Category Archives: Europe

by Joel | 30 July 2025 · 3:24 pm

Life in Poland’s Partitions, 1795

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 421-424:

Life under the three empires took on distinctly different forms. If regionalism was a problem earlier, it now threatened to become even more intractable. Although the three partitioning powers prided themselves on being enlightened states, each approached the new territories and new subjects differently. Thus, a new layer of regionalism was superimposed on the old ones. The newly acquired population was incorporated into each of the partitioned territories in different ways. Each empire was further diversified and internationalized—perhaps in ways even the partitioning powers had not anticipated. Likewise recall that, although the final partition of Poland came only in 1795, already since 1772 certain parts of the country had come under foreign rule, which left the territories further differentiated.

Prussia became a much more heterogeneous entity, although it sought to dilute the concentration of Poles in the newly acquired territories. The Prussian state took over the Crown lands, which it sold to German landowners; German bureaucrats took the place of Polish officeholders. No municipal self-rule or noble assemblies were allowed under Prussian rule. A Protestant power, Prussia also took over properties belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Religious issues complicated the picture. Prussia truly became a multiethnic and multidenominational state. It was faced with either dealing with, or doing away with, diversity.

Prussia eventually undermined the Polish nobles by taking away their privileges. The position of their peasants was strengthened. The position of Jews was changed beyond recognition, their corporate rights undone. Rather, Friedrich the Great delineated two types of Jews: those who were to assimilate and in the process receive civil rights and those who did not have these rights and would be expelled from the province. This facilitated a relatively rapid Germanization of the first group—certainly compared to the two other Central and East European empires.

The situation in Austria looked quite different. Under Maria Theresa and especially Joseph II, various reforms were implemented—reforms that could be considered enlightened. But under Francis I, scarred by the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic periods, reaction ensued. Seeking to centralize power, the Habsburgs took away various privileges of the Galician nobility. Indeed, many nobles suffered dreadfully under Austrian rule: if they were not able to provide proof of nobility—something that was difficult for many an old noble family fallen on hard times—they were reduced to the status of peasants. This déclassé nobility was clearly the worst off, although the burden of taxation reduced further nobles to penury. The peasants came to fare slightly better, as they were protected by legislation and the amount of time they spent working for the landlord was regulated. Jews were obliged to take German surnames and serve in the military (like members of all the estates), but their communities still had jurisdiction over religious matters. Although a staunchly Catholic power, Austria clearly did not trust its own population: witness the strong censorship of newspapers and other printed materials in the empire. The province would remain backward, socially as well as economically.

The territories that came under Russian rule—the most extensive of the lot—were the most ethnically diverse. The easternmost lands were inhabited by people we would now call Belarusians and Ukrainians (but which then were most likely termed Ruthenes or even Russians), Lithuanians, Tatars, and Jews. Poles were mainly noble landowners. It was Polish (Sarmatian) culture that had long radiated out through the entirety of the Commonwealth and that still carried weight.

Paradoxically, these lands witnessed little initially in the way of reforms. Even the old courts and laws were maintained. The nobles within the Russian Empire initially were not as inconvenienced as were nobles under Austrian and Prussian rule, except for the fact that Crown lands were taken over. By contrast, peasants found Russian rule more onerous: now classified as serfs, they were the chattel—that is, the personal property—of the landholders, who could do with them as they wished. Furthermore, they would eventually be subjected to Russia’s onerous military service: recruits were taken for a period of twenty-five years.

The biggest problem for the Russians related to religion. The imperial authorities would do away with the Uniate (Greek Catholic) religion in the 1830s, forcing Uniates to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. As the partitions provided Russia with her first real encounter with large Jewish populations, she decided to restrict them to a region that would become known as the Pale of Settlement; this swath of land was more or less coterminous with the boundaries of the former Commonwealth. Unlike their coreligionists elsewhere, Jews, thus, could not penetrate further into the heart of the empire, that is, into Russia proper.

Such was the starting point. It would not be the ending point. The arrangement ratified in 1795, and reaffirmed in 1797, proved less permanent than the partitioning powers might have imagined.

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Filed under Austria, Germany, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia

by Joel | 27 July 2025 · 6:48 am

Reconstructing Rothenburg

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 150-153, 162-163:

By establishing its place on the tourist map of Europe, Rothenburg ob der Tauber connected itself to an international network through which it built up a stock of admiration and affection. Although that was an intangible kind of capital, it turned out to be the saving of the enterprise. If John McCloy’s mother had not been one of the many foreigners who visited Rothenburg before the darkness closed over Europe in the 1930s, and took spell-casting pictures home with them, the whole of the town might have suffered the same fate that the American bombers visited on four-tenths of it.

One of the artists inspired by images of Rothenburg ob der Tauber was Adolf Hitler, who had initially hoped to pursue a career as a painter. On a visit there in 1934, a few weeks after adopting the title of Führer, he recalled how he had seen many pictures of Rothenburg in his youth, and had greatly enjoyed drawing the town himself. A few years later, he made funds available for the preservation of the town walls, stretches of which were in danger of collapse. His affection for Rothenburg was shared by the Nazi movement in general, for whom the ‘Germanest’ (‘deutscheste’) of towns became something of a pilgrimage destination.

The feeling was mutual. Rothenburgers took to Nazism even before the party took power. At the election in July 1932, when the Nazis became the party with the most seats in the Reichstag with 37 per cent of the national vote, they took 60 per cent of the vote in Rothenburg. After Hitler became Chancellor the following year, Rothenburgers flocked to join his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Two-thirds of the town’s population became members. Unlike Würzburg, whose Catholic traditions and associated political sympathies dampened enthusiasm for the radical new National Socialist movement, Rothenburg was a small Protestant town in a relatively poor part of Germany. In that respect it fitted the profile of Nazi-supporting localities, but it was more than merely typical. Rothenburg had a very special place in the landscape of the Third Reich.

