The Smellscape of Jewish Lublin––and its Afterlife (original) (raw)

The smell of onion and herring, the distinct hubbub, the crowded streets, these all dominate the narratives about Jewish Lublin before the Second World War. Sensory impressions are an important aspect of urban experience. "We see the city, we hear the city, but, above all, we smell the city" (Henshaw 2014, 4), thus, sticking our nose into the urban is a most rewarding way to understand how odors in particular shape the atmosphere of certain spaces and our emotional attitude towards them. Especially Lublin's predominately Jewish neighborhood Podzamcze was repeatedly addressed for its sensory peculiarities-and nuisances. This article starts with the olfactory perception of Jewish Lublin in prewar sources and asks after the postcatastrophic discourse about Podzamcze's (sensory) topography after the Shoah. In 1942/1943, under national socialist occupation, Lublin's Jewish neighborhood Podzamcze-then part of the ghetto-was cleansed from its inhabitants and radically dismantled. In 1954, this devastated area was made the main stage of the new Socialist regime to celebrate "Lublin of the Future." Podzamcze was to become a modern and spacious place, cleansed of the remnants of the old (Jewish) topography, symbol of backwardness, stench, and crowdedness. The article approaches Podzamcze as a postcatastrophic topography-postcatastrophe as a concept looking at the effects of the catastrophe of the Shoah (see Artwińska et al. 2015; Artwińska and Tippner 2017). Drawing largely on prewar and postwar local Polish newspapers 1 the article takes into special focus the official discourse evolving around the area in 1954 and follows the narrative about Podzamcze until the 1990s. Case Study Lublin: "Jewish Smells" and Urban Order Here Lublin serves as an exemplary case study, depicting the Polish pre and post Second World War situation, representing the troubled, yet in many ways 'ordinary' history of a medium-sized city in East Central Europe. Before the Second World War, Lublin had the typical ethnic structure of a city from that region, with over one-third of the city's population declaring themselves Jewish. 2 After 1918, the city was on its