than just the religious one between Roman-Catholics and Greek-Catholics – which the literature usually focuses on when discussing Polish-Ukrainian relations (p. 10). The author should also be praised for addressing not only the question of Ukrainian nationalism, but also that of Polish nationalism and the RomanCatholic villagers. These so-called ‘Mazurians’ (in Polish: Mazurzy), whose ancestors had mostly immigrated from central Poland in the early modern period, are an often overlooked group, even though they counted in the several hundred thousand. Most of them lived in the Tarnopol voivodship, some also in parts of the Lwów voivodship, and only a few in the Stanisławów voivodship. Often ‘Mazurians’ and ‘Ruthenians’ (in Polish: Rusini; in Ukrainian: rusyny – the traditional name used for the Greek-Catholics – lived together in mixed villages. Another smaller but more distinct group consisted of several tens of thousands of Polish settlers who acquired farm land in eastern Galicia after the First World War because of lower land prices and with some support of Polish state institutions. The study consists of three major parts, under the headings: ‘Localness’, ‘School’, and ‘Politics’. The first part – ‘Localness’ – explores different dimensions of the perceptions of ‘others’ among villagers. It is strongly based on 332 Reviews ethnographic research from the interwar period. In addition, a series of interviews conducted with former inhabitants of eastern Galician villages in Poland since the 1990s, many of them by the author herself or by her students, constitute another important source. The author shows that along with the distinctions based on religion, other important distinctions made by the villagers were social in nature, e.g. with respect to landlords, the urban intelligentsia, or between the wealthier peasants and the village poor. Further distinctions referred to language and dialect, or included territorial dimensions such as ‘mountaineers’ and ‘lowlanders’. With respect to religious differences, the study emphasizes that in the villages’ everyday life the two religious denominations of Greek-Catholics and Roman-Catholics were part of one community. The author clearly demonstrates that the distinction between the religious communities was not that strong and often not too clear. The number of mixed marriages was large, and religious feasts of one denomination were often also attended and celebrated by members of the other. Furthermore, a widespread phenomenon was that members of one denomination attended the Sunday mass of the other instead of that of their own with Roman-Catholics much more frequently visiting the Greek-Catholic churches than vice versa because the number of Greek-Catholic churches was larger and they were often located within closer distance. Evidently, the villagers considered their religious duties to be fulfilled by attending a service of the other denomination. While the first part of the study is situated in the field of historical anthropology, the two other parts address issues of cultural and political change in the villages. The second part explores school attendance and conflicts concerning the language of instruction in elementary schools. The increasing linguistic Polonization of elementary schools, which in Austrian times had been mostly Ukrainian, was one of the major issues of contention between the Polish state and the Ukrainian minority in the interwar period. This conflict became more severe after the introduction of new rules for determining the language of instruction, the so-called lex Grabski – named after the then-minister of education Stanisław Grabski in the beginning of 1925. These new rules privileged the Polish language and resulted in a significant decrease of schools in the Ukrainian language, either in favour of schools conducting classes in Polish or so-called ‘utraquist’ schools with both Polish and Ukrainian classes. Declarations by parents specifying the language which they wished their children to be educated in constituted the main instrument for determining the language of instruction in linguistically-mixed communities. When a certain minimum of declarations in favour of Polish (25 children) or Ukrainian (40 children) was registered, classes in these languages had to be introduced. Olga Linkiewicz refers to this as a ‘plebiscite’ about national preferences. On one hand she concludes that the conflicts over schools were an important factor that increased national antagonisms in the villages; while Reviews 333 on the other she argues that the conflicts over the language of instruction in elementary schools also displayed strong elements of localness and reflected a national indifference among villagers. She exemplifies this with a lot of ambiguous and inconclusive behaviour on the part of parents. For example, they changed declarations repeatedly or demanded a different language for their children than they gave as their own mother tongue. The study also analyses conflicts over school attendance. In 1925, in the three south-eastern voivodships school attendance amounted to between 81 and 87 percent of the children of school age. Fines assessed on parents because of the absence of their children in school often appeared to be difficult to execute, or even led to serious conflicts in communities when they were applied to a large number of families. Olga Linkiewicz mentions poverty, long distances to schools, and the fact that children had to work on the farms as reasons why they did not attend school. But she mostly emphasizes a conflict of values about education and schools between the villagers on the one hand and the educated classes and the state on the other. Clearly, such differences in values existed. Nevertheless, in the long-term perspective the more important interests of the villagers seem to have been rather contrary to those that LInkiewicz’s study emphasises. Apparently there was an increasing congruence of values between peasants, the state, and upper classes with respect to education, as demonstrated by the strong and steady increases in school attendance since the end of the nineteenth century. By the end of the 1930s school attendance was nearly universal. The increase in the number of elementary schools – which began already before the First World War – was not only the result of pressure by the state or intelligentsia, but to a high degree also the result of the fact that a growing number of villagers began to understand the benefits of education and requested the village councils to provide and maintain a schoolhouse as a precondition for having the Galician Crownland administration send and pay a teacher.1 It would seem that in the interwar period the antagonism of values that the author hypothesizes had been largely overcome to a great extent. The third part – under the heading ‘Politics’ – in fact focuses mostly on Polish and Ukrainian celebrations in the villages. Additionally, it provides an overview of Polish and Ukrainian political parties as well as other organisations, and discusses their activities in the villages. The most important Polish festivities were the state holidays of 3 May and, after 1926 also of 11 November. During this period festivities in honour of state dignitaries, primarily of Józef Piłsudski, became increasingly important. Ukrainian Svjatoslav Pacholkiv, Emanzipation durch Bildung. Entwicklung und gesellschaftliche Rolle der ukrainischen Intelligenz im habsburgischen Galizien (1890–1914) (Wien, 2002), 85 f.; Kai Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien. Über Zugehörigkeit und soziale Emanzipation im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2005), 297–301. 1 334 Reviews celebrations consisted mostly of the ‘freedom feast’, which celebrated the end of serfdom in 1848, and of those in memory of important personalities in Ukrainian culture, primarily Taras Ševčenko and the Galician author Markijan Šaškevyč. For both Poles and Ukrainians the commemoration of the fallen soldiers and fighters of the First World War and the Polish-Ukrainian conflict of 1918–19 were also important. Increasingly, the celebrations and commemorations led to protests and troubles from the other side. But the study also shows that representatives of the Ukrainians participated in Polish state commemorations. The author identifies the main Ukrainian narrative, which was expressed both during the national celebrations in the villages and Ukrainian political activities, as being the suppression of Ukrainians and the occupation of Ukrainian territory by the Polish ‘lords’ and the Polish state. In contrast, the main Polish narrative highlighted Polish state traditions and presented Poles as a threatened minority in the region. The author emphasizes that the Ukrainian narrative related much more strongly to the traditional peasant perceptions of ‘others’ than the Polish narrative. As a result, she argues that Ukrainian organisations and political parties were more successful in organizing and mobilizing villagers for their aims than were their Polish counterparts. Although probably correct, this argument would have greatly benefited from more comprehensive data about the branches, membership, and activities of the relevant organisations and a comparison between them. More generally, while the second and third parts – where the study goes beyond historical anthropology and into the fields of political and cultural history – include a wealth of interesting observations, they are adversely affected by three major shortcomings. The first is that the study has been written, with only a few exceptions, on the basis of Polish sources, i.e. files of the voivodship administrations, mostly those of Tarnopol, of the Polish school administration, and some Polish newspapers (mostly close to the National Democrats and the Sanacja), as well as the already mentioned interviews with former Polish inhabitants of eastern Galician villages. The study makes only very small usage of Ukrainian newspapers or other materials that present the views of the Ukrainian protagonists in their own words. Even with a critical analysis of the Polish sources, it seems rather inevitable that important aspects of the analysed situations and relations get lost. The second problem, which has been already been hinted at above, is that the study does not investigate more systematically and thoroughly the role of the different Polish and Ukrainian organisations, including political parties, in the villages. Admittedly, the study does refer to different organisations and parties and presents observations about their activities. But it does not, for example, compare the number of local branches, their development during the two decades between the two World Wars, or the role of peasants in Reviews 335 relation to members of the intelligentsia in these organisations. There is also little information on their impact on relations between villagers, and thus on the study’s basic question concerning localness vs. nationalism in the villages. A more comprehensive analysis seems crucial for this question, because the national separation of society to a large extent took place in the sphere of civil society. The framework of a structural analysis would have provided a better basis for evaluating the relative significance of the many diverse observations or occurrences in the villages that the study reports, as well as for a Polish-Ukrainian comparison. The third shortcoming is related to the study’s analysis of the Polish national narrative and Polish activities among the peasants. It appears to have escaped the author’s notice that there was not just a national democratic and a Sanacja version of the Polish national narrative, but a third one as well; one that, in principle, was much more attractive for the peasants than the other two, i.e. that of the Polish peasant movement. This narrative served to demand equality and social and economic improvements for the Polish peasants, not least because of their core importance for the nation.2 It had strong similarities with the Ukrainian narrative, because it also denounced the peasants’ suppression by the landlords and upper classes.3 In contrast to the period before the First World War, when the Polish peasant parties remained largely restricted to western Galicia, in the interwar period they gained some influence also in the eastern part of the former Austrian crownland, although their actual strength and organizational structures in that region have not been researched in depth yet. Apparently they were much less successful in gaining the active support of villagers in eastern Galicia than in western Galicia or central Poland. But it is not really clear what the reasons for this were.4 In any case, the explanation that the Polish national narrative was less attractive for the peasants than the Ukrainian one seems to oversimplify the actual situation. A related question that would have also been highly relevant for the issue of nationalism vs. localness in the villages is the extent to which Ukrainian parties got support from the Roman-Catholic, Polish speaking villagers; and vice versa. The same question could be raised for associations, co-operatives or organisations, such as the Polish Kółka rolnicze or the Ukrainian Sil’s’kyi hospodar. 