From Lemberg to L’viv
Conflict over Memory in a City on the Border
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Throughout its history, L’viv has belonged to different empires. Its multi-ethnic population consisted primarily of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians. Western historians and émigrés romanticise the city as a multi-cultural metropolis. In fact – whether under Polish rule, during Nazi occupation, or in the Soviet Union, or nowadays as the centre of western Ukraine – the city has always been the site of aggressive identity policies that excluded segments of the population. A differentiated appraisal of the past is not taking place. The local elites are engaged in a politics of memory in which dubious traditions of the Ukrainian nationalist movement are being exalted, and the Jews and the Poles are being eliminated for a second time.
(Osteuropa 6/2008, pp. 211–228)