Hans-Christian Maner Galizien. Eine Grenzregion im Kalkül der Donaumonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. IKGS Verlag München 2007. 329 S., 8 Ktn. = Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas e.V. an der LMU München. Wissenschaftliche Reihe (Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte), 111. ISBN: 978-3-9809851-7-8.
In 1908 one Polish Galician representative to the Reichsrat in Vienna regretted “dass unser Land Galizien das Unglück hat, für die österreichischen Völker und deren Vertreter, ja sogar für die meisten Organe und Leiter der Zentralregierung eine terra incognita zu sein.” Another Polish representative lamented the “vollkommene Unkenntnis Galiziens” in the Reichsrat: “Sie haben gar kein Interesse daran und hören nur eben aus fernen Landen, wo sich die Völker miteinander schlagen, eine Kunde, die sie gar nichts angeht und so amüsant ist, wie ein Telegramm aus der Mandschurei.” (p. 155) These assertions of ignorance in Vienna about Galicia are cited in Hans-Christian Maner’s important new book about the Habsburg perspective on Galicia as a border region of the monarchy.
Maner’s work, in fact, shows that the Polish representatives were quite wrong, and that, ever since the creation and annexation of Galicia in 1772, the Viennese government was immensely interested in acquiring knowledge of the province, knowledge for the purpose of more effective administration and, in the more general sense proposed by Foucault, knowledge as the basis for imperial mastery. Yet, at the same time, the Viennese perspective on Galicia emphasized some of the province’s alien qualities, its “eastern” and “backward” aspects, in defining its subject relation to the imperial metropolis. In the spring of 1908, when news from Galicia was compared to a report from Manchuria, there had actually been major news about Galicia in the Viennese newspapers every day, covering the shocking assassination of the viceroy or namiestnik of the province, Andrzej Potocki, by the nationalist Ukrainian student Myroslav Sichynsky. In 1908 Galicia remained terra incognita perhaps only to the extent that the Viennese public was shocked by the violent intensity of the national antagonisms that culminated in assassination.
Maner introduces his work with some theoretical reflections on the nature of a “Grenzregion” – conceived in terms of the relations between the imperial center and the provincial periphery. Galicia, for the Habsburgs, was not just any province, but the province that reached to the empire’s far eastern frontier, the political border with the Russian empire, such that the Orientalist imagination might indeed leap from Lviv all the way to Manchuria. For the nineteenth-century writer Karl Emil Franzos, Galicia was already “Halb-Asien.” Maner structures his study around the different focuses of the Viennese perspective, and the first section is by far the longest, roughly half the length of the book, discussing Habsburg political conceptions of Galicia from the partition of Poland in 1772 right up until the eve of World War I, including the reflections on Galicia as terra incognita in 1908. There then follows a series of much shorter sections that focus on military considerations concerning Galicia, the Viennese press on Galicia, literary and travel accounts of Galicia, perspectives on the Galician Jews, and finally economic perspectives. The overwhelming balance of the book thus considers political issues, and the other sections, while immensely stimulating, seem almost to offer agendas for future research.
Maner has synthesized a vast secondary literature while also making extraordinary use of a very wide range of primary sources, including archival materials. His multifaceted depiction of the metropolitan perspective – from politics to literature to economy – will be useful and stimulating to all scholars interested in the province. In the section on the “Wiener Öffentlichkeit” Maner cites some fascinating nuggets from the Viennese press, even dating back to the early nineteenth century: in 1809 when Napoleonic policy and the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw threatened the very existence of Galicia, the Wiener Zeitung was claiming to discover that Galicia appreciated “das Segenvolle und die väterliche Milde der Österreichischen Regierung mit kindlicher Dankbarkeit.” (pp. 207–208) The official Viennese press thus hopefully framed the metropolitan-periphery relation in paternal-filial terms at the very moment when such formulations might have been least convincing.
In the section on political perspectives, Maner makes use of the Austrian state archives to discuss plans to divide and restructure the province between 1846 and 1848, noting even the possibility that the name of Galicia might have been altogether abolished at that moment. (The cited plan to make Lemberg the center of a western gubernia and Tarnow of an eastern gubernia must be a mistake, either in the archive or by the publisher; surely the intention was actually the reverse.) (pp. 89–90) Particularly fascinating are some of the materials that Maner uses in his section on military considerations. While a memorandum of 1810 described the Carpathians as the “Vormauer der Monarchie,” by 1873 another memorandum was reckoning more realistically with the difficulty of defending Galicia against a foreign army, presumably the Russian army. (pp. 181, 193) Some may wonder whether it makes sense to place the Jews of Galicia in a chapter of their own, separating them from other considerations of religion and society, but Maner would certainly not be the only scholar to approach Jewish issues as a separate agenda in writing Galician history.
In his conclusion Maner sees Galicia as having always been appraised and administered according to the priorities of the Habsburg metropolitan center: “Die Region wurde in der gesamten Zeit stets als Randregion betrachtet, die bestimmten Zwecken zum Wohle der Zentrale zu dienen hatte.” The Viennese view of Galicia, according to Maner was strictly “utilitarian,” such that “Galizien kann sozusagen als Spielball äußeren, aber auch inneren Sicherheits- und Machtdenkens angesehen werden.” (pp. 279–280) In fact, Maner’s own work suggests that the Viennese perspective was somewhat more complicated than that formula would imply. Especially in the constitutional period after 1867, which was also the age of autonomy for Galicia, one might discern a more symbiotic system of mutual views and conceptions moving reciprocally between monarchy and province. Maner’s important book offers scholars valuable information, stimulating insights, and whole new agendas for future research toward the better understanding of Galicia’s place within the Habsburg monarchy.
Larry Wolff, New York
Zitierweise: Larry Wolf über: Hans-Christian Maner Galizien. Eine Grenzregion im Kalkül der Donaumonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. IKGS Verlag München 2007 = Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für deutsche Kultur und Geschichte Südosteuropas e.V. an der LMU München. Wissenschaftliche Reihe (Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte), 111. ISBN: 978-3-9809851-7-8., in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Neue Folge, 56 (2008) H. 4, S. 606-607: http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Wolff_Maner_Galizien_Eine_Grenzregion_im_Kalkuel.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)