That place was inscribed principally through the activities of the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organisation, which strove to instil National Socialist values in the German people through recreation and exercise. Kraft durch Freude – KdF for short – offered ideological tourist excursions to the town it described as ‘an everlasting witness to the glorious German history of the Middle Ages, a shining monument to German community in olden times’. Rothenburg became a theatre in which Nazi illusionists conjured the spectacle of an ideal folk community magically preserved within its walls, where modern Germans would believe they were ‘seeing a fairy tale of a long-gone golden age resurrected’, as the Nazi party newspaper put it. Among the steps that the town took to enhance the magic was the institution of a Christmas market, without which the fairy tale would not have been complete.

As well as providing affordable domestic holidays for Germans of modest means, KdF made a point of reaching out to members of the ‘Volk’ on the edge of the Reich or beyond its borders. The first contingents came from lands in the west. Under the peace settlements that followed the First World War, the Saar region had been placed under the control of the League of Nations. In 1935, voters in the territory opted to be reunified with Germany, by a majority of over 90 per cent. KdF transported Saarlanders to Rothenburg, where the organisation encouraged them to recharge their feelings of national pride and community. It also brought people from the Rhineland region, which was barred to military forces under international treaties. Hitler sent his troops into it the following year, to huge national acclaim.

From the opposite direction, a thousand Austrians came on a ceremonial day trip after their country was incorporated into the Reich in 1938, marching into the town from the railway station to be greeted by ranks of Nazis chanting ‘Sieg Heil’. They departed in the same fashion after seeing the town’s quintessentially Germanic sights, completing an occasion hailed by the local newspaper as the ‘deepest expression of connection between people of the same tribe and same blood’. Germans from the Sudetenland made a similar procession after the Reich seized the region from Czechoslovakia later that year.

The Reich’s revanchist ambitions further east were implicit in the organisation of visits from Danzig and the Memel territory. Danzig had been designated a Free City, kept separate from both Germany and Poland under the protection of the League of Nations, because it found itself in the corridor through Baltic Prussia that gave Poland access to the sea. Memelland was a strip of eastern Prussia that Germany had been obliged to give up under the Versailles Treaty in 1919; Hitler strong-armed the Lithuanian government into returning it in 1939. The symbolism of the trips was clear enough: the Reich had brought its people to the ideal German home town, and soon enough they would be living in the homeland as well, once its borders were extended to embrace them.

Rothenburg also offered the Nazi regime a means to project soft power abroad, in the form of the Shepherd Dancers, a group founded in 1911 to revive a local tradition on the basis of a historical claim dating back to 1517. They danced at the Albert Hall in London, and paraded through Hyde Park bearing the Third Reich’s swastika flag. Back home, they performed in the market square for crowds on excursions from the huge Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, less than two hours away by train. Although there was no question of imposing the standard Nazi urban ensemble – a grand avenue, a vast assembly space, a massive Party building – as Hubert Gross had planned to do in Würzburg, there was no need. Rothenburg was homely, but on a scale that tended to the monumental. Its houses’ proportions spoke of burgher prosperity; its main streets were straight and wide enough for marching columns. And if there was no space for the Nazi cohorts within the walls, they could always camp beneath them. The location was popular with the Hitler Youth, which at one point massed 1,400 of its members, drawn from more than 27 countries, in a tent city along the base of the town’s fortified perimeter.

…

One of [the town’s former Nazi mayor, Friedrich] Schmidt’s initiatives as a councillor was an attempt to revive the Christmas market, which had lapsed since its inception during his term as mayor in the 1930s. He was assisted in the bid by Ernst Unbehauen, the artist who had made the antisemitic ‘warning’ plaques that had been installed at the town’s gates….

A person would not have to be a fascist or an ultranationalist to agree with Unbehauen that brash modern advertisements should be kept off Rothenburg’s streets. Conservation societies in historic towns all over Europe would sympathise with his view and applaud his efforts. But in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, denying the twentieth century had a subtext that went beyond Unbehauen’s personal record as a Nazi and an antisemitic propagandist. A town that looked as though the twentieth century had not happened offered an enticing illusion to Germans who wanted to pretend that the century’s fourth and fifth decades had not taken place. Joshua Hagen, the American historian who has examined Rothenburg’s career as ‘the most German of towns’, observes that ‘in the 1950s and beyond it came to represent opportunities for relatively untroubled engagement with Germany’s past’. People could follow the town’s history as far as the twentieth century ‘and then fast-forward to 1950, because as the tourist guides will tell you, nothing happened. It was asleep, timeless, and nothing ever changed.’

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by Joel | 24 July 2025 · 1:29 pm

German vs. Polish War Damage

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 126-128, 130-131:

[“Bomber”] Harris believed that the bombing campaign against German cities, together with the Soviet struggle against Hitler’s forces in the east, would bring the war to an end in 1944, sparing the Western Allies from having to mount an invasion. The Ministry of Economic Warfare provided him with a table of a hundred German towns, compiled from Bomber’s Baedeker data, rating them according to their economic importance. He crossed them out one by one as his planes worked through the list. Although the campaigns did not have the effect that he had predicted, they continued after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, and were sustained almost up to the moment at which Germany finally surrendered.

