Łódź (German Lodz, also Lodsch, 1940–1945 Litzmannstadt), located
in the center of Poland around 130 km southwest of Warsaw, is the
third largest city in the country with over 695,000 inhabitants
after Warsaw and Krakow.
The capital of the Łódź Voivodeship
is the seat of the University of Łódź and the State University of
Film, Television and Theater. For the economy of the country, the
resident companies of the textile industry as well as the
entertainment and electronics branch form a focus.
Middle Ages and early modern times
Łódź had its
origins as a small settlement on a river named after the city Łódka.
This river runs below the city. The place was first mentioned in
1332 as Łodzia. In 1423 Władysław II Jagiełło granted city rights
under Magdeburg law. In the 17th century, the development of the
place experienced a certain stagnation, which was further
intensified by a fire in 1661 and the outbreak of the plague. With
the construction of the Catholic St. Joseph Church in 1665, the city
received its first sacred building.
Period of division until
the end of the First World War
With the second partition of
Poland in 1793, the city became part of Prussia. Around 1800 only
190 people lived here. After the Peace of Tilsit in 1807 the place
became part of the Duchy of Warsaw and in 1815 it was integrated
into Congress Poland, so that the city was under the Russian Tsar.
This and the subsequent changes laid the foundation for Łódź's
economic boom.
Building areas were created in the south of
the village. The first German cloth makers settled there in 1823,
mostly recruited in western Germany as well as in Saxony, Bohemia
and Silesia and later also from the Prussian province of Posen. The
German weavers, spinners and dyers, who soon formed the majority of
the population, traditionally carried out their craft at home at the
beginning.
In the course of industrialization, Łódź became
the most important location for the textile industry in Congress
Poland. The city was generally considered to be the Manchester of
Poland. The population rose from less than 1,000 to several hundred
thousand. The first textile factory was completed by Christian
Friedrich Wendisch in 1826. The cloth makers' guild was founded in
1825 as the city's first guild. The upswing in Łódź was slowed down
by the November uprising of 1830/31. After the fighting, however,
the upswing continued and so Louis Geyer (also Ludwik Geyer) built a
textile factory in 1836, the so-called White Factory.
In 1848
Jews were first allowed to settle in the newly built factory town.
In 1854 Carl Scheibler opened his first machine factory and one year
later he set up a modern spinning mill here. During a weaver revolt
on April 20, 1861, some factories were damaged. In 1865 the city
received the economically important connection to the rail network.
The Łódź Volunteer Fire Brigade was formed in 1876. Construction of
the first synagogue in Łódź began in 1882. Two years later, the
Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral was inaugurated.
In 1892 there were violent clashes between the residents and the
Russian military, with 164 people dying on June 23. The largest
Jewish cemetery in Europe was established in the same year on an
area donated by Izrael Poznański. Doły Cemetery, established in
1896, is the largest municipal cemetery. In 1897 there were 314,000
people in Łódź, 40% of whom were Germans. Poland's first cinema, the
Iluzjon, opened here in 1899. In 1904 there were 546 factories in
the city employing 70,000 workers, mostly in the textile industry.
Workers' misery was widespread in Łódź. The child and infant
mortality was at times at 70%, partly because there was no sewer
system in the city for a long time. Around 1900, 80% of Łódź's
population was still illiterate.
During the First World War,
the city of Łódź became a battle zone. The battle for Łódź ended in
a draw, but the Russian armies had to surrender the city to the
Germans on December 6, 1914. The war was a severe economic blow for
the city. On the one hand, the important Russian market collapsed,
and on the other hand, the occupiers dismantled large parts of the
factories without regard to the predominantly German owners.
Interwar period
In the Second Polish Republic, newly founded
after the end of the World War in 1918, the laborious reconstruction
of industry began in Łódź. In 1931 around nine percent of Łódź
residents were German-speaking. The relationship between Jews and
Germans was favored by the linguistic proximity. In 1930 there was
even a German-Jewish electoral bloc. Nonetheless, anti-Semitism was
widespread in Łódź among Germans and Poles alike.
Second
World War
The outbreak of World War II hit the city at its
post-war economic high. On September 9, 1939, the Wehrmacht marched
in without a fight. After the invasion of Poland in September 1939,
the new Reichsgau Posen, later Wartheland, was created within the
Association of the German Reich. The industrial area around Łódź was
incorporated into this on November 9, 1939. The city itself formed a
German urban district in the Kalisch administrative district. Always
written Lodz by the Germans in the city, it was officially called
Lodz after the region was annexed to the German Empire.
