Galicia

Who still knows Galicia? Who still knows where it is – or rather, where it used to be? Because Galicia no longer exists. It has disappeared from the map. Its western part now belongs to Poland, its eastern part to Ukraine.

Joseph Roth, perhaps the most knowledgeable expert on this world, but also a great number of other writers are from this region. It was the home of Jewish humour, as well as that of the Hasidic miracle-performing rabbis, who ruled the shtetls.

Martin Pollack invites us on a journey into this fascinating and lost world, starting in Eastern Galicia, home to Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish and German populations, to the Bukovina – the home of Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer – where Romanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Armenians and above all the Romany people formed a diverse cultural landscape, to Lemberg, the capital of Galicia.

Contemporary photographs accompany this journey into the past.