2 Jan Molenda, Chłopi – naród – niepodległość. Kształtowanie się postaw narodowych i obywatelskich w Galicji i Królestwie Polskim w przededniu odrodzenia Polski (Warszawa, 1999), especially 196–240. 3 Struve, Bauern und Nation, 323–83. 4 Kai Struve, ‘Polish peasants in Eastern Galicia: indifferent to the nation or “pillars of Polishness”? National attitudes in the light of Józef Chałasiński’s collection of peasant youth memoirs’, in Acta Poloniae Historica, 109 (2014), 37–59, here 51–4; see also Alicja Więzikowa, Stronnictwo Chłopskie 1926–1931 (Warszawa, 1963), 115 f. 336 Reviews Overall, the study convincingly argues that the villagers’ traditional selfperceptions in relation to ‘others’ need to be taken into consideration when analysing the reception of nationalism among them. With its emphasis on localness, the study develops an innovative term for describing the bonds in local village communities beyond the internal divisions of religion, language, or social status. However, the analysis of the actual impact of nationalism on village communities in the interwar period would have benefitted from a clearer conceptual framework for a comparison of the Polish and Ukrainian cases, and the inclusion of a wider range of sources. proofreading James Hartzell Kai Struve Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pod klątwą. Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego [Cursed: A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom], Wydawnictwo Czarna Owca, Warszawa, 2018, two vols., 768+807 pp. This ominously entitled book revisits the Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946 – traumatic primal scene in communist Poland’s dawning light. In a long blood-stained day civilians, policemen and soldiers savagely murdered thirtyfour Jews – and two Christian Poles charged with protecting them – while injuring forty-three other Jews. The pogrom spread to the railroad network, brutally claiming some thirty more Jewish lives. Which curse does the author, eminent historical anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, have in mind? That which a rabbi actually – and understandably – called down on the pogromists in the bloodshed’s aftermath? Or does one hang still today over Kielce, or even over Poland itself? The reader must decide. Tokarska-Bakir sets herself multiple challenges. One is to hyper-empirically reconstruct the pogrom’s escalating course, asking why the civil authorities, clergy, civil police, security police, Polish army, and armed Soviet occupiers failed to halt it, and whether such failure was welcome to them and, if so, why. Another is to determine the pogromists’ social identity and motives for assaulting the Jews, most of whom were Holocaust survivors – some of them pre-war inhabitants of Kielce – who had recently returned to Poland from behind Red Army lines in the Soviet Union. Yet another is to interpret the bloodshed in the light of anthropological, social-psychological, and other social-science theories of collective violence. “Traditional Polish discourse”, she says of both popular and scholarly opinion, views the pogrom as a ‘provocation’, that is, a political conspiracy. In anti-communist, nationalist and anti-Semitic eyes it was the work of the Security Police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa [UB]) – headed by cadres of the communist Polish Workers Party (PPR), many allegedly Jewish – collaborating with Reviews 337 Russian occupiers in erecting the new sovietized Poland (p. 15). Their aim, in allegedly triggering the pogrom and failing to quell it, was to pin blame on anticommunist ‘reactionaries’, especially ‘London Poles’ and their backers in the homeland, so as to discredit them as anti-Semites in Western eyes. But, as she concludes, “this book’s aim was to show that”, in the pogrom’s outbreak as in its interpretation, “no provocation was necessary”, nor did one actually occur (p. 409). Instead, the pogrom exploded in the course of the “protracted and dirty civil war” raging after the German retreat between “mortal enemies” among the Poles themselves: the anticommunist camp of hard-line nationalist partisans and their followers (NSZ/WiN, AK), locked in ideological contest and murderous armed struggle with the PPR and its Soviet backers, while the mass-based Catholic Church and Peasant Party (SL) cheered the anticommunists from the sidelines. In Kielce of 1944–6, as throughout Poland, the warring parties shed each other’s blood in forest clashes and urban ambushes, yet also coexisted in unspoken truce based on the mutual imperative of “survival and profit from plunder” (przetrwanie i zyski z szabru). Tokarska-Bakir boldly proposes this “alliance” (sojusz) as “the key to understanding the Kielce pogrom as well as the postwar history of Poland”. The result is that, “above all, the dichotomy ‘żydokomuna/Naród Polski’ [‘Jewish communism/Polish Nation’], hitherto fundamental to this subject, disappears”, replaced by scholarly focus on “brutal Polish-Polish war full of surprising connections to the present day” (pp. 14–15). Tokarska-Bakir argues, with deep documentation, that the pogrom arose not from communist strength, but rather weakness, both of the PPR, the UB and civil police (MO) and the Soviet occupiers (reluctant to involve themselves for fear of association in Western eyes with pogrom violence). Lacking sufficient cadres, the Polish authorities admitted into public-sector jobs people war-hardened to the idea that “Jews were to be killed”. Many had been pre-war rightist-nationalist army officers, policemen, and jurists. Others, including PPR functionaries, were self-serving opportunists. It was they, and not ‘scum’ or ‘communist provocateurs’, who allowed the Kielce pogrom to run its bloody course. The Polish church ‘supplied the ideology’ (of ritual-murder-based anti-Semitism) while the civil authorities’ ambivalence and fumbling enabled the violence. Such an interpretation profoundly challenges still influential present-day Polish scholarship, including work sponsored by the Institute of National Memory (IPN) that strives to sustain the conspiracy thesis.1 Non-Polish readers 1 See, for example, the IPN-sponsored 2008 film, directed by Artur Janicki: IPNtv: Pogrom czy mord. Kielce 4.07.1946 - film dokumentalny, at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=AyMvYW1Rwqc (Accessed: 19 Dec. 2018). It labels the pogrom a Soviet/PPR ‘prowokacja.’ It charges that soldiers entering the Jewish refugees’ 338 Reviews will perhaps be disappointed that Tokarska-Bakir largely neglects the most well-known English-language book on the subject, Jan Gross’s Fear. Similarly, her engagement with Marcin Zaremba’s important 2012 book, Wielka Trwoga (The Great Fear), soon to appear in English translation, might have been more fruitful. But, as an analysis of the Kielce pogrom itself, Tokarska-Bakir’s book impressively and persuasively establishes a new paradigm, retiring earlier readings to the historiographical archive.2 Top-down political analysis was not her highest priority. It is paradoxical, in the case of a lengthy micro-historical study with 2,766 footnotes and a thick accompanying volume of documents (but, regrettably, no index), that its author begins with an invocation of Fernand Braudel’s preference for deep structures and longue durée over l’histoire événementielle (event-history). The human mystery she most wants to solve is “how that which is a daily phenomenon – violence – becomes normative”, in the sense, one assumes, of morally justifiable in perpetrators’ (and society’s) eyes (p. 13). This requires close attention to the behaviour and mentality of those committing the violence. It entails as well a theoretical imagination capable of framing the empirics of riotous murder in persuasive interpretive and causal terms. Such difficult intellectual exercises are akin to juggling several slippery balls in the air, a skill in which Tokarska-Bakir displays impressive technique. The book begins substantively with Polish-Jewish eye-witness testimony, largely tragic and embittered, yet also empirically indispensable. Jewish survivors were aware that, to the hoary tradition of magical thinking infusing Judeophobic ritual-murder ideology, the charge had been newly added that Jews returning from the Nazi camps or the Soviet Union were biologically debilitated (wycieńczeni) to such an extent as to murder gentile children to obtain blood for self-strengthening transfusions. Tokarska-Bakir’s witnesses also stressed the pogrom murders’ extreme brutality: women thrown from a balcony and bayoneted to death on the ground, youths knifing a fleeing woman to death. “One person was already practically beaten to death, but those boys continued to pound him with great stones, reducing him to pulp”. Another said “I, who made my way across the battle-front, never witnessed such things”. Many remembered the “mass hysteria”, the cries of “you drank our blood” and “did Polish blood taste good?” (pp. 29, 32, 34, 43, 50). Women figured prominently in the bloodshed. A Jewish witness said he had never shelter, removed their uniforms and deliberately shot from the windows into the crowd, offering a pretext and justification for anti-Jewish violence routinely invoked in civilian and military pogroms during the First World War and its aftermath. See William W. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920 (Cambridge, 2018). 