A Portuguese Man in Łódź or Orientalized Ignorance: Łódź in Descriptions, Accounts, and Reports from the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries from a Historian’s Perspective

Abstract

The article addresses the image of Łódź in descriptions, accounts, and reports from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries from a historian’s perspective. These works, which have previously attracted the interest of literary scholars and sociologists, have only relatively recently become a source actively used by historians. From this perspective, they represent an extremely interesting but also problematic source for studying the city’s history. The author presents the most important of these texts published before World War I, highlighting that they were written with the intention of breaking the ignorance of the Polish public regarding the industrial city. A notable feature of these texts was their Orientalization, meaning that the accounts of travels to Łódź resembled descriptions of distant and exotic journeys, implicitly to the East. An example of this type of literature is the letters from an imaginary correspondent from Portugal, published in “Kurier Łódzki” in 1910. These letters illustrate how Łódź, a symbol of modernity, was reduced to the status of a strange city reminiscent of fairy tale places full of curiosities located far away in the world. This strategy, while aiming to familiarize Polish readers with this “foreign” industrial city, simultaneously reinforced the negative stereotype of the city, stemming partly from the adopted conventions and partly from the cognitive limitations of their authors.