A Death in Kraków and the End of an Empire

What is it about?

On 16 April 1918 Pessachja Meller was beaten to death on the tramway in Kraków as a mob descended on the city’s Jewish neighborhood to destroy and plunder. While the police stood idly by, Jews organized armed self-defense. The article studies the events in Kraków in the spring of 1918 from the perspective of the Jewish community, looking at the dynamics of violence, the actions of the attackers, and the responses of state authorities. It thereby shows from a local-historical perspective the fall of Habsburg-Austrian society in the last year of the war, as inter-communal relations collapsed, and the state gradually disintegrated.

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