Chapter 11 Reconstructing Multilingualism in Everyday Life: The Case of Late Habsburg

Jan Fellerer

1 Introduction

This chapter1 addresses the question of multilingualism in the everyday life of the late , with focus on Lviv (Lemberg, Lwów, L’viv),2 the capital of the crownland “Kingdom of and Lodomeria.” The city’s officials, residents, and visitors from surrounding areas spoke varieties of Pol- ish, Ukrainian, , and, to a lesser extent, German and other minority languages. These multilingual encounters were subject to the ever more ardu- ous politics of nationalism of the late Habsburg Monarchy. Crucially, the semi- autonomous status gained by Galicia following the “Polish-Austrian Compro- mise” after 1867 produced a shift from German to Polish as the prime language of the province and its capital.3 This attempt by the imperial government in Vienna to appease Galicia’s traditional Polish elites triggered an increasingly well-organized political backlash from nationally aware Ukrainian4 circles. Meanwhile, contemporary Jewish politics were moving away from a fad- ing assimilationist trend of adopting Polish culture towards the conflicting

1 The archival research for this chapter was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, as part of the project “Sub-Cultures as Integrative Forces in East-Central Europe: 1900–present,” 2016, http://subcultures.mml.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 11 November 2018). 2 To avoid any unintended political connotations, the version of the city’s name (and its inhab- itants) adopted in this chapter is the contemporary international English form “Lviv” (and “Lvivians”), rather than “Lemberg” and “Lwów,” the German and Polish equivalents prevalent until the First and Second World War, and also unlike “L’viv,” the city’s modern Ukrainian name. Names of other towns and villages in eastern Galicia will be quoted in Polish, with the first mention accompanied by the Ukrainian version in brackets. Lviv street names will be quoted in their Polish form of the time only. 3 See, e.g., Christoph Marschall von Bieberstein, Freiheit in der Unfreiheit: Die nationale Autonomie der Polen nach dem österreichisch-ungarischen Ausgleich 1867: Ein konservativer Aufbruch im mitteleuropäischen Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993). 4 The Austrian authorities referred to the and the of Galicia as “Ruthenian”, partly in a bid to dissociate them from the Ukrainians of the .

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004407978_012 Reconstructing Multilingualism in Everyday Life 219 emancipatory movements of Zionism and socialism.5 The general political cli- mate widened fault lines along national and ethnic divides. They became man- ifest in the special institutions, public spaces, and channels of communication that emerged to cater separately to the city’s main ethnolinguistic constituen- cies. For instance, there were separate Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish political parties, educational associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and journals.6 This provided the city’s Ukrainian and Yiddish speakers in particular with spheres for exclusive use of their language in the face of an otherwise Polish-dominated public urban life. Thus, the general political constellation in the history of late Habsburg Lviv and the province of Galicia at large increasingly favored national seg- regation or even overt hostility, paired with the continued dominance of Polish-speaking elites. At the same time, the multilingual and multiethnic character of the city—and the encounters therein of people of different lan- guages and religions—remained a reality on the ground that had to be dealt with in everyday life. In fact, urban life placed ever-stronger emphasis on ex- change and mobility. In the closely-knit space of modern Lviv, the city’s resi- dents and visitors had ever more dealings with each other, for the purposes of trade and commerce, employment, lodging, entertainment, personal rela- tions, and marriage.7 These had to be conducted in one way or another, rais- ing the question of how the polyglot setting worked in practice in ordinary everyday life. The historiography on language issues in multilingual Lviv, and in Galicia and the Habsburg Monarchy more widely, has so far hardly ever ad- dressed this question. The focus, in Polish, Ukrainian, and Austrian, as well

5 See, e.g., Joshua Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6 See, e.g., Olena Arkuša, “Misce L’vova v dyskusijach pro nacional’nyj charakter Schidnoji Halyčyny na zlami XIX–XX stolit’” [Lviv in discussions about the national character of Eastern Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century], in L’viv: Misto, suspil’stvo, kul’tura [Lviv: City, society, culture], vol. 8/1, ed. Olena Arkuša and Mar’jan Mudryj (L’viv: L’vivs’kyj nacional’nyj universytet, 2012), 365–410; John Czaplicka, “Introduction,” in Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of Culture, ed. John Czaplicka (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13–45; Jaroslav Isajevyč et al., eds., Istorija L’vova [History of Lviv], vol. 2 (Lviv: “Centr Jevropy,” 2007), 238–79, 371–88, 414–24, 475–82; John-Paul Himka, “Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish- Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia,” in Focusing on Galicia: , , and Ukrainians, ed. Israel Bartal and Antony Polonsky (London; Portland: Littman Library, 1999), 25–48; Yaroslav Hrytsak, “Lviv: A Multicultural History,” in Czaplicka, Lviv, 47–73. 7 Svjatoslav Pacholkiv, “Zwischen Einbeziehung und Ausgrenzung: Die Juden in Lemberg 1918–1919”, in Vertraut und fremd zugleich: Jüdisch-christliche Nachbarschaften in Warschau— Lengnau—Lemberg, ed. Alexandra Binnenkade et al. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 164.