Agata Zysiak
Kamil Śmiechowski
Kamil Piskała
Wiktor Marzec
Kaja Kaźmierska
Jacek Burski
From Cotton and Smoke: Łódź – Industrial
City and Discourses of Asynchronous
Modernity 1897–1994
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9
List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
13
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
There Is a City in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Translocal Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Printed Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Journey Through a Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Structure and Content of the Modern Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
17
19
21
24
27
31
The Beginnings: Entrance to the Industrial World 1897–1914 . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Promised Land in the Mud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Othering to Condemnation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Re-imaging the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Harmonious Modernity and Urban Self-assertion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Dream of a Proper Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Calling for Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Inventing Welfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Educating the Masses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Envisioning Urban Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ethnicizing the Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Forging Modernity – Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
37
37
45
52
56
62
66
73
82
84
88
98
The Interwar: Democratic Politics and Modern City Between Two World
Wars 1918–1923 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Decline of the “Polish Manchester” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Years of War: the Economic Collapse and Political Liberalization . . . .
Democratic Politics and the Press in the Independent State . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Class Warfare to the Modernization Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Visions of a Metropolis and Municipal Socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
101
101
102
106
110
118
6
Table of contents
Rhetorical Shifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Against the “Philosophy of the Crowd” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
National Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Antisemitism as Social Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Antisemitism to Political Mobilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Class or Nation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Crisis of Modernization and European Civil War – Conclusion . . . . .
121
128
132
135
145
149
153
The Postwar: Social Justice for the Proletarian City? 1945–1949 . . . . . . . . . .
New Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New Worldwide Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Postwar Cinderella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New Scope of Press Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tempting Visions in Hard Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Rhetoric of Appeasement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Patterns of Legitimization: Dark Past and Bright Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Working Classes and Everyday Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Toward a Functionalist City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Osiedle and beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Metropolitan Dreams and a Wake-up Call . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From Modest Modernization to a Socialist City – Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . .
161
161
162
165
170
176
180
184
187
192
195
200
206
212
Transition: The Post-industrial Orphan in Neoliberal Poland 1989–1994 . .
Re-inventing the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Socialist-Style American Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Shock and Helplessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New Press and New Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Market as a Principle of Social Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
City in Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Projects of Breaking Through . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bringing Capitalism back in – Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
217
217
219
227
232
239
242
246
253
A City Lost in Space in a Country Lost in Time – Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Struggling with the Modern Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
City from Cotton and Smoke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Press is Back in Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Narratives of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
257
257
261
264
266
Methodological Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
271
Table of contents
7
Primary Sources Covered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
275
Reference List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
277
Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
299
List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
307
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project was possible thanks to the generous support of the Polish National
Science Centre for the research project realized at the University of Łódź, Poland,
financed by research grant Opus 2, contracted as UMO-2011/03/B/HS6/01874 .
Project coordinator: Kaja Kaźmierska .
The challenge of team work on a collective project stimulated exchange between sub-disciplines and allowed individual research pursuits to be improved
through dialogue . Also, external insights help enquiry to go further on the uneasy
way of long-term research . Many insights in this book were triggered by consultations, talks, conference interventions and private conversations which we are
unable to recall and acknowledge in detail, and it would be too cumbersome to
list them here anyway . Many of the ideas that appear in this study were suggested
by generous commentators, and many other result from consultations, reviews
and debates .
All team members benefited from the generous support of the various institutions which were their place of employment or which hosted them as research
fellows during their work on the project . Because of the divergent trajectories of
all the co-authors, it would be difficult to mention all of them here .
Apart from the authors of this book, during the initial phase Kamil Brzeziński
and Patrycja Kruczkowska also participated in the project . Zbigniew Bokszański
and Paweł Starosta from the University of Lodz supported the research team with
kind advice and generous institutional support . Izabela Smuga and Adam Musiałowicz joined the team for scanning, character recognition and preparation of
the research material . Michał Gruda from the Miastograf website offered his advice and resources to complete illustrations for the book . The complete list of colleagues at different universities in different parts of the world all of whom offered
their generous support in commenting on early drafts, book proposals and articles presenting the results of the project would be too long and many important
voices are, unavoidably, conspicuously missing . Scholars who offered advice and
comments are (in alphabetic order) Ayten Alkan (Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton), Biskupski (Gdańsk University), Howard Brick (University of Michigan), John Bukowczyk (Wayne State University), Winson Chu (University of
Wisconsin-Madison), Claudia Eggart (Free University, Berlin), Maciej Janowski
(Institute of History, Polish Academy of Science), Brian Porter-Szucs (University
of Michigan), Harsha Ram (University of California, Berkley), George Steinmetz
10
Acknowledgments
(University of Michigan), Bo Strath (University of Helsinki), Balázs Trencsényi
(Central European University), Peter Wagner (University of Barcelona), Joanna Wawrzyniak (Warsaw University) and Genevieve Zubrzycki (University of
Michigan) .
Academic reviewers of this book, Agnieszka Kolasa-Nowak (Maria
Skłodowska-Curie University, Lublin) and Tomasz Majewski ( Jagiellonian University, Cracow) carefully read the manuscript and offered insightful comments
and feedback . Julia Podziewska heroically worked on language editing which allowed this study to be presented in a clear and an attractive form .
Marginal parts of this study (but none of the chapters as such) have been
published in various academic journals in various languages . Work on those articles and comments by editors and reviewers of the following journals also proved
helpful to us: American-Canadian Slavic Studies, Journal of Historical Sociology,
Kwartalnik Historii Żydów, and Praktyka Teoretyczna .
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1 . Modern discourse about Łódź with obstacles, utopian and dystopian dimensions, 1897–1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table 2 . Expression of metropolitan urban discourse with diagnostic
expressions and visions of improvement 1897–1914 . . . . . . . . .
Table 3 . The modernizing program presented in the discourse of Łodzianin and Dziennik Zarządu miasta Łodzi, 1918–1923 . . . . . . .
Table 4 . The rhetoric of “class warfare”, 1918–1923 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table 5 . “National capitalism” versus degenerate capitalism: image in
the right-wing press, 1918–1923 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table 6 . The rhetoric of the “consolidation of the nation”—ethnic conflict and political mobilization, 1918–1923 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table 7 . The structure of “municipal socialism” and “national capitalism” discourses, 1918–1923 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table 8 . Examples of binary oppositions in the postwar discourse on
Łódź and its historical trajectory, 1945–1949 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table 9 . Quality of everyday life in the discourse – examples of problems and projected solutions, 1945–1949 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table 10 . List of main topics of the modern discourse with diagnoses and
projects, 1989–1994 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51
94
117
127
142
148
151
187
191
252
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 . Łódź and its shifting position regarding state borders . . . . . . . .
