The City and the Knowledge in East Central Europe: Plea for a Stronger Tie-Up in Research

Current Research Paradigms

While modern historiography on East Central Europe has discovered the cities of the wider region as an attractive research subject during the past two decades and has begun to investigate questions about the regions’ societies through the “lens of city history,” researchers working on “European” cities, particularly within comparative historical research, have neglected cities in East Central Europe because of their presumed backwardness. Metropolitan centers in Western Europe such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, in contrast, have served as rich sources of urban historiography since the very beginning of this specialized research. This is also true for those cities that served the research discussion as milestones when looking for specific examples, particularly examples of modernity such as infrastructure, urban architecture, and other fields of innovation.

All studies follow the assumption that the cities within this research focus represent “European cities.” ⁴ In this regard, they all refer back to the two German sociologists Georg Simmel ⁵ (1858-1918) and Max Weber ⁶ (1864-1920) who, with their research, provided the foundations for future academic analysis on the ideal prototype of the “European city,” and who are still considered to be guiding principles of the European historical research of cities.

Following Max Weber, the “European city” has provided the core of a European identity since the Middle Ages and consequently become the symbol of a “moderate and limited modernity.” After Weber pointed out the city’s characteristic autonomy and the following rise of confident, nonaristocratic but bourgeois elites, historical research approached a further definition of the ideal prototype of the historical city and ventured to discuss what “modernity” or “modernization” would mean in this context. In this regard, the “European city” can be seen as a normative characterization.

I see the purpose of such a paradigmatic and, in the end, normative typology in its supplying of research questions and opportunities for analysis to identify different specifics: general modern research has paid particular attention to the diversity of life forms in the city and in the urban environment, whereas it also has been “fascinated by the regional and national differences between industrialized Europe and the European periphery, by the varieties between Western and Central European and their early urbanization and the late urbanization in Eastern.” ⁷ This claim made by Helmut Kaelble, one of the most prolific German city historians, points out the stereotypical perception of East Central European cities and the eastern borderlands. This emphasizes the existence of a clear hierarchy between the cities in Western and Central Europe and in East Central Europe which is still being negotiated: the cities of East Central Europe still fade into the background of this kind of research or only appear in its periphery, which can be explained by their presumed marginal relevance as well as their relatively small size when compared with Western European metropolitan areas. Further reasons for this neglect can be found in their multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural nature which clashes with predominantly national research approaches but also requires proficiency in numerous foreign languages; the incoherent and often lacking state of historical sources and of research about these cities adds to the challenges which researchers face when trying to access relevant publications and research materials.

Based on the typology of the “European city,” which only provides a category for analysis to be applied when beginning further research, the previous assessment leads to the question of how to define an “East Central European city” ⁸ as a subtype of a “European city” ⁹ and in clear contrast from “East European” or “Russian” ¹⁰ as well as “Southern Central European cities.” ¹¹