During those last terrible months before the clock stopped at Stunde Null, Allied bombers made sure that they had left few German cities unvisited. The major targets had all been struck over and over again; minor potential targets now attracted increasing attention from the mission planners. With hindsight, speculative remarks in the Bomber’s Baedeker entry for Pforzheim read like a death sentence upon the Black Forest town and its inhabitants, who specialised in making jewellery and watches. ‘These industries were formerly carried out largely in the homes of the individual workers,’ the report observed, ‘and it may be said that almost every house in this city is a small workshop . . . As was the case in the 1914–1918 war, most of the factories and workshops of Pforzheim will have now been turned over to the manufacture of precision parts for instruments, small-arms components, fuzes, clockwork movements and similar products . . .’

In his post-war report on Bomber Command’s operations, Harris rewrote the Baedeker’s presumption into a statement of fact. As if the RAF’s reconnaissance aircraft could see through roofs and ceilings, the chief of Bomber Command asserted that ‘almost every house was a small workshop engaged in the production of instruments, small arms and fuzes’. Every house was therefore confirmed as a legitimate target, and so was everybody in it. The RAF bombed the town towards the end of February 1945, raising a firestorm. ‘Hardly a building remained intact,’ Harris claimed: the accepted figure for the extent of the destruction is 83 per cent. He noted that Pforzheim had a population of 80,000, but not that the raid killed 17,600 of those inhabitants. It was the third highest toll from an Allied raid in Europe, after the firestorms that left 18,500 dead in Hamburg and 25,000 in Dresden. The scale of the whole campaign is indicated by the estimate of 350,000 for the total death toll.

In hindsight, looking back along a timeline in which the war against the Third Reich ended in May, the attacks carried out against modest German towns in February and March seem to defy any strategic justification. Pforzheim and Würzburg were the most horrific instances of bombing that was, in Richard Overy’s measured judgement, ‘evidently punitive in nature and excessive in scale’. At the time it may have looked different to many on the Allied side, after the Western Allies’ slow progress towards German territory and the Reich’s deployment of new weapons, including the V-2 ballistic missiles that represented a new technology for bombing cities. The first American troops did not manage to get across the Rhine until early March, little more than a week before the climax of the British raids on Würzburg. In January, Britain’s Bombing Directorate had advocated inducing ‘a state of terror by air attack’. Hitherto, the RAF had euphemistically talked of attacking ‘morale’. Now the word ‘terror’ was slipping into the Allies’ usage, as they cast about for ways to win the war.

Even with hindsight, and even with decades in which to reflect upon how to locate right and wrong in the history of the air war against Germany, the campaign poses questions that are intractable even when they are answered. The period of reflection seemed to last until almost the end of the century, and then the books began to appear. Peter Johnson wrote his memoirs, subtitled Reflections and Doubts of a Bomber, which were published in 1995. The writer W.G. Sebald produced a series of essays that came out in 1999 under the title Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature). Lighting his argument with firestorm scenes, he criticised his fellow German authors for having failed to write about the bombing war in a satisfactory fashion, or at all. Then, in 2002, came Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire), the best-seller that thrust the Bombenkrieg, and German suffering, to the forefront of national public debate about the Second World War. Written by a freelance scholar-journalist, Der Brand was not an argument about morality or a detached academic summation of events in their broader context. It was a literary enactment of agony, its testimony unbearably eloquent, and a lament for loss. To describe it as repetitious is not to deprecate its narrative structure, but to recognise the depiction of similar horrors in city after city as an assertive act of remembrance. Professional historians criticised its standards of scholarship, while acknowledging its literary power. Pushing its readers onward through inferno after inferno, Der Brand insisted that their gaze should be fixed upon the lives consumed in the fires, and the agonies in which those lives ended.

…

Across the eastern border, by contrast, Germany’s actions had created a moral framework of invulnerable simplicity for the Poles. In Warsaw the narrative was grand, tragic and unequivocal. It was easy to put together a story of urbicide planned from the start of the occupation, or even earlier (on the basis of a rumour that Friedrich Pabst had been appointed as the future Chief Architect of Warsaw more than a month before the German invasion). The so-called Pabst plan made a compelling narrative element, although in reality it may have been little more than a vanity project for a peripheral regime functionary from Würzburg. Poles embraced the story that emerged from the capital’s ruins, a sublime arc of victimhood and valour, as the story of the nation. Warsaw’s tragedy was Poland’s tragedy in its most concentrated form, reaching a peak of intensity in the Old Town’s passion of resistance, devastation and martyrdom. As it rebuilt its capital city, the whole nation created an example to be followed throughout the country, in spirit if not necessarily in form. The reconstruction of each individual Polish town or city was understood to be part of the greater national project.

No such understanding was available to Germans, for whom the very idea of a national story was fundamentally compromised. Jörg Arnold notes that Der Brand rarely even speaks of ‘Germans’ at all: ‘the locality, not the nation, is the focal point of reference’. That was the position in which the people of German cities found themselves after Stunde Null. Each town had to work out a story of its own upon which to rebuild itself.

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by Joel | 21 July 2025 · 5:40 pm

Changing Faces of Lublin’s Old Town

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 220-223:

Lublin has a long history as a site for key moments in the formation of Polish states. A congress of nobles welcomed Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania there in 1386, as he made his way to his royal wedding in Kraków, and proclaimed him King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland. Jogaila returned the favour by granting a range of privileges that enabled Lublin to develop as a centre of trade between the two countries he and Jadwiga had united through their marriage. The treaty of union that inaugurated the Polish-Lithuanian Republic was signed at Lublin’s castle in 1569.

