When Austria annexed Galicia during the first partition of Poland in 1772, the province's capital, Lemberg, was a decaying Baroque town. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Lemberg had become a booming city with a modern urban and, at the same time, distinctly Habsburg flavor. In the process of the "long" nineteenth century, both Lemberg's appearance and the use of public space changed remarkably. The city center was transformed into a showcase of modernity and a site of conflicting symbolic representations, while other areas were left decrepit, overcrowded, and neglected. Habsburg Lemberg: Architecture, Public Space, and Politics in the Galician Capital, 1772–1914 reveals that behind a variety of national and positivist historical narratives of Lemberg and of its architecture, there always existed a city that was labeled cosmopolitan yet provincial; and a Vienna, but still of the East. Buildings, streets, parks, and monuments became part and parcel of a complex set of culturally driven politics.

Catherine Horel has undertaken a comparative analysis of the societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy as represented in twelve cities: Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste, and Zagreb. By purposely selecting these cities, the author aims to counter the disproportionate attention that the largest cities in the empire receive. With a focus on the aspects of everyday life faced by the city inhabitants (associations, schools, economy, and municipal politics) the book avoids any idealization of the monarchy as a paradise of peaceful multiculturalism, and also avoids exaggerating conflicts. The author claims that the world of the Habsburg cities was a dynamic space where many models coexisted and created vitality, emulation, and conflict. Modernization brought about the dissolution of old structures, but also mobility, the progress of education, the explosion of associative life, and constantly growing cultural offerings.

Urban Multilingualism in East-Central Europe: The Polish Dialect of Late-Habsburg Lviv makes the case for a two-pronged approach to past urban multilingualism in East-Central Europe, one that considers both historical and linguistic features. Based on archival materials from late-Habsburg Lemberg––now Lviv in western Ukraine––the author examines its workings in day-to-day life in the streets, shops, and homes of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The places where the city’s Polish-Ukrainian-Yiddish-German encounters took place produced a distinct urban dialect. A variety of south-eastern “borderland” Polish, it was subject to strong ongoing Ukrainian as well as Yiddish and German influence. Jan Fellerer analyzes its main morpho-syntactic features with reference to diverse written and recorded sources of the time. This approach represents a departure from many other studies that focus on the phonetics and inflectional morphology of Slavic dialects. Fellerer argues that contact-induced linguistic change is contingent on the historical specifics of the contact setting. The close-knit urban community of historical Lviv and its dialect provide a rich interdisciplinary case study.

In 1918 the Danube Monarchy ceased to exist and its provinces became parts of the Monarchy's successor states, which increasingly assumed the character of nation-states. The regimes of these countries were usually oblivious and/or hostile to remnants of the erstwhile Austrian rule due to ideological reasons: they treated them as traces of a superimposed imperial power and an alien – democratic, pluralistic, liberal – tradition. Notwithstanding that fact, erasing the Habsburg Empire from maps of Europe did not entail the entire cancelation of its legacy on the former Habsburg territories. Although officially neglected or suppressed, this legacy made itself felt, overtly or tacitly, in discourses present in the public sphere of the countries that superseded the Monarchy.

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.

A hundred years ago Lemberg (also known as Lviv and Lwow) was part of the Habsburg Empire and famed for its splendour and rich cultural life. Until the German occupation in 1941, a Jewish community of over 100,000 people lived in Lwow. When the Soviet Union annexed the city in 1944, virtually all the Jews had disappeared in the Holocaust, and the Polish and ethnic German inhabitants were expelled while Ukrainians and Russians took their places. For seven hundred years, Jews made major contributions to the culture, economy, and social life of the city. The Nazis not only exterminated the Jews, but also did their best to wipe out all traces of them. This is the first comprehensive book about the Jews of Lviv. This book includes three life-stories of Jewish survivors, whose lives are interwoven with the tragic history of the city. All three life-stories are accompanied by a chapter on material places and their histories. In these, attention is not only paid to the past, but also to the contemporary Jewish community in Lviv. Carefully selected pictures enrich the text throughout, and the book includes a visitor's map of the town. Also included is a list of literature and websites for further information. [Subject: Jewish Studies, History, Holocaust Studies, Polish Studies]

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