In contrast to cities in Russia and Southeast Europe, the cities in East Central Europe had an important influence on their surrounding societies, which had been shaped by agriculture until the twentieth century. However, this influence was of minor impact when compared with cities in Western Europe. Here, they had developed into centers of the emerging states and thus into hubs of knowledge transfer and the distribution of goods since the becoming of nations during the Middle Ages. With the founding of cities, people of Western Europe had been recruited and settled according to “German law”; local as well as recruited and privileged Jewish populations began to inhabit the cities at the same time. The cities were, therefore, characterized by their multiethnicity and the presence of various religions. It was particularly this ethnic-national, religious, and cultural diversity which would become a defining characteristic of East Central European cities until the twentieth century. However, the ethno-religious structure of the cities’ population often differed significantly from the population of the greater region: the mix of populations, differing from city to city, was hardly ever reflected in the ethnic structure of the population living in the surrounding areas, for example, in Lviv, Vilnius, and Riga. The cities of the Baltic Region in particular contained large German populations, whereas the Jewish communities made up the largest part of the cities in the former Polish eastern territories, a strong contrast when compared with the rural regions. ¹² This demographic mix distinguished the population often together with or in addition to further factors of social segregation. Until the late eighteenth century, the cities of East Central Europe became part of the three European Empires, a process which at least in some areas was accompanied by the destruction of older traditions of self-government and the imposition of administrative and legal conditions. Consequently, new administrative and political structures as well as means of communication were introduced and imperial elites were instated in administrative offices; in some areas, however, traditional elites succeeded to keep their positions and their influence, at least from an economic point of view. The political and economic role of these cities consequently often decreased and became limited to their surrounding regions. ¹³ The decline of social class or the guild rule in the East Central European cities during the nineteenth century was followed by a process of urbanization. Depending on the imperial requirements, the self-governance of the cities continued to develop in varying degrees through reforms, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century, while most of them, at the same time, became subject of only delayed and minor industrialization with only some exceptions (such as the city of Łódź); this was accompanied by a population increase which, however, was less extensive than in Western European cities. However, it is important to note that cities—similar to Southeast Europe—developed into national, political, and cultural centers. Since both modernity and a distinct European character—two concepts which were understood as guiding and value principles ¹⁴ —turned into evidence of national capability and the change and modernization of cities into urban centers proceeded, however, less radical than it was the case in the cities in Southeast Europe. All in all, the cities of East Central Europe developed their own variants of urbanity during the nineteenth century. ¹⁵ This was not only true for the capitals of administrational units, but also for smaller cities which functioned as centers for local regions. For the new urban elites, these developments allowed the struggle for and the rise to power which, consequently, also influenced processes of social and national modernization. The founding of the national states brought an additional boost of modernization for the new capitals, which now developed into national metropolitan areas or, as can be seen with the example of Lemberg, became the capital of their respective region. However, as a consequence of World War II, (some) East Central European cities were destroyed (urbicide) or experienced the violent replacement of their populations due to governmental population policies.

Current Research and General Desiderata

The city history of Eastern (Central) Europe, in contrast to European city history in general, has received a second class treatment although it could contribute important aspects to the overall picture of a European city history. ¹⁶ Neither the eras of Nationalism in the National States nor the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe saw the distinctive research of city history in or about Eastern Europe, which can be explained with both the “German” past of many of the cities and the agricultural structuring ¹⁷ of the region. ¹⁸ The reasons for this neglect can be found with the main foci of the master narratives, all subjected to the respective imperial, national, and ideological influences, which have guided the research interests in the past. While the newly founded national states saw first approaches to a history of the cities during the interwar period, the Soviet hegemony began to work against these tendencies after World War II. Although this period saw ideologically motivated social historical studies on single specific groups within the population, such as the working class or the intelligencja, all of them ignored the perspective of a city history. Under the influence of the Marxist–Leninist guiding principles in historical research, interest in the cities of the modern period was limited since processes of urbanization were mostly explained with the rise of the cities’ bourgeois populations. Only the political changes at the end of the twentieth century saw, to some extent, the beginning of a public interest in local and regional histories. ¹⁹ Until today, there is neither a research institute with a specialized focus on city history nor a distinct and specialized historical discipline for the research of city history ²⁰ since this interest is still subordinated to the comprehensive study of national and state histories.

Studies on the history of the cities published by East Central European historians, as a result, still approach city histories from the perspective of their respective nation and, consequently, discuss their multiethnic conditions only in their margins, if at all. ²¹ These studies are approached from local, regional, and national traditions and need to be seen as local histories resulting from traditional and positivistic approaches rather than results of modern urban and city historical research. German and Anglo-American influences in recent approaches undertaken within the cultural studies, however, have provided the basis for a growing interest in more modern and more comprehensive research projects. This change of paradigms within historical research has also changed the interest in the modern city history of East Central Europe which hitherto had been restricted almost exclusively to the legal and social history of the medieval and early modern period. Since the turn to the twenty-first century, the cities in Eastern Europe have become a highly vivid and innovative field of research with diverse approaches especially coming from abroad. This increase in popularity is not astonishing at all if we take into account that urban history can be used as a lens to understand a society and that—with a few exceptions—cities in Eastern and East Central Europe in modern time had never been a field of research. During the past decades, however, particularly the historical research of the city in East Central Europe succeeded in employing new research perspectives which have been productively adapted to the multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural characteristics of these cities. When compared with the city histories and the urban histories of Western Europe, the methodologies employed here have successfully made up for the time lost or have even overtaken the latter. Based on these innovations, the questions raised in this special issue provide a close connection with related and general research areas and allow an important revision of the recent understanding of modernity: the city as a space of communication, the city as a space of representation and of adapting to changing conditions, and the city as a space of modernization and knowledge.