2 Jan Gross, Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York, 2006); Marcin Zaremba, Wielka Trwoga. Polska 1944–1947 (Kraków, 2012). Reviews 339 seen men “like these baby (‘females’), with their eyes, murderous, enflamed, their lust to kill”. They murdered in groups, smashing victims’ heads, moving from one to the next (p. 256). A Polish hospital doctor said he had seen many corpses of Nazi victims, “but such macabre smashed heads and bodies cut to pieces I never saw anywhere” (p. 68). A high-school professor, witness to pogrom murder, said “I, who was a concentration camp prisoner, rarely saw such sadism and bestialization” (pp. 278–9). In an cruelly iconic scene, earlier highlighted by Jan Gross, a crowd in festive, picnic-like mood stoned a man, standing helplessly in a stream-bed, unhurriedly to death (p. 241). All of this was, though Tokarska-Bakir does not remark it, an extreme murderousness rarely observed among civilians in anti-Jewish violence before the war.3 What story of Nazi-occupied Poland does it tell? The pogrom arose from a ritual-murder charge filed with Kielce police by the father of hunger-hounded boy Henio who, having run away from his poverty-stricken home, blamed Jewish abductors upon his return, which was then celebrated in his sub-proletarian neighbourhood as a Christian triumph. Tokarska-Bakir, recognizing the disorder and frequent drunkenness in this milieu (where many poor Poles had appropriated shabby housing from nowvanished threadbare Jews), reads the child-abduction trope as a psychological mechanism enabling neglectful parents to project their guilt on to the mythical Jewish ‘Other’. Her book amply documents claims of pogromists and their apologists that they were acting in defence of all Christian children. She concedes the origins of ritual-murder charges and ensuing violence among what critical scholarship and public opinion have long termed “the scum” (szumowina). Such ill-educated and low-status Poles were aware of the poor, ragged Jews still present in their consciousness, “living on the fringes in empty houses as if still their ghostly owners”. Young Henio was a “ventriloquist, in whose imaginings there spoke a society terrified for centuries by Jews”. Elders shared them. “The person sunk in fantasy feels no reproaches of conscience. When he robs or injures someone, he says ‘it did not struck the poor man’” (na biednego nie trafiło) (pp. 96–7). The Catholic hierarchy shared the ‘poor man’s’ magical thinking, manifested also in numerous miraculous wartime and postwar sightings, including tranceinducing images of the Heavenly Mother (Matka Boska). Kielce bishop Czesław Kaczmarek torpedoed a (self-serving) government-proposed anti-pogrom proclamation by insisting that Jewish machinations might have underlain the murders, with the aim of discrediting Poland in the West. (As with all ‘provocation theories’ of pogrom violence, the question hangs unanswered: 3 On physical atrocities in anti-Jewish violence, see Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence. Cf. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ, 2001). 340 Reviews why – in such conspiracy theorists’ minds – do common folk let themselves be duped into committing bloodshed? Are they mere puppets? What are their motives?) Kaczmarek cruelly opined that “divine providence worked through Hitler, bringing down on the Jews such scourge and punishment” (p. 124). A church conference in August 1946 censured Częstochowa bishop Teodor Kubina for his pastoral letter condemning ritual-murder accusations and anti-Semitic violence. A British diplomat reported of conversations with high churchmen that “considering the prevalence in Poland of anti-Semitic attitudes the bishops fear that condemning anti-Semitism would weaken the Church’s influence” (p. 121). Tokarska-Bakir sees the pogrom-role of the governmental authorities – provincial governor (wojewoda), security police, civil police, and army – through several theoretical lenses. One is US historian Richard White’s concept of ‘the middle ground’, referring to pragmatic coexistence on the north American frontier, when military solutions were unattainable, of irreconcilable enemies – white settlers and the soldiers protecting them versus unsubdued armed indigenous peoples. Similarly, the PPR authorities and their political opponents – ‘London Poles’, rightist nationalists (NSZ/WiN), and opportunists tainted by wartime collaboration – rubbed shoulders in the new regime’s institutions, neither side strong enough (yet) to banish the other. Tokarska-Bakir also enlists anthropologist Edward Banfield’s concept of ‘amoral familialism’, Jan Gross’s notion of ‘privatization of power’, and Anton Blok’s ‘mafia clientelism’ to highlight officialdom’s pervasive struggle for self-protection and material gain – above all, though dealings in confiscated property, whether ‘post-Jewish’, ‘post-German’, or stolen from fellow Poles – but also to escape retribution for wartime crimes. Tokarska-Bakir documents many instances of Kielce officials’ participation in wartime murders of fugitive Jews. She challenges Zaremba’s stress on the new regime’s recruitment on its payroll of the ‘uprooted and superfluous’ by revealing the prominence there of prewar officials, military and civil, not excluding many former semi-fascists and recent members of the London-directed Home Army. Among policemen dispatched to quell the Kielce pogrom were three wartime collaborators with the Nazi occupants. The UB’s undermanned Security Police possessed no legitimacy in pogromists’ eyes, nor would their Soviet backers intervene to quell the bloodshed. When first deployed against the pogromists, the Polish army, plagued by disaffection within its ranks, only unleashed more bayonet-wielding pogromists on the defenceless Jews. Only at day’s end did a detachment of soldiers commanded by a dutiful prewar army officer, later ousted as class enemy, halt the flickering violence. Tokarska-Bakir’s lengthy exposition (in chapters five, eleven–fourteen) of the religious, civilian, and military authorities’ failure to halt the pogrom offers damning evidence of the new regime’s inner contradictions and weaknesses. Yet, in chapter 6, entitled after Akira Kurosawa’s famous film Rashomon, Reviews 341 she warns that a definitive “reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom, despite a profusion of sources, remains unattainable” (p. 186). Her method is to critique and dismiss empirically falsifiable interpretations while establishing a densely documented hour-by-hour pogrom narrative. In the end, she finds most persuasive among 1946-penned analyses a 2004-published report (reproduced in full in second volume) attributable to Jewish communal leader and trained psychologist Adolf Berman, who branded the Kielce army leadership ‘absolute clowns’ and the pogrom itself as ‘psychosis’ (pp. 202 ff., 393). The regime’s halfhearted post-pogrom propaganda efforts to condemn anti-Semitism having met widespread popular rejection, it subsequently blamed the Kielce disaster on ‘the reaction’ – its rightist opponents – while suppressing further discussion and information, hoping desperately to escape its own stigmatization as entrenched żydokomuna. Tokarska-Bakir highlights the ‘embarrassment’ (wstyd) the regime suffered at the sight, not only of its armed forces engaged in murderous pogrom, but of the violent participation of industrial workers as well. Berman reckoned the pogrom crowd at its largest at some four thousand, among whom workers from the metallurgical Huta Ludwików alone numbered some six hundred, half – he thought – members of the socialist (PPS) or communist (PPR) party. Tokarska-Bakir accounts for this in part by near-society-wide entrapment in Judeophobic beliefs, but also by working-class antagonism, fuelled by certain strands of socialist ideology, to ‘Jewish capital’. Some of Poland’s emerging communist government’s own ideologists downplayed proletarian anti-Semitism in similar terms, as historically regressive mix of fading Christian-nationalist self-mystification and naïve class resentment. In view of relatively privileged modern industrial workers’ bloody handiwork in Kielce, Tokarska-Bakir disputes influential leftist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s association of ethno-religious aggression among common folk with ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-political’ groups (p. 246). In appraising the pogromists’ social profile, she rejects what she terms, in English, “riff raff ” theory, highlighting as perpetrators the ‘social dregs’ (męty społeczne). Instead, she embraces the ‘social cross-section’ hypothesis (przekrój społeczny), emphasizing involvement of ‘ordinary people’. Among arrestees, only one was unemployed, and none was homeless, “for owing to the appropriation of Jewish property a majority of Kielce inhabitants’ material condition had considerably improved”. And although Jewish victims were robbed as well as beaten or killed, the pogrom was soaked in anti-Semitic political-ideological justifications of aggression. It was, in pogromists’ minds, ‘popular justice’ (ludowa sprawiedliwość). In one of her fundamental theses, Tokarska-Bakir writes that “antipathy to the ‘bloodsucking Jew’ (Żyd-krwiopijca), a figure understood by all – Catholics, nationalists, and communists – became after the Second World War the cement” – among others commonalities, especially seizure of formerly Jewish and German possessions – “of the Polish imagined community” (pp. 246, 296–8). 342 Reviews The pogrom was itself an expression of communitas – in a land where wartime repression and trauma had shattered it – both of mourning (for imagined murdered children), of the carnavalesque (the mayhem displaying a celebratory, even ‘picnic-like’ side), and of group-bonding violence. Here Tokarska-Bakir invokes cultural anthropologist Victor Turner on communal enactment of culturally routinized scripts depicting dramas of death or triumph of the ‘Hero’ of the cult in which they were raised. The primal scene of the Christian-Jewish antagonism was Jesus’s Passion, the script of which was deeply embedded in Polish-Catholic mentality. Some pogromists cried out to their victims, “did you savor Christ’s blood?” (pp. 248–52). Tokarska-Bakir also recalls anthropologist Stanley Tambiah’s notion that ethnic riots are the reverse of potlatches: the destruction of Jewish lives and property endows the perpetrators with victims’ “status, talents, and riches” (pp. 252–4). This reviewer, upon once asking a non-academic Polish acquaintance about her thoughts on past Polish anti-Semitism, heard that “maybe we thought they were better than us”. As for pogromists’ material incentives, Tokarska-Bakir recalls postwar commentator Kazimierz Wyka’s stress on Poles’ unscrupulous appropriation of Jewish possessions, thereby creating a wholly new class of urban property-owners (mieszczaństwo). But she does not reduce the pogrom to material self-aggrandizement. “The pogromists were not penniless paupers, but rather citizens on the way up” (na dorobku), more driven to secure already ill-gotten gains than to seize them. The book impressively documents the very extensive Jewish property that passed, with official connivance of various kinds, into Polish hands, while recalling numerous murders accompanying Jewish survivors’ efforts to recover former possessions (pp. 283–9). The concluding chapter – ominously entitled, in English, ‘Bogeyman’ – employs Africanist Pamela Stewart’s concept of “societal witchcraft” (społeczne czarownictwo) to describe widespread Polish Judeophobic self-blinding. It arose from “guilt felt by the collectivity, which in response constructs plots about outsiders, shifting culpability on to them”. She summarizes her explanation of the Kielce pogrom as the interplay of four causal factors: traditional anti-Semitism, anchored in the ritual murder legend; the “easily mobilized experiential resource (zasób doświadczenia) of everyday wartime murder of Jews”; fear of postwar