Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow

Nathaniel D. Wood. Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. xiv, 272 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $40.00, cloth.

The adjectives that first come to mind after reading this book - words like "delightful," "funny," and "entertaining," - are not the ones I would typically apply to a significant scholarly monograph, particularly one dealing with Polish history, a topic that is usually so laden with lachrymose sobriety. But that is precisely Nathaniel Wood' s point: our view of Poland's past has been so overwhelmed by stories of national suffering and resurrection that we have been blinded to almost everything else. Even those of us who have been critical of Polish nationalism still tend to remain trapped within the categories established by patriotic activists a century ago, perceiving everything through the prism of the nation and its much-recounted "tragic fate." Wood shatters that trap wide open by offering a portrait of daily life in Cracow during the first years of the twentieth century, as depicted on the pages of the popular press. His cast of characters includes servant girls, shopkeepers, homeless children, middle-class journalists, night watchmen, aviators, peasant migrants, and many more, whom we follow as they attempt to adjust to the transformation of a small town into a modern city. Wood's dry wit and vibrant writing style make him an ideal guide through Cracow's busy streets of a century ago. Although it helps that he is relying on a source base that tends towards both the dramatic and the comic, in the hands of many historians even this material could become dull.

Beyond the sheer entertainment value of the book, however, is a serious argument. As Wood puts it, "In Cracow's popular illustrated daily newspapers, the principal source of identification, the 'first-person plural' that led to the creation of an 'imagined community', was not national but metropolitan [...]. Even in an era of intense nationalism, the popular press and its average readers were more concerned on a daily basis with urban issues than national ones" (p. 202). The citizens of Cracow were joining what he calls an "interurban matrix" that allowed them to see themselves alongside the citizens of London, Paris, Chicago, and Berlin, and to interpret stories of crime, traffic, disease, development, electrification, or dirt as relevant whether set a few blocks from their home or a continent away. Cracovians were becoming, Wood argues, "less obsessed with the city's Polish past" as they embraced the norms of twentieth century urban life (p. 128).

The mark of a really important scholarly thesis is that it seems obvious once stated, despite the fact that no one has quite noticed it before. Of course people cared more about plumbing than politics on a day-to-day basis; of course they did not go through their lives constantly performing their Polishness. But the full impact of that "of course" only emerges (of course) after one reads a book like Becoming Metropolitan.

The last decade or so has seen the publication of a small library of books about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East-Central Europe, and virtually all of them have dealt in one way or another with the emergence of national identities and the triumph of nationalist ideologies. The best of these works have emphasized that this development was highly contingent and dependent upon the hard work of national activists, in contrast to a previous generation of scholars who spoke of "national awakenings" in highly teleological terms. Wood himself would surely acknowledge that the morphin g of the region's ethnoreligious-linguistic hodgepodge into a massive nationalist battleground was quite an important story, but it was never the only story - in fact, for the overwhelming majority of people at the time it was not even a particularly important story. National identity appears in this book as a means of framing political conflict on the large scale (for example, in parliamentary debates), but not as a crucial rhetorical trope when it came to the matters that most people cared most about, most of the time.

As one shifts perspective in this way, what emerges is a particular form or modern urban identity that allowed a Cracovian to empathize more easily with a contemporary from Kansas City than with a supposed compatriot from the Galician countryside. The concepts of "civilization" or "Europe" played a more important role than "Poland" in the ebb and flow of local affairs. Some might argue that Wood stacked the deck by focusing almost exclusively on mass-circulation periodicals rather than the more politicized reading material of the intelligentsia, but there is little doubt that the former give us a much better window onto the quotidian concerns of the majority. Perhaps Wood goes a little too far when he implies that the world depicted on the pages of those newspapers represented the views and attitudes of their readers - it would be more precise to say that those texts constructed a discursive field that shaped how people could describe and thus (to an extent) perceive that world - but when set alongside the many strengths of this book, such methodological nitpicking is inconsequential. Becoming Metropolitan is a book that will be read by everyone interested in Polish history, Habsburg history, urban history, the cultural history of modernity, and (for that matter) anyone who enjoys being entertained while having their preconceptions overturned.

[Author Affiliation]

Brian Porter- Sz�cs, University of Michigan