One sign of urbanity are, firstly, processes of modernization, which have been subject of analysis in both Western and East Central European cities. While in Western Europe, analysis mostly focused on technological and infrastructural characteristics, research on East Central European cities has primarily approached architectural aspects ²² of city history. Today, the term modernization summarizes complex developments which refer to trends of structural diversity and include questions of identities, normative systems, cultural codes, and world views, while avoiding a normative assessment of these issues. ²³ “Modernization” consequently sheds hence its negative connotation in terms of “to make up/to catch up”.It describes nonnormatively an in itself dynamic and continuously developing “collection of transfer processes connected with each other [. . .] The process of modernization is not limited to the social environment but is also taking place in our heads and hearts.” ²⁴ This comprehensive understanding allows a new interpretation of urban development in East Central Europe ²⁵ : even though these cities were located in the “backyard of modernity,” ²⁶ they were, precisely for this reason, able to develop a specific understanding of and ambition for modernity since here the urban development was subjected to the influence of different factors than it was in Western Europe.

This also includes the aspect that the city represented a (transnational) space of communication, and thus of interaction, which comprised all ethnicities and social classes and in which all of their different interests were negotiated. ²⁷ For only the dense network of actors in the urban space can provide the respective density of exchange processes, of transfer and situations of interaction which often include conflict and cooperation. ²⁸ The creation of public urban space thus not only provides the guidelines, but also forms the basis of all recent approaches to the city history in East Central Europe; within these approaches, the question of ethno-religious diversity contributes an important matrix of analysis. This already indicates that a number of different sectors of the public—differing in their national, social, political, and cultural positioning ²⁹ —can act alongside or sometimes even against each other within public space. The presence of these different sectors of the public provides an important impulse for the research of city histories in general. They allow the development of innovative perspectives, since the possibilities to vary research on these different sectors are highly complex: it is possible to include the respective (political) media, the cultures of memory and celebration, ³⁰ the cultures of organizations and associations ³¹ as well as the sciences ³² and educational agendas within the analysis and, therefore, develop (historical) explanations for the political culture as well as for the national, governmental, or social representations all present in these cities. These approaches go beyond the research of the presumed deficits which have been ascribed to the cities in East Central Europe in comparison with cities in Western Europe; furthermore, they emphasize that the question of the public in the city is not limited to the political elites. The aspect of multiethnicity, which has been subject of complex research but has yet to receive the attention it deserves, is of particular interest for studies of the local space ³³ ; various public groups need to be included here since, as was mentioned before, previous studies solely focused on aspects of nationality. An integrating perspective, taking the varying multiethnic conditions into consideration, could overcome narratives which are based on a focus on the national state and also have remained valid and are still used today. It is, therefore, important to discuss the multiethnic contexts of the networks connecting the ethnic groups and to understand their role as a special resource for urban development. This can provide new insights into the nationalization of public space, for example, in regard to the question of why the conflict between the Polish and the Ruths led to its violent escalations in Lemberg. ³⁴

National and political movements in the city are thus closely related to the diverse ethnicities present in respective urban space, the latter representing a phenomenon which has so far been neglected in studies of the local cities. However, only the cities’ communicative density provided the basis for these national movements and allowed their increasing political impact in the first place. In addition, the multiethnic environments also influenced the development of the cities by their specific (national) forms of representation, as studies have shown, with the example of Triest around the 1900s ³⁵ or the process that led to the Budweis people being identified as either Czechs and Germans. ³⁶ The multiethnicity of the city also includes the diverse cultural representations, resulting in specific communication processes, ³⁷ which reflect the processes of acquiring power pursued by different national, ethnic, or religious movements, as well as the imperial or national efforts to claim and establish power relations. ³⁸ The consequences of urbanization, however, such as the necessity to feed the growing and mostly poor population or to ensure public health, ³⁹ have to this day received only limited attention by historical research. The new research paradigms discussed above have led to an increase of interest in the specific living conditions: “Life in the big city” ⁴⁰ is not the only characteristic of interest when studying urbanity or its problems; in addition, questions of food supply and other means of infrastructure necessary to supply the city’s population are receiving increasing attention at the moment. These approaches focus on infrastructural conditions and urban services such as the water supply, slaughterhouses, ⁴¹ municipal meat shops, municipal medical services, and so on from a less technical point of view; instead, they “read” these characteristics from the perspective of how they influenced the population ⁴² and social changes in the city.

