History takes place. Neuere Forschungen zur Geschichte multiethnischer Städte Zentralund Osteuropas im 20. Jahrhundert

Since the debate on the past and present of Central Europe among emigré writers and intellectuals in the 1980s the urban history of Central and Eastern Europe has become a vivid research fi eld in the German and English historiography. It also went alongside with the ‘spatial turn’ in historiography which claims an importance of space in historical analysis. The review essay discusses three books by two German and one American scholar representing three diff erent perspectives on urban history in the ‘age of extremes’: the city as a space of experience (Lviv), the city as a palimpsest (Grodno) and the microhistory of a city through the lens of a tenement and its residents (Warsaw). All three books demonstrate that urban history beside or even because of its methodological eclecticism off er important insights into the history of society. It illuminates processes of integration, exclusion and annihilation on a local level and integrates them into a macrohistorical analysis as well as into the history of modern social, cultural and political identities and loyalities, emphasising their situativity and fl uidity.