Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow

Nathaniel D. Wood. Becoming Metropolitan: Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. xiv, 272 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $40.00, cloth.The adjectives that first come to mind after reading this book - words like delightful, funny, and entertaining, - are not the I would typically apply to a significant scholarly monograph, particularly one dealing with Polish history, a topic that is usually so laden with lachrymose sobriety. But that is precisely Nathaniel Wood' s point: our view of Poland's has been so overwhelmed by stories of national suffering and resurrection that we have been blinded to almost everything else. Even those of us who have been critical of Polish nationalism still tend to remain trapped within the categories established by patriotic activists a century ago, perceiving everything through the prism of the nation and its much-recounted tragic fate. Wood shatters that trap wide open by offering a portrait of daily life in Cracow during the first years of the twentieth century, as depicted on the pages of the popular press. His cast of characters includes servant girls, shopkeepers, homeless children, middle-class journalists, night watchmen, aviators, peasant migrants, and many more, whom we follow as they attempt to adjust to the transformation of a small town into a modern city. Wood's dry wit and vibrant writing style make him an ideal guide through Cracow's busy streets of a century ago. Although it helps that he is relying on a source base that tends towards both the dramatic and the comic, in the hands of many historians even this material could become dull.Beyond the sheer entertainment value of the book, however, is a serious argument. As Wood puts it, In Cracow's popular illustrated daily newspapers, the principal source of identification, the 'first-person plural' that led to the creation of an 'imagined community', was not national but metropolitan [...]. Even in an era of intense nationalism, the popular press and its average readers were more concerned on a daily basis with urban issues than national ones (p. 202). The citizens of Cracow were joining what he calls an interurban matrix that allowed them to see themselves alongside the citizens of London, Paris, Chicago, and Berlin, and to interpret stories of crime, traffic, disease, development, electrification, or dirt as relevant whether set a few blocks from their home or a continent away. Cracovians were becoming, Wood argues, less obsessed with the city's Polish past as they embraced the norms of twentieth century urban life (p. 128).The mark of a really important scholarly thesis is that it seems obvious once stated, despite the fact that no one has quite noticed it before. Of course people cared more about plumbing than politics on a day-to-day basis; of course they did not go through their lives constantly performing their Polishness. …

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