Page 96 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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22%) and a Jewish majority. Moreover, Łuck looked different to Poznań—many of its buildings
were made of wood, rather than brick; its streets were narrower and not always paved; and it lacked

the sewer system that its sister city in the west could boast. At the same time, however, these

differences were highlighted in order to bolster, rather than to undermine, the idea that the two Polish

towns should be joined together under Poznanian guidance.

At an international fair that was held in Poznań in 1925, the western city’s leaders took the

opportunity to stake out a rhetorical claim for their unique civilizing role in Łuck, the only town from

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the eastern borderlands that was represented. On the final day of the exhibition, when the president

of Poznań indicated that his city would extend its role as a protector over Łuck, he argued that this

process could not be achieved through the efforts of municipal administrators alone. Instead, and in

keeping with the city’s traditions of organic work under the German empire, the links between the

two places were to be cultivated through a range of social and sporting organizations—and even

through an exchange by which schoolchildren from both towns would get to know one another

directly. The plan to initiate a program of “fraternal patronage” by which Poland’s “leading cities”

would select a “younger brother” from among the “less developed cities” of the state’s eastern

borderlands implied an intimate, familial, but by no means equal, relationship between Poles on

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geographically opposite sides of the country. While it is not clear what, if anything, came of such
efforts, the implication was that this relationship could be defined only by a kind of civilizational

asymmetry between nominally equal citizens. Moreover, the fact that Poznań’s fraternal hand was

held out exclusively to ethnic Poles left an uncomfortable silence around the future role of Łuck’s

Jewish majority.

86 Mędrzecki, Inteligencja polska, 44.
87 Katalog Wystawy Związku Miast Polskich na Międzynarodowym Targu w Poznaniu 1925 (Poznań, 1925), 14-15;
31.
88 “Łuck pod patronatem Poznania,” Przegląd Lubelsko-Kresowy, June 5, 1925, 3.

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