Guardians of the nation: activists on the language frontiers of imperial Austria 9780674023253

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Guardians of the Nation

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Guardians of the Nation ACTIVISTS ON THE LANGUAGE FRONTIERS OF IMPERIAL AUSTRIA

Pieter M. Judson

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England 2006

Copyright © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Judson, Pieter M. Guardians of the nation : activists on the language frontiers of imperial Austria / Pieter M. Judson.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02325-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-674-02325-0 (alk. paper)

1. Nationalism—Austria—History—19th century. 2. Nationalism— Austria—History—20th century. 3. German language—Political aspects. 4, Language and languages—Political aspects. 5. Austria—Ethnic relations— History—19th century. 6. Austria—Ethnic relations—History—20th century. 7. Europe, Central—Ethnic relations—History—19th century. 8. Europe, Central—Ethnic relations—History—20th century. 9. Nationalism— Europe, Central—History—19th century. 10. Nationalism—Europe, Central—History—20th century. I. Title.

DB47J83 2006 320.5409436'09034—dc22 2006043601

for Cally and Jud

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Contents

Preface 1x Note on Language Use xut0

Maps XU ONE Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People I

Two Schoolhouse Fortresses 19 THREE Encounters on the Rural Frontier 66 FOUR’ Reluctant Colonists: The Sudmark Settlers 100 FIVE ‘Tourism to the Rescue: Consumption and

National Identity I41 six Violence in the Village = 177 SEVEN ‘The First World War and Beyond: The Transformation of the

Language Frontier 219 Abbreviations 259

Notes 261 Index 305

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Preface

TEN YEARS AGO I set out to discover how some rural and multilingual

regions of the Austrian Empire had become national by examining the strange world of nationalist associations from the inside. Before long my goal and my subject had shifted. I wondered whether ideas about nation had taken root at all in regions where nationalist organizations alternately celebrated local victories and then complained of small memberships and widespread apathy. A visit to the old town of Kasperské Hory deep in the Sumava region of southern Bohemia helped transform my approach to this increasingly puzzling phenomenon of the rural language frontier. On my first research trip I had collected and catalogued several accounts of rural nationalist violence from around 1900, naively presuming that where I found violence, I would also find nationalist com-

mitment. I knew that the town square at Kasperské Hory had witnessed a particularly violent nationalist incident in September 1908. I was curious to see the setting where rural Czech and German nationalists had allegedly faced each other down, each group asserting its ownership of the square. In the town I also visited the local Sumava museum with its exhibits of crafts, folk art, and naturalist specimens.

In the small historical exhibit upstairs a photograph of a Corpus Christi procession around 1900 caught my attention. It was the only photograph on display of village life from the time of that violent nationalist incident. The photograph depicted a town square filled with peasants and Burger in their Sunday best, parading from the

X Preface Church of St. Margaret. There was no indication of what language the participants spoke or what nationality they claimed for themselves. I left the exhibition wondering which picture of local life was more accurate, the photograph of villagers involved in a traditional religious

festival or the newspaper accounts that painted a picture of intense nationalist division.

As I learned over the years, the rural language frontter—as such multilingual regions were known—did provide the setting for several ferocious nationalist conflicts. But who exactly had participated in the violence, and what larger meanings had local societies attached to the conflicts? As I came to know the liminal world of the language frontier

better, I learned that violence was anything but a reliable indicator of national commitment. I also came to understand that the world of nationalist activism could not easily be separated into component parts, Czech, German, Slovene, or Italian, Just as people around 1900 could not easily be categorized in those same terms. This project, so long in the making, benefited from the aid, advice, and goodwill of several generous people and institutions. Fellowships from Fulbright, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK), the German Marshall Fund, and Swarthmore College and a grant from the Austrian Cultural Forum supported my research and writing efforts both in Europe and in the United States. The staffs of the Austrian National Library, the Austrian State Archives, the Central State Archive in Prague, the German Federal Archive in Bayreuth, and the Styrian Provincial Archive and Library welcomed and assisted

me. So too did a friendly woman (name unknown) in the village of Horice who graciously consented to open the one-room passion-play museum for me, and who kindly directed me to the former location of the long-since-demolished theater. That I can communicate at all with the contemporary inhabitants of the Bohemian Woods is largely due to the tenacious efforts of my Czech teachers and fellow students at the Charles University language school in Prague with whom I also shared the crises of that terrible August of 2002.

One of the great benefits of undertaking this kind of study is the opportunity to travel to some out-of-the-way destinations. Several friends and colleagues served as my uncomplaining companions and guides on trips to locations as diverse as Prachatice, Maribor, Ptui, and what is left of Sentilj. Others provided me with warm hospitality

Preface Xl and the opportunity to present my work to Austrian and German publics. In particular, I would like to thank Emil Brix, Moritz Csaky, Monika Glettler, Peter Haslinger, Waltraud Heindl, Helmut Konrad,

Lutz Musner, Peter Stachl, Monika Stromberger, Cornelia SzaboKnotek, Stefan Troebst, and Heidemarie Uhl. Peter Bugge invited me to an unforgettable “Bohemia colloquium” in Skagen, Denmark, and over the years has debated with me on panels, at restaurants, and in airports every conceivable point of interpretation that appears in the book. In the United States and Canada I benefited from stimulating exchanges with Catherine Albrecht, Doris Bergen, James Bjork, David Blackbourn, William Bowman, Matti Bunzl, Holly Case, Belinda Davis,

Eagle Glassheim, Atina Grossmann, Maureen Healy, Isabel Hull, Sarah Judson, Rudy Koshar, Seth Koven, Veius Liulevicius, Robert Nemes, Cynthia Paces, James Retallack, Scott Spector, Sharon Ullman, Daniel Unowsky, Lora Wildenthal, Nancy Wingfield, and my insightful comrades in the Philadelphia-area German historians’ workshops. I frequently enjoyed the hospitality of the Center for Austrian

Studies and invitations to share my findings with stimulating colleagues at the University of Minnesota, especially Gary B. Cohen, David Good, Mary Jo Maynes, and Eric Weitz. Anthropologist Daniel Segal’s work continues to inform my own thinking as a historian. Early in the writing process my colleagues in the History Department at Swarthmore College challenged me with difficult questions and intriguing suggestions. Later I benefited from the close readings Alison Frank and Helmut Walser Smith gave the manuscript. Both of

them have taught me through example that elegance is a quality of prose to which academic writers can indeed successfully aspire. Throughout the process of research and writing I received friendly help, support, and close critical readings of the manuscript from Gary B. Cohen. Without Gary’s inspirational example I would not have been able to develop and pursue this topic in the first place. Historian and good friend Jeremy King, a keen and insightful innovator in this field, generously put aside his own many projects on several occasions to help me with my manuscript. I am also lucky to have scholars Laura L. Downs, Diane Shooman, Marsha Rozenblit, Leslie Delauter, and Nora Johnson as dear friends. They continually furnish me with muchneeded emotional and scholarly support. Over the past decade it has been my significant privilege to teach

Xi Preface superb students. Without their challenging questions and insightful observations this book could not have been written. Many former students (Katherine Pence, Caitlin Murdock, Christian Davis, Joshua Zeitz, Eli Rubin, Tara Zahra, Erik Huneke, Will Mackintosh, Ross Bowling, Brendan Karch, and Helaine Blumenthal, to name but a few) are already bringing new energy and creativity to the historical profession. John Kosinski and ‘Tara Zahra served as tireless research assistants and stimulating companions in Vienna in the summer of 1998. ‘Tara has since become a formidable historian in her own right whose work I frequently cite and whose insights and friendship I cherish. My teacher and friend Istvan Deak remains a profound source of scholarly and human inspiration to me.

At Swarthmore College I want to thank Theresa Brown for her assistance in preparing the manuscript and Alfred Bloom and Constance Cain Hungerford for their enthusiastic support of my scholarly work. I am privileged to work in an institutional environment where

research projects and classroom teaching inform and enliven each other. Charles Devlin created another highly supportive environment—in fact, a real home—with me in East Falls, without which this book also could not have been finished. Kathleen McDermott of Har-

vard University Press expertly guided the project to its conclusion. Berg Press, Berghahn Press, and Overlook Press graciously permitted me to include some previously published materials. Ella, Callie, Matthew, Dylan, and Lucas will not know just how much they too contributed to their uncle’s esoteric project, but it was a lot. Indirectly, this book addresses questions raised by my own family experience. I was born in Utrecht when my parents lived in the Netherlands, a country we returned to several times during my childhood

and adolescence. My parents taught us to value the ways that bilingualism could enrich our lives, not as an esoteric personal achievement but as something utterly and unquestionably normal. I dedicate this book to them in gratitude for that lesson, and for many others.

Note on Language Use

WRITING ABOUT MULTILINGUAL REGIONS in a way that does not

privilege a nationalist frame of reference requires considerable agility

on the part of the historian and frequently produces inelegant and unwieldy formulations. In this book I refer to Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia as the “Bohemian Lands” and avoid the unfortunate and, alas, all-too-popular term “Czech Lands.” I prefer any minor historical inaccuracy of the former to the nationalist implications of the latter. I also try to avoid referring to “Czechs,” “Germans,” Italians,” or “Slo-

venes” (among others) unless the people to whom I refer publicly expressed a nationalist inclination. In the period covered by this book itis far more accurate to refer to Czech, German, Italian, or Slovene speakers. Even this more accurate usage simultaneously hides and exoticizes quotidian practices of multilingualism in the regions known

as language frontiers. I refer to place names in the two (and occasionally three) languages spoken by their inhabitants. Although this practice may seem cumbersome to some readers, it helps challenge normative assumptions that presume that places and people have authentic national identities.

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Guardians of the Nation

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ONE

Languages, [erritories, Politicians, and People It had been discovered and brought to people’s atten-

tion in the course of the nineteenth century that in order to possess individuality as a citizen every person must belong to a definite nationality or race. —Joseph Roth, The Bust of the Emperor [1935],

trans. John Hoare (2003)

IN HIS 1902 STUDY of language use in Bohemian society, German demographer J. Zemmrich sought to draw his readers’ attention away

from nationalist parliamentary battles that dominated the news in Vienna and Prague and to direct it to some little-known rural regions

of Bohemia he referred to as “language frontiers.” It was in those peasant villages, he claimed, where neighboring nations literally jostled each other, that activists ought to direct their efforts. Zemmyrich warned that while “the little nationalist wars fought daily from village to village rarely attract atlenuion in broader circles,” it was precisely

“these ongoing wars on the language frontier, far away from and largely unrelated to parliamentary storms,” that would determine “the final outcome of the nationalist struggle.”' Zemmrich’s warning re-

flected an interesting dynamic in the nationalist politics of Cisleithania, suggesting as it did that events in rural villages played a greater

role in determining the outcome of national struggles than did parliamentary political activity. What exactly was it that Zemmrich and others like him in the Czech or German nationalist camps believed was occurring in those villages situated in places they called the rural language frontier (Sprachgrenze in German, jazykova hranice in Czech)?

In what did those litthe nationalist wars consist? What kind of meta1

2 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People phorical battles took place, and who were the combatants? And what kind of outcome to these daily struggles would have constituted a final one?

To answer these questions, we need to consider the particular qualities nationalists in Austria assigned to the places they called language

frontiers, or, to be precise, the characteristics they assigned to the inhabitants of those regions. Most nationalist activists believed nations to be well-defined entities whose members shared eternal and easily recognizable traits. The slippery nature of the language frontier, however, called these fundamental beliefs about nations into question by suggesting that national identity constituted a mutable quality rather than a fixed one. Nationalists consistently portrayed the battle on the language frontier as an attempt to solidify the local hegemony of one nation in order to repel the potential advance of another.” Yet despite depictions of frontier wars in these clear terms, those who inhabited such multilingual areas, the alleged foot soldiers of the nation, often exhibited inexplicable behaviors, identifying themselves with neither

nation or with both nations. When Zemmrich referred to ongoing battles on the frontier, he did not simply mean a conflict waged between hostile members of different nations. Instead, he alluded toa far more complex war waged by nationalists to consolidate their own followers, their own nation, at the local level. The generals fought primarily to establish a sense of self-identification that would link individuals, families, and communities to the nation. Does indifference to nationality require explanation? Should we find it exceptional, as did nationalists at the time, that inhabitants of these regions refused to commit themselves to a single nation, that they continued to speak two languages, to socialize or worship with those who spoke a different language, and to send their children to different-language schools? Contemporary observers made little sense of ongoing habits of marriage between people who spoke different languages.* Most explained these allegedly exceptional behaviors by

citing the same factors once used by liberal politicians to explain peasant opposition in the 1870s to the new school system: the rural ignorance, religious piety, and opportunism of their subjects. These characteristics must certainly be evaluated in any discussion of the frontier regions, since almost every frontier population to which they

were ascribed was in fact rural and apparently less exposed to the education, media, and secular nationalist activism experienced by

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 3 Austria’s urban populations. Many historians today, much like earlier nationalist activists, consider nationally indifferent behaviors to be relics of earlier cultural forms that largely disappeared by the time of the First World War. Many historians view the first decade of the twentieth century as the moment when processes of modernization finally transformed the Austrian countryside, bringing ideas about nationalism in their wake and wiping out rural indifference to or ignorance

of the idea of nation. This book starts from a very different set of assumptions about the

world of the rural language frontier. It rejects the very concept of frontier or border as an adequate description of this world and contends rather that most inhabitants of such regions rarely viewed them-

selves specifically as “frontier people” or their regions as frontiers between nations. Phenomena such as bilingualism, apparent indifference to national identity, and nationally opportunist behaviors ex-

pressed the fundamental logic of local cultures in multilingual regions, a logic that neither nationalist activism nor so-called modernization processes were capable of destroying. Far from constituting sites of daily battles among nations, so-called language frontiers were often populated by rural people who did not automatically translate division in language use into divisions of self-identification or even of loyalty.’ In fact, many rural Austrians sought to minimize the effects of their linguistic differences with their neighbors by developing both formal and informal institutions to bridge those gaps. These institutions encouraged bilingualism and cooperation, not national hostility. In many rural parts of Moravia and Bohemia, for example, families had traditionally exchanged children for extended periods of time in

order to give them the opportunity to learn both regional languages (the so-called Kindertausch/Wechsel in German, handl in Czech).® In parts of Styria and Carinthia parents traditionally demanded bilingual

schools for their offspring for much the same reasons, seeing in bilingualism a vehicle for social and economic advancement.’ Czech and German agitators in rural parts of the Bohemian Lands complained well into the twentieth century that even ostensibly patriotic members of rural nationalist associations continued to engage in child exchanges with their neighbors despite the dangers of “Germanization” or “Czechification” that nationalists believed such choices would incur.®

This book traces the processes by which nationalists in the Austrian

4 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People half of the Dual Monarchy conceptualized linguistically mixed regions as language frontiers and endowed them with a particular significance as the premier sites of national conflict. It examines activists’ efforts

to remake the rural populations of such regions into nationally polarized peoples. Examples are drawn mainly from linguistically diverse districts in southern Bohemia, South Styria, and South Tyrol, each of which became well-known targets for nationalist activism. In the first

of these regions, the so-called Bohemian Woods or Sumava, Czech and German nationalists fought each other for demographic and political advantage. In the second and third, German nationalists fought

Slovene and Italian nationalists for dominance. In all three sites German nationalists struggled to consolidate the loyalty of local populations for their cause against very different opponents and under very different conditions. Although this book focuses largely on the efforts of German nationalists in all three regions, it also draws on Czech, Slovene, and Italian nationalist examples and sources to provide the reader with a more complete understanding of the particularities of each local situation and to underline the point that nationalists of all kinds in these regions ultimately faced similar challenges. Above all, nationalists struggled to popularize their positions among local inhabitants, to make nationalism particularly relevant to local concerns, and to bind local populations permanently to one side or the other. The book documents this struggle topically, examining the effectiveness of very different types of nationalist strategies to woo local populations, from founding local minority schools to importing colonists from other regions, from projects to modernize rural economies to the creation of local nationalist tourism industries. Although nationalists had fought political battles in Habsburg Austria from the moment the 1861 and 1867 constitutions were implemented, those early skirmishes had taken place at the formal level of institutional politics, in town or district councils, provincial diets, and the imperial Parliament. These conflicts had not necessarily involved most or even many of the people who inhabited so-called language frontier regions, except in marginal ways. The nationalization of socalled frontier populations as a distinct strategy developed out of the nationalists’ perception that in a time of increasing popular mobilization, the side that mobilized the largest numbers of people who felt the deepest commitment to their nation would win the political war.

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 5 This would require the development of new kinds of strategies (in addition to political ones) for mobilizing support, strategies that could be implemented effectively in every locality where linguistic or

religious differences provided potential opportunities for building forms of identity difference. Although activists worked hard to nationalize populations by shaping peoples’ educational options, their social lives, or their consumer choices, nonnational populations did not simply disappear. They too continually transformed their own justifications for maintaining national flexibility (or indifference) under changing conditions in the modernizing rural world, even after

nation-states had taken over rule in these regions in the 1920s and 1930s. Using examples from local settings, this book documents how nationalists succeeded brilliantly in nationalizing perceptions of the rural language frontier by 1914 but largely failed to nationalize its populations. Much of this book is devoted to a study of nationalist strategies in the last years of the Austrian Empire. Nationalist successes, where they did occur, can be ascribed to the enormously creative energies produced by the activists who worked tirelessly to reconceive almost every aspect of public and, later, private life in these regions in nationalist terms. Nationalist organizations of every kind, but particularly those

focused on education, set up shop in multilingual regions like the Bohemian Woods, South Styria, or the South Tyrol. Their proclaimed object was to offer aid and assistance to members of their nation who found themselves surrounded by hostile members of another nation and in danger of losing their national identity. In fact, however, nationalists directed their efforts toward nationalizing those very people who, defying all nationalist logic, did not identify themselves as members of a nation. Activists targeted those people who continued to act, shop, vote, attend school, and respond to census questionnaires as if the very concept of “nation” meant nothing to them. The book rejects the notion of the language frontier as a time-honored border between self-consciously defined cultures. Rather, it examines how the nationalists constructed such multilingual regions as “border” or “frontier”

regions as part of a larger strategy to normalize national identities and to eradicate both bilingualism and the alternative loyalties that it represented. Activists developed discourses—and later added behaviors—of hostile national relations in order to project the idea of age-

6 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People old conflict onto such regions. These discourses and behaviors in turn became tools used to constitute those very differences in local society.

To the extent that they succeeded, nationalists clearly owed their advances to hard ideological work and not to some organic process by which unsuspecting Czech speakers or German speakers magically

awakened to find themselves Czechs and Germans in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although nationalists themselves preferred to speak in such organic terms, this book will avoid invoking arguments and terminology that validate such an ahis-

torical, if popular, view of the nationalization process. Instead, it builds on earlier arguments by Gary Cohen and others that removed nationalist teleologies from the process, reminding us that as often as

not, frontier Czech speakers might become German nationals, German speakers might become Czech nationals, and all might well remain bilingual and liable to change “sides.”® At the same time, the book eschews the aura of exceptionalism—and even exoticism—often attached to terms such as “bilingualism,” “side switcher,” or even “intermarriage” and insists instead on the normalcy of the behaviors those terms describe. Social scientists have for a long time recognized the constructed nature of national communities, yet strangely, they have not yet found a convincing way to relate nationalized outcomes to nonnational origins. This deficiency is perhaps understandable in a modern world system dominated by the presumed naturalness and inevitability of the nation-state. The very normalcy of the nation-state encourages us to think more about the constructedness of nationalist ideologies than about the processes by which nationalist ideologies create nations. By glossing over the processes of nationalization to focus on ideology (ahistorical claims) or on outcomes (nation-states), scholars unintentionally reinforce what Jeremy King has called the “ethnicist” presumption, the teleological view that modern nations embody premodern entities.'° A decade ago Rogers Brubaker rightly complained that studies of nationalism, for all their gestures to constructedness, continued to treat nations as real entities, adopting “categories of practice as categories of analysis.” Brubaker argued that we should not investigate nations, but should rather ask: “how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states?”"! Building on Brubaker’s argument, I believe that we need to inves-

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 7 tigate just how nationhood is institutionalized, not simply “within and

among states,’ but, more important, within local societies and cultures. Nowhere is this question more critical than in studies of Central

and Eastern Europe, where national communities often developed locally within the context of multicultural empires. For the past century, with some exceptions, nationalists have generally controlled the parameters of the discussion, writing the history of the region as the retrospective validation of the nation and avoiding a close examination of nationhood itself. But they have not been alone in their en-

deavors. Historians of Western Europe, too, tend to abandon their own critical approach when confronted with the East. The alleged complexities of cultures, peoples, languages, religions, and cultural traditions (all, by the way, as much elements of Western European history as of Eastern European history) become serious obstacles to an engaged analysis when they are encountered in the East." In a larger sense the book also aims to help remove imperial Austrian society and politics from the realm of historical pathologies; we should not understand Austrian history as the story of an anachron-

istic survivor in the modern period. Political nationalism simply played different roles in Austrian political culture than it did in states such as France, Germany, or Hungary. Yet the processes of social and economic modernization, bureaucratization, and expansion of com-

munications and transport networks that characterized the period 1880-1914 in each of these societies were strikingly similar in Austria,

as was the rise of mass politicization through enfranchisement and participation in electoral politics.'? Nor did nationalist political conflict necessarily slow the successful implementation of these processes, as has frequently been asserted. Rather, the flowering of several forms

of politics organized around nationalist themes reflected the rich diversity of Austrian civic life." Historians of developing nation-states in Europe have often theorized that an important relationship exists between the dual state projects of modernizing societies and nationalizing societies. To Ernest Gellner, for example, state modernization required a common literacy, a form of standardization allegedly imposed by the nationalization of formerly linguistically diverse cultures.'° Social scientists of an earlier age often viewed the Habsburg Monarchy, therefore, as

somehow deficient in or even apart from these general European

8 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People processes of modernization precisely because the Austrian half of the monarchy recognized eleven official languages and never became a nation-state. As a failed state, after the events of 1918, it appeared to represent the exception that proved the rule of the nation-state norm.

Yet if nothing else, the history of Habsburg Austria in the period 1867-1918 demonstrates that social, political, economic, and administrative modernization could easily occur without nationalization. Other historians have adequately critiqued the notion of a particularly Austrian or Habsburg Sonderweg, that is, an exceptional and failed route to modernity. The more interesting point here is that in rural Austria around 1900, both Czech and German nationalist activists defined themselves repeatedly and obsessively as the very embodiment of modernity in what they considered to be an otherwise backward society. As we will see, they repeatedly conflated the state’s modernizing program with their own nationalist agendas, embracing social and economic change and presenting it as their own distinctive contribution to the improvement of local society. Since Austria’s rulers did not forge its population into a single na-

tion in the nineteenth century, it was often believed that when nationalist movements did develop in the monarchy, they could not be contained politically. Their increasing assertiveness, according to this line of thinking, produced a serious paralysis in Austrian politics that would have made democratization impossible and doomed the state to eventual collapse, had the First World War not accomplished the same end in 1918.'° Social, economic, and political modernization did

not, however, produce a breakdown in Austria, and especially not because that modernization had been accomplished outside a conceptual framework—or against a framework—of nationalism. In fact, historians who study Austrian domestic politics interpret many of the most egregious examples of nationalist conflict in terms of political ritual with its own predictable dynamics and limits, rather than as an uncontrollable force that eventually destroyed the monarchy. Their analyses demonstrate that those parties that publicly performed rituals of nationalist obstruction in the legislative bodies were frequently ready and willing to negotiate in private behind the scenes.'’ Work by historians attentive to the dynamics of regional nationalist politics also suggests two important alternatives to the traditional view that the political stalemate induced by national conflict destroyed the multinational empire. The first of these alternatives is based on the

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 9 observation that nationalists deployed a harshly radical rhetoric in order to gain mastery over rival groups within their own nationalist movements and rarely to defeat the so-called national enemy. Different social and political groups staked out and performed more or less radical positions in order to win votes as the “most nationalist” or the “most legitimate” representatives of the nation.'® The second of these insights suggests that nationalist movements, however radical or moderate, competed to demonstrate their loyalty to the emperor. Their struggles were not oriented toward gaining territorial independence, but rather toward improving their relative position within the

greater context of the multinational empire.’ This book examines the dynamics of nationalist political culture as a way of reframing the presumed relationships between social, economic, and political modernization in Austria, on the one hand, and the rise of nationalist movements, on the other. To start with, it was the very constitutional guarantees made by the imperial Habsburg regime that created space for political activism organized specifically around language use and ideas about nation to develop and flourish in Austria. Some of these opportunities grew out of high-court decisions and parliamentary legislation, but many more of them developed at the local level of village politics, particularly after the passage of laws that established communal autonomy in 1862.”° In fact, the Austrian system produced dual sets of local administrators. One set arose from the liberals’ communal autonomy law that enabled local

voters to elect their own officials. At the same time, the Habsburg State appointed another set of district administrators who owed allegiance to the state.?’ If ritualized nationalist conflict periodically closed down the imperial Parliament or the Bohemian Diet, political participation (often based on a limited franchise) and considerable local political decision making nevertheless flourished at the level of the villages, towns, and cities in almost every region of the empire. This transformed local village and town administration into potential

settings for nationalist politics. In multilingual villages, towns, or regions, early political movements attempted to mobilize popular support by demanding linguistic equality for their side. As political conflict developed around language issues, representatives of each “side” scoured the region for every potential voter, attempting to mobilize nationally indifferent people into nationalist political parties. At the same time, economic development and educational reform

10 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People in the 1870s and 1880s created considerable social transformation in many rural regions of Austria. Change brought all kinds of new im-

migrants to rural Austria whose education, background, and work often predisposed them to support nationalist causes. Teachers, civil servants, railway employees, telegraph operators, and _ hoteliers, among others, often brought their own sense of nationalist belonging

and commitment to their postings in rural Austria. Some believed passionately that their unquestioned duty was to awaken the denizens of allegedly backward rural regions to their national identity. Others brought traditions of voluntary associations and national activism to

their new homes. The larger results of these developments were hardly predictable, however, and it would be mistaken to speak of an urban nationalist elite simultaneously modernizing and nationalizing a backward countryside. The relationships forged by these new im-

migrants to their new communities were complex, as were the responses of rural people in general to the economic opportunities and transformations brought by the last decades of the nineteenth century. The important point is that a significant number of such newcomers and their allies saw the world in nationalist terms. Nationalist activists took every opportunity to transform rural social conflicts into national ones and to forge from them enduring national loyalties and identities. Conflict in rural societies, as we will see, did not necessarily reflect the long-term existence of deeply felt nationalist animosities. Yet it offered nationalists an opportunity to create and stoke those animosities by giving local events nationalist meanings, especially to those who had experienced them. Nationalist news-

papers, for example, interpreted events in rural Austria through a consistently radical nationalist lens. Reports of local social conflict in their pages were soon presented as stories about national conflict on the frontier. From a nationalist perspective it soon appeared that most

events in the rural world, and in particular all examples of social conflict, reflected in some way the fundamental national loyalties of the rural masses. Those loyalties, of course, needed to be refined, organized, and efficiently directed, according to activists, but there was little question of their existence. The process by which activists reconceived local social life in national terms is difficult to document, since it requires an analysis of local conflicts whose particulars were often only reported by nation-

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 11 alists themselves. Their narratives are frequently the only records available to us, although government and police reports occasionally pro-

vide alternative accounts. Close readings of these nationalist texts demonstrate the surprising degree to which self-doubt and frustration haunted the normally self-confident nationalists. Activists might depict local relations in harshly nationalized terms, yet they could not escape facing up to the local “survival” of nonnationalist ways of be-

having and identifying. Much of this book, in fact, relies on close readings of nationalist accounts to document the worrying absence of that which was being claimed, to document, that is, the frequent irrelevance of nationalist identities to rural society.

The Setting: Language, Census, Nation By 1880, the Austrian half of the dual monarchy had already experienced close to twenty years of constitutional and parliamentary life. Participation in electoral politics during that early constitutional or

“liberal” period had been limited to men who were enfranchised, around 5 percent of the total population for parliamentary elections, sometimes more for local elections. In the rural language frontier regions of Bohemia, Styria, and Tyrol, as in other rural regions of imperial Austria, local rates of political participation remained relatively low. The gradual transformation of Austrian public life that followed the constitutional reforms of 1861 and 1867, however, even-

tually brought far more people into political life than those middleand upper-middle-class urban and rural Burger who had originally been enfranchised. The rise of an openly political press and the creation and spread of political associations eventually reached Austrians at every level of society, exposed them to newer political discourses, and drew them into significant policy debates. In the 1880s and 1890s successive governments enfranchised increasing numbers of men who became the targets of the mobilization efforts of competing political movements, while for the first time, nationalists founded branches of their associations in rural Austria. Democratization came slowly, especially in rural localities where, unlike in the cities, voters could not

directly elect their deputies to the diets or the Parliament. Instead, they elected an intermediate slate of electors who in turn chose the candidate for the diet or the Parliament. Elections to the provincial

12 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People diets and most town councils were also organized according to a curial system that divided voters into two or three voting classes based on the size of their tax contribution. In local elections each class or curia elected roughly the same number of deputies to the town council, so that wealthier citizens’ votes continued to carry far more weight than the votes of the rest. Although the curial system did continue to priv-

ilege wealthier taxpayers in local and diet elections and to shut out the socialist parties from significant local representation, progressive election reforms in the 1880s and 1890s initiated a powerful politicization of local society across the empire. In 1907 the Austrian government introduced universal manhood suffrage and ended the curial system of voting in parliamentary elections.” The political and social institutions launched by the German liberal parties of the 1860s and their allies had not exactly developed in the way their framers had predicted for them. In particular, the early German liberals presumed that their constitution would have the long-term effect of diminishing the role that nation or nationalism would play in Austrian politics. They had looked to the ill-fated constitution produced in Kremsier/Kromeériz by the Austrian Parliament in the revolutionary year 1848—49 to “solve” the question of linguistic rights and national identity. Imagining the issue in terms of individual

rights rather than corporate identities, as nineteenth-century liberals were wont to do, the men of Kremsier/Kromeériz in 1849 and Vienna in 1867 aimed to establish a kind of rough equality among each of the recognized languages used by Austrian citizens in each province. This allowed the liberals to guarantee fundamental civic rights to individual speakers of different languages while maintaining a centralized form of government that relied on the German language as its administrative lingua franca. The German liberals were strict political centralists. Believing that federalism would allow noble dominated diets to trample on the civic rights, educational policy, and religious reforms they had just legislated, the liberals fought any program that would devolve significant state powers to the provincial diets. In their 1867 constitution most German liberals regarded the clause guaranteeing equality of language use as a guarantee of basic civil rights for the individual and certainly not as a way to give constitutional standing to so-called nations. They had not intended to lend constitutional recognition to the claims that individuals might make

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 13 as corporate groups; they had merely recognized the right of individuals to use their own languages in normal daily intercourse wherever this was practical. Implicit in this decision was a belief that although local or domestic relations might be transacted in a vernacular language, more serious public transactions would take place in German. The liberal state would sanction equality among Austria’s legally recognized languages in primary-school education while giving Austrians

the opportunity to pursue secondary or university education in German. According to the German liberal authors of Austria’s constitution, this development would eventually diminish nationalist conflict. This was not to be the case. Instead, every nationalist movement in post-1867 Austria organized its political agenda primarily around achieving linguistic parity for itself in education, in provincial administration, and in the judiciary. Czech, Polish, and, later, Italian, Slo-

vene, and Ukrainian nationalists argued successfully that statesupported secondary schools and often university faculties should be established in their respective languages, as well as in German (or, in the case of Galicia, in Polish).?° Subsequent Supreme Court and administrative interpretations of the constitution reinforced nationalist demands by construing the constitutional language guarantees in a

far broader manner than the document’s liberal authors had themselves envisioned.

Although the courts and the governments refused to recognize the legitimacy of “nation” as a legal category, the realization of nationalist

programs through the attainment of specifically linguistic goals helped validate the concept of nation in popular discourse and informally in institutional life. It also encouraged nationalists to define nation in terms of language use. In 1905, as Jeremy King has argued, the anational state took a big step toward becoming a multinational state—one that recognized the legal existence of “nations”—when it sanctioned the Moravian Compromise.** In this agreement the state attempted to defuse the national conflict in Moravia by abandoning its traditional refusal to recognize nations and dividing up political and administrative provincial competencies between separate Czech and German national bodies. ‘The terms of the compromise obliged Moravians to register as either Czechs or Germans. Although nationality was certainly not ascribed—individual heads of families might choose either nation for their families—once a family had chosen, it

14 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People was extremely difficult to change nations. In a sense, the compromise hastened the nationalization of local society by demanding that Moravians become Czechs or Germans, whether they wanted to or not. This compromise was followed by similar agreements for the provinces of Bukovina (1910) and Galicia (1914) and in the southern Bohemian town of Budweis/Budejovice (1914) (the latter was never implemented). Negotiators were never able to reach a similar agreement for Bohemia, however.?° Another key institution from the 1870s, the imperial census, also reinforced the importance of language in politics and helped produce the very idea of the language frontier as the specific location for national conflict. In 1880 the government undertook the first official

census to measure language use in the empire. Since the Austrian government did not recognize the existence of nations in law, it determined after lengthy internal debate to query respondents about their “language of daily use” (Umgangssprache in German, obcovact rec

in Czech) rather than about their “national identity” or even their “mother tongue.” Some languages, such as Yiddish or Moravian, were not included as options for respondents. Furthermore, the state’s in-

sistence that respondents report only a single language made the census utterly blind to the extent of regional bilingualism. King attributes the latter decision to the influence of a resolution at the 1872 International Statistical Congress held in St. Petersburg. Although del-

egates from the Habsburg Monarchy at the Congress opposed the claim that language use was a proxy for nationality, they nevertheless

agreed to the single-language principle in order to make Cisleithania’s statistics comparable with those of other states. “The domestic, homogenizing zeal of Europe’s nation-states, by force of interstate example and under cover of scientific objectivity,” writes King,

“contributed to eliminating from the census, the option of claiming to speak both German and Czech.” Nationalist activists had of course urged categories like “mother tongue” or “nationality” on the government, instead of “language of daily use,” but they too were silent about the census’s inability to measure bilingualism, a phenomenon they preferred to ignore and hoped would die out. Whatever their reservations, however, nationalists of all stripes immediately treated this decennial census as a critical weapon in their arsenal, refusing to accept that “language of daily use” measured anything other than national belonging.”®

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 15 Nationalist Political Culture and Frontier Activism The census helped produce the concept of the language frontier as a border between distinct nations because it enabled activists for the first time to plot their alleged demographic strengths and weaknesses geographically. If one language (nation) had made inroads against another in the past ten years, it was easy to say exactly where that had taken place. As we will see, this enabled nationalist organizations to choose their local battlegrounds carefully and with considerable precision. By the time the third of these censuses was taken in 1900, the census had indeed become an occasion for nationalist agitation at all levels of society. Nationalist activists exhorted their followers to win over as many people as possible to their language and to guard vigilantly against any examples of fraud or illegal coercion of respondents

by the enemy. As a result, the census results produced increasing numbers of lawsuits and engendered passionate parliamentary debate challenging particular outcomes. The first of these censuses in 1880 also coincided with a significant political defeat for the German liberal parties in parliamentary elections and their subsequent exclusion from the Austrian cabinet for some thirteen years. This defeat, along with other defeats in elections

to provincial diets, forced German nationalists to reexamine their overconfident understanding of the role that German culture played in the empire and of their own particular concept of nationhood. German nationalists in Habsburg Central Europe had traditionally conceived of their own nation in universal, nonterritorial, and largely

cultural terms. To them, the German nation represented a positive force for the progressive transformation of all the region’s inhabitants, a universal culture of education that offered opportunities for social

and economic advancement. German liberal nationalists had rarely given much thought to questions of local language use precisely because they presumed that all ambitious Austrians would want to learn the German language in order to achieve upward social mobility. Similarly, they had rarely thought of their nation in specifically territorial terms because of its universal cultural significance. ‘The census results of 1880, combined with the pro-Slav tilt of Austria’s new government

in the 1880s, cast considerable doubt on these assumptions. The census results suggested that there were fewer German speakers in Austria than had previously been imagined, and that this number was

16 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People actually diminishing, not increasing. The census results also lent a kind of legitimacy to the claims made by other nationalists such as the Czechs, who tied their own social advancement specifically to the increased use of their language in Austrian public life. If Czech were the language spoken by a majority of Bohemians and Moravians, then Czech should take its place beside German as an official administrative language for those provinces as well.?’ Several historians have analyzed the internal political struggles of

the 1880s that produced more territorially and ethnically oriented forms of nationalist ideology in the German bourgeois parties, in both the parliamentary and local contexts. In terms of ideology, as we will see, the traditionally liberal understandings of German nationhood in

universalist terms did not die out completely. They were joined by new understandings of nationhood, all of which jostled each other in the next seventy-five years, providing different kinds of ideological justification for a German nationalist politics, depending on the demands of the situation or the needs of a particular group. These new understandings of nationhood were broadly articulated starting in the 1880s by two new types of voluntary association that aimed to promote nationalist consciousness in German speakers throughout the empire

and to reverse the alleged demographic decline in the relative position of German speakers. In the spring of 1880 activists in Vienna founded the Deutscher Schulverein or German School Association. Their published call to arms claimed that “thousands and thousands of children of German parents on the language frontiers and in mixed-language regions grow up without a German school and are lost to the German Volk.”*®

To counter the effects of this tragic development, the organization

would raise money for schools to serve all such children. A few months later, using similar justification, Czech nationalists organized a comparable organization for Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the Ustiedni matice skolsk4. Slovene nationalists followed suit in 1885 with their school association, the Druzba Ciril-Metod (Cyril and Methodius Association), and in 1891 Italian nationalists founded a school association called the Lega Nazionale (National League).*? Together the various school associations raised millions of crowns to fund pri-

vate schools for children who would otherwise have had to attend school in a “foreign” language. These organizations copied each

Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 17 other’s organizational structures and innovative forms of activism, feeding off each other’s successes and learning from each other’s failures. In any given region their rivalries offered the most compelling

arguments to local nationalists for joing and contributing money. Later on, nationalists developed a broad variety of other self-help organizations, many of which also raised significant funds and mobilized thousands of ordinary Austrians for their causes. ‘The Deutscher

Bohmerwaldbund (German League for the Bohemian Woods), the four narodny jednoty or Czech nationalist associations for Bohemia and

Moravia, the various Leagues of Germans (for Bohemia, East Bohemia, North Moravia, and South Moravia), and the Tiroler Volksbund (Tyrolean People’s Union) were regionally based associations that worked to strengthen the economic base of allegedly threatened language groups in rural areas.*° They provided their conationals with welfare benefits, job-training opportunities, or improved farm imple-

ments. Another interregional German nationalist organization, the Sudmark, sought to buy up local property and to settle colonists who spoke one language in regions inhabited by speakers of another language. Although, as we will see, this latter type of colonizing venture belonged to an extremist fringe of nationalist activism, by 1914 several nationalist movements controlled school systems, banking networks,

and the distribution of local welfare benefits. And this was not all. Nationalist activists strove to nationalize every possible element of public or domestic life by controlling media and shaping their followers’ consumer options as well. They accomplished all of this in the face of state indifference or even opposition. The following chapters trace a process of attempted nationalization

at that site where nations supposedly bordered each other: the language frontier. My goal is not simply to demonstrate that this frontier was an ideological construction, but rather to analyze the success of the frontier idea as the outcome of hard ideological labor accomplished by particular people and organizations. My object is to demonstrate how nationalist activists in Austria instituted a specific form of nationhood in their own image by creating the idea of the frontier, using the particular tools at their disposal. Although the frontier or borderland has become a highly popular concept among social scientists, and the subject of numerous academic symposia and collections of essays, this book argues that it was nationalists themselves who

18 Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People made it into a place of interest to scholars. There was nothing intrinsic about such regions, not even their inhabitants’ use of more than one language, that caused them later to become the settings for ethnic cleansing or genocidal violence. The regions from which I have

drawn my examples can hardly be said to have shared much more than their status as rural language frontiers. Southern Bohemia, South Styria, and the South Tyrol—from which I draw most of my examples—were economically, socially, and demographically dissimilar in

many ways. They were also the setting for nationalist conflicts that differed from each other in their particulars. Yet their depiction by activists as language frontiers in the nineteenth century made them appear interchangeable as nationalist battlegrounds in the twentieth century. Finally, this book argues that despite the prominence of such frontier regions in the history of nationalist violence, it remains to be seen why or even whether the inhabitants of such language frontiers ever became national.

TWO

Schoolhouse Fortresses To the nationalist parties of today, the school and the

schoolhouse are what the church and the church building were for the religious parties at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. —Dr. Josef Spindler, Die deutsche Schulvereinsschule in Wrschowittz: Geschichte einer deutschen Schule im tschechischen

Sprachgebiete, nach den Akten erzahit (Leipzig, 1898)

IN 1907 THE GERMAN School Association added four new designs to its existing line of postcards whose purchase lent financial support to

the association's efforts. Two of the new cards used settings meant to be recognizable as “language frontiers.” In one of these, explained the association’s monthly magazine, “the artist... takes us to the language frontier and shows us a small village... The village is hard pressed by the national foe, but that foe can do little against it, because a protector hovers above.” Against the wide-open rural landscape, the artist had depicted the School Association insignia as a life-

giving sun hovering above a village, shining high in the sky, “recognizable [to all] through its work” and “protecting all whose rays it touches.” Two young girls and a boy, each carrying a satchel, “perhaps from a neighboring village where Germans live dispersed among

Czechs,” pause on their way to school to appreciate the sight. According to the article, the allegory brought to mind the many ways that “the School Association often spreads light in regions that lie far away from cultural centers. Truly, the School Association gives life to

the Germans on the language frontier, and has earned their gratitude.”!

This chapter explores the construction of the concept “language frontier” by nationalist organizations eager to expand the scope of 19

20 Schoolhouse Fortresses their political and social activism. In the 1880s so-called frontier or border regions became understood as the premier location for national conflict in Cisleithania. Journalists, statisticians, novelists, and poets working in several different languages all contributed to the creation of this powerful trope that anchored nationalist conflict in Habsburg Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet even as they projected heroic visions of nationalist sacrifice onto the imagined frontier, many of those activists most familiar with conditions in such regions confessed to troubling doubts about their nation’s future. For these activists, the language frontier became a site of frustrating contradiction. If some people in frontier communities lived exemplary lives devoted to nationalist activism, many more frustrated the efforts of local nationalists by expressing indifference or even hostility to the concept of national identity.

In no comparable territorial setting did nationalists face the internal contradictions of their own beliefs as blatantly as they did in rural language frontiers or so-called language islands, such as those portrayed in the School Association’s 1907 postcards. Nationalist assertions about the frontier depicted a world shared uneasily by allegedly mutually hostile national cultures. Inhabitants of such regions had a stronger sense of national identity than most because of the daily battles they allegedly fought against the advance of a neighboring nation. Evidence of daily social life in such regions, however,

told a different story. What the nationalists characterized as the painful necessity of interaction between neighboring nations was often treated unselfconsciously by locals as a normal facet of daily life

in a multilingual region. The contrast between the heroic rhetoric about life on the language frontier and the lived experience of frontier folk could not easily be reconciled either in terms of individual identity or ultimately in terms of larger group identities. To accommodate the contrasts between their heroic picture and a less-thanheroic reality, nationalists often switched tacks, portraying frontier people as more endangered than most, since the very proximity of a foreign culture could dilute the national sensibilities of anyone who lacked a strong national commitment. Only through inoculation by a powerful dose of their own national identity, it seems, could unsuspecting frontier folk be prevented from becoming assimilated to their neighbors’ culture.

