Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg's study is a long-awaited monograph about a major Central European metropolis. Łódź, or Lodz as it is conventionally spelled in German and English, became a site of industrialization and multicultural interaction as well as Nazi genocide and communist reordering. The author weaves these strands together with considerable insight and faithfulness to the sources.

The book's main chapters are arranged according to period and theme. Bömelburg begins with a basic outline of the city's origins before and during the nineteenth century and then moves to the growing ethnic and social diversity prior to World War I. He applies the term "multiculturality" (Multikulturalität) to this diverse population, which is personified by its stereotypical inhabitant, the so-called Lodzermensch. Regarded by early twentieth-century critics as a symptom of denationalization, this "cosmopolitanism from below" is seen today as a positive role model for the European Union (4-5). Nonetheless, the chapters on World War I, the establishment of the Second Polish Republic, and the interwar period reveal increasing polarization in municipal life and politics, spurred especially by nationalism and antisemitism.

A good half of the book is devoted to World War II and its immediate aftermath. Here, Bömelburg underscores the radicality of Nazi plans and action to transform Lodz into Litzmannstadt - Germany's new name for the city in 1940-by framing the city as a locus of forced migrations. These include the 1941 deportation of thousands of Romani from the Burgenland to the so-called Zigeunerlager in the Lodz ghetto, where they suffered in horrendous conditions before being sent to the Chełmno/Kulmhof death camp. Bömelburg largely adheres to the narrative of wartime Lodz being in effect separated nationally into three cities (197). The resulting equally long chapters focusing on Germans, Poles, and Jews allow for a fine parsing of how the city's population was separated, killed, or deported-and ultimately how they are remembered in different ways.

Yet the book's own division of the city into three populations risks replicating nationalist terminology and assumptions. For example, should Volksdeutsche, commonly translated as "ethnic Germans," be included in the same chapter as "Reich Germans" who moved to the city during the occupation, or would it be epistemologically more valuable to have them included in a discussion of the Polish population? After all, most Volksdeutsche in the Lodz region had grown up in the Russian Empire or Second Polish Republic, and many had only a weak command of German. As other scholars have argued, ostensibly German communities abroad should not be viewed only or even primarily through a German national lens. [1] Because collaborators are often counted as German, reconsidering Volksdeutsche through their Polishness could open new perspectives on local complicity in the Holocaust.

Overall, Bömelburg's study addresses the question of Polish involvement in the Holocaust rather tangentially. In explaining the Polish attitude toward Jews during the Holocaust, the author provides a range of opinions on Jews and antisemitism. He focuses on the weakness of the underground resistance in the Lodz region, the lack of Polish participation in the German terror against Jews in the fall of 1939, and the overall "passivity" of Poles vis-a-vis Jews in the ghetto (254). When surviving Jews returned to Lodz, there was no post-war pogrom, but the city became increasingly less safe. This situation fostered the flight of Jews from the city that lasted from the summer of 1946 through 1950.

Nonetheless, the study could have explored more how the Polish population behaved as it was becoming the demographic majority of the city despite - or because of - Germanization policies. Bömelburg provides some hints, noting for example that up to 40 percent of housing in post-war Lodz had once belonged to Jewish owners, and this may have fostered Polish hostility toward returning Jews (327). Here, this reviewer would have appreciated more insight into how ordinary Poles, themselves victimized, justified the persecution of their Jewish neighbors during the war and after.

Bömelburg devotes more attention to Reich and ethnic German experiences at the end of the war. He comments on the hardships they endured, including the deportations in the late 1940s, and he follows some notable Lodzers who were active in expellee political and cultural organizations in West Germany. But how did everyday expellees from Lodz take advantage of assistance programs in the Federal Republic of Germany, including the "burden equalization" (Lastenausgleich) law from 1952 that gave restitution for lost property? These transnational questions of property and reparations deserve to be included in the history of Lodz as well.

Two chapters cover the consolidation and disintegration of communist rule in the city: one until 1956 and the other continuing to 1989. These chapters encompass episodes centered on milestones in the city, including the building of the university, where Bömelburg relies on the work of Agata Zysiak. In the "anti-Zionist" campaign during the political crisis of 1968, he poses the question of how Lodz's multicultural background could have produced the antisemitism of communist leaders like Mieczysław Moczar. Bömelburg also follows the development of the film industry across the two chapters and includes Andrzej Wajda's 1977 adaptation of Władysław Reymont's "The Promised Land" (Ziemia Obiecana). Although some scholars such as Omer Bartov have noted that the movie repeats antisemitic tropes present in the original work, Bömelburg argues that the figure of Moryc Welt is portrayed in the film with greater nuance (373-374).

The author highlights how women shaped the city's history, particularly in the postwar period. He notes that there were 20 percent more women than men in the city's population in 1955 (356), and they made up almost two-thirds of the textile workers (370). A former textile worker, Michalina Tatarkówna-Majkowska, rose in the 1950s to become the first secretary of the Lodz committee of the Communist Party. Despite her stature in Lodz city politics, she is covered only briefly in two paragraphs in the book. Bömelburg provides greater detail about the role of women in labor revolts. Worsening factory conditions led to strikes in Lodz's textile factories and succeeded in forcing the government to rescind planned price increases-just months after the better-known shipyard strikes that were bloodily suppressed at the end of 1970. Yet the largely female textile workforce remained markedly underrepresented in the later Solidarity movement in Lodz.

After 1989, the economic transformation once again hit women disproportionately hard. Bömelburg notes how such achievements by women workers have been elided in the city's popular memory. To this day, the city's public memory glorifies swashbuckling male entrepreneurs, most symbolically in the "Monument to the Three Industrialists" (Henryk Grohman, Izrael Poznański, and Karol Scheibler) on Lodz's main thoroughfare, Piotrkowska Street. While his coverage of the role of women is commendable, Bömelburg could have taken the time to examine other blank spots. For example, Lodz's post-communist rediscovery of itself as the "city of four cultures" does not intersect with the reality of new ethnic groups that have recently arrived in the city. In the 2000s, Vietnamese-run food stalls populated the grounds of the shuttered Ramisch factory in the center of town, but this "Chinatown" was evacuated in 2009 to make space for "OFF Piotrkowska Center"-an originally edgy commercial development that, with its (Western) European cachet, could easily be at home in Berlin or Manchester. Whether Muslim minorities and the increasing number of Ukrainians can find their own niche in the kind of multiculturalism being marketed in Lodz today remains to be seen.

A stronger editorial hand could have avoided some errors and confusion. For example, varying statistics for the later postwar Jewish population are given without dates or specific citations (354, 364), and there are some inconsistencies with names: Władysław Gomułka is introduced twice as Wiesław (351, 362), without any indication that this was a pseudonym. Mieczysław Moczar appears as Zbigniew (342), and Jerzy Kropiwnicki is listed as Grzegorz in the index (497).

Bömelburg's study is a powerful overview that synthesizes the wealth of new scholarship on Lodz while incorporating insights from his own archival research. Throughout the book, he extensively cites from German, Jewish, and Polish documents and historians. The voices from Polish sources especially are assiduously reproduced in the original in the footnotes - a boon to every historian working on this fascinating city.

Note:

[1] For an excellent discussion of many of these works, see: H. Glenn Penny / Stefan Rinke: Germans Abroad: Respatializing Historical Narrative, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 41 (2015), 2: Rethinking Germans Abroad, 173-196.

Winson Chu