Speaking of counterfactuals, “Neu-York” (yes, via MetaFilter; sue me) if conquered by the Nazis. I would have lived on Salbei Weg (Sage Street) — if of course my Jewish relatives had escaped extermination and I had been born some kind of halfsie converso.
NewYorkistan, though, is still the best. I scanned and framed this immediately it appeared, which you remember was soon after September 11. Although it might also look like a conquered New York, I believe it is not, but rather a vision of the city as a feuding melange of tribes — a comparatively peaceable mirror of its enemies.
The Edge of the American West 
24 comments
January 10, 2008 at 12:22 pm
zunguzungu
Just out of curiosity, has any society in the modern era actually been conquered and had all its names changed like that? I remember in history class hearing the old saw that “you’d be speaking german” if x, y, and z hadn’t happened in WWII, but it seems counterintuitive, like an awful lot of trouble for a conquering power to go to, especially one not known for its commitment to assimilating ethnic others. I ask because maps like these (and my history teacher in high school) seemed to just presume a specifically colonial (and settler colonial) rationale behind WWII that doesn’t necessarily fly, and I wonder where that presumption that war is about “taking over” comes from.
January 10, 2008 at 1:00 pm
eric
That is an excellent question. New Amsterdam, maybe?
January 10, 2008 at 1:21 pm
eric
Okay, well, I don’t know how you define “modern” (in my old job, it was everything that wasn’t ancient), but there is this:
January 10, 2008 at 1:35 pm
ari
Wait, are we talking about a wholesale renaming project in the wake of conquest and colonization? Because that happens all the time, right? (See: Americas, The.) I must be missing something.
January 10, 2008 at 1:38 pm
eric
I think the key word is “modern.” Has it happened to a “modern” society. zunguzungu’s comment clearly indicates knowledge that there are colonial, settler societies where it has happened.
January 10, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Ben Alpers
How about the Kaliningrad Oblast’ of Russia?
This is the noncontiguous piece of Russia bordered by Lithuania and Poland and on the Baltic Sea. Its main city is Kaliningrad.
Through World War II, this was the northern part of the German province of East Prussia. Kaliningrad was Königsberg, the former capital of East Prussia and Kant’s home town. As the Soviet Union swept west toward the end of World War II, two million people (according to Wikipedia) fled the region, which was then resettled (and renamed) by Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians.
In 1939 (again according to Wikipedia) had 2.49 million inhabitants, 85% ethnic Germans, with the rest Polish-speaking Masurians in the South and Lithuanian-speaking Lietuvininkai in the North.
According to the 2002 Russian census, the Kaliningrad Oblast’, which is only part of what was once East Prussia, had 955,281, of which 82.37% were Russian, with the next largest ethnic groups being Ukrainians (5.31%) and Byelorussians (4.94%), followed by Lithuanians (1.46%). Germans, once the vast majority of the population, now constitute only 0.87% or 8,340 inhabitants.
Here, in a very different context, is a blog entry that concerns the changing map of Königsberg/Kaliningrad (I linked to this because in part because this was the first street map of Kaliningrad I could find; Googlemaps has yet to go there). This really is a New York-to-Neu-York story.
East Prussia was only the largest scale example of the vast displacement of German-speaking populations from eastern and central Europe following the war. The Czech region of Bohemia is full of towns that were predominantly German speaking until the late 1940s.
(One would be remiss in this context not to note the countless Yiddish-speaking Shtetls that the Germans themselves had wiped off the map prior to their own displacement.)
January 10, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Ben Alpers
Whoops…I didn’t proofread that well. Those 1939 population figures are for the entirety of East Prussia.
January 10, 2008 at 3:45 pm
KRK
Wait, didn’t the Nazis undertake some significant efforts to Germanize at least parts of Poland, with wholesale renaming of towns and moving in German settlers? (I just watched the first disc of Shoah last night, so this is in my head.) The Nazi approach to non-Slavic conquered Europe may not have been colonizing, but I’ve understood that they viewed land to the east as open territory.
As for “you’d be speaking _____ if _____ had happened,” I think that’s correct if read as “you’d have to have learned to speak ______….” rather than “you’d be speaking only _____….” And with each generation the language of the conqueror/occupier has increasing influence.
I spent a little more than a year in a small town in northern Slovakia in the early 1990s. The old-timers, whose parents would have grown up as subjects of the Hapsburgs, tended to be conversant in German (though not exactly the same German I was using); the middle-aged teachers I worked with seemed to have only whatever foreign languages they might have needed for their professions; the 20-somethings and teenagers were all conversant in Russian, though they disavowed it (perhaps for my benefit). I imagine the next generation will all be conversant in English.
January 10, 2008 at 3:55 pm
yojoe
But for the $2,500 price tag, I would have purchased one of these maps.
January 10, 2008 at 4:06 pm
ari
Yes, I was missing something. As usual. Sorry to be dense. I read the modern era, full stop, not so-called modern societies.
January 10, 2008 at 7:36 pm
matt w
I saw that in a gallery. Some of the other projects on her site are very good; I especially found Schadenfreude disturbing.
(Warnings: Her site has weird navigation. Also, she seems to perpetuate the lampshades and soap thing, which I believe to be dubious.)
January 10, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Sandie
Does this count? After the Spanish Civil War, many of the major street names in Spanish cities were renamed in honor of Francisco Franco, Jose Antonio, and other victorious Nationalists. Streets in Catalonia were changed from their Catalan spellings to Castilian spellings. With the democratic transition in the 1980s, the street names often reverted to their pre-Civil War status, and in Catalonia, the streets became Catalan once again.
January 10, 2008 at 10:50 pm
mjm
I am reminded of Rick’s retort to Major Strasser: “Major, there are parts of New York I’d advise you not to invade.”
January 11, 2008 at 7:35 am
zunguzungu
I meant what Eric said I meant, even though that’s not exactly what I said! I was trying to think of an occasion of invading and renaming that didn’t involve the fiction that the land was unoccupied (or an effort to make the land actually unoccupied). There are plenty of occasions where a “modern” force invaded a “non-modern” society and renamed all the land, but in such cases, for a certain mentality, the land isn’t being *re*-named, but just named (the classic Lockean thing of non-agrarians being unable to really *occupy* land, and all its permutationsthat followed). The conceit that an invading society would actually care what language *I* spoke (someone perceived as non-savage) seems to run against most imperial history, and I was wondering if there was an occasions where conquest actually impelled an invading force into that kind of project. After all, as KRK points out, nazi policy with regards to the land to the east was to fill up land that had been emptied (breathing room, and all that) but their policy towards lands not seen as part of Germany was more the fiction of Vichy, which did not imply “Germanizing” France. My suspicion is that the only people who care what language a vanquished foe speaks are invaders who see themselves bringing modernity, of some sort, to savages, so the “you’d be speaking german” thing struck me as strange. Maybe my old teacher was thinking in the terms KRK describes, though I suspect not.
January 14, 2008 at 3:22 pm
MeGo (Melissa Gould)
Thanks, Matt W. Indeed, it was brought to my attention — after my “Schadenfreude” project, by an historian who has written about my work, in fact — that the soap business is dubious; debunked, if memory serves me, by an Israeli historian. However, the lampshades, I believe, did exist. Check with the US Holocaust Museum — they’ll have the real dope. Sorry about my weird website navigation; I have a thing for pop-up windows.
January 14, 2008 at 4:52 pm
matt w
Hi, thanks for stopping by! I really found the Schadenfreude site very powerful, and IMO the soap and lampshades still have their power even if they aren’t based in fact. (I’m not a historian, so I can say that.) This movie might be enlightening if we saw it–AFAICT the lampshades that was originally said to be of human skin wasn’t, and there was hearsay evidence for such a lampshade but it’s never been proven that there was one.
January 14, 2008 at 6:09 pm
MeGo (Melissa Gould)
Hi Matt, That looks like an interesting movie. I’ll see if I can track it down somewhere…
Thanks, re the lampshades and soap; I also agree that they still have power (but of course being the artist I am going to say that!) even if the scenario is ultimately apocryphal, though why is it I feel I have *seen* a lampshade, either in a book or at the Auschwitz Museum or somewhere?? I have a strong visual recollection of seeing one. Was I seeing a fake? One made of plastic, as in this film?
You could also look at the lampshades and soap, in Schadenfreude, as metaphors for the horrors that really did occur. People were killed, whether or not their bodies were made into goods afterwards…
January 14, 2008 at 6:44 pm
MeGo (Melissa Gould)
(Btw, how does one get an avatar here?)
January 14, 2008 at 8:20 pm
eric
Hi, MeGo, and welcome! If you want to get an avatar, you go to http://www.wordpress.com and click “sign up now!” Fill out the next page — you can get just a username, not a blog — then you can modify your user to your heart’s content. Or a little, anyway.
January 14, 2008 at 9:28 pm
megophone
Ah, now where were we? I cannot offically be MeGo here, nor even mego (one already exists, the imposter!) so megophone it is. Thank you, eric!
January 14, 2008 at 9:31 pm
megophone
But my avatar is nowhere to be seen… Hmmn.
January 14, 2008 at 9:59 pm
MeGo
Maybe now?
January 14, 2008 at 10:04 pm
matt w
It takes a while to start showing up. And you have to remember to log in (not saying you would’ve forgotten, but other people have). And, it looks like you’ve discovered that you can make your name show up any way you like, even if you can’t have MeGo as your actual username.
January 14, 2008 at 10:09 pm
MeGo
Yes! I figured that out. I even started a phantom blog! When you see a baloney face then you’ll know I’ve arrived, so to speak. WordPress has a nice interface.