ABSTRACT
Throughout the catastrophic twentieth century, dramatic transformations reshaped the political geographies of the former imperial peripheries and turned Lviv and Trieste, thriving centres of cosmopolitanism and multicultural diversity, into nationalist peripheries of modern states. The two World Wars and the new political boundaries, (re-)negotiated and (re-)drawn by the winners, but even more their local effects – expulsions, resettlements, ethnic cleansings – dramatically changed the urban culture of both cities. While Trieste was cut from most of its historical hinterlands, Lviv experienced dramatic demographic changes and was integrated in its Ukrainian surroundings. Intended to erase memories and to unify the cultural landscape, the politics of readjusting the populations to the (moving) political boundaries produced, instead, new victimized groups and ‘communities of memory’. Fascism and communism often reinforced ethnic divisions as the competing nationalisms supported one or the other. Thus, the status of various social and ethnic groups as ‘victims’, ‘heroes’, or ‘collaborators’ was institutionalized not only on the national level, but also as a part of the Cold War architecture of Europe. This established hierarchy of collective memories and political statuses collapsed
together with the Iron Curtain. While nationalists and populist politicians today try to mobilize the memory of victim groups, ‘transnational’ narratives and symbols – such as the Galician myth and ‘Istrian identity’ – become important sources of cross-border and regional cooperation (Bialasievicz and O’Loughlin 2002; Minghi and Bufon 2000).