Schoolhouse Fortresses 21 Even historians and social scientists who study frontier regions today can find few adequate terms that treat the experience of their inhabitants as somehow normal rather than exceptional. “Borderlands,” “hybrid cultures,” “mixed communities”—each term conveys an a priori (nationalist) impulse to fix members of such communities with authentic and lasting identities that have been at most temporarily disrupted by accidents of mixing. This line of thinking shares with nationalist activists a belief that differences in language use constituted a significant basis for self-identification among people who lived in linguistically mixed regions. The focus on determining authentic identities makes it difficult to imagine bilingualism or social

interaction among people who spoke more than one language as normal, or indeed possible, without seeing the force of some external power (Germanization, Czechification) at work. The very question of

language use directs our attention to the imagined differences that nationalists believed ought to have divided peoples and distracts us from the often-normalized, unremarkable bilingual communities they

produced. In a province such as Bohemia, nationalists focused on language use to the exclusion of other aspects of social existence in order to prove that significant differences separated peoples. As Peter

Bugge and others have shown for the Czech example, nationalists organized their ideologies around the distinctiveness of the Czech language precisely because no other significant shared characteristics (religion, class, color) appeared to differentiate the mass of Czech speakers from German speakers in the Bohemian Lands. Nationalists on both sides in Bohemia forced linguistic differences to stand for a host of alleged qualitative differences among peoples precisely because Czech- and German-speaking Bohemians shared a culture that was dangerously similar in every other way.’ Nationalists labored mightily to resolve the tension between their own ideals of endangered national purity and the social realities of bilingualism or fluid social relations across imagined national boundaries that were too often present in frontier life. This tension manifests itself, for example, in some glaring absences from those 1907

postcard images of an idealized language frontier patrolled by the good offices of the German School Association. What, if anything, made this postcard image recognizable as a frontier, beyond the presence of the School Association insignia? After all, the scene depicted

22 Schoolhouse Fortresses neither the national enemy nor any form of cultural interaction between peoples. The postcards and the nationalists who hawked them treated the language frontier as if it were an exemplary part of the national territory and not a marginal region whose very contact with enemy nations somehow threatened to dilute its German character. The apparent paradox of constructing the frontier ideologically as the most German or Czech of all national territories lay at the heart of ongoing nationalist ambivalence about daily life in those regions that constituted real language frontiers.® The postcards do depict some other important symbols that a century ago would have signaled the identity of the place to activists as a national frontier. These in turn would have struck nationalists from

even earlier decades as new to German, Czech, Italian, or Slovene nationalist ideologies. The image defines Germanness largely in terms

of children, buildings, and specific landscapes, rather than in terms of abstract humanist ideals. In so doing, the postcard suggests that Germanness no longer resided in an elite set of cultural attributes available to all Austrians who strove to realize the liberal values of humanism, as it had in 1848.‘ In depicting the frontier, nationalist imagery increasingly located Germanness in children and in their schoolhouses. As we will see, children became both the objects and symbols of a nationalist activism aimed specifically at frontier regions. This form of activism involved building more national schools, ostensibly in order to strengthen the nation by inculcating a strong national

commitment in frontier children at an early age. This would, it was believed, put an end to traditional bilingualism, social mixing, intermarriage, and national indifference among rural frontier people. At the same time, as we will see, frontier schools often served to nationalize any available children, not simply those who allegedly belonged

to the nation in question. Until the post-1945 expulsions in Czechoslovakia, many frontier people continued to frustrate the expectations of nationalists by refusing to identify fully with one nation or another and by rejecting a nationally polarized view of their own communities. When such people did align themselves with one nation or another, nationalists complained that they did so opportunistically, demonstrating both a deplorable lack of commitment to their adopted national identity and a dangerous potential to change sides. Census results for rural, lin-

Schoolhouse Fortresses 23 guistically mixed regions in several regions before the First World War

appeared to confirm this behavior, as villages whose overall population numbers remained stable reported a German-speaking majority in one census and a Czech- or Slovene- speaking majority ten years later. Although nationalists knew all about this kind of behavior and even shaped their strategies to take advantage of it, their public pronouncements generally ignored its existence. When they could not overlook side switching, nationalists usually blamed it on the subversive actions of their opponents (forced Czechification, Germanization) or, in moments of profound frustration, on the alleged ignorance of rural frontier people. Their contradictory attitudes toward frontier folk—publicly praising their heroism while privately bemoaning their unreliability—also mirrored nationalists’ conflicted attitudes toward rural populations in general and bourgeois attitudes toward peasants and working-class people in particular. As in many urbanizing European societies around 1900, nationalists might claim to esteem peasants as the repositories of traditional national values, but in practice nationalists despaired over peasant ignorance. In the years after the publication of the 1880 census results, activists on all sides analyzed the data to plot the exact placement of the local language frontiers. Treating language-use statistics as if they reflected the national predisposition of respondents, activists mapped the territorial reach of their nations with a statistical precision previously unavailable to them. Furthermore, by plotting statistical changes over time—the numbers of those lost to one nation and gained by another, the numbers of immigrants and emigrants of one nation or another— nationalists determined the future outlook for their nations in any given region. As long as the respondents did not link their own language use to a larger national identity, however, such studies conveyed little more than nationalist potentials, and certainly not national realities. Driven to intensify national awareness and to improve their relative

Statistical standing in time for the next census, nationalists turned increasingly to education wherever the lines that separated nations seemed malleable. Education offered nationalists a powerful tool both to promote the use of their particular language and to link its use more fully to a concept of national community.® The rising nationalist obsession with education and its physical embodiment, the

24 Schoolhouse Fortresses schoolhouse, as the means to preserve and strengthen the position of local linguistic minorities reflected a nationalist belief in the power of education to solidify the permeable community boundaries that had hitherto failed to differentiate nations from each other. Illiterate parents might not grasp the fundamental importance of their own nationality, but their children could develop a solid nationalist understanding of self if nationalist teachers had access to them from earliest childhood.® For the nationalists, only education could solidity the otherwise weak boundaries that supposedly separated neighboring

nations. National identity might be lodged in the blood, but it required the help of a solid national education to survive the perils of frontier cultures that consistently threatened its survival. Austria’s constitutional structures helped create the political op-

portunities that encouraged nationalists to see minority education both as a creative solution to the challenge of nationalizing the masses

and as a highly profitable political issue. The liberal constitution of 1867 had proclaimed the rights of Austrian citizens to education in their own language. In a nod to the powerful German liberals from Bohemia who feared Czechification at the hands of majority Czechs, it had also promised that no one would be required to attend school in a language other than his own.’ When these dual promises were combined with the specifics of the liberal school legislation of 1869, they shaped the nationalist political strategies that resulted in the phenomenon of the minority school. Nationalists turned to Austria’s legal system to obtain fulfillment of this constitutional promise. The courts, in turn, relied on the liberal school law of 1869 to shape the specific

rules for determining language use in local education. In doing so, they also gradually elaborated a set of legal requirements for the founding of state-supported minority schools. According to the 1869 law, a school had to be erected wherever a five-year average of forty children lived within a distance of four kilometers or one hour by foot. A Supreme Administrative Court decision in 1884 applied these original test principles to situations where linguistic minorities required a state-supported minority school in their district. If a five-year average of forty children within the four-kilometer radius requested

a school in a different language from the existing school, then the state—and the local school board—was obliged to accommodate the request.® This legal requirement offered the various nationalist school

Schoolhouse Fortresses 25 associations an enormous opportunity. If they built a private school locally that might eventually attract forty children, they could then

force the state and the local community to assume the financial burden for the minority school. Once the funding for an originally private minority school had been taken over by the state, nationalist activists could direct the funds that had paid for the private school to the founding of new schools in other promising locations. When Czech, German, and, later, Slovene nationalist school associations built private schoolhouses in linguistically mixed regions of rural Austria, local nationalists often came to see the buildings themselves as whitewashed territorial claims on the local landscape. To be sure, minority schoolhouses took their place next to other, less notable reminders of potential local conflict such as business, street, or railroad-station signs in one language or another or statues to national heroes. Nevertheless, the solid two-story modern school buildings with their high-pitched roofs towered like architectural giants over largely one-story rural landscapes, aggressive challenges by a linguistic minority to the hegemony of another group.’ Not surprisingly, the schools also offered their national opponents tangible targets on which to vent their wrath. Nationalists on all sides soon complained

about vandalism against their school buildings. Violence against schoolhouses, they alleged, became a favored means to challenge the

right of a minority to express its national pride. In time, any act of vandalism against a school confirmed dire nationalist narratives about the violence that intensely nationalized rural populations perpetrated

against each other in frontier regions. Nationalist accounts left no space for the possibility that such vandalism might not be motivated by nationalist hatred. Both the schoolhouses and any attacks against them became symbolic vehicles for understanding local social life in nationalist terms. By 1900 nationalists had constructed the rural lan-

guage frontier as a heroic setting for their own activism and alternately as a place of potentially dangerous ambiguity.

The Rise of the Frontier We can trace German nationalists’ earliest elaboration of a frontier ideology to a specific moment: the founding of the German School Association in the spring of 1880. At the organization’s founding

26 Schoolhouse Fortresses meeting in Vienna’s Musikverein, its progenitors offered a potent combination of images and tropes that would dominate nationalist ideologies. Styrian Viktor Kraus, for example, told his listeners that without German schools the German “will be demoralized; he will have no backbone against the culture of other peoples.”’? Using these words, Kraus exploded the traditional logic with which German nationalists had understood both the position and role of their “nation” in Austria. They no longer spoke for an acknowledged Staatsvolk or Kulturnation. Kraus and his colleagues reconceived the German place

in the monarchy as a fortress to be defended rather than as a set of universal qualities less fortunate nations might adopt on their way to becoming German. The locus for this new defense was not to be the Parliament, where German liberals had recently lost the majority they

had long taken for granted, nor was it to be accomplished through narrowly political means, as most liberals tended to imagine. Instead, nationalists located the threat to the German nation at its territorial peripheries, on the language frontiers. The School Association’s very

first printed public appeal proclaimed that thousands of children were lost to the German nation annually for lack of German schools in linguistically mixed regions. This discovery—based on the writings of a German nationalist Catholic priest active in the South Tyrol—led to a decades-long reorientation of German nationalism away from politics in Vienna toward the social, economic, and demographic health of Germans on the frontiers. The nationalists turned to a concept—the language frontier—that in the mid-nineteenth century had been largely irrelevant to Austrian politics. The original understanding of the term was descriptive rather than moral in its significance, and its study had involved the investigation of local dialects and their geographic histories.'' Those who had used this term were usually linguistic historians, ethnographers, Statisticians, folklorists, or observers who commented on linguistic phenomena, and not nationalist politicians.’? The term “language frontier” came to assume a political significance partly as a result of

this reorientation of German politics and partly as a result of the political opportunities created by the constitution of 1867. That document’s relatively open-ended promises of equality for language use in public life offered Czech nationalist activists in particular the opportunity to pursue sweeping political agendas. If speakers of Slavic

Schoolhouse Fortresses 27 languages formed a linguistic majority in a given region, then they might now agitate to make their language the language of civil administration and schooling instead of German. This opportunity in turn encouraged activists to treat another new institution—the Austrian government’s new decennial census, which started in 1880—as a formal measure of each nation’s relative gains and losses. When the liberal state had begun to develop the concept of a modern census in the 1870s, it had originally considered gathering information about its citizens’ mother tongue or even their nationality. In the end, however, the census office had settled on the less controversial “language of daily use.” Nationalists continued to

lobby hard for a census that would ask for respondents’ mother tongue rather than the nationally neutral “language of daily use,” and eventually they treated the more neutral category as if it nonetheless implied national identity.'* At the same time, however, the nationalist viewpoint won an implicit victory of sorts since respondents were not allowed to report more than one language of daily use. The census thus ignored the potential extent of bilingualism in several regions, and this made it much easier for nationalists to treat it as a national database for all of Cisleithania.

With the census of 1880, nationalists of all kinds calculated the extent of what they increasingly referred to as their “national property’ (Nationalbesitzstand, narodnit majetek) and used it to establish spe-

cific territorial claims.'* This process proved ideologically uneven, producing several often self-contradictory arguments to justify territorial claims for political hegemony. The focus on numbers and territories gradually transformed the ideological qualities with which German nationalists in particular had characterized their nation. Where they found themselves the numerical minority, German nationalists returned to more traditional liberal ideas, highlighting the absolute cultural value of a German education, German commerce, German handwork, or German agricultural productivity. They emphasized, wherever possible, the degree to which a German-speaking minority paid a majority of the local taxes. The far greater ability of Germans to create value from the land where others had merely toiled for survival, they argued, ought to guarantee the former the right to

a determining voice in local politics, even if they constituted a minority of the local population.'® Elsewhere, German nationalists de-

28 Schoolhouse Fortresses veloped more historical arguments to justify their political hegemony in territories where their rule was threatened by an emerging majority of non-German-speaking immigrants. These immigrants ought to as-

similate to Germanness, it was argued, since they had moved to a

traditionally German area. In those territories where German speakers formed a clear majority of the population, nationalists also relied on census data to justify preventing the founding of minority schools by the national enemy. The regional diversity of German-speaking communities and their geographic dispersal throughout Cisleithania made any single one of these arguments by itself untenable for the whole. Other nationalists might build their fantasies around political control over specific core territories where, according to the census, their language was spoken by a majority of the population, such as the Czechs in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the Slovenes in Carniola, or the Poles in Galicia. There could never be a single territory or region in Austria, however, that might serve the German nationalists in a comparable way. Far more than that of other nationalists, the German nationalist imagination focused on the several dispersed and marginal regions where people and land could both be “lost” or “gained” for the nation. They pointed out that the so-called frontier experience was also far more

specific to German speakers than to their rivals. Germans, it was claimed, had to defend more “frontiers” in Austria than did other nations. What the nationalists meant was that German speakers lived in close proximity to more alien linguistic groups than did any other linguistic group. This made the task of organizing a German nationalist defense all the more difficult. The German School Association frequently reminded its members that it “has to defend German national property from attacks on four sides and erect fortifications that can turn back the assaults of fanatical nationalist opponents.”!® The association competed financially not simply against any single group like the Czech or the Slovene nationalists, but rather against the combined efforts of Czech, Slovene, and Italian nationalist organizations. The challenge became a daunting one indeed when it was framed in these terms. “Czech, Polish, Slovene, and Italian nationalist defense organizations together can raise close to five million crowns annually. Against them the German School Association can raise barely a million and a half crowns!”!

Schoolhouse Fortresses 29 In fact, Italian nationalists faced a situation similar to that of German nationalists, if on a somewhat smaller scale. Although Italian speakers constituted a substantial linguistic minority in the Tyrol, they nevertheless constituted political majorities in the diets of ‘Trieste and Gorz/Gorizia/Gorica and in Istria, where they dominated the towns. Italian nationalists focused most of their efforts on maintaining their hegemony in these latter regions where industrialization and increased migration brought growing Slovene- and Croat-speaking minorities

(and eventually majorities) in the late nineteenth century. Like German nationalists too, Italian nationalists were used to thinking of themselves as representing a higher culture into which Slav-speaking peasants and workers would eventually assimilate themselves.

Czech nationalists focused their attentions on consolidating political power at every level of administration in the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia where Czech speakers constituted a large majority of the population. Czech nationalist associations, however, developed their own concept of the frontier and its role in the national territory. As Czech-speaking workers migrated into industrial regions of Bohemia and Moravia previously dominated by German speakers, Czech nationalists referred to them as modern-day colonists who would extend the boundaries of Czech national territory outward to the very

borders of Bohemia. Their particular challenge consisted in preventing Czech-speaking workers on this language frontier from assim-

ilating to German, just as Slovene nationalists worked to prevent Slovene-speaking workers who sought employment in Germandominated towns such as Cilli/Celje, Marburg/ Maribor, and Pettau/ Ptui in South Styria from assimilating to German. For all nationalists, the frontier was the key setting for a statistical zero-sum game, since a census gain on the part of one nation, it was believed, could only be made at the expense of the other. With the results of a second census taken in 1890, nationalist statisticians could now plot long-term trends more easily, and a growing statistical literature gradually took over survey work previously done by individual observers. This helped create an interregional consensus about what areas were endangered and what kind of help they required. Ironically, the most salient feature of linguistic life in such regions—their bilingualism—remained utterly invisible both to census takers and to nationalist commentators.

30 Schoolhouse Fortresses The 1902 publication of J. Zemmrich’s Sprachgrenze und Deutschtum

in Bohmen, followed by Heinrich Rauchberg’s magisterial threevolume Der nationale Besitzstand in Bohmen in 1905, made the Czech-

German language frontiers a subject for popular and ongoing discussion among nationalists. Both works were excerpted and published

in popular nationalist journals that gave them a far broader readership in Austria and in Germany than they might otherwise have received.'® Zemmrich attempted to link statistical advances and declines

to evidence culled from surveys he sent to local German nationalist organizations. His work stressed the role of local political institutions—occasionally even the role of individual organizers or teachers— to explain trends and locate efficient solutions. Rauchberg’s work, in contrast, focused on complex demographic trends, comparative local

birthrates, child mortality, immigration statistics, and economic developments to create a picture of long-term trends less influenced by the agency of individual activists. Rauchberg concluded that changes in the language frontier over time had been and would continue to be minimal, particularly in agrarian regions of Bohemia. Zemmrich, however, fretted over the potential weakness of German nationalist organizations in regions where German-language use seemed to be in decline. Both men’s works were widely read and cited by German nationalists across the monarchy, and both contributed to the popularization of a kind of commonsense knowledge about the so-called language frontier. These works and the flurry of magazine articles they engendered, however, based their arguments on the same slippery assumption that we have already encountered among earlier nationalist interpreters of the census: that choosing to report one language or another could be understood as commitment to a national identity. Constantly undercut by anecdotal references to local conditions, this assumption always remained untested, unproven, and presumed. Yet the nationalists who promoted the frontier concept read those census statistics about language use as if they reflected self-conscious individual loyalty to nations. They hardly addressed the issue of bilingualism as it might

relate to identity, except in the surveyors’ concern that the census should be sure to measure a bilingual respondent’s “authentic” language and not the “wrong” language. In a section that examined the basis for national statistics, for ex-

Schoolhouse Fortresses 31 ample, Zemmrich alluded unselfconsciously to the question of bilingualism, but offered no convincing answers. He regretted that the government had chosen to measure the respondents’ “language of

daily use” rather than measuring their “nationality” or “mother tongue.” To illustrate the potential confusion created by this category, Zemumyrich pointed out that an outsider in a nationally homogeneous region would not be able to use his own language in daily intercourse. According to a census that measured language of daily use, such an

individual would have no choice but to report the language of the foreign majority as his own. Clearly this category often prevented speakers of a minority language from listing their “true” identities. Zemmrich assured his readers that thanks to nationalist activism, over time most people had come to understand “language of daily use” in terms of nationality. By the time his study was published, he believed

that there could be little doubt that among the general population

one’s language of daily use referred to one’s national selfidentification.'9 Zemmarich was not as confident about this assertion precisely with

regard to Bohemia’s rural language frontiers. He admitted that in these regions many people had developed problematic habits of bilingualism, problematic because these habits made their national identity difficult (but not impossible) to categorize. “Often they don’t know which language they should admit to [in the census] and then are easily swayed by [the opinions of] others. This happens frequently on the language frontier, when a village changes its linguistic majority from one census to the next.” Such changes did occur and could be explained by changes in political control that might have occurred in the municipality between census years. Whichever side controlled

a town hall, noted Zemmrich, could influence the census choices made by the town’s undecided or bilingual inhabitants. Zemmrich expressed confidence in the accuracy of his figures, however, because

in 1900 “watchful nationalist associations” had overseen the 1900 census, and their influence had allegedly prevented local town governments from altering statistics to suit their nationalist agendas. Furthermore, Zemmrich claimed that the presence of Jews in the census complicated matters considerably, since in Bohemia the Jews tended opportunistically to list themselves as Czech or German speakers depending on which language constituted the majority in a locality, de-

32 Schoolhouse Fortresses spite the fact that “among themselves they all speak a more or less pure form of German.””° Despite the allegedly helpful role played by nationalist associations

in guaranteeing the accuracy of the census, Zemmrich returned repeatedly and with considerable ambivalence to the problems posed by the fickle inhabitants of the language frontier. Further in the text, in his discussion of the Bohemian Woods region Zemmrich again registered the ignorance of the German-speaking peasants regarding their national identity, and their unfortunate tendency to fraternize with their Czech-speaking neighbors. “It is difficult to find any national consciousness here, and traditionally the schools failed to awaken it. Luckily German farms do not often pass into Czech hands, but German peasant sons often marry into families near Czech cities and their descendants become Czechs, whose German family names alone attest to their [national] origins.”?! To nationalist observers such as Zemmrich, any potential manipu-

lation of the census at the local level was problematic precisely because they believed that the census recorded the relative numerical strength of nations. Yet although nationalist writers and many later historians generally treated the census as a record of popular nationalist commitment, they actually had plenty of evidence to draw the opposite conclusion. An entire range of nonnationalist factors, from political suasion to basic issues of sociability, influenced the choices individuals made about language use when they filled out the census forms. For many rural respondents, the language question (not to mention the nation question) simply did not hold the kind of personal significance that nationalists attributed to it. Historians too have generally treated the census results as confirmation that imperial Austria was indeed divided into conveniently quantifiable nations. Histories of the empire, for example, continue to include maps that confuse the matter in one of two ways. First, using data from the 1910 census, maps based on majority language use in a given region frequently purport to depict the boundaries of nations. Surprisingly, this practice has continued to this day.” Second,

many works include maps that depict majority language use in the empire as a well-bounded and thus territorially discrete phenomenon. Very few maps in very few texts explain that their maps show only the language-use patterns of a majority of the populace in a given region

Schoolhouse Fortresses 33 and not of the whole. Despite excellent critical analyses of both the census and of the politics of language use by historians Emil Brix, Gary Cohen, and Gerald Stourzh, among others, old nationalist habits do not die easily.”

Frontier People If the twin challenges nationalists faced on the rural frontier—bilingualism and national indifference—disappeared relatively easily in statistical studies, they could not be as easily brushed aside in nationalist

propaganda and policies. Nationalist propaganda usually celebrated frontier folk, claiming that such people had a special awareness of their own national identity precisely because of their close proximity to other nations. Nationalist news reports from frontier regions attempted to reinforce this view by featuring local stories of national heroism prominently. With regard to policy, however, nationalist organizations operated under a different assumption, fearing that communities on the frontier constituted a weak link in the national armor. Families there might at any moment fall prey to the blandishments of a clever enemy and desert their own nation for another. Sons or daughters of careless parents might marry the offspring of a different nation and be swallowed up by the enemy society. Occasionally these frustrations boiled over, infecting otherwise optimistic nationalist propaganda about frontier people. The very concept of a language frontier suggests some of the many challenges that activists faced as they worked to raise popular interest among their own followers in rural nationalist causes. Nationalist conflict was understood to be located in a setting far removed from the more urban experience of most members of nationalist associations and far less immediate to their own lives. “It was impossible for most people to follow the complexities of the nationalist struggle,” Zemmrich himself claimed in his introduction, “living as they did so far from the battlefields of the language frontiers.”** Since the language

frontier as it appeared in the depictions of nationalist writers and artists was also an overwhelmingly rural phenomenon, it appeared both foreign and exotic to urban bourgeois nationalist activists and their neighbors. Never mind again that much nationalist conflict actually took place in the urban industrial centers of Silesia, Bohemia,

34 Schoolhouse Fortresses or Moravia.”? For the purposes of the nationalist imagination, such struggles were played out among rural people in small villages, far away from more familiar urban settings. This distance, however, gave nationalists considerable license for invention in their published portrayals of the rural world to their followers. In what follows I analyze German nationalists’ literary and journalist depictions of the people who inhabited the rural frontier, contrasting the sunny optimism of their invented tropes with the occasional eruptions of angry frustra-

tion that could also characterize their image of frontier German speakers.

One projection of the German nationalists was their belief that the inhabitants of frontier communities were far more aware of the nationalist struggle than were their brethren who did not confront “linguistic others” in daily life. In this belief the nationalist fascination with the frontier reflected an idealized projection of purity onto the so-called border areas by nationalists in political metropolises such as Vienna, Graz, Prague, or Brunn/Brno. Before 1900 it was far more often those cities and not the rural frontier regions that witnessed the bulk of the nationality conflict as it was played out in political and administrative institutions and occasionally in the streets. Sull, urban nationalists justified their activism in Parliament and in the provincial diets by arguing that they gave a voice to the struggles of countless ordinary Czechs or Germans or Slovenes on the frontier who fought daily battles to maintain their national identities. Several urban writers also praised the vigorous nationalist commitment of the frontiersman, contrasting it with the decadence of the cosmopolitan urbanite who cared little for the fate of his nation.” As the location for such a powerful, yet unstable projection of nationalist fantasy, the frontier and its inhabitants embodied several contradictory qualities that served the situational needs of the nationalist

movements. Men and women of the frontier appear in nationalist literatures simultaneously as brave, self-sufficient colonizers and as tragic victims of the nationalist apathy of the nation back home in the

cities. It was this colonizer, as Rudolf Hans Bartsch reminded the readers of his popular 1912 Styrian Hezmmat novel Das deutsche Led,

who had tamed the wild frontier for the nation, cultivating it and bringing it culture, thereby embodying the best virtues of the nation. “Then the German arrived with the Bible and the Nibelungenlied in his

Schoolhouse Fortresses 35 hands. He cleared the land, he drained the swamps, he built walls around the unprotected towns, thereby bringing great relief to the people. Like a god, he brought a higher level of being. Like the Archangel Michael who descended from the clouds to destroy the dragon,

the German conquered this land from on high. With his tax payments, twelve times the size of those paid by the Slavs, he built the schools where they learned everything.”?’ In this same literature the frontier family’s existence was frequently

threatened by the colonizing activities of the nationalist other.*® Bartsch also lamented that German farmers were gradually being driven off the land they had settled in South Styria by the machinations of unscrupulous Slovene nationalists. The two contradictory images of hero and victim supported each other quite well. ‘They created a politically fruitful tension that enabled nationalist organizations alternatively to mobilize (urban) people around threats of national decline and also to celebrate occasional successes as proof of German cultural superiority. The language frontier’s fundamentally rural qualities made it a field for contradictory discourses that alternately figured the peasant as the heroic subject or as the ignorant object of nationalist pedagogies. In

the more romantic version of the national narrative, the hardy peasant inhabitants of the language frontier embodied national virtue far more than did their culturally degenerate urban counterparts. According to this view, the peasants acted as guardians of the frontier

and, by extension, of the nation. Their experiences told a moral lesson. The Sprachgrenzler or frontier folk had worked hard for centuries to maintain their national identity in the face of what was portrayed as a constant attack from a series of devious foes. Das deutsche Leid, for example, depicted the qualities of the border Germans of South Styria in just such idealized terms: “Only the strongest hearts can survive here on the borderland. Men, for whom honor and duty come naturally, whose hearts are filled with divine love and not the earthly variety; men who are strong enough to remain steadfast, to be good friends to each other and a worthy enemy to the opponent. They must know how to conciliate when they have been victorious. We offer

a strong example, we people of the borderlands, we are no flabby half-breeds.”*° Here Bartsch’s heroic example of the frontiersman shames the often-careless attitudes toward national identity displayed

36 Schoolhouse Fortresses by those living far away from the frontier. National boundaries had become blurred in decadent urban centers such as Vienna where nationalists complained, for example, that Austro-Germans had degenerated into a race of cosmopolitan Genussmenschen or pleasure seekers.*”

On Bartsch’s frontier the Sprachgrenzler’s physical proximity to other

nations clarified the boundaries that supposedly differentiated Germans from their Slav or Italian neighbors. Thus the virtues exhibited by the frontier German not only separated him from other Germans, but also delineated the ways his culture differed from that of his close

neighbor. Bartsch typically paints the Slovene speakers of South Styria, for example, as innocent children who have been led by a semieducated urban elite of Slav lawyers to treat the Germans as en-

emies. This opportunistic Slovene elite, explains Bartsch, like the Czech elite in Bohemia, has been educated in German schools, but can at its best only mimic German culture. This elite has learned sets

of facts and figures from its largely German education, and it has learned the tricks of fancy rhetoric, Bartsch averred, but it lacks a deeper ability to work with abstract ideas.*! Differences between the two cultures extended well beyond the Slav

inability to share in particular German virtues. For many German nationalists, the very contours of the landscape, the landmarks, the village architecture, the particular ways in which the fields were worked, the systems of roads, railroads, and waterways, all embodied German superiority. In regions where Slavs had over time replaced the Germans, activists often claimed that the landscape itself betrayed

the territory’s origins. “Even older neighborhoods in present-day Slavic municipalities show a German orientation,” wrote Moravian parliamentary deputy Armand von Dumreicher of Eastern European town planning and architecture in 1893. “All of this eastern culture was planted by German Burgher colonists.”*? Of a trip to southern Bohemia in 1884, German nationalist journalist Franz Hollriegl wrote,

“The Capitoline ruins are a fine destination for the traveler... But of equal interest to a German in Austria today are the ruined sites of the German people, those cultural treasures created by Germans that have since fallen into the hands of others.”*? Given these presumptions, German nationalist attitudes about Slav laziness, incompetence, or confusion in agriculture are hardly surprising.

Schoolhouse Fortresses 37 Not every German frontiersman was portrayed as a hardy hero by any means, as we learn from some other examples of Heimat fiction. Karl ‘Turk’s didactic “Eine Mischheirat” (“A Mixed Marriage”) depicts

quite graphically the dangerous degree to which the boundaries separating nations on the frontier can be breached if Germans ignore

the dangers posed by the Czechs, preferring to pursue individual short-term happiness. The story also illustrates the common trope that the Germans will lose the nationalist wars unless they sacrifice personal interest for the common good of their community. Turk, who began his political career as a follower of Georg von Schonerer, pub-

lished this story in several collections and almanacs in 1898 at the time of German nationalist protests against the Badeni language ordinances.** The story takes place in rural Moravia on the language frontier. Josef, the only son of a wealthy German-speaking peasant family in the village of Feldsbach, loves Bozenka, the daughter of a wealthy family in the nearby Czech village of Velka. Josef’s parents are

dead set against the match. Like Bartsch on the subject of the Slovenes, Josef’s parents observe that the Czech-German relationship had not always been a hostile one. They had even sent young Josef on the traditional Kindertausch/handl to live with Bozenka’s family for two years so that he might learn the other language. This relatively cordial relationship had changed, according to Turk, as the rural Czechs had gradually fallen under the sway of urban political nationalists. Nation-

alist activism had perverted the normally docile Slavic character, bringing out a lazy indifference and an undeserved sense of entitlement, as opposed to its former diligence. If the Germans want to maintain the prosperous position they have built up over the centuries for themselves, ‘Turk tells us, they must be careful not to socialize with the national other on the frontier, for that other, formerly submissive, has become devious.

When Josef argues quite sensibly that Bozenka expects a large dowry, his father answers that in earlier times, when the Czechs were harmless, he might have welcomed the match. What he means is that in earlier times Bozenka would have assimilated to a German identity. Nowadays, however, the Czech nationalists are always looking for ways

to insinuate themselves into purely German communities as Czechs.

His father’s frequent warnings that “Bozenka is an obstinate Slav through and through who will do her best to Czechify the family”

38 Schoolhouse Fortresses cannot dissuade Josef. At the climax of the story a fateful encounter

helps seal Josef’s destiny and, by extension, that of the frontier German village. One Sunday he meets the town Jew, who soon elicits the whole story and offers Josef the following advice. “Don’t pay any attention to your father. Germans are always telling me I’m not a real

German and the Czechs are always saying I’m not a real Czech, al though I speak both languages perfectly [emphasis added]... Learn a lesson from me—I don’t pay any attention to national status of any kind. You should marry wherever you find it advantageous to do so. And once you’re married, your father will forget about the whole thing.”

Here Turk projects his own fears about the fragility of national existence on the language frontier onto the local Jew, the quintessential man without a nation. The fact that the Jew speaks both languages

perfectly only underscores the real dangers that threaten Germanspeaking children raised in linguistically mixed border regions. Without the intervention of the organized national community, the children could be lost to the enemy, and this is precisely the outcome

of ‘Turk’s story. Josef and Bozenka are married, but to obtain the dowry, Josef signs a contract making her co-owner of the farm. From this moment Josef’s fortunes decline dramatically. Bozenka does not get along with the servants and the farmhands, so she fires them all

and replaces them with Czechs from her own village. The farm is rapidly transformed into a tiny Czech colony where both the German language and German customs are quickly forgotten. Frontiers of several varieties are breached as the German sense of order and cleanliness is forgotten. German virtues are not replaced with a traditional Slavic simplicity, Turk tells us, but with the lazy, arrogant qualities that reflect the shadow side of the Slavic character. Josef, for all his good German efforts, cannot keep the estate from financial deterioration. Not surprisingly, his children experience trouble at school because they never speak German at home. In fact, they grow up hating the German language and the other German-speaking village children. When Josef dies at the age of thirty-three, exhausted and de-

pressed, Bozenka inherits the farm and soon remarries a younger Czech. In the end, two precious forms of national property on the frontier—land and children (and their potential descendants)—are forever lost to the German nation.

Schoolhouse Fortresses 39 Clearly Bartsch’s conception of German peasants as hardy national heroes coexisted uneasily and in tension with far less flattering depictions of peasants on the language frontier. Negative images of rural Austria such as Turk’s informed the writings of several local activists, especially those who lived in rural regions. These activists constantly battled against what they believed to be a national indifference based on a rural stubborn ignorance. Villagers, they claimed, had little idea that a national struggle raged all about them, tending instead to accept bilingualism as normal, to socialize regularly, and even to intermarry with members of other nations. Of such German-speaking peasants in the Bohemian Woods Zemmrich wrote tersely, “The peasant population acquiesces easily to Czech encroachments.”*° Publications of the nationalist school associations reveal these con-

tradictions most fully, and for good reason. These organizations sought to keep local nationalist feelings at a high pitch in order to increase membership and financial contributions. While they often recounted activist victories on the frontier to give readers a sense of their group’s effectiveness, they also played up stories of the opponent’s activism or peasant indifference in order to keep members in

that state of constant alert. In one of its very first editorials, the German School Association magazine Getreue Eckart asked why so many Germans appeared to place so little value on the protection of their national property. In a series of articles on so-called frontier

Germans, the magazine complained that national consciousness seemed to be weakest precisely among Germans on the language frontier.*° A year later, referring to conditions in southern Bohemia,

a School Association author shared the bitterness he felt when he considered “the indifference of men who call themselves German and who administer their precious charge so foolishly that they must relinquish it to the enemy.”*’ A 1911 Sudmark survey of conditions in

the frontier town of Zierberg/Cersak on the Mur/Mura River in South Styria concluded that the situation there proved “what a contemptible people we are.” Conjuring the historical example of the

Rhine Confederation, those German states that had allegedly betrayed their Germanness by concluding an alliance with Napoleon, the author noted that in Zierberg/Cersak too, “The German sides with the [Slovene] enemy against his own people. In Zierberg German farmers who know not a word of Slovene cry obsessively that

40 Schoolhouse Fortresses they are Windisch, [and] ‘we don’t need a German school!’ ” In this particular case the nationalists blamed such behavior on the influence of the local priest, allegedly a Slovene nationalist. It was he who had “unmanned [the farmers] nationally and driven them to the point of denying their own natural instincts.” The unflattering accusation implied that the unenlightened frontier peasant was far more likely to follow the orders of the wily local priest than to act according to the dictates of national loyalty.*®

German nationalist frustration with the apparent indifference of many frontier German speakers to their nationality is reflected powerfully, if indirectly, in yet another kind of Heimat fiction, Rudolf Fiedler’s “Wie der Schneiderflori wieder deutsch geworden ist” (“How

the Tailor Florian Became German Again”).* In this tale of life on the rural language frontier, Fiedler tried to blame nationalist indifference among German speakers on specific social and economic pressures exerted by local Czech nationalists. German speakers on this fictional frontier were truly victims, helpless in the face of cruel Czech economic dominance. Even if they had wanted to be nationalists, their miserable situation prevented them from expressing that desire. They required the intervention of a nationalist activist or organization like the School Association from the outside to bring them back into the German fold. In fact, the entire story is a transparent tribute to the salutary effects of nationalist organizations on frontier society. Florian, a German-speaking tailor in a frontier village, was poor because most of the villagers, Czech nationalists, took their work

to a Czech tailor in the next town. The few other German speakers in the village had gradually submitted over time to Czech rule: “Czech was preached from the pulpit, Czech was taught in the school, busi-

ness at the town hall took place in Czech, and at the local inn they played cards in Czech.” There was no one among the villagers who might lead the German speakers to develop a stronger sense of their own German identity. Florian and his wife depended so heavily on the kindness of their Czech customers, for example, that they sent their children to Czech schools. Worst of all, according to Fiedler, in the last imperial census Florian had reported his language of daily use as Czech. All of this changed when Josef Reimer, a wealthy German activist with the “imposing look of the ancient Teutons about him,” arrived

Schoolhouse Fortresses 4] in the village and bought a piece of Czech property. Reimer brazenly spoke German to the local priest and the mayor. As did real-life associational activists, he visited every family that he suspected had some German in its background, and he invited the men to join a German association. Soon, with the help of the German School Association, Reimer even built a German-language minority school in the town and hired a teacher to live there with his wife and children. Although angry Czech vandals occasionally smashed the school windows and

painted graffiti on its whitewashed walls, Reimer succeeded in attracting several German children to the school, but not those of the tailor Florian. He and his wife still feared the loss of their Czech customers. Their children were even forced by Czech pupils to take part in an ambush of children from the German school. Florian’s nationalist guilt tore him apart internally. Christmas Eve found him standing in the snow outside the little German schoolhouse, his tearful face pressed against the window, watching the Christmas party inside. Candles lit the room, and the strains of “Silent Night” reached the outside as happy children surveyed the Christmas

tree and the presents provided for them by the generosity of the German School Association. Speaking to the children, the teacher admonished them to help bring the spirit of the Christ child to the German people by always remaining loyal to their language and their people. Suddenly the idyllic scene was shattered as a stone smashed the window and hit a young girl in the forehead. Florian gave chase

and managed to catch the culprit, who turned out to be the son of the Czech mayor. After this incident Florian joined his fellow Germans and brought his family to the Christmas party, even though, as his wife pointed out, it would mean almost certain loss of his business.

“God and Reimer will provide for us,” Florian tells her, as Reimer welcomes the family back “to the German Umgangssprache.”

Despite its promising outcome, Fiedler’s story echoed the deep frustration expressed by many local activists in rural Austria about the unwillingness of their German brethren to commit themselves fully to a German national identity. As in the story, both Slav and German nationalists claimed that parents were often forced to make choices

for themselves and their children that ran counter to their own national preferences, just as they were often forced to report a different language than their own on the census. Nationalists repeatedly cited

42 Schoolhouse Fortresses alleged threats or bribes made by employers, apartment owners, or

even local priests to explain those choices that appeared to run counter to nationalist logic. Czech and Slovene nationalists explained the phenomenon by arguing that Slavs could too easily be seduced into betraying their own nations by German promises of social advancement. Even after 1900, in an era when knowledge of German was no longer necessary for the pursuit of a career in the Bohemian provincial civil service, Czech nationalists continued to argue that misguided Slav parents still believed that their own children would ben-

efit from a German education.*® German nationalists in turn frequently bemoaned the fact that well-funded Slav nationalists in a given

village could bribe parents to send their children to a Czech or Slovene school with promises of high-quality Christmas presents and more modern, hygienic facilities. That such promises or threats often swayed people—German, Czech, or Slovene speaking—in choosing their children’s school or the language they reported on the census is beyond question. Yet we must also be careful to leave open the possibility that rural Austrians may have occasionally exercised their own agency in choosing, and changing, which local school they chose for their children.