Figure 2 . Structure of discourse of the modern (author: Agata Zysiak) . . .
Figure 3 . Łódź seen from the suburbs, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s
collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 4 . Karol Scheibler Factory, author: Bronisław Wilkoszewski,
1896, Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, PL 39 607 A-7 14
(Wikimedia Commons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 5 . New Market: Town Hall and Evangelical Church, author:
Bronisław Wilkoszewski, 1896, Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, PL 39 607 A-7 06 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 6 . Pinkus apartment house, auhtor: Bronisław Wilkoszewski,
1896, Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi, PL 39 607 A-7 35
(Wikimedia Commons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 7 . Meyer Passage, author: Bronisław Wilkoszewski, 1896,
Muzeum Miasta Łodzi, MHMŁ/I/2096 (Miastograf .pl – digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 8 . Piotrkowska Street, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . .
Figure 9 . Łódź Fabryczna railway station, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 10 . Łódź Kaliska railway station, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 11 . Town’s Credit Association (Miejskie Towarzystwo Kredytowe),
author: Bronisław Wilkoszewski, 1896, Archiwum Państwowe
w Łodzi, PL 39 607 A-7 11 (Wikimedia Commons) . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 12 . Workers’ housing near the Scheibler factory, “Księży Młyn”,
postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 13 . The Izrael K . Poznański Factory, author: Bronisław Wilkoszewski, 1896, Muzeum Miasta Łodzi, MHMŁ/I/2096 (Miastograf .pl – digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 14 . Fair in Leonard Square, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 15 . German occupation during WWI, a time of rising political activity: patriotic demonstratoin on the anniversary of the Constitution of 3 May, 3 .05 .1916, from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
27
32
47
47
58
58
59
59
65
65
69
79
91
93
105
14
List of illustrations
Figure 16 . General panorama of the industrial city, author: unknown,
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-U-3228 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 17 . Female textile workers on the road to the factory, author: unknown, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier
Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-P-2234 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 18 . Typical backyard of a cheap tenement house in Łódź, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny
– Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-U-3838 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 19 . Crowd in the street in a district on the outskirts, Narodowe
Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-G-5745 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 20 . Electric tram on Piotrkowska Street, author: unknown, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny
– Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-U-3852 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 21 . Reymont Square, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection .
Figure 22 . New building for the Stanisław Staszic elementary school; education was one of the main areas of local investment in the
1920s, author: unknown, ca . 1925, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji,
1-N-1643 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 23 . View of the southern, industrial district (Catholic cathedral
and the main Evangelical church in the center), from Łukasz
Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 24 . Fair at the Old Market, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 25 . The Bałucki Market, author: unknown, 1931, Narodowe
Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-G-5749 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 26 . Panorama of the southern working-class districts (view from
the tower of the Catholic cathedral on Piotrkowska Street),
author: unknown, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-U-3820-2 . . . . .
Figure 27 . Piotrkowska Street in the 1930s, postcard from Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 28 . District Court building in Dąbrowski Square, an example of
modernist and monumental representative architecture
of public service buildings in the 1930s, author: unknown,
1930, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier
Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 29 . Modernist headquarters of the Department of Waterworks
and Sewerage System in Łódź, author: unknown, 1938, Na-
107
111
115
115
116
118
125
129
139
140
150
155
156
List of illustrations
rodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny
– Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-G-6595 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 30 . Installation of the sewerage system on Piotrkowska Street,
author: unknown, 1929, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji, 1-G-6598 .
Figure 31 . Modernist housing estate on Polesie Konstantynowskie
district, inspired by Karl-Marx Hof and the “Red Vienna”
progressive housing policy, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe,
Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny – Archiwum Ilustracji,
1-U-3831-1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 32 . The New Market during German occupation, postcard from
Łukasz Biskupski’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 33 . View of the powerplant EC1 in the 1960s, author: unknown,
ca . 1960 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 34 . Textile worker, ca . 1960, author: Ignacy Płażewski, Muzeum
Miasta Łodzi, MHMŁ/I/4717/2 (Wikipedia Commons) . . . .
Figure 35 . Ruins of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, author: Ignacy Płażewski,
1946, Muzeum Miasta Łodzi, MHMŁ-I-4723-1 (Miastograf .
pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 36 . Widening of Zachodnia Street, ca . 1960 .– once an elegant boulevard . Author: Wacław Kamiński (Miastograf .pl digital collection)
Figure 37 . The „Widzew-Zachód”housing estate, ca . 1965, author: Ignacy Płażewski, Muzeum Miasta Łodzi, MHMŁ/I/4710/16
(Wikipedia Commons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 38 . Skyscraper of the Textile Center (from 1956 TV headquarters), author: Wacław Kamiński, ca . 1960 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 39 . Construction of the Great Theater started in 1949, ca . 1950,
author: unknown (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 40 . Construction of the new building for the University Library
which was completed in 1960, ca . 1957, author: Wacław
Kamiński (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 41 . Sports hall constructed in 1957, ca . 1960 ks . Skorupki 21 St .,
author: Wacław Kamiński (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . .
Figure 42 . The „Party House”, headquarters of the Communist Party regional branch, ca . 1955, author: Ignacy Płażewski, Muzeum
Miasta Łodzi, MHMŁ/I/4710/11 (Wikipedia Commons) . . .
Figure 43 . Tenement houses and factory chimneys in city center,
1960, author: Ignacy Płażewski, Muzeum Miasta Łodzi,
MHMŁ/I/4717/6 (Wikipedia Commons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 44 . View of a street parallel with Piotrkowska, just two blocks away,
Wólczańska Street 162, ca . 1960, author: Wacław Kamiński . .
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List of illustrations
Figure 45 . Piotrkowska Street, ca . 1960, author: Ignacy Płażewski,
Muzeum Miasta Łodzi, MHMŁ/I/4721/6 (Wikipedia Commons) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 46 . Piotrkowska panorama, author: Grażyna Rutowska, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, Archiwum Grażyny Rutowskiej,
40-G-181-6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 47 . The “Manhattan” housing estate in Łódź, author: Edwin
Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 48 . Small business after transformation (street food), author: Edwin Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 49 . Small business after transformation (street food), author: Edwin Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 50 . Small business after transformation (street trading), author:
Edwin Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . .
Figure 51 . Small business after transformation (street trading), author:
Edwin Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . .
Figure 52 . Author: Edwin Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 53 . Author: Edwin Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 54 . Piotrkowska Street, author: Edwin Dekker, 1991 (Miastograf .
pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 55 . Marchlewski Factory (former I .K .Poznański Factory) devastated, author: Edwin Dekker, 1992 (Miastograf .pl digital collection) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 56 . Entrance to the main building of ŁZZB im . Obrońców Pokoju
(the former Scheibler factory), author: Edwin Dekker, 1991,
Miastograf – digital collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 57 . The ideological positioning of the local dailies in Łódź in the
four periods investigated in the paper . Colors indicate contemporaneity (author: Agata Zysiak) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Figure 58 . Domains of intervention . Areas of interest and activity which
were scrutinized, subjected to critique or projected within the
discourses of urban modernity in the four investigated periods . The size of the bar indicates their relative importance (author: Agata Zysiak) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
INTRODUCTION
The city greeted newcomers with a mysterious “characteristic, dirty fog on
the horizon, which constantly hangs above the capital of chimneys .”1 Directly
on arrival “the smoke wrapped [newcomers] in some impenetrable, sulfurous
atmosphere .” Gradually, through this “gigantic cloud of smoke” “a forest of brick
chimneys stretched to the sky”, and with “a proud hatred belched smoke, fire and
ashes up into the sky”, creating “an impression that a legion of blazing volcanoes
was embracing the proletarian city .”2 Entry into this urban area from its rural surroundings generated fascination and repulsion . It triggered a state of shock .
“Every age has its shock city .”3 This city can be a window which enables us
to understand the contemporary world, its greatest achievements and it darkest
horrors . Manchester was a shock city of 19th century industrial England—a theater of horror and fascination, a place that prefigured and indirectly shaped the path
of industrial giants around the world . Not without a reason were many urban
habitats baptized French or Finnish Manchesters . Rather than take Paris to be the
capital of the 19th century, as did Walter Benjamin, Janet Wolff considers the paradigm of new ways of working and living to have been Manchester .4 The fates of
industrial cities in the 20th century differed . Most of them were hotbeds of urban
contention where powerful ideologies stirred up mass political constituencies .
Some of these cities enjoyed new prominence in socialist states as flagships of
forceful industrialization, while others were exposed to the vagaries of transforming capitalism . Finally, all of them faced deindustrialization, crisis and attempts to
reinvent their futures anew .
This book is about a place that epitomizes the experience of the rise and fall
of industrial modernity in Eastern Europe, “the Polish Manchester .” Łódź, in
present-day central Poland, was a rapidly growing textile center, one of the few
Artur Glisczyński, “Łódź po zaburzeniach” [Kurier Warszawski, 1905] in: Piotr
Boczkowski, Łódź, która przeminęła w publicystyce i prozie: (antologia) (Łódź: eConn,
2008), 495 .
2
Iwan Timkowskij-Kostin, Miasto proletariuszów (Łódź: Tygiel Kultury, 2001) .
3
Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1993), 56 .
4
Janet Wolff, “Manchester, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Classical Sociology 13, no . 1 (February 1, 2013): 69–86, https://doi .org/10 .1177/1468795X12461413 .
1
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Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
places which paved a way to industrial, capitalist modernization outside of the
so-called West . Its history is a tale of struggle with modern social change in Eastern Europe . It is also a tale of modernity arising in a multinational empire, later
redeployed within the borders of an emerging nation state, passing through state
socialism, tormented by structural transformations and finally thrown into the
whirlwind of the late-capitalist global economy .
This path exposed local populations to difficult challenges . Incoming rural
migrants, people whose state-affiliation suddenly changed, postwar refugees and
sacked female workers for over a century looked for means to find their way in
the changing urban reality . They sought to become not only objects of modernization but also subjects actively envisioning their futures . One late 19th century newcomer of rural origin remembered how he came to the city which overwhelmed him with its pace of life and the power of machine production . Soon he
bought a shared subscription to a “bourgeois” daily and started to discover the
world around: “the fresh newsprint excited my mind and filled it with undefined
longings for knowledge and its beauty . I was enriched by the scent of the newsprint itself .”5 The local press was a useful companion in making sense of modern
life, and an outlet that nurtured numerous visions of improving urban reality .
The book examines local press debates at four pivotal periods of social and
political dislocation that stimulated debate and self-reflection on the modern
city . We construct an unusual multi-temporal case study with four cross-sections
in order to historicize local struggle with urban modernity . These four moments
are: (I) Rapid industrial growth in the framework of the tsarist borderlands;
(II) State crafting in a highly antagonistic ideological setting after the First World
War; (III) Socialist rebuilding of a structured city after 1945; and (IV) Hopes
and disappointment of the transition and turbulent “Westernization” after 1989 .
These four moments of the “urban question” epitomize broader debates in Eastern Europe about the city, the nation and the polity . Spanning over a century yet rooted in a down-to-the-ground analysis of primary sources in the provincial context, this
book revisits the landscapes of intellectual means mobilized to interpret social reality
and change it . Whereas cultural and intellectual histories paint a broad-brush picture
of urban modernity, we chose prismatic perspectives zooming in on fragmentary rationalities, localized attempts to make sense of urban experience but also to actively
transform it . Second-hand idea dealers and rank-and-file journalists were looking for
peace of mind in describing, understanding and sometimes changing the modern reality around them . Thus, we decided to study those voices as an empirically traceable
inscription of the confrontation with asynchronous modernity . These insights add up
to a multi-faceted portrait of the 20th century urban experience in Łódź .
Lucjan Rudnicki, Stare i nowe (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy,
1979), 176 .
5
Introduction
19
There Is a City in Europe
Arising from scratch, Łódź grew to prominence as a factory-town in the
1820s . It swiftly became one of Europe’s fastest-developing industrial centers,
reaching 300,000 inhabitants by 1900 and 850,000 in 1989 . The “city of cotton”, as it was soon baptized, was a “shock city”—a great urban center with all
the problems that rapid capitalist urbanization triggered . German artisans, Polish
peasants and Jewish small traders flocked to the growing city founding textile
enterprises and tiny workshops, adding to a multi-ethnic industrial patchwork
subsumed under a profit-seeking imperative .6 Łódź took up the baton as the most
significant industrial hub, simultaneously the biggest urban center between Moscow and Berlin, besides Warsaw .
As a result, Łódź used to have an ambivalent public image . It was soon christened “the Polish Manchester”, and like the “original” it had a tarnished reputation as a “shock city” if not, even less ambiguously, as “a bad city .” One should not
be misled by the title of a renowned novel about the city, written by the Nobel
Prize winner Władysław S . Reymont – “The Promised Land .” This was an ironic slogan coined by the author to intrigue the audience before presenting what
was actually an anti-urban and anti-cosmopolitan story lurking behind a realist
facade .7 After all, both the Victorian and Polish publics were equally immersed
in similar anti-urban sentiments .8 Industrial hubs were everywhere mercilessly
criticized as aberrations of progress rather than its justified outcomes . The “shock
cities”, where dynamic development was accompanied by raging class conflict
and social disorder, were spaces typical of 19th century capitalism, with its rapid
urbanization and the industrialization of Europe . In Eastern Europe, however,
this ambiguous position was further reinforced by the contrasts produced by
asynchronous modernization .
