Habsburg Galicia: troubled and wonderful diversity

The education sector was also reformed and improved, allowing, among other things, the possibility of teaching in the Ukrainian language.

In the 19th century, however, Galicia’s population also experienced violent rivalry between the Ukrainian minority and the Polish majority. The latter consisted mainly of landowners and governors, so that even in those areas where ethnic Ukrainians made up the majority of the population, the administration remained in Polish hands. The Habsburg authorities did little to balance the situation; on the contrary, there was clearly a pro-Polish bias in imperial policies. Despite this, under the rule of the Empire, Ukrainian (or rather, as it was then called, Ruthenian) society enjoyed a good deal of cultural autonomy, which was not granted to the Ukrainians of Tsarist Russia.

After Poles and Ruthenians, the third largest ethnic group was the Jews, whose numbers grew to almost double during the Habsburg rule. The Jews of Galicia lived in small, picturesque villages, the shtetl, where they mainly worked as merchants. Over the years, however, Galicia’s Jewish component also came to occupy many state offices, so much so that at the turn of the 20th century, Jews made up 58% of the province’s civil officials and judges.

Galicia was thus a multi-ethnic region within a multi-ethnic empire, and this peculiarity was noticed even back then. Bruno Schulz, one of the most famous writers of the time in fact wrote in his memoirs:“I am a public employee, an Austrian, a Jew, a Pole – all at once within an afternoon”

 The words and lives of Galician authors are one of the best gateways to the culture and history of this province and allow us to step back in time and almost experience the atmosphere that existed then. 

In order to tell the story, I decided to ask an expert for help. Eugenio Berra is the founder of Confluenze – Nel sud-est Europa con lentezza and contact person in the Balkans of the sustainable tour operator Viaggi&Miraggi. Since 2019, he has been organising tours to discover Galicia, unfortunately suspended by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

Eugenio knows about the article I am writing, and answers the phone eagerly, immediately jumping into the story of Schultz’s life. “Bruno Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobyč, a town in the Lviv oblast, into a Polish-speaking but Jewish family. His stories are permeated with magical realism, and tell of childhood myths, his relationship with his father and work in the small shtetl workshop. Schulz would only develop a relationship with his religion at the age of more than 30, unfortunately shortly before the arrival of the Nazis, by whom he would be killed in the ghetto of his hometown in 1942” says Eugenio.

Our conversation naturally leads us to Lviv (or Lemberg), the capital of the Ukrainian part of Galicia. Eugenio tells me how writers of the time could not help but write about Lviv, such was their fondness of it. “Joseph Roth gave a beautiful definition of Lviv as a city with canceled borders” he explains, “Roth was born in Ukraine in the late 19th century to a Jewish family. And to the Jews of Galicia he dedicates a splendid book, ‘The Wandering Jews’, in which he recounts life in the Galician shtetl, inhabited at the time by eighty percent Jews.”