claims to recover Jewish property; and anxiety over imagined subjection to “Jewish overlordship” (panoszenie się Żydów), through restoration of Jewish economic strength and/or “Jewish control” of the emerging communist regime. It was, Tokarska-Bakir concludes, resistance to “what was commonly called ‘Jewish overlordship’” that most inclined Judeophobes to violence (pp. 405, 415). Earlier Tokarska-Bakir wrote of “the genocidal (ludobójcza) paranoia that caused the pogrom” (p. 383). To this mixture of subconscious and conscious motives for riotous bloodshed she adds a functionalist explanation: through engagement in expropriation of formerly Jewish and German property, and through entry Reviews 343 into public sector employment in emergent People’s Poland, anti-Semitic nationalists – and anti-Semites generally – found it easier to scapegoat Jewish survivors than to challenge the new communist authorities, with whom they were – as Tokarska-Bakir’s deployment of Richard White’s ‘middle ground’ thesis showed – coming to an unspoken modus vivendi. The communists in their great non-Jewish majority displayed to the anti-Semites an “undeniable home-grown familiarity” (swojskość). To rail against their burgeoning power entailed risks, including even conscience pangs over the bloody domestic civil war that was slowly drawing to a close. It was far easier to blame the new regime’s disappointments and defects on ‘the Jews’ (p. 411). In the end, Tokarska-Bakir returns to Braudel’s scorn for mere ‘eventhistory’. The Kielce pogrom flared up, not because of a single ritual-murder charge, and much less because of deliberate provocation, whether from left or right, but rather because the social-psychological landscape was, through the workings of history, a deadly minefield. Her final point: as when in medieval Europe self-identification with martyrs for the faith – notably, innocent victims of imagined ritual murder – helped pious individuals comprehend themselves subjectively as Christians, so too does the same emotional-psychic mechanism continue today its working in the interior of Judeophobic Poles, rigidifying their sense of innocence (p. 417). Surely this rich and psychologically insightful book is a major achievement and powerful challenge to the still-dominant sway in modern Polish historiography of ideologically-driven political event-history (often disfigured by what Tokarska-Bakir ingeniously terms ‘detectivist anti-Semitism’, tirelessly searching for hidden Jewish malefactors and influences) (p. 104). Paired with Marcin Zaremba’s many-dimensioned diagnosis of social disorder and emotional-psychological after-trauma in a devastated land, it illuminates the tragedy-laden birth of People’s Poland far more profoundly than earlier historiography has done. Some questions linger. Having raised the issue of subconscious Polish Christian ‘guilt’, Tokarska-Bakir neglects its referents. And, despite inclusion among her four pogrom determinants of Poles’ exposure to “everyday wartime murder of Jews”, the book offers no sustained discussion of how the Holocaust, in its many forms, influenced the pogromists’ and their Christian supporters’ attitudes and behaviour. She documents but a tiny handful of expressions of Polish empathy and support for Jewish Holocaust survivors. Few policemen, railwaymen, or soldiers actively defended Jews facing violence. Death threats arose from the mob against Poles charged with wartime shielding of Jews. But is it plausible that Polish witnessing of the Holocaust played no causal role in the Kielce pogrom and the thousand-fold other postwar murders of Jewish survivors? Scholarship has shown beyond doubt that wartime public opinion gradually accepted and even welcomed the Nazi genocide’s destruction of the Jewish presence in Poland, which henceforth would be an ethnically 344 Reviews cleansed Christian land.4 Yet it remains to grasp how, at the subconscious or rationally unreflected-upon level, the Holocaust’s occurrence – and Poles’ witnessing of it, their sometimes active murderous participation in and widespread profiting from it – coloured popular feelings and fuelled readiness to commit violence against the crushed remnants of the colossal killing. One possible approach, suggested by Tokarska-Bakir’s concluding invocation of Christian identification with imagined ritual-murder martyrs, is to suppose that Polish society very widely identified itself – and not only a few individual children claiming victim-status – as the object of lethal postwar Jewish menace. If Jewish survivors required transfusions, it was the entire Polish society – also severely depleted biologically by war – whose blood was at risk. And if Jewish survivors were “drinking Polish blood”, Judeophobic Poles will have been subconsciously inclined to imagine themselves as the targets of Jewish revenge for the monstrous genocide, in which, as everyone knew, Polish ‘scum’ – both low-class, middle-class, and high-class – had participated, sometimes with the most fiendish of violence. Was such a Polish reaction, in Tokarska-Bakir’s terms, ‘guilt’ or ‘genocidal paranoia’? In either case, it accords with her culturally and psychologically penetrating interpretation to propose that Kielce pogromists and their supporters understood themselves to be at war with a deadly and diabolical force – however harmless, viewed in sober daylight, the crushed and ruined, less than tenpercent remnants of Polish Jewry actually were. Such a perspective on postwar anti-Semitic violence – whose memory is still today so painful – helps explain how Polish society, traumatized if not ‘cursed’ by war, succumbed so largely to denial of Holocaust complicity and continuing embrace of anti-Jewish resentments in place of the brotherhood that common suffering, however unequal, might have brought forth.5 William W. Hagen Adam F. Kola, Socjalistyczny postkolonializm. Rekonsolidacja pamięci [Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation], Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń, 2018, 484 pp. What was the historical position of Poland in the Cold War world? What societies would Polish social experience compare to, so that the intended comparison be intellectually correct, interesting, and fertile? How to describe 4 For a valuable recent synthesis of the literature, see Joshua D. Zimmerman, The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York, 2015). 5 On the problem of denial: Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead. Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY, 1997). Reviews 345 the collective memory of one’s own history and of the local society’s relationships with the other societies? And, as far as civic aspects are concerned: with which societies ours is to be compared so that history, social sciences and humanities may play the positive role in shaping our collective identity – one that well serves the collectivity, rather than devastates or weakens it? These fundamental questions shape the interests as well as research and publishing efforts of humanists. The book under review seems to have been motivated by these questions. Its author, literary scholar Adam F. Kola, educated in Oriental Studies, presently works as a researcher at the Nicolaus Copernicus University’s Laboratory for Research on Collective Memory in Post-Communist Europe. In his book, he provides a reply that is not new as far as humanities are concerned, though still intriguing. The reply is not as clear as I would wish it to be as a reader, but decodable in any case. Observing the popularity of the postcolonial approach, which has recently been growing among Polish literary and cultural scholars, the author has decided to trace the attitudes in Polish humanities of the post-war period towards the Third World, post-colonial countries. Firstly, chapter 1 analyses official documents and propaganda pamphlets regarding Poland’s politics towards decolonisation and non-European countries, focusing on the early period of the late 1940s and the early 1950s, dealing most extensively with attitudes towards the wars in Korea and Vietnam. The particular role of World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace held in August 1948 in Wrocław is emphasised. The author argues that early post-war communist Poland’s propaganda supported the decolonisation, comparing the colonial oppression to the oppression suffered by Poland during the Second World War. The European colonialism as well as the American interventions after the war were interpreted as manifestations of the same imperialism that propelled Germany to provoke and start the Second World War. Opposed to it was the ideology of internationalism, ‘fight for peace’ (this being the key slogan, according to Kola’s findings) and popular access to education, culture and progress. The Polish population, exhausted and beleaguered by the war and then, under communism, enjoying common education, reconstruction and industrialisation of its country, apparently understood the Third World peoples that still suffered imperial oppression and dreamed about schools. Criticism of racism is a significant trait of these propagandist documents. As Kola convincingly indicates, racism was meant to trigger a familiar reluctance as it provided arguments for the colonial imperialism and its Nazi counterpart, and for slavery characteristic of both. This section can be of interest to historians specialising in early postwar communist Poland, its thought and propaganda. Analysis of documents regarding the attitude towards non-European and colonial societies deserves respect and paves the way open for further research. Neither Poland nor none of its ‘socialist’ (communist) neighbours ever developed an ideology 346 Reviews of fraternity with Third World peoples on a scale characteristic of Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. This remains, in any case, an interesting and underelaborated thread in the history of the Soviet Bloc. This same part of the book comprises an analysis of poetry of engagement. It remains unclear to me why it is not the section entitled ‘Literature, arts, sciences’. Secondly, the part entitled ‘History’ carefully traces the Polish reception of the postcolonial approach that took shape in the West in the latter half of the twentieth century. The proposed conclusion is the following: the works of Western ‘postcolonialists’ published in Polish translations, with Said’s Orientalism published in the early 1990s in the lead, had no impact on the local scholarly discourse until the turn of the twenty-first century. Kola revealingly points to the fact that Polish-language versions of the studies produced as part of Western postcolonial trend were published in the fifties and sixties and, to a lesser extent, in the seventies and eighties. The author analyses the introductory essays and commentaries to these translated works from the years 1950–91. The Western postcolonial approach entered the Polish intellectual circulation at the turn of the twenty first century in the right-wing oriented publications which placed emphasis on Poland’s cultural dependence on Russia and the West. Kola considers the essays by Ewa Thompson published in 2000 to have been the founding text. The following two decades saw the discourse gain the left-wing voices as well, Kola observes. The pioneering work in this trend, according to him, is Maria Janion’s Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna: fantazmaty literatury of 2006. According to Kola’s calculations, Said has remained the most important – namely, the most