By that time, the urban kernel later known as the Old Town was taking shape on the high ground opposite, as a sturdy cluster of churches and townhouses arranged around a market square and an axis running from the Grodzka Gate on the eastern side to the western Kraków Gate. With an area of ten hectares, the walled town was the same size as its Warsaw counterpart. Meanwhile the space between the castle and the town was beginning to fill with buildings, as the Jewish quarter developed on the inferior land known as Podzamcze, meaning ‘under the castle’. Jews had been prohibited from settling within the city walls in 1535, after Christian merchants objected to the competition they introduced.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the district below the castle boasted one of the most important Hebrew printing houses in the country, and provided the base for the principal Jewish authority in Poland. Around the turn of the nineteenth century it became a major centre of Hasidic Judaism, after the legendary spiritual leader Yaakov Yitzhak haLevi Horowitz took up residence on Podzamcze’s main street. He was known as the Seer of Lublin, because of his reputed ability to see into the future and across the world, and he bestowed a magical aura on the Jewish Town that remained as his posthumous legacy after his death there in 1815.

As the century went on, however, many of Lublin’s Jews were drawn to modernity instead of mysticism. Their local horizons were opened up in 1862, when they gained full citizenship and the city abolished restrictions on where they were permitted to live. ‘Through Brama Grodzka, by which they had waited for so many years, they entered Lublin again,’ wrote the historian Meir Balaban, ‘renting and buying properties for shops and homes, first on Grodzka Street and later also on the Market Square.’ The poorer incomers gradually found niches throughout almost the whole of the Old Town, which had fallen into decline after being abandoned by its wealthier residents. Those who could afford it made instead for the up and coming streets around the city’s spacious central avenue. They resembled their Christian neighbours in their dress and lifestyle, while the old Jewish quarter became even more of a world apart.

That world disappeared from the face of the earth during the Second World War. After the German invaders took control of Lublin in 1939, they ejected Jews from the townhouses around the central avenue, forcing them back to the old Jewish quarter. The Jews of the Old Town were sent there in April 1941, after the occupiers turned the former Jewish Town into a ghetto, which they liquidated a year later. Some 26,000 Jews from the Lublin region were killed at the Bełżec extermination camp, almost all of them upon arrival. Others were sent to a secondary ghetto on the outskirts of the city, Majdan Tatarski, and eventually to the nearby Majdanek camp. The Lublin extermination ended with Aktion Erntefest, Operation Harvest Festival, in November 1943. Over two days, SS squads and German police shot 42,000 Jews at Majdanek and two other camps in the region. At the outbreak of the war, some 43,000 Jews had been living in the city, out of a total population of around 120,000. Almost none of them were left alive by the war’s end.

Little was left of the Jewish Town either. The Germans razed much of it to the ground, as they did in Warsaw’s Jewish district. There, the destruction had begun as a tactic used by the occupiers in their efforts to suppress the Ghetto Uprising. In Lublin, the Germans had already emptied the houses, which they condemned on the grounds of the buildings’ poor construction standards and states of repair. Their underlying purpose was to erase the remains of Jewish presence, which in that locality dated back four hundred years.

The main street disappeared altogether, and with it the form that the Jewish settlement had found in Lublin’s topography. It had previously run along the base of the slope below the castle, its buildings jostling for space and concealing the lie of the land. Tumbledown shacks and solid edifices alike were gone, as was the warren of alleys into which Alfred Döblin had ventured. One unintended consequence was to give the Red Army a clear field of fire in front of the castle for its artillery when it fought its way into Lublin in July 1944.

Three days after the Soviet forces captured the city, the new authorities installed the provisional body that became known as the Lublin Committee, and which formed the germ of the regime that eventually became the Polish People’s Republic. This was the third key moment in Lublin’s history as a site of state formation, initiating a drive to build socialism on Soviet lines that was led by a man with local roots. Bolesław Bierut was born near Lublin and went to school in the city. His early work experience there included a job as a bricklayer’s assistant, and his presence was felt in the reconstruction of Lublin when he headed the country during its Stalinist period.

The site with the most obvious potential for symbolically loaded redevelopment was the barren plain, overlooked by the castle and the Old Town, that now lay where the main street of the Jewish district had previously been. A quadrant had been spared on the far side, where the tenement houses were in relatively good condition, and housed ethnic Poles who had been displaced by the creation of the Majdan Tartaski ghetto. Apart from that, the area formerly occupied by the Jewish Town was emptier than it had been since the Middle Ages.

For nearly ten years, the authorities’ efforts were concentrated up above, within the castle, and were devoted not to reconstruction but to the suppression of armed resistance. The castle had itself been rebuilt in the 1820s after a long twilight of ruin, its rectangular mass clad in a stern neo-Gothic facade appropriate to its function as a prison. Having served to incarcerate anti-czarist insurgents in the nineteenth century, communists between the wars and resistance fighters during the German occupation, it now held anti-communist partisans, many of whom had previously been anti-Nazi partisans. More than 30,000 prisoners were confined there during the new regime’s first decade in power. Death sentences were carried out in the cellar of a building that stood by the castle’s arched front entrance.

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by Joel | 20 July 2025 · 6:05 pm

Changing Wilno into Vilnius

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 179-183:

The transformation of pre-war Wilno into post-war Vilnius was effected by removing those of its inhabitants who called it Wilno, the Poles who had constituted the majority of its population. Their departure followed the removal by genocide of the second largest ethnic group in the city, the Jews, who called it Vilna or Vilne. The same sequence took place in the other borderland city that Poles had held dear, known today as Lviv, which had also been inhabited largely by ethnic Poles and Jews before the war.

