Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City by Christoph Mick (original) (raw)
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Submitted to Central European University, Department of History, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts , 2023
This research is an initial product of my attempt to look at the history of World War II, the Nazi occupation of Poland, and the Holocaust from a very local and very private perspective. I conducted it in a Ukrainian-Polish borderland, in Eastern Galicia, one of the bloodiest scenes of the period of 1939-1944, in a rural area – the terrain usually overlooked by WWII and Holocaust historians. In this work, I am debating the common approach to analysing events and personal actions of that period according to the ethnicity of the actors. By looking closely at several cases of Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, and Jews, I am demonstrating that the ethnic categories were often either non-existent for the actors or fluid and were often forcefully imposed rather than willingly accepted. The evidence I provide here mainly consists of written testimonies, mostly from the late 1940s, Polish, Ukrainian, Soviet, and Western German investigation and court documents from the same period, and oral interviews I collected in Ukraine and Poland in 2017-2019.
Eastern Galicia and the Anatomy of a Genocide
BOOK FORUM: OMER BARTOV, ANATOMY OF A GENOCIDE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A TOWN CALLED BUCZACZ (NEW YORK: SIMON AND SHUSTER, 2018), 2018
The persecution and extermination of the Jews in eastern Galicia – as well as in some other parts of Eastern Europe – has remained an under-researched area until today. Although, in the last few decades, ever more historians have started to investigate the Shoah in western Ukraine, we still do not have any detailed studies about such crucial aspects as the Ukrainian police, the role of the Ukrainian administration in the persecution and murder of the eastern Galician Jews, and the interactions and dynamics between Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, and Germans during the Holocaust. Omer Bartov’s study has not closed these huge research gaps, but it shows how some of them can be closed. One of the most remarkable aspects of his book is the micro-historical approach to a typical multiethnic eastern Galician town with a remarkable name.
Ab Imperio, 2017
Review of Christoph Mick, "Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City" (West La- fayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015), 445 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-55753-671-6.
2024
The aim of this seminar is to explore the history and memory of Galicia - a truly multicultural region in East Central Europe. Although artificially created by the Habsburg partition of Poland in 1772, Galicia has become an important reference point for different groups of people within and outside the region, and continues to inspire shared views of East Central Europe as a whole. In the first part of the semester, we will study the history of Galicia during the long 19th century: starting from the late 18th century, when Galicia became part of the Habsburg Empire, we will look at the main processes that shaped the political, economic and sociocultural history of this province until 1918. In the second part of the term, we will look at what Galicia meant to whom and why, across time and space, with a particular focus on Austrian, Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian memories. The range of topics covered in this seminar includes: class, collective imagination, heritage, migration, political mobilisation, public space, religion, violence and urban history.
Accepted Manuscript; Published Version: European Review of History 24 (2017), 2, 200-213 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2016.1257574)
The mobilization of the Galician home front was of particular importance for the Habsburg monarchy because of the strategic importance of this province during the First World War. The aim of this article is to take a closer look at the diverse political measures of the Habsburg political and military authorities in Galicia, which were often inconsistent with one another. It deals with propaganda as well as with oppressive measures and discriminatory policy towards certain nationalities. It argues that the political situation in Galicia, which was a national trouble spot in the decades before the First World War, as well as the fact that the province was a war zone, influenced these measures. Moreover, the article demonstrates the contribution of Galician protagonists both to the propagandistic mobilization for war and to the acts of violence. The article argues that the mobilization of the Galician home front was a failure. The propaganda efforts contrasted strongly with the brutal measures of the Austro-Hungarian army and with the growing national conflicts in Galicia. Instead of strengthening a sense of community in view of the common enemy, the war rather alienated the different Galician population groups from each other, but also from the Austrian state.
This article focuses on the disturbing emotions experienced by qualitative researchers who study traumatic historical events, particularly those that happened during World War II and Holocaust. Based on her own research experience in doing an oral history of interethnic relations and violence in Western Ukraine (Galicia) in WWII, the author examines her personal negative emotional response throughout the study and its impact on her participants in the research process in general. The objects of analysis in the article are several emotion-generating situations in the field, which created troubling feelings and emotions such as vulnerability, guilt, and shame. The article also provides some insights related to coping strategies with stress and trauma, which could be used by other researchers dealing with emotional difficulties in the field.