The war in Galicia
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 24, 2023
There were regions in the centre of Europe that have been wiped off the map. One of these — it is not the only one — is Galicia, which today largely coincides with the territory in which a nefarious war has been fought for over a year. Until the end of World War I, Galicia was the furthest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bordering Russia. With the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, the victors, certainly no less iniquitous than the vanquished, assigned it to the reborn Poland, just as Bucovina, which bordered it, was just as whimsically annexed to Romania. The borders, every time redrawn with rubber and pencil on the geographical maps by the mighty, are worth what they are worth, but it is probable that Galicia will never reappear on the inventories of European politics. What matters to us, much more than cartography, is the world that existed in that region — that is, the men who breathed, loved, earned a living, cried, hoped and died in the Königreich Galizien und Lodomerien (this was the official name of the province). A variegated set of Ruthenians (as the Ukrainians were called at the time), Poles, Jews (in some cities almost half the population), Romanians, gypsies, Hutsuls (who constituted a short-lived independent republic between 1918 and 1919) walked the streets of Lemberg, Tarnopol, Przemyśl, Brody (birthplace and homeland of Joseph Roth), Rzeszow, Kolomea. Each of these cities had a different name according to the language of their inhabitants; in each of them the Catholic churches around the corner turned themselves into synagogues and these into Orthodox and Uniate churches. It was not a rich region, indeed the officials of Kakania regarded it as the poorest and most underdeveloped of the empire; however, it was, just because of the plurality of its ethnic groups, culturally lively and generous, with theatres, newspapers, schools and universities in more languages and a flowering of writers and musicians that we have yet to learn to know. It is this world which from one day to the next, in 1919 found itself politically and juridically annihilated, and it is this multiform, intricate reality which some decades later received the coup de grâce by the nazi occupation (1941–1944) and then by the Soviet one. But even before becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the land that bore the name of Halych or Galicia (according to some of Celtic origin, like the Spanish Galicia) and at the end of the Middle Ages was under Hungarian rule with the name of Principality of Galicia and Volhynia, had been disputed from time to time between Cossacks, Russians and Poles, until Grand Duchess Maria Theresa took advantage of the first partition of Poland in 1772 to annex it to her empire. In 1922 the territory was annexed to the Soviet Union, with the name of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, from which it parted in 1991, abbreviating its name to Ukrainian Republic.
It is time to cease believing in the names and borders marked on the map and rather ask ourselves what happened to all of it, what happened to that world and those forms of life that we have just evoked. How do they survive — if they survive — beyond the infamous registers of state bureaucracies? And isn’t war now underway once again the fruit of the oblivion of those forms of life and the odious, fatal consequence of those registers and those names?
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 24, 2023
There were regions in the centre of Europe that have been wiped off the map. One of these — it is not the only one — is Galicia, which today largely coincides with the territory in which a nefarious war has been fought for over a year. Until the end of World War I, Galicia was the furthest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bordering Russia. With the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, the victors, certainly no less iniquitous than the vanquished, assigned it to the reborn Poland, just as Bucovina, which bordered it, was just as whimsically annexed to Romania. The borders, every time redrawn with rubber and pencil on the geographical maps by the mighty, are worth what they are worth, but it is probable that Galicia will never reappear on the inventories of European politics. What matters to us, much more than cartography, is the world that existed in that region — that is, the men who breathed, loved, earned a living, cried, hoped and died in the Königreich Galizien und Lodomerien (this was the official name of the province). A variegated set of Ruthenians (as the Ukrainians were called at the time), Poles, Jews (in some cities almost half the population), Romanians, gypsies, Hutsuls (who constituted a short-lived independent republic between 1918 and 1919) walked the streets of Lemberg, Tarnopol, Przemyśl, Brody (birthplace and homeland of Joseph Roth), Rzeszow, Kolomea. Each of these cities had a different name according to the language of their inhabitants; in each of them the Catholic churches around the corner turned themselves into synagogues and these into Orthodox and Uniate churches. It was not a rich region, indeed the officials of Kakania regarded it as the poorest and most underdeveloped of the empire; however, it was, just because of the plurality of its ethnic groups, culturally lively and generous, with theatres, newspapers, schools and universities in more languages and a flowering of writers and musicians that we have yet to learn to know. It is this world which from one day to the next, in 1919 found itself politically and juridically annihilated, and it is this multiform, intricate reality which some decades later received the coup de grâce by the nazi occupation (1941–1944) and then by the Soviet one. But even before becoming part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the land that bore the name of Halych or Galicia (according to some of Celtic origin, like the Spanish Galicia) and at the end of the Middle Ages was under Hungarian rule with the name of Principality of Galicia and Volhynia, had been disputed from time to time between Cossacks, Russians and Poles, until Grand Duchess Maria Theresa took advantage of the first partition of Poland in 1772 to annex it to her empire. In 1922 the territory was annexed to the Soviet Union, with the name of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, from which it parted in 1991, abbreviating its name to Ukrainian Republic.
It is time to cease believing in the names and borders marked on the map and rather ask ourselves what happened to all of it, what happened to that world and those forms of life that we have just evoked. How do they survive — if they survive — beyond the infamous registers of state bureaucracies? And isn’t war now underway once again the fruit of the oblivion of those forms of life and the odious, fatal consequence of those registers and those names?
(English translation by I, Robot)
Rudolf von Alt, Galician gypsies, 1839. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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