The Jewish question and the modern metropolis: Urban renewal in Prague and Warsaw, 1885--1950

Closely considering two projects, Finis Ghetto in Prague (1887-1915) and The Six-Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Warsaw in Warsaw (1949-1955), this dissertation uncovers the embedded "Jewish question" as a concomitant to the evolution of modern architecture in Central and Eastern Europe. While the Jewish question emanated out of the eighteenth-century debates concerning the political emancipation of the Jews, it soon surfaced in the cultural arena as both a reflection and a consequence of the dramatic restructuring of social organization and the attending and oftentimes turbulent responses to the transition into modernity. As long as their status in society remained contested and the rhetoric applied to the Jews tenaciously construed them as essentially different and Other, the Jewish question persisted as an influential motif of the modern condition. Drawing on lingering anti-Jewish bias and culturally constructed images of the Jews, the notions of Jewish space and Jewishness thus entered the discursive landscape of architecture as potent conceptual tools deployed in the authentication of architectural projects as both modern and national. Uncovering their origin as architectural concerns and demonstrating how these particular ethnoracial notions were subsequently accorded defining roles in the transformation of fin-de-siecle Prague and postwar Warsaw into modern metropolises not only raises questions about architecture's complicity in perpetuating negative stereotypes of Jews but also unveils the instrumentality of architecture in the construction of modern national identity. Moreover, exposing the complex matrix of social, cultural, economic, and political forces peculiar to Central and Eastern Europe that contributed to the entanglement of nationalism and the Jewish question in modern architectural culture corroborates an underlying assertion of this study: Despite the teleological unity attributed to the modern movement by canonical histories written in the twentieth century, the unfolding of architectural modernism was a multifaceted and uneven process that reflected a broad range of artistic, social, and cultural influences and a diversity of negotiated responses to the inherent ambiguities and complexities of modernity.