Tales from Half-Asia: Small-Town Galicians Encounter the World

Abstract:This article discusses the years between the revolutions of 1848 and World War I, experienced by many Europeans as a time of unprecedented new opportunities for self-realization and collective liberation, and as one in which individual and collective identities became progressively constrained within national boundaries. In such towns as Buczacz and similar sites in the Austrian province of Galicia, people had more choices than ever before or after. Yet groups and individuals also began to be distinguished from others not only by religion and ethnicity, but also by whether their history gave them the right to continue living where they were. The author traces this process by discussing some better and lesser known individuals of this period: the Ukrainian author Ivan Franko, his Jewish counterpart Karl Emil Franzos, the scholar David (Zvi) Heinrich Müller, the writer S. Y. Agnon, Sigmund Freud, the doctor Fabius Nacht, his socialist-anarchist sons Max (Nomad) and Siegfried (Naft), and their idol Anselm Mosler, as well as the communist leader Adolf Langer, later known as Ostap Dłuski. Through these individual portraits, the author shows that the realization of the Enlightenment's lofty aspiration of liberating the individual from collective feudal constraints ended up unleashing forces that undermined the very core of humanism.