Vilnius’s reconstruction was principally a population project and only secondarily a rebuilding programme, especially in the Old Town. Czesław Miłosz described the pre-war city as an enclave of negative ambiguity, ‘neither Polish nor not-Polish, neither Lithuanian nor not-Lithuanian’. The aim of the reconstruction was to remove that ambiguity, remaking Vilnius as a city that was definitely Lithuanian and very definitely not Polish. It succeeded in establishing the city’s Lithuanian identity, but had to make do with concealing the ambiguities endemic to the Old Town and the surrounding districts.

Until the Nazi occupation, the heart of Vilnius’s character as a multi-ethnic city was a triangular district adjoining the central space over which the town hall presides. The historic Jewish quarter was not beyond the walls – unlike in many European cities, such as Kraków, whose Jewish residents had been sent to live in the separate township of Kazimierz at the end of the fifteenth century – but right in the middle of the city. A larger Jewish neighbourhood spread out from it across the western side of the Old Town. By 1939, according to one estimate, the central district was home to 75,000 people, of whom 35,000 were Jewish.

Many of that fraction were crammed into the overcrowded and insanitary alleys of the original quarter, which was an object of fascination for outsiders and a symbol of identity for Vilna’s Jews. During the First World War, a boy named Moyshe Vorobeychik often happened upon German soldiers painting and sketching scenes in the quarter. Some of them were notable artists in civilian life. Vorobeychik himself became a photographer, under the name Moï Ver, and produced an avant-garde album based on one of the Jewish streets. The project represented a desire shared by other young Jewish artists in the city, to innovate and embrace modernity while retaining their cultural roots. They formed a group called Yung Vilne, whose emblem was a young tree growing above one of the old Jewish quarter’s signature arches.

Max Weinreich, an eminent linguist and scholar of Yiddish, felt similarly about the relationship between learning and place. He considered that modern Jewish research needed an environment like that of Vilna, where ‘the houses and stones retain a memory’ of its Jewish cultural heritage. Weinreich was a leading figure in the YIVO institute of Yiddish studies, which continued a tradition of intellectual enterprise that had made Vilna a centre of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, in the nineteenth century. YIVO’s headquarters opened in 1933 on a broad modern street at a distance from the city centre, but the emotional heart of Jewish Vilna was still embedded in the sclerotic alleys of the old quarter. The enclave retained its allure for outsiders too, despite the warning in a guidebook by a Polish professor about ‘the typically eastern slovenliness of the inhabitants of this anti-hygienic district and its unbearable fug, which makes it impossible for a cultured European to visit these alleys, especially on hot summer days’.

After the Germans took control of Vilnius in 1941, they confined its Jewish population to two ghettos, one in the old quarter and one in the newer neighbourhood. The former was the smaller of the two, holding 11,000 people. It was liquidated after a month, in October 1941, leaving 29,000 people in the larger one, which was maintained until September 1943 and used as a source of labour. The ghetto inmates’ tasks included the construction of a model of Vilnius, which was produced by a team of thirty architects, engineers, draughtsmen and artists. They were forced to create a representation in miniature of the city from which they had been excluded, complete with the tiny zone where they were imprisoned in the middle of it. Four of them are known to have survived the war, but they were rare exceptions. The great majority of Vilnius’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, many of them shot by squads of Lithuanian volunteers at a killing ground in woodland outside the city. Several hundred managed to stay alive until the end of the German occupation, and a few thousand escaped – many of them involuntarily, deported by the previous communist authorities – into the depths of the Soviet Union. Nearly all of the survivors subsequently emigrated to the United States, Israel and other distant lands. Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, became an exile memory.

The dissolution of Wilno began with an attempt by Polish forces to recapture it. In July 1944, as the Red Army pushed westwards, the Polish underground state launched a nationwide operation to liberate cities and territories ahead of the Soviet advance. The battles of July were the overtures to the nine-week tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising, which began on the first day of August. Wilno’s political and emotional importance to the Polish cause was expressed in the codename for the Armia Krajowa (AK) assault against the city’s German occupiers: Ostra Brama, the Polish name for the Gate of Dawn. A grand and reverent window is set above the arch on the inside of the gate; through it an image of the Virgin Mary, clad in gilded silver, presides over the street below. The site is one of the most intense foci of the Marian cult at the heart of Polish Catholicism, and therefore of Polishness as it is orthodoxly conceived, venerating Mary as ‘Queen of Poland’. Thousands of silver votive offerings attest to its devotees’ faith that the image has miraculous powers. It is said that the first of the offerings came from a Polish-Lithuanian commander who led his men through the gate in an assault on the Swedes who occupied the city in 1702.

As a precedent, it was hardly auspicious. Instead of ejecting the occupiers with supernatural support from the Mother of God, the attackers were checked and forced to retreat. The assault in 1944 also lacked the miraculous intervention that would have been needed to achieve its double objective of driving out the Germans and keeping out the Soviets. After failing to overcome the German defences on the first day, and struggling to communicate with their comrades inside the city, Polish units operated alongside the Soviet forces. In the latter stages of the battle, AK troops fought their way through the Old Town to capture the city hall, and raised the Polish flag over the castle tower. It was quickly taken down by their inimical Soviet allies, who replaced it with a red one.