Frontier Schooling Nationalist liberals on all sides in the nineteenth century had traditionally regarded the schoolhouse as the most effective location for battling rural resistance to progressive modernity. Their turn-of-thecentury heirs constructed the same rural schoolhouse as the precious site where the members of the next generation would learn both to celebrate their own national identity and to reject their parents’ indifference to cultural mixing. Just as Kulturkampf liberals had viewed the primary school as a potent weapon against popular ignorance and

superstition in the 1860s, so too did nationalists see the public elementary-school system as a potential antidote to their own anxieties about children’s socialization in a mixed-language setting. In particular, schooling in a foreign language, they argued, constituted the first step in a process that could eventually end in the tragedy of a child’s denationalization and identification with the enemy. The German School Association illustrated this terrible potential in

Schoolhouse Fortresses 43 a short play it commissioned for its twenty-fifth anniversary jubilee. The play was set in the cottage of a rural Bohemian factory foreman

in the early 1880s. In the first two scenes the foreman’s children struggle with their homework, counting and declining torturously in

bad Czech. Their mother cannot help them with their assignment since she has never learned Czech. Their father suffers at the thought

of their having to be educated in Czech even though, as he points out, there are as many German speakers in the village as there are Czech speakers. He has written several petitions to the Ministry of Education, to no avail, and as a last resort he has contacted a new organization called the German School Association. During the play the father’s resolve is severely tested when his supervisor threatens to fire him if he does not send his children to the public (Czech) school

and his wife entreats him not to make trouble in the village. In the end, however, the foreman’s tenacity is rewarded when the German School Association unexpectedly answers his call with the promise to erect a new German-minority school in the village. The children have

been saved for their nation, and the play ends with a triumphant tableau depicting an apotheosis of Germania, a mythical embodiment

of the German nation. According to the instructions, above her should hang “the school association insignia crowned with a laurel wreath and decorated with twenty-five little lightbulbs. To the right and left of Germania should stand Germanic warriors; next to them a group of grateful farmers and their children, to form a semicircle.”*! This was the official mission of all the nationalist school associations: to found minority schools in frontier regions that would rescue children for their nation by offering them an education in their own national language where such schooling was unavailable. Nevertheless, although nationalists claimed to rescue children for their nation, it seems that much of their real work actually involved competing for the as-yet-to-be-determined souls of children whose parents’ indifference to national identity made them potential candidates for assimi-

lation to any nation. The Czech and German school associations in particular sought to assimilate all available candidates to their nation, from bilingual children of any background to the products of socalled mixed marriages. This nationalizing goal, far more than the rescue of children from nationally committed families, represented the real work of the school associations, and a highly pragmatic op-

44 Schoolhouse Fortresses portunism rather than an insistence on some essentialist authenticity shaped their strategic competition for the souls of these in-between children. How had this come to be the case? Certainly the founding members of the German School Association who had met in Vienna’s Musikverein in the spring of 1880 had little expected that indifference to

nationality altogether would turn out to be the most significant problem their organization was to encounter. Over time, however,

their increasing experience in frontier regions and the statistical studies of men such as Zemmrich and Rauchberg produced strategies

that worked hard to capitalize on the presence of nationally indifferent children in linguistically mixed regions. In towns or villages with fewer than the requisite forty German-speaking schoolchildren, the organization did fund private schools as a means to fortify a minority in linguistically mixed districts.“ Of course, in such districts the association could depend on a core group of convinced German na-

tionalist parents to send their children to a German school. Yet the association was far more concerned about the fate of “the children of numerous mixed marriages” or “those ‘fluctuating types,’ those indif-

ferent people who lack a strong nationalist conviction.” Germanminority schools, it was claimed, required the association’s support in order to compete with well-funded Slav alternatives for “children from mixed marriages or children of nationally hermaphrodite parents.”*

Such parents, noted the association, might send their children to “whichever school was better equipped or organized” or whichever school provided material advantages such as “free books or other instructional materials or better presents at Christmas.”“* Using such tactics, the German School Association might attract German-speaking or bilingual children from the region to its school, or even the children of some local Slav families that wished to send their children to the new school.* Sometimes the association offered financial support to existing state-funded German schools in towns that also supported a rival Czech, Polish, Italian, or Slovene school to enable the German school to compete more effectively against the others. Nationally ambivalent parents, in turn, might be won over by bribes or simply by the greater educational resources an enemy school might have at its disposal. A German newspaper report from the village of St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj in South Styria noted, for example, that in

Schoolhouse Fortresses 45 1905 the numbers of pupils at the local German school had risen by 5 to a total of 117. At the same time, however, the newspaper re-

counted that another 5 pupils had withdrawn from the German school that year to attend its Slovene counterpart because of nationalist “agitation” in the village. ‘The German school had allegedly found

itself under constant verbal attack by local Slovene nationalists who claimed that children at the Slovene school would receive new clothes for Christmas as opposed to the “old rags” distributed by the German School Association. Even worse, two German-speaking families that had recently moved to the village had apparently decided to send their children to the Slovene school because it was considered to be better organized than the German school. The German nationalist newspaper suggested bitterly that the real reason for the popularity of the Slovene school might be the fact that in the previous year “not one pupil had been punished for poor attendance.”*° Recognizing that the provision of modern facilities, free schoolbooks, or even Christmas presents might not be enough to ward off the danger represented by the founding of a new minority school, nationalist associations often stepped in to found kindergartens designed specifically to assimilate the youngest children from mixedlanguage backgrounds. School Association kindergartens, for ex-

ample, became an all-purpose solution both to the dangers of denationalization that allegedly threatened German-speaking children and to the challenges of assimilating non-German speakers to the German community. Kindergartens kept young, working-class German children aged three to six off the streets where they might

pick up a foreign language at a tender age, a serious concern to nationalists on the language frontier. Behind their protective fortress walls the kindergartens worked hard to prepare children linguistically to attend German primary schools. They also helped introduce children of non-German-speaking or bilingual parents at a very early age into the German-speaking community. In 1913 the German School Association estimated that the efforts of its kindergartens had rescued over 10,000 children from the “dangers of the streets” and led them to a German school.” What dangers the streets posed to such children and their incipient national identities may be inferred from a 1906 article in the German School Association’s magazine Getreue Eckart regarding petitions to lengthen vacation periods. ‘The School Associ-

46 Schoolhouse Fortresses ation argued vociferously against the idea, claiming that a longer vacation would expose the youngest children from mixed marriages who were just becoming accustomed to the German language to bad (linguistic) influences on the streets. These in turn would undo the hardfought accomplishments of the kindergarten. Here the socialization undertaken by the kindergarten was framed in specifically nationalist terms, with asocial or delinquent behavior linked to linguistic confusion.*®

Over the years the Czech and German school associations developed a clearer understanding of the particular needs and requirements of small rural communities, as well as programmatic ways to overcome any obstacles to attending the minority school that local children might face. If children had to travel a long distance to attend the minority school and could not return home for lunch, the associations funded programs to feed children their afternoon hot meals in the schoolhouse or at a neighboring inn. Poorer pupils whose families might have difficulty clothing them adequately could look forward to the annual Christmas gift program that provided them with shoes, hats, and overcoats (despite mutual accusations about the gifts’

alleged poor quality). Through their attentive involvement in such community-oriented programs, school association activists gained a lasting influence in many rural communities. Leaders encouraged such activism precisely because the ability of a nationalist association

to project a local image of providing care, resources, and opportunities for social mobility might influence parents’ decision about which school their child should attend. These strategies sought to influence those parents in linguistically mixed districts who apparently did not choose their children’s school according to national interest. Yet what appeared to be national indifference among such parents often reflected their desire to obtain a bilingual schooling for their children, based on careful considerations of opportunities for local social mobility. Both rural tradition (Kindertausch/handl in Moravia) and their commonsense understanding of the dynamics of local economies in linguistically mixed regions led many parents to demand a bilingual education for their children until well into the twentieth century.*? Although few media articulated this commonsense point of view publicly, historians should

not be deterred from excavating them wherever possible, and from

Schoolhouse Fortresses 47 taking seriously their popularity. On his research trip to the Bohemian Woods in the summer of 1918, journalist Robert Scheu met several

peasant parents in Prachatitz/Prachatice who sent their children alternately to Czech- and German-language schools to ensure both their fluency and their literacy in both languages.®® In an example from South Styria, a group of Slovene-speaking parents in the tiny spa town

of Sauerbrunn/Slatina in 1900-1902 petitioned to be removed from the local Slovene-language school district of Heiligen-Kreutz / Sv. Kriz

so that their forty-three children might be taught both in German and in Slovene. As residents of a community dependent on a growing tourism industry that served a mostly German-speaking clientele, the parents of Sauerbrunn/Slatina clearly saw a bilingual education for their children as advantageous. Members of the Slovene nationalist district council in Heiligen-Kreutz / Sv. Kriz vociferously opposed the secession and denied the possibility that economic interest could outweigh national belonging. They claimed that only direct and indirect threats by the spa owners had won the employees there to the idea of a German or bilingual school.*! In this latter case, as in many others, it is particularly difficult to reconstruct the exact concerns by the parents because almost from the start the German School Association intervened to support the lawsuit, shaping the parents’ publicly articulated demands according to its own nationalist agenda. The case is nevertheless illuminating because it demonstrates the considerable gap between parents’ economic interests, on the one hand, and the growing influence nationalist organizations exercised in the politics of local school districts, on the other. In South Styria, a region with an older tradition of bilingual schools, parents’ options were increasingly limited to schooling their

children either in German or in Slovene and almost never in both languages.°? Both Slav and German nationalists used their growing control over district school boards to end all bilingual education. They increasingly removed the option of studying the second provincial language, and the traditional so-called utraquist or bilingual pri-

mary schools in the region declined precipitously. In 1870 South Styria counted 199 such utraquist schools where pupils were taught in Slovene in the lower classes and in German in the upper classes, as opposed to 35 Slovene-language schools. By 1913 only 49 utraquist schools remained, next to 230 Slovene-language schools and over 50

48 Schoolhouse Fortresses German-language schools.*®* In the Sauerbrunn/Slatina example, par-

ents had faced an imperfect choice between a Slovene public school

that included no German-language class in its curriculum or a German School Association school conducted primarily in German but that would include classes in the Slovene language as well. Neither offered a truly bilingual option. In fact, by 1914 parents who considered a working knowledge of both regional languages to be indispensable to their children’s economic success had far fewer options than they had enjoyed in 1880.°4

Inside the Frontier School The children who passed through the more than 500 “light and airy” modern schoolhouses built by the German School Association, for example, clearly came from several different kinds of linguistic or nationally conscious backgrounds. They were not uniformly “frontier Germans” in the way that much of the literature on the frontier implied; that is, they were not necessarily children of German-identified parents. The association claimed to serve the needs of two categories of pupils in particular. It defined the first category largely by descent as “all children of German and mixed marriages.” In defining the second category, however, the association saw its role more in environmentalist terms, given the complex political and cultural realities of the language frontier. This category included children “of Germanfriendly Czechs, Poles, Slavs, and Italians,” who could attend “in limited numbers only if it is clear that after graduation these children will enter a German trade and so be won over to the German cause forever.” Their parents tended to vote “with the Germans in communal, diet and parliamentary elections and . . . would feel themselves forced into the enemy camp if their children were not accepted to the German-language school.” As the School Association reminded it readers, “Many a German minority in Styria, Carinthia, Moravia or Silesia only maintains its influential or controlling position in local

politics thanks to the efforts of such German-friendly Slovenes, Czechs, or Poles.”®’ These were Germans in the political sense. The average pupil in a minority school may not have been a child whose family was grateful to avoid the terrible fate of denationaliza-

tion on the frontier. Nevertheless, in the Bohemian Lands both the

Schoolhouse Fortresses 49 Czech and German nationalist school associations repeatedly accused each other of working secretly to Czechify or Germanize the unwilling

children of the other nationality. The accuracy of such accusations depended largely on one’s political perspective. Activists on all sides tended to interpret categories as liberally as possible, seeing potential nationals in children of almost any linguistic or class background. And if there were the slightest possibility that a child might be induced to switch sides, nationalists then invoked charges of prior forced dena-

tionalization to justify the latest switch. Such charges raised heated emotions among nationalist activists, but they carried almost no weight in the courts, largely because the anational government considered that language use (and later nationality) could not be determined objectively by a third party, but only by the individual in question. Under the empire no side had the requisite resources or political power to Czechify, Germanize, Italianize, or Slovenicize significant local populations against their will. Yet both constantly made the accusation precisely because local rural populations often held no particular nationalist loyalty to one side or the other, no matter what language or languages they used. Had populations been thoroughly nationalized by 1900, the nationalists would have had far less opportunity to charge their opponents with the kind of foul play implied by accusations of Germanization or Czechification. Whatever the verdict about alleged Czechification or Germanization, one thing is be-

yond doubt: minority schools, whether Slav, Italian, or German, worked to nationalize the children who passed through their rooms. Here it is instructive to consider the example of Jewish children in linguistically mixed regions of the Bohemian Lands, Galicia, or Bukovina. The German School Association preferred not to discuss this category of pupil openly. In its early years the School Association had financed German-language Jewish private schools wherever such schools served the interests of a local German-speaking minority. ‘This

policy was neither publicized nor hidden. Anti-Semites among the German nationalists had challenged that policy openly, most notably at the association’s annual conventions in 1882 and 1885. In 1885 the anti-Semites, led by Georg von Schonerer, moved several resolutions that would have made any support for Jewish schools incompatible with the ideological goals of the School Association. “If,” as one antiSemite put it, “the Jews are not Germans, then we should not consider

50 Schoolhouse Fortresses supporting any Jewish Community schools.”°° Most members of the association clearly rejected this logic, and the convention easily defeated this early anti-Semitic challenge.*’

Some historians claim that by 1900 the School Association had adopted an anti-Semitic volkisch tone, yet all evidence points to the contrary.*® The difficulty lies in the deliberate vagueness the association’s leaders frequently cultivated regarding the issue of Jewish mem-

bers and schools. For the sake of convenience and internal peace, they tried to ignore anti-Semitism, treating it as just one of several political movements within a broad German nationalist movement. Legally the School Association was constituted as a nonpolitical organization. This also made it illegal for the organization to debate political issues. Its leaders expressly rejected political debate for ideological reasons as well, claiming that the German nation (unlike antiSemitism) was a cause that stood above politics. When they refused

to address the issue of Jewish membership, they were not simply avoiding a thorny issue. They were in fact rejecting attempts by antiSemites to politicize their legally apolitical movement. When necessary, however, School Association leaders addressed anti-Semitic challenges head-on. At the organization’s 1898 convention, for example, Gustav Gross spoke against the adoption of a plank that would have given local branches the right to refuse membership to people they did not wish to accept. “Although this resolution may appear to be about local self-rule, ...its authors are not really inter-

ested in achieving greater autonomy for their local branches... Instead, they hope to use this reform to introduce the principle of judenrein branches, through the back door, into the statutes.” Another delegate from southern Moravia went further, calling the resolution a blatant attempt to make numerous loyal members feel snubbed and unsure of their place in the organization. “It is significant that these kinds of resolutions always come from representatives of towns that are completely German. They don’t have to experience the national

battle, but they attack those of us in the back who are engaged in those battles, and they want to split and weaken us.” The resolution was voted down by a margin greater than two to one. Unlike many other German nationalist associations in imperial Austria, neither the School Association nor the Bohmerwaldbund ever added the noto-

Schoolhouse Fortresses 51 rious Aryan membership paragraph to its bylaws. In fact, the refusal of both to be drawn into the orbit of anti-Semitic volkisch nationalism

made other associations like the Sudmark reluctant to work with them.°°

A decade later, in 1908, when delegates of all the German nationalist organizations from across Austria met for the first time to coordinate an empirewide strategy, their discussions avoided the issue of Jewish membership in the German nation. It was for some people an uncomfortable silence, broken only once by an exasperated Sudmark member who stated that “coordination among the varied organizations would be a lot easier if they all would adopt the Aryan paragraph.” The silence from the floor that followed this suggestion was

deafening. Not one of the hundreds of local leaders present responded to this suggestion. Instead, Gustav Gross, German nationalist

parliamentary deputy and by this point chairman of the German School Association, asked the speaker to stick to the subject under discussion and reminded the delegates that they were there to work for a matter that was above politics. He did not mention the question

of the Aryan paragraph by name; he did not need to. School association magazines, nevertheless, did not fully ignore Jewish Germans either and referred occasionally to German Jewish concerns in Austria. An article lamenting the decline of Germanlanguage use in Galicia, for example, accused local officials of pressuring Jews to report their language of daily use as Polish instead of as German on the census. Still another article surveyed the dialects

of German spoken in Galicia and Bukovina, emphasizing that the variation within the various German dialects was as great as the vari-

ations that separated Yiddish from German. This claim implicitly countered the anti-Semitic allegation that Yiddish was fundamentally different from German, and that the government should prevent Yiddish speakers from reporting German as their language of daily use in the census.®! Another School Association report used the shocked terms it usually reserved for attacks on German-language schools else-

where in the empire to describe a Polish nationalist attack on a German Jewish school in Galicia. Several articles regretted that Jews in majority Czech-speaking regions of Bohemia had come under se-

vere political and social pressure to change the language of their

52 Schoolhouse Fortresses schools from German to Czech. None of these articles explicitly claimed the Jews as an integral part of the German community, yet taken together, they leave little doubt that Jews (both as individuals and as a group) had a role to play in that community.” If the backgrounds of pupils in these schools varied enormously, all the associations took great pains to develop a singular look for their schools, books, and equipment in line with the kind of imagined cultural homogeneity that nationalization implied. The look of the minority schoolhouse reflected the great care that the nationalists lavished on their schools, making them proud local symbols in every possible way of their nation’s cultural accomplishments. The walls of German-minority schools, for example, proudly displayed not only a

picture of the emperor, but also the posters “To You, oh German Youth,” and “To You, oh German Maiden.” At the time of their intro-

duction these last poetic items had been the subject of conflicting resolutions by the Ministry of Education, which had at first balked at allowing their presence. Eventually, however, these commandments lost their nationalist or revolutionary quality with the authorities and came instead to symbolize general youthful virtues such as loyalty or respect to authority. Next to these hung a German School Association calendar and an image of the School Association oak tree, spreading its protective branches over the frontier land. Outside, it was hoped

that the building would be surrounded by a pleasing garden, and perhaps the grounds would include a small gymnastics hall.® Above its entrance every School Association schoolhouse bore the words “deutsche Schule” writ large. In truth, claimed the School Association, the old motto “The very stones themselves bear witness to it” could easily apply to the work of the School Association. “['These |

hundreds of stone fortresses that have been built on the language frontier to protect the threatened German nation announce the glory

of the School Association philosophy of honest and_ successful German protective work. The German School Association is—according to Minister [Heinrich] Prade—the noblest cultural association of the German people in Austria. To every attack, to every insult

from the Czech, Polish, Slovene or Italian side it answers with—a German school!”

Schoolhouse Fortresses 53 The Schoolhouse Drama The various school associations may well have countered each other’s insults by building schools, but this strategy appears to have produced

an altogether new kind of battle on the frontier. Indeed, those m1nority schoolhouses built by one national community for the benefit of “its” children and marking the landscape with their undeniable presence soon became themselves the objects of nationalist attack of the kind we have encountered in Rudolf Fiedler’s fictional frontier drama. According to nationalist logic, the schoolhouse offered a pre-

dictable target for enemy vandalism. It towered above most other buildings, its many glass windows could be easily shattered to great effect, and it constituted an unmistakable symbol of the enemy’s territorial claim to the local landscape. Those who built the schools in

turn developed a new popular literary genre for reporting such incidents of vandalism, a genre they clearly believed would win them greater support from their conationals, as well as increased police protection from the anational state. I call this genre the schoolhouse drama.

The schoolhouse drama offered journalists a coherent narrative structure for explaining apparently random incidents of violence in terms of vague but pervasive conspiracies. This was just one of several tropes writers used in order to confirm their almost paranoid nationalist worldview and to propagate their particular construction of the

language frontier. They received indirect support in their popularizing endeavors from scientific observers such as Zemmrich who worried that nationalist conflict in the villages would fail to attract atten-

tion in broader circles. Zemmrich need not have worried. The nationalist press made certain that no reader could remain ignorant of the local battles that constituted this larger war.® Finally, dramatic accounts of attacks against schoolhouses obscured activists’ concern about possible national indifference among locals on the frontier and

supplied urban readers instead with repeated confirmation that the language frontier was indeed a setting for serious conflict.

As an element of nationalist strategy, the schoolhouse drama worked to build nationalist feeling while claiming simply to reflect it. The narrative used its emotional power to encourage readers who had not already taken sides in the nationality conflict to do so. And what

54 Schoolhouse Fortresses normal being could remain neutral when children became the targets

of attacks? The schoolhouse drama thus continued the tradition of more heroic depictions of life on the language frontier, with the difference that the threats made by the nationalist opponent now went well beyond abstract ideas like “denationalization” to focus on bodily harm in everyday life activities. The drama made use of several stock elements, especially in the ways in which it juxtaposed the innocence of children to the violent threats of brutal, half-crazed adults. Most attacks on minority schoolhouses involved repeated nighttime vandalism that produced several broken windows and almost no personal injuries. In cases where individuals were actually targeted, it was more often the schoolteacher rather than his charges who bore the brunt of the attacks. Yet whether

children were actually present during such incidents or not, and whether they were threatened or not, the narratives somehow found ways to mention them and to imply their endangerment. The schoolhouse might symbolize the territorial injury to its attackers, but its defenders always played up its association with the innocence of the children who spent their days there. As with other kinds of nationalist narratives about rural violence, the schoolhouse drama always stressed the unwarranted and unprovoked nature of the attacks while exaggerating the dangers involved. Reporters frequently expressed surprise that more people had not been injured in order to heighten an implicit sense of danger. They also praised the alleged levelheadedness of the teachers who found themselves under attack. The accounts concluded with attempts to place the incident into a larger context of national conflict, relating it to other attacks in the region and homogenizing various incidents into a single, interchangeable type of StOry.

The earliest schoolhouse dramas appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century, coinciding with the flowering of local associational efforts and nationalist media in rural parts of Austria. Increas-

ingly dense networks of regional nationalist newspapers, whether German, Czech, Italian, or Slovene, shared and circulated these stories, reinforced by nationalist magazines and associational journals. An incident in the South Styrian village of St. Georgen an der Sudbahn / Sv. Jury na juzni zeleznici (population about 500) in 1884 provides an extremely early example of the narrative dynamics that later came to structure reports about schoolhouse attacks. There an

Schoolhouse Fortresses 55 attempt by local German speakers to found a branch of the German School Association produced a brawl that provoked police intervention. Both German and Slovene nationalist newspapers agreed upon the bare facts of the story: German nationalists from nearby villages

had been invited to help inaugurate the new association. Among these, over 100 outsiders had arrived in St. Georgen / Sv. Jury that morning by train from the city of Cilli/Celje. When the German nationalists tried to hold their meeting in a local inn, they claimed to have been heckled and then physically attacked by Slovene national-

ists. The men fought off the Slovene nationalist attack while the women took refuge in the kitchen, where, one Slovene newspaper claimed, they held a Slovene kitchen boy captive, threatening to roast him on the stove. When the gendarmes arrived several hours later, they arrested three out-of-town Slovene nationalist activists and escorted the visiting German nationalists back to the train for the return trip to Cilli/Celje.® As more details of the incident emerged, it turned out that many

of those who had fought for the German side had been promised money and free beer to make the trip from Cilli/Celje. Similarly, Slovene nationalist leaders had gathered their own outsiders from the surrounding villages beforehand and instructed them to disrupt the meeting. The heart of the matter concerned Slovene nationalist fears

that a German school would soon be founded in the village. The Slovene papers spent most of their energy ridiculing the contention that the inhabitants of St. Georgen / Sv. Juri) needed the German School Association in the first place. Claiming that only three or four German-speaking families lived there, the Slovene nationalists could see no purpose for bringing the School Association to St. Georgen / Sv. Jurilj other than to Germanize the local population. German nationalist newspapers, in turn, told an early version of what later became a standard story about the frontier: in danger of denationalization, the hard-pressed German minority had begged for outside help in founding a local branch of the School Association. Both sides asserted their right to organize locally, claiming that local people were so conscious of their national oppression at the hands of the other side that they desired the nationalists to take a more active role in local affairs. At the same time, each side accused the other of being the tool of outsiders who did not belong in the area.

In this early example members of the other nationality were

56 Schoolhouse Fortresses equated with outsiders whose purpose threatened the existing local social or cultural equilibrium. The promise of free beer to encourage the presence of outsiders suggests that the nationalist identity of the locals may not have been as strong as nationalist leaders liked to claim. What activists and newspapers originally depicted as a local conflict was as much a conflict that pitted one set of outsiders against another. By 1900, however, interference by nationalist outsiders in local affairs had become far more common, and their efforts often

produced a concrete reminder of their presence in the minority schoolhouse itself. For nationalists, at least, a minority school represented the ongoing attempt by one side to undermine the very ability

of the other to survive. If one side had slowly been increasing its power in municipal politics over the years, it viewed the minority schoolhouse as the final holdout of the desperate enemy. Once this fortress was taken, a national takeover would be complete, as in the case of the ongoing Czech nationalist attacks against the German schools in Benetzko and Stickau discussed later.®” More often the majority saw its power slowly chipped away by the aggressive actions of

a growing minority community that had considerable support from outsider nationalist organizations. In these cases every victory by the minority announced approaching doom to the dwindling majority. In 1905, for example, the German School Association built a brand-new German private school in the South Styrian “frontier” town of Lichtenwald/Sevnica (859 inhabitants). According to the Marburger Zei-

tung, the schoolhouse was “the most beautiful building in Lichtenwald, and would prove a special ornament to its [already] attractive neighborhood.”®* According to the 1900 census, German speakers accounted for less than 10 percent of Lichtenwald/Sevnica’s population. Yet in terms of numbers of pupils, the school was a surprising success. It seems to have attracted pupils from the surrounding

region, not only from German-speaking families but also from Slovene-speaking families, as the following events suggest.

In 1906 the School Association reportedly petitioned the state to confer public status on its Lichtenwald/Sevnica school and fund it. In order to gain public status, the association had to prove that the school already served enough pupils to pass the “forty-pupil/five-year average” test. Given the very small size of the German-speaking pop-

ulation of Lichtenwald/Sevnica (fewer than eighty people) and the

Schoolhouse Fortresses 57 surrounding villages, someone else must have been attending the school to enable the School Association to claim such a large number of pupils. Indeed, the petition to the state had the predictable effect of reviving agitation against the school in Slovene nationalist circles. Slovene nationalists, allegedly led by the town priest, tried to force several parents to change their minds and to send their children to a local Slovene-language school instead. Seeing the new school as a tool of Germanization rather than as an opportunity for social mobility, as some Slovene-speaking parents may have viewed it, Slovene nationalists fought desperately against a state takeover that would almost certainly guarantee the long-term survival of the school. According to the German nationalists, the Slovenes invoked the typical scare tactic of claiming that any parents who sent their children to the German school would be financially liable for the new building. The School Association in turn tried to assure local parents that the new school would cost the town nothing.®? With this story in mind, consider the following series of events.” On Sunday, 29 July 1906, children and parents in Lichtenwald/Sevnica celebrated the end of the school year. Local newspapers and the School Association’s Getreue Eckart reported a festive mood among the happy pupils and their proud parents. At the close of the ceremonies the children received Chinese lanterns for a parade back to the center of town, where they would then disperse and return to their homes. The lanterns served a useful purpose, as well as a celebratory one,

since at the time the town had no streetlights, a fact the German nationalists blamed on alleged mismanagement of a Slovene nationalist municipal council. While a small band played and the children

sang and marched, their parents and friends joined the parade or brought up the rear. In order to prevent any hint of national provocation, about 500 meters before the group reached the town square, the headmaster allegedly asked the band to withdraw from the parade and bade the children stop singing. In this act we see the reasonable levelheadedness of the local nationalist leader or teacher, a typical element in nationalist accounts of violence. When the silent parade reached the square, however, it encountered a crowd of about fifty people standing in the darkness outside an inn who yelled earsplitting cries of “pfu” and the Slovene greeting “Na zdar.” All attempts by the headmaster to establish peace failed.

58 Schoolhouse Fortresses Instead, when German countercries of “Heil” filled the marketplace, the allegedly Slovene nationalist mob broke through the parade to carry out what the German nationalist press referred to as a “carefully planned attack.” The rioters grabbed the lanterns from the children, and soon, in the resulting darkness, “German blood flowed.” Three or four German handworkers who rushed forward “to protect the children” received blows from walking sticks and horsewhips. All the children managed to escape, crying and screaming, but back on the market square anarchy reigned for a full hour, until finally at 11:30 the gendarmes arrived to restore order. The German press claimed that the attack had been planned two weeks before, during a recent Sokol or Slovene nationalist gymnastics club celebration held in Lichtenwald/Sevnica on 15 July. The son of the mayor, Kristian Starkl, had been overheard a week before the violence assuring his friends that they would all “show the Germans” and make sure they never celebrated another school festival again. From this remark the German newspapers warned darkly that the local Slovene nationalists would not rest until they had completely destroyed the school, if possible. Yet one year later the local gendarmes reported to the district captain in Rann/Brezice that the next German school festival had proceeded peacefully and without disturbance of any kind.” In the fall of 1908 the German schoolhouse in Lichtenwald/Sevnica

was back in the news, this time itself the object of an attack that occurred in the weeks after serious nationalist rioting in the nearby cities of Laibach/Ljubljana and Pettau/Ptui.” The school headmaster Tomitsch, who lived there, later reported having been awakened at 3:00 AM by sounds of shattering windows on the south side of the building. He leapt from his bed, and before he could even take his gun from its rack on the dining-room wall, the windows on the west side of the building were smashed as well. Tomitsch fired his gun to alert the neighborhood to the attack, and soon another teacher who lived in a nearby house joined him in the school. They decided to report the incident to the gendarme station, but before they could

leave the grounds, two shadowy figures literally ran into them. Lighting a match, the teachers recognized court clerk Westak and the son of Vice Mayor Simoncic. By the next morning the two had confessed to the crime and had

implicated two further accomplices. Each was found to have con-

Schoolhouse Fortresses 59 sumed excessive amounts of alcohol, and each was subsequently sentenced to two to four weeks in jail. Tomitsch and his school emerged relatively unscathed, given the amount of damage (especially to windows) that such schoolhouse attacks usually produced. The extreme

inebriation of the attackers in this case not only made them give themselves away, but also made their attack less effective than it might

have been. One of the perpetrators even turned out later to be wealthy enough to pay for the necessary repairs. Interestingly, ‘Tomitsch himself did not seem to share the nationalist interpretation of

this incident, despite his role as School Association teacher in a mixed-language region. At the trial the teacher went out of his way to ask the court to treat the defendants with mercy. Evidently he did not view the incident as a serious example of local nationalist anger boiling over, but simply as the prank of some drunken youths. The nationalist press, the School Association, and even the Slovene nationalist defense lawyers ignored the teacher’s plea, preferring to

present the case in highly nationalist terms. Because the attack had occurred in the wake of the severe anti-German riots in Laibach/ Ljubljana, Slovene nationalist lawyers for the Lichtenwald/Sevnica de-

fendants attributed the school attack to legitimate nationalist anger rather than to drunken bravado. They presented their clients as concerned members of the nation, arguing that their anti-German “excitement” was understandable—even praiseworthy—given recent events, and should serve as a mitigating factor. The German nationalist regional newspaper in nearby Cilli/Celje, the Deutsche Wacht, added to the nationalization of the narrative, fulminating against the “outrageous suggestion” that “violence perpetrated against the innocent German population in Laibach/Ljubljana” could in any way serve as an exculpatory factor in the Lichtenwald/Sevnica case. The School Association too was not above nurturing a link between events in Laibach/Ljubljana and Lichtenwald/Sevnica as a way to increase

the dramatic power of the latter story and to keep it at the forefront of media attention. In an attempt to inflate the story of the school attack and place it on a par with the Laibach/Ljubljana riots, the association published two commemorative stamps honoring the “German martyrs of 1908” and advertised the two together. One stamp depicted the despoiled German casino in Laibach/Ljubljana, while the other displayed the Lichtenwald/Sevnica schoolhouse.” Other schoolhouses and schoolmasters were less fortunate than

60 Schoolhouse Fortresses Tomitsch, and a few experienced moments of real terror. On the night of 5 September 1904 a Bohemian schoolmaster in Roscha had retired early because of an illness. He normally worked until 10:00, and on this night he had left the lamp on his desk burning. Just before

10:00 a shot rang out from the garden below. The shot broke the window, a glass vase on the sill, and the lamp on the desk. Pieces of buckshot hit the door to the kitchen, passing just a few centimeters from the head of his thirteen-year-old son and the bed of his wife. The next day an investigating gendarme found a note in the garden

written in Czech that threatened to kill both the teacher and the mayor. A year and a half later a group of Czech nationalists allegedly attacked the same schoolhouse, attempting this tme to break down the doors and windows. They were prevented from doing so by the fact that the school had recently been wired with an electric alarm.” These stories and several that followed went well beyond the simple

destruction of property to stress the physical danger to which the brave nationalist teacher and his terrified family had been subjected. Images of broken windows were not enough to fuel readers’ outrage; now stories required defenseless women and bloodied children. The dramatic quality in the Roscha story derived in no small part from the danger to which the teacher’s family had been exposed, even if it had ended too quickly to have much effect on the sleeping child. And if the threat to the family were not explicit enough, then it might also be manufactured through implication, as in one narrative about an attack on the German minority schoolhouse in Benetzko. In this case the schoolmaster and his family had been awakened by a large

crash, which turned out to have been caused by the simultaneous hurling of several enormous rocks into the classroom. The structural damage in this case was more significant than usual, given the size of

the rocks, yet the author preferred to speculate about the potential

danger to the family rather than discuss the real damage to the building. Referring to the attackers as “Hussites” and repeatedly using

the adjective “burning,” the author conjured images of fourteenthcentury hostages locked in burning churches. He considered the family members lucky to have escaped being burned in their beds even though there was no shred of evidence that this had been the intent of the attackers.” In 1909 the German School Association’s monthly raised the stakes

Schoolhouse Fortresses 61 even further, presenting a far more extreme schoolhouse drama that

transformed the nature of the genre by highlighting the specific threat of violence to women and children. The journal published a bloodcurdling account with half-page illustrations of a nocturnal siege

of a German-language minority school in the Bohemian town of Stickau. The attack was allegedly carried out by a mob of some 300 angry Czech nationalists, and in this case both the teacher and his family lived in the threatened building. The school in Stickau had already been subjected to frequent stone attacks, but nothing that had ever brought so large a crowd and such immediate danger to the family inside the schoolhouse. “As the raging crowd approached the house, the schoolmaster retreated with his wife and four children, all under ten years of age, to a room inside the schoolhouse. They barricaded the windows and door against the invasion as well as they could in the dark and in such haste, using wardrobes. There, deathly afraid, the family awaited its fate.””° This story epitomized all the necessary elements of a schoolhouse drama designed to raise the nation-

alist ire of readers: a raging mob, an endangered woman, and four children whose ages—“all under ten years’—the author was especially careful to note. Although few schoolhouse attacks approached the story of Stickau

in terms of drama, the manner in which the narrative linked this incident to other such incidents encouraged the reader to see all such attacks in similar terms. Broken windows were elided with potential

attacks on women and children, making all attacks equally threatening in their potential. The authors did not need to list each of the attacks individually in order to make the connection clear. The informal creation of this genre in the first place and its constant repetition in the pages of nationalist newspapers and journals made it unnecessary for the authors to connect each attack explicitly to other ones. Instead, offhand phrases such as “typically,” “unsurprisingly,” or “as usual” sufficed to link the most harmless incidents, of which there were countless ones, to the most dangerous ones, as if they all constituted parts of the same story. Nationalist authors often invoked the schoolhouse-drama genre as a framework for understanding examples of bullying attacks by gangs of children of one nationality against defenseless children of another nationality. Authors openly linked such attacks to attacks on school-

62 Schoolhouse Fortresses houses. A 1904 School Association article on the repeated Czech nationalist attacks against the school in Benetzko, for example, reported that “not only the brave schoolmaster has to suffer [these attacks],

but also the children.” The author proceeded to report a typical schoolhouse stoning incident. He linked this, however, to a completely different story of an alleged Czech gang’s brutality toward a single German pupil in the same district. Not only had the gang attacked the German child, beaten him, and stolen his cap, but it had then dragged him to a wasps’ nest and threatened to seat him on top of it. With his last ounce of strength the boy cried for help, and soon

the German teacher came running. “He freed the martyred child from the hands of the wild horde,” wrote the author, but his actions were greeted with an outcry from local Czech nationalists who accused him of mistreating his own pupils.”’ It is certainly possible that Czech- and German-speaking children beat each other up. Schoolhouse bullying could easily be framed in national terms, lending it a compelling logic to adult readers. Whether such behaviors demonstrated children’s overriding loyalty to a nation or simply the incidental dynamics of their group behavior, however, is unclear from the evidence.”®

In these cases the narrative structures themselves created nationalist incidents out of events whose deeper nationalist significance is not at all evident from the accounts. Several structural points lent coherence to the narratives of violence against schools. First, each of these stories contrasted the fanaticism of the enemy with the reasonableness of the

German teacher. Second, although set in public arenas, each story involved an implicit threat to private family life. Third, each story implied that the violent nature of the incident reflected the profound depth of underlying nationalist feelings in the community. This last point suggests an alternative way of understanding the nationalist dimension of the incidents around which nationalists constructed their narratives. Since nationalist narratives tended to reverse cause and effect logic in their narratives, writers of these stories used incidents of violence opportunistically as a means to constitute national feeling in a locality or region by making the incidents appear to reflect the prior existence of such feeling. Some incidents of violence such as

these may have helped crystallize feelings of national belonging among people for whom such feelings did not normally exist. For the participants, a violent incident may have produced momentary feel-

Schoolhouse Fortresses 63 ings of national belonging. Here we may be witnessing national belonging as a contingent and dynamic event, rather than “as a relatively stable product of deep developmental trends in economy, polity, or culture.”” The degree to which the schoolhouse-drama genre resonated in public is suggested by the ways in which Heimat fiction writers such as Rudolf Fiedler adopted the same narrative model for recounting a moral tale of frontier life. In Fiedler’s story the fictional town featured a German school that was frequently the object of rock and graffiti attacks. The fictional tailor in this story witnesses a glass-shattering

attack that injures a young child and that turns out to have been carried out by the son of the Czech mayor (rather than the Slovene vice mayor, as in Lichtenwald/Sevnica). Writers of fiction followed the nationalist newspaper genre closely to give their own work more credibility. Their fiction in turn reinforced images of the frontier as a place of ongoing nationalist violence. In contrast to the ways in which nationalists and historians have typically analyzed national or ethnic conflict, schoolhouse violence did not necessarily reflect underlying nationalist unrest or even the local existence of nationalist groups. Instead, these incidents were used repeatedly to produce nationalist feelings and thus to create a nationalist public out of a nationally indifferent one. Using the schoolhouse drama as a narrative model, nationalists attempted to create an

understanding of local events that always placed the nation at its center. Their task was made easier for them by their choice of the frontier as the setting for their dramas. The fact that speakers of more

than one language really lived in proximity to each other in these regions and periodically could statistically (despite bilingualism) be divided from each other on a purely linguistic basis made the frontier

an ideal setting for the nationality conflict in the first place. Every misunderstanding, every insult, and every violent incident there could

be assigned a nationalist significance, something that would have been far more difficult to accomplish in linguistically more homogeneous regions of Austria.

Conclusion It was indeed a remarkable accomplishment that nationalist organizations such as the Czech Ustiedni matice Skolska or the German

64 Schoolhouse Fortresses School Association raised so many millions of crowns to benefit Austria’s schoolchildren.*® Extremely high literacy statistics, as well as favorable pupil/school ratios, for the Bohemian Lands suggest that chil-

dren living in these contested regions had far greater access to high-quality educational opportunities than did their peers who lived in less conflicted neighboring regions.*! Although many of these educational accomplishments can be attributed to the high living standards enjoyed in the western regions of the Austrian Empire, the fact remains that the addition of so many private schools to the alreadyexisting number of state schools produced enviable results for Austrian children. The nationalists, however, would be the first to remind us that their accomplishments could not be measured in terms of the broad educational benefits they brought to rural Austrian schoolchildren. Nationalists defined success in terms of their ability to heighten people’s consciousness of their national identity, their encouragement of people to participate more actively in the community life of the nation, and their ability to improve their census numbers. It is difficult to measure the success of the school associations by using the nationalists’ own criteria. Such organizations reached only a limited number of people in the community. Although participation

in organizational activities or minority schools produced plenty of helpful statistics to buttress nationalist claims of popular support, participation did not necessarily translate into the quality of individual commitment demanded by activists. Several factors that might have little to do with nationalist commitment could produce attendance at one school over another, precisely because parents followed their own

logic in making a particular school choice. Particularly in those regions with a tradition of bilingualism anchored in custom or institution, such as Moravia or Styria, parents exploited nationalist generosity for their own nonnationalist purposes. And although many Austrians might remember their schoolhouse experience positively, fewer recipients of nationalist generosity responded by becoming committed nationalists. Other nationalist self-help associations such as the Bohmerwaldbund or the Narodni jednota posumavska might gain local reputations as generous welfare institutions that provided impoverished peasants with farm implements, seed, or agricultural education. Through the work of these institutions, more Austrians may have experienced the rhetoric of national identification in more

Schoolhouse Fortresses 65 personal ways as well. This hardly made real nationalists of them, as the nationalists themselves understood. In discursive terms, however, the nationalist organizations and their press produced far more brilliant accomplishments than the Christmas gifts or welfare benefits provided by their schools and economic

institutions. While the organizations had opened schools or soup kitchens in multilingual areas, their publications had managed to reconceptualize those areas in completely new ways for their followers, their readers, and the general public. Nationalists redefined multilingual or nationally disputed regions as the critical setting for larger political conflicts and moved the discursive locus of conflict away from

the political stalemates in Vienna or the provincial capitals to the allegedly embattled peripheries. This, in turn, promoted a new way of understanding those regions among other Austrians. Even today, what appears as the commonsense logic of the nationalist version of the frontier or borderland continues to blind us to the powerful creativity of those activists who imagined this fiction in the first place. To benefit the national idea, activists created an entirely new kind of landscape in the abstract known as the language frontier. They then peopled this landscape with a certain kind of inhabitant. Their depiction approximated reported reality just enough to gain currency with

those Austrians who would never experience a language frontier themselves (and even, as we will see, with some of those nationalist visitors who did). ‘They rewrote the histories of these disputed regions in terms that reinforced their frontier qualities, they popularized their claims by making nationalist tourist attractions of these regions, and finally, activists even targeted certain frontier regions for ambitious settlement programs. Yet despite the popular success of frontier fiction, nationalists also continued to report what seemed to them to be nationally indifferent, apathetic, or even, as in the Styrian case of the peasants of Zierberg/Cersak, renegade behavior. ‘The often-unspoken problem for nationalists remained the people of the frontier themselves.

THREE

Encounters on the Rural Frontier The local branches of our [Czech] national associations Owe their existence tin the countryside mainly to

the activity of teachers ...They work in every way possible for the national awakening of the indifferent countryside. —Frantisek Joklik, O pomérech ceského narodniho skolstvi a ucitelstva v kralovstvi ceskem [On the Situation of Czech

National Schools and Teachers in the Kingdom of Bohemia] (Prague, 1900)

IN THE 1880S LEADERS of the earliest German nationalist associations

seemed constantly to be on the road, exchanging the comfort of familiar cities and towns for places largely unknown to them. According

to magazine and journal accounts from that decade, nationalist leaders engaged in a veritable flurry of exploration and discovery. Where did their esoteric and difficult-to-reach destinations lie? In rural Austria. No edition of the German School Association magazine was published in its early years without some mention of Vice Presi-

dent Viktor Kraus’s latest trip to evaluate the needs of some littleknown corner of Bohemia, Carinthia, or Silesia.' To association mem-

bers who followed these reports, the tireless Kraus must have appeared to spend more time on the road than he did in his day job as deputy in both the Austrian Parliament and the Styrian Diet. Josef Taschek and his circle in Budweis/Budeéjovice made similar forays into

unknown territories, although their destinations lay closer to home in the nearby, if occasionally impenetrable, depths of the Bohemian Woods. The Budweisers too sought to learn more about both the people who inhabited their region and the conditions in which they lived. 66

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 67 By the first years of the twentieth century, hardly two decades later, association leaders had exchanged their constant travel for the more

sedentary comforts of the urban boardrooms that graced their new associational headquarters. Both the numbers of nationalist associations and their respective memberships multiplied considerably by 1910, and this in turn created expanding budgets and a broader range of program expenditures. At the same time, the number of associational leaders on the road had diminished considerably. Now if these leaders were to be seen traveling to rural enclaves at all, they were on their way to some speaking engagement or festival sponsored by a local nationalist association. After 1900 nationalists could boast of permanent contacts in towns and villages throughout rural Austria— some even with telephones. These local corresponding members coordinated village events and fundraising activities with the demands

of the larger organizations in places that had only recently been viewed as utterly cut off from society. Nationalist associations had established a lasting, if often-tenuous,

foothold in rural Austria. Yet who became their local members and leaders? What kind of villagers had stepped forward during the intervening years to join the nationalist cause? Did their activism spell the end of rural indifference to the nation and effect a growing mobilization of rural populations into national communities? Finally, what qualities characterized the uneasy relationships between nationalist organizations and the rural world, both in discursive and social terms? This chapter examines the nationalist encounter with the world of the

rural language frontier by attempting to provide answers to these questions. The deeper significance of this investigation, however, lies in the complex relationship it analyzes between nationalist activism

and the social, economic, and cultural transformations experienced by rural Austrians during this period. If nationalism took root in the countryside after 1900, it did so while the countryside was busy transforming itself. Starting in the 1870s with the establishment of a new and universal education system, rural Austria had increasingly come to terms with the changes and people brought by new transport and

communications infrastructures and by the growth of interregional commerce.

Nationalists were well aware of the enormous dimensions of this transformation and often claimed responsibility for having encour-

68 Encounters on the Rural Frontier aged—if not outright created—it in the first place. Furthermore, in predominantly rural regions they tended to define their nationalism in terms that specifically invoked a vision of rural modernity, situating themselves at the epicenter of all progressive change. This suggests

some further, less apparent dimensions to the nationalist constructions of the frontier that we have already encountered. The nationalist battles in rural Austria were not fought against the national opponent alone, as those who followed newspaper accounts of schoolhouse dramas and other conflicts in the countryside might have believed. Instead, daily battles were more often directed against the apparent national indifference of local rural holdouts—potential conationalists—who refused to adopt a nationalist identity. This concern was certainly familiar to members of associations whose publications occasionally expressed a frustrated disbelief at this kind of behavior. What was less apparent to outsiders was the degree to which local nationalists blamed their neighbors’ indifference specifically on the latter’s alleged rejection of a broad vision of rural modernity. Nationalists explained the frustrating national indifference they encountered in rural Austria as a misguided resistance to the forces of progress, rather than as a reasonable, if regrettable, choice to remain nationally neutral. In both the German and Czech nationalist views, indifference to nation and resistance to the benefits of progress resulted from stubborn ignorance and amounted to pretty much the same phenomenon. The nationalists’ confusion of these twin beliefs is understandable if we consider both the intellectual and organizational debt most turn-of-the-century nationalists, German or Czech, owed to political liberals of an earlier era. The radical educational reforms of 1869 had been designed in large part by implicitly anticlerical liberals concerned with the transformation of an ignorant and dependent rural mass into an enlightened and progressive citizenry. The new school system produced remarkably swift results in terms of high literacy rates in western Austria.* Yet the powerful opposition in

rural districts that greeted their educational reforms in the 1870s— especially the eight-year requirement for boys and girls—confirmed for the liberals both the backward nature of the peasantry and the enormity of their task. Peasant opposition to the laws generally rested on an unwillingness to forgo children’s seasonal labor. Clerical conservatives who opposed the educational laws on ideological grounds soon tapped this peasant resentment for political purposes.*

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 69 Liberal fears thus centered on the ability of a reactionary clergy to manipulate the attitudes—and votes—of an unenlightened peasantry. This general mistrust also helps explain why, unlike their Czech nationalist counterparts, German liberals and nationalists regarded reform of the electoral process to which rural people were subjected with considerable apprehension. Unlike voters in the urban curiae, for example, rural voters did not traditionally elect candidates to the diets or the Parliament directly. Instead, they voted for district representatives (Wahlmanner) who in turn elected deputies to the diets and Parliament. This two-tiered process made it far easier for elite candidates—often large landowners or urban-based liberal Honoratioren—to control votes in rural districts, as did the fact that voting was often done in public. By 1900 rural electoral behavior was rapidly changing in Bohemia with the development of both Czech and German nationalist agrarian parties. These gained some ground in the language frontier districts of southern Bohemia after 1900. In 1907 the German Agrarians and Social Democrats each elected the most deputies from Bohemia— sixteen—to the reformed Austrian Parliament. The Czech Agrarians developed under the auspices of the Young Czech liberals, while the German Agrarians were fostered by renegade Progressive nationalists.” The success of these two parties in the first decade of the twentieth century might have suggested to some an increasing nationali-

zation of public life in rural regions of Bohemia. However, these parties’ function as sponsors of particularly agrarian economic and liberal educational agendas eclipsed any potential role in mobilizing the region's villages for specifically nationalist causes. ‘The 13,000 or so members of the Deutsch-osterreichische Bauernbund (German Austrian Farmers’ Association), an organization that supported the work of the German Agrarian Party in Prague and Vienna, pledged above all to “protect and support small holders’ interests.” Specifically

national points were not on the agenda, although one of the ten resolutions voted at the association’s 1908 convention did thank the German civil servants of Bohemia.® Much of the organization’s agenda dealt with specifics of agricultural tariff policy. It would be difficult to

conclude from the pages of its publications or the transcripts of its conventions that either the Bauernbund, or the Agrarian Party it sup-

ported was a force for nationalization. On the other hand, local German nationalists may well have given their approval to the Bauern-

70 Encounters on the Rural Frontier bund precisely because it worked to accustom its members to the practices of bourgeois associational life. By integrating farmers into a broader network of associations and by encouraging them to learn more about modern agricultural practices, the Bauernbund fit well with a liberal ethos of rural modernization. For this reason, both the Bauernbund and the agrarian parties exercised a minimal influence

at best on most rural inhabitants of poorer regions such as the Bohemian Woods. Clearly, German nationalists around 1900 shared the liberal misgivings about the potentially damaging effects of rural ignorance on the forces of progress. But while liberals had worried about the ability of

the clergy to manipulate an unenlightened peasantry, nationalists worried about peasants’ unwillingness to commit themselves to a national community, or worse, the ability of the national enemy to seduce a dependent peasantry away from its nation. Both kinds of fears demanded solutions based on the traditional liberal panacea, secular education. The newer nationalist understanding of education, however, differed from the more conventional hierarchic liberal vision of knowledge imparted to passive recipients within the four walls of a schoolroom. Nationalists went well beyond the liberal pedagogies of

the 1860s and 1870s to demand an ongoing education for rural people that might well start in the schoolroom but would continue outside it, eventually expanding into every available realm of social or cultural practice.

