Remembering Lwów

Remembering Lwów focuses on Lviv, today a West Ukrainian city, but until WWII, a Polish city known as Lwów. The history of Lviv is a transregional story of rival memories rooted in trauma, loss, and competing narratives of ownership, not unlike once-German Breslau (today Polish Wrocław) or once-Polish Wilno (today the Lithuanian capital Vilnius).

The larger dynamics of mythmaking around such cases are at the heart of this study. Robert Pyrah explores the crucial difference between "memory" and history; and offers an innovative exploration of nostalgia through the Polish discussion about Lwów across several generations: from the city's status in a restored Poland after 1918 to the recent present. Taking a synchronic view, from the perspective of each period, Pyrah reveals a local and national mythology in constant motion, frequently confounding the retrospective record. This in turn highlights how history is used by key actors to serve present-day goals, a discussion relevant both to the wider Central European region and memory studies as a practice.

Mining a rich variety of sources, including unseen archivalia, interwar newspapers, websites, and online forums, Remembering Lwów shows how discussion of Lwów is both a lens into Polish national mythology and a demonstration of how history and memory interact as phenomena. The result is both a definitive history of one city's afterlife and a timely methodological primer in an age of "fake news"—as shown by how Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, following the 2014 annexation of Crimea, was justified using slanted historical arguments.