Women and the Warsaw Home Front

This chapter examines the intersection of war and gender in Warsaw. The resurrection of an independent Polish state in the aftermath of the First World War was accompanied by the establishment of equal political rights and suffrage for women, a cause that had minimal support before the war but was accepted after the war with little public debate or dissent. However, that the war itself had something to do with this important development in Polish political culture is assumed rather than established in the historiography of modern Poland and the emerging scholarship about women and gender. Moreover, in the scant literature on the role of women in wartime Poland, the focus had been placed—or misplaced—on a small minority of women who served as volunteers in auxiliary military organizations, particularly those in support of the Polish legions.

Living on the Edge

This chapter discusses the disastrous state of Warsaw's wartime economy. An almost complete disruption in the supply of coal in the war's first months dealt a crippling blow to industrial production in the city. The impact on employment was equally devastating, and no recovery was possible as long as the war continued. Shortages of basic goods and commodities, particularly food, were prevalent from the very beginning and became ever more acute during the German occupation. Meanwhile, German efforts to strictly control the consumption of food and other basic goods in Warsaw led to widespread smuggling and thriving black markets, which advantaged those who could pay even higher prices in order to access vital resources.

Poles and Jews

This chapter addresses the impact of the war on relations between Warsaw's two principal and competing national groups, Poles and Jews, by exploring themes that take into account the dramatically different attitudes of the Russian and German regimes toward the Jewish population. To be sure, the actions of the Russian Army were largely responsible for the large Jewish refugee population in the city during the first part of the war, one of the main contributing factors to Polish–Jewish tensions. By contrast, the principal goal of the German occupation regime was to maintain stability, which required a balancing act between Poles and Jews in Warsaw—an approach that many Poles interpreted as serving Jewish interests.

Wartime Crisis Management and Its Failure

This chapter looks at the Warsaw Citizens Committee, which emerged in August 1914 to assist in the basic provisioning of the city, finding work for the unemployed, assisting the families of military reservists called up to the Russian Army, and mobilizing financial resources to deal with the war's expected hardships. Those hardships, however, would be far greater than anticipated, leading to a rapid expansion of the committee's activities. Soon enough, the committee found itself involved in the organization of public kitchens, the sheltering of refugees, the setting of price controls, the monitoring of public health, and the protection of children. Eventually, with so many of Warsaw's inhabitants relying partially or completely on public support, escalating needs outstripped the city's financial resources. By the end of the war, a bankrupted city administration was unable to pay its own employees, let alone feed some two hundred thousand people in the public kitchens inherited from the Warsaw Citizens Committee.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Warsaw during the Great War. Warsaw entered the war not as a capital city but as the third city of the Russian Empire. In the war's first year, Warsaw witnessed massive shifts in population as a consequence of mobilization, evacuations, deportations, and male labor out-migration on the one hand, and the arrival of refugees and wounded soldiers in the other. By the second winter of the war, the city experienced rapidly escalating incidences of starvation, disease, death, and conflict over the increasingly scarce resources necessary to sustain human life. The chapter then compares Warsaw's experience of the Great War to that of the Second World War.

A Minor Apocalypse

This concluding chapter begins with an attempt to capture Warsaw in November 1918 in imagery that is in stark contrast with the standard narrative of the city as the scene of recovered Polish statehood. This imagery will be drawn from scenes set in cold and unlit streets that featured ubiquitous begging, long lines for foul-tasting “bread,” riots and the looting of public stores, everyday theft and banditry, widespread prostitution, and mounting incidents of personal, intercommunal, and political violence. The chapter then evaluates the “minor apocalypse” that occurred in Warsaw during the First World War by looking more precisely at the prevalence of certain kinds of disease, mortality and fertility rates, and the war's larger demographic consequences, and by comparing these data with those obtained for other European cities. Ultimately, this evaluation provides a better understanding of the problems confronting the establishment and consolidation of a functioning parliamentary democracy in Poland's “old-new” capital city.

The Frontline City

This chapter focuses on the war's first year and the last year of Russia's imperial presence in the city. During this year, Warsaw was a frontline city and the setting for experiences that were not repeated following the Russian evacuation, although they indeed had long-term impacts. Artillery bombardment in and from the city suburbs, aerial bombing, scorched-earth demolitions and explosions, and exchanges of fire across the Vistula between departing Russians and entering Germans were loud and visible reminders of Warsaw's exposure to the fighting. So, too, was the constant movement of people and things. These occurred amidst rumors of various kinds, spy scares, and reports of miracles typical of a state of siege mentality, even though the city was actually spared a siege.

Warsaw’s Wartime Culture Wars

This chapter focuses on Warsaw's wartime culture wars. Before the war, Warsaw was a busy metropolis, a city in a hurry with coach traffic comparable to that of the largest of European urban centers, proud of its high culture dominated by the classical performing arts and boasting a lively nightlife revolving around its many cafes and restaurants. This Warsaw was assaulted almost immediately by the exigencies of war, as disruptions of public transportation, the imposition of curfews, and a ban on alcohol sales undermined the efforts of the city's cultural elites to maintain “business as usual.” At the same time, the exacerbation of existing social, ethnic, and gender tensions found expression in the public discourse on culture and propriety during wartime, reflected in heated debates about horseracing and legalized gambling, temperance and prohibition, the emerging new venues of cinema and cabaret, and radical changes in fashion.