Researching the Language Frontier In a special survey published in 1904 to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Deutscher BOhmerwaldbund or German League for the Bohemian Woods looked back on two decades of labor to foster progressive economic and cultural modernization in a region characterized by economic stagnation, poverty, and emigration. The Bohmerwaldbund liked to claim that its programs often served to jump-start local village economies either by creating new opportunities for villagers that linked their specialized agricultural and craft products to new markets outside the region or by developing new products that might fill existing demand in outside markets. In both cases the association recalled that the activism of its early years had been directed

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 71 toward ongoing research of basic conditions throughout the region. Already in 1883 Josef ‘Taschek and his Budweis/Budeéjovice colleagues

had circulated questionnaires to “the most accomplished German men” (the association meant the best-known men) in southern Bohemia, inquiring about economic conditions in their particular communities. This informal poll had proved inadequate for the purpose, and so the Bohmerwaldbund had undertaken more intensive research. “Countless trips into the region were undertaken, and on different occasions the advice of local friends was sought. The organization used every chorus festival, every pleasure trip [Ausflug] to encourage the growth of the association. With great enthusiasm the new local groups researched national and economic conditions in their communities.”’

In his annual report for 1885 Taschek typically reported that he, along with several friends of the association, had made many trips in the last year to the more isolated target regions for the association’s activism. These trips, explained Taschek, brought the Bohmerwaldbund invaluable information that in turn helped produce concrete results.* He might have added that the information was instrumental in constructing the very frontier itself. All this exploration, and the subsequent mapping of rural Austria it produced, served several overlapping purposes. In the first place, to paraphrase Taschek, such forays assembled early databases for studying national relations on the various language frontiers. They enabled activists to map the nationality struggle onto the region with a degree of precision hitherto impossible. But nationalist associations also needed to learn a lot more about the populations who formed the objects of their activism in order to use their limited resources as effectively as possible. After all, if the School Association hoped to offer German-language schooling to children in linguistically mixed regions of rural Austria, it had to locate those children before it could build and staff its schools. In these early years the association leaders had neither the census results, problematic as they may have been, nor the kinds of detailed analysis of the frontier at their disposal that would later be provided by scholars such as the German nationalists Rauchberg and Zemmrich or Czech nationalist Antonin Bohac.’ Beside the well-publicized general research trips to Bohemia undertaken by German School Association vice president Kraus, for ex-

72 Encounters on the Rural Frontier ample, it was not uncommon for other executive committee members to travel to distant communities in the early 1880s to investigate requests for aid personally. As Chairman Moritz Weitlof reported in 1883, “Repeatedly it became necessary to obtain information about school issues from the community itself, and to participate personally in the realization of our tasks. In particular the Chair and Vice Chair Dr. von Kraus undertook the most inconvenient and time-consuming trips.” In 1882 the association budget listed an expense account of 406.63 florins to cover travel to endangered regions by executive committee members.’

Similarly, to strengthen the economic position of poor rural German speakers in the region, the Bohmerwaldbund had to research the character of local economies before it could develop its agricultural, job-training, and placement programs. Travel, investigation, and

evaluation had to precede programs and expenditures if the latter were going to produce the hoped-for outcomes, particularly since the nationalist opponent—in this case the Narodni jednota posumavska, also founded in 1884—was typically engaged in the same process." And although several language frontier regions might technically be located in urban or industrialized areas, it was the more isolated rural frontier regions above all that required exploration.'? Very few of the communities in question were attached to the larger informal provincial political networks that German and Czech nationalist associational leaders and local politicians had created in the 1870s, or Slo-

vene nationalists had developed a decade later.'* Even regional political leaders had very little knowledge of minority Czech-, German-, or Slovene-speaking populations located at some distance from better-known towns. These populations themselves had little formal connection to those existing fragile political networks, and their communities often sported the most rudimentary forms of voluntary community organization, if any. The exploratory travels served another related purpose as well. Nationalist associations sought out local subjects—that is, potential new recruits—not simply local objects for their activism. They hoped not only to strengthen the nation at its endangered margins by aiding isolated communities, but also to mobilize rural populations to join their cause. By imposing forms of assistance on rural communities, whether in the guise of minority schools in their own language or

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 73 farm implements and low-interest loans to prevent emigration, nationalist associations sought to increase their memberships, as well as

the relative strength of the nation. Organizations such as the Bohmerwaldbund, the Narodni jednota posumavska, or the Sudmark measured their success not simply in terms of their ability to help local farmers, but also in terms of steady membership growth and fundraising success. The various nationalist school associations also did not simply rest on their laurels and leave town once they had founded a new school. To the contrary, once they had established a new school, these associations raised their local profiles continuously in order to build greater public support for the new minority school.

To that end, for example, school associations encouraged the formation of even more local branches that would in turn raise funds, sponsor festivals, and take an active role in community affairs.

The early nationalist associations failed precisely in this regard. They were not particularly successful in mobilizing the hoped-for numbers of local rural recruits for their causes, as both the lists of

branches—more urban in character throughout the 1880s and 1890s—and the membership statistics suggest. It was extremely difficult for nationalist organizations to establish ongoing local contacts

and, later, chapters that shared their vision of nationalist strength through economic progress. The Bohmerwaldbund was perhaps the most successful rural organization because of the careful attention it gave to developing strategies based on research of local conditions. Yet a close examination of that organization’s annual report for 1891 shows that of the 148 existing branches, only 65 reported some activity during the previous year, and of these, only 10 could claim to have held meetings more than twice.'* Not even the popular furor teutonicus unleashed by the Badeni language laws in 1897 was sufficient to

create sustained membership growth in nationalist organizations among rural German speakers. Association leaders often explained this disappointing phenomenon in terms of the backwardness and ignorance that characterized small rural communities, cut off as they were from the progress being made all around them.'® Not surprisingly, the early encounter between nationalist activists and local communities was rarely pleasant for the former, as several tactful reports suggest. This seems to have been the case especially for the BOhmerwaldbund, whose activism centered on encouraging

74 Encounters on the Rural Frontier community members to participate in economic self-help projects. It was one thing for a visiting urban worthy from the School Association

to evaluate whether the placement of a school there might “help” local German speakers to maintain their (imagined) sense of national

identity. It was quite another to convince those villagers that they should consider job or skill retraining, orient their local economies around new products, change their agricultural customs, or even welcome tourists. Juxtaposed to their usual litany of recent successes, Bohmerwaldbund annual reports also documented the frequent unwillingness of villagers to respond positively to the opportunities that were offered to them.'®

Transformations in Rural Austria While those nationalist leaders of the early 1880s had been on the road, they may well have shared train compartments or seats on rural wagons with other kinds of nationalist travelers, also voyaging to or returning to rural Austria. Members of these other groups were not

visiting the countryside in order to research it, however, but were moving there in order to transform it. The rapid growth of the imperial school system, a nascent welfare system, and transport, communications, commercial, and administrative networks in the final decades of the nineteenth century brought a series of veritable invasions

to rural Austria. Teachers, civil servants, physicians, railroad employees, telegraph operators, credit officers, and tourists all arrived in formerly isolated rural regions such as the Bohemian Woods or South Styria. Although these invaders often served as instruments of state policy, they frequently saw themselves as agents of social change,

bringing elements both of progress and of a heightened national awareness to their rural destinations. Eventually, the arrival of these elements in the countryside alleviated some of the early difficulties encountered by nationalist organizations in Austria’s more isolated rural regions. These arrivals and their imported activism also made it easier for nationalists to claim that they had finally achieved a more universal appeal among rural people, despite the fact that their organizations remained highly limited in their class appeal. In a 1905 report on his exploratory travels for the Sudmark, activist Viktor Heeger noted this phenomenon with

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 75 some frustration, complaining that “only occasionally do some real natives show up [to my presentations]: [usually] craftsmen, hardly ever farmers or workers.” For the most part, Heeger grumbled, “it’s always the same picture: of the thirty or so people who attend [the meeting], hardly more than five actually grew up in the place. The rest are all new arrivals, namely, the civil servant, the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher, etc.”'” When nationalist organizations did succeed in establishing themselves locally in rural Austria after 1900, they invariably attracted recent white-collar immigrants rather than “native” farmers or workers to their ranks. These men and women gave nationalist organizations their long-sought foothold in the countryside, but their activism did not necessarily mean that nationalism had gained a more universal appeal there. In fact, nationalist organizations often used growing white-collar activism to mask their ongoing inability to mobilize much genuine interest among Austria’s more traditional rural classes. The presence of the newcomers in small towns and villages often changed local social relations substantially. For one thing, these generally lower-level white-collar employees brought with them habits of voluntary association as a way to gain specific economic, cultural, or political ends. Often themselves people of rural background (if from a different region) who sought social mobility and the higher status of a civil service job, these outsiders had acquired some professional schooling in a larger town. There they had frequently joined some professional or nationalist organizations and had developed a habit of reading newspapers. When they were posted to rural districts, they brought many of these habits back to the rustic world with them. In general, these individuals tended to view the interests of the local village in larger regional, provincial, or nationalist frameworks to which they often nurtured links through newspaper and journal subscriptions.'®

Government statistics and the records of an increasing number of specialized white-collar professional organizations demonstrate the growth of these professions across both urban and rural Austria. What is particularly noticeable for our purposes, however, is the degree to which many of those white-collar activists came to dominate local nationalist efforts in rural Austria after 1900. This was sometimes but not always the case in urban areas. In the cities white-collar profes-

76 Encounters on the Rural Frontier sionals would have had to compete for predominance in associational life with the members of a more traditional liberal business elite who

often continued to exercise a strong hold on nationalist organizations. Furthermore, depending on local conditions, lower civil servants in the cities might as easily align themselves with Christian Socialism or Social Democracy rather than with the various nationalist movements in the years leading up to 1914.'? Any growth of nationalist organizational life in rural Austria after 1900, however, seems to have depended in great measure on the influence, activism, and loyalties of these new figures in the local landscape. Rudolf Hans Bartsch

and other Heimat writers apotheosized the activism of these newcomers, rightly seeing them as the engine of local nationalist organization. In Das deutsche Leid Bartsch’s hero Georg marvels at the spirit of self-sacrifice that characterizes the local civil servants he encounters

on a hike through South Styria. “These impoverished schoolmasters and minor civil servants,” he tells his companion, “they contribute a tenth of their annual income to the nation, they who can barely afford life’s necessities.”*°

The growing role played by white-collar workers in rural nationalist activism is also reflected in statistical evidence from the more townoriented nationalist associations, both Czech and German, that gradually took root in more rural parts of Austria after 1900. A comparison

of membership numbers and branch locations of the Bund der Deutschen in Bohmen or League of Germans in Bohemia between 1896 and 1909, for example, illustrates the transformation experienced by one corner of rural Austria, the Bohemian Woods, in a relatively short period of time. An 1896 membership survey showed that

outside the major towns of Budweis/Budejovice and Krummau/ Krumlov, only two small towns and one village in the primarily rural

region could even boast a local branch of the organization. Their combined membership had totaled 225. In a 1909 survey, however, the Bohemian Woods region alone (aside from the Budweis/Budejovice and Krummau/Krumlov branches) now counted forty-two local branches of the Bund with a total of 2,046 members.*! In the same region the Narodni jednota posumavska counted 141 branches in 1892, but by 1906 it boasted close to 450.” An analysis of the professions of local branch secretaries of the Bund der Deutschen for 1896 and 1909 yields some further evidence both for a migration to the

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 77 countryside of new social groups and of the leading role those newcomers played in building nationalist organizations there. In 1896 nearly half of the rural Bund der Deutschen club secretaries in Bohemia belonged to what we might call the traditional rural or village Mittelstand—the independent craftsmen and small retail merchants of the kind documented by Hanns Haas for rural Salzburg in an earlier period. By 1909 that figure had shrunk by more than half to just 18 percent. Instead, teachers and school officials, who in 1896 had made up only 5 percent of the total, now predominated among the local branch secretaries with 30 percent.

In fact, white-collar workers as a whole had constituted only a quarter of the local officers in 1896. In 1909 they made up well over 50 percent of the total. As with most such organizations, Bund der Deutschen membership statistics by occupation are available only for associational officers, not for the membership at large. Nor can we attach too much significance to these statistics alone to estimate the

social composition of the at-large membership of rural branches. Often when such associations tried to classify branch members in terms of broad occupational categories, it was precisely the smaller or rural branches that failed to report the information.’ These statistics do at least suggest two important conclusions. First, when rural branches of nationalist associations grew in size after 1900, their increase was more likely drawn from settlers new to the area rather than from families that had lived there for generations. In other words, nationalist associations did not prosper by mobilizing existing rural populations more fully, but by mobilizing immigrants to the countryside. Second, the people who drove these organizations locally were

increasingly white-collar workers, most often teachers and other school officials. When the statistics are considered in the broader con-

text of local newspaper accounts, annual associational reports, and associational publications such as almanacs, they suggest that nationalist growth in the countryside depended on the increased presence there of schools, railroads, welfare offices, regional market opportunities, and tourists. The growing importance of the schoolteacher to rural nationalism

can be explained both quantitatively, the increased numbers of teachers posted to rural Austria, and qualitatively, the ways in which teachers defined their professional mission in a society that assigned

78 Encounters on the Rural Frontier them (at least rhetorically) an increased status. Starting in the 1870s, the numbers of all primary-school teachers in Austria grew rapidly and then rose considerably in the 1880s with the implementation of the 1869 liberal school reforms. The new law, sanctioned on May 10, 1869, required a minimum of eight years of primary schooling for both boys and girls starting at age six. It also transformed the relationship of the school to organized religion completely by creating a

supraconfessional school that no longer privileged the Catholic Church. The law also added classes in natural science, geography, history, drawing, painting, domestic studies for girls, and gymnastics for boys to a curriculum formerly dominated by religion, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Finally, the law also regulated questions of financial obligation and local control over schools. Laws that gave significant control over the schools to provincial diets and community school boards balanced the powers of the centralized state that established basic minimum demands on all children. A reform so radical in its scope created an enormous growth in the

business of education in Austria. In Bohemia alone, the number of new primary schools (including private minority schools) grew by 498

in the first five years of the new system. By 1914 that number had increased by over 2,000.74 In order to accommodate both the curricular changes and the stunning expansion of the school system caused by the new eight-year attendance requirement, the law also established guidelines and institutions for the training of teachers. The state set

up several four-year teacher-training institutes for men and women

throughout the empire where potential teachers prepared for an exam that would earn them a certificate of qualification. That certificate, in turn, gave teacher candidates the right to apply for school positions anywhere in Austria. In 1914, for example, Bohemia had nineteen such institutions to train male teachers and eighteen to train women.”

In connection with the sense of mission they encouraged in teachers, the 1869 reforms had also set in motion a process of professionalization among teachers that asserted their claim to higher Status in Austrian society. For the first time, teachers were accorded a status equivalent to that of state civil servants, a status that subjected them to unified professional requirements and gave them a standardized pay scale and rights to social insurance programs. This new status

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 79 made teaching an attractive vehicle for many ambitious students from Muittelstand backgrounds who hoped to achieve significant social mobility and financial security. The equivalent rank to government civil servant brought some social prestige (if not always financial riches)

to the sons and daughters of petty producers, retail merchants, and farmers. For single women, daughters of the petty and professional bourgeoisie, teaching offered the possibility of serious white-collar employment.”©

Beyond financial status, however, the liberal reforms had placed the crucial responsibility for educating the citizenry squarely in the hands of the new teachers, giving them a profound sense of a missionary role to Austrian society. The explicit language of the liberal reforms regarding curricular changes also meant that, like it or not, schoolteachers of all linguistic backgrounds came to see themselves as carriers of a liberal ideal of progress. ‘They often brought what they conceived as “modernity” to places that they or their supporters believed to be socially, economically, and culturally backward. One pro-

fessional publication counseled teachers posted to rural schools to “act as the bearer of culture out there in the countryside. No one else is capable of diagnosing the [cultural] needs of the countryside and healing them.””” The nature of the Austrian Kulturkampfin the 1870s

had only reinforced this mind-set among many teachers, for it was precisely their new authority over Austrian youth that Catholic conservative politicians and Church leaders challenged so vehemently.”®

Particularly in smaller towns or more isolated regions the schoolteacher tended to challenge the local priest for the kind of local authority that had traditionally adhered to the latter. And as a carrier of progress, the teacher was often also a vehicle for nationalist ideas. Schoolteachers also constituted a rural vanguard within the Czech, German, and Slovene nationalist movements by the 1890s, particularly in multilingual regions of Austria where both the nationalist associations and the state built minority schools. In districts such as these, the very rationale for founding a second, minority school demanded a specifically nationalist reading of local conditions. When a local branch of a nationalist association lobbied the state to found a new minority school, it inevitably provoked the anger of a rival, “majority” nationalist group. When a nationalist school association built its own private school, hoping to persuade enough local children to attend

80 Encounters on the Rural Frontier that the state would fund the school, other nationalists in the region scrambled to shore up their local hegemony and discourage children from attending the new school. For these reasons, teachers in minority schools were often implicated in local nationalist political struggles long before they even arrived at their new post. Building a minority school on the frontier, whether public or private, meant adding yet another activist teacher to the local mix who was likely to come into conflict with teachers from the existing “majority” schools. Of course, the mere presence of a new school did not guarantee the quality of the facility or of the education pupils might receive there, and this in itself created a new set of bitter nationalist controversies in some regions. In cases where the state was obliged to found a minority school, for example, the reluctant local school board might place the school in a low-quality, unattractive facility, hoping eventually to drive it and its teachers away. Children registered in those minority schools, it was hoped, might be persuaded to return to the more pleasant and sanitary facilities of the majority school. And if the five-year average of pupils at a minority school fell below forty, then the community no longer bore a responsibility to maintain it. This gave the defenders of the local minority school endless ammunition to put the nationalist cause at the center of local public life. German nationalists in Schuttenhofen/Susice bitterly denounced the tragic

scenario that had played itself out over a twenty-year period of struggle in their frontier town. In this majority Czech-speaking town the district school board had shunted the German-minority school to

a property that had been condemned. The number of children enrolled had gradually dwindled until it finally fell below the forty-child mark.*? In 1908 Czech nationalist activists in Bohemia submitted a

petition to the imperial government complaining of the intolerable condition of several Czech-minority public schools located in Germanmajority school districts. German and Czech nationalists accused each

other of using any means—including legal chicanery—to prevent their respective school associations from building minority schools.*° Once they were built, however, no one complained about the quality of those private facilities erected by the German School Association

or the Usttedni matice Skolska. These new schools were very well equipped. The minority schoolteacher frequently assumed a role in the com-

Encounters on the Rural Frontier Sl munity that went well beyond the traditional classroom activities. Certainly the private schoolteachers hired by the German School Association or the matice skolska for their private schools well understood the challenging role they were expected to play in local communities as animators of nationalist activism. A poem by Anton Ohorn, dedi-

cated to teachers in German Austria, reflected this understanding. “Times are hard! But on your shoulders they weigh double, you loyal German troop.” Ohorn concluded, “Better days ought to come your way, our growing nation owes you at least that.”*! But if better days were not yet in sight, at least the School Association recognized the increased responsibilities its teachers undertook by paying them special subsidies. Private schoolteachers hired by the German School Association generally received a onetime financial subsidy (allegedly in honor of their success at teaching or their nationalist commitment). The association also paid regular hardship subsidies to teachers who ran schools in particularly contentious regions where schoolhouse dramas might be the norm, or to those posted to villages at a severe distance from their homes. These allowances consumed a considerable part of the association’s budget, noted one of its leaders in 1905, but they were necessary in order to reinforce both the nationalist and pedagogic commitments of their recipients.*? Likening the subsidies to special wartime allowances, a School Association journal used martial imagery, comparing “service on the language frontier” to service at the military front. Noting the special demands made on teachers

both inside and outside the schoolhouse, the journal reminded readers that “teachers should play a role in their community not simply as educators of youth but also as leaders and counselors to adults with regard to every national and economic issue.” Given the leadership role the local teacher was expected to assume in the community, “one could hardly expect him to have to worry about how to afford his daily bread as well.”°*°

Teachers in private or minority schools on the so-called language frontier were not the only ones who carried the ideological burden

of educating whole communities for the nation. To the contrary, many teachers posted to rural districts found themselves surrounded by a population utterly indifferent to the pedagogy of nationalist enthusiasm. Nor did those populations value the benefits that modernization might confer on their own communities. As one BOhmerwald-

82 Encounters on the Rural Frontier bund author explained in an essay written in 1886, it was up to the teacher to mobilize the rural community for the twin goals of national

protection and progressive modernity achieved through adult education, carefully planned community lectures, and organized social gatherings (Bauernabende). This early essay on the potential role of the teacher focused on a kind of cultural awakening to be accomplished among rural Bohemians. The teacher “should emphasize the German character and honorable German history of the community, perhaps by focusing on important German role models from the past

that can evoke pride and emulation among contemporary rural people.” The weekly lectures should leave the impression that “as a consequence of its great culture, the German people is called upon to solve the difficult social questions of the day, questions whose complexity put them beyond the ability of the Slav to handle.”* In the 1880s such exhortations imagined the teacher as the lone voice of national culture in a rural frontier wilderness. A quarter century later, a Sudmark article emphasized a teacher’s necessary leadership role in the work of growing rural nationalist associations. Now it was the teacher’s motivating role in local associational life rather than simply a cultural expertise that gave the teacher a greater authority in the community that went well beyond influencing local youth. Playing on the term Volksschule (people’s school, the term for Austria’s elementary school), the article suggested that “only through collaboration with the nationalist associations does the primary-school teacher [ Volksschullehrer| become a true teacher of the people | Volkslehrer|.”°° If the Sudmark sought to motivate teachers to play a role in

the associational life—not simply the cultural life—of their communities, it need not have worried. By the time these lines were penned, teachers already dominated the ranks of local nationalist organiza-

tions. One attendee at an annual meeting of a provincial German nationalist association noted that “at the conference, the teachers had such a majority over the other classes, and were so numerous in the assembly of delegates, that... one might think he was at a teachers’ conference.”** In 1900 Czech nationalist teacher and writer Frantisek Joklik argued that “in the countryside teachers alone organize all the nationalist collections. Close to a thousand from their ranks belong to the Central Czech School Association. The local branches of our national unions owe their existence in the countryside mainly to the

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 83 activity of teachers.”*’ By 1900 teachers not only involved themselves actively in local nationalist community life, but often assumed more specifically economic community functions as well. In Moravia, for example, German nationalist teachers served as custodians for local credit banks and cooperatives.** In their early years Czech, German, and Slovene nationalist organizations in rural Austria depended on the services of another kind of teacher to support their twin nationalizing and modernization efforts. Starting in the 1880s, nationalist associations hired Wanderlehrer or traveling teachers. These men traveled to relatively isolated commu-

nities on a regular basis, holding educational lectures, encouraging nationalist organizing, and reporting back on specific conditions. ‘The Wanderlehrer played a critical role in the 1880s and 1890s, during the

transitional period between the founding of rural organizations and their achievement of a mass of membership after 1900. In the years before a minority school could be founded or before a local teacher arrived with a nationalist agenda (and the arsenal to achieve it), the Wanderlehrer motivated nationalist activism in isolated rural regions of

language frontiers. The particular lecture topics he chose reflected the dual nature of his task: spreading nationalist consciousness and teaching modern agricultural and business techniques.* If rural Austria had experienced an invasion of teachers and Wanderlehrer in the last years of the century, this invasion had been accompanied by an equally impressive flood of books purchased by nation-

alist associations for the lending libraries they established. The libraries, it was hoped, would facilitate the modernizing and nationalizing efforts of teachers and other local activists. They were meant to stimulate mass interest in economic, scientific, national, historical, and cultural topics. The idea derived from a liberal tradition dating back to the 1860s and 1870s when liberal associations had tried to spread enlightenment by establishing local Volksbibliotheken (people’s

libraries) in village town halls or schools.*° Often the local teacher served as the local custodian of these new nationalist libraries. The numbers and size of the libraries grew rapidly. In 1904 the Bund der Deutschen in Bohmen had established twelve such libraries. By 1908 the number had grown to ninety, and the Bund could report that both the borrowers and the number of books borrowed had increased annually. This could not be said of another of the Bund’s projects,

84 Encounters on the Rural Frontier namely, a traveling library or Wanderbucherer. The Bund blamed its poor reception on confusion regarding its use.*! In 1898 the much

smaller German Association for Iglau and the surrounding region raised money to establish eight libraries, seven of which were located

in rural villages in the Iglau/Jihlava language island that straddled Bohemia and Moravia. Local teachers ran seven of these. Their book collections ranged in size from 22 to 155 volumes.” In 1904 the Sudmark supported sixty-three libraries in Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and the Tyrol with a total of 71,000 volumes and 18,000 borrowers.*® By 1910 the Sudmark had added a traveling slide show to its offerings to local branches. When local communities borrowed the slides and a projector, they experienced a visual depiction of German communities in far-flung regions of the empire, in another effort to territorialize the abstract German nation. Teachers and libraries played an equally important role for Czech nationalist activists in rural regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia and in Lower Austria and Vienna. Although Czech nationalist ideologies did not exactly mirror those of their German nationalist counterparts, they did share with them a powerful understanding of the nation defined in terms of social, economic, scientific, and cultural

progress. Both Czech and German nationalists envisioned their nations as bearers of science and culture, although the former tended to define culture more in terms of modernity and future accomplishment, while the latter grounded their cultural authority more in past accomplishment.** For this reason, both targeted rural backwardness as problematic for the success of the nation. In 1893, for example, the Narodni jednota posumavska counted 123 libraries with a total of 16,148 volumes both in the Bohemian Woods region and at its headquarters in Prague. By 1906 the organization had founded nearly 400 libraries. Almost two thirds or 64 percent of Narodni jednota posumavska librarians were local teachers or school officials. In addition,

of the educational lectures held by local branches to benefit their communities in 1906, nearly half dealt with specifically economic issues (agriculture, technology, hygiene), while the other half covered

nationalist topics (history, biography, Czech culture, and current events) .*

Teachers may have been the most visible new figures on the landscape in popularizing nationalist ideas in rural parts of Austria, but

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 85 they were by no means the only ones. Several nationalist organizations noted either with concern or enthusiasm both the transitory and permanent immigrants brought to rural Austria by the expansion of the railway system. New populations of railway workers and lower-level officials arrived in several rural communities throughout Austria after

1900. In such cases, however, the specific effects of migration depended on the particular profile of railway workers in a given region. German nationalists in southern Bohemia, for example, complained loudly that most of the blue- and white-collar workers brought in to build and administer new branch lines were all Czech speakers. Their presence in rural communities such as Eisenstein / Zelezna Ruda, Salnau/ Zelnava, or Prachatitz/Prachatice around 1900 created socalled artificial communities of Czech speakers in regions where Czechs allegedly did not belong. Their presence, it was claimed, inevitably attracted a host of troublesome Czech nationalist organizations that demanded minority schools. German nationalists in Pra-

chatitz/Prachatice complained that too many railway officials appointed to their predominantly German-speaking town were Czechs. The latter, complained the German nationalists, were able to influence railway workers who came to the Prachatitz/Prachatice region to remain Czech and not to assimilate.*° In 1910 German nationalists from the northern Bohemian town of Bodenbach/Podmokly

even brought an unsuccessful suit to the Supreme Administrative Court challenging the establishment of a local minority school to serve the children of railway workers. A transitory population of Czech-speaking railway employees, seasonal workers, or civil servants,

argued the German nationalists, should not be treated as a longstanding local minority with the right to found its own school.*’ In South Styria, however, German nationalist reaction to the ex-

pansion of the Sudbahn was enthusiastic, since it tended to bring increasing numbers of German-speaking workers and officials into a majority Slovene-speaking region. In 1905 the Marburger Zeitung, for example, reported approvingly about the ways in which the newly arrived Sudbahn employees had been integrated into local social life.

That year the Sudbahn railway’s factory workshop band had serenaded guests at the Sudmark’s annual winter festival.** In 1913 the Sudmark reported enthusiastically about what it called the “great potential for building up a new German community” in Pragerhof/Pra-

86 Encounters on the Rural Frontier gersko, formerly a sleepy village with a large Slovene-speaking majority just to the south of Marburg. Pragerhof had recently gained importance as the site of a new junction that connected the Sudbahn’s north-south line to an east-west line that extended to Budapest. The railway expansion had brought large numbers of German-speaking workers to the town. Recognizing Pragerhof/Pragersko’s potential as an expanding German outpost, the German School Association had even recently decided to build a school there.*® The growth of railroad networks brought other potential economic benefits that nationalists in some regions eagerly sought to develop further. Basic services frequently followed the establishment of a railroad station, including rudimentary hotels, pensions, restaurants, and pubs, many of which were owned or staffed by outsiders to the region who hoped to profit from the increased links to the outside world. In Bohemia nationalist activists took advantage of the growth in transportation to encourage the development of a tourist industry. They

promoted winter-sport options in both the south and north and summer rentals in several rural regions, all options that had been made possible by the arrival of railroad connections. Other relative newcomers to rural Austria who served as activists in local nationalist associations included physicians, apothecaries, notaries, and lower civil servants. The latter require some discussion, given the ethos of strict objectivity and exclusive loyalty to the monarch that had traditionally dominated the emperor’s civil service. The expansion of the imperial state administration after 1848 and especially of the provincial and district bureaucracies tended to undermine several bureaucratic traditions that had worked to prevent lower civil servants from participating in political or, later, national activism. This was particularly the case for local provincial civil servants who tended to identify their interests with their home province and language group despite the best efforts of their professional organizations to imbue them with the older spirit of anational patriotism. The expansion of the civil service brought several changes, both in the composition of the bureaucracy and in the ethos of its members. Despite the explicit efforts of both higher bureaucrats and professional organizations to maintain the traditionally anational professional ethos, civil servants identified themselves increasingly as members of nations.*°

One reason for this was that the generation that was starting its

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 87 careers around 1900 was far less mobile than previous generations of civil servants had been. Increasingly, state and provincial civil servants were not only posted to their province of origin, itself unusual by the standards of earlier periods, but also tended to remain in that same

province for their entire careers. ‘This made it far more likely that they would form other important social, cultural, and political attachments that vied with or complemented the loyalty they owed to the dynasty. In the second place, starting in the 1880s, nationalist activists on all sides had made an issue of the linguistic origins of civil servants and their relative numbers. This meant that unlike their predecessors, educated young men who joined the civil service around 1900 more likely considered themselves to be members of a national group first and representatives of the supranational state only secondarily. Furthermore, the generation that joined the Bohemian civil service after the 1890s was the first for whom it was possible to have been educated in a linguistically segregated setting from grade school through untversity.”! In the third place, the status of the German language declined in many provincial administrations after 1900 as more regu-

lations required that the external business of the provincial civil service, that which required contact with the public, be carried out in all legitimate provincial languages and not simply in German. This latter trend had fairly severe consequences for German-speaking candidates for the civil service in the Bohemian Lands. While even lowerlevel Czech- or Slovene-speaking candidates gained some rudimentary knowledge of German in order to qualify for the provincial bureauc-

racy, German speakers rarely learned the other language of their province. This handicapped them considerably and eventually discouraged German speakers from seeking careers in the provincial services.

Although the representation of German speakers in the imperial

State bureaucracy remained far higher than the percentage of German speakers in Austrian society recorded in the census, German speakers lost their apparent advantage when it came to staffing a provincial bureaucracy such as Bohemia’s. There, by 1914, only 5 percent of the provincial civil service identified themselves as coming from a German-speaking background.” This meant that provincial civil ser-

vants posted to communities that considered themselves to be German were often self-identified Czechs. Czech-speaking civil ser-

88 Encounters on the Rural Frontier vants posted to predominantly German-speaking areas of Bohemia not only formed their own tightly knit social communities—including

membership in local nationalist associations—but also became the target for much criticism by local German nationalists. Whenever a pothole went unrepaired or a local demand could not be funded, German nationalists explained these frustrations by projecting them onto the provincial bureaucracy’s alleged hostility to the local community.

Rural Encounters in One Corner of Southern Bohemia Relative newcomers such as schoolteachers, civil servants, druggists, physicians, and railway officials often defined their own national iden-

tity in terms of a commitment to progress and an irresistible modernity. Their activism focused as much on obtaining that modernity for their new rural home communities as it did on forcing their new neighbors to become national. ‘Targets for their propaganda included the rural conservatism of their neighbors and the nationalist civil servants of the enemy nation, both of which seemed to block progress for the village and the nation. To their way of thinking, the supranational imperial state was not only an ultimate arbiter of this conflict but also the object of nationalist demands for subsidies to fund pet projects for the purpose of modernizing the countryside. Nationalists

used the same dual logic in petitioning the state that characterized their attitudes to the neighbors they perceived to be nationally indifferent and stubbornly opposed to progress. They both complained of unfair treatment at the hands of the local government (the other nationality was more highly favored) and accused local authorities of

indifference to the great potential that economic development offered the region. Such accusations could easily become politicized, since the men who made them often served as elected village councilors one diet or parliamentary deputies, and their appointed counterparts in the local civil service made excellent targets in political campaigns.

Let us examine the nationalists’ construction of their world at the local level, taking as our starting point two small communities of the

rural Bohemian Woods region. Here we can gain an even clearer sense of how the complex relationship between visions of modernity

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 89 and national community dominated nationalist interpretations of their quotidian surroundings. The towns are Bergreichenstein / Kas-

perské Hory and Prachatitz/Prachatice, separated by about thirty miles of forested hills. Both had recently become known for their historic buildings and beautiful natural surroundings, thanks to the propagandizing efforts of nationalist activists. Visitors around 1900 attributed a great sense of charm to each town, based in part on an aesthetic presentation of a kind of pleasant and out-of-the-way backwardness when compared with more aggressively modern parts of Bohemia and Austria. Town modernizers used the tools of the modern world to produce that aura of past charm.°** Activists in each worked relentlessly to create a comfortably modern environment using an aesthetic language of nostalgia that fulfilled the vacationer’s expectation of an idealized rural past. Both towns had become growing

centers of tourism for people who wanted to enjoy both modern winter sport and traditional summer vacationing. Prachatitz/Prachatice, known as the “small Nuremberg,” was the larger of the two. With a population of about 4,000 (75 percent reporting German as their language of daily use in 1910), it functioned as the administrative center both of a district captaincy and of a judicial district. The town had a railway station and published a weekly German nationalist newspaper, Deutsch-Bohmerwald, which reported on events in other nearby towns with German-speaking majorities such as Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory and Winterberg/Vimperk. Although largely a German-speaking administrative center, Prachatitz/Prachatice sat directly on the language frontier in a district whose rural majority spoke Czech.

Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory was only half as large as Prachatitz/Prachatice, with a population of 2,221 in 1900, 94 percent of whom listed German as their language of daily use. Since many of these inhabitants actually lived outside the town center itself, Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory conveyed a more distinctly rural village profile than did Prachatitz/Prachatice. It had been a flourishing center for gold mining and the salt trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but by the nineteenth century the town had become a rural backwater whose only importance was to serve as a local agricultural market for the surrounding region. Bergreichenstein / Kas-

perské Hory too was located close to the language frontier in

90 Encounters on the Rural Frontier southern Bohemia. The town itself belonged to the district administration of Schuttenhofen/SuSice, a market town of some 7,000 predominantly Czech speakers ten miles to the northeast on the other side of the language frontier. The Schuttenhofen/Susice district encompassed three rural judicial districts, one of which was centered at Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory. German nationalists in town frequently complained that their town was unfairly attached to a Czechmajority district that lay on the “wrong” side of the language frontier, and that was subject to the arbitrary misrule of civil servants appointed by Czechs. On several occasions they petitioned the government to let their town form a new German district captaincy in concert with the village of Hartmanitz/Hartmanice to the north, which also belonged to the Schuttenhofen/Susice district. Far more critical to the creation of a nationalist environment than raw statistics about language use is the fact that Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory and Prachatitz/Prachatice had attracted Germanlanguage middle and secondary schools, in addition to the normal elementary schools. Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory housed not only a German-language primary school, but also two middle schools

and a trade school. Prachatitz/Prachatice boasted a reputable German gymnasium attended by both local and boarding students in

addition to Czech- and German-language primary schools. Each hoped to attract more boarding pupils from places as far away as Vienna, although only Prachatitz/Prachatice had adequate facilities to house them.* Not surprisingly, each town housed over fifty teachers

in 1908, and these, along with other newcomers, worked hard both to modernize the town and to integrate their rural neighbors into their national movements.*® Each town had a German-speaking mayor

and an elected town council that could be counted on to express radically nationalist sentiments. Each also counted a number of appointed Czech-speaking district and judicial civil servants who became the frequent object of harsh criticism by the mayors and the municipal councils. Each town also attracted nationalist unrest, including violent

incidents that required outside intervention by the authorities. In 1907 in Prachatitz/Prachatice, when Czech nationalists held a festival inside the town walls, rioting broke out that required police intervention and wounded several activists. One year later a German nationalist festival in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory provoked several

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 9] days of rioting that will be examined more closely in Chapter 6. The incident resulted in one death, several injuries, and a military occupation. At the same time, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the rural populations of the two towns played little role in such

outbreaks and remained substantially indifferent to nationalist activism.

Both German and Czech nationalists told very different stories about the national situation in the region. In 1908, for example, German nationalists considered Bergreichenstein to be their town, a place with no history of nationalist conflict until quite recently. ‘Traditionally, as one regional newspaper explained, the very few Czech

speakers who had moved there had belonged to the lowest social classes and had easily (and laudably) become Germanized over time. Other Czech speakers such as vendors frequented the monthly town markets, but according to the paper there had never been an indigenous Czech minority rooted in the town. All of this had changed in the 1890s when a minority population of civil servants appointed from

Prague had invaded the town, the product of an alleged Czech nationalist scheme designed to thwart German nationalist demands for an administrative separation in Bohemia. After 1900 the town could

no longer be categorized as 100 percent German in character. German nationalists protested repeatedly that the civil servants appointed to Prachatitz or Bergreichenstein, from judges, tax assessors, and notaries to the local apothecary, were in fact agents of Czech nationalism. Their appointment had allegedly made the town more prone to nationalist conflict in the past decade, and the German na-

tionalists responded by portraying themselves and the Germanspeaking population as innocent victims of a national conspiracy. German nationalists claimed specifically that as educated people, these newly arrived Czech-speaking civil servants were far less likely to assimilate to the German community than had earlier working-class

Czech-speaking migrants. To the contrary, these educated Czech speakers immediately founded branches of allegedly provocative na-

tionalist associations such as the Narodni jednota posumavska, founded savings and loan associations, and aggressively marked their shops and offices with Czech-language signs. Given their political goals (separation rather than cohabitation), local German nationalists viewed these developments with increasing dismay.°’

92 Encounters on the Rural Frontier German nationalists in both towns faced other challenges as well, besides the increased presence of an organized national opponent. They sought to broaden participation in village associational life and to reorient its perceived tasks to creating new community identities for their towns. In combination with local professionals (innkeepers,

small retailers, and a local manufacturer), the newcomers among them worked to expand economic connections to regional and interregional commerce, providing their leadership skills and associational experience to local village organizations as well. ‘This was critical because in both towns nationalists frequently complained about the indifference they found among their rural neighbors both to national identity itself and to cooperating in revitalizing the region. From the pages of Deutsch-Bohmerwald in Prachatitz/Prachatice we learn how nationalists set about reforming their surroundings and their neighbors. Their nationalism in the Bohemian Woods was no backward-looking ideology designed to revive some rural past utopia, but rather a vibrantly progressive creed that embraced change for the sake of national improvement. Writing about a broad variety of economic and cultural concerns, the correspondents and editorialists in Deutsch Bohmerwald equated a desirable nationalist commitment with the practical utility of progress and modernity for the region. They consistently equated the region’s interests with increased education, an expanded communications and transportation infrastructure, commerce, tourism, and even a proposed electrical works on a local river. According to the repeated claims of the newspaper, each of these broad fields offered unlimited possibilities for increased social mobility and prosperity in the village. The success or failure of important local modernizing initiatives that sought to realize these potentials, however, was bound up with the ability of the German national community to determine its own future. This is where local German nationalists alleged that Czech nationalist civil servants did their worst damage. Deutsch-Bohmerwald regularly

reiterated the complaint that the fate of a predominantly Germanspeaking town such as Bergreichenstein lay in the hands of the majority Czech-speaking administrative district of Schuttenhofen/Susice. The Czech civil servants allegedly ignored the town’s infrastructure needs in favor of wasteful and provocative measures such as the im-

position of bilingual street signs on the town, despite the fact that

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 93 according to the newspaper, the only Czech speakers in town were the civil servants themselves. Even in Prachatitz/Prachatice, itself a

district captaincy, hostile Czech nationalist bureaucrats, it was claimed, exercised a negative political influence over the town’s fate. At the same time, the newspaper regularly extolled the civic and nationalist activism displayed by the local German-speaking teachers, administrators, and white-collar workers, confirming the leading role such new arrivals played both in shaping municipal programs and in

directing the local nationalist movements. In the year 1908 alone, their own efforts gained for Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory a new vocational school, adult agricultural classes, a successful beautification campaign, a swimming pool with summer swim classes, the renovation of a local castle ruin (the Karlsberg/Kasperk), and the promotion of winter-sport tourism. If the newspaper expressed resentment toward supposedly Czech nationalist civil servants, it could be equally contemptuous of the communitys own nationalist shortcomings. Nationalists expressed pride at local accomplishments and impatience with the lingering vestiges of backwardness. Progress and modernity were defined in both moral and nationalist terms; backwardness, however, derived either from ignorance or from the machinations of local Czech politicians. These articles also help us see the ways in which, despite its universal claims, nationalist activism remained limited to a minority of townspeople. Several articles expressed impatience with nationalist apathy as demonstrated in the slow growth of membership in the town’s nationalist, educational, or self-improvement societies. The editors occasionally lambasted the local populace in both towns for its alleged inability or

unwillingness to cooperate in the creation of a modern tourist industry that would benefit the local economy. The success of a tourist industry often depends on the willingness of each individual in the community to participate in presenting the place in a certain light. It is not surprising that when activists complained about their neighbors, they focused on the latter’s unwillingness to participate in presenting the town at its best for the visiting tourists. In this way, specific issues such as the quality of local accommodations or services became a field for local activists to impose their larger middle-class, modernizing agenda on the rest of the town.