After six days, the Germans were defeated, and on the day after that, the Soviet leadership ordered the disarming of the AK soldiers. The ensuing arrests of Polish officers heralded a programme of repression that saw thousands detained in Vilnius as the year went on. That sent an ominous message to the Poles who comprised most of the city’s surviving population. In September, the Soviet and Polish authorities agreed terms for the removal of ethnic Poles from Lithuania to territory within Poland’s new borders. It was to be a notionally voluntary exodus, not an expulsion. Lithuanian Poles were sent away from their homes and birthplaces in railway goods trucks, but they were not herded onto the trains at gunpoint. The official term was ‘evacuation’, which suggested that the Poles were being given aid – and that they were under threat.

Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog’s (1968) Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change was one of my most memorable textbooks during my early graduate work in linguistics, in a class taught by one of my most memorable professors, Derek Bickerton.

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by Joel | 18 July 2025 · 4:42 pm

Poland’s Last Royal Election, 1764

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 366-367:

[T]he outcome of Polish elections in the eighteenth century had hardly been a matter of domestic choice. The second Wettin himself owed his election to the heavy hand of the foreign coalition that saw fit to back him.

In this regard, the election of 1764 would be similar to the election of 1734. Russian troops would once again facilitate the promotion of the candidate favored by Tsarina Catherine II. The tsarina’s interference in Commonwealth affairs would come at a higher price this time, despite the fact that the other candidates put forward—the aged Hetman Branicki and an underage Wettin—were hardly attractive. Still, Catherine would have to finance the purchase of votes so as to overcome the opposition of the republicans. Taking no chances, August Czartoryski organized an armed confederation that, disallowing the use of the liberum veto, would guide the Convocation Seym to completion and even introduce some reforms. Ultimately these developments caused the leaders of the opposition, including Branicki, to flee the country.

Who was Catherine’s candidate? Like the candidate advanced by the magnate-led republicans, he was a Piast, if one with a rather unusual major qualification. Stanisław Poniatowski was the son and namesake of the recently deceased former leader of the Family. Yet his claim to fame was not solely—or even primarily—because he was related to the rich, powerful, and influential Czartoryski brothers, his uncles, who had allied themselves with Russia to secure the succession. Rather, Poniatowski attained the crown thanks to what turned out to be a happy accident: when he was in Saint Petersburg in the years 1756–1758, he had been the lover of the young wife of Grand Duke Peter—Catherine, herself.

Nearly a decade later, Catherine saw him as the perfect pawn in her game of controlling what happened in her increasingly impotent and unruly neighbor: any reforming to be done was to come at her instigation. She envisaged the Commonwealth of Both Nations [Poland and Lithuania] as a vassal state, a well-run vassal state. The tsarina’s selection of Poniatowski was supported by Friedrich II, who nonetheless preferred to keep the Commonwealth the way it was, weak and ineffectual. It was thought that Poniatowski, who incidentally had no wealth of his own (after his father’s death he was supported by his cousins) and who held only the amusing title of Lithuanian Master of the Pantry, would be a malleable and subservient Piast.

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by Joel | 17 July 2025 · 12:52 pm

Poland’s Silver Age Ends

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 329-330:

The seventeenth century had proven a mixed bag for the Commonwealth. It began on a relatively high note, with the reign of Zygmunt III Vasa that ushered in the so-called Silver Age. Mid-century, however, the Commonwealth nearly imploded, wracked by devastating invasions, civil war, and the loss of left-bank Ukraine. The country’s recovery from the [Swedish] Deluge, although noteworthy, was only partial. The nobility clung ever more tightly to its cherished Golden Freedoms and rejected anything that smacked of political reform, particularly if it might lead to a strengthening of the monarch’s position within the country. Even the triumphant, world-historical victory of Sobieski and his forces at Vienna—the high point of the century—did more for Western Christendom than for the Commonwealth itself.

The final election of the seventeenth century did not lead to the confirmation of a new Piast (or native Sarmatian) dynasty. Despite his efforts, King Jan III Sobieski proved unable to secure for his sons the Polish succession. To the contrary, the election of 1697 would mark a reversal of recent policy, which since the Deluge had given preference to candidates of noble Piast heritage. From the vantage point of hindsight, an interesting pattern emerges. Consider the elections both preceding and following the triplet of Vasa reigns. The first two elections, limited to foreign candidates, put one regrettable (Valois) and one memorable (Batory) candidate on the Polish throne. The anti-foreign backlash following the abdication of Jan Kazimierz Vasa (which marked the end of the Polish Vasa dynasty) put two Piasts (native candidates) on the Polish throne: once again, one regrettable (Wiśniowiecki) and one memorable (Sobieski) candidate.

Despite the fact that Sobieski not only had significant military victories under his belt but also had fathered sons who could contend for the throne, the electoral pendulum swung once again—out of their reach….

This clear rejection of the Sobieski heir—and, by extension, all candidates of Polish/Sarmatian noble descent—opened the doors wide to foreign involvement. This time, the results of the election ended up demonstrating to what extent the Commonwealth elections could be used in the power struggle between the various major European players.

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by Joel | 11 July 2025 · 5:48 am

Electing a King of Poland, 1573

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 210-212:

The interest in the election of 1573 was palpable. This was not only an opportunity to become king of the largest country in Europe. Freed of all dynastic constraints by the death of the last Jagiellon, the nobles of the federative state could elect any ruler they chose. The playing field, thus, was as level as it might ever be. This moment in Polish history represented an unparalleled opportunity for an ambitious royal foreigner to expand, in exponential fashion, his influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, instead of a military campaign, there was a political campaign to be fought. And what a campaign it was! The curiosity factor itself must have been great, given that this was the first election of its kind. To borrow a metaphor from a Polish nobleman who would participate years later in the election process, the period of interregnum was a courtship dance: the Commonwealth the attractive bride, and the candidates from various countries her suitors. Each strove to make a positive impression on the father.

