Abstract This study examines the architectural and social evolution of workers’ halls across the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its successor states. It follows them, starting with their emergence as multifunctional community centers in the late nineteenth century to their later transformation into sites of political mobilization and contested memory. Drawing on case studies from Vienna and Budapest alongside halls in provincial and industrial towns, the analysis traces how these buildings were shaped by their diverse founders – labor organizations, municipal authorities, and employers alike – and how their architecture and use shifted following the Habsburg Empire’s dissolution and the formation of new nation-states. The study argues that workers’ halls offer a distinctive lens on collective identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe, illustrating how working-class communities negotiated belonging across linguistic, ethnic, and political divides, and how the buildings’ afterlives – abandonment, repurposing, or rediscovery – continue to reflect their contested heritage in the post-socialist present.
Abstract Although its European institutional counterparts, such as the Camera del Lavoro (Italy, 1891) and Arbeiterkammer (Austria, 1920), have an established presence in the historical scholarship on labor relations in the early twentieth century, complex and in-depth research on the Romanian Labor Chambers is lacking. While the institutional trajectories of the various chambers have been addressed, mainly from the perspective of trade unions and socialist circles, in a book chapter (Săvoaia 2022, 149–92), the topic remains largely understudied. My study emphasizes that these institutions are vital for understanding labor relations in interwar Romania as they served as fertile soil for the political and economic transformations that occurred during and after the Second World War given that they managed to survive and remained active under continuous government control of different political regimes from 1933 until 1948. From this perspective, my research focuses on the first years of their existence (1933–1937) and is driven by the conceptual framework that labor chambers served as ideational spaces where social policymaking would unfold and as sites where loyalties would be negotiated in relation to, on the one hand, the government in power and, on the other, the Romanian state as a whole.
Abstract This article examines the experiences of Belarusians and those involved in Belarusian elite circles in the aftermath of the First World War and into the 1930s. It explores primarily three spaces where they operated: the Second Polish Republic, Soviet Belarus, and diasporic communities abroad, particularly in Prague. Examining their activity in multiple places speaks to the diversity of this network and to its ability to adapt to different measures implemented by various states, which changed between the world wars. Though operating under certain constraints, these actors, with some success, were able to use their positions and circumstances to develop Belarusian culture and continue their cause. Examining their activity across different spaces also reveals many parallels between the “imperial” and “post-imperial” periods and spaces.
Abstract Established in 1922 by the German financial and political elites of Timişoara, the German House was modeled on similar institutions in cities with substantial German populations and aimed to consolidate the social, cultural, and associative life of the local German community. Over time, it came to function as a metonym for the city’s German establishment. However, as political allegiances within this establishment gradually fragmented, the symbolic potency of the German House likewise diminished, prompting plans for the construction of a new and improved institution. Consequently, the original building lost much of its representative significance, becoming a synecdoche largely devoid of its earlier meaning. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of representational space, this article argues that the German House operated as a metonymic site in the production and reinforcement of Germanness in Timişoara, shaping both the cultural and political expressions of Banat Germanness during the interwar period.
Abstract This article examines the spatial imaginaries of Polish-speaking socialists in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland from the 1905 Revolution to the consolidation of the Polish national state. Socialists interpreted their world through spatial references, envisioning solidarities that ranged from local factory networks to global political alliances. The Polish Socialist Party (PPS) largely prioritized national independence but actively fostered anti-imperial solidarities with other oppressed nations in the empire and beyond. The Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) championed internationalist agenda and more openly aligned with German and Russian socialist movements, while seeking to unite workers for empire-wide social change. Drawing on socialist leaflets, newspapers, and protest records, the study analyses spatial imaginaries to uncover how different socialist groups imagined political communities and alternative futures, having their afterlives also in the post-imperial context.