This twin strategy of attacking Czechs and indifferent Germans

94 Encounters on the Rural Frontier while promoting associational life and reform projects is clear from Deutsch-Bohmerwald’s very first number in 1908. In a section dedicated

to local news and events, one article complained that the newly appointed district physician in Prachatitz appeared to be a committed Czech nationalist, thus adding to the number of Czech civil servants unfairly imposed on the town. A second article complained that local German retailers were closing up shop well before the legal closing hour, leaving the field to their Czech competitors, who were poised to capitalize on German laziness. This was followed by a call on Prachatitzers to protect the historic remnants of earlier times, not simply out of respect for the past, but for aesthetic reasons, to make the town appear more attractive to visitors. The section closed with an announcement of an upcoming social evening (and lecture, “Christmas among the Blind”) sponsored by the Bund der Deutschen in BOhmen and encouraged all German guests to attend.®® In its New Year’s editorial for Bergreichenstein, the paper recounted a similar set of complaints and of recent accomplishments in which the town could jus-

tifiably take pride. Bergreichenstein’s town council had restored several historic houses on the main square, it had demolished some unsightly deteriorating buildings, and it had erected a system of streetlights. Of equal importance, however, to these physical improvements were the moral ones linked to them: revival of the town’s Beautification Society and the growing branches of its singing, gymnastics, charitable, and nationalist organizations. Yet another sign of accomplishment was the recent expansion of two new schools. On the negative side, however, the editorial deplored the fact that the allegedly unsympathetic Czech regional administration often stood in the way of progress (for example, road repair), wasted district funds on unnecessary bilingual signs, and actually opposed a railway connection for the town that might benefit the tourism industry.” During the year Deutsch-Bohmerwald repeatedly endorsed the continued efforts of the Bergreichenstein Beautification Society to make the town more attractive to tourists, particularly the projected renovation of the nearby Karlsberg castle ruins and a hiking path leading to them. It related approvingly that the (German nationalist) mayor’s office took the beautification of the town seriously, that the main square was kept clean, and that nearby trees and gardens were well

taken care of. The care taken in presenting the town, opined the

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 95 newspaper, would ensure that newcomers to town would come to love their new He:mat and would be encouraged to devote their energy to public service.® It also praised the decision to rename several streets after well-known German historical figures such as Emperor Joseph II, Friedrich Schiller, gymnastics founder Ludwig Jahn, and regional author Adalbert Sufter. “May the ideals that these names embody for us inspire our town forever.”®! The project of renaming enabled local nationalists to re-create community identity in their own image, both for the sake of visitors and as a warning to local Czechs. In a related development the town hired a professional painter to create new road

signs in German for Bergreichenstein and the surrounding region, since the district administration insisted on erecting bilingual signs. With more signs like this, claimed the newspaper, “the region would gain the appearance that most embodies its identity, the appearance of a purely German region.”® In May the paper encouraged Germans in the region to participate in a recently invented tradition that carried on “a worthy and ancient custom of our Germanic ancestors” by

building bonfires on the hilltops for the solstice in June. This too, wrote the paper, would confirm the German appearance of the landscape.°°

The newspaper prodded the townspeople to take better advantage of links to the outside world by advertising their town more aggressively. One article praised the growth of a postcard industry, but reminded its readers that such cards created the region’s reputation

throughout the entire world. Therefore, all postcards should be tasteful in content (“only show the best views”) and in a single language (German).® The paper also complained that “German summer vacationers pay far too little attention to our beautiful little corner [of the Bohemian Woods]” and added a nationalist slant, claiming that the Czechs did a much better job of bringing in tourists to the Bohemian Woods than did the Germans.® A month later the paper raised the demand “Give us a swimming pool!” In a fascinating rhetorical flourish the paper connected the concepts of national progress to two of the town’s important industries: education and tourism. Noting that Bergreichenstein was home to “a grammar school, a trade school and a high school,” the paper complained that “in the 20th century [we] still have no swimming pool! Not from a lack of water, mind you—of that we have plenty—but from a lack of insight into

96 Encounters on the Rural Frontier the salutary effects of bathing.” The newspaper then reinforced the rhetorical connection by asking, “How should our students stay fresh and healthy? How should Bergreichenstein become a summer resort, when it offers no opportunity for swimming! How much money is our town losing because of this?”° A swimming pool was not the only means for inculcating modern habits and satisfying the demands of tourists in town. In July the news-

paper encouraged the town to found a Heimat museum “where the surviving treasures of our forefathers could be displayed along with appropriate explanations.”°’ The museum might be started in a single room, suggested the newspaper, and would undoubtedly encourage popular interest in Bergreichenstein’s glorious past. During this time the newspaper consistently accused Czech nationalist administrators of working actively to thwart progress in both towns. An April article criticizing the government for attempting to denationalize the region by appointing Czech civil servants to purely German towns was followed by an exhortation to demand singlerather than dual-language stamps at local post offices.®* Not only did

the paper claim that administrative posts in Bohemia were increasingly closed to Germans and their children (a common complaint made in Bohemian German nationalist circles), but Czech administrators apparently worked (in vaguely unspecified ways) against progress for the town economy.” Here the paper clearly attempted to make the constant complaint of Bohemia’s German nationalist politicians relevant to a local audience. Several articles referred to the lamentable state of travel infrastructure in the Bohemian Woods, another result of Czech irresponsibility. Commenting on a recent excursion by Bergreichensteiners to the village of Albrechtsried, the paper claimed that “[even] in Bosnia one would undoubtedly find better road connections than here in the Bohemian Woods.””° Yet not every barrier to progress could be blamed on Czech nationalists. A July article linking nationalism to knowledge and progress

chided the town’s Germans for not yet having organized a reading club or library. The fact that the town’s tiny Czech minority already sported such a reading group, the Literarni spolek, put the Germans to shame. In fact, only the year before, the town’s leading Czech administrator, the much-maligned Dr. Anton Singer, had himself lectured on Jan Hus to the small Czech nationalist community.”’ “How

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 97 many wasted hours could be rescued from numbing card games and foolish beer drinking? Therefore, off to the deed, whoever has a concern for Bergreichenstein’s future!”” In yet another exhortation to Bergreichensteiners to join in national associational life, the newspaper complained that the local branch of the gymnastics society was

so small that it would not be able to participate in the upcoming regional and Austrian gymnastics festivals.”

These last two exhortations in particular indicate a lingering fear by local middle-class nationalists that the town’s German speakers might in fact have had more in common culturally with their Czechspeaking peasant neighbors than with themselves. Here we see a clear ambivalence expressed by nationalists who would like to locate na-

tionalist virtue in the exemplary rural Germans of the frontier, but who must in fact teach those virtues (both civic and cultural) to the German speakers in their locality. The perceived cultural failures of local German society call into question the very existence of that society in the first place. While busy nationalists worked hard to improve economic and cultural conditions in the region, did other inhabitants share either their sense of purpose or their self-identification as Germans?

In July the newspaper sharply reminded Prachatitzers with available

summer rooms for rent to report them, along with descriptions of their facilities (gardens, kitchens), to the local tourist office. In August

it was Bergreichenstein’s turn. The newspaper demanded that Bergreichenstein’s town fathers create more available rental rooms—too often there were not enough to accommodate all the visitors to the area. “If the Germans don’t do something about this swiftly,” warned the newspaper, “some Czech landlord will soon take advantage of German laziness.” The paper then reported with pride that the swimming pool was finally completed and that it proved the progressive spirit of Bergreichenstein’s German town council (as opposed—implicitly—to its Czech district administrators).” On 13 September, however, the paper published a highly illuminating editorial about tourism in Prachatitz/Prachatice that crystallized nationalist frustrations with local backwardness. Titled, appropriately enough, “Examining Our Conscience,” the article focused with some urgency on the degree to which the growing tourism industry was critical both to the town’s economic survival and to its national survival. According to

98 Encounters on the Rural Frontier the editorial, the experience of the recently concluded summer season had demonstrated that several outstanding problems remained

to be addressed by local villagers. The locals had charged far too much both for rooms and for meals, a shortsighted practice that would simply drive tourists away or into the waiting arms of the local Czechs. Furthermore, the editorial claimed that customers received far more polite service in Czech-owned shops than in German shops. Wares also needed to be displayed more attractively, and shopkeepers

should attend better to hygiene. This latter fact, noted the paper, often counted far more to tourist customers than did the price of the wares. To strengthen national identity, to improve the local economy, and to achieve social progress, tourism must be promoted far more effectively.’

It seems clear from this brief discussion of discourse within German

nationalist circles in Prachatitz/Prachatice and Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory that the forces promoting nationalism there also fought a rearguard action to promote a kind of liberal modernity among an allegedly backward and insufficiently nationalized populace. Both Czech and German nationalists invoked a moral rhetoric of progress that linked national identity to a bourgeois vision that fostered education, hygiene, commerce, and historic preservation in a world badly in need of improvement. For these local German nationalists, it was the local tourist industry that would benefit in partic-

ular from an active policy of community self-improvement. The German population of both towns would in turn gain a more solid economic basis for their survival in a larger nationalized world. All the local nationalists tried hard to change the character of their communities by policing the very habits of their neighbors. Already at its founding in the 1880s, the BOhmerwaldbund had complained that the inhabitants of these small forest towns (Waldstadte) had “no insight into the swiftly changing nature of things and are difficult to move forward.”’’ It was up to the newcomers to teach their neighbors

how to adapt to change and seize the opportunities it offered their communities. The necessary promotion of the local economy justified all kinds of radical modernizing changes involving more intensified policies around education, hygiene, historic preservation, or tourism, changes that often elicited misunderstanding or local opposition. ‘This

Encounters on the Rural Frontier 99 agenda enforced a consistent policy of modernization in order that the German community might actually come to embody the higher cultural qualities that by definition made it superior to all other peoples and that defined a German national mission in the Austrian Empire. Only through ever more ambitious educational efforts could the people of this language frontier be made to approximate those ideal frontier Germans whom nationalist activists increasingly held up

as an example to the rest of the nation. And by successfully using media and political forums to link their agendas to a broader nationalist interest, the local activists were able to claim a kind of universal appeal for their particular program. In other words, we are viewing

here an example of nationalists attempting to bring a nation into existence in their own image. The interesting phenomenon, remarked upon by virtually no one

at the time, is that through their civic activism, the new arrivals to rural Austria had swiftly come to define themselves as the authentic rural insiders with a natural right to set the local agenda. At the same time, they vigorously maintained their identification with the modernizing state policies from the outside that had brought them to rural Austria in the first place. The voluminous stream of self-critical newspaper articles that found fault with Bergreichensteiners’ insularity suggests the high degree to which the invaders eagerly made use of their

self-perception as natives. And if those outsiders now considered themselves to be legitimate insiders, their influence worked to diminish the importance of specifically local conditions, local forms of self-identification, and local ways of viewing the landscape in the formation of town policy. The latter considerations were increasingly replaced by a generic sense of national self-identity that might claim to be anchored precisely in local specifics, but actually involved the application of imported behaviors, traditions, and concerns.

FOUR

Reluctant Colonists Lhe Sudmark Settlers In ten years the bridge will be completed, the supply line that will link Marburg to German farmers in the German-speaking lands. —Rudolf Hans Bartsch, Das deutsche Leid: Fin Landschafts-Roman (Leipzig, 1912)

AT A CLIMACTIC POINT in Rudolf Hans Bartsch’s 1912 Styrian novel Das deutsche Leid, the hero Georg comes upon a hilltop village settlement high above a green valley where from below, at a great distance,

he hears the echo of Slavic folksongs. Overcome with the emotion of recognition, Georg identifies this place as the former home of a Slovene girl to whom he had lost his virginity in a passionate and memorable affair some twenty years earlier. Yet the place has changed. In his youth this spot had emanated an air of tragic poverty. Now Georg sees before him a cluster of comfortable-looking farmhouses, newly plastered in white and blue, with well-tended gardens. Where earlier

the phylloxera and general “Slavic mismanagement had produced misery” in the village, now “the place fairly laughed with prosperity.” Boys and girls playing and singing German songs in the nearby vineyards look up and call out “Gruss Gott” in a German colored by Swabian tones.

Suddenly Georg realizes that he has happened upon the iconic Sudmark settlement at St. Egydi / Sv. Il. “Oh holy earth,” murmurs Georg, deeply moved. “Scrimped and saved for, penny by penny in collection boxes, acquired and built up through painful sacrifice, a tesumony to individual self-denial. The litthe schoolteacher in the 100

Reluctant Colonists 101 Waldviertel, the University student in Innsbruck, the high-school youth in Leoben, the kindergarten teacher on the Danube, the small factory

manager in Moravia, the modest merchant in Pettau, or the postmistress on the far-away Sava River, each has no better reward than to know that German songs are now being sung here.”? Bartsch’s account might have been drawn directly from a Sudmark publication advertising in detail both its setthement (Besiedlung) at St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj and the colony’s transformative effect on the local

landscape. By June 1914 the Sudmark had in fact resettled some seventy-three German-speaking families (over 400 people) on 2,500 acres of farmland, most of it formerly owned by Slovene-speaking farmers on the language frontier. The majority of these families, often from as far away as Wurttemberg, were settled in the area north of Marburg/Maribor, in and around the village of St. Egydi / Sv. Ij, just south of what is today the border between Austria and Slovenia.

The Sudmark hoped eventually to connect the city of Marburg/ Maribor to the more homogeneously German-speaking region of central Styria some twenty kilometers to the north by transforming the linguistically mixed region between them into a primarily Germanspeaking region. In the long run the Sudmark hoped to Germanize enough inhabitants of South Styria’s rural landscapes to link the region’s major German-language islands, the cities of Cilli/Celje, Marburg/Maribor, and Pettau/Ptui. This project, however narrowly conceived, fed the broader colonizing ambitions of several association

members who dreamed eventually of linking primarily Germanspeaking territories to the north with Austria’s Adriatic coastal cities to the south.? Since its founding in 1889 the Sudmark had vigorously promoted the settlement idea as a means to strengthen German national communities on the southern language frontiers of the monarchy. However, the prohibitive cost of such a program had prevented repeated attempts at its realization. When the organization finally found the

means to realize a sustained settlement project beginning in 1906, the program produced a range of unanticipated social, economic, and

political challenges almost overnight. In economic terms, for example, the Sudmark had not anticipated that its intervention in local markets might drive up property values, encouraging both Germanand Slovene-speaking farmers in the region to sell at inflated prices

102 Reluctant Colonists and making for less efficient use of available funds. Worse, complications resulted from Sudmark assumptions about the importance of their German national identity to the settlers themselves when, as we will see later, some opportunistic purchasers turned out to be lessthan-loyal Germans once they had gained their subsidized property. Then, when the Sudmark located land-hungry vintners from western Germany who agreed to emigrate to South Styria (and who just happened to be Protestants), Sudmark leaders faced harsh accusations of anti-Catholicism from the influential Social Catholic parties. Once their setthement program finally seemed to have stabilized, Sudmark leaders again faced opposition to the policy, this tme from their own members who wanted to see comparable efforts made and funds spent in other threatened parts of Austria. Some of these problems reflect what became an ongoing source of general frustration for nationalists of all stripes who looked to the language frontier for inspiration. The rural world was hardly as nationalized as the Sudmark, its rivals, or later historians presumed it to be, and real social relations on the language frontier defied the easy categories imposed upon them by nationalist activists at the turn of the twentieth century. In practice, not all people who called themselves Czechs, Germans, Italians, or Slovenes actually shared the kind of sustained nationalist commitment presumed to mark those hardy nationalists who peopled the language frontier. Many other bilingual individuals and families reyected even a rudimentary national identity, preferring to name themselves according to their region or their religion and vacillating from year to year when required to report a single language in the imperial census. As we have seen in earlier chapters, nationalists angrily accused such “hermaphrodites” of op-

portunistic side switching even as they competed to draw the offenders into their own national communities. This chapter examines the Sudmark settlement programs from several angles, both for the purpose of evaluating nationalist leanings among rural populations on the language frontier and to trace the rise of more territorially aggressive elements within nationalist circles around 1900. The attempt to settle colonies of nationalists on the language frontier in order to preserve its alleged national identity may make some sense, however perverse, to readers familiar with the holocaust, Heim ins Reich, the post-1945 expulsions, or more recent

Reluctant Colonists 103 ethnic cleansings. Nevertheless, we are dealing here with populations for whom national belonging was a far more contingent and situational element of self-identification than it would be only a generation later during the interwar period. While Sudmark members repeatedly

expressed pride in their organizational attempts to change the linguistic balance on the frontier, they also despaired of finding peasants

whose sense of national identity might outweigh their identities as workers of the land or as practicing Catholics. For, just as the Nazis were to discover in occupied Poland after 1939, these latter elements of identity often overpowered the potential attractions of national identity, even for settlers imported from the German Reich. Not a few colonists “went astray,” socializing with, intermarrying with, and even identifying with their Slovene-speaking counterparts in the hilly regions to the north of Marburg/ Maribor.

From Defensive Self-Preservation to Aggressive Colonization Ever since the 1880s the earliest German nationalist associations had expressed and justified their efforts in largely defensive terms. The various school associations, for example, responded defensively to nationalist fears about children losing their ability to speak their mother tongue. The Bohmerwaldbund and the Narodni jednota posumavska both acted defensively to shore up the economic situation of German-

or Czech-speaking communities and, in the case of the former, to prevent further German emigration from a poor region of Bohemia. The various regional German associations for Bohemia, North Moravia, or South Moravia all proclaimed similar goals and added measures designed at least to give the appearance of battling demographic decline, such as caring for orphans of German parentage who might otherwise end up in Czech-speaking institutions. Czech nationalists consistently accused these latter associations of promoting a policy of Germanization aimed at Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian Czech speakers. From an ideological standpoint, at least, the evidence on this point is often ambiguous in its implications. Explicitly defensive rhetoric used by both German and Czech national-

ists frequently incorporated several elements of implicitly expansionist policy. The ideologies of the various associations tacked ambivalently between concerns for the cultural or material survival of

104 Reluctant Colonists the individual and an increasing emphasis on the importance of place.

This ambivalence is perhaps less surprising in the case of the Bohmerwaldbund or the Narodni jednota posumavska, which, after all, sought variously to defend, maintain, or improve the position of German or Czech speakers within the context of a defined geographic region. Yet even in the case of the interregional German School Association or the Ustiedni matice Skolska, a more traditionalist focus on cultural capital as the definition of nation gave way to an emerging

focus on territorial definitions of nation. The School Association sought to maintain existing German-speaking communities that were feared to be dying out in a linguistic sense. Yet the very dynamic that drove the association contained within it the seeds of an aggressively expansionist program. The need to use all available resources efficiently drove the nationalist school associations to convert as many of their private schools as possible over time into state-supported schools. ‘The state requirement

for conversion from private to public support—that a minimum of forty pupils attend the private minority-language school annually over a five-year period—drove the rival school associations to adopt every

available means of persuasion in order to raise the number of children who attended their schools. Rather than defensively providing school choice for isolated language minorities, the school associations

engendered fierce competition for numbers in some localities. Although individual preference determined choice in many cases, all sides pressured families, using employment, housing, and even financial remuneration as incentives to encourage or to prevent attendance in a local private school.

It was therefore at least understandable when the Matice or the School Association accused each other of Germanization or Czechification efforts, even though each couched its own policies in highly defensive terms. The Sudmark’s setthement program in South Styria, however, differed from the programs pursued by the school organizations in its explicit promotion of territorial expansionist aims, even if the realization of those aims occurred on a very modest scale. The settlement program had begun defensively enough, expressed as an attempt to keep German-owned land in the hands of Germans. Organizationally these protective efforts had been consolidated under the jurisdiction of a special Sudmark subcommittee for Bodenschutz

Reluctant Colonists 105 (land protection) and Besiedlung (settLement). The first term conjured up defensive tactics and generally applied to urban cases where a local

house or landmark was in danger of being bought by the national enemy. Besiedlung, however, suggested a more aggressively expansionist policy. Although the ultimate goal, in this case the protection of Marburg/Maribor and the Drau/Drava Valley from “further Slovene incursions, had a defensive ring to it, the policy of buying up land and settling a new German population on it was undeniably expansionist. If Germans needed to build protective setthements around their territories in order to prevent further incursions, who could say where the setthkements would actually end? Indeed, once the settlement policy became a reality, the rhetoric that surrounded its purpose also changed significantly. Some ideologues treated the very success of the Sudmark’s limited settlement program as proof of the feasibility of creating Germanlanguage territorial links to communities as far away as Trieste and the Adriatic Sea. Arguing in radically expansive terms, they fantasized a powerful future German presence in Trieste. Their writings noted that substantial progress had already been made in this direction with

the completion of the Sudbahn railway, the creation of Germanlanguage clubs, kindergartens, and schools in Trieste, and the rise of a tourist industry in Istria and Abbazia/Opatija. Anyone who pre-

sumed that “the German nation would [simply] limit itself to observing the Adriatic from the [distant] mountain peaks of Carinthia,” asserted the authors of Die deutsche Mark am Sudmeer, “contradicted both the history and the natural mission of the city of Trieste.” Who, asked these nationalist visionaries, would bar the Germans from access to the Adriatic? If England, France, and Germany had built colonial empires outside Europe, argued others, then Austria’s imperial destiny lay in southeastern Europe, and this required a safe outlet to the sea. Never mind that the Austro-Hungarian Empire in fact already possessed several outlets on the Adriatic; German nationalists claimed that they would not be truly stable until German colonists populated them.*

This reasoning produced something of a rhetorical confusion. It posed the situation of individuals largely in defensive terms while dis-

cussing the future of German communities in aggressively expansionist terms. ‘To some extent this apparent confusion reflected dif-

106 Reluctant Colonists ferences between an increasingly visionary, if marginal, milieu of extreme nationalists and the more mainstream membership of most nationalist associations. It also reflects the dual-pronged strategy of a nationalist media that increasingly reported threats to individuals and

their property as a means to mobilize greater numbers of people more fully for the nationalist community cause. At the same time, the media promoted an aggressively expansionist nationalist politics. Both ideological elements, defensive and aggressive, coexisted, however uneasily, within the associations, and both could be invoked, depending on the requirements of the situation. If visionary imperialist programs frequently appeared in the pages of the Sudmark’s monthly magazine, they do not seem to have influenced the concerns of association members. Most of them, as we know from the transcripts of annual conventions, concerned themselves more with the pressing details of daily or annual operations than with the potential conquest of the Adriatic. The arguments deployed here with regard to southern Austria also suggest that despite a more racialist rhetoric, a fluid opportunism still

shaped the imagined boundaries that separated the nations themselves (German, Italian, and Slovene), even after 1900. Here nationalists argued that it was only the relatively recent influence of politi-

cized Catholic priests and infiltration by a growing number of professional nationalists from neighboring Carniola that prevented the Slovenes of Styria and Carinthia from living peacefully with their German neighbors. In Carniola with its capital city of Laibach/Ljubljana, Slovene speakers dominated elected institutions, schools, and administrative life. Some German activists in Styria believed that the Slovenes might serve as useful allies of the Germans, while others thought them capable of full assimilation to German culture. As one Sudmark writer put it as late as 1914, “Slovene [nationalists] work tirelessly to effect a national enlightenment of the peasantry, but we can still convince thousands of those ‘national undecideds’ if our own

protective associations provide moral (309 Sudmark People’s Libraries with 200,000 volumes) and material support.”° Unlike the polarized situation in Bohemia, German nationalists in the south saw real possibilities for at least allying with and possibly assimilating large numbers of Slovene speakers. The latter might also come to play a role not unlike that played by the small Ladin-speaking

minority in the South Tyrol that aligned itself politically with the German nationalists.

Reluctant Colonists 107 Indeed, the situation in rural South Styria, if not in neighboring Carniola, produced a far less polarized political landscape than that in Bohemia, with a considerable number of Slovene speakers unwilling to cut their ties to German speakers in the ways demanded of them by Slovene nationalist leaders. Slovene-speaking farmers, for example, often sought German or bilingual schooling for their own children, recognizing the potential for social mobility inherent in bilingual education. South Styria had a long tradition of Slovene-language schools, and the Styrian provincial government had generally supported their founding. For this reason, Slovene nationalists consistently opposed local requests to establish bilingual schools (known as utraquist) there. This would have been understood as a step backward for the Slovene nationalist movement. German nationalists themselves were often just as hostile toward the utraquist schools, claiming that the teachers’ knowledge of the German language in bilingual schools tended to be woefully insufficient. Yet especially in areas with a developing tourism industry, local Slovene speakers demanded utraquist schools for their children, or at least schools that taught the German language, thereby contradicting the preferences of local Slovene nationalists on the district school councils for Slovene-language schools.° German nationalists in Styria were willing to exploit these ambiva-

lent tendencies within Slovene communities for political gain. In 1900, for example, Mayor Joseph Ornig of Pettau/Ptui began to publish a Slovene-language newspaper, Stajerc (The Styrian). The paper encouraged Slovene farmers to expand their economic relations with

buyers in Graz to the north and to reject the anti-German boycott demands of the regional Slovene Catholic Populist Party. Soon supporters of the Stajerc idea (politically pro-German Slovene speakers)

formed a political party and ran candidates in parliamentary, diet, and municipal elections. In a 1908 parliamentary by-election the Marburger Zeitung noted approvingly that although the Slovene Catholic Populist candidate Korosec had won with 19,153 votes, the Stajerc candidate Wratschko had attracted 7,056 votes, with the Slovene liberal candidate Rebek receiving 2,807 votes. In 1911 the party’s candidate

for Parliament attracted 2,277 votes in the rural Marburg district (where St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj was located), almost as many as the 2,645 given to the Slovene Clerical candidate.’ As we will see, however, openness to national assimilation worked both ways in South Styria, and nationalist affiliations were defined at the village level as much

108 Reluctant Colonists by social custom (religious affiliation, intermarriage, which pub one frequented) as by issues of ethnic or even linguistic purity.

The Sudmark Settlement Program According to its almost mythic foundational story, the idea for the Sudmark had originated with a tireless School Association activist in Graz named Joseph Feichtinger. Not surprisingly, Feichtinger was himself a schoolteacher and founder of a private gymnasium in Graz. As with much Sudmark lore, the mythic tale, too, involved the frontier village St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj. A certain “farmer Franz” there was threatened with the loss of his farm to a Slovene purchaser. Like many of

the small farmers in the region who grew fruit or raised grapes for wine, Franz had incurred considerable debt over the years, so that only one poor harvest sufficed to uproot this German farmer from his land. Feichtinger heard about this particular case and started a collection to save farmer Franz’s farm. His success in this instance caused Feichtinger to discuss with friends and colleagues the possibility of somehow broadening the scope of the German School Association’s activities in order to address the economic needs of poor German farmers in the region. These discussions produced the Sudmark in November 1889.° The Sudmark originally intended to support Germans in linguistically mixed regions of Carniola, Carinthia, Styria, and Istria. Later the organization broadened its scope to include German-speaking com-

munities in the South Tyrol / Trentino, as well as to oppose what it saw as creeping Czechification in parts of Lower and Upper Austria. Through a mixture of self-help, loans, Christmas donations for children, agricultural education, and facilitation of trade opportunities, the organization hoped to change what it perceived to be a trend of declining German influence in these southern rural regions of the monarchy.® For the first fifteen years of its existence, the Sudmark’s settlement activities were confined to publishing periodic lists of avail-

able properties in linguistically mixed communities and advertising them throughout Austria and in the German Reich. As early as 1890, for example, one central committee member had proposed that lists of available properties be published in Reich German newspapers in order to attract German emigrants from the Baltic territories of Russia to southern Austria.

Reluctant Colonists 109 Throughout the 1890s the association spent considerable sums on

loans to farmers for the purchase of land and even, on occasion, purchased buildings and farms itself. Typical of Sudmark ventures were the contributions it made to local building societies for the pur-

pose of erecting hotels or restaurants in important towns such as Rann/Brezice where the German minority had no central point for congregating and German travelers had no German place to spend the night. Sull, it was not until after 1905, when the organization’s annual income regularly exceeded 150,000 crowns, that it could consider anything financially more ambitious.'° In 1906 and 1907 the executive committee reported the first slow steps it had taken to establish a long-range setthement policy, as opposed simply to negotiating random sales or loans as they became

necessary. The new policy committed the Sudmark itself to purchasing properties as they became available in specific places and then

to finding suitable settlers who might purchase the properties from the organization at a discounted price. After this point both the income and the financial obligations of the Sudmark grew rapidly, mostly because of the highly touted settkement policy. From 1908 through the first half of 1914 annual income rose from 450,000 to almost 600,000 crowns, the endowment almost doubled (from 770,000 to 1,400,000 crowns), and annual expenditures for the setthkement program ranged from 106,000 (1913) to 245,600 crowns (1911)."

The Setting Where and how was this money to be spent? Once again we might note the way the name “St. Egydi” recurs with a kind of teleological certainty in the Sudmark history. In 1889, as noted earlier, the village had provided the setting for the organization’s mythic founding. In that same year Egon von Pistor, listed as “landowner and mayor of St. Egydi / Sv. Ij,” had been one of the few village politicians elected to the first governing board of the Sudmark (most were urban deputies

to the Parliament or diets from the cities of Graz, Klagenfurt, and Vienna). In 1895 the organization had sent financial relief to the village after hail had severely damaged the harvest. The village had long constituted a potentially favorable place to start a settlement program. St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj already housed a German School Association private school dating back to 1889 that served increasingly as a

110 Reluctant Colonists magnet to parents throughout the region who wanted a German education for their children.'? In September 1905, however, and for the first time in recent memory, German nationalists suffered a political defeat of great symbolic significance in elections to the village council.

The Slovene nationalist party managed to win control of both the second and third curiae in village elections and thereby wrest political

control of the village from the German nationalist party. Given the particulars of a curial voting system based on property ownership, the

Slovene nationalists normally won the third curia and the German nationalists normally won the first, giving each side four “safe” seats on the village council and making the second curia the location for serious political contest. In 1905 the Slovene nationalist sweep of the second curia gave that party a two-thirds majority of eight to four in the council. The political defeat lent considerable urgency to the settlement question.'®

In 1900 the village of St. Egydi / Sv. Il} covered an area of about 1,400 acres of land on steep hills, and most of its 127 houses and farms were dispersed well away from the single main road. Although three of the holdings could be classified as Grossgrundbesitz, most land was owned and farmed by single families. Along with viniculture and

fruit, the villagers raised pigs (266) and cattle (3380 head). In 1900 the village population of 715 (503 Slovene speakers, 201 German speakers, and the rest undetermined) was strictly Roman Catholic. The village boasted a small church built 100 years earlier, two savings and loan cooperatives, two regional primary schools (one in Slovene provided by the community and one private school supported by the German School Association, both with six classes), four gendarmes, and one physician. The Sudbahn railway that linked Vienna and Graz to the cities of the south passed just below St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj at Egydi Tunnel, where the village boasted a regional post office and later a small station. ‘The presence of the Sudbahn not only made the village

more accessible to the outside world (both to settlers and later to visitors), but also created more and varied economic opportunities within the village. Local fruit growers, for example, developed close trade relationships with buyers in Graz. Within the village, too, the presence of the railway eventually brought a station, two inns, and some small pubs on the main road, along with several Sudbahn employees."*

Reluctant Colonists 111 St. Egydi / Sv. Ij was the largest community in the Windische Buhel. This picturesque region of steep hills, vineyards, forests, and orchards

overlooking Marburg/Maribor and the Drau/Drava Valley to the south separated that urban German-language island from the more homogeneously German-speaking rural territories to the north on the Mur/Mura River. As such, the village was well positioned geographically to anchor a future settkement program that sought to “reconnect” the two German-speaking regions. The actual distances that separated St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj from Marburg/ Maribor to the south (twelve kilometers) and majority-German Spielfeld/Spilje to the north (five kilometers) were relatively small and thus made the Sudmark goal of creating a linguistic bridge seem realistic enough. “Whether we maintain or lose this village will signify the difference between preserving access to the threatened city of Marburg from the German-language region of Middle Styria or being locked out.” If St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj was alternately imagined to be a linguistic gateway or a bridge between Spielfeld/Spilje and Marburg/ Maribor, then Mahrenberg/Radlje to

the west anchored the second point on this triangular setthement project that envisioned the Germanization of the entire Drau/Drava Valley to the south and east. And although by 1914, 85 percent of the Sudmark’s settlers had been placed on farms in the Windische Buhel, the remaining 15 percent, nine families with about forty-five mem-

bers, were located in the Drau/Drava Valley around Mahrenberg/ Radlje.

Sudmark leaders judged that the immigration of a relatively small number of new German-speaking settlers both to St. Egydi / Sv. Ih and to the surrounding hamlets would suffice to change the political

balance of power there decisively. As setthement subcommittee chairman Karl Frais reported retrospectively in 1911, “[At the time] our task seemed to be to put as much land in German hands as necessary in order to regain the majority for the Germans in the next [local] election.”'° Clearly behind Sudmark colonial idealism there lurked a more practical concern to achieve the maximum possible effect as quickly as possible. ‘The German speakers would not exactly

need to outnumber the Slovene speakers in the St. Egydi / Sv. Ih region in order to proclaim success. They would simply need to own

enough property to be able to outvote them. Once the German nationalists had ensured their political control of villages in the region,

112 Reluctant Colonists so their thinking went, then demographic success, the provision of a lasting German majority, would more easily follow. In 1904 the Sudmark spent its first significant sum in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij: 28,000 crowns to build an inn on the main road not far from the railway station. Called the Sudmarkhof, this establishment came to serve as a social center for the German nationalist and settler communities in the region, as an occasional place of worship for the region’s Protestant newcomers, and as a starting point for curious visitors traveling to the region. The Sudmarkhof housed several local German clubs, such as the gymnastics association, and it offered hot meals to children from the region who attended the local German School Association school and who lived too far away to permit them to return home for the midday meal. With the relative success of this first venture, the Sudmark proceeded to buy up several hundred acres of farmland, and in 1907 the organization was able to settle the first three German-speaking families there.'®

The Settlers The Sudmark rarely found an immediate purchaser for land already on the market, and the number of potential sales far outnumbered the number of ready buyers from outside the region. The association often found itself forced to buy land as it became available and then to hold it while it sought suitable settler families to buy it. In cases such as this, the association also did not necessarily resell the land in exactly the same condition as it had bought it. Often the Sudmark

bought plots of land that it then redivided or consolidated before resale. Sudmark leaders strongly believed that only midsize farms (thirty yokes or about forty-three acres) were appropriate to their pur-

poses, since anything larger would require the help of hired hands who the organization feared would normally be low-wage Slovene speakers. In addition, the Sudmark magazine never tired of reporting to its readers that considerable funds had to be invested in land formerly occupied by Slovene farmers before Germans could be settled there. Alleging that the previous Slavic owners left their houses in

utter disrepair and their fields and vineyards in a condition approaching ruin, the Sudmark claimed that it had to repair the damage

done by previous Slovene owners before offering the property for resale.'”

Reluctant Colonists 113 In order to encourage their move to South Styria, the Sudmark offered settlers various financial enticements. It promised to offset their mortgages by making them an interest-free loan, the amount to be determined by the size of the plot and the size of the settler family. The Sudmark also reimbursed the settlers for half of their moving costs. Finally, depending on the quality of the weather and the first year’s harvest, the Sudmark might agree to pay the first year’s taxes

or the mortgage interest on the farm. In return, settlers agreed to give the Sudmark the right of first refusal on the resale of the farm. This last condition was meant to ensure some means of redress against any settler who might “show himself to be unreliable in a volkisch sense” and would at least prevent the land from ever falling back into the hands of the national enemy. Still, as the Sudmark pointed out,

the greatest guarantee of national victory over time would be the volkisch conduct of the settlers themselves. This made the question of who was to settle on this land all the more important.'®

On the surface, the only requirement for settlers was that they be good Germans. Yet this apparently simple condition was harder to fill than might at first be imagined, and in fact it was really only one of several important considerations. In the early years especially, with no experience to guide its policies, the Sudmark often misjudged settler candidates and the conditions under which they were brought to the area. These failures were, of course, only related much later by Sudmark publications, well after the venture’s subsequent successes had justified its early failures. As late as 1914, however, the Sudmark was still finding it necessary to bring a lawsuit against a settler couple from

Baden who had exploited the association and refused to make their promised payments.'%

All candidates for farms had to be farmers themselves and had to agree to occupy the land with their families. The organization did not want to sell land to urban absentee landlords who might then sublet

it to Slovene families, for example. Given the nature of the fruit, grape-growing, and wine industries, farmers also had to bring a considerably specialized knowledge to the venture, and this by definition caused the Sudmark organizers to limit their recruitment efforts to farmers from specific regions where similar conditions prevailed. Although they were able to attract some settlers from the grape-growing

regions of Lower Austria, understandably, few farmers wanted to abandon their holdings in that comparatively more prosperous re-

114 Reluctant Colonists gion. When farmers did agree to move from Lower Austria to Styria, the Sudmark feared that intrepid Czech-speaking farmers might subsequently occupy their former land in Lower Austria, thereby feeding

a new nationalist threat. The same type of problem held true for German-speaking farmers from the South Tyrol / Trentino who also knew something about grapes, but whose place, it was feared, might be taken by Italian vintners from the south. German-speaking farmers in Hungary offered another possible source of settler farmers well schooled in viniculture, but (ironically) several legal barriers hindered their easy emigration from Hungary to Austria. So the Sudmark worked to attract settlers from wine-producing areas in West Germany, particularly from Wurttemberg (so-called Swabians from the region around Heilbrunn). This particular determination brought with it further unexpected

challenges. In the first place, simply resettling German-speaking farmers would not alter the local political balance of power until those settlers had gained full citizenship status. Settlers from Germany had

to undergo an application process that often took years before they earned the right to vote in local elections. A far greater challenge to their successful integration, however, was the fact that the immigrants from southwest Germany were Protestants. This meant that some pro-

vision had to be made for their ability to worship, since this region of Austria had not seen a Protestant since the seventeenth century. More important, however, the religious issue fed the ongoing political controversies between the Sudmark and its many critics in the Catholic press and the Catholic political parties (both German Social Catholics and Slovene Catholic Populists). All accused the Sudmark from

the start of attempting to convert the region both by means of its settlement policy and by promoting Georg von Schonerer’s antiCatholic Los von Rom movement.

The Sudmark spent much effort to counter these accusations. On the surface, the organization justified settling Protestants in the region with familiar arguments about the difficulty of finding farmers who were both knowledgeable about vineyards and also German nationalists. The Sudmark steadfastly denied any political or religious preferences in finding good German candidates for setthkement. Yet the Sudmark’s long tradition of lambasting local Catholic clerics for their apparently Slav nationalist sympathies meant that at least im-

Reluctant Colonists 115 plicitly, its own rhetoric partially confirmed the accusations of its critics. In a 1908 article explaining why so many of the settlers were Protestants, the organization conceded that Protestant settlers were less likely to come under the powerful influence of the local Catholic Church. The article defended Sudmark policy in part by recounting

tales of Catholic German renegades in St. Egydi / Sv. Il) who had switched nations because of the overpowering influence of their church. These examples are worth examining in greater detail since they expose the ideological gap between nationalists’ expectations about German identity and the real ways such identity issues actually functioned in the context of village life. When in 1908 the Catholic Linzer Volksblatt accused the Sudmark of advertising in Reich German newspapers for specifically Protestant families to resettle in Styria, the organization found it necessary to

explain in more explicit terms just why the local Catholic Church represented such a danger to Sudmark efforts. In reply, the organization claimed that in fact, until this ttme, as many Catholic families had been resettled in St. Egydi as Protestant ones. The organization conceded that although religion should not have been a consideration in choosing settlers, nevertheless, the behavior of the local priests had made it into a concern: “We might add, unfortunately, that one

of the [recently] settled Catholic family fathers was elected to the village council as a substitute deputy, and he went over to the Slovene

camp ...As long as the Slovene priests spend all their time thinking about how to destroy Germanness [Deutschtum] and engaging in subversive Slovene agitation rather than thinking about religion, then the

settlement of so dangerously threatened a place as Egydi with only Catholic families has to be a volkisch consideration.””° The article compared the Slovene nationalist efforts of the Catholic Church in South Styria with the Polonizing activities of the church in Prussian Posen/Poznan, where German Catholic peasant settlers from

Bamberg in the west had supposedly been won over by their church to the Polish cause. On a smaller scale, claimed the Sudmark, the very same thing was occurring in St. Egydi. Statistically, over two-thirds of the villagers might claim Slovene as their language of daily use. Yet with names like Hammer, Baumann, Baumgartner, Lenz, Thaler, or Zelzer, noted the Sudmark, some of the most fanatic local Slovene nationalists clearly descended from German-speaking parents and

116 Reluctant Colonists grandparents who had been led astray by fanatic local priests. One Catholic settler “seduced” by Slovene fanatics whose families had allegedly originally been Germans themselves suggested that dangerous

anti-German forces were hard at work in the village. The Sudmark did not need to mention that it would take a considerable force to persuade someone to give up something as precious as his national identity, yet this implicit assumption runs throughout these and the following stories about national renegades. Entwined with arguments about the pernicious pro-Slovene influence of the church came arguments based on expectations regarding linguistic fairness. Nationalists of all kinds throughout the monarchy had deployed these familiar arguments for decades. In this case the Sudmark added the point often made by German nationalists (and to a lesser extent by Italians when they argued against Slovenes) that their outsize cultural and financial contributions to the local community earned them an even greater right to be heard. With only a third of the population (although the Sudmark claimed that at least half of the self-styled Slovenes actually knew German as well), the German speakers in St. Egydi / Sv. [lj nevertheless paid two-thirds of all village taxes. Yet, despite repeated petitions to the diocese, only Slovene was preached from the pulpit there.?' And how, asked the Sudmark, returning to the fairness argument, could one in good conscience persuade German Catholic families to settle in a region where they would receive no spiritual guidance in their own language? The organization repeatedly petitioned the bishop in Marburg to provide St. Egydi / Sv. Ij with a German priest (in itself a useful propaganda measure), but these requests had gone unanswered. With a German-

speaking priest, opined the Sudmark, the situation would be much different, and Catholics would settle in St. Egydi without hesitation.” The same issues arose repeatedly in the next few years, and in 1910 the Sudmark sued the Catholic Grazer Volksblatt and several other Catholic newspapers successfully for libel after articles published in De-

cember 1909 had accused the Sudmark of promoting a Protestant, specifically Los von Rom, agenda. The Volksblait had portrayed the Sud-

mark Subcommittee for Settlement issues in dangerously conspiratorial terms. “All the members of the setthkement committee are without exception new [recently converted] Protestant loyalists of Los von Rom.”* It further charged that these members consistently com-

Reluctant Colonists 117 municated with a network of Los von Rom pastors. The Linzer Volksblatt added that contributions made by largely Catholic farmers to the Sud-

mark paid Protestant renegade pastors to travel to Germany in order to entice foreign Protestants to move to Austria: “There are enough upstanding German farmer sons in the alpine lands who would gladly move to the regions that the Sudmark wants to settle. They would also bring with them their small fortunes and could ensure themselves a secure existence with minimal aid. But the Sudmark does not want to hear anything about them because they are Catholics!”** The Sudmark’s Central Committee responded pointedly and pub-

licly to these accusations, reminding its critics that not every upstanding German farmer son knew how to tend a vineyard. It conceded that it could indeed settle Austrian vine growers in South Styria, but warned that “this would remove them from Lower Austria or the Tyrol, where in the former case Czechs and in the latter case Italians

would then [gain the opportunity] to immigrate.” Finally, the committee pointed out that since its founding, 95 percent of the financial donations it had made had gone to Catholics.”° In yet another article defending itself from attacks by the Linzer Volksblatt, the Sudmark Central Committee answered further charges,

for example, that the setthement program had inflated land prices severely, or that the Sudmark had spent most of its money facilitating property transfers from German families to other German families. To the first accusation the committee replied that some inflation was an inevitable accompanying phenomenon, given that both Germans and Slovenes consistently attempted to bid for the same properties. Nevertheless, the inflation was not nearly as serious as the offending articles had charged, as anyone who examined the public sales records might judge for himself. (Here the Sudmark did not address a related concern occasionally raised by association members themselves, namely, that even “good German” sellers might inflate their

asking price, knowing that the Sudmark would guarantee the purchase.) In the case of German-to-German sales, the Sudmark responded that even these transfers must be viewed as lost opportunities for would-be Slovene purchasers and therefore constituted a real national gain and not simply a financially wasteful preservation of the national status quo.?’