The German district president in Kalisch moved his
seat to Lodsch on April 1, 1940. At the same time, extensive
incorporations came into force. The town of Ruda Pabianicka and the
surrounding rural communities Brus (German: Bruss), Chojny and
Radogoszcz (German: Radegast), which had been under the
administration of the Lord Mayor in Lodsch since January 1, 1940,
were formally incorporated into Lodsch.
On February 8, 1940,
the Łódź ghetto, one of the largest in the “Third Reich”, was
established. The Jews imprisoned there had to do forced labor and
were later mostly deported and murdered in concentration camps. Only
about 900 people were found alive when the Red Army marched in. A
youth concentration camp existed next to the ghetto from 1942
onwards, in which children were locked up from the age of two. At
least 500 children died here. In 1940 there were 692 murders of the
sick in the context of the German euthanasia policy of patients at
the Kochanowka institution.
On April 11, 1940, Łódź was
renamed Litzmannstadt by the German occupation authorities in honor
of the German General Karl Litzmann (1850-1936), whose 3rd Infantry
Guard Division had fought victoriously in the Battle of Łódź at the
end of 1914. On February 15, 1941, the name of the administrative
district Kalisch changed to Litzmannstadt.
Post-war and
People's Republic of Poland
On January 19, 1945, Soviet troops
reached the city. Since the city's economic structure remained
relatively intact, but Warsaw was destroyed, Łódź became one of the
most important cities in post-war Poland. Until 1948 it served as
the seat of government; a temporary permanent relocation of the
capital here was abandoned in favor of the reconstruction of Warsaw.
Many strikes took place in 1945/1946 and the workers felt they
had been betrayed. The fact that Jews were disproportionately
represented in leadership positions intensified the existing
anti-Semitism enormously. The Jews perceived this as a pogrom
atmosphere and prompted many of them to emigrate.
In 1948 the
later famous Łódź Film School was founded, producing graduates such
as Roman Polański and Andrzej Wajda. Jan Moll performed the first
heart transplant in Poland in 1969 in the city's hospital.
The official propaganda of the Polish United Workers' Party (PVAP)
praised Łódź as a model city of the labor movement. In reality, the
working conditions, especially in the textile factories, were
miserable, the machines were barely modernized, and serious
accidents at work kept occurring. When Wajda made his film The
Promised Land, set among the textile barons of the 19th century, in
1974, no elaborate sets had to be made: some of the machines from
that time were still in operation. Again and again there were work
stoppages in the textile factories. A strike in February 1971 forced
the new PVAP leadership under Edward Gierek to make concessions; it
was the first successful strike in the history of the People's
Republic of Poland.
present
Łódź experienced economic
decline in the first ten years after 1989. There was high
unemployment and some of the former magnificent buildings were left
to decay. An administrative reform in 1999 reduced the number of
voivodeships to 16 and enlarged the Łódź voivodeship to 18,219 km².
In 2002, the Galeria Łódzka opened a modern shopping center not far
from the previous Central. The city has recently changed
significantly: factory buildings have been converted into event
venues, museums and shopping centers, and the Parada Wolności
(comparable to the Love Parade) takes place annually on Piotrkowska
Street, the longest boulevard in Europe. According to official
information, it is said to have the highest density of bars and
clubs in Europe, which are often hidden in small backyards. The city
administration and many small organizations are also trying to
revive the special flair of the once multicultural city. In order to
commemorate the once peaceful coexistence of Jews, Russians, Poles
and Germans, the Festival of the Four Cultures takes place every
year. The former Poznański textile factory was opened in 2006 as
“Manufaktura”, the largest shopping and entertainment center in
Poland. The old factory halls were extensively restored and a new
wing was added.
Origin of name
Łódź means "boat". The origin of
the name is controversial. The assumption that the name of the city
comes from the small river Łódka ("[small] boat") is not certain.
The name is possibly derived from the Slavic first name Włodzisław
or from the old Polish term Łozina for willow tree.
coat of
arms
The coat of arms shows a gold-colored wooden boat with an
oar on a red background. From a heraldic point of view, it is a
talking coat of arms because it depicts the city name; whereby the
underlying interpretation - as with other speaking coats of arms -
does not have to agree with the actual origin of the name. The first
documented representation of a boat in the coat of arms is preserved
on a city seal from 1535. This is likely to have been in use since
the middle of the 15th century. The coat of arms was continued
almost unchanged until 1817.
Later there were numerous
modifications, among other things to adapt the coat of arms to the
Soviet pattern. Of the numerous proposals to include the textile
industry, which is important for the city, in the coat of arms, none
was implemented.
The coat of arms was introduced on June 5,
1936, with one interruption during the German occupation: from 1941
to 1945 the coat of arms showed a golden swastika on a dark blue
background.
The motto of the coat of arms is: Ex navicula
navis, Latin for: From a boat a ship.