In areas exposed to external impulses and encroaching global capitalism,
economic change had an unequal and combined character .9 Various social processes had their own pace, being differently integrated in transregional circulations and penetrated to a different degree by market relations . Furthermore,
Jan Fijałek et al ., eds ., Łódź: dzieje miasta do 1918 r. (Łódź; Warszawa: Państwowe
Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1988); Julian Janczak, “The National Structure of the Population in Łódź in the Years 1820–1938,” Polin, no . 6 (1991): 20–26 .
7
Karolina Kołodziej, Obraz Łodzi w piśmiennictwie pozytywistyczno-młodopolskim
(Łódź: Piktor, 2009) .
8
Jerzy Jedlicki, Świat zwyrodniały: lęki i wyroki krytyków nowoczesności (Warszawa:
Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2000) .
9
Leo Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, trans . L . Nichol
(Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2010) .
6
20
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
technologies, radical ideas, cultural trends, consumption patterns and material
aspirations were transferred selectively, not always in accord with each other or with extant realities . For instance, the higher social strata proselytized
imported ideas and conspicuously consumed goods complicit with cutting
edge “foreign” fashion . Exposed to such attractive examples, popular classes
wanted to follow, but any broader demand for industrial goods could not be
easily satisfied within an agrarian economy . This provided fertile ground for
various, home-brewed, or imported, projects of radical social change, which
promised universal prosperity but above all a reshuffling of global hierarchies .10
Such a contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous11 augmented modern
desires whilst simultaneously diminishing their possible satisfaction . It was in
such a situation defined by asynchronous modernity that the modern debate
in Łódź unfolded .
Łódź many times found itself a city on the edge of tomorrow, a vanguard
and a victim of progress . Its history is a series of struggles to become modern,
to be “just on time .” When time sped up unprecedentedly for a sleepy rural
backwater, when two world wars reshuffled the social order, and finally when
the late 20th century brought “the end of history”, the city and its polity were
once again re-imagined anew . In Łódź, modernity forced its champions and
victims alike to face its uneasy form, scattered, rapid and ruthless . At the same
time, it offered the paradoxical promise of leaving itself behind . As Marshall
Berman noted, modernity brought about a self-perpetuating dislocation, but
simultaneously urged its objects to become subjects of the historical process .12
In Łódź it triggered a constant will to become modern without asynchronous
distortions, to achieve the harmony of a city that would finally meet the demands of the day . Thus, one journalist from the turn of the century believed
that “a moment when meeting the basic requirements for a ‘decent, healthy and
harmonious personal and public life’ will be possible, does not belong to the
very distant future .”13 This longing, in its various renditions, fueled the mission
of local journalists for the next hundred years and did not allow them to lay
their pens, typewriters or PCs to rest .
Andrew C . Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the
Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism, Nachdr . (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002) .
11
Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics,” trans . Mark
Ritter, New German Critique, no . 11 (1977): 22–38 .
12
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(London: Verso, 1983) .
13
“Z dnia na dzień,” Goniec Łódzki, no . 78 (1900) .
10
Introduction
21
Translocal Modernity
What was their modernity really about? The question here is also, so to
speak, a topographical one . How did modernity happen in the world? The question is usually answered either by concentration on a very few flagship sites of
modernity or on almost abstract global processes . The vast majority of writings
on urban modernity offer studies of the cutting edge metropoles: Paris, London,
or New York .14 Its counterpart is an examination of global and transnational
shifts, exchanges and flows .15 These paradigms of thinking signify the outermost
poles of debate, and they easily overlook how modern experience was actively
constructed when transnational processes and metropolitan voices hit urban debate at ground level .16 Where did modernity take shape day to day?
As paradoxical as it may seem, the answer is: it was happening elsewhere .
Focus on abstract processes gives us an understanding of the complex system that
the global world would become . Earlier, the agenda of the day was a sociological
analysis of a general process, allegedly happening in different places at a different
pace, but essentially homogenous despite its variance . Modern metropoles were
considered trailblazers on a world scale . The capitalist West and its experience of
rapid development, inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution, became a classic
paradigm of modernization and the dominant path to follow for many societies
in forthcoming decades . The second half of the 19th century and (at least) the
first half of the 20th were marked by undifferentiated and unambiguous concepts
Carl E . Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage
Books, 2012); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Hagen Schulz–Forberg, London–Berlin: Authenticity, Modernity, and the Metropolis in
Urban Travel Writing from 1851 to 1939 (Brussels; New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Alan
J . Kidd and Terry Wyke, Manchester: Making the Modern City (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity Early Sensational Cinema and
Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) .
15
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The
Many–Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Stefano Bianchini, Eastern Europe and the
Challenges of Modernity, 1800–2000 (London; New York: Routledge, 2015) .
16
Notable exceptions breaking away from this binary framework are Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture & Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Nathaniel D . Wood, Becoming Metropolitan: Urban
Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
2010); Paul Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist
Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries (Boston, MA: Academic Studies
Press, 2012) .
14
22
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
of social development . Later, a growing awareness of global entanglements rendered the dependencies and differentials more visible, showing that metropolitan modernity had an evil twin in the seemingly backwater realities of slave-holding plantations .17 All those entangled places, peripheral, but globally connected
industrial centers among them, reveal more about global modernity than the
centers of the popular imagination such as London, Paris or New York . They were
the global history .
Such industrial hubs, embodying global modernity in an exceptional, yet typical way, may be grasped by the notion of the “ordinary city .”18 They are not, however, places only embodying the modern struggle on the ground . There transnational
trends struggled with local traditions and premodern patterns, revealing tensions
between different time paces . Modernity is generally a translocal phenomenon—
not only does it move between places and contexts, but it is also always conceptualized as being somewhere else, stimulating movement for those who debate it .19 The
will to keep up with such imagined centers of modernity was particularly powerful
in Eastern Europe, where local power brokers struggled to fulfill their European aspirations20 or launched radical projects of social reconstruction capable of reversing
global hierarchies, be they fascism or communism .21 But the alleged center is actually constructed through the margins as the polycentric model of multi-directional
rather than linear flows of modernity demonstrates .
From Chana Kronfeld’s argument about “minor literature”22 or postcolonial studies to the multiple modernities approach,23 many scholars have criticized
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1999); Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities
(Leiden; New York: Brill, 2012) .