The rest of the article addressed the allegations of anti-Catholic

118 Reluctant Colonists conspiracy. The arguments used here went into even greater detail about how the villagers themselves treated questions of national selfidentification than had the previous articles. Where previously the Sudmark had only hinted at the larger phenomenon of national renegades, here it gave more specific examples. Here also, once again, nationalist sources unintentionally betray significant information about the degree to which rural populations had decidedly not become nationalized by 1900. The Sudmark article began by rebutting one assertion in particular made by a certain Dr. Mayr on behalf of the Linzer Volksblait during the recent trial. Mayr had argued that the inhabitants of the German alpine lands already had a strong-enough sense of their national identity to resist being Slavicized, and he used the example of the Germans

of the South Tyrol who for centuries had fended off all attempts to Italianize the region. Wrong, proclaimed the Sudmark. Germans had suffered substantial losses in the South Tyrol. But to the extent that this had not been the case, it was due to the accomplishment of priests

in the Tyrol who prized their German identity. After all, it was the writings of a priest in the South Tyrol that had inspired the founding of the German School Association in 1880, and thirty years later countless priests continued to work both for the School Association and for the Tiroler Volksbund. The situation was far different in South

Styria, where, according to the Sudmark, not a single Germanspeaking priest served the needs of some 52,000 Germans in the Marburg diocese alone.”® The article then elaborated the real problem with settling Catholic farmers in St. Egydi. Catholics naturally sought out the local priest for advice and counsel on all kinds of issues, just as they had back in their

German Heimat. They had always let themselves be influenced on political and national issues by him. But now their local priest happened to be a Slovene nationalist who not only heard confession in Slovene, but who also supported the Slovene nationalist political cause. “The priesthood in these regions is not only Slovene by birth, but also by conviction. It not only speaks Slovene, it also seeks to Slovenize. Thanks to it, we have seen repeatedly that Catholic immi-

grants to the southern language frontiers from the other alpine regions in a short time are lost to the Slovenes.” The article actually

cited the names of former Germans in St. Egydi and surrounding

Reluctant Colonists 119 hamlets who had recently become Slovene, including three originally Tyrolean farmer families (Lutz, Tappeiner, and Massenauer) where “the parents remained Germans; their children, however, had become bilingual, and their grandchildren are—Slovene.” A 1911 Sudmark

article complained that when priests in the region had urged their parishioners to list themselves as Slovene in the 1910 census, some “nationally weak Germans,” including one from the German section of northern Styria, had listed the Slovene language on the census form.” The Sudmark named other reasons for nationalist betrayals by Germans, especially the problem of mixed marriages (Muischheiraten), to

explain how the process of denationalization worked. In 1904, for example, a farmer from the Tyrol had moved to St. Egydi with his wife, who hailed from Salzburg (“both good Germans”). When her husband died, the desperate wife had turned to the Sudmark for financial help, and the organization had stood by her. Hardly had her farm been saved, however, when the widow married a Slovene, and now the property was in Slovene hands. Another settler named Girlinger from Upper Austria, who had never even learned Slovene, nev-

ertheless fell under the influence of the Slovene priest in town, socialized with Slovenes, voted for the Slovene party in village elections,

and sold his farm to a Slovene. “Yes, even the very first settler that the Sudmark brought in—it was a Catholic from Westphalia in the German Reich, no less—fell into the Slovene net to such an extent that when he died, the Slovene newspapers referred to him as one of the ‘righteous Germans.’ ” No wonder the Sudmark had turned to Protestant settlers from Germany. Clearly their religious affiliation helped guarantee their Germanness. Their “religious differences will in most cases prevent them from mixing with Slovenes.” Apparently, religious differences were of such a high order in the village that they trumped language differences in terms of organizing social life. ‘The Sudmark could only fantasize that someday German speakers might take their national affiliation as seriously as Protestants and Catholics took their religious affiliation. It is possible, of course, to explain such apparent phenomena as “national renegades” without resorting to the conspiratorial trope of the nationalist priest. To the extent that the supposed national renegade constituted a phenomenon at all (outside the nationalist world-

120 Reluctant Colonists view), such a person’s behavior may simply signify that there were less

clearly or differently defined “nations” in villages. The normal dynamics of village life may offer far better terms for understanding what to the nationalist appeared to be conscious behavior, and what to the individual may have had little to do with choice between one nationality or another. If the priest spoke Slovene, if much local socializing occurred in Slovene, and if German speakers married into Slovene-speaking families, clearly this was a functionally bilingual so-

ciety. Whether those nationally “in-between” people occasionally affiliated themselves with one nation or another, whether they in fact

had become national renegades, only mattered at those few times such as elections when the act of voting demanded national affiliation. At such moments the “in-between” citizen might well be swayed to one side or the other, yet more for reasons of local contingency than

because of a feeling of loyalty to a nation or a language that outweighed other potential loyalties. The real accomplishment of the Sudmark in the places where it was active may simply have been to increase the politicization of village life that made national affiliation and the choice to use one language or another critical in far more situations. The Sudmark could bring in all the settlers it wanted, but

this effort would be in vain if it did not at the same time alter the perceptions of local society about language and identity in some fundamental ways.

Nationalist accounts about renegades also confirm the frequently self-contradictory ideological terms in which activists defined national

belonging or allegiance, depending on the opportunity of the moment. As noted earlier, Sudmark activists often wrote about the differences that separated Slovene and German treatment of the land, as if to reinforce the belief that such moral differences were indeed visible to the naked eye. “We have had to expend much diligence and effort to improve the soil so badly neglected by the previous Slovene owners,” wrote a group of settlers from St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj in the Sudmark’s magazine in 1914.*° “Slovene farming techniques are utterly backward and defective, and Slovene neglect of their own houses requires that the Sudmark invest considerable sums for improvements and even raise new buildings,” reported the subcommittee on settlement in 1912.°' A visitor from Berlin recounted that local settlers had complained to him about the deficiencies of Slovene farming. “|The

Reluctant Colonists 121 Sudmark] must often rebuild their houses from the foundations up, since the German master race [| Herrenmensch| can not live in a pigsty the way the Slav does. The Slovenes are ignorant about how to treat

this land and often simply let it become a wilderness, a fact that I heard a lot of settlers here sigh about... Here in the southeast there is land aplenty, only up until now, [it has been] deficiently farmed. It is only waiting for a recolonization by the Germans to change all that.”*?

At the same time, however, the Sudmark also characterized many Slovene nationalist activists as descended from German parents or grandparents and pointed to mixed marriages as a means by which Germans were converted to Slovenes. Sudmark activists too were often eager to welcome any assimilating Slovenes into the German

fold and to suggest that without the pernicious influence of the church in particular, Slovenes might even assimilate in greater numbers. Differences between cultures may have been visible to the discerning eye, and the arrival of German settlers may have improved the landscape in a moral sense. Still, members of either culture might at any moment renounce their allegiance to one side, join the other side, and somehow assimilate the cultural markers that their new allegiance entailed. In making this admission, the Sudmark implicitly conceded the ultimate impossibility of evaluating the depth of a potential settler’s German nationalist conviction. These internal ideological contradictions reinforce a sense that nationalists operated in a fundamentally opportunistic environment, rather than according to abstract imperatives. Despite their insistence on the naturalness and normality of national differences, political

goals clearly trumped most arguments about national purity in shaping policy. It is also clear from the example of the Sudmark that the specific range of this opportunistic environment was shaped by local concerns and was therefore limited in some directions. Going back to the organization’s founding, but particularly after its adoption of the Aryan clause in 1907, for example, Jews clearly had no place in the Sudmark and were even figured as dangerous enemies to the nation. The Sudmark’s harshly anti-Semitic tone does not reflect ideological inflexibility so much as the fact that issues of Jewish mem-

bership or support made little difference in the particular regions where the Sudmark operated. It therefore could afford to make strong

122 Reluctant Colonists anti-Semitic ideological pronouncements and stick to them. This was also far different from the situation in many other nationalist organizations where the same spectrum of opportunism was often determined by the very role played by Jewish members or Jewish institu-

tions in the functioning of the nation. This is not to say that nationalist organizations in regions with a substantial Jewish presence (Bohemia, Moravia, Lower Austria, Galicia, and the Bukovina) could not afford to be anti-Semitic. On the contrary, anti-Semitism was often invoked by one nationalist organization in those regions to challenge the nationalist credentials of another. It does, however, demonstrate

some ways in which ideological flexibility and a certain amount of local opportunism shaped the policies of interregional organizations, even those such as the Sudmark that appeared to profess extremely defined ideas about the differences among national groups. Far more troublesome to the Sudmark’s settlement policy than potential ideological differences over long-term goals, such as the assimilation of Slovene populations, was its specific focus on St. Egydi / Sv. Ij. As early as 1909 some members began to complain that altogether too much money was being spent in Styria, specifically on the Windische Buhel. According to the grumblers, funds ought to have been

invested in other regions as well. Even some members from South Styria doubted the wisdom of a policy to extend the purely Germanspeaking territories to Marburg/Maribor while ignoring the desperate needs of more isolated German-language islands such as Cilli/Celje, Pettau/Ptui, and Rann/Brezice. In 1911, as a result, the Sudmark’s annual convention voted to change the focus of the settlement policy. From now on the organization was supposed to intercede more aggressively in specific cases either to find purchasers for particular plots

of land as they became available or to make loans and subsidize interest on mortgages for potential purchasers. But the Sudmark should no longer rely primarily on making its own land purchases, as it had been doing in the Windische Buhel and the Drau/Drava Valley. By a vote of 1,579 to 408, the delegates to the annual convention at Cilli/ Celje passed the following resolution: “The delegates demand that the Central Committee limit the settLement activities in St. Egydi to only those deemed most necessary to secure and maintain the land already won and to give greater attention to securing threatened German-

speaking regions in Carinthia, South Styria and the other regions where the Sudmark is active.”*®

Reluctant Colonists 123 Only a year later, at its convention in Salzburg, however, the Sudmark membership backpedaled and decided to modify this decision

in order to renew its existing settkement work while aiding other threatened regions more actively. The issue of an aggressive, if expensive, setthement policy could not be laid to rest precisely because it had become such a propaganda success. As we will see later, the Sudmark used St. Egydi effectively to promote its greater vision of

German rural settkements. Never mind the fact that the exorbitant sums expended on this policy had brought the organization close to financial crisis and severely limited its other options. The fact was that St. Egydi offered a tangible example of nationalist success in a war that produced very few victories. To offset the policy’s heavy financial drain, the Sudmark planned to found a Beszedlungs-und Bodenschutz bank with a starting capital of 2 million crowns. It was hoped that this bank, later renamed Deutschosterreichische Bodenbank, would function as a financial appendage to the Sudmark, lending money to specifically volkisch causes. ‘The outbreak of war, however, prevented the

realization of this initiative that had been planned for the fall of 1914.*4

Expanding Visions: Artisans, Proletarians, and Retirees on the Frontier Even before 1911 the subcommittee for setthkement had been expanding its efforts to connect sellers with appropriate purchasers ( Vermittlung) and in doing so had greatly expanded the target populations

deemed appropriate for setthement. Now the committee actively attempted to settle artisans, workers, and even retirees. ‘This expansion was linked in part to an emerging ideological concern expressed in Sudmark circles that urbanization and flight from the land hurt the German nation not only statistically, but also morally. It was important, according to the Sudmark, to maintain a strong farming popu-

lation as the backbone of the nation. Predictably, this ideological predilection for maintaining and strengthening a rural way of life, at least as practiced by Germans, was also meant to diminish the dangers to Germans of deleterious urban lifestyles. During the last years before 1914 the Sudmark published a variety of articles that warned against several kinds of threats to national

hygiene, most of which could be traced to the ill effects of urban

124 Reluctant Colonists living. Among the most frequently observed problems were overall declines in family size, a typical concern for European nationalists of

the period, and more specifically in the Sudmark, the imagined spread of alcoholism. Attempts to build up and strengthen rural communities of German speakers after 1900 assumed a new moral imperative that exceeded the traditional emphasis on the benefit to the land of having knowledgeable and diligent German farmers work it.

Now, in a development typical again of nationalist conservatives throughout Europe, the concept of a healthy rural life replaced former images of rural ignorance and backwardness. This new rural ideal was increasingly constructed in opposition to the imagined negative effects of urban living. According to Sudmark ideology, German farmers had always been welcome on the language frontier. Now it was hoped that several other social groups would follow them.*°

In its 1911 report the subcommittee on setthement urged local branches on the language frontiers to send it detailed reports on what kinds of artisans or Handwerker could best be settled in their town or village and what kind of demand existed for their services. If the right

conditions for their economic survival were present, the Sudmark would attempt to find willing German artisans to settle on the language frontier, but the report noted at the same time that the biggest obstacle to their resettlement was a scarcity of existing workshops and housing. ‘The Sudmark could not easily find artisans with the kind of capital necessary to build new workshops for themselves. ‘The subcommittee also blamed the attitude of local Sudmark activists who made

far too little effort to solve the problem of housing in particular. In 1911 the subcommittee reported that eleven potential resettlements had failed precisely because of these deficiencies. As with farmers, the problem was frequently one of timing. It was difficult to coordinate

the needs of potential new settlers in the short amount of time necessary to respond to property sales as they arose. Nevertheless, the subcommittee reported that it had resettled seventeen artisan families in 1911, ten in South Styria, two in Carinthia, one in Abbazia/Opatija, and four in threatened sections of Lower Austria. The subcommittee regretted that it had not as yet succeeded in attracting younger families with more children to the language frontier and that the artisans it had settled were relatively older and had fewer children. The families settled in 1911 ranged in number from one to seven people each, with most at three or four.*®

Reluctant Colonists 125 Just what was meant by “more children” was clear from the subcommittee’s report on resettling workers’ families, one of which boasted

ten children. In the case of factory workers or manual laborers, the Sudmark tended to rely (along with several other German nationalist organizations) on the work of German nationalist labor exchanges in Vienna. The organization noted that bringing workers to the language frontier was essential because otherwise those ubiquitous Slav workers, ever ready to migrate to an industrializing region, would dominate local employment. The Sudmark also claimed that while it was relatively easy to Germanize Slav workers who migrated to predominantly German-speaking regions, those who worked on the lan-

guage frontier tended stubbornly to remain Slav in sympathies. Having German workers there would be decisive in helping win the national battle. In 1911 the subcommittee reported that it had resettled six workers’ families, one near Pettau/Ptui, one factory worker

near Cilli/Celje, and four construction workers in Pragerhof/Pragersko. The Sudmark envisioned great potential for building up a German community in Pragerhof/Pragersko. The town lay to the south of Marburg/ Maribor and was an important railway junction that

connected the Sudbahn (north-south) line with an eastern line to Budapest. The railway employed many blue-collar and white-collar workers, and the German School Association had recently built a school there.*’

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of this expanded land-settlement policy was the Sudmark’s attempt to market the language frontier as a suitable place for older German speakers to retire. In 1909 the Sudmark magazine published an article promoting this very scheme and signed by “a non-Styrian who would like to spend his final years in South Styria.” The author reminded readers that a great number of retirees from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia already made a practice of moving to Graz in order to live out their retirement years in a place with a milder climate, excellent services, and generally lower prices. In fact, Graz had already gained a reputation as a center for retirees (a Pensionopolis) in the mid-nineteenth century. Sull, Graz was

not for everyone, especially retirees of lesser means, reminded the author, and not all retirees preferred to live out their years in a city. “Many a [lesser] civil servant, many a teacher, many a German laborer who has saved for his whole life, none has a greater wish than to live out his last years in his own cottage with a pretty garden.” The author

126 Reluctant Colonists pointed out that South Styria had beautiful landscapes, a mild climate,

and a low cost of living, and he suggested that the Sudmark create comfortable resting places for older national comrades and thereby increase the German population there. Not only could older Germans serve their nation in their declining years, but they would also bring added business for German artisans, builders, and pub owners. Finally, the article called on the Sudmark to found a building corporation that could buy up small plots of land, build garden cottages, and then advertise for retirees.** How seriously the Sudmark adopted the suggestion of settling re-

tirees in the Windische Buhel is unclear. Given the financial drain created by its other setthkement commitments, the organization was certainly not about to assume the added burden of building retirement cottages. Nevertheless, the idea itself clearly merited consideration, as subsequent annual reports by the settlement subcommittee made clear. If retirees could be induced to move to the language frontier at minimal cost to the Sudmark, so much the better. After all, given their retirement funds, not only did they contribute consistently to the local economy, but more important, their property holdings and citizenship rights usually qualified them immediately for the vote. In 1911 the subcommittee reported that the settkement of retirees had been attempted for the first time, but with minimal success. The Sudmark had received thirty-two inquiries from interested parties and had forwarded these to local branches for information about potential sale properties or rentals. However, there appeared to be very

few if any suitable properties for retirees on the language frontier. Farms were clearly inappropriate for this purpose since most retirees sought only small garden-style cottages either to rent or to purchase. Not surprisingly, such suburban-style housing was as yet unknown in most rural villages in South Styria. In the end, only four of the original thirty-two applicants could actually be settled. Stull, the subcommittee

noted that the recent passage of housing legislation had led to the founding of building societies both in Cilli/Celje and Lichtenwald/ Sevnica, and these might well produce the kind of smaller houses that would facilitate the future setthement of retirees.*° Despite such harsh realities, the Sudmark continued to market the

concept of retirement on the language frontier, noting in a 1912 article that a retired German couple would only need upwards of 3,000 crowns in savings to buy a nice cottage with a garden in several

Reluctant Colonists 127 villages.*° Another article attempted to allay any fears potential settlers

might experience about living out their final years in a region the Sudmark itself had so often characterized as a nationalist battleground. The Sudmark had spent much of its propaganda arsenal trying to convince readers of the immediacy of nationalist conflict. Now, in something of a reversal, it attempted to banish the fears reluctant retirees might harbor about living in what had been depicted as a war zone. Retirees were assured that they would not have to face any personal danger themselves should they decide to move to the frontier “since most settlements are already safely in German hands

or have a strong German minority.” In addition, since the nonGerman “peasants depend economically on the Germans, outwardly, at least, they maintain a friendly demeanor.” Furthermore, “acts of

violence and street fighting...almost never happen here without some outside provocation and are limited to those places that are breeding grounds of anti-German agitation.”*! Reassuring words indeed for elderly Germans looking to apply their gardening skills to a small plot of land in the golden south.

Marketing an Icon: The First Nationalist Theme Park The setthement program was an enormous source of pride for the Sudmark, despite the serious financial burden and the political challenges it created. After the first few confused years of the program, the organization embarked on something of a propaganda campaign that attempted to place the St. Egydi / Sv. Ij colony at the very center

of German nationalist efforts throughout the empire, indeed, throughout Europe. Sudmark writers set their remarkable accomplishment alongside those of Frederick the Great of Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, and especially the contemporary Germanization programs in East Prussia begun under Bismarck. Each of these great men of the past had struggled to develop a successful settLement policy for Ger-

mans in the East. The Sudmark had matched their efforts and had done so without any support from the state. “It was,” recalled subcommittee chairman Karl Frais in 1908, “a daring undertaking, to try to accomplish that which powerful princes had attempted in the Middle

Ages or what in our days the Prussian State had begun under Bismarck’s leadership using the modest means of an association.” Once the Sudmark opened the Sudmarkhof in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij, it

128 Reluctant Colonists initiated a policy of inviting members and curious visitors to visit the

village and see for themselves just how the settlement policy had changed the region. This public promotion of St. Egydi / Sv. Tj served a complex set of purposes. In the first place, the Sudmark wanted to provide some kind of visible justification to the membership

for the enormous resources it was spending on the project. At the same time, the organization clearly hoped that visitors to this friendly outpost on the language frontier would gain a new understanding of the immediacy of the supposed national struggle there. For even the most nationalist of German speakers from the more homogeneously German-speaking territories of the north, the Sudmark’s constant reports, warnings, and dire prophesies could assume an abstract quality when they were consumed so far away from sites of open conflict. “One should study the national conflict on the language frontier on the basis of one’s own observation,” wrote one enthusiastic visitor to the region in 1911.* In his annual report that year Karl Frais noted, “Opinions may differ [on the effectiveness of the program], but no

one who has actually visited the place and investigated it has ever denied that a good piece of German work has been accomplished here that the Sudmark can [proudly] show the rest of the world.” A visit to St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj might fire the visitor’s imagination with the potential for future German settlement and increase the activist—

or financial/philanthropic—impulse once the visitor had returned home. The Sudmark frequently claimed as well that visits from other Germans would help strengthen the spirit and resolve of the besieged Germans on the frontier. Ultimately, however, the visit to St. Egydi / Sv. Il] served a much deeper purpose. The apparently innocent act of showing visitors around the village enabled the Sudmark to create the very nationalist society—along with the nationalist conflict it entailed—in microcosm. After decades of promoting a belief in the importance of nationalist identity to daily life, the Sudmark could finally illustrate that proposition through visits to its own model nationalist community. The Sudmark only existed because of the nationalist fears

shared by specific elements in Austrian society, but not generally shared by a majority of Austrians. Most Austrians did not live their lives according to the overwhelming demands of nationalist activists. Even those Austrians who did admit the importance of nation rarely did so with the strength of conviction and consistency of action de-

Reluctant Colonists 129 manded by institutions such as the Sudmark or the nationalist press. The literate and loud minority that believed in nations and perceived the importance of national conflict in everyday life warned that those who did not take sides would eventually be swallowed up by the conflict. St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj offered a world in which nationalist activism, nationalist choices, and nationalist commitment permeated daily life in the way in which nationalists believed that it should throughout the monarchy. Its caricatured portrayal of reality made it the ideal nationalist theme park. Not only did the village provide nationalists with a tangible microcosm of their worldview; it also served as a graphic illustration of several moral elements of German nationalist ideology. Visitors to St. Egydi / Sv. Ij were provided by the Sudmark or by villagers with the proper lens through which to understand what they saw. The testimonies from visitors betray the helpful context provided by Sudmark guides and members of local German associations. Every visitor reported that on the surface, for example, the village and its surroundings appeared to be prosperous, neatly laid-out, well tended, clean, orderly, and friendly. None of these qualities can be measured objectively, and all of them can only be understood in a relative sense. ‘The

benchmark against which these qualities were perceived was the former (and by now legendary) disorderly, miserable, and unfriendly Slovene past from which the Germans had rescued the village. Visitors never saw that former state (except from the distance of hillside out-

looks), but they heard about it constantly, whether from Sudmark accounts or from popular writers like Bartsch.

In 1907, when the Stidmark held its annual convention in Marburg/Maribor, the organization planned its first “mass outing” to St. Egydi / Sv. Ij to view the Sudmarkhof and survey “other properties of our association there.”* In 1909 members of the Central Committee made the first of several “inspection tours” to the village. After a hike that took them door-to-door to visit all the settlers, the members depicted the setthkement program as “healthy and valuable work.”

In 1912 economist and later president of the German Austrian Republic Michael Hainisch visited the setthkement and praised its economic success. “The impression I gained was altogether an excellent one...I consider the accomplishments achieved under the leadership of the Sudmark, despite all odds, to be highly significant.”*°

130 Reluctant Colonists More typical in the years before 1914 were the observations of nationalist travelers to the region whose detailed impressions were often quoted at great length by the Sudmark to give them maximal exposure. In 1912 one W. Frank, a German fraternity student from Berlin,

wrote an account of a trip to St. Egydi / Sv. Ij. Like other visitors, Frank spent more time describing the countryside for his readers than he did describing his impressions of the people he met there. Gazing from his window in the train from Graz, Frank already perceived the link between the moral and the nationalist significance of the natural landscape in the region. “To the south, where the Mur bends southeastward, the landscape becomes hilly; this is the Windische Buhel. Here the Slovenes have crossed the Drau, which [once] served as the language frontier.” Arriving in Egydi Tunnel, Frank stopped in the garden of the Sudmarkhof for a light breakfast, noting the small gymnastics hall next to the Hof, “where they say the local German men and boys enthusiastically tumble on Sundays.” Proceeding thus forti-

fied into the “irregularly formed hills under flowering fruit trees, through small wooded areas, across meadows, vineyards and wheat fields,” Frank found “the scattered farms, some thirty in number, that the Sudmark has put in German hands.””” After explaining the financial technicalities of the setthement program, Frank noted how difficult a challenge the settlers often faced, given the disorderly habits of the previous Slovene owners. After observations that left an impression of abundant land just waiting to be cultivated by intrepid German colonists, Frank devoted his final paragraph to impressions of the settlers themselves. “How have the settlers established themselves in their new circumstances? Despite some complaints, they seem genuinely happy with and thankful for their new properties. You notice this from the friendly welcome you receive everywhere, under shady chestnut trees or in spotless parlors, from whose walls portraits of King Karl of Wurttemberg look down on you

...A bookcase groans under the weight of the family Bible, surrounded by schoolbooks . .. Even Schiller’s poems can be found here.

The children attend the German School Association school in St. Egydi. The only regrettable thing is that it is difficult for the German

settlers to acquire citizenship. So they cannot vote in village elections.”** The equation of the German settlement with cleanliness, piety, high culture, and, above all, productive use of the land only

Reluctant Colonists 131 makes sense if it is contrasted to the miserable, sordid, uneducated, and unproductive world of the Slovenes, so close at hand and so readily available for quick contrasts. In 1913 the Berlin Association for Germandom Abroad planned an

August tour of the language frontier in southern Austria that was meant to give the participants experience of and insight into the “na-

tional situation” in the region where the Sudmark was active. The three-week trip began in Passau with a Danube cruise to Vienna. From

there the travelers made their way to Graz and then to the cities of the south: Marburg/Maribor, Cilli/Celje, Laibach/Ljubljana, Abbazia/Opatya, Pola/Pula, and Trieste, ending in Villach and Klagenfurt. Between Graz and Marburg, however, the party made a stop at St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj. There they were “warmly received and welcomed by several settlers and members of the Sudmark.” The guests were

then taken to a small chapel high in the hills from which they had an excellent view of the entire setthement region. Afterwards, in the sudmarkhof, “the ladies of St. Egydi received and served the gentlemen visitors” a breakfast, while the president of the association, parliamentary deputy Heinrich Wastian, welcomed them. Wanderlehrer

Hoyer gave them a detailed lecture about economic and social conditions in the region, ending his talk with a plea for the visitors to encourage other Germans to migrate to the region. Whether this visit produced any more settlers in the region is doubtful. More important, the Sudmark took this opportunity to strengthen its ties to the nationalist milieu in Germany and to solicit financial support. The following year the Central Committee reported that the Association for Germandom Abroad had decided to sponsor regular trips to the Austrian language frontier in the South.” In 1913 a set of visitors of an altogether different type also visited St. Egydi / Sv. Ij. It seemed that a group of students from Mannheim, seven high-school girls and five male university students (along with their chaperones), had developed a burning desire to visit the Swa-

bian colony in St. Egydi. Why? They had all read Rudolf Hans Bartsch’s Styrian Heimat novel Das deutsche Leid, quoted at the opening

of this chapter. The novel was probably the most famous single piece in a genre of which one historian has written, “['They] were read in

many families. Their influence often surpassed that of political speeches and newspapers.” The visiting students were hungry to ex-

132 Reluctant Colonists perience some of the drama of the language frontier for themselves. The group toured the area, looking down from the high hills at the part of the landscape their guide described as the “borderline.” The students engaged in “friendly national intercourse [sic] with the settlers,” participated in a choir rehearsal, and at the end of the two-day visit professed themselves highly satisfied with what they had seen and

experienced. The students promised to return soon and to encourage others from Germany to visit.°° “The beautiful landscape and the national significance of the Sudmark settlement area in St. Egydi and

in the Drau valley [have] earned it popularity as a destination for outings and trips that also have the effect of heightening public aware-

ness of and interest in the settlement program.”! This claim by the Central Committee seems to have been born out not only by accounts of travelers from far away, but also by the increased number of local visitors from the city of Marburg/Maribor, all attracted to weekend events sponsored by the Sudmarkhof. In May 1908 the Sudmarkhof announced that it had hired a new caterer and

that culinary standards at the restaurant were on the rise. In September it hosted a German Volksfest that attracted 1,000 visitors to the

Hof and its gardens. In the years before 1914 the Protestant community seems to have held weekly services in the gymnastics hall of the Sudmarkhof, and in 1913 the establishment installed an indoor bowling alley.”

Did It Make a Difference?

The enthusiastic accounts of visitors from near and far helped the Sudmark project the image of St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj as a robustly successful experiment in nationalist activism. Certainly Slovene nationalists eyed the Sudmark activities in the Windische Buhel with concern. As early

as 1908, at a time when the local Slovene party still controlled the village council in St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj, the newspaper Nas Dom caricatured the settler families as “Prussians,” complaining that “now arrogant Swabs strut about on the friendly homesteads that once housed pious Slovene farmers.” Other newspapers warned that if it were not stopped soon, the advancing tide of Germans would soon push the Slovenes back below Marburg/Maribor. Such rhetoric matched the Sudmark’s own militantly ambitious verbiage and demonstrated how

Reluctant Colonists 133 polarizing parties, intent on mobilizing their own supporters, might exaggerate the grave dangers allegedly posed by their opponents.*® In 1909 the Sudmark smugly quoted a pamphlet published by a Slovene nationalist student group that depicted the complete destruction of the Slovene communities in the Windische Buhel as the first step in a Great German march to the Adriatic. Four years later the Sudmark published a lengthy two-part article that reported the observations of A. Beg, a Wanderlehrer for the Slovene nationalist Cyril and Methodius Association. Beg spent several years traveling the Slovene-German-lItalian language frontier from Styria to Carinthia and, to Italy, writing observations, evaluating strengths and weaknesses

of various Slovene communities, and documenting German nationalist efforts in those regions as well. Describing one village in the Gai Valley, Beg observed that “German terrorism in Notsch can be attributed to a small number of innkeepers, railway employees and gendarmes. There is a branch of the Sudmark headquartered here led by the stationmaster. The Slovenes in the region are not organized at all yet; only in St. Georgen do they have a loan fund. A teacher in Saak founded a choral society in Saak and St. Georgen last spring. There are very limited financial means, and the enemy constantly stirs

up strife.” Not surprisingly, it was the branch of the Sudmark and its whitecollar supporters that gave the German nationalists the edge in this particular valley, a point the Sudmark delighted in reiterating in its commentary on the Beg report. Yet Beg had also noted the founding of a Slovene choral society and a loan fund, both of which he believed

constituted promising first steps toward combating the _betterorganized German nationalists in this region. Yet to what extent, if any, had the Sudmark settlement program in fact reshaped the demography of this region, beyond the alternately elated or dire claims made by its activists? In a period of eight years the organization had indeed financed the settlement of at least sixtyfour families or 435 people on 2,410 acres of land in seventeen communities, most of which were located in the Windische Buhel region, with the rest in the Drau/Drava Valley around Mahrenberg/Radlje. From 1906 through 1913 the organization had dedicated well over | million crowns directly to loans and land purchases; spending on set-

tlement had often come close to swallowing up 40 percent of the

134 Reluctant Colonists association’s annual income. In 1914 the Sudmark was already laying the groundwork to expand its efforts, planning to populate a linguistically mixed region of southeastern Carinthia with German settlers.°° In Sudmark terms and those of its opponents, however, these statistics hardly begin to measure the organization’s qualitative accomplishments. Far more important than the numbers of settlers was the

apparent change in local power relations, in values, and in the particular national quality of the community. A jubilant 1910 article in the organization’s magazine titled “The Battle for St. Egydi” described exactly those qualitative changes supposedly wrought by the organi-

zation. The article reported recent victories by the German party in village elections in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij and in neighboring Zirknitz/ Curknice. Not long ago, in 1905, the Slovene nationalists had celebrated victories in the second and third voting curia that had given them a majority of eight seats to four on the village council. Now the Sudmark rejoiced that the German nationalists had regained control of the council by electing three of the four deputies in the second

curla to give the Germans a total number of seven seats on the council. Fearful of potential defeat, the Slovene nationalist adminis-

tration had, according to the Sudmark, repeatedly postponed the elections. The Slovenes had supposedly used the recent centenary celebrations of the local church as an opportunity to bring in “Jesuit missionaries” who agitated for the Slovene cause. On election day several Slovene students from the University of Graz even arrived to help the Slovene nationalist party. But it was all to no avail, as the Sudmark pointed out. Taking credit for this important political victory, the organization claimed, “If today Egydi has a German majority on the village council, it is thanks to the quiet and careful work here over the past three years of the Sudmark. The Sudmark has made it possible for us to occupy this important bridgehead that the enemy was attempting to defend with every weapon at its disposal.”°° The link between the settlement program and the election victory may well have seemed unquestionable to nationalist observers of both sides at the time. The statistical evidence for this quantitative and qualitative change, however, suggests otherwise. Census data dispel the claim that a local increase in the number of German nationalists

caused by the setthkement program had anything to do with the German political victory. They further suggest that at least in terms of raw numbers, the setthement program utterly failed to alter the

Reluctant Colonists 135 linguistic balance in favor of German speakers. The same evidence also demonstrates that the qualitative changes touted by the Sudmark were indeed illusory, because they rested on a fundamental misreading of the rural world in Austria. The statistics demonstrate that even in politically polarized St. Egydi / Sv.Il}] many people reported themselves alternately as German speakers and Slovene speakers in different census years. Furthermore, the census data prove that the number of German-speaking settlers in the district was dwarfed by the number of Slovene-speaking immigrants whose poverty may have pre-

vented their communal enfranchisement in the second voting curia in 1910. Bartsch’s romantic hymn to the settlers notwithstanding, the hard truth is that both the village and its surroundings had in fact become less German speaking and not more so in the years since 1900. This is especially unexpected since in South Styria as a whole, German speakers increased their percentage representation in the 1910 census.°’ Surprisingly, historians preferred to believe Bartsch and the Sudmark rather than the clear evidence of the imperial censuses, easily available to all who care to look. German nationalist his-

torians believed the Sudmark’s assertions in order to buttress their own claims of unfair expropriation at the hands of a brutal Yugoslav regime after 1918. Yugoslav historians in turn used accusations of successful Germanization to justify their own anti-German policies in the region.*®

The imperial census of 1910, the last year for which we have reliable

evidence, confirms that no fewer than seventy-seven foreigners did indeed reside in the St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj district, with some seventeen resident in the village itself. Statistics on religion also reported the sudden presence of eighty-four Protestants in a district where as recently as 1900 there had been only Catholics. Although the census at least confirms the presence of foreign settlers, it also proves that at least these new Germans did not vote in the decisive elections of 1910 that returned the village to German nationalist rule. Their categorization as Staatsfremde (resident aliens) shows that these new landowners had not yet obtained Austrian citizenship. According to the Sudmark, it was indeed difficult to obtain both citizenship and voting rights for settlers from Germany. These processes took too long, and the settlers themselves did not always make the effort to achieve those rights.°°

By its own admission, by 1910 the Sudmark had settled fewer than

136 Reluctant Colonists half the number of families it would eventually bring to the region. The number of potential new voters was in fact relatively small in 1910. Indeed, the 1910 census tells us that, if anything, Slovene speakers had increased their relative percentage of the population in the decade since 1900. Raw numbers of German speakers or Slovene speakers had little effect on the election outcome anyway, since property ownership and tax payment determined membership in the cru-

cial second voting curia where elections in St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj were closely fought. Just a few changes in local landownership involving the

more prosperous village landowners would have sufficed to tip the balance to the Germans in 1910. Changes in property ownership may well have increased the number of German voters in the village’s second curia, even as the overall Slovene-speaking population had increased. It is, of course, also possible that the attention paid to St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj by the German nationalist movement may have created

more local support for German nationalists by influencing patterns of sociability within the more select local society of the more prosperous landowners in the village. Slovene speakers may have voted for German nationalist candidates but reported Slovene as their language of daily use on the census, a practice that would seem consistent with flexible loyalties in the region. It is critical to evaluate nationalist claims against the census results precisely because of the ideological prominence assigned to the presumed success of “Germanization” both by German and Slovene nationalists at the time and later by historians in Austria, Nazi Germany, and Yugoslavia. The controversial imperial census was the ultimate standard by which nationalists on both sides measured their successes or failures over time. The overall census results for Styria showed that the Slovene-speaking population did indeed decline from 36 percent in 1880 to 29.37 percent in 1910, while the German-speaking popu-

lation apparently grew from 67 percent in 1880 to 70.5 percent in 1910. In the South Styrian districts, those (including St. Egydi / Sv. Ij) that were subsequently ceded to Yugoslavia and today constitute the eastern region of Slovenia, Slovene speakers declined in the decade from 1900 to 1910 from 73.84 percent to 71.5 percent. In that same period German speakers in South Styria increased their total from 26.16 percent to 28.5 percent. In political terms, the Sudmark and the other German nationalist organizations could claim signifi-

Reluctant Colonists 137 cant progress in their efforts to reverse the apparent general trend of German decline in the monarchy as a whole, given the overall census results for Styria and Carinthia.” This developmental pattern in turn “consoled” German nationalists somewhat, given their relative census losses in 1910 to the Czechs in the more populous northern provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia.

This pattern confirmed for Slovene nationalists their own bitter claims of enforced Germanization, especially in the South Styrian cities of Marburg/Maribor, Cilli/Celje, and Pettau/Ptui. In a wellknown protest made to the Austrian Parliament in 1911, Slovene deputy Karl Verstovsek referred to this census as “null und nichtig!” (void and invalid). Not without good reason did Slovene politicians angrily protest the corruption of the census results in precisely those German-majority cities. The same arguments were taken up later by Yugoslav historians to justify the (in the eyes of German nationalists) equally lopsided results of the 1921 Yugoslav census, when German

speakers suddenly vanished. This appeared to validate the claims made by Yugoslav social scientists and politicians that many so-called German speakers had in fact been Germanized Slovenes all along.*! In focusing so determinedly on the census results, both sides acted

as if the census could have reflected an authentic, essential truth about national relations in South Styria. Their political claims only made sense if indeed discrete populations of nations (or prenational

ethnic groups) existed, requiring political representation as such within the Austrian state. Both Slovene and German nationalists imagined the situation as follows: authentic members of one nation were coerced into reporting themselves falsely as members of another na-

tion. Institutional pressure from sources as diverse as schools, employers, and local bureaucracies rounded out the explanation for why true members of one nation could have “gone over” to another nation.® Yet in the end the census did not measure national loyalty but language use, and enough inhabitants of the region seemed to have been conversant in both languages to switch sides, whatever their reasons.

Ironically, the self-styled emancipatory discourse that demanded rights of political self-determination for nations managed also to paint the situation in terms that left absolutely no room for individual, personal self-determination. The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that

138 Reluctant Colonists the needs of the average German or Slovene speaker, in whose name the nationalist activists claimed to speak, and whose fundamental wellbeing the nationalists claimed to have at heart, could not be met by nationalist solutions. Historians stubbornly prefer to view the evidence in contexts shaped by the dominant nationalist discourses of the time, utterly ignoring the clearly nonnationalist worlds whose existence this evidence more than confirms. If a German settler in St. Egydi / Sv.

Ij became a “renegade” by siding with Slovene nationalists on the village council, this act might better be explained in nonnationalist terms than in terms that demand that his actions conform to some predetermined, internally authentic national identity. If Slovenespeaking parents demanded the right to educate their children in German, were they therefore complicit in their own Germanization?

Let us briefly consider once more the possible effects of the German settlement program in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij. The table shows a set of statistics that may surprise the reader. As mentioned earlier, the 1910 census actually reported a considerable increase in the numbers and percentages of those who claimed Slovene as their language of daily use, while German numbers for the village fell quite dramatically. The total village population had increased from 715 to 784, but the percentage of those who reported German as their language of daily use, including here the 17 foreigners, had fallen from 29 percent in 1900 to 16 percent in 1910. (For the St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj district the drop was less drastic: from 24.3 percent to 23.6 percent.) Since the village administration had returned to German control from Slovene

control just before the census had been taken, it is difficult to attribute the 1910 results to local administrative pressure applied to the population. Had the German figures perhaps been artificially inflated in the first place back in 1900? Given the results of the census over time (see the table), we must conclude that significant numbers of villagers changed the language of daily use they reported from decade to decade in both directions,

first from Slovene to German, and later from German to Slovene. The number of those who reported the German and Slovene languages differed radically from decade to decade. Those differences cannot be explained by looking to new immigrants to the village. Even

if 93 of the new villagers had reported their language as German in 1890 and only 16 as Slovene, how are we to explain what happened

Reluctant Colonists 139 Imperial census results for St. Egydi / Sv. lj (village) by language of daily use and confession

Subgroup

Foreigners German Slovene Catholic —_ Protestant Year Total Number (%) Number (%) Number (%) Number Number (%)

1880 594 0 253 (43) 339 (57) 594 0 1890 701 0 346 (49) 355 (51) 701 0 1900 715 0 201 (29) 503 (71) 715 0

1910 784 17 (2.2) 119 (16) 648 (84) 773 11 (1.4) Percentages are based on the numbers of residents who actually reported a language of daily use in any given year. Sources: k.k. statistische Zentralkommission, ed., Gemeindelexikon der im Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und Lander bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszahlung vom 31. Dezember

1900, vol. 4, Stetermark (Vienna, 1904), 182; k.k. statistische Zentralkommission, ed., Spezialortsrepertorium der Osterreichischen Lander bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszahlungen vom 31. Dezember 1880, 1890, 1910 (Vienna, 1883-1915); Osterreichische Statistik

Bd. 1, Heft 2 (1882); 32, Heft 1 (1892); 63, Heft 1 (1902); Spezialortsrepertorium der osterreichischen Lander, vol. 4 (Vienna, 1915), 95.

in 1900? In that year the village gained only 14 new inhabitants, while a mass of 145 people seems to have switched from German to Slovene.

The number of those reporting German declined by 40 percent between 1890 and 1900, and then by another 40 percent between 1900 and 1910. If the Sudmark had brought in some 20 or more settlers during that decade, the fact is that another 60 or so Slovenes also seem to have arrived during the same period. To some extent the census results, if we accept the contingency involved in reporting language of daily use, are beside the point. When it suited them, nationalists argued that the census accurately reflected the relative sizes of nations. When the results did not suit them, they argued that the numbers had been achieved through manipulation and force, or that respondents were not yet adequately aware of their real identity. At best, therefore, these census numbers constitute a warning against nationalist thinking altogether. Activists and historians, both Slovene and German, have been far too eager to accept the transformative claims made by the Sudmark. No scholar ever actually examined the census statistics for St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj in

140 Reluctant Colonists the context of the Sudmark settlement program, although they are readily available. Yet several historians cite the allegedly successful Germanization efforts of the Sudmark in South Styria as proof that nationalist issues were of critical importance to the local rural populace. For nationalist activists, writers such as Bartsch, journalists, and pol-

iticians, the story of the settlers encouraged a logic intrinsic to nationalist discourse and politics. Nationalists needed to organize politically in order to awaken a necessary sense of identity within their rural brethren. The necessary awakening required that the activists create nationalist identities for consumption by rural subjects. If you settled self-conscious Germans on the language frontier, they would

reinforce a sense of pride in nation and resist assimilation. Thus would the Germans win back territories that had been lost to them over time or win new territories necessary to their survival, even though the process required altering the populations that now inhabited those territories. That German nationalists could project such visionary ambitions onto an apparently blank map of Austria resulted in no small way from the successes they perceived themselves to have forged in St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj. The very triumph of the St. Egydi venture also confirmed the apparently limitless ability of ordinary Austrians to come together and affect history through association with each other. It demonstrated the power of nationalists to create effective institutions of their own outside the purview of the ever-present Austrian state. As one activist writer claimed joyfully on the cover of the Sudmark magazine for February 1911, “The power of a people is, in the end, nothing more than the combination of thousands of individual efforts and accomplishments, just as a river is the combination of all continually flowing sources. [| Nationalist] protective work is only possible through the unification of small individual accomplishments, which each person carries out as a duty. We should never allow ourselves to feel too super-

fluous, too small, too incapable, and leave everything to the heroes and intellectual giants.”®

FIVE

Tourism to the Rescue Consumption and National Identity Now more than ever before, we Germans have an ob-

ligation to travel to places where above all, we can support the threatened German nation, where we can accomplish national work even while enjoying ourselves. —Ewald Hause, “Soll der Deutsche die slawischen Kustengestade des Sudens besuchen?” Mitteilungen des Vereins Stidmark (1910)

IN THE FALL OF 1892, in a village in southern Bohemia, leaders of the

Deutscher Bohmerwaldbund, along with the mayor, the village councilors, the local priest, and a crowd of excited villagers, laid the foundation stone for a modern festival theater. Capable of accommodating 2,000 spectators, endowed with the first electrical lighting system in the region, and decked out with the very latest technology in musical and scenic design, the hilltop theater quickly became an important

fixture of the local landscape. For over a century the villagers of Horitz / Horice na Sumavé had performed their own passion play for local rural audiences. Now the Bohmerwaldbund sought to transform their sleepy village into an internationally acclaimed festival site that might one day rival the Bavarian town of Oberammergau and attract visitors from around the globe. The Bohmerwaldbund gambled that the passion play would anchor a growing tourism industry in the region that would, in turn, reverse the declining economic and demographic position of the German-speaking population in the Bohemian Woods.!