frequently quoted – author in Polish postcolonial studies. The author takes into consideration works from the areas of literary studies and cultural studies, the latter speaking a language that caused its message attractive to the former. The most important and frequently recalled study in this context is Jan Sowa’s Fantomowe ciało króla of 2011 (reviewed in APH 107). Kola neglects, in turn, the references to the postcolonial approach, Orientalism, and Said in studies written by sociologists, political scientists and historians, which were published in Poland since the mid-nineties. This first part of the book will probably be interesting only to a group of literary scholars who are accustomed to their professional jargon (which I personally find unbearable). Thirdly, and most interestingly for social historians, Kola presents an analysis of reportages, visualisations – photographs in textual books and albums as well as novels and other fictional pieces from the Third World countries. Most of the messages under Kola’s analysis come from Korea and Vietnam, less frequently India or northern Africa. Latin American representations have been neglected. The narratives regarding the wars in Korea and Vietnam offered by the books published by official state-owned publishing houses in the fifties and Reviews 347 the sixties portrayed non-European peoples as exotic, and thus resembled the Western white man’s stories. The key and original aspect of Wojciech Żukrowski’s prose works, as Kola emphasises, was that they established solidarity between the war sufferings of Asians and Poles (being a separate suffering subject, Jews were not addressed in these narratives): “Polish wartime experience becomes a key to understanding or empathise with the situation of the Vietnamese” (p. 308). Literary works and studies dating to that period accused the West, particularly the United States, and German Nazis from the Second World War. Some authors called both groups of countries ‘fascist’. This same aspect of solidarity in wartime suffering is highlighted by the poem Posłanie do braci w Wietnamie [A message to our brothers in Vietnam] by Stanisław R. Dobrowolski, which accompanied Zbigniew Staszyszyn’s photographs in a 1971 album: This country, where a common chimney smoke not a pot bonfire recalls but a murderer’s stroke, … sends you now, our brothers behind many seas, a simple message: “We have heard your pleas!” (p. 305) Mirosław Żuławski’s novel Rzeka czerwona (1953) presents the Foreign Legion as an astute instrument of French imperial policy. Since its recruits came from the French colonies as well as from Europe, Żuławski projected lines of animosity and solidarity between members of various nations. As Kola remarks, in the Legion, “a white Pole puts himself on a par with the other colonised people [i.e. the rebelling slaves in San Domingo in the early nineteenth century] or Moroccans in the service of France, rather than with his own neighbour – the European German” (p. 319) – and, he does not want to join those fighting against the colonised Vietnamese. In the context of my own research into New York City as a miniature of the world, I find the figure of the Foreign Legion as a similar laboratory of global relationships and hierarchies rather interesting. It is worth emphasising (once again) that according to Kola’s findings, “the colonial war was [depicted as] an extension of the European struggling from the time of the two World Wars” (p. 323). A common element of the image of the enemy consists of racism – the ideology of a hierarchy of human races, slavery of some of them coupled with extermination of others. Kola points, moreover, to the fact that texts published in Poland in early post-war years show anti-imperial wars as struggle for self-determination of the nations; such texts were thereby supposed to build a sense of solidarity between the Polish reader, who remembered the Partitions and the nations that were waging their anti-imperial wars. Fourthly, references to studies penned by the historians and sociologists Marian Małowist and Jerzy Wiatr dealing with non-European areas do not 348 Reviews seem to contribute to the research pursued by historians or sociologists. Some of these fragments appear irritating from our standpoint as sociologists and historians – especially when they refer to commonly known studies and insist that they “have never become part of the mainstream”. Małowist’s output in the area of non-European research has in fact never been forgotten or overlooked. The African-studies research he initiated is the one that has outstandingly developed and blossomed (among the other streams he patronised), and is currently followed up with research by Michał Tymowski and his students. Let me note that Małowist is discussed in the chapter ‘History’ while Wiatr is covered separately, in the conclusive section (an arrangement whose rationale I cannot find explained). Fifthly, the study under review attempts at interpreting the postcolonial oblivion and reinstate the memory of the postcolonial discourse of the 1950s and 1960s. From the standpoint of the history of thought, such interpretation apparently contributes nothing new. Why the postcolonial discourse, present in Poland already in the 1950s and 1960s, has not become betterestablished in a broad awareness? Why has it not influenced the ways in which the anticommunist oppositionists employed their ideological arguments? Kola argues that “the postcolonial discourse was appropriated by the authority and official politics, and thus was of no use in expressing rebellion and resistance against them” (p. 418). The dependence theory and postcolonial discourse were misappropriated by intellectuals, of whom some – Wiatr being an example – functioned as prominent officials of the state ruled by a single party. In the year 1982, Wiatr had his book Drogi do wolności [Paths to freedom] published, in which he expressed his conviction about an emancipative role of anti-imperial rebellions in postcolonial countries, and simultaneously was perceived at the University of Warsaw, Institute of Sociology, where he lectured, as an adherent of the martial law and opposition-buster: a not unimportant coincidence. In the civic perspective, the book endeavours to retrieve for collective memory the Polish representations of the Korea and Vietnam wars. Again, let me stress that the best job in this respect is done by the chapters on literature and arts. Reading the book in question by a historian or sociologist is burdensome. Accustomed to a model whereby a scholarly publication ought to be structured so as to pose a research question, specify the relevant literature, the methodology applied, a discussion of the findings, an interpretation, and conclusions, the reader comes here across more than five hundred pages of a text that intersperses these threads. Discussions of documents and studies or literary pieces are blended with references to literary criticism and the author’s own literary and philosophical associations. The conclusion section unexpectedly provides and extensive analysis of Jerzy Wiatr’s output that was Reviews 349 not covered on any of the several hundred preceding pages. It can be guessed that the author’s background in literary studies encourages his tendency to attach considerable attention to the structure of a text, at the expense of its context. Source analysis is mixed with literary-critical remarks and associations with rather distant readings. As to the central message, obscurities, not to say contradictions happen. The chapter of literary representatives of the Third World – definitely, the most interesting section – concludes that “if … we refer to Polish communistperiod literature about non-European worlds, it appears that this dictum, characteristic as it is of the centrist models of Orientalism, was excellently fulfilled in peripheral narratives as well” (p. 284). However, several dozen pages later, he points to the already-mentioned examples of narratives expressing solidarity even if postcolonial people are orientalised. In the conclusion, Kola states that after the Second World War “both the interwar period and the earlier achievements from the Partitions era were never mirrored in the production of ideology-imbued knowledge on non-European worlds. The severance was complete, and the denial was full” (p. 416); earlier on, however, he refers to a novel in which a Pole recalls the history of Polish members of Napoleon’s army who, instead of pacifying the revolution of the slaves in Haiti, simply joined it. Or, perhaps, ‘production of knowledge’ is confined to the academia, while the author quits the ‘scientific poaching’ (which he otherwise commends) and does not have fictional literature in mind, in this particular sentence? I have found in this book no explanation why the representations of Korea and Vietnam of the 1950s–1960s wars’ time are considered by him the most important thread of the texts under analysis. Is the author’s special interest in the region of south-eastern Asia the actual reason? This might be explained by his Oriental studies background, especially that the Caribbean and America remain outside his focus. In sum, the book will be of interest to historians of literature of postwar communist Poland, comparative analysts, experts in cultural and literary studies dealing with contemporary East Central European literatures. A number of interesting threads will also be picked up by historians of thought or ideas, as long as they approach propagandist documents and literary pieces as manifestations of intellectual life. trans. Tristan Korecki Anna Sosnowska 350 Reviews Science Overcoming Borders, ed. by Věra Dvořáčková and Martin Franc, trans. Hynek Zlatník and Steve Coleman, Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR, Praha, 2018, 274 pp. The volume is devoted to examining chosen international scientific congresses and conventions within the context of scientific exchanges as a reflection of social and political history. In his brief introduction to the book, Martin Franc stresses that the authors’ interest in researching scientific conventions as a platform for scientific exchange “stems from the latest methodological trends” in this area. While concentrating on the case of socialist Czechoslovakia, Franc remarks upon the particular importance of science for the ideological discourse of the whole Eastern Bloc (p. 9). The first, theoretical chapter written by Ulrike Thoms represents the global perspective on the issue. The author starts her essay by referring to the ideal image of science, which ‘originally’ was understood as a res publica litteraria without any concern for social and national differences (p. 11). Nevertheless, in aiming at contextualising the whole volume, Thoms makes an important remark concerning the fact that the nationalisation of science during the nineteenth century inevitably influenced the agenda of those institutions which dealt with international scientific exchanges in the early twentieth century. The description of the isolation of German science following the First World War, the ‘new nationalisation’ of science after 1933, and the behaviour of the German scientists in boycotting the speeches of their Jewish colleges (pp. 14–17) introduces the reader to the socio-political context of the scientific process we can expect to find in the book. The last section of Thoms’s article is based primarily on statistical data regarding the scientific conventions which took place after the Second World War. A variety of charts and