18
Ash Amin and Stephen Graham, “The Ordinary City,” Transactions of the Institute
of British Geographers 22, no . 4 (December 1, 1997): 411–29, https://doi .org/10 .1111/j .
0020–2754 .1997 .00411 .x; Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and
Development (New York: Routledge, 2013) .
19
Tomasz Majewski, ed ., Rekonfiguracje modernizmu: nowoczesność i kultura popularna
(Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne, 2009); Tomasz Majewski, Wiktor
Marzec, and Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska, Migracje modernizmu. Nowoczesność i uchodźcy
(Łódź; Warszawa: Stowarzyszenie Topografie; Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2014) .
20
Jan C . Behrends and Martin Kohlrausch, eds ., Races to Modernity: Metropolitan
Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940 (Budapest: Central European University Press,
2014) .
21
Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World .
22
Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics
(Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1996) .
23
Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 2002) .
17
Introduction
23
the unilineal idea of progress as well as a model and transmission or diffusion
from center to peripheries . For instance, Susan Stanford Friedman introduced
the “circulation model” which aims at contesting the Europocentric and reductionist model of modernization . She aimed at examining connections, links and
conjunctures, in general, what is nowadays the focus of so much global academic attention: transnational networks . The resulting sensitivity underlines the interactivity as well as multiple agencies and centers across the globe .24 Building
on this, Harsha Ram tried to combine Friedman’s perspective and the center/
periphery model in order to tackle actually existing peripheral modernity in Tiflis/Tbilisi, a place plugged into the global cultural flows in a way not dissimilar
to Łódź . However, the aim of this move is not to disavow “the dramatic asymmetries of power .” While Kronfeld tries to understand regional articulations
through the center, Ram proposes constructing the center through the margins .
He concludes with a remark that should be kept in mind while examining Łódź .
If modernism reflected not the triumph of modernization but rather its uneven, impeded and locally inflected geographical spread, then might not modernism have
been most sharply and vividly expressed precisel/y where the process of modernization was only belatedly or patchily successful?25
In the case of Tiflis researched by Ram, and similarly in Berman’s analysis of the
Russian Empire, the modern public sphere, and the field of literature and art became a part of a worldwide network . They were substitutes for barely existing
“material” modernization, simultaneously reflecting and shaping global tendencies . Łódź is an opposite case—it is its infrastructure, economic position, pace
and insensitivity of development that follow Manchester or New York, but almost nothing more . Its public and intellectual sphere were only germinating, and
many expressions in local debate rejected what was new, fluid and “modern” from
the perspective of the core-cities . Neither type of modernism fits neatly into the
rigid scheme of unilineal progress and thus they beg for a far-reaching reconceptualization of our spatialized teleologies .
One of these types has led to the history of Eastern Europe often being written
in a way which underlines differences between the East and the West . This strategy
of “differencing” the history of the eastern peripheries of Europe from its western
core-centers may be helpful in tackling the general trajectories of vast arrays of dissimilar territories stretching longitudinally from Helsinki to Istanbul . However, it
Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity
across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) .
25
Harsha Ram, City of Crossroads. Tiflis Modernism and the Russian–Georgian Encounter, forthcoming book .
24
24
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
may prove a dubious strategy when analyzing the more detailed, spatialized social
history of modernity . Multiple differentials embedded in the capitalist transformation of the world triggered uneven developmental processes on different spatial
scales, often entangled within connections not necessarily deployed in their direct
vicinity .26 Consequently, rigid geopolitical frameworks and imagined geographies
may reveal their limited explanatory capacity in more zoomed-in research .
This concerns, for instance, those places fixed in the “spaces of capital”27 in
a way that enmeshes them in transregional commercial networks (while drawing
extensively from local resources such as land, water, laborers), yet simultaneously
isolates them socially from their direct surroundings . In a word, Łódź was one
of the huge industrial centers which mushroomed in the 19th century across the
globe, as it was positioned on the increasingly porous borderland between
the Russian world-empire and European networks of knowledge and technology
transfer . Thus, it used to have much more in common with its far away industrial
counterparts than with places it directly neighbored .
Whilst a typical modern city, it stood out from the local context . Exploiting local resources and attracting surrounding rural populations, it was a foreign
body against the backdrop of local social and cultural ties . With its embeddings in
transregional commercial borderland networks consisting of external capital perpetuating accumulation on the one hand (and in one direction) and export-driven production on the other (and on a different vector), Łódź epitomized a form
of exceptional normality . Hence, such a theoretical decision about the understanding of modernity has its reasons in actual, asynchronous and entangled
modernization processes .
Printed Modernity
The starting points for discourse of the modern on and within industrial cities were similar . The debate on the urban question established a considerably stable set of meanings and images, which was later developed, reused and changed .28
On differentials in surplus extraction connecting distant places see Tomba,
Marx’s Temporalities . On global conjunctures of uneven development of production in
localized outcomes see Kacper Pobłocki, “Learning from Manchester . Uneven Development, Class and the City,” Praktyka Teoretyczna, no . 3(19) (2013): 237–67; Alexander
Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015) .
27
David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001) .
28
About the importance of thinking in terms of questions, see Holly Case, The Age
of Questions Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, Ame26
Introduction
25
Beginning with the rise of the textile hub, local debates mirrored the main bones
of contention and narratives of their respective times—from the hygienist movement and an orientalizing gaze on the urban poor in the late 19th century, to the
ideologically saturated urban community of nation or class in the interwar period, to a socialist city and postwar infrastructural development, and last but not
least, to re-emerging market society, foreign investments and technocratic management of the city in 1990s . Visions of modernity were important coordinates
for multiple agendas of critique and reform . Zooming in, we capture moments
of reflection about modernization, urbanization and what a modern city is and
should be, writing an urban intellectual history of sorts .
Discourse research and intellectual history started to attract historical sociologists just after the humanities as a whole had been changed by the linguistic
turn .29 Text-oriented historical research is grounded in a general awareness of the
indirect and language-mediated status of primary sources . Researchers turned to
discourse as the missing link between the materiality of production (so stressed
in Marxist approaches) and modern experience .30 Just as the harbinger of this
trend—labor history—incorporated language and discourse in its entire methodological edifice, designed to scrutinize modern class subjectivities, so do we, also
aiming at text-oriented historical research . Along the lines drawn by discourse theory, we believe that all existing objects and actions are meaningful due to a historically constituted set of rules .31 All human cultural activity is symbolically deployed
and meaningful due to its being patterned like a language . Therefore, we analyze
entire cultures (and pluralized modernities) as language-like sign systems . We see
discourse as a generalized matrix of social practice, perpetuated by attempts to
stabilize meaning, limit uncertainty and conceal the very fact of its ultimate unavoidability . That is why urban visions of modernity are always projected upon the
screen of purported time sequences . Teleology brings peace of mind .
rican, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth
Century, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 2018) .