The different topics discussed above already indicate that gender-related aspects have not found their way into the history of the cities and the urban history (not only) of Eastern (Central) Europe ⁴³ : nevertheless, it seems as if specific scopes and motivations of action existed particularly for women. What was the women’s movement’s influence on the public space during the processes of national and political acquisition? Or, in addition, which roles did women have via their own networks and their specific forms of knowledge transfer? ⁴⁴

All in all, the present research foci approach the cities in East Central Europe during the second half of the “long” nineteenth century as a form of laboratory: the respective “experimental designs” provided by single cities offered spaces where imperial conditions met specific and effective networks which established reciprocal horizontal as well as bottom-up connections and not—as has often been presumed—exclusively top-down network processes. These networks initiated and continuously influenced central national, political, cultural, and economic developments which drove the modernization of their societies. These cities, therefore, were spaces of condensed communication which made them spaces of knowledge transfer within the urban society and places of expert and knowledge cultures; they were thus influenced by different forms of knowledge transfer which, at the same time, offered new opportunities for cities’ own further development.

Cities and Knowledge in East Central Europe—Innovating Traditional Research Approaches

Approaching cities as laboratories leads to a research field which appears to be promising for future research but has not been made fully accessible yet, and which has, also in respect to Western Europe, only received limited attention so far: this is particularly true for the connections between the history of the city and the history of knowledge. Central factors of urban development particularly include the presence of expert knowledge, knowledge transfer in the cities, and the relevance of urban space for such knowledge transfer and for specific forms of knowledge which, in the end, all require dense communication networks. These factors allowed and still allow a specific form or urban knowledge as well as of urban knowledge transfer.

All the main foci and desiderata of a history of modern cities in East Central Europe discussed in this study have revolved around the topics of knowledge and knowledge transfer without really touching it, without defining and connecting it explicitly: however, national processes of acquisition cannot be realized without the communication of both historical knowledge and of knowledge defining the own national identity. ⁴⁵ This becomes particularly clear in areas where the destructions of war, the urbicide of World War II, and the forced exchange of populations required the reconstruction of communication structures, of identities, and last but not least, of the cities themselves—a reconstruction where experts were of central importance. ⁴⁶

If this reconstruction encompasses knowledge of a shared narrative, this knowledge and its acquiring, but also its transfer, receive fundamental importance for the development and the modernization of cities in East Central Europe in many aspects. One example can be found with the necessary improvement of public education: the level of illiteracy at the end of the nineteenth century was exceedingly high in comparison with Western Europe. In agricultural societies, the city represented a place where education and knowledge were made accessible. This included not only higher education as it was offered by the universities, ⁴⁷ which were mostly located in the future capitals of the coming national states, and by academic research institutions, technical and scientific academies, and other institutions as well as the academies of sciences, which all became factors of the cities’ increasing importance. Education in the city also included the foundation of secondary schools and vocational training institutions, of museums such as industrial museums or museums of natural history, which all contributed to the growing appeal of the cities. ⁴⁸ In addition, the cities tried to solve social problems and to promote the development of commerce and business using institutions for technical and industrial education as can be demonstrated with the example of Lemberg. ⁴⁹ Additional factors of knowledge transfer consequently also include national exhibitions which were held not only in Galicia but also in the Bohemian countries, as well as technical and scientific exhibitions which presented specific achievements. ⁵⁰

Knowledge also played a significant role outside of said institutions: scientific research led to a modern understanding of hygiene and public health. ⁵¹ This resulted in a number of administrative measures, such as the establishing of medical services and medical health care for the poor, the construction of slaughterhouses, and the introduction of municipal laboratories and agencies. Other administrative measures of central importance also included the construction of water pipelines and sewage systems, the redevelopment of poor areas, and new building regulations based on new medical and technical insights which claimed modern, bright, and dry apartments with clean water and a sewage system to be the basis for public health. The introduction of modern scientific methods of analysis led to a more specific examination of foods, for example, in regard to the cleanliness of flour and milk, which not only resulted in the establishing of municipal laboratories but also in the construction or modernization of municipal slaughterhouses, butchers, and market halls. The results of academic research thus entered the practical sphere of public services and care ⁵² (Ernst Forsthoff) which led to joint efforts of knowledge coming from different subjects and was consequently adapted to the necessities which resulted from the growth of the cities and the formation of modern urban lifestyles ⁵³ ; this represented thorough knowledge transfer and its utilization according to the different needs of modernization par excellence.