The Bohmerwaldbund’s efforts to promote Horitz / Horice and the 14]

142 Tourism to the Rescue Bohemian Woods built on the more rudimentary local efforts we encountered in Prachatitz/Prachatice or Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory in Chapter 3 in order to develop a regional tourist industry on a far more ambitious scale. The scope of the BOhmerwaldbund’s ambition was indeed breathtaking. It rested on a belief that the power of modern technological advances could be harnessed to transform what appeared to be the backward isolation of this region into a powerful economic and national virtue. The isolation of the region would be reimagined as the basis for a quiet, unspoiled rural idyll characterized by careful historic preservation. In its plans the association

hoped to harness two emerging components of personal selfidentification among more urban middle-class Austrians more effectively to each other. The first of these was the sense of belonging to a nation, a component of identity that found few concrete outlets for personal expression except during political campaigns, public rituals, and associational activities. ‘The second of these involved the ways in which consumer choice increasingly became understood as a question of self-presentation rather than of private inclination. Nationalists may have been responsible for popularizing the idea of national identity in some circles, but by 1900 they had come to believe that they could only succeed if they could harness the enormous potential of personal

consumption to their national ventures. In essence, this meant breaking down the liberal ideological barriers that traditionally had separated public political life from private domestic life. National commitment had to transcend all other forms of social commitment

if it were to be experienced as the very core of personal selfidentification. One way to anchor nationalist identity in the core of the individual was to make it the supreme guide to personal consumption.

This chapter examines nationalists’ efforts to harness both the propaganda and economic potentials of the relatively new tourism industry to nationalist goals by making nationalists out of tourist consumers. Activists endeavored to redefine the practices associated with

tourism and to reframe them to make nationalist commitment— rather than self-education, entertainment, relaxation, or health— their guiding aim. Claiming that tourism provided new opportunities to promote nationalist identities within the Austrian Empire, some organizations focused their efforts on promoting regional tourism.

Tourism to the Rescue 143 Beyond nationalist intentions, however, this chapter examines the ambivalent outcomes of the nationalist engagement with the tourist industry. Their experience with tourism forced nationalists to revisit the difficult question of what role the peasantry was to play in the national community, either as the object or the subject of nationalist pedagogy. As we have seen in Chapter 3, locals in embattled rural frontier dis-

tricts frequently responded with indifference to the increased demands made on them by the proponents of a budding nationalist tourist industry in their villages. The encounter with tourism on a broad scale also transformed nationalists’ own practices and ideologies by substituting an unexpected

economic pragmatism for their more radical ideological demands, especially since their efforts depended on significant infrastructural

contributions from the supranational state. It is not surprising, therefore, that the ideologically least radical of the German nationalist

associations, the Bohmerwaldbund, developed the most successful German nationalist tourist ventures. The Bohmerwaldbund’s plan grew out of associational efforts to invigorate the nation, but not in the way other associations did. ‘The Bohmerwaldbund’s theater project intentionally harnessed itself to existing state efforts to modernize the

region. The Bohmerwaldbund supported so-called German communities in the Bohemian Woods by attracting tourists to strengthen the local economy. But when urban visitors came to Horitz/Horice, they were promised an authentic folk tradition not explicitly marketed as “German” but rather as “peasant.” By attending the peasant passion play, visitors would support the local economy and thereby indirectly bolster the demographic position of German speakers in southern Bohemia. For this very reason the Bohmerwaldbund’s national vision differed markedly from the more radical visions of comparable groups such as the Sudmark. Where colonial and racialist imperatives—to create an Aryan German national population link between Graz and the Adriatic—dominated the Sudmark settlement project, the Bohmerwaldbund sought pragmatically to reinforce the economic position of a culturally defined German nation in a frontier region inhabited by two equally matched nations. The notion that tourism could somehow serve a nationalist interest was not uncommon in turn-of-the-century Western and Central Eu-

rope, but it assumed a far different form in Austria than in self-

144 Tourism to the Rescue defined nation-states such as France, Germany, England, or Italy. In those emerging nation-states tourism offered both nationalists and the state a symbolic means to unify culturally diverse societies. ‘Tourist literature might emphasize the unique identity of a discrete region, pays, or Heimat, but it also located that region in a larger narrative whose inexorable logic produced a united national culture.” The antinationalist Habsburg state in fact promoted just such an approach

to tourism, similar in its unifying intent. Both the state and most private Austrian tourist organizations painted the monarchy as a culturally diverse yet institutionally united entity loyal to the dynasty in the person of Emperor Francis Joseph.* They characterized ethnic, linguistic, or religious differences as purely regional in nature, not national in significance. They viewed Austria’s cultural pluralism as something of a tourist attraction in itself, and the interaction among different Austrian cultures as a positive good. As one contemporary study of tourism in the Dual Monarchy noted, “In the context of this

Central European community, the tourism industry assumes a meaning that goes well beyond its economic consequences. Here the traveler appears as a cultural ambassador who promotes communication among the allied peoples and an intensification of their mutual relations.”*

By contrast, German or Czech nationalists within Austria used tourism as a means to offer a different ideological vision that substituted the individual nation for the government’s emphasis on an interregional, unified public culture organized around dynastic patriotism. Yet even as nationalists undermined the notion of a common Austrian identity, they offered an alternative concept that stressed an interregional unity of their own. Czech nationalists worked hard to create a unified identity to link Czech speakers in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. German nationalists promoted a common identity that supposedly linked German speakers across the monarchy, from Vorarlberg in the west to the Bukovina in the east. In both cases a nationalized form of tourism was meant to fortify the concept of a geographically dispersed yet culturally united community of Czechs or Germans in Central Europe.° Before we can speak of tourism in the service of one set of nationalists in their battle against another, we have to recall how the various forms of activism practiced by these organizations were simultaneously

Tourism to the Rescue 145 directed inwardly and outwardly to accomplish very different goals. The purpose of the aggressive rhetoric directed by German nationalists against their external enemies, for example, was often to popularize national identity internally among German speakers rather than to domesticate their opponents. Invariably the first object of nationalist rhetoric was that undecided Czech or German speaker who simply did not yet realize that he or she was in fact a member of the Czech or German nation. As with their other strategies, tourism was a form of personal consumption invoked by nationalists to help instll a sense of national identity and national commitment in potential

members of the nation. Later, through the particular consumer choices they made, tourists could also take their place on the front line of nationalist defense, using their role as tourist to fight the national enemy.

Nationalists adapted tourist literature to their strategic needs in several ways. First, they cast tourist practices in a manner that elided the worlds of private consumption and public commitment and made them appear to be intertwined and interdependent under the rubric of “nation.” Tourism, like other forms of private consumption, became recast as a bridge to link private family concerns with larger

community issues (nationalism). This effort added a popular new theme to the existing rhetoric of economic self-help, nationalist boycotts, and matchbook consumption.® Second, nationalists used guidebooks to inscribe the natural landscape with a specifically national character. Building on earlier didactic efforts in the almanacs to teach

eager readers about faraway places that were a part of their larger interregional nation, this new effort helped the reader locate the particular moral qualities of a landscape that lent it a national identity. The nationalist guide provided the traveler with a key to interpret what he or she saw, with a lens for understanding the deeper historical and national significance of the view. Since it brought together ideas about landscape, nature, history, language, and authenticity, tourism offered tantalizing possibilities to the nationalist who wanted to delin-

eate the territorial boundaries of a nation and to make those boundaries visible to others. Just as the Sudmark helped visitors to the frontier recognize the difference between miserable Slavic farms and neat German ones, the nationalist guidebook added political, historical, and folkloric dimensions to this first layer of understanding.

146 Tourism to the Rescue At an altogether different level, tourism could fulfill more prosaic but equally important functions to aid the nationalist cause. Some regional organizations tried to use tourism as a means to strengthen the economic viability of their conationals in order to prevent pop-

ulation decline through migration or the feared mixing among nations. In this case tourism appeared to promise economic prosperity to those local communities flexible enough in their outlook to take good advantage of the opportunities it offered. Ironically, as we will see, when these economic efforts succeeded, they tended to mute the more strident nationalist rhetoric of radical activists. The few nationalists who built up regional tourist industries successfully soon learned that the violence of nationalism—both its discursive and physical varieties—could damage the economic viability of their venture irreparably.

Nationalists Take Up Tourism

One author introduced his travel guide to the multilingual South Tyrol / Trentino region with the following remarkable statement: “I consider it necessary to point out that this listing does not attempt to be a true guidebook. Thus it is not written according to a tourist’s perspective but rather according to an exclusively nationalist point of view. There are still plenty of German travelers who have absolutely no idea about, no understanding of the fact that every German traveler to these nationally embattled regions is also the bearer of a nationalist duty that he must fulfill.”” The author, Wilhelm Rohmeder, a nationalist activist and cofounder in 1905 of the German nationalist Tiroler Volksbund or Tyrolean People’s Union, challenged the traveler to join the ongoing war for national survival that supposedly

pitted local Germans against Italians in the Tyrol. Rohmeder demanded that nationally conscious travelers spend their money in the correct establishments and boycott those that abetted the enemy. His guide carefully evaluated the nationalist commitment of even the smallest establishments in the tiniest mountain villages and warned the reader to beware the subtle subterfuges of an enemy who well knew how to take advantage of any traveler’s inexperience. As an early exercise in the attempt to nationalize patterns of consumption, Rohmeder’s guide made several assumptions that seem at

Tourism to the Rescue 147 best naive to today’s savvy traveler. Would the hungry tourist who wanted to obtain a good meal as quickly as possible allow nationalist principles to interfere with fulfilling this basic need? Would the tourist, once alerted to the issue, actually make consumer choices according to such an abstract principle as nationality? Would he or she in fact quibble about the national identity of the cook, the waiter, or the hotelier? And there was another questionable aspect to Rohmeder’s reasoning: his conviction that it was possible to categorize every hotel or restaurant owner according to a clear principle of national commitment in a world where such commitment rarely existed to the extent demanded by nationalists. According to this guidebook, one was either a German ally or an enemy. If there were any difficulties in making such a determination, they were associated with the difficulty in keeping track of tourist establishments that often changed

hands, and not with the assumption that national commitment is somehow transparent and fixed in the first place. Rohmeder’s project faced another obstacle familiar to nationalists, namely, the popular belief that nationalism was about high politics and not about daily life. ‘lo Rohmeder and other activists, nationalist considerations transcended the ideological boundaries that separated the personal realm from the public world of politics that most people perceived. In fact, activists such as Rohmeder tried to erase those boundaries altogether by convincing others that nationalism was not limited to the realm of politics. Although the individual traveler may have considered tourism to be a purely private leisure activity, Rohmeder knew better. He demanded that tourists infuse this individual leisure activity with the same nationalist vigilance normally reserved for community political life. Rohmeder’s writings promoted a more radical ideology than that shared by most German nationalists in Austria around 1900, yet he was not exceptional in his desire to link the private habits of the individual consumer to some kind of nationalist form of self-identification. Elsewhere in the Habsburg Monarchy activists of all kinds discovered in tourism one of several forms of personal consumption that might usefully be made to link daily life concerns with the realm of politics. Many organizations, including the Sudmark, suggested that travel to visit a language frontier might raise an individual’s nationalist consciousness. One nationalist tract praised the tourist who visited the

148 Tourism to the Rescue frontier, claiming that the national struggle not only dignified those who fought the daily battles, “it also dignifies those who as admiring witnesses share the experience with him.”* As in the case of those well-publicized trips to St. Egydi / Sv. Ij, the newly enlightened nationalist would return home with a personal understanding of the

importance of nationalist identity, having witnessed the terrible struggle. In the future he or she would be more careful about other forms of consumption as well, such as where one shopped or whom one employed. For nationalists, the very issue of encouraging forms of personal consumption linked to leisure—in this case tourism—harbored potential moral pitfalls that went beyond the simple question of national commitment. Like other forms of leisure activity, tourism had to be linked to ideas about moral improvement; otherwise it might degenerate into the kind of irresponsible hedonism that characterized bourgeois images of the decadent nobility. Early literature on the subject displayed a profound concern to present bourgeois tourism as an educational activity that promoted self-improvement rather than selfindulgence. Personal consumer choice assumed a moral dimension

when it was made for the good of the nation. At the same time, emerging ideas about national identity also sought to revise definitions of personal virtue and to replace the more traditional, abstract, and liberal prescriptions about individual comportment with a personal commitment to the needs of a national community. German nationalist appeals frequently depicted Austrian Germans as a people that sought only enjoyment in life and whose easygoing ways had enabled the Slavs and Italians to make territorial, cultural, and legal gains at German expense. German speakers who lived in areas of Austria where there was little or no Slav presence were described as especially lazy or unthinking, since they could easily ignore the problem of nationalist conflict that was not part of their daily existence. A writer for the Sudmark in 1912 claimed that “we AustroGermans have only ourselves to blame—given our egoism, our craving

for pleasure, and our indifference to the fate or future of our people—for our national decline.”®

As a form of leisure and enjoyment, tourism might well be suspected of encouraging the worst traits among the Germans. The nationalists who promoted tourism therefore linked it consciously to

Tourism to the Rescue 149 concepts of duty, labor, and community virtue. A 1903 manifesto published by the magazine of the German Tourist Association of Brunn/ Brno, for example, stressed tourism’s potentially moral and hygienic functions: “The reader should become familiar with tourism’s ultimate aims, with its hygienic advantages and its ethical meaning.” The ap-

peal then linked these morally positive elements of tourism to the nationalist cause and stressed the ways that the tourist could serve the nation: “Finally, everyone should keep in mind the lofty duty that our association owes our badly threatened German nation.”'® Yet tourism was also meant to be enjoyable. So even as they couched their appeals in sternly moralizing terms, nationalists conceded that work for the nation should also be personally fulfilling. “The summer holiday re-

sorts and spas, with their affluent guests... offer a promising field for every kind of nationalist engagement/activism, which for the truly German-minded vacationer is not work but rather a pleasure and a delight.”!’

Did nationalist exhortations actually shape consumer choices, or did they fall on deaf ears? Organizations may well have succeeded in raising considerable sums for their annual budgets through the sale of consumer items such as kitchen matches or postcards, but did this propaganda actually shape tourist behavior to any extent? A preliminary answer would have to concede that nationalist considerations shaped behavior at best only at the margins. That is, they motivated the small minority of tourists who were also nationalist fanatics, and they affected consumer choice only when their exhortations were compatible with other more pressing concerns of tourists. When with some fanfare in 1907, for example, the Sidmark advertised its first guided excursion to the southern language frontier, no one actually expressed any interest in the proposed ten-day tour, and the idea had to be dropped.'? On the other hand, as we will see, the well-advertised passion play in Horitz/Horice drew thousands of enthusiastic tourists whose reasons for attending had far less to do with nationalism and more to do with the novelty of the event. Ultimately it did not much

matter whether tourists changed their behavior to fit the nationalist cause or not. Even if tourist literature did not bring German speakers in great numbers to visit the threatened language frontier for nationalist reasons, it at least made them consider the possibility that such nationalist conflict existed when they traveled there in the first place.

150 Tourism to the Rescue Nationalizing Landscapes, Territorializing Nations Tourist literature became an important instrument as nationalists increasingly sought to give real places a national identity, using a mix of ethnographic and historical arguments. The literature that famillarized potential tourists with the local sights and sounds of nationally disputed regions tried to recast the ways tourists experienced places they had perhaps decided to visit for other reasons. This literature

brought the nationalist significance of a place to the fore, often adding the element of historical geography to a nationalist rhetorical arsenal that had previously relied on the question of local language usage alone to argue its positions. Earlier political debates had often centered on relatively abstract questions regarding the general rules of language use in the civil service or in educational institutions of a given region. Now, popular guidebooks redescribed traditionally multiethnic regions in Bohemia or the Tyrol as originally and therefore authentically Czech, German, or Italian. They claimed a timeless and homogeneously national Bohemian Woods or South Tyrol, using an antihistorical argument that nevertheless looked to history for its jus-

tification. This argument located a region’s authentic identity in a particular moment of the distant past and then rendered all historical change since this original moment invalid. The imagined national past justified attempts to claim an original national identity for a place in the present where Italian or Slav immigration or even Slav tourism posed a threat. This in turn enabled nationalists to create a territorial vision of their nation. As with the Sudmark’s fantasies of a German drive to the Adriatic, territorial nationalism enabled self-styled representatives of a language group to claim territories no longer inhabited by people who even spoke their language. Wilhelm Rohmeder offers us two small yet instructive examples of

this phenomenon and its important link to tourism. His 1901 essay on the alleged former extent of Germandom in the Italian-speaking districts of the South Tyrol marshaled historical arguments to suggest that the region known as the Trentino should in fact be considered German territory. Only the historical migration of Italian-speaking peoples into the region had produced its unjust modern charactertzation as somehow “Italian.” This kind of thinking underlay Rohmeder’s long-term obsession with winning back as much real territory

Tourism to the Rescue 151 as possible in the Trentino by establishing German schools there to Germanize the local population. But it also underlay his promotion

of nationalist tourism, as a second example suggests. In an 1898 volume ostensibly about German nationalist school issues, Rohmeder

nevertheless took the opportunity to chide the popular Baedeker guidebooks to the region for using Italian place-names rather than the “historically correct” German ones.'® By dint of their physical presence in the landscape, German tourists

could also be understood to conquer territory for the nation. The tourists’ presence transformed nationalist rhetoric about space into action, and tourists were often viewed as nationalist activists, whether or not they actually saw themselves in such terms. When a nationalist tourist club planned a trip to nationally disputed territory or when it set up a system of marked hiking paths ( Wegmarkierungen) its members physically asserted their ownership of that terrain. Such actions could produce vandalism or even violence when activists clashed over the symbolic ownership of the land. “After the other side agitated against our path markers,” reported the Bohmerwaldbund as early as 1886, “we decided to petition the district administrators to direct the local

gendarme posts to protect them.” The organization depicted its actions in terms of a common good for the region that encompassed both German and Czech interests. “After all, [the markers] serve all travelers in the Bohemian Woods, and were only erected by us to encourage more tourism in the region.” Several tourist clubs in Bohemia and Moravia complained over the years that rival organizations had vandalized the systems of marked paths they had constructed for

hiking." Perhaps the most notorious episode of this kind involved a provocative trip to the Trentino by members of the German nationalist Gymnastics Association in the summer of 1907. Led by artist and professor Edgar Meyer, also a founder of the Tiroler Volksbund, the group of

thirty-four men and seven women planned a walking tour to visit German-speaking enclaves in this predominantly Italian-speaking re-

gion of the ‘Tyrol. Italian nationalist activists quite correctly understood the trip as a provocation, an aggressive assertion that Ger-

mans owned the very landscape itself, and they resolved to prevent the tour from taking place. Hostile demonstrations in several villages harassed the travelers. When they arrived in the village of Calliano to

152 Tourism to the Rescue board a train for the trip back home, an angry mob physically attacked them. The five policemen present lost control of the situation, and the ensuing bloody battle left several people badly wounded." Whether or not individual Austrian tourists actually identified themselves as nationalists, activists certainly liked to frame tourists’ behavior in a highly partisan light. Nationalists, who already interpreted the monarchy’s censuses as a statistical picture of nationalist competition, now began to estimate the numbers of each nationality who visited their region as tourists. Josef Taschek, chairman of the Bohmerwaldbund, repeatedly warned of a Czech invasion of German territory in the Bohemian Woods, using such statistics. “The Czechs frequently organize outings to the Bohemian Woods and they view mass visits to particular places as a means of encouraging their Czechification. This [danger] can only be resisted by the migration of Ger-

mans to [our] summer resorts in greater numbers.”'® In fact, the Czech organization for the region, the Narodni jednota posumavska placed a greater premium on organizing trips for schoolchildren and others from so-called endangered towns in the Bohemian Woods to visit the Czech capital than on bringing Czech speakers to the region.'” Nevertheless, all this activism, along with the statistics that informed it, suggests just how strongly nationalists worked to reconfi-

gure local reality in their own terms, using travel and tourism. Increasingly they described multilingual regions as_ historically German or Czech in order to justify their depiction of recent immigrations (and recent could mean 500 years ago) as an illegitimate invasion.

Such “redescriptions” were undertaken on several levels. While re-

gional organizations and the guidebooks they produced marketed their stories to a vast general public (Durch Deutschbohmen sold its run

of 20,000 more than once), village and town associations, especially beautification associations, carried out comparable projects at the local level. In Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory, for example, the local beautification association, along with the town government, created hiking paths to bring tourists to the ruins of the nearby medieval castle Karlsberg/Kasperk by various scenic routes. Karlsberg/Kasperk was an important reminder, asserted the town association, of Bergreichenstein’s golden medieval past and specifically of its German identity—this despite the fact that it had been built in 1356 by order

Tourism to the Rescue 153 of Emperor Charles IV, a figure claimed by Czech nationalists for their national pantheon. Czech nationalist guidebooks, meanwhile, established their own history of the town that proved it authentically Czech: “Kasperské Hory was originally a purely Czech district, and those who ascribe its development as a gold-mining town to the Germans are in error.”!® On a lake east of the city of Trent at the turn of the century, several

German nationalist organizations banded together to restore a castle

the Sudmark called the “pearl of the South Tyrol,” and its Italian neighbors referred to jokingly as the “German Mecca.” The castle was Burg Persen, known by local Italian speakers as Castel Pergine. “Every German who travels to the South Tyrol,” wrote the Sudmark, “should definitely plan as long a visit as possible to Persen, to whose restoration almost every volkisch association in Germany and Austria has contributed.” The Sudmark described the very restoration process itself

as a triumph in the nationalist struggle. Local Italian nationalists in the Lega Nazionale had supposedly taken heart when the venture had fallen on financial hard times. For a while it had looked as if the Germans would have to abandon this project on the Lake of St. Christopher. Such a defeat, intimated the Sudmark, would have replicated the long history of German decline in the region and would have left this authentically German locale fully in the hands of the Italian nationalists. At the last moment, however, the necessary funds had been raised, and enough restoration had been accomplished that the castle could open its gates to visitors in April 1913. The medieval castle had been lit with electricity and provided with a heating system that sup-

posedly lent it a cozy atmosphere, even in the winter months. The open arcades had been glassed in, the stately rooms refurbished, and the park newly landscaped. Those organizations that purchased a share in the venture (for 500 German marks) could select a room on the third floor of the castle to furnish and rent at a nominal fee to members of the organization who wished to spend the night. For a fee of one crown Sudmark members might stay the night in that organization’s chamber, a room confidently described in the magazine as “one of the best in the castle.”! Perhaps the most ambitious example of such territorialization was the gradual popularization of the term Deutschbohmen or German Bo-

hemia to mean a specific territory by the turn of the century. The

154 Tourism to the Rescue word itself had long referred to those regions of the province settled primarily by German speakers and catalogued most famously in Heinrich Rauchberg’s exhaustive multivolume study of German “national property” in the first decade of the twentieth century. Later those diverse regions would come to be known around the world (however

inaccurately) as “the Sudetenland” in a reference to the Sudeten Mountains of northwest Bohemia and Moravia. The term Sudetenlander (Sudeten lands) occasionally also referred to all the German-speaking regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia as early as the 1890s. What is remarkable, however, is the way that Deutschbohmen came to be un-

derstood as a literal place on the map, rather than as the abstract total of the cultural and material property of German speakers living in Bohemia. Guidebooks to German-speaking regions of Bohemia in the 1890s may have referred to specific language frontiers such as the Bohemian Woods or the Riesengebirge, but they had never conceived of the entirety of German-speaking Bohemia as a particular region.”° This made little geographic sense, since unlike the relatively geographically compact Czech-speaking regions of Bohemia, those where German speakers lived were not only physically separated from each other but also formed parts of several disparate ecological environments. The notion of a geographic unitary Deutschbohmen required a certain ideological leap of faith on the part of the beholder. This leap, this transformation from abstraction to specific territory, took place in several institutional contexts but was most convincingly realized with the publication in 1910 of the guidebook Durch Deutschbohmen by

the Provincial Association for Tourism in German Bohemia. The guidebook gave detailed descriptions of all manner of tourist destinations under the presumption that the Czech-speaking regions of Bohemia in fact constituted a completely separate and foreign land, as it were, from the territory German Bohemia. Information on transportation connections, for example, explained how to get from one corner of Bohemia to another without mentioning the Bohemian territory that the traveler would have to cross to reach his or her destination.

Tourism to the Rescue 155 Tourism and the Local Economy Guides such as Rohmeder’s that urged a tourist boycott of nationally hostile vendors, hoteliers, and restaurateurs counted on the power of

nationalist logic to bring prosperity to local German businesses. “Avoid the Osterias and the Alberghi, when you travel to the south, just as you would avoid the Czech pubs in the north,” wrote one German

nationalist organization, “and support the German inhabitants.” The act of spending money, if done in a self-consciously national manner, would create a kind of ripple effect to benefit the nation. In his national survey of Carinthia undertaken for the Cyril and Methodius Association (the Slovene nationalist school association), Wanderlehrer A. Beg assured his readers that “if Slovene or Slav summer vacationers

would start coming to the Gai Valley, it would make an enormous difference.” The rural population there, asserted Beg, would desert their German seducers in an instant if Slovene nationalists would offer them some economic support.”! Activists frequently linked the economic benefits of such nationalist tourism both to the psychological benefits it would bring local conationals and to the educational effect on the tourist as well. “The organization of excursions led by special-

ists to particular areas of threatened regions would have an educational effect on the participants, as well as a beneficial influence on our struggling brethren on the language frontier. Such visits would not only give them new inspiration to persevere in their struggles, but would also bring them considerable economic benefits.”

By 1914 several guidebooks to multilingual regions exhorted German nationalist tourists to spend their money wisely. In 1913 the ambitious Deutsches Jahrbuch fiir Osterreich appeared, which listed German nationalist-owned businesses in every Crown land of the Aus-

trian half of the Dual Monarchy. In this case activists promoted tourism in their publications to link the nation’s economic strength to its demographic survival in strategic border regions. In such localities the German nation had to be strengthened literally house by house, business by business, as with the Sudmark’s settlement program. Every allegedly German-owned property sold to a Slav contrib-

uted to economic and demographic decline. Headlines in German nationalist publications, for example, regularly warned their readers about Czech nationalist efforts to acquire tourist properties in sup-

156 Tourism to the Rescue posedly German resort areas, whether in northern Bohemia or in southern Dalmatia. “The Czechs seek to establish themselves in the German mountains of northern Bohemia and use every economic and linguistic means to pursue a Czechification of the region, just as they do in other areas. The [recent] leasing of the Hotel ‘Austria’ in Spindlermuhle by a Czech proved useful to this strategy.”?° This Czech expansion was not even limited to the linguistically disputed regions of Bohemia, as the Sudmark self-righteously pointed out in 1911. In an article on the Austrian Riviera, the organization claimed that more and more Czechs vacationed on the Adriatic and even founded their own hotels, such as the Hotel Riviera in Pola/ Pula.*4

In 1906 the Sudmark began listing its own local recommendations for summer housing rentals in its magazine. Sudmark members from rural areas were urged to send in information about accommodations, local climate, day trips in the region, swimming possibilities, restaurants, and the nearest railroad and post office. These would be listed free of charge to encourage Sudmark members to spend their vacation money on their fellow Germans in threatened regions. The organization added that of course, in its columns “recommendations of non-German or of nationally unreliable people and businesses are out of the question.”*? The Sudmark magazine only carried such advertisements for two years, however. This suggests that the proposal to gather such information both for the benefit of tourists and of local German speakers engaged the interest neither of tourists nor of prospective local renters. Possibly Sudmark members who liked to travel

were not that interested in summering on the language frontier. A more likely explanation, and one that fits with the experience of the Bohmerwaldbund in the north, is that locals in the potential destnations were unwilling to do the hard work of generating and organizing the necessary information about their villages. As long as such initiatives came from above and did not involve sustained local efforts, they were doomed to failure. After two years the Sudmark no longer listed summer vacation possibilities.

Other ideas enjoyed more, if limited, financial success. The Sudmark sought to have old numbers of its magazine placed in alpine huts run by the Austrian Tourism Association and the Alpine Association in the Tyrol and Carinthia “so the occasional German tourist

Tourism to the Rescue 157 who until now perhaps had not even heard the name Sudmark will pick up our magazine while staying in a mountain hut.””° Later the group placed its Sudmark collection boxes in such huts, as well as in restaurants and hotels, just to make sure. These collection boxes became a significant element of annual fundraising, despite the almost constant complaints of the thievery directed against their contents.?’ Tourism brought a real promise of a broader economic prosperity only to those rural communities flexible enough in their outlook to take good advantage of the opportunities it offered. Greater eco-

nomic prosperity, of course, implied the chance to preserve and strengthen the national identity of communities in minority-language islands or on the language frontier against the dangers of emigration

caused by economic decline. Unlike the nationalist propaganda or boycott approaches to tourism discussed earlier, however, this economic vision for tourism demanded a sustained commitment to research, publicity, and the development of local infrastructure. And unlike the above-mentioned invocations of tourism that could provoke violent incidents, this focus on the specifically economic benefits

of tourism had the effect of muting the very nationalist rhetoric of the local organizations that had originally promoted it. Only one major German nationalist organization in Austria, the Bohmerwaldbund, actually undertook such a large-scale and sustained effort to improve regional economic circumstances by promoting tourism. The others simply presumed that their published rhetoric would somehow create a positive economic effect for local Germans. When Josef ‘Taschek and his colleagues founded the Bohmerwald-

bund in 1884, they immediately made a priority of encouraging tourism to their region. Why Taschek saw tourism as a potential savior of the southern Bohemian economy at such an early date is difficult

to say. In the 1880s Austria’s tourism industry was only just being organized, mostly in well-traveled destinations with good railway con-

nections such as the Tyrol, the Bohemian spa towns, the imperial capital of Vienna, or the new Adriatic resort of Abbazia, the center of the “Austrian Riviera.”*® Yet from the start, leaders of the league asserted that the tourist industry offered the Germans of the Bohemian Woods a viable economic solution to many of their problems. They argued that tourism could help revitalize the economy and sus-

tain the local German-speaking population in the face of an in-

158 Tourism to the Rescue creasing Czech migration to the region. Taschek believed that the developing institution of the Sommerfrische or summer holiday rental

offered a solution to the economic misery of the Germans in the Bohemian Woods. The extremely low prices of accommodation and board made the region highly attractive to middle-class vacationers who could not afford long-term visits to more fashionable spas and summer resorts. The quality of the air was also legendary. Taschek wagered that southern Bohemia’s sumptuous landscapes, its meandering rivers, its small medieval towns, and its forested hills, high enough to offer dramatic views, but easily accessible to the average nature lover, along with its relatively low cost of living, could attract hordes of summer vacationers from neighboring Bavaria or Austria. The problem was that the Bohemian Woods was virtually unknown to the outside world and had little tourist infrastructure to speak of. The major commercial routes of the nineteenth century had bypassed the region. Seeking to make a virtue of this isolation, the Bohmerwaldbund published guidebooks and worked actively with local beautification or tourist associations to generate grassroots excitement for tourism. It encouraged local groups to create well-marked systems of hiking paths to lead visitors to unique natural attractions, and it encouraged municipal councils with donations to undertake beautification, renovation, and building projects, such as the creation of local swimming pools.

The Bohmerwaldbund soon found it necessary to lobby the antinationalist Austrian state for assistance in this nationalist venture. In order to compete with traditional tourist destinations such as the Tyrol, the Bohmerwaldbund needed public transportation links to make its region accessible to vacationers. Association leaders found themselves petitioning the state to add new railway connections, roads, and bus service and more telegraph and, later, telephone con-

nections in the places they hoped to transform into centers of tourism. As we will see later, the organization’s close cooperation with

the state moderated the content and tone of the Bohmerwaldbund’s nationalist rhetoric considerably. Once this organization depended on the state for significant financial support, or rather, once it allied itself with state-run modernization projects, it avoided radical or combative rhetoric. Unlike the more strident Sudmark, whose members gloried

in what they accomplished independently of the state, the Bohmer-

Tourism to the Rescue 159 waldbund promoted a vision of self-help within a German national community that was not defined racially and that did not begrudge the Czechs power within their own sphere.*? As Taschek explained in 1913, “We do not begrudge the Czechs their cultural work in the part of the Bohemian Woods that belongs to them. Yes, my heart is glad

when I hear that the Czech teachers raise their children to be good people, good Austrians, and that Czech leaders urge their communities to Christian love, piety and the virtues that the Bible teaches.”*° The Bohmerwaldbund’s success in lobbying the state for the modest Budweis-Salnau railway line in 1891 emboldened the organization to launch its most ambitious effort to bring tourists to the region. In that year it financed the production of the passion play in Horitz/Horice, a small community located just south of Krummau/Krumlov on the new rail line.

The Bohemian Oberammergau The village of Héritz/Horice sits 679 meters above sea level on a steep

hillside in a rolling landscape that remains bucolic even today. In 1900 the village (or Markifleck, as such regional marketplaces were traditionally called) counted a population of 1,232 inhabitants with 146 houses covering 500 hectares. Its layout has not changed much during the past century. Most of the buildings still surround a long narrow square built into the side of a hill. At the bottom of the square

stands a small Gothic church, fully renovated in 1892-93 and renowned for its Grodener carved wood statuary. According to the Austrian census of 1900, an overwhelming majority of Horitzers (1,222) claimed German as their language of daily use, while 10 individuals claimed the Czech language. Twelve individuals in the village were listed as Jews and the rest as Catholics.*! Most villagers farmed and

raised sheep, although some did work at the graphite works in Schwarzbach / Cerna v Posumavi, almost an hour away. One kilometer below the village, about a ten-minute walk from the tiny main square, lies the railroad station. As was often the case in rural Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, the arrival of a railway played a critical role in determining the particular trajectory of the village’s development. In this particular case it is clear that without the new railway connection, the Bohmerwaldbund would not have invested so

160 Tourism to the Rescue many resources in the town, and Horitz/Horice’s passion play might never have gained worldwide attention. The villagers had founded a local branch of the Bohmerwaldbund as early as August 1884, and by 1888 their branch numbered 178 members (15 percent of the total village population). Their president, Francis Mugrauer, ran the local inn, the Zum Teufel. The Bohmerwaldbund held its local meetings here, and it was also here, ironically, given the inn’s name, that rehearsals for the passion play took place in 1893 before the theater’s completion. Horitz/Horice frequently earned an honorable mention in the Bohmerwaldbund magazine. One story involving the activities of the local priest helps explain why German nationalists there and in the region did not fear that their support for the local passion play would somehow subsidize the politically reactionary or alleged pro-Czech activities of the Catholic Church. Most German nationalists in Bohemia, as in South Styria, considered parish priests to be unofficial yet highly effective “national fifth columnists,” men who could be considered part of Slav nationalist movements. Both the church’s political opposition to the liberals’ secular school system and the increasing tendency of local priests to

speak Czech rather than German or both languages (given the changing provincial makeup of recruits to the clergy) made all church

institutions suspect to German nationalists in Bohemia. Horitz/ Horice, however, reported a more cordial relationship between its parish priest and its local German nationalists.* In 1886 the village council had decided to erect a monument to Emperor Joseph II. The local branch of the Bohmerwaldbund had shared the costs with the village council, and in August 1887 the town

dedicated the statue. Interestingly, it was reported that the parish priest had helped with the preparations for the celebration and had participated at the unveiling. He had even decorated the parish house with both the imperial black and yellow flag and a German nationalist

black, red, and gold flag. “These flags prove,” noted the Bohmerwaldbund magazine, “that the priest in this parish is no enemy of the German people and of his own parishioners, but a priest who fulfills the duties of his office as a good Austrian should, and who remains loyal to his nation of origin.” Most parish priests would, of course,

have boycotted such a ceremony, not so much for its arguably German nationalist aspects but because they rightly perceived the anticlerical nature of the cult of Joseph II in Bohemia.*®

Tourism to the Rescue 161 Around the time of the railroad’s completion, a young gymnasium professor from nearby Krummau/Krumlov, Johann Josef Ammann, began researching passion-play traditions among peasants in southern Bohemia. Horitz/Horice was the only village that had maintained the tradition from the seventeenth century through the 1880s. The village also had an 1816 text written by linen weaver Paul Grollhesl, who had adapted it from seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation texts by Cistercian monks in the region. During the course of the nineteenth century, peasant groups had performed the Grollhesl play at irregular intervals, generally dressed in their Sunday best and at a local inn for mostly peasant audiences. In the 1830s the play had flourished under the guidance of a particularly forceful parish priest, Father Bruno. He had tried, with mixed results, to professionalize the venture. Bruno’s caustic marginal remarks cover the original Grollhesl manuscript, and his severely disapproving comments tell us much about how peasants

treated the work in the 1830s. Repeatedly Bruno admonished the performers to inject more seriousness into the venture: Mary Magdalene should be presented as a loyal follower of Christ, not as a lovesick schoolgirl; the taunting of Christ should induce pity in the audience, not hysterical laughter.**

New elements were added to the performances over the years. In 1851, for the first tme, women played the female roles of Eve, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Veronica. Around that time some players also began to create what they imagined were historically authentic costumes for themselves. In the 1880s a local theater group took over the production. On learning of a traveling production of the play in the winter of 1889, Ammann rushed to make the arduous two-hour journey on a stormy day from Krummau/Krumlov to the village of Kalsching/Chvalsiny, a trip that today takes a matter of minutes. In Kalsching/Chvalsiny he was able to witness a production firsthand. According to Ammann, the piece had a powerful effect on local peasant audiences. By the end there was not a dry eye in the house, especially among the women. And both intentional and unintentional comedic touches helped hold the attention of the audience during the long hours it took to perform the piece. Although at first Ammann had never dreamed that the play might compete with Oberammergau’s passion play, the completion of the new rail line and the subsequent financial support of the BOhmerwaldbund for a real festival theater in Horitz/Hofrice excited his ambitions.

162 Tourism to the Rescue For their part, Taschek and the other leaders of the organization saw in the passion play a golden opportunity to introduce far more tourists to the Bohemian Woods than had been previously thought possible. Once the tourist had come to Horitz/Horice to see the play and had been exposed to the surrounding landscape, he would want to return for summer relaxation, to enjoy the good clean air, and perhaps in the winter he would come to ski, skate, and toboggan. So in 1892 the organization concluded an agreement with the village of Horitz/Horice to provide the financing both for a festival theater and for the production itself. The village would provide the actors (some 350 strong), while the league hired designers, a musical director, and a theatrical director from Budweis/Budejovice, Ludwig Deutsch, who claimed, at least, to be experienced in passion-play productions.”

Construction of the theater proceeded apace on a hill above the town, and by the spring of 1893 the largely wood structure on a granite foundation was ready. The village also hastily erected some refreshment stands to satisfy the visitors who would sit through an eight-hour performance with few intermissions. The performances were timed so that visitors could catch an evening train back to Krummau/Krumlov or Budweis/Budeéjovice, but many people were known to sneak out before the final tableau for fear of missing their connection. Most visitors preferred not to chance actually spending a night in Horitz/Horice, something the 1910 Baedeker guide to Austria advised against.*’

Responses to the passion play varied. Most newspapers and critics, particularly the German nationalist ones, gave it enthusiastic reviews,

but not because of any recognizably German element in the play. Newspapers praised both the technological marvels (electric lights, organ) and the convincing, simple acting style of the Horitz/Horice villagers. Several Catholic conservative papers conceded that the play

was both powerful and emotional, although they deplored its connection to the anticlerical German nationalist Bohmerwaldbund. Grumbling was to be heard in the more radical German nationalist and anti-Semitic papers as well, but for the opposite reason. They complained that by sponsoring the passion play, the nationalist movement had played into the hands of clerical reactionaries. What is interesting, however, is the degree to which eventually the most radical German nationalist organizations (such as the Sudmark) decided to

Tourism to the Rescue 163 close ranks behind the Bohmerwaldbund. Instead of seizing this opportunity to discredit moderate nationalists and to split the nationalist movement further (a frequent strategy for obtaining political and financial support), these groups focused on the positive publicity the play might bring to local German nationalists. In August 1893 the conservative Vaterland did report that Czech nationalists had managed to gain access to the play’s text and, with the support of local clerical conservatives, were planning their own rival passion play. This report turned out later to be groundless and may even have been planted by German nationalists who were attempting to stir up greater sympathy for the play among those hardcore nationalists who hated the idea of supporting a project so con-

nected to the Catholic Church. Repeatedly throughout the 1890s some clerical conservative anti-Semitic newspapers launched thinly veiled attacks on the play.**

Not only did German nationalists and foreign tourists flock to see

the passion play in the early years, but soon it began to draw the interest of prominent citizens, of the nobility, and of the Habsburg family as well. The bishop of nearby Budweis/Budeéjovice was a frequent visitor, and his presence did much to diminish attacks on the venture by the conservative media. After the first month of perform-

ances, members of the Schwarzenberg family who owned a good chunk of the Bohemian Woods reserved several blocks of tickets. Later the family erected its own refreshment pavilion for the exclusive use of its guests. A week after the first Schwarzenberg visit in 1893,

the governor of Bohemia, Count Franz Thun, bought tickets for a gala performance. And in mid-August the local papers reported that the play had even piqued the interest of the Kaiser’s brother Archduke Ludwig Viktor. In 1895 Crown Princess Widow Stephanie attended a performance as a guest of the Schwarzenberg family. Despite

terrible weather, several hundred people showed up to greet Stephanie and her daughter Archduchess Elizabeth. Along with a performance, the audience heard Taschek thank the crown princess widow in person for ensuring that the passion play would be included in the volumes of the Osterveichische-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und

Bild being prepared under her patronage. In 1896 it was the turn of the heir to the throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, to attend. After a French and American coproduction filmed a short version of the

164 Tourism to the Rescue play in 1897, an American entrepreneur even tried unsuccessfully to organize a tour in the United States.** In May 1895 the village, together with the Bohmerwaldbund and the local savings and loan bank, created a limited liability corporation known as the Horitzer Folk-Theater or Volksschauspiele. The orga-

nization contributed 6,000 florins and the bank 9,000 florins for shares of the corporation. ‘This way the festival could be placed on a financially more secure footing and could itself gain access to capital through loans instead of depending on the generosity of individuals or the BOhmerwaldbund. The elected board of directors of the corporation included ‘Taschek, Mugrauer, the mayor and vice mayor of Horitz/Horice, the mayor of Krummau/Krumlov, a representative of the actors, and several notable citizens of Budweis. The latter included the lawyer Dr. Israel Kohn, a Jew, a close associate of ‘Taschek’s, and a longtime board member of the BOhmerwaldbund. In 1912, the last time the passion play was performed before the First World War, the villagers of Horitz/Horice erected a granite obelisk in honor of Josef Taschek. The monument stood above the town near the theater and was sculpted by Jordan Wiltschko, the stonemason who played the role of Jesus from 1894 through 1912.*

Tourism, the State, and Nationalism So far I have focused on nationalist strategies for putting a form of leisure activity such as tourism to use, either to transform a discursive national identity into a material reality or to revitalize local economies and thereby strengthen the situation of conationals. Yet these efforts did not exist in a vacuum. We must also consider how the early institutionalization of the tourist industry may have worked to impede the

very effectiveness of those nationalists who attempted to use it for their purposes. When nationalists turned to tourism, they invoked a relatively new phenomenon, but one that was already structured by specific institutions that increasingly sought greater support and recognition for their work from the Austrian state. Although tourism might have brought modernization to rural communities, this process involved a set of complex interactions at several levels between local, regional, and interregional interests. ‘The tourist

industry was not necessarily an outside bourgeois imposition on

Tourism to the Rescue 165 peasant life. Rural inhabitants might well take advantage of new opportunities offered by the completion of a railway line, road, or mountain pass. Local initiatives often underlay the rise of the tourist industry, so it is difficult to characterize it as the work of “outsiders” to the rural milieu, just as it is difficult to see general processes of modernization in rural Europe as purely external impositions.*! Local activists did, however, attempt to improve their chances by linking their initiatives to state-sponsored bureaucracies in related government ministries at either the provincial or imperial levels. This point helps

us understand how their attempts to use the budding local tourist industries for their own purposes often backfired on nationalists, particularly the more radical variety, with the latter finding their own agenda suddenly modified to fit the needs of the industry rather than vice versa.