29
Peter Wagner, “As Intellectual History Meets Historical Sociology,” in: Handbook
of Historical Sociology (London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage, 2003); Elizabeth A . Clark,
History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press, 2009); Elías José Palti, “The ‘Theoretical Revolution’ in Intellectual History: From The History of Political Ideas to The History of Political Languages,” History
and Theory 53, no . 3 (2014): 387–405, https://doi .org/10 .1111/hith .10719 .
30
Joan W . Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no . 4 (1991):
773–97 .
31
David Howarth, Discourse, Concepts in the Social Sciences (Buckingham [England]; Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2000); Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, Routledge Innovations
in Political Theory 26 (London; New York: Routledge, 2007) .
26
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
The transfer of such comforting narratives between modern visionaries,
second-hand idea dealers and local populations tightened when the modern press
connected all these groups into a single feedback loop . Discourses of the modern
exercised increasing influence on the social imaginary when readership numbers
grew . The press accompanied the birth of the modern city and for its inhabitants
this was one of the core means of their making sense of the city . This role was intensified in industrial hubs, growing rapidly and attracting new populations, who
also found their way in urban life through the press .32 As a truly modern form, the
press evolved alongside the city and its inhabitants .
While the late 19th press catered to the barely politicized common sense of
the urban dweller, there emerged in the interwar period more partisan visons
of organizing urban polity which pitted them against each other in a highly polemical mode .33 Later the press became the vehicle of the more ordered ideological transfer of an emerging postwar socialism, just to enter the 1990s as an
unconfident soothsayer trying to make sense of a pivotal social transformation
and find a new language in a plural political setting . Thus, it is the press which
offers unparalleled lenses through which to follow vernacular modern critique
and modernization dreams from almost the beginning of Łódź’s modern history .
The role of newspapers is not limited to creating the “imagined communities” of assumed readers . There is a widely-shared consensus among scholars
of the social role of the press that “newspapers have always created readers, not
news, as their primary function .”34 Newspaper language can be seen very much as
a “social semiotic” which, in its generic range, draws particular social groups into
particular styles of presentation .35 Such coagulated forms of discourse have the
capacity to reproduce social relationships with considerable power . Local intellectuals’ efforts to make sense of a changing world, to describe it, and to harmonize with assumed benchmarks and multiplying expectations produced situated
Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University
Press, 1998); Singer, Melodrama and Modernity Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, chap . 3 .
33
Bernhard Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) .
34
Martin Conboy, The Language of Newspapers: Socio–Historical Perspectives,
Advances in Sociolinguistics (London: Continuum, 2010), 8 . On imagined communities, see Benedict R . Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 2006) .
35
Michael A . K . Halliday, Language as a Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of
Language and Meaning (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1977); See also Allan Bell, The
Language of News Media, Language in Society (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1991) .
32
Introduction
27
modernity projects with their own agency to forge urban policies .36 What follows
is an attempt to scrutinize such modernity projects enmeshed in the local press
discourse .
Figure 1 . Łódź and its shifting position regarding state borders .
Journey Through a Century
In Chapter 1 we examine the “shock city” at the turn of the century and the
foundations of Łódź’s urban discourse . This period witnessed an anti-positivist
turn in Polish intellectual culture; there was a rethinking of the rural lower class-
36
Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic .
28
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
es’ political agency and nation-building capacities . Correspondingly, the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and an urban lifestyle began to arouse suspicion rather than
evoke occidental dreams . In the era of accelerated class formation and modern
politicization in the Kingdom of Poland before and during the 1905 Revolution,
Łódź took up the baton as the most significant industrial center in the country .37
It was the ground zero of modern Polish nationalism and class-oriented mass
movements . Łódź, largely populated by economically influential Germans and
Jews, posed the Polish public an overriding challenge . Likewise, the local Polish
intelligentsia had a hard time finding a relevant springboard for its own vision
of the city .38 It had to acknowledge actually existing predicaments including the
weakness of the local cultural elites, distance between local reality and the dominant Polish culture, class tension, exploitation and the acute underdevelopment
of the urban infrastructure . No wonder that the chief questions of modern life
were ardently debated .
Journalists actively re-conceptualized the social bond, moving from a moralized critique of the poor, to philanthropic projects supplementing deficient
institutions, to explicit ideas of welfare provision organized by the state in the
common interest . Urban citizenship was considered an important factor of
a functional polity . Various groups were invited to actively participate in urban
life—in a way more inclusive than envisioned in the ethno-nationalism that already held sway in Warsaw-based debate . The local press shaped provincial public
opinion by issuing the first complex analyses of the city’s condition and forging
visions of its future .39 Once broadcast, these soon became a bone of contention
in the evermore polarized public sphere .
Seeking to explore this polarization, in Chapter 2 we study the early years
of the interwar period, marked by the nation-state building project . The chapter characterizes the years of the First World War as a period of economic crisis
and also of simultaneous political activation . It was a hard time for the city,
which rapidly lost the base of its economic development—open access to the
Russian market . Local polity had to struggle with economic decline and polit-
Robert Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) .
38
Winson Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 117–18; Wiktor Marzec and Agata Zysiak, “Journalists Discovered Łódź like Columbus .” Orientalizing Capitalism in the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Century Polish Modernization Debates,” Canadian–American Slavic Studies
50 (2016): 235–65, https://doi .org/10 .1163/22102396–05002007 .
39
Kamil Śmiechowski, Łódzka wizja postępu. Oblicze społeczno-ideowe “Gońca Łódzkiego”, “Kuriera Łódzkiego” i “Nowego Kuriera Łódzkiego” w latach 1898–1914 (Łódź:
Dom Wydawniczy Księży Młyn, 2014) .
37
Introduction
29
ical conflict . In the uncertain conditions of the nascent post-Versailles Polish
state, notions of the urban community and the place of the city in the nation
were to be radically redrawn .40 In this context, we shed light on how the process
of democratization affected the dynamics of political disputes and changed the
discourse of the Łódź press .
Two competing visions of a desired social order developed in the 1920s:
“national capitalism” and “municipal socialism .” The former ideal propelled the
arguments of the political right . This was displayed in a gradual dying down
of Polish-German conflict and its replacement by Polish-Jewish antagonism,
strengthening in 1930s after the Great Depression . The proposed remedy was
a rebirth of the national community through economic cooperation and ethnic
solidarity . In turn, the idea of “municipal socialism” marked the thinking of the
Polish Socialist Party, who governed the city during the first postwar years . In this
milieu the city was envisaged as a battlefield for a better future . The working class
and its needs became the main determiners of urban policies . Nationalists’ and
socialists’ visions of the “good city” were grounded in different political philosophies and concepts of society—a disciplined, organic and ethnically homogenous community struggling with its outer enemies vs . present class antagonism,
struggle for the future emancipation of the workers and active social policy in
real time, respectively . Aside from the reconstruction of their logic and applied
argumentation, the unexpected resemblances in their rhetoric have also been
explored . The last sections discuss the main stages of rivalry between socialism
and capitalism in Łódź in the second half of the 1920s and in the 1930s . The dynamics of this conflict mirrored the wider history of the “European civil war” of
1914–1945 .