Processes like these are unimaginable without knowledge transfer or without the respective networks: the Dresden Hygiene Exhibition in 1911, for example, played a central role in the growth and the distribution of knowledge; local experts and policymakers were both sent to this event. ⁵⁴ This indicates that modern urban life was no longer possible to be organized or administrated without the help of (different forms of specific) knowledge: this led to the rise, if not the dominance, of experts such as physicians and chemists but also of civil engineers in the municipal administration, particularly on the management level.

The local dignitaries who traditionally used to dominate municipal politics in the past appeared to be overwhelmed by the numerous challenges and innovations, which were all based on new knowledge. Consequently, they had to rely on the expertise of these people in their decision-making processes which led to local politics being strongly influenced by the findings and opinions of experts who, in addition to their new role in policy-making processes, now entered the local political elites and dominated the respective local discourse. On another note, it is important to mention that the continuously growing administration not only underwent a professionalization through the new technical and medical experts but also experienced change itself due to the introduction of new technologies in communication, such as the telephone and the typewriter, as well as due to the changing tasks and their necessary solutions. Our study’s period of interest thus provides access to the change of elites in two ways, both of which would have been impossible without knowledge and knowledge transfer: on the one hand, from an ethnic-national perspective, since the new “domestic” national elites found themselves increasingly in competition with the rising elites of other ethnicities. The municipal administration and governance, on the other hand, also experienced a change of its elites from a social as well as a professional perspective due to the intrusion and rise of experts. ⁵⁵ Knowledge became a major resource for the future of urban development and for the successful answering of the challenges resulting from urbanization and modernization.

Particularly because “modernization” no longer only refers to developments in an exclusive linear order, which can eventually be seen as normative developments, but also comprises “search processes with unknown results in a series of possibly unintended actions,” ⁵⁶ knowledge transfer has a central role in these “search processes.”

The renewed concept of modernization, which now is no longer understood in its normative sense, allows a change of perspectives within the history of the city which no longer implies the presumed backwardness to be negative per se, but considers it to be a resource and a change for an independent development which consists of more factors than the ones which have to be made up for by the city. The cities had to find their own model of development within their specific conditions, but they were able to catch up with knowledge and trends of modernizing the city stemming from other cities mostly, however necessarily in Western Europe. By that, they were able to adapt “best practice”-models which are understood as “recipes (methods) for success” and which imply that by using them, the users must not compulsorily use all “ingredients”: they refer to and take advantage of webs of knowledge exchange and transfer and take advantage from that, what seems to be of benefit and of importance to reach their goal. ⁵⁷

As was claimed above, knowledge transfer and its adaption to the East Central Europe context were inherent to processes of urbanization and modernization. ⁵⁸ The actors could “help themselves” from a pool of well-tried practices and solutions so that the modernizing process was—in comparison with Western cities—at least temporarily more dense and finally accompanied by strategically thought-out objectives which were equally based on these best practices and on their own traditions.

The multilayered relationship between urban modernization and the growth of national movements, on the one hand, and the necessary knowledge (transfer) ⁵⁹ on the other have only partially, if at all, been discovered by recent research. When studying the history of the city, it seems therefore necessary to approach this topic from the perspective of the diverse forms of knowledge and their influence on the development of the city as well as—always within the context of the multiethnic conditions found in East Central Europe—to take a closer look at the networks and the forms of exchange between the cities and the different actors involved.

Particularly approaches such as this one can help to overcome research concepts which still consider cities in East Central Europe as backward and which are thus only of limited use for a historical analysis; they can offer a new perspective on the central importance of the cities for the social developments in the region as well as demonstrate that the cities were rather innovative instead of backward-oriented due to their respective “developmental design of urbanization and modernization.” Knowledge and knowledge transfer become guiding concepts for urban development, particularly in East Central Europe, but also need to be taken under consideration in the research of urban history and city histories in general: establishing a multilayered connection between knowledge transfer and urban development in the modern age allows a broadened research perspective which adds important possibilities for further study and analysis; this can lead to a more detailed understanding of the problems in East Central Europe and of the development of multiethnic cities in other regions as well.