graphs, covering primarily the period between the 1960s and 2012 (pp. 18–25), bring the reader back to the global perspective of an issue which in various places in the book is left simply to describing the individual historical events that influenced the scientific agenda. The following articles are comprised of case studies. The Soviet case is examined by Elena Sinelnikova, and deals with the phenomenon of ‘scientific societies’ (Rus. obščestva) as an important factor for international academic exchanges in the early Soviet period. This approach offers an important perspective for examining the adaptation of informal scientific institutions founded in the late imperial period to the new realities of the Soviet state. The author shows how the world-wide scholarly authority, “excellent foreign language skills”, and personal academic contacts of the members of ‘scientific societies’ helped to establish their academic relationships with scientific organisations from countries which still did not recognise the newly established Soviet state. Additionally, Sinelnikova examines the engagement of scientific societies in political debates. She writes about the protest of the Russian Geographical Reviews 351 Society (RGS) against the idea of the London Geographical Society “to remove European names in Central Asia, including the Russian ones” (p. 33). Besides this telling example, Sinelnikova offers an insightful observation concerning the decrease in the educational and academic level of “young scientists joining the scientific community after the October revolution” (p. 39). Another article of the volume addressing the Soviet case, although from another perspective, is the paper of Jan Arend. The author deals with the attendance of American soil scientist Curtis Fletcher Marburg at the Second International Congress of Soil Science held in Leningrad and Moscow. In discussing the history of the dispute between the North-American and Russian (Soviet) schools of soil science over who founded this research area, Arend mentions the complicated political and ideological context surrounding this visit of the American scientist in 1930 (i.e. before the Soviet state was recognised by the USA in 1933). Arend claims that American soil scientists were especially interested in the potential of the Soviet Union in wheat production (pp. 59–61). The absence of any public data on this topic made the Marburg’s trip an event of special political importance for those Americans and Canadians involved in wheat production and export against the backdrop of Stalin’s aim to re-enter the international wheat trade. During the Congress’ excursions, Marburg was able to observe types of soil which were unknown to him before (especially in the Černozem region), though the topics he was especially interested in were marginal to the agenda of the Congress. Additionally, Arend remarks upon the fact that Marburg showed some sympathy for collectivisation as “a project to place agriculture under government control according to ‘scientific’ principles.” The author concludes his essay by offering his opinion that Marburg’s trip represents an example of “the transfer of knowledge between two … national traditions” (p. 75). One of the most ‘personal’ and easily readable essays of the volume is written by Petra Tomsová. Her article is based on the travel notes of the young Czech geographer Jiří Viktor Daneš and brings the reader back to the late imperial period, representing the personal experiences of the (then) twentyfour-year-old geographer attending the Eighth International Geographical Congress in Washington (1904). Despite the absence of a ‘research question’, this article contains plenty of fascinating details illustrating the realities of scientific life better than the formal documentation more generously quoted throughout this book. Jiří Daneš, later one of the most prominent Czech geographers, recorded in his travel notes not only his personal comparative perspective of hotel services, food, political issues, and attitudes towards the emancipation of women, but also remarked upon the language skills and preferences of the participants in the Congress; the differences in organising the scientific events in Europe and in the USA; as well as the specific features characterising the different ‘national delegations.’ Daneš’ inherent sense 352 Reviews of humour, as transmitted by the author in a lively way, makes the text flow very pleasantly, while the map depicting the travel itinerary of the geographer (p. 80) helps the reader both to visualise Daneš’s trip and, in many cases, to compare it with his or her own travel experiences. The interwar period in Czechoslovakia is presented in the articles of Kamilia Mádrová, Petra Hyklová, and Katarína Zawadská. The first paper is based on the sources of the Czech Technical University (CTU) regarding the participation of students and professors in international scientific events; the second paper refers to the participation of Czech astronomers in international conferences; and the third addresses international lawyers’ conventions which took place in the 1930s. After describing her rich base of sources, Kamilia Mádrová refers to the issue of political engagement of Czech scientists in the Peace Conference in Paris following the First World War and their active part in establishing the new geographical image of Czechoslovak Republic. While she points out the “lack of knowledge of foreign languages (especially French)” by the Czechoslovak scientists (p.115), the author does not fail to mention that CTU-students who participated in international scientific conferences strove to develop their foreign language skills. Additionally, Mádrová writes about student organisations such as the ‘Students’ Technical Association’ and the ‘Union of Young Engineers’, while also mentioning cooperation with German student organisations and attempts to organise a scientific cooperation “with the states of the Danube region [emphasis mine – A.L.]” (p. 121). Petra Hyklová starts her essay with an examination of the Astronomical Institute of the Czech University (since 1920 the Charles University) and the Astronomical Institute of the German University (Deutsche Universität Prag). In passing, she also refers to the Czech Astronomical Society, which “was a fully amateur society until 1922 [emphasis mine – A.L.].” Additionally, the journal Říše hvězd is represented as evidence of the “close links between amateur and professional astronomers” (p. 124). The political context of the issue appears in her description of the activity of the International Astronomical Union and the International Research Council. Her description of the measures “to prevent the German monopolisation of science”; debates on the election procedure based on the population numbers in the represented countries; and the issue of Soviet presence in scientific organisations illustrate the influence of current politics on the scientific life. Specifically, Hyklová describes the case of Zdeněk Kopal, a student member of the International Astronomical Union (pp. 132–3), although the reader remains unfamiliar with the extent to which his participation was a typical case. Referring to the First Convention of Slavic Geographers and Ethnographers, the author extensively quotes conference papers testifying to the nationalistic approaches of the speakers in their understanding of science. In concluding her essay, Hyklová argues that “the system of adopting decisions in the affairs of the International Astronomical Union did not reflect the differences between the big and small countries”, Reviews 353 adding that while “the most populous countries had the highest number of votes” in administrative and financial matters, “the differences however were not so great” (p. 144). The Slovak context of the interwar period appears first in the essay of Katarína Zawadská. The author starts with the issue of “exact Slovak legal terminology” and shows the way in which this issue became a topic of public debate. More importantly, Zawadská mentions the active participation of “amateur authors” in developing and propagating the “new terminology” (p. 147). In referring to the problems with unifying the legal system of Czechoslovakia, the author emphasises that international participation in the lawyers’ congresses held in the country included some Russian and Ukrainian exiled lawyers. In passing, the author refers to the First Slavic Lawyers’ Convention and other ‘European Congresses’ which Czech and Slovak lawyers participated in. Zawadská does not concentrate on the Slovak and Czech context while referring to, among other things, Nazi German lawyers and their ideas on law and punishment proclaimed at a Congress in Berlin. Unexpectedly, the reader can also find pieces of information on the contacts between German and Polish lawyers (as, for example, the creation of the German-Polish Legal Institute in Berlin in 1937), [emphasis mine – A.L.], on the Soviet concept of law, and on the international legal discussions on the eve of the Munich Agreement. The socialist period of Czechoslovak history is discussed in the articles of Milena Josefovičová, Michaela Kůželová, Martin Franc, and Věra Dvořáčková. Based primarily on administrative documents, Josefovičová starts by examining the ideological underpinnings of ‘socialist science.’ After remarking upon the technocratic and scientific character of socialist ideology, she refers to the creation of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1953), which became the main organisation dealing with international scientific exchanges. In examining the annual documentation of the Academy of Sciences between 1953 and 1960, Josefovičová notes the applied character of the tasks which were formulated for Czechoslovak scientists, while the usefulness of having a scientific exchange with foreign specialists was the main argument justifying the necessity for maintaining international contacts with western scientists. Among other things the paper refers to the case of the physicist Jan Tauc, who had been banned from leaving Czechoslovakia (even to travel to other socialist countries) because of his brother’s emigration. Besides this, Josefovičová mentions the membership of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the International Council of Scientific Unions as evidence of the international activity of Czech scientists and remarks upon the rupture of these international contacts after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The essay of Michaela Kůželová is the only article in the volume dealing with the reports of Czechoslovak philosophers, historians and social scientists. The title (‘When a Scientist Went to Fight’) clarifies the perspective from 354 Reviews which the author intended to examine the issue. When defining the research question of the article, Kůželová writes that her idea was to analyse “the interpretation of international scientific congresses as a place of ideological and political struggle” by examining selected reports. In describing the political context of the issue, the author remarks upon the presence of military metaphors such as ‘front line’, ‘ideological struggle’, and ‘enemy’ in describing various international conventions. In a similar vein, reports from the Congress of Historical Sciences in Sweden (1960) described the convention as “a great ideological collision between Marxist and idealistic history” (p. 191), while the Sixteenth World Congress of Philosophy was defined as a “struggle between the two social systems” (p. 