The Rules of the Game

Yet the matter was not that simple. Making a good impression was not entirely under the control of any given suitor, and the choice of ruler was not a personality contest. The foreign candidates for Polish king were not even to enter the territory of the Commonwealth, let alone campaign. Nor could domestic candidates be present at the election field. This was a move introduced by Jan Zamoyski during this first election—a move that resulted in the elimination of conniving magnates from consideration. Envoys would campaign, as it were, on their behalf.

There nonetheless were various ways to make an impression—some within the control of the individual candidate, some beyond. Some candidates in 1573, such as the Habsburgs, were not above trying to buy votes—nor were some nobles above benefiting from this; “wining and dining, and making promises” would become part and parcel of Commonwealth elections. In contrast to past elections elsewhere in Europe, however, it would not suffice to win over the most influential individuals, the senators—each of whom represented powerful interests within the country as a result of the offices held—or even the parliamentarians/members of the estates. Those could be numbered in the dozens—or at most, hundreds. Here (thanks again to Zamoyski, who pushed for the king to be elected viritim [in person]), one had to make an impact on a much larger, fluid assembly comprised for the most part of rank-and-file nobles. These were nobles who cared to exercise the right bestowed on them and help decide who would rule the country, but who may or may not have had much experience in governance outside of the local seymiks.

In a way, the noble collectivity that convened during the interregnum resembled more a whole front porch’s worth of shotgun-wielding relatives than a genteel father. The prospect of an election drew some forty thousand nobles to the environs of Warsaw in April 1573. Astride their steeds, they assembled on and around an enormous field, resembling nothing more than the site of a medieval chivalric tourney. The central field, where the palatine and regional delegates convened, was marked off by a ditch and a stockade fence. The masses of noble electors gathered along its perimeter; information was relayed back and forth between center and periphery, allowing those gathered to hear the various reports on the candidates. A large wooden building stood at the end of the field. Its purpose was to protect from the elements the collected paper results of the electoral process.

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by Joel | 10 July 2025 · 4:58 am

Poland-Lithuania’s Golden Age

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 166-169:

That Poland-Lithuania was able to rein in the natural inclination of monarchs to seek absolute power was partly the result of the country’s unique political heritage and traditions and partly the result of a unique period of efflorescence, one reflected not only in the degree to which Renaissance ideas penetrated the polity but also in the economic well-being that accompanied the Golden Age….

This Golden Age was no misnomer. Not that Polish miners had suddenly discovered a rich vein of gold. The market for gold and silver bullion was dominated by Spain, whose recent penetration of the New World had uncovered vast new supplies of these precious ores. Poland-Lithuania turned out to have ample reserves of a resource that was in great demand elsewhere in the world: grain.

The particular world conjuncture of the late fifteenth century suddenly upped the ante for the grain trade. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century (which, incidentally, never made its way to Poland) had a significant effect on the economy of the countries in Western Europe, which upon rebounding shifted from agricultural production to animal husbandry. The population increase in the growing cities of the West, combined with the conscious decision to raise sheep for wool instead of planting seeds for grain meant that food was at a premium—a situation reflected in the so-called price revolution, which suddenly made it exceedingly profitable to engage in the export of staple foods.

It so happened that Poland-Lithuania was perfectly poised to take advantage of this situation. Not only did these lands have ample fields of grain. They now could profit in full from exporting their grain surplus via the Baltic. How? Because Poland-Lithuania now had an outlet to the sea. In earlier centuries, the Teutonic Knights had dominated the Baltic Sea coast and, with it, all sea-bound trade. This changed in the mid-fifteenth century when the population of Royal Prussia—including cities such as Gdańsk and Elbląg—opted for Polish rule. One long (thirteen-year) war and peace treaty later, Royal Prussia became part of Poland-Lithuania. After the mid-fifteenth century, the Teutonic Knights had to content themselves with the less fertile and less developed lands to the east; and even those lands, known after 1525 as Ducal Prussia, became a fief of the Crown of Poland.

In exchange for their allegiance, the inhabitants of Royal Prussia were given several important political and economic privileges. These included the right to their own regional parliament (the Prussian estates), municipal self-government for the cities, the right to trade everywhere in the vast country, and exemption from any additional tolls on the Vistula. The region’s incorporation into Poland-Lithuania, thus, had the potential to bring much benefit to the state. Gdańsk merchants could contract for Polish grain, and those supplying the grain had recourse to the growing world market for their staples, the easiest commodity for a large lowland country to produce. The result was that in the sixteenth century Poland became the main supplier of grain to Europe. Each fall, tons of golden grain—oats and rye, wheat and barley—were shipped to markets far and wide. Whereas in the year 1490, around twenty thousand tons of rye were exported, for example, nearly a century later (in 1587), the figure had risen to around seventy-one thousand tons.

Some of the grain went to destinations within the Baltic region—to places such as Lübeck or Copenhagen, Stockholm or Riga. The other (larger) half sailed through the sound. Some of the grain ended up not only in Amsterdam but also in places such as Setubal or Faro in Portugal, or even all the way to the Mediterranean.

Among the greatest consumers of Polish grain were the Dutch. Those mighty world traders hailing from a tiny waterlogged flatland could no longer feed themselves. Gdańsk itself was responsible for half of Amsterdam’s Baltic trade. But the Dutch were hardly the only foreigners present in the port Gdańsk. Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Englishmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, all traveled to this Baltic entrepôt in search of what Poland-Lithuania could supply. They found a sea of warehouses bursting with rye, wheat, and other grains as well as fibers (flax and hemp), forest goods (wax, honey, potash, lumber), even salted beef.

