After Nationalism? Urban History and East European History

Urban history in our field has taken many different forms in the past few decades. The first part of this article discusses how urban historians have provided new perspectives on a topic long dear to Eastern Europeanist hearts—nationalism. The second part will briefly survey other forms of urban history that have predominated within the field, many of which recall the questions and approaches first found in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna. The final part concludes with some thoughts about what the rise of urban history among Eastern Europeanists might mean for the future of our field. The discussion will remain limited to works written in English and those dealing with the modern era.

When attempting to provide graduate students a brief history of the study of nationalism in our field, I inevitably focus on Gary Cohen’s Politics of Ethnic Survival, originally published in 1981. ¹ I emphasize how the book marked a break from intellectual histories of nationalism as well as histories that portrayed nationalism, and the nationalization of individuals, as a seemingly inevitable process riding on the heels of modernization. Cohen’s book, similar to Miroslav Hroch’s Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, emphasized the situational nature of national identity. ² From that moment on, historians of the region, and especially of the Bohemian Lands, have not looked back. Now we all seem to talk about side-switching, amphibians, national indifference, and the hard work that national activists had to undertake to encourage people to embrace national identities. ³ Less appreciated, however, is just how important historical context—Prague from 1861 to 1914—was to Cohen’s work. This was a Prague undergoing massive social and economic upheaval that included, within a contained space, a potent mixture of associations, government institutions, language groups, and politicians. The city, in other words, created the conditions for the course of events that Cohen describes: the failure of German elites to attract the lower classes to their cause and the struggles among liberal Germans to fend off their völkisch counterparts. Just as importantly, the city provided a relatively limited geographical setting to study nationalism and national identity. It was a space small enough in scope to see, in better detail, how a wide variety of individuals embraced, rejected, or ignored nationalist overtures. And by looking at a city, rather than a territory that would later make up the borders of a nation-state, he avoided a teleological pull that would suggest that a Bohemia made up almost entirely of Czechs was the natural result of historical events.

Since 1989 the city has provided the setting for a number of other histories of nationalism that, like Cohen’s book, have sought to understand how people embraced national loyalties; demanded that others do the same; or sought to make their own choices about national loyalty, often for material reasons. Robert Nemes’s Once and Future Budapest, for example, studies, among other things, the moment at which urban elites embraced Hungarian nationalism in cafes, dance halls, and public spaces. Jeremy King’s Budweisers into Czechs and Germans not only shows how nationalism came to Budějovice but also details the stubborn persistence of Habsburg loyalties just as local city politics became nationalized. ⁴ Others have concentrated on nationalization not of people but of city spaces, ⁵ or how cities can reveal in their structures the many, often overlapping identities so common to city life. ⁶ The city, in short, has provided an ideal setting for scholars seeking to see nationalism up close while emphasizing individual agency and the complex, contingent nature of national identification. Yet that setting also provides an up-close look at the processes of modernization that created the context for those decisions.

Not all urban historians of Eastern Europe have nationalism as their primary focus. Indeed, in what appears to be part of a general trend in our field, questions related to the study of nationalism figure less prominently in recent research agendas. Still, research questions posed decades ago still resonate in the field of Eastern European urban history. I am thinking in particular of the remarkable legacy of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna, which was published in 1979 and continues to generate its own subfield of reactions and counterreactions among practitioners of Eastern European history. ⁷ One can hear echoes of Schorske’s magnificent chapter on the construction of the Ringstrasse among the many newer works that seek to understand how politics, culture, and nationalism are expressed through a city’s built environment. ⁸ Much of the most exciting work in this area has been done on the Communist era, where panel buildings, urban planning, and the creation of whole new cities has revealed much about regimes’ attempts to express ideology through the urban landscape. ⁹ Similarly, historians of the modern period have looked at how urban monuments have constituted an expression of political power and a specific interpretation of history. And like other built structures, monuments became a battleground for individuals and groups seeking to promote a certain view of history and the present. ¹⁰

One can also hear echoes of Schorske’s chapter on Georg von Schönerer, Karl Lueger, and Theodor Herzl in histories that trace out the emergence of political movements as they took form within urban contexts, reminding us how peculiar, local concoctions of ideas, peoples, and institutions can lead to political formations whose impact stretches far beyond municipal borders. ¹¹ More direct lines of descent can be found in the many wonderful studies that seek to reconstruct cultural moments and experiences present at the turn of the nineteenth century. ¹² Many have ventured beyond the educated elites, paying particular attention to the impact of modernization on the city’s inhabitants. In these works nationalism forms just one part of a story that includes poverty, filth, trams, female domestic workers, and the incorporation of suburbs. In his recent study of modern Cracow, Becoming Metropolitan, Nathaniel Wood states up front that modernization, but certainly not nationalism, will be the focus of his study. ¹³ Yet his and similar works complement nicely recent works of nationalism that emphasize the situational nature of national identities as well as the ability of people to switch national identities. Here other identities are put into play; situations and experiences unrelated to nationalism come into fuller view. National indifference makes even more sense when we have a clearer picture of people’s lives and concerns. ¹⁴

The wide range, and sheer number, of works on the urban history in Eastern Europe, of course, cannot be traced to two books. I have not mentioned, for example, the recent manifestations of that oldest of forms: the urban biography. ¹⁵ Nor has mention been made of the “blank spots” in our field. Little work has been done, for example, on the relationship between the city and nature or on the environmental impact that cities have had on the surrounding countryside. ¹⁶ That will certainly change. Indeed, many of the works cited above were, no doubt, just as influenced by contemporary trends in urban history as by Cohen’s and Schorske’s books. ¹⁷ Looking to the future, East Europeanists will certainly continue to draw from other fields while building upon our own traditions of urban history. This observation, in turn, suggests several reasons why the practice of urban history in Eastern Europe holds great promise for our field. Urban history reflects a shared interest in a type of geographical space, rather than a particular methodology or research question, yet urban historians have at their disposal an impressive toolbox of methodological approaches and research questions from which they can draw and then apply to their particular cases. Urban history invites comparisons of events, peoples, and cultures among cities in a way that can transcend regional specializations. And it has the potential, as seen above, to examine large forces and big structures within a context that provides for detail and complexity. Urban history, in other words, can reduce the scope of our inquiries—whether they be about nationalism, modernization, or something else—to a manageable size. Much, of course, can be lost by reducing the scale to the size of a city. Too often the city under consideration can seem like a world unto itself, which in turn isolates the study from larger historical questions. But as we look for ways to become more European and global, the study of the local, ironically, might prove to be one of our most promising alternatives.