Remembering Lwow

<p><b><i>Remembering Lwów </i></b><b>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). </b></p><p>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.</p><p>Mining a rich variety of sources, including unseen archivalia, interwar newspapers, websites, and online forums, <i>Remembering Lwów</i> 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.</p>