Few cities match Lodz (or “Łódź,” in contemporary Polish) in terms of the intensity of its social history. In its long history of striving for self-reconstruction and improvement to meet modern benchmarks, local public and civic desire in this multi-ethnic industrial hub had many objects on which to focus. Apart from various infrastructural projects, such as the sewerage system (Łódź was the last European metropolis of over half a million inhabitants to be equipped with one), examples included a museum of local lore and history, and a university. In a way, similar longing, especially among the people professionally interested in the city, concerned an all-encompassing monograph of its history.

This is—as must be any modern dream—a moving target. Academic fashions, tastes and styles change, so previous endeavors by German Łódź expats or historians from the University of Łódź could not permanently satisfy this longing. The challenge was taken up by German historian Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, who for decades worked on Łódź-related topics and became a “friend of the city,” engaging in fruitful cooperation with scholars in Łódź.

The result is an immense monograph covering the city’s entire modern history. The narrative deals skillfully with the complexities of the city’s past with an account featuring the shifting perspectives of its inhabitants of different ethnicities. The reader gets a synthetic overview of the city’s industrial beginnings, its rise to prominence, and its embedding in global production chains and imperial politics. The narrative continues through the catastrophe of the first world war and the city’s new place in a Polish national state. It reaches a climax—expressed in the sheer number of pages devoted to the topic—with the Nazi occupation and consequent extermination of the Jews. From there, the story continues by addressing the ethnically more homogenous socialist state that supported the proletarian city but later abandoned it in favor of other industries. The transition to a post-communist society devastated the city’s economic life, and its subsequent regeneration was slow. The book concludes by discussing the present city’s prospects for development and its current self-image.

Multi-ethnic Łódź was brought to an end with Nazi occupation. The city, directly incorporated into the Greater German Reich, witnessed an unprecedented shift in inter-ethnic relations. Populations that had lived side by side in conflict and cooperation were now pitched against each other. Jewish inhabitants were sequestered in the ghetto and intended for extermination, while Poles were stripped of most of their rights and selectively killed according to the whims of the dictatorial occupying administration and the terror it inflicted. The ensuing tensions, choices, and multi-directional violence are extremely complex, and continue to fan historiographical and political controversies. The Nazi occupation, extermination of Jews and later exile of Germans deserve ongoing research. Many issues remain underexplored, even in this book; one such is the extent of ground-level interactions between ethnic groups during the occupation, with the Jewish ghetto in Litzmannstadt (as the city was renamed) possibly being far less cut off than the customary account (which the author seems to endorse) asserts. However, this short period of the city’s history, despite undoubtedly being pivotal, takes an outsized portion of the author’s attention. The ups and downs of the truly entangled history of this industrial hub in various state configurations remain merely a backdrop to what Bömelburg identifies as the main drama.

This global history is worth an in-depth exploration and this city may well serve as a model to investigate broader patterns characterizing urban structures among shifting spatial formats of the state. Admittedly, the author does sketch the fascinating story of the local variant of capitalism, as seen in an industrial hub powered by the nexus of local labor and water resources, global flows of technology and skill, and vast Eastern markets. The city was an ethnic mix of German craftsmen often turned industrialists, a steady influx of Polish workers, Jews from all walks of life and Russian administrative personnel, as well as other, smaller communities. Occasionally, this melting pot overheated, resulting in explosions of extreme social tension such as the 1905 revolution. However, it was also marked by significant patterns of cooperation, producing a particular business-oriented non-nationalized ethos, capable of mediating ethnic conflicts in a more durable way than was achieved in Warsaw.

What put an end to these networks was the emergence of an independent Poland after 1918, illustrating the fate of imperial cities in nation states. The city’s ability to serve as a case study for a broader phenomenon continued with its socialist transformation and ethnic homogenization after 1945. Yet the background story presented by Bömelburg of the local anti-communist dissidents who complained about the lack of support among non-intelligentsia remains underexplored. Perhaps there was little opposition in Łódź because there were few who resented lost careers after the comprehensive communist alteration of social mobility. The worlds of workers, admittedly working in difficult conditions but still benefiting from socialism at least on the level of dignity and perceived agency, are yet to be described in depth. The demise of these once-flourishing structures of socialist subjectivity is worth studying. For instance, the transition brought far more than just a derailment of the local economy, which Bömelburg rightly embeds in the global postindustrial shift. The local population rushed to launch small scale textile production and sell it in the bazaars surrounding the city. The demand remained, now equally compartmentalized, in “Eastern markets”, embodied in shuttle traders travelling by bus from the former Soviet republics to supply their own small shops and stalls. This story hardly squares with the tales of passive homines sovietici unable to adapt to capitalist reality, and may change the historiographical assessment of the larger social crisis of the post-transition years.

All these dimensions would gain analytically from comparative insights. They would help to assess the exceptionality of Łódź and its active othering in the Polish historiography and public sphere alike. It seems that this othering is a much broader phenomenon affecting industrial cities, ethnic mixes or simply just “second cities.” Thus, the symbolic position of Łódź is not reducible to a particular trajectory of a truly modern, working-class, multiethnic and femininized city in a cultural framework dominated by rural fantasies of the nobility, nationalist triumphalism, and patriarchal glory mirrored by victimhood.

Ultimately, the book is to be commended twice over. First, the city finally has a monograph worthy of its complexity. It is a skillful synthesis capturing a fascinating and multi-layered history from multiple perspectives, showing global roots, networks and influences and exploring conflicting cultures of memory. Despite solid historiographical backing, and the extensive referencing (in several languages) indispensable to addressing this topic, the book keeps the reader’s focus and remains a thrilling read. A lucid style maintains precision without veering into the worst excesses of German academic writing. The author pointedly uses examples and anecdotes to make this challenging read a satisfying experience. The book also delivers a well-grounded analysis of the darker sides of the city’s history. Second, the book recognizes that there is always more to tell about Łódź, whose history probably cannot be contained in any single monograph. In this way it perpetuates the unrealized dream of final fulfilment that runs like a scarlet thread through the city’s continuing history.