All this earned the Gdańsk merchants and their Polish suppliers a pretty penny. In the early years of this increased Baltic trade, a foreigner noted what he observed during the annual two-week long fair in Gdańsk, which began on Saint Dominic’s feast day (August 4). He saw over 400 ships arrive in the port. Yet their holds, albeit awaiting the harvest of grain, were hardly empty. They had brought to the shores of Poland-Lithuania all manner of luxury items: French wines; Spanish olive oil, lemons, preserves, and fruits; silks and other fine cloths; Portuguese spices; English cloth and tin. Reportedly the first eight days of the fair were spent loading the boats of the foreigners with Polish-Lithuanian wares, the next eight with selling luxury items (some clearly of global provenance) to the Poles. Business was booming. By mid-century, the historian Marcin Kromer was reproaching his compatriots in the Kingdom of Poland for being obsessed with luxury and splendor, and for adorning themselves in foreign fabrics and exotic leathers, in silks and purples, silver, gold, pearls, and gemstones.

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by Joel | 7 July 2025 · 6:10 am

Mazovia (with Warsaw) Joins Poland

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 146-149:

Zygmunt’s reign did bring many positive developments, however. One important accomplishment was the ultimate incorporation of Mazovia (with its ducal capital of Warsaw) into the Crown of Poland. Regardless how odd this may seem to contemporary readers, Warsaw—despite its central location and later claims to fame—was not yet fully a part of the realm. Since the fourteenth century, Mazovia had been a fief of Poland, controlled by a branch of the old Piast princely dynasty. Bit by bit, the Crown of Poland had acquired pieces of that territory; yet it was only after the death of the last Mazovian prince, Janusz III, in 1526 that the process of incorporation was completed.

For a Polish province, Mazovia was in many ways atypical. The duchy had long eschewed battle with the Teutonic Knights to its immediate north and even maintained good trade relations with them. As of the late fourteenth century, Mazovians had played an important role in facilitating the trade of timber and naval stores coming to Baltic ports via the Narew, Bug, and Vistula Rivers. The duchy likewise assisted the transit trade of furs, wax, and honey from Lithuania as well as cattle from Volhynia. After 1500, Mazovians expanded their activities to include the grain trade. As for the social composition of the duchy, it boasted a preponderance of nobles—certainly vis-à-vis Poland-Lithuania as a whole. Some 20 percent of the population claimed a noble patent—quite a large number, though to be sure most of these were impoverished soldier-nobles. Warsaw had a provincial feel, although in the sixteenth century it was beginning its ascent, in part thanks to trade.

[It sounds as if Poland may have acquired its own equivalents of the Prussian Junker class when it incorporated Masovia into the Crown of Poland.–J.]

Although King Zygmunt managed to incorporate the remaining pieces of Mazovia into the Crown, he was less successful in pressing state and dynastic interests in the region of the Baltic Sea, this despite a very real occasion to do so. For a war fought against the Teutonic Order in 1519–1521 brought the Knights to their knees—literally. One of the most famous images in Polish history dates from 1525, the so-called Prussian Homage. A triumphant view of this grand event was painted in 1882 by the nineteenth-century Polish artist Jan Matejko, whose colorful brushstrokes lavishly rendered the scene of the former grand master of the Teutonic Knights, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, kneeling before the Polish king and publicly swearing his fealty.

Yet such a rosy view of the event—although attractive to Matejko’s contemporaries, who took especial pleasure in seeing Prussians bowing down before the Poles, even if only in the deep historical past—was misleading. Much more could have been achieved than simply having Albrecht von Hohenzollern kneel before the Polish king (who was, after all, his uncle) and resign himself to the status of subordinate. What could have marked the end of Prussia as an independent entity—had Zygmunt pursued the fight further—instead gave little Prussia a new lease on life. Recall that part of Prussia had already been incorporated into the Crown by Zygmunt’s father. This was the so-called Royal Prussia, which had sought to break away from the hold of the Teutonic Knights and turned to the Polish king for help.

What went wrong, then? Although it was a Polish fief, in this moment Prussia was permitted to undergo a notable change. No longer to be run by the Teutonic Knights, it was transformed by Albrecht von Hohenzollern-Ansbach (the aforementioned nephew of Zygmunt) into a secular state. Henceforth the last grand master of the Teutonic Order would be known as Duke of Prussia, and his successors would have hereditary rights in the lands formerly held by the Order. Not only that: the Prussia of Albrecht von Hohenzollern simultaneously embraced the views promulgated by Martin Luther, who by nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517 initiated a movement that would forever change the face of Christian Europe. This was the Protestant Reformation. Close to Martin Luther himself, Albrecht became—with Zygmunt’s permission—the first territorial Lutheran ruler and Prussia became the first Protestant state in Europe.

That this should occur without bloodshed or upheaval was in part due to Zygmunt the Old’s willingness to approve this amazing transformation of the former arch-Catholic polity—in part to keep Ducal Prussia from moving into the orbit of the Holy Roman Empire. To be sure, in the Treaty of Kraków of 1525—the first European treaty between a Catholic and a Protestant state—Zygmunt and Albrecht agreed that Ducal Prussia would come fully under Polish control on the extinction of Albrecht of Hohenzollern’s line. That only a generation later a different king would, in a pinch, exchange his hereditary rights to succession for military assistance is but one of the fateful missteps that would haunt Polish history for centuries to come, even if it could not be foreseen in 1525.