192). Besides this, the author stresses the fact that the organisers of the congresses which took place in the Western countries also discriminated among their ‘socialist science emissaries’, for example by giving some unsatisfactory accommodation or complicating the procedure for publishing their papers. In addition, the article refers to several examples of open conflict between the scientists representing socialist Czechoslovakia and Czechoslovak émigrés attending international conventions. The article which follows returns to the biographical perspective of the issue and analyses the travel notes of two Czechoslovak scientists: Josef Charvát and Ivan Málek. The comparative biographical approach of the author, Martin Franc, helps to show the complexities of building and maintaining a scientific career in a socialist country. As Franc explains, both the nonpartisan endocrinologist Josef Charvát and the communist microbiologist Ivan Málek not only attended international conventions but were also members of foreign scientific academies and institutions. Party membership did not prevent Ivan Málek from becoming a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the German ‘Leopoldina’ academy of natural sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, as well as the International Cell Research Organisation of UNESCO. Alongside the comparative description of protagonists’ preferences in food and comfort, Franc also remarks upon the fact that the politically active communist Málek, who possessed ‘a service passport’, experienced many more problems with international trips after the Soviet invasion than the nonpartisan Josef Charvát, even if the physician faced some administrative difficulties with obtaining high positions in scientific organisations. The title of the last article of the volume (contributed by Věra Dvořáčková) – ‘RILEM 1961: The First Post-War Convention of the International Union of Laboratories and Experts in Construction Materials, Systems and Structures in Socialist Bloc Countries’ – forces a non-expert reader to search for an explanation of the acronym ‘RILEM’. The answer is given only on the fourth page of the paper and is surprising in its simplicity: the acronym is derived from the French name of the conference organiser mentioned in the title (p. 233). The paper covers the circumstances of the conference arranged by Reviews 355 this organisation in Prague in 1961. The applied character of the organisation made the conference an important event not only in theoretical terms, but also regarding its industrial perspectives. According to Dvořáčková, the RILEM conference in 1961 became the first convention in the Eastern Bloc “with so many foreign attendees”. According to the author, this was a sign of the (then) relative openness of the Eastern Bloc toward holding subsequent conferences by RILEM in Poland, the Soviet Union, and Romania. In mentioning that the language of the organising country was – along with English and French – one of the official conference languages, the author concludes the article with the insightful comment that: “In doing so, the West made it clear that it was counting on the East to be involved” (pp. 244–5). Since the authors declined to influence any final impressions of the volume by writing a conclusion, the reader will need some time to reflect upon what might be the essence of the book. Moreover, it is difficult to say that the idea, structure, and logic of narration of the book are explained in-depth in the very brief (three-page) introduction, which addresses only one of the cases discussed in the volume. The theoretical chapter by Ulrike Thoms is obviously intended to perform some explanatory function and leads the reader to expect a complicated narrative between the global and local perspectives of the issue, but this expectation does not characterise the subsequent narratives. The structure of the book could testify to the thesis that harmony and symmetry is only the product of scientific violence against ‘reality’. There is no sense in asking why two articles of the volume deal with Soviet cases in the interwar period and all others deal with Czechoslovakia in different periods, but in my view if the global perspective is really to be considered essential to any extent, the essay on the late imperial period (Petra Tomsová) should have come immediately following the theoretical chapter. It would have seemed very natural to read, after the ‘imperial biography’ of Jiří Daneš, the essay on the post-imperial fate of ‘scientific societies’ in light of the social and political cataclysms in the early Soviet period (Elena Sinelnikova). Besides this, only a few of the articles maintain an internal logic of narration, meaning that the reader repeatedly faces the necessity of reflecting upon the ways in which each paragraph is connected to the previous and the following ones. It would not be appropriate to generalise based on a remark made in an individual essay when all of the other texts are written by different authors who are not in any noticeable way connected to each other. Nevertheless, I think that the first case study broaches a question which acquires more relevance after reading many of subsequent chapters. Even though I find the article of Elena Sinelnikova better historically-rooted than many of the other texts in this volume, I cannot avoid asking (to take one example) in what ways the attitudes of the Russian Geographical Society regarding toponyms in Asia (1923) corresponded to the policy of ‘korenisatsiya’ undertaken by the Bolsheviks at the time. More importantly, the statement following 356 Reviews a description of the opinions of society members, that “[s]aving Russian names in Central Asia had great political and ideological importance for the Soviet government” (p. 33) creates the impression that the activity of this institution was exclusively determined by the interests of the Soviet government. I would argue that the academic relevance of this, and many other articles of this volume, would be stronger if the issue being debated was represented in a more complex narrative. In my view, it is important to describe the differences and contradictions in the interests of different actors, as well as their understanding of the tasks and sense of science which coexisted under the given conditions. I might extend this issue, albeit with some reservations, to the discussion of most of the articles in this work, especially those devoted to the socialist period of Czechoslovak history. Phrases such as “in the socialist concept” (p. 194), “the socialist bloc’s view” (p. 201), and “the West made it clear” (p. 245), testify to the significance of this point. In her article, Milena Josefovičová argues that the history of science and technology can open a new perspective in “formulating the Eastern European narrative”, “as traditional political history fails in certain respects and cannot provide answers” (p. 166). Without delving into a discussion on the concepts of “traditional political history” and the “Eastern European narrative” (which, moreover, is partly a quotation), I find it important to stress that referring to stereotypical interpretative models for making the narrative ‘logical’ is a poor way to attain the aims of the history of science formulated by Josefovičová. There is no ‘concept’ that exists without people and no ‘bloc’ with its own ‘view’, while the ‘West’ can hardly make anything ‘clear.’ In my view, these terms, coined during the Cold War, should be used (if indeed they are necessary at all) in a very precise way so as not to create ‘fictive facts’ on which the arguments are based or hide contradictions. The understanding of socialism, Marxism and Leninism varied to some extant not only in the different socialist countries, but within the editorial boards of different journals of the same socialist country (even in such Soviet propagandist newspapers as Pravda and Izvestia). Michaela Kůželová insightfully remarks on the fact that official reports followed a special ‘style’ which seemed in general terms relatively coherent throughout the period examined in her paper, even though “to some extent … these reports were also influenced by the contemporary political situation, such as liberalisation of the regime”, when “more reports that lacked ideology could be written” (p. 204). Despite the fact that these changes are unfortunately not so obvious after reading the article, it would be important in my view to develop the idea mentioned in the conclusion of Kůželová’s article and concentrate on the differences in reporting international scientific events instead of referring to general stereotypes. In addition, I think the book would be advantaged if it took a step beyond the ‘ceremonial language of reports’, so as not to create an impression that these reports illustrate the ‘realities’ of scientific life. Reviews 357 Another feature which, in my view, is of relevance to most of the articles can be called ‘sources-oriented logic of narration.’ The topics mentioned in the articles are discussed to the extent that they have been ‘found’ in the sources examined by the authors, without any thematic structuring of the issues in light of current historiography. Since the book has been published by an archival institution, this perspective is understandable and may even help the advanced reader to understand the character of the sources, which could possibly be found in the archival records mentioned by the authors. On the other hand, those topics of great historiographical importance which could potentially attract a broader academic audience are usually discussed in a less-detailed manner than many less significant ones. The topics of historiographical importance would include: the nationalistic discourse in understanding the tasks of science and the ‘national’ translation projects regarding ‘scientific terminology’; the political engagement of scientists; the role of the newly-established small countries in the international organisations of the interwar period; the relationship between German and Czech scientists or students in the context of internal conflicts in interwar Czechoslovakia; the attempts to reconstruct the imperial space of the Habsburg Monarchy by creating international student scientific unions (as far as we can tell in light of the small mention of this topic, p. 121); the particularly significant question of the relationship between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ science in the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the issue of scientific journalism; the changes in scientific hierarchies and student participation in international conventions; the ‘Slavic idea’ both in the interwar period and after the Second World War; conflicts between the representatives of the Eastern Bloc and exiled scientists attending international congresses; and the career opportunities available to nonpartisan scientists versus members of communist party in the socialist countries. All of these topics are just briefly mentioned in the book, with about the same amount of attention paid to them as to the dissatisfaction with food vouchers at a conference in Prague. In my view, if these historiographical topoi were to become central topics in examining international scientific conferences of the period, the book would attract the attention of many historians of science and perhaps reach the desired ‘global perspective.’ The incorporation of a system and logic in defining which sciences and what kind of international conventions were the subjects of research would make the volume more worthwhile at the theoretical level. It must, however, be said that the book is designed for attentive and knowledgeable readers who can read between the lines, draw their own conclusions, and separate the wheat from the chaff. Such readers will undoubtedly find some important and relevant information in this book. proofreading James Hartzell Aleksei Lokhmatov 358 Reviews Agnieszka Mrozik and Stanislav Holubec (eds.), Historical Memory of Central and East Central European Communism, Routledge, New York, 2018, 294 pp. There is an extensive literature on the way the communist past has been worked through in East and East-Central Europe since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Most existing studies have focused on exploring confrontations with the past on the level of whole societies. Central to such works are national-level memory politics, legal and historiographical efforts to work through the past, representations in popular culture and nostalgic memory, while tourist practices are now increasingly coming into focus. What has largely been left out of such studies, however, is the memory of that group of people whose identities were particularly closely entangled with efforts to create socialist states – namely communists themselves. How, then, do people who called, or continue to call, themselves ‘communists’ remember ‘communism’? In exploring this complex issue, this volume focuses, on the one hand, on the central question of the role of historical memory for a political movement whose core ideal was based on the creation of a future world. On the other hand, the editors Stanislav Holubec and Agnieszka Mrozik explicitly address the relationship between self-historicization and the actual position of power that the political movement found itself in. The volume thus considers the following questions: how did communists’ rise to power transform the workers’ movement’s historical imagination; how did a bureaucratic party apparatus rework ‘proletarian’ history; what influence did political crises and periods of ‘normalization’ have on memory; and, finally, how has the European Left worked through its own past since losing power around 1989/90? The case studies presented in this edited volume concern the entire Soviet-dominated region and cover memory practices in a period ranging from the 1920s to today. Several contributions offer a comparative perspective, while others present developments in cultural memory over longer periods, in some cases going beyond 1989. The book is structured into three parts that construct a retrospective “archaeology of the memory” (p. 15). While the first part addresses leftist memory in the post-socialist period, the third part deals with the memory politics practiced by communists while they were in power. The middle part, titled ‘Memorial Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe’, links these sections by primarily focusing on the material legacy of state socialism. There was (and is) no single group of ‘communists’ nor a single communist memory, as the editors point out in the introduction. Nonetheless, they employ the concepts ‘communism’, ‘labour movement’, ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary Left’ as synonyms to describe all of those movements, parties and political programmes “that themselves used the term and identified with it” (p. 15). Thus, the volume explores a broad spectrum of leftist identities that range Reviews 359 from Stalinists to reform communists. However, splinter groups and smaller factions, such as Maoists and Trotskyists, are not taken into account. Mrozik and Holubec account for this diversity by highlighting plurality, as is evident in the title of their introduction ‘The Historical Memory of European Communisms’. They argue that the nineteenth-century workers’ movement showed little interest in memory politics or historical memory, even though the Marxist worldview was built on a “grand narrative of European and global history” (p. 2). The Paris Commune of 1871 is presented as the first decidedly leftist lieu de mémoire, with the editors proceeding to outline various international and national historical founding myths in Europe. By highlighting important caesura, such as Marx’s death in 1883 and the 1917 February Revolution, the Second World War (or the Great Patriotic War), Stalin’s death and the violent suppression of the East-Central European reform movements between 1956 and 1981, and finally the political breakthrough of 1989, they offer a concise overview of the most important phases and motives shaping communist memory politics as well as the emergence of an anti-communist consensus in the 1990s. The struggles over the ‘correct’ way to deal with the communist past since 1989 provide a framework for the first part of the book. Although the three contributions adopt completely different approaches, they do display a common theme through their focus on the Left’s struggle to find an identity following the failure of state socialism. Thorsten Holzhauser and Antony Kalashnikov present a systematic comparison of Germany’s Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). Demonstrating the two successor parties’ structural similarities, the authors present an outline of efforts to find an identity, with the contribution pointing to both externalist and internalist explanations. Csilla Kiss’s contribution, meanwhile, focuses on a single party, namely the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP) that emerged from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party in 1989. She adopts an openly leftist position in arguing that it is necessary for the HSP to develop a coherent politics of memory in order to counteract the dominance of the right in Hungarian discourse today. Kiss argues that the antifascist consensus could offer a foundation for a potential leftist counter-discourse, something that is necessary not least because “the spectre of fascism appears as a real danger in today’s Hungary” (p. 36). In his contribution, the economist and former national chairman of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) Walter Baier addresses the need for an adequate response from the Left in the realm of historical memory on the European level. In particular he considers the role of the Left in European integration. The contributions to the second part are likewise focused on the postcommunist period, although they approach it on the level of whole societies and national memory cultures. While Aleksandra Kuczyńska-Zonik (Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine) und Stanislav Holubec (Jena and Hradec Kralové) 360 Reviews primarily focus on the material legacy of communism in the form of monuments, memorials and architecture, Ekaterina V. Klimenko (Russia) explores state and civil-society memory projects, addressing a broad spectrum of institutional and media-related aspects. Holubec’s comparative microstudy of memorial landscapes in the two cities offers a more convincing analysis than Kuczyńska-Zonik’s somewhat eclectic attempt at presenting a general overview of the situation in East-Central Europe. The co-editor frames his case study of the removal and destruction of memorial plaques and monuments in the post-socialist period in the context of the two cities’ fundamentally different memorial traditions. The more notable ideologization of urban space in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, he argues, is to a significant degree related to Catholic memorial culture in Bohemia and the destruction of monuments that accompanied the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. The third and final part of the book focuses on communist historical memory before 1989. Here, too, the individual case studies reveal a diverse range of interests and empirical approaches. Alongside a classical analysis of images of allies and enemies in Darina Volf ’s study of Czechoslovakia and an outline of a particular memorialization campaign related to the October Revolution in Oksana Klymenko’s study of the work of ‘Istpart’ in the Soviet Union, there are also contributions addressing negotiations of historical memory involving various factions and generations within communist parties. Jakub Szumski highlights how the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP) dealt with the highly troubling legacy of the ‘Solidarity revolution’ of 1980/81, while Monika Ciobanu considers the significance of the generation associated with Nicolae Ceausescu’s predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in the context of the historical memory emerging after his death in 1965. Agnieszka Mrozik also focuses on a particular generation, namely the female communist activists who were excluded from the PUWP as a result of the destalinization pursued by Władysław Gomułka after 1956. Her contribution is particularly impressive, not only because it offers a gender-related perspective but also because it focuses on one particular type of source, namely autobiographies. Mrozik notes that there was a “boom of life writing” (p. 192) in 1960s Poland, as she works closely with these sources to establish the extent to which nostalgic memories of revolution served to obscure the troubling legacy of Stalinism. At the same time, she argues that “the authors attempted critical intervention into contemporary reality at the moment they wrote these memoirs” (p. 195). It is source-based and clearly-structured contributions such as Mrozik’s that ensure that, overall, the volume offers a valuable contribution. Its significance lies in the fact that it challenges certain prevailing conceptions of communist historical memory, or at least offers a more complex perspective on it. History neither served solely as a repertoire of affirmative myths before 1989, nor can it be conceived exclusively from an anti-communist perspective after the Reviews 361 collapse of state socialism. What also becomes clear is that the Soviet Union did not exert total control over the European people’s republics. Indeed, it is evident that each socialist country had its own communist traditions that were incorporated into their particular historical memories. The volume is most convincing when it remains true to its aim of reflecting upon leftist memory in the historical context. Readers convinced by the rather general title that Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism will examine popular-cultural appropriations of state-socialism will be left disappointed. Indeed, the fact that the volume limits itself to a leftist perspective is precisely where its strengths lie. It is thus all the more regrettable that the editors did not pursue this approach consistently, with the middle part of the book bearing little connection to the issue of communist self-historicization. It is also a shame that many of the thematic strands outlined in the introduction are ultimately not reflected in the contributions. What forms did the historical memory of the workers’ movement take in the pre-war period outside the Soviet Union? What impact did the return of a future-oriented perspective in the context of the 1960s space programme have on the circulation of images of the past? What was the role of the former Trotskyists and Maoists from Western Europe who as Greens and Social-Democrats shape EU policy today? These are just some of the questions left open by this volume. It should therefore be hoped that it will serve as inspiration for further research. trans. Paul Vickers Sabine Stach