The local and regional organization of the tourist industry had begun as early as the 1880s.” In 1881 a group of businessmen and hoteliers in Graz, along with representatives of local tourist associations, had organized the Association for the Advancement of Tourism in Styria, the first of many regional Landesverbande or provincial umbrella organizations designed to coordinate and promote the tourism industry. The Tyrol followed suit with its own umbrella organization in 1889.*° Much later, in response to these private efforts, the Austrian

government created an official subministerial section devoted to tourism. This office distributed government subsidies to the individual provincial organizations, first under the aegis of the Railway Ministry and subsequently in the Ministry of Public Works.“ In doing so, both

the provincial and imperial governments conferred a semiofficial status on the various provincial umbrella organizations. In several Crown lands (Styria, Carinthia, the Tyrol) the dominant position of the German language was politically so well normalized that the provincial organizations for tourism, in all essentials German national organizations, never even had to name themselves as such. To read the guidebooks published by the Tyrolean or Styrian Landesverband, for example, one would never guess that more than a third of each

Crown land’s population did not report German as its language of daily use.* If the official publications of the Landesverbande simply ignored the

existence of Italian or Slovene speakers, radical German nationalists

166 Tourism to the Rescue such as Rohmeder or the Sudmark authors tried desperately to draw

attention to them. Rohmeder’s guide to the South Tyrol did not simply direct tourists to inns, hotels, and restaurants owned by sup-

posedly reliable German nationalist or German-friendly natives. Rather, Rohmeder went so far as to warn German tourists against the supposed underhanded efforts of the enemy to mislead them. In one case he reported of a hotel in the village of Kampidell [szc] that its owner, one Felix Valentini, was “an agent of Italian irredentism. In order to fool German travelers he has affixed a huge metal Edelweiss to his house.” According to Rohmeder, appearances inside a tourist establishment could be equally deceiving. He named several restaurants run by reputed Italian nationalists that prominently displayed German-language newspapers and German-language menus in order to fool an unsuspecting German clientele into spending its money in enemy establishments.*°

Where some counseled political moderation, citing the benefits that tourism brought to all inhabitants of the region, whether Italian or German speaking, the political logic of radical nationalism urged the opposite course. Not only should Germans stop patronizing Italian speakers, the latter should also be forced to understand just how much their financial survival depended on the goodwill of the former. In 1907, soon after the riot involving Edgar Meyer’s hiking party in Calliano, the Sudmark chided both the ungrateful Italians in the South Tyrol / Trentino and, implicitly, the German tourists as well. The Germans strive to gain the friendship of the Italians; they celebrate

their culture and rave about the sunny South. Annually an army of ramblers travels to Italian-Land and fills the pockets of the local innkeepers and merchants. For this reason it is at the very least careless [of the Italians] to reward this German friendship with veiled hatred. In a single year the tourist industry in the Italian South Tyrol counted 36,232 German visitors, while Italy only sent 27,793. Ought there not to be some attempt to attract this stream of visitors to the German part

of the region? The [Italian] irredentist enemies of Germans down there who ambush and beat up Germans should come to feel in their own wallets just what German money is worth. Maybe this loss in income would cool off the hotheaded agitators of the /talianissimt somewhat!*

Tourism to the Rescue 167 Neither the provincial umbrella organizations nor the Tyrolean tourist industry in particular could comfortably accommodate the aggressive tactics demanded by a Rohmeder or the Sudmark. The more mature tourism industry in the Tyrol required above all a secure environment in which to flourish. Extreme nationalists on both sides of the issue who wanted to wage war at the local level of the hotel and restaurant threatened to disrupt the entire industry. In a region such as the Tyrol that had already come to depend heavily on a successful tourist industry for its economic survival, nationalism had to remain

moderate, discreet, and positive in tone in order not to scare away potential tourists of all backgrounds. In 1907, the same year in which

Edgar Meyer led his ill-fated tour to the Trentino, one local newspaper reported that in municipal elections in the region around Lake Garda moderate Italian and German nationalists had allied to oust radical Italian nationalists from the town halls. Why? The paper reported that the tourist trade had clearly suffered (with hotel bankruptcies in both Arco and Trent) from the lamentable intrusion of nationalist activism into local society. Moderates on both sides wished to signal to tourists that the area was once again safe for vacationers. The Bozner Zeitung opined further that economics (if nothing else)

would teach those “radical Italians” the importance of welcoming paying guests, a lesson many German nationalists seemed in need of learning as well. ‘The more successful the tourism industry, it seems,

the less successful the kind of nationalism that insisted on radical separation. More often than not, either in the Tyrol or in the Bohemian Woods, nationalists themselves seem to have been overpowered

by the economic logic of an already-developed industry that easily resisted effective nationalization.* In nationalist terms, Bohemia represented a specialized case for the organization of the tourism industry (although the Tyrol was clearly moving in the same direction). In Bohemia both Czech and German

nationalists were politically so well organized that this Crown land sported two provincial associations for tourism. One, situated in Prague, represented so-called Bohemian or Czech interests, and another, located in Karlsbad / Karlovy Vary, represented the interests of self-styled German Bohemia.* As it did in other policy matters such as schooling and agriculture, in Bohemia the state subsidized two separate nationalist organizations for tourism.°® This tacit compromise,

168 Tourism to the Rescue like other formal and legal compromises undertaken in Austria during this period, was part of a state attempt to diminish the exceptionally divisive effects of the nationalist political struggle by nationalizing parts of the provincial government. By delineating separate, if parallel, functions for both Czech and German corporatist institutions, the state hoped to turn nationalist attentions away from battling each other and toward developing separate but equal administrative

institutions for their communities. It is precisely because of this largely piecemeal institutional process that Jeremy King has argued, as noted in Chapter I, that nations gradually became recognized as legitimate bodies in Austrian law and institutions.*! This development could of course be seen as a victory for nationalist leaders, eager to gain recognition for their claims from the state. Yet as King points out, this development in fact constituted a significant victory for the anationalist Habsburg state. The division of administrative functions between battling nations meant that they no longer had a clear field on which to battle against each other. Instead, they might now direct their activism toward building their own communities in a process that could only benefit the Habsburg state. This kind of institutional division by nation meant that the organizations themselves relocated their struggles to gain greater favor with or resources from the state. Moderate nationalists leapt at the chance to work within this evolving system in order to gain credibility with the state and thus precious resources for their constituents. Radical nationalists well understood that nationalist separation at the state, provincial, regional, or urban level would turn the situation against their interests, and they fought bitterly against the compromises. The radicals accused leaders who brokered the agreements of having surren-

dered the nationalist interest to the enemy. Yet the temptation to conclude these agreements was indeed powerful. In Bohemia or Moravia such agreements guaranteed to Czech nationalists far more political power far more swiftly than they could hope to gain if German nationalist obstruction continued to thwart their efforts. To German

nationalists, the compromises offered linguistic minorities a guarantee of permanent survival and minority representation.” To both groups, the compromises offered increased access to state funding. The two tourist associations no longer battled for survival but instead cast themselves as expert committees to help guide governments to budget their resources.

Tourism to the Rescue 169 The Provincial Association for Tourism in German Bohemia represented diverse tourist associations, sports clubs, municipal governments, the German-dominated chambers of commerce in Bohemia

(Eger/Cheb and Reichenberg/Liberec), and nationalist organizations. Its monthly magazine was distributed to municipalities and organizations throughout Bohemia, from regional tourism offices in the spa towns of southwestern Bohemia to those in Prague, Aussig / Usti nad Labem, Leitmeritz/Litomerice, and Reichenberg/Liberec. Outside Bohemia the association maintained offices or representatives in Brunn/Brno, Frankfurt am Main, and Dresden as well. The organization’s rhetoric almost ignored Czech nationalists and their institu-

tions to focus on pursuing the interests of the German community within the context of the state. The occasional exceptions to this trend

prove the rule. When, for example, the association did mention the Czechs at all, it was in cases where competencies had yet to be divided, as with suggestions for devolving authority over railways from the cen-

tral state to provincial (Czech proposal) or regional (German proposal) institutions.®*®

The minutes of the organization’s meetings suggest that in its relations to the state it spent most of its efforts focusing on issues of transportation, particularly the addition of new railway links and bus lines to the existing transport network or the creation of bargain fares to tourist destinations. How the association contributed to the territorialization of Deutschbohmen is demonstrated by its lobbying efforts

to promote specific rail links that would aid the region to cohere as such.

By 1914 this kind of compromise pertained only to Bohemia. Neither the Slovene nationalists in Styria nor the Italian nationalists in the Tyrol wielded the kind of political influence enjoyed by the Czech and German nationalists in Bohemia. Neither the Slovene nor Italian nationalists had yet developed an unambiguously united front on all major linguistic, cultural, and administrative issues capable of chal-

lenging the provincewide hegemony of German interests in the tourism industry in Styria or the Tyrol.°* Within the German nationalist community too, this kind of development contrasts strongly with the pride engendered by Sudmark efforts to forge a successful settlement program. In one case nationalists worked to link their fortunes to the state and moderated the tenor of their ideologies. In the other case their success drove nationalists to radicalize their ideology while

170 Tourism to the Rescue celebrating their ability to accomplish such triumphs as the settlement program without securing any help from the state.

Locals and Tourists In a highly perceptive essay on the impact of tourism in the German-

speaking Tyrol during this period, Laurence Cole concludes that “tourism brought modernity to the mountains, but wearing traditional clothes.”® In political terms Cole argues that a broad coalition of local business and consumer interests promoted tourism against some (but

not all) defenders of the traditional agrarian milieu. In social and economic terms, however, tourism created a set of conflicts that cannot simply be categorized under a rubric of urban versus agrarian or bourgeois versus peasant. The industry required a modern infra-

structure in order to function, and yet it simultaneously required a natural and unspoilt environment within which it could operate. In cultural terms Cole argues that the rise of a service sector locally helped “nationalize” peasant culture by redefining its significance and then marketing it. Peasants became drawn into national life because peasant practices now became a symbol of a kind of national authenticity. This was clearly the case in Horitz/Horice, where the purpose

of the modern technology embodied in the festival theater was to convey peasant authenticity more effectively and to greater numbers of people. This combination was even more evident in a region such as the

Tyrol that attracted far more visitors both from Austria and the German Reich than did the Bohemian Woods.*® Peasant traditions became in themselves a tourist attraction, a commodity linked to both the commodification and the nationalization of the landscape itself.

The focus on peasant material culture as a tourist attraction went hand in hand with the tourist interest in fresh air, physical activity, and the beauty of dramatic mountain landscapes. If peasants or locals became one of the attractions themselves, it also meant that nationalists who attempted to use the industry had to pay close attention to local needs. This need put the radicals at odds with the locals once again, not simply because the radicals demanded such uncomfortably extreme measures as boycotts and even violence, based on abstract principles unrelated to local conditions.

Tourism to the Rescue 171 The more radical forms of German nationalism imported from other parts of the empire did not engage well with local populations in the Tyrol. An outside organization such as the Sudmark that tried to set down roots in the South Tyrol quickly aroused suspicion in a province whose inhabitants were famous for their parochial outlook. Not only were the anticlerical Sudmark agitators considered to be outsiders, but they also had a reputation for promoting Protestantism and anti-Catholicism. In Styria, with its long tradition of popular anticlericalism, this presented fewer problems for recruitment. In the

Tyrol, where Catholic religious practice and provincial tradition largely defined Germanness, the Sudmark found little indigenous sup-

port for its propaganda, despite the fact that it pursued several projects there, including the renovation of the Burg Persen.°’ The narrowly propagandistic approach to tourism practiced by the Sudmark required little sensitivity to the local populations. An effort such as that of the Bohmerwaldbund to promote nationalist tourism for primarily economic purposes, however, required precisely that higher degree of engagement with both the strengths and needs of the local population. Unlike the situation in the Tyrol, the fact that the Bohemian Woods had no tourist industry to speak of made the early efforts of the nationalists that much more important. The success of activists in the Bohemian Woods in building a modest tourism industry did not imply, however, that the local activists who worked with the BOhmerwaldbund to promote tourism to their villages did so for transparently nationalist reasons. Rather, as Cole implies for the Tyrol, and as we have seen in Chapter 3, many village activists linked their nationalist agenda to a series of other local modernizing imperatives that on the surface had little to do with nationalism as such. In other words, many of those individuals who were likely to promote

tourism at the local level were also members of nationalist associations.°®

Those villagers who did embrace tourism as potentially beneficial to their community were also often part of that larger group of relatively recent arrivals to the rural world discussed in Chapter 3 who lent their activist energies and leadership skills to the local village branches of nationalist organizations. In combination with local professionals and innkeepers in the Bohemian Woods, these newcomers worked to expand local economic connections to regional and inter-

172 Tourism to the Rescue regional commerce, often through the development of tourism. As we saw earlier, issues such as the quality of local accommodations became a critical field for such local activists, usually teachers, civil servants, innkeepers, small businessmen, or railway employees, to impose their specific vision of modernity on their fellow villagers.

How did nonnationalist elements of rural society respond to the arrival of tourists from the outside world? Bohmerwaldbund leaders learned a surprising lesson early on: that villagers did not always ap-

preciate the benefits tourism might bring them. Nationalist vacationers who visited their persecuted German brothers and sisters deep in the Bohemian Woods were often shocked by the low standards of accommodation the natives provided. Many complained about sanitary conditions both to the Bohmerwaldbund and to the Provincial Association for Tourism in German Bohemia. In the winter tourists complained that villagers reported temperatures and snow conditions so intermittently as to make it impossible to plan winter-sport vacations.°? And when surveyed about what their district could offer outside visitors, some local activists expressed a deep frustration with the unwillingness of their fellow villagers to comprehend the potential economic benefits tourism offered to them. In an 1887 report to Budweis/Budejovice, for example, Bohmerwaldbund activists in the village of Kirchschlag bemoaned their lack of a post office, a physician, and, above all, a population at all interested in taking advantage of

the opportunities tourism offered them or even in participating in local associational life.°°

The Bohmerwaldbund leadership walked a difficult line between defending the quality of village accommodations to the outside world and urging local organizers to do a better job. In 1904 ‘Taschek reported optimistically that local tourist accommodations had generally improved in the twenty years since the founding of the Bohmerwaldbund.®' Nevertheless, a year later Taschek complained that “the majority of innkeepers are not prepared to make any sacrifices in order to inform the public about the charms or the amenities of the Bohemian Woods.”® The question of clean and higher-quality accommodations for visitors became more pressing once the passion play in Horitz/Horice received international attention. That attention was not always flattering. As we have already seen, the 1910 Baedeker

advised visitors to the passion play to stay in nearby Krummau/

Tourism to the Rescue 173 Krumlov and to avoid spending the night in Horitz if possible.® In 1908 Raoul Auernheimer, feuilletonist for Vienna’s Neue freie Presse,

published a scathingly sarcastic account of a visit to Horitz/Horice.

While he praised the simple intensity of the play’s performers, Auernpcgheimer denounced the unacceptable level of accommoda-

tion and general boredom that he found characterized life in the surrounding region. Of the highly touted Krummau he wrote, “Only

in a small town like this does one learn the true meaning of [the word] boredom.” Although this cruel depiction of rural life drew angry protests from all kinds of BOhmerwaldbund supporters, including author Peter Rosegger, it nevertheless reflected an image that local promoters of tourism could not easily change.” Activists’ desire to populate endangered landscapes with Czech or German tourists, combined with their frequent equation of their own culture with civilization, points to yet another problem embedded in the promotion of a nationalist tourism. What, after all, was the relationship between the urban tourist and the peasant on the language frontier, not to mention the relationship between the ambitious local vendor and the less enthusiastic villager? Nationalist rhetoric, particularly in its most radical formulation, stressed the commonalties that united all members of a nation across any conceivable barriers of class

or educational difference. It often praised the peasant as the most authentic exponent of the nation and recommended the healthy, simple quality of rural life. Yet, as we have seen in previous chapters, peasants on the language frontier who supposedly embodied nationalist virtues often became the object of local nationalist modernization

efforts rather than their authors. In reality, peasants too needed to be taught their heroic national identity, and they needed to be taught to accept the presence of the tourist as well. Reports from the Bohemian Woods around 1900 consistently related the immense difficulties involved in bringing tourists to spend their summers in villages that had previously enjoyed little contact with outsiders. Nationalist students who traveled to the countryside too tried actively to bring peas-

ants into their nationalist activities. Guidebooks for students who hiked in such areas, however, stressed the importance of treating peasants with respect, thus betraying the unspoken assumption that in fact the opposite would more likely be the case.” If locals did not always welcome visits from their urban conationals,

174 Tourism to the Rescue it is also unclear whether tourists chose their destinations according to nationalist commitment, as nationalists hoped would be the case. The successful enticement of tourists to a given spot did not necessarily produce a stronger sense of national identity among those visitors, nor did it mean that tourists had made their decision to travel

there on the basis of nationalist concern. The example of Horitz/ Horice and its passion play is particularly instructive in this regard.

The play certainly fulfilled the ambitions of local and regional German nationalist activists by bringing more tourists to the region. And in their public statements, at least, both German and Czech nationalist leaders treated the play’s nationalist significance as selfevident. Yet whether tourists themselves actually returned home with a more distinct consciousness about the national struggle on the socalled language frontier is harder to evaluate. Nothing about the passion play, including the international theatrical style in which it was performed, appears to have reinforced a specifically German national identity among visitors or performers. Personal testimonies of visitors to Horitz/Horice instead emphasized the profoundly moving emotional quality of the experience rather than any particularly Germanic qualities, whatever those might have been. Visitors do not seem to have left believing that they had witnessed something particularly German, but rather an example of regional folk art, impressive in its rural simplicity. Visitors rarely commented on the play as a national or nationalist event until after the First World War when in 1923 the tradition was revived. By now the Bohemian Woods had attached to a self-styled Czechoslovak nationstate, and this development more than any other lent the play a new, nationalist significance. Did the institution of the passion play increase the nationalist consciousness of the Horitzers themselves? Actually, the play seems rather

to have strengthened the villagers’ consciousness of themselves as Horitzers far more than as Germans. Recollections and anecdotes confirm that their participation in the passion play indeed played a central role in the villagers’ lives and in their self-identification. Already in the 1890s, for example, male Horitzers were known to wear extremely long hair and full beards in order to recall Old Testament scenes, especially in years when the play was not performed. The village did everything in its power to market itself as a kind of goal for

Tourism to the Rescue 175 cultural rather than national pilgrims, especially in those off years. Nor did the fact that the nationalist Bohmerwaldbund had contributed so much to Horitz’s newly found fame create a stronger sense of nationalist identity there. Rather, as elsewhere in southern Bohemia, villagers seem to have considered the BOhmerwaldbund to be something of a local welfare organization its whose German nationalist identity was secondary to its important economic self-help functions.

Visions for the Future In 1910 the Sudmark published a debate under the title “Should the German Visit the Slavic Coastal Cities of the South?”®* The two authors

each represented German nationalist points of view, and they both answered in the affirmative. They based their affirmative conclusions, however, on extremely different assumptions. One writer, who con-

sidered Istria and Dalmatia highly unpleasant in terms of both weather and accommodation in comparison with the Italian Adriatic, nevertheless argued for the necessity of visiting any region where a minority German population might be threatened by Slavs, no matter

how disagreeable such a visit might be. “Whoever is considering spending a vacation on the Adriatic can help maintain the German presence here by patronizing this German establishment.”®’ The other argued for the necessity of extending a German cultural influence to

Dalmatia, since Austria, as a great empire, must maintain a coastal presence. The first defined Germanness narrowly in ethnic terms, linking endangered populations to particular places. The other defined Germanness in expansive cultural terms, claiming the entire coast for this culture. One focused on a politics of boycotts. The other

urged cultural interaction as a way to spread German influence in strategic regions such as Trieste or Pola/Pula. Both, however, urged German-speaking tourists to visit the regions in question. From a view through the lens of tourism, it seems even less possible to speak of a singular German culture or German nationalist politics, much less of a singular German national interest in Cisleithania. Na-

tionalists, of course, did their best to deny this reality. Those who attempted to use tourism discursively for their purposes always asserted that in fact there did exist that kind of singular, transregional

176 Tourism to the Rescue set of “German” interests that united German speakers in Central Europe. Those who attempted to build a tourist industry quickly learned that success lay in paying attention to local conditions. The varied uses of the growing tourism industry by nationalist activists clearly depended on the particular qualities of nationalist politics and the level of development attained by the tourist industry in any given region. The most successful examples of a nationalist tourism happily compromised nationalist content when necessary (in a way that radicals would have rejected) for economic success. Both the organizers of the Horitz/Horice passion play and the Provincial Association for

Tourism in German Bohemia demonstrated a pragmatic understanding of the potential ways in which tourism might serve the interests of the national community. In the real world of villages and regions, nationalists rarely achieved

their hoped-for unity. German nationalists remained as frustrated about the unwillingness of German speakers to see themselves as German nationalists—to do the hard work of nationalism—as they were about the supposed gains made by so-called rival nationalities in the Habsburg Monarchy. Radical nationalists’ aggressive assertions, reflected in the fierce quotations taken from guides like Rohmeder’s, suggest that national self-identification was a far more fragile and contingent phenomenon than either historians or nationalists were likely to admit. It also suggests that although nationalists believed that they

had found in consumerism a promising new instrument to spread their beliefs, consumer behavior too often followed a logic dictated by something other than the nationalist imagination.

SIX

Violence in the Village It is our firm conviction that ordinary folk do not trouble their heads over world events, however much they may rant and rave about them on Sundays. —Joseph Roth, The Bust of the Emperor [1935],

trans. John Hoare (2003)

AS DAWN BROKE ON MONDAY, 7 September 1908, a shocking report

spread in the southern Bohemian district seat of Schuttenhofen/ Susice. Rumor had it that a rowdy group of visiiung German nationalist students and their local sympathizers had staged a brutal assault on the Czech nationalist social club or beseda in the neighboring town of Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory. According to Czech nationalist

reports, the attackers had shattered windows, damaged masonry, smashed furniture, rummaged through closets, ripped newspapers from their holders, and threatened the men and women they found inside the building with force. One report even claimed that the beseda

had been physically demolished. Describing the same _ incident, German nationalists later told a much different story. Although they conceded that their actions might have inflicted some minor damage to property, they differed with Czech nationalists over the reasons for the outbreak. German nationalists claimed that their cowardly Czech counterparts had unleashed a hailstorm of lethal stones and shocking

verbal abuse from the relative security of a second-floor window against innocent revelers on the street below. In entering the building to seek out the wrongdoers, the German nationalists had merely acted to restore order after stones had injured several of their company. The disputed chain of events that began just a few blocks off a small town square in this sleepy corner of the Bohemian Woods stirred up ilar

178 Violence in the Village a ripple effect of activity within the next twenty-four hours. Rumors about the incident caused minor nocturnal disturbances in the nearby hamlets of Unterreichenstein / Dolni Rejstejn and Hartmanitz/Hartmanice. In Schuttenhofen/Susice crowds assembled to protest the

alleged mistreatment of the Czech-speaking minority and hurled stones at travelers from Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory. District Administrator Bohm dispatched an auxiliary force of gendarmes to Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory and called for military reinforcements from Klattau/Klatovy to help maintain order in both towns.' The added military presence seems at first to have escalated the violence, and brushes between gendarmes and angry crowds produced one death and several minor casualties. As word of these local events spread beyond the region to the rest of Austria, they assumed broad nationalist meanings, thanks largely to the combined interventions of the press and regional politicians. The incidents produced political repercussions that were felt as far away as Prague and Vienna and at the highest levels of government. In fact, their reverberations may have been more influential in Vienna and Prague, where they fit persuasively into competing political arguments about nationalist claims, than they were in the rural towns where they had actually taken place. Coming at a critical moment in Bohemian politics, on the eve of the reopening of the Bohemian Diet, the incident gave rival nationalists plenty of ammunition as they jockeyed for position before the renewed contest. Seizing the opportunity of the moment, Czech and German nationalist politicians (and their respective newspapers) invoked the suffering of the newly minted martyrs in southern Bohemia to demand government concessions on several long-standing issues. This chapter uses the events of September 1908 to analyze the ways in which nationalist activists exploited violent incidents and endowed

them with propagandistic value by linking them repeatedly to larger narrative frameworks. Nationalists told and retold stories such as these, making them into examples of a particular genre that involved recognizable sets of actors and situations. Complicated, messy events were reduced to their most recognizable elements and compressed into intelligible stories about battling nations, where people allegedly acted out of long-term commitment rather than for spontaneous reasons. Newspapers’ and politicians’ rhetoric fitted the events at Ber-

Violence in the Village 179 greichenstein / Kasperskée Hory and Schuttenhofen/Susice into such narratives, giving them a coherence and significance they otherwise would have lacked and making them far more compelling to popular audiences. By recasting highly localized conflicts in universalized terms as best they could and wherever they could, activists justified their own self-fulfilling claim that ordinary Austrians cared about nationalist issues. Each side maneuvered to gain greater legitimacy for

its political claims both in the eyes of its own public and with the imperial government. The nationalist press gave a compelling narrative structure to quite random local incidents, primarily to reaffirm their nationalist significance. When it served their purposes, both press and activists were even willing to invent stories of rural violence altogether. Vandalism, name-calling, stone throwing, and brawling had _ long-established traditions in rural Europe, but the attachment of nationalist significance to such events around the turn of the century was a relatively new phenomenon. Nationalist disputes now seemed as likely to be fought out on country lanes as on urban boulevards. As a result, contemporary observers and later historians concluded that around 1900 the nationalities’ conflict that dominated Austria’s cities and legislative

institutions had apparently swallowed up the countryside as well. Readers of rural Bohemia’s regional newspapers might well have concluded in 1908 that a veritable war raged about them. As they constructed this tale of a nationalized countryside, nationalists and their newspapers continued their tradition of blaming vio-

lence on unprovoked attacks made by the enemy. But increasingly after 1900 their narratives preferred to downplay the importance of specific provocation and to blame violent behavior on allegedly deep, ongoing, and legitimate frustrations within local society. Violent out-

bursts may have appeared to be spontaneous, claimed nationalists, but in fact they revealed enduring local commitments to maintain national traditions in the face of increased challenges brought by outsiders to the community. Violent incidents, no longer considered incidental to local social life, supposedly proved that the rural populace exhibited a high degree of nationalist commitment. And once local violence had abated, argued the activists, the nationalist commitment of the rural masses continued to simmer under a deceptively placid surface until the inevitable next outbreak reaffirmed their engage-

180 Violence in the Village ment. Every new example of violence only added to the existing cata-

logue, and over time journalists and politicians trotted out the erowing collection to prove both the inevitability and the normalcy of nationalist violence.

While accounts of rural violence around 1900 tried to normalize the presumption of a nationalized rural world, other kinds of nationalist writing continued to rupture this same logic by complaining of stubborn rural resistance to nationalization. If nationalist newspaper accounts generally presumed the prior nationalization of the rural masses, their editorials continued to betray uncertainty about the accuracy of that very claim. Had Czech-, German-, or Slovene-speaking

society in fact become sufficiently conscious of its authentic, inner national identity? The same undertone of frustration regarding the indifference of their rural comrades toward nationalist identity we have encountered in earlier discussions about the rural language frontier permeated nationalist discourse about violent incidents as well. Although outbreaks of violence allegedly reflected the deeply felt nationalist rage of a community, more often than not, stories about violence were used strategically to initiate the very process of nationalization among an otherwise apathetic population. Historians too have read the media’s litany of nationalist outrages as a relatively transparent reflection of community commitment rather than as an attempt to create nationalist feeling among the uncommitted, those “in-between” people who refused to identify themselves fully with a single nation. The nationalist media had long resorted to a militant rhetoric to describe nationalist struggles that most Austrians would otherwise have found prosaic in character and irrelevant to their daily lives. After all, what did complex and drawn-out legal struggles over street signs,

schools, or bureaucratic appointments mean to most Austrians? The press consistently characterized these political and administrative struggles in bellicose terms, using a language that implied the ongoing possibility of real physical danger. Sull, in quotidian terms, these so-called battles were generally a pretty dull business. So, as we have seen with the schoolhouse-drama narrative, the newspapers gradually added another element to their accounts of nationalist conflict: physical violence in daily life. Increasingly they augmented their apoc-

alyptic accounts of institutional struggles with reports of small-scale

Violence in the Village 1381 incidents that, by themselves, might seem only momentarily shocking but, when fit into a nationalist narrative, assumed a far more sinister aspect.

Nationalists brought their struggle into the parlors of the average newspaper reader by stressing unprovoked attacks made by members of one group on innocent members (women and children) of the other. Yet unlike the case of the schoolhouse drama, which pitted competitive symbolic claims on public space against each other, these new reports of violence involved victims engaged in ordinary private

pursuits. If newspaper readers remained cool toward parliamentary filibusters, perhaps their blood could be made to boil by accounts of women and children accosted by nationalist bullies on the street. Although these incidents usually involved a spoken threat or misplaced saliva rather than physical violence, and although they occurred in public settings, their deeper significance lay in their implied threat to domestic life. Recounting them became a way to demonstrate repeatedly that national identity was not purely a question of political commitment but one of private survival as well. Local examples of nationalist bullying, boycotts, school conflict, or employment discrim-

ination forced the reader to confront the long-term personal implications of abstract judicial rulings or legislation. So it was that when violence broke out in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory on 6 September 1908, the nationalist media had already prepared a seamless structural explanation to frame the physical abuse suffered by private individuals in terms of injury to an abstract whole, the nation. And although the newspapers had not caused the violence, their reporting did its best to prolong its effects by framing the violence as the normal consequence of living in a national world and egging on their readers to revenge. The following analysis of the events at Bergreichenstein / Kasperske

Hory examines nationalist rhetoric and government documents to prove the unevenness of nationalism’s appeal to the rural populace on the language frontier in southern Bohemia. Put another way, my account provides a corrective to nationalist historiography, disproves the confident presumption of a nationalized rural populace, and demonstrates how that illusion was created and disseminated. As we have

seen, much of the evidence for rural nationalization around 1900 relied heavily on media sources and interpretations provided by na-

182 Violence in the Village tionalists themselves, evidence framed and implicated by nationalist discourses. When examined closely, that evidence often turns out to say remarkably little about rural people themselves. As tempting as it may be to rely on such accounts to understand the historical experiences of individuals or communities, printed media sources tell the historian far more about their producers than about their subjects. Nationalist attempts to shape public understanding of events in Bohemia also betrayed a consistent undertone of unease about the credibility of their allegedly normative worldview. This, I believe, is precisely because so few people shared that nationalist view. Despite their normative claims, nationalist discourses themselves neither reflected

nor shaped the full meanings of their own experience for most rural Austrians. Additionally, when examined more closely, nationalist narratives betrayed substantial inconsistencies and omissions that derived from the need to impose a nationalist way of thinking on a public as yet unused to thinking in such terms. These inconsistencies reveal the spaces where alternative viewpoints can at least be surmised, if not reported. It may be impossible to reconstruct other points of view with any accuracy, but their existence can often be plotted, first by reading nationalist accounts against themselves and second by contrasting those accounts to those generated by the anational government. The latter were no less implicated in a politics of interest than the former, but their value lies in the very different set of presumptions on which they were founded.

Words Almost from the moment the Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory in-

cident took place, Czech and German nationalist responses reinforced the validity of each other’s claims by placing these events in a

nation-oriented framework. Their common basis for attributing meaning to events was narrow in its scope and closed to interpretations that did not acknowledge the nation as the basic touchstone for community identity. Their accounts left no room for the possibility that the broader populace might not universally share nationalist readings of the events of 6-9 September. More important, neither side admitted that the incident might not have touched everyone in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Horry, since each side claimed to speak

Violence in the Village 183 for entire populations. All Bohemians had to belong to one side or the other in the conflict. The global world of nations does not easily admit the possibility of national hermaphrodites or amphibians and prefers to see such beings as people not yet conscious of their inherent national identity and its importance. The last point is particularly important since yet another set of accounts—those written by imperial government officials—also suggests that nationalist commitment was not as universally or deeply shared.

Government investigations often contradicted the nationalist reports that presented every event, no matter how small, as a confirmation of a nationalist point of view. The local authorities’ own examinations of nationalist claims frequently demonstrate that the newspapers too easily crossed the line between strategic exaggeration and outright lying. On several occasions administrators in Vienna or

Prague got wind of violent nationalist incidents by reading the nationalist press rather than from communications sent them by their own district administrators. When this happened, the imperial or royal ministry routinely requested that the office of the provincial governor or the district administrator provide a retrospective account of the incident. The local police or district gendarmes then carried out an investigation and reported their findings. In some cases it turned out that nationalist newspapers had taken insignificant, oftenunrelated events and transformed them into a nationalist story of local significance. Small wonder that the district officials had made

no report about these incidents. The nationalist press alone had knowledge of these incidents because no such incident had in fact taken place. The local police might recall something that resembled what the nationalists had reported, but this “something” had no defining shape to it that would mark it as a nationalist incident worthy of note. Take, for example, the following account of a disorderly exchange in the southern Bohemian village of Stachau/Stachy that allegedly

could have escalated into a bloody battle had not cool heads prevailed. On 29 May 1908 the Ministry of the Interior requested an investigation from the governor of Bohemia about the following event

that had been reported widely in the Bohemian German nationalist press: “Attack on German gymnasts. As the Bergreichenstein gymnasts

returned from their Easter excursion to Eleonorenhain through the

184 Violence in the Village Czech [village of] Stachau, the Czechs attacked them. Only the gymnasts’ levelheadedness prevented a bloody brawl from breaking out.”

The newspaper went on to link this apparently isolated event to broader German nationalist political complaints regarding the borders of administrative districts and the languages used on local signs.

“Unfortunately the road that connects the German Bohmerwald towns of Winterberg and Bergreichenstein passes through a Czech region at Stachau, where one is far more likely to find signs in French

than in German, despite the fact that the through traffic here is almost completely German.” The governor's office forwarded the request to District Administrator Bohm in Schuttenhofen/Susice, and on 9 June Bohm was able to make the following report to the governor. According to a local gendarme post, some German nationalist gymnasts from Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory had indeed passed through Stachau/Stachy on the road from Winterberg/Vimperk on 20 April. The same gymnasts, clearly drunk, had yelled hostile anti-Czech slogans and songs from their cart as they passed through the village, drawing the attention of a few local inhabitants. Of the local people who took any note at all of the passing travelers, only Franz Krause Jr. (described as a youth) actually ran after the wagon with some village children in tow. These had indeed thrown pebbles after the gymnasts, without hitting

or hurting anyone. It had certainly not constituted an incident and at most could be considered street play on the part of some young people in Stachau/Stachy.° In this case the nationalist press had essentially created a coherent and dramatic narrative from little more than village gossip in order to reinforce an image of a rural landscape torn by nationalist strife. The fact that a few village children had thrown pebbles at a passing

cart had offered the reporter potential material for depicting daily circumstances in nationally polarized terms. The press had even praised the restrained behavior of the German gymnasts in the face of imagined provocation, constructing virtue out of the fact that no incident had broken out. In fact, the gendarmes had reported that it was the slogans of the drunken German gymnasts, not the actions of the Stachau/Stachy villagers, that had constituted the closest thing to a provocation. Nor did the so-called restraint of the gymnasts actually save the day, but rather, the relative lack of interest displayed by the

Violence in the Village 185 Stachauers in responding to this minor provocation. The government

investigation had exposed the newspapers’ narrative of nationalist conflict in the rural Bohemian Woods as false, and the Ministry of the

Interior could be satisfied that nothing of note had taken place that day on the road from Winterberg/Vimperk. But such government reports were not, as a rule, made public. Nor did the offending newspaper find itself forced to issue a retraction of its claim. Even if it had issued a retraction, the damage was already done, and the story of the holiday trip from Eleonorenhain/Lenora had entered the annals of nationalist mythmaking, along with countless other stories of equally dubious provenance. With regard to the events of 6-9 September, there is no question that something seriously nationalist in character took place. In this case it is more a question of determining how serious and for whom. To understand the respective frameworks in which Czech and German nationalists anchored their narratives, recall the familiar

complaints of each nationalist group in this region. Both tacked adeptly between a rhetoric of victimization and one of aggressive col-

onization, depending on the requirements of the situation. Here, where German speakers constituted an overwhelming majority of the

village population, Czech nationalists frequently portrayed their brethren as abject viciums of German aggression. When the occasion demanded, the same victims became pioneers reconquering border

outposts of the so-called Czech lands for the future benefit of the nation. German nationalists, in turn, despite their linguistic predominance, liked to see themselves as victims of Czech migration and the efforts of Czech nationalist administrators. Kasperské Hory’s Czech-speaking residents formed an embattled, ill-used minority on the language frontier. According to a Czech nationalist tourist guide to the region, it was only the events of the Thirty Years’ War that had dissipated the town’s originally Czech national character. In writing about the 1908 incident, Narodni listy too described the town as a “Germanized” village.* Czechs in Kasperskeée Hory, it claimed, were often the objects of public insult and threatening behavior. German nationalist landlords might at any moment eject them arbitrarily from their apartments on trumped-up pretenses, and the German-dominated town council did its best to make them feel unwelcome. German speakers regularly bullied Czech speakers

186 Violence in the Village in town, and Czech speakers had recently moved their beseda, or social club, from an inn on the town square to a house farther off the square because of just such a conflict with a landlord.® The minority Czech

population of Kasperské Hory, argued Czech nationalists, required government protection in order to avoid daily persecution or the long-term fate of Germanization.® German nationalists, as we have seen, depicted Bergreichenstein as

their town, a place with no history of nationalist conflict until quite recently. Traditionally, as the Pilsner Tagblatt put it, the very few Czechs

who moved there had assimilated to the German community. Other Czech speakers such as vendors frequented the annual town markets, but according to the paper there had never been an indigenous Czech minority rooted in the town.’ All of this had recently changed when an “artificial” minority population of civil servants had settled in the town. German nationalists protested repeatedly that the civil servants appointed to Bergreichenstein, from judges, tax assessors, and notaries to the local apothecary, were in fact agents of Czech nationalism. Their appointment had allegedly made the town more prone to na-

tionalist conflict in the past decade and had conferred a sense of victimization on the local majority German-speaking population.® As

we have seen, German nationalists also resented the fact that as educated people, these Czech civil servants were not likely to assimilate

to the German community. To the contrary, these educated Czech speakers founded local branches of nationalist associations and marked their shops and offices with Czech-language signs. Given their

politcal goal of administrative separation from the Czechs in Bohemia rather than cohabitation, German nationalists viewed these developments with increasing dismay.

None of these developments by itself represented a particular threat to anyone. It was rather in the context of community life and administrative power that they assumed a threatening aspect. German nationalists, for example, complained increasingly after 1897 that their town should belong to an administrative district overseen by German civil servants and not to a linguistically mixed district overseen by an allegedly Czech nationalist bureaucracy. Proclaiming that the current arrangement enabled Czech nationalists to impose na-

tionalist humiliations such as bilingual signs on their Germanspeaking constituents, German nationalists claimed that the sum total of these daily humiliations had inevitably led to violence.

Violence in the Village 187 The Czech Account On the particular Sunday night in question, several members of the Czech-speaking minority later reported having felt more than a little persecuted.’ That weekend Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory had played host to the annual convention of the Deutscher BOhmerwaldbund. This event had brought several German nationalist visitors to the town, particularly fraternity students from Prague. Czech nationalists in town later claimed to have maintained an intentionally low profile throughout the weekend. They had even organized a Czech nationalist outing for that Sunday, 6 September, in order to avoid contact with the German nationalist visitors in town. Those who had spent the day on the outing returned to town that evening around ten o’clock, whereupon a small group of them withdrew to the beseda. Even before their arrival bands of German fraternity students had already loitered intermittently in front of the house to yell “Pfui beseda” and “Heil” and to sing the “Watch on the Rhine.” When these provocations elicited no response, the students had dispersed. Around eleven o’clock the students returned, this time “with prominent members of local German nationalist associations as well as the German rabble in tow.” Eventually shouts came from the crowd that stones were being thrown from the windows of rooms occupied by notary Jiricka and accountant Tybl. ‘Town police commissioner and councilor Fiedler entered the house with five municipal police officers

and editor Preitischopf (also an agent of the Bohmerwaldbund). Meeting no resistance, the police went up to the second floor and roused the family of accountant Tybl, but their initial search produced

no stones. When cries continued that stones were being thrown, a group of students broke down the doors that the police had locked during their search and set about despoiling the ground-floor rooms of the beseda. According to Czech accounts, they had terrorized the few tavern guests there, including some women, yelling at those who dared protest, “Tell it to the Narodni listy!” Eventually the mob made its way up to the second floor, where it did indeed find several stones. The latter, according to Czech nationalist accounts, had clearly been thrown from the street. In the course of this action several windows were smashed and masonry was damaged. Fiedler then drew up a list of the people present in the beseda, and the crowd finally withdrew at around two o'clock in the morning.

188 Violence in the Village According to the same Czech nationalist sources, Fiedler and Preitischopf were not the only German nationalist worthies present at the beseda that night. In addition to the town councilor, lawyer Frankl, secretary Nausch, candy maker Ertl, and editor Preitischopf, teachers

Ertl, Neumann, and Plach, as well as the wife of local headmaster Thurner and the wife of town physician Stingl, were also observed in the mob. The prominence of more bourgeois elements in the crowd was a crucial theme in Czech nationalist accounts of events. Czech

leaders accused German leaders of carefully orchestrating these events and of making them appear popular and spontaneous in nature. Czech nationalists denied that the attacks on the beseda and the harassment of Czech individuals reflected a spontaneous expression

of nationalist feeling among the indigenous population. Responsibility for the disorders could not be attributed to the misbehavior of a crowd of uneducated peasants or workers. Instead, Czech nationalist leaders claimed that the Bohmerwaldbund leaders and other local and

visiting German nationalists had used the festival as an opportunity to harass local Czechs.

At eight o’clock the next morning (Monday, 7 September) Dr. Anton Singer, chairman of the Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory District Council and a member of the Czech nationalist community, sent a brief telegram to the governor's office in Prague.'® It read, “Last night the beseda was assaulted and the windows smashed.”!! Allegations

about the exact content of this telegram would later become part of the controversy when German nationalists claimed that it had announced the complete destruction of the beseda. For the next two days mob violence against Czech-speaking citizens continued to punctuate

public life in town, and “the Czechs had to remain on guard even when asleep.”'? Crowds of fraternity students and local rabble threat-

ened individuals on the street, demonstrated in front of Czechs’ houses or businesses, and smashed their windows. Teacher Joseph Strnad found himself surrounded by some 150 people on the square who spat on him angrily and chased him home, all the while jostling and kicking him. Czech nationalists reported that District Judge Smitek too was assaulted by mobs on the square in the presence of German nationalist town councilor Fiedler, evidently to the latter