Chapter 3 focuses on the period following this war . We study the postwar
reconstruction from 1945 to 1948 and the accompanying press debate envisioning socialist modernity . Because the Jewish population of the city had mostly
perished, and the German inhabitants were expelled, at the end of the war Łódź
appeared to be the biggest, and simultaneously least destroyed, Polish city . The
working-class city of a newly constituted state, the future People’s Republic of
Poland, seemed to be the perfect imaginary, if not institutional, capital .
This was the time of the so-called Gentle Revolution, when space for debate was relatively broad, only later tightly grasped by Stalinization . We examine briefly the situation of Poland and Eastern Europe within the postwar order,
which was the context for emerging visions of modernization . Łódź was without
doubt an industrial city . It was not, however, a socialist city like Magnitogorsk41
Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland .
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) .
40
41
30
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
or Nowa Huta .42 As an industrial center with a 19th century genesis and a strong
working-class ethos it offers a slightly different insight into socialist urban reality .
We propose the term “modest modernization” in contrast to a later rise of a “gigantomania” in investment . Paradoxically, the possibility of a working-class capital in a working-class state meant the city’s marginalization . Politically, workers
appeared too defiant for the new government and major investment skirted the
textile hub to focus on heavy industry instead . At the same time, local debates
still nurtured a specific language of postwar modernization . This encompassed
productivist mobilization and legitimization of the new regime, with a rhetoric
of appeasement as well .
Quite elaborate strategies were developed to make sense of sewage pipe
leaks and supply shortages . The core concept of a socialist city was developed
in the press, but this was accompanied by more daring visions of a functionalist city proposed by the Łódź-based artist—Władysław Strzemiński . Dreams of
becoming a metropolis reappeared in one of the most important urban centers
of the nascent People’s Republic of Poland . Thus, we later on examine what being a metropolitan center meant to contemporaries . The final part focuses on the
breakdown of the first postwar discourse from 1948 onwards and the emotions
triggered when it became clear that Łódź would not be a flagship urban center of
socialism . What seemed to be the perfect historical moment for the proletarian
city, turned out to be a yet another disappointment .
This would not be the last disappointment in the history of Łódź . In Chapter 4 we examine discourses about Łódź that emerged following the 1989 implosion of state socialism and the industrial form of life . The situation was particularly
dramatic not only because it came in the wake of years of negligence, but also because of a lack of any supportive programs for either the textile industry or former
textile workers . Here the highest feminized workforce in the country intersected
with low levels of education and traditional Catholic values . These kept female textile workers in their homes, while miners or shipbuilders were out fighting for their
rights on the streets of Warsaw . The poverty, frustration and social derailment that
ensued were framed as the unavoidable costs of modernization .
The economic situation fueled an identity crisis that was proclaimed in press
discourses . Once the socialist era had come to an end, working-class heritage
was denied legitimacy . Thus, a desperate struggle to build a new identity began .
This involved the shibboleths of Łódź the fashion city; Łódź the trading city; and
Łódź the center for international fairs . The rejection of working-class lore was the
common ground of two opposing narratives: that of the creative city—resilient,
enterprising and open to investors and also that of the fallen city—blighted, poor
Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society,
1949–56 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013) .
42
Introduction
31
and devastated . As in most of the former “Manchesters”, the neoliberalization of
the economy brought deindustrialization and social decline—the vicious circle
of history revived the ideology that had made the industrial centers grow, but this
time its return brought about their ruin .
Despite changing social circumstances and abrupt geopolitical shifts, these
discourses that circulated for over a century are marked by common elements .
All these projects would often have a patterned shape, characteristic for a form
typical of the modern discourse .
The Structure and Content of the Modern Discourse
Across time, all four cross-temporal case studies of the modern urban discourse, reveal common features . argumentation in the press was often structured
in a similar manner . Starting with a statement describing reality, it subsequently
points out current deficits and problems, as well as the reasons for the undesirable situation, just to conclude with recommendations or appeals for change .
This recurrent form of perception is a scaffolding which allowed social actors, in
this case mainly journalists, to make sense of the rapidly changing reality around
them, describe imperfections of this reality and propose meaningful pathways to
change it . The thread leading from diagnosis, to critique, to prospective vision,
represents the basic timeline of modern thinking oriented toward self-assertion
and reflexive reform .43 This pattern is much more than a construction of text; it is
a particular paradigm of action, expressed in thinking, writing and practice .
Exploring this logic, one can observe that many modern discourses promise
a harmonious modernity—a state of fulfilled and integrated being keeping up
with the promise of the modern challenge . At the same time, they clearly picture
what prevents this fullness appearing as a sworn political enemy, foreign yoke or
long-term negligence . This addition is necessary, as a harmonious modernity will
forever remain an unfulfilled promise; the experience of reality always denies the
illusion of its possible full realization .44 The modern condition, as a self-perpetuating movement, is exactly grounded in this paradoxical experience .
Correspondingly, modern discourses are grounded in an implicit utopian
horizon . This may not be very perceptible but without it the modern form of
thinking would be impossible . The utopia—an idealized scenario—is a promise
of achieving that harmonious modernity, which is denied by the virtually created,
Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung,” in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol . 1 (Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1972), xiii–xxvii; Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social
Thought (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988) .
44
Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity (London: Wiley, 1999) .
43
32
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
fantasmatic enemy . The latter ultimately brings into the field of vision the threat
of dystopia—a disaster scenario .45 While the diagnoses, obstacles and visions differed for different political options, the logics of modern discourse still remained
similar . The clue lies in the obstacle itself, which is, at the very same time, the
foundation enabling the appearance of any utopian project at all .46
Figure 2 . Structure of discourse of the modern (author: Agata Zysiak) .
This underlying structure could lead to different, often contradictory, projects of modern change . Moments of social and political dislocation, such as the
threshold periods studied in this book, stimulated such modern visions and pitted against each other polemists advocating differing senses of the future . As Reinhart Koselleck noted, modern times are marked by a separation of the space of
experience and the horizon of expectations .47 What is envisioned as to come is no
longer directly embedded in knowledge of the past . This change challenged the
sense of the obviousness of presence and stimulated various concepts of movement, dynamic ideas of time and imaginings of the future . Correspondingly, we
see the specific discourses of urban modernity as complex figurations expressing
Glynos and Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory .
This issue is described in detail in Agata Zysiak, “The Desire for Fullness . The
Fantasmatic Logic of Modernization Discourses at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Century
in Łódź,” Praktyka Teoretyczna, no . 3(13) (2014): 41–69, https://doi .org/10 .14746/
pt .2014 .3 .3 .
47
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans . Keith
Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) .
45
46
Introduction
33
assumptions about time, space, community and order, and simultaneously envisioning their movement in history . Thus, in subsequent chapters we trace changing attitudes regarding these dimensions .
Various attempts to build a convincing narrative about the modern urban
challenge may also be seen as historically changing imaginings of the future, or
to use Koselleck’s phrase, futures pasts .48 As longings not always realized, they
nevertheless shaped the actions of historical actors in real time, as they were past
futures true and meaningful at the time of utterance .49 The question of time also
encompasses the “regimes of historicity” present in particular modern discourses .50 In particular, we mean the varieties of the assumed timelines and self-ascribed place within them pushed by local actors . We ask how these regimes of
historicity were negotiated on the ground in the press, as well as who populated
the assumed timelines—what benchmarks of progress were used and what modern places stimulated local aspirations .
As was widely documented, such prospective discourses very often had a direct spatial reference, most aptly expressed in the very notion of utopia .51 Urban
imaginations from the very beginning of utopian thinking contained detailed visions of space which would foster the harmonious life of the moderns . In actually
Koselleck .
Georges Minois, Geschichte der Zukunft : Orakel, Prophezeiungen, Utopien, Prognosen (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 1998); Lucian Hölscher, Weltgericht oder Revolution: protestantische und sozialistische Zukunftsvorstellungen im deutschen Kaiserreich
(Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta, 1989); Lucian Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer–Taschenbuch–Verlag, 1999); Peter S . Fisher, Fantasy and Politics:
Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1991); Rüdiger Graf, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933 (München: Oldenbourg, 2008) .
50
Alexander Escudier, “Temporalities and Political Modernity,” in: Political Concepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual History, ed . Javier Fernández Sebastián
(Santander: Cantabria University Press; McGraw–Hill Interamericana de España,
2011); Diana Mishkova, Balazs Trencsenyi, and Marja Jalava, eds ., “Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and Northern Europe, 1890–1945 Discourses of Identity and Temporality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) .
51
Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Behrends and Kohlrausch, Races to Modernity: Metropolitan Aspirations in Eastern Europe, 1890–1940; Daria Bocharnikova and Steven E . Harris, “Second World Urbanity:
Infrastructures of Utopia and Really Existing Socialism,” Journal of Urban History 44,
no . 1 (2018): 3–8, https://doi .org/10 .1177/0096144217710227; Stephen J . Collier,
Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011) .
48
49
34
Agata Zysiak, Kamil Śmiechowski, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Kaźmierska
existing spaces of modernity that visibly questioned such ideals, the urge to order
space remained at the core of urban discourse . The late Victorian city was in the
eyes of social reformers the infrastructural grid modeling modern liberal citizenship .52 Similarly, industrial Łódź was a place where various spatialized imaginations were forged . A tangible lack of infrastructure urged journalists to propose
various visions of reconstructed urban space . This spatial sensitivity reemerged
after the Second World War when the paradigm of the socialist city spurred on
bold ideas of reconstruction . Space was to be shaped in a way capable of keeping
up with the new times and modeling a new human .53 We investigate these in order to reveal tacit assumptions about space in the urban discourse .
Projected spaces were closely related to envisioned forms of community .
The press was an important factor in forging modern subjectivities, and also as
a body of collective actors acting on the historical scene . The role of newspapers
is not limited to creating “imagined communities” of assumed readers in terms
of national belonging .54 In addition to that, the early press catered to the general metropolitan audience, thus creating a sense of new social cohabitation—the
modern industrial city .55 We study this sense of citizenship promoted in the local
context . This task was willingly continued after the creation of the Polish nation
state . It is worth asking how the highly polarized ideological projects bid for the
support of new working class readers, and what kind of affiliations they offered .
In the post-Second World War context, attempts to construct the unity of the rebuilding Poland was rivaled by the socialist incentive to construct a new popular
identity of the working citizens . The shape of this fragile balance is also our object
of scrutiny . Similarly, we want to check how after 1989 general optimism that
turned into disappointment fostered an emergency sense of community . During
the same period, however, the new capitalist order required the construction of
new social hierarchies and urged the elite milieux to distance themselves from
the popular classes . All these dimensions contain two recurring elements: the
modern will to improve and the resurfacing of narratives of order .
The press in Łódź was an agent of urban improvement . Journalists were restless in diagnosing problems and devising interventions, not always considering
Chris Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City,” Social History 27, no . 1 (2002): 1–15; Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom:
Liberalism and the Modern City (London; New York: Verso, 2003) .
53
Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Slavomíra Ferenčuhová and Michael Gentile, “Introduction: Post-Socialist Cities and Urban Theory,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, no . 4–5 (2016):
483–96, https://doi .org/10 .1080/15387216 .2016 .1270615 .
54
Anderson, Imagined Communities; Conboy, The Language of Newspapers, 8 .
55
Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 .
52
Introduction
35
the agency of people whose conduct was targeted for reform . Self-appointed specialists in urban planning, infrastructure and civil society left their imprint on
local authorities and the civility of urban dwellers, trying to remake society from
the bottom up . This “will to improve” has had a long and troubled history .56 We
ask about enduring continuities from the imperial period to the 1989 transition .
In detail, we explore areas of intervention, benchmarks against which the pursued improvements were measured, and the desired state of affairs . Profound social and political transformations fanned the fear of uncertainty . The corresponding negative pole of signification is anarchy and chaos: unpredictability vis-à-vis
time, urban disarray vis-à-vis space, and the dissolution of ranks vis-à-vis society .
We trace how the will to order migrated through these domains, signifying the
specificity of urban modern visions in different periods of European history, finding its embodiment in Łódź press debate .
The result is a landscape of visions and attempts to improve urban living, always confronted with unintended consequences and external constraints . In this
way the book provides insight into the situated intellectual history of Eastern European modernity . A summary of subsequent strivings in all four periods may be
found in the concluding section of the book . Chapters in the book are presented
in approximate chronological order, narrating dislocations in turn, posing milestones in our common struggle to be modern . As we are perfectly aware, such
a strategy is a yet another truly modern attempt to narrate contingency in a way
which makes it intelligible to us, modern subjects .
Tania Li, The Will to Improve. Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of
Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) .
56