A Death in Kraków and the End of an Empire

The article analyzes the outbreak of mass violence against the Jewish community of Kraków in April 1918. Before the background of widespread hunger and the gradual decline of the Habsburg Empire, relations between the Polish-Christian and Jewish communities collapsed, leading to several days of violence and plunder. As the police stood aside, Jews organized the self-defense of their neighborhood. These events are analyzed from a local-historical perspective, using them as a microcosm to reflect on the wider decline and eventual demise of the Habsburg Empire. The article reads the dynamic of imperial collapse through the perspective and the terminology of a local Jewish community. It demonstrates how in these terminal crisis, local communities, as well as the organs of state power, gradually withdrew ‘inwards,’ centering on their own survival and rendering everything ‘other’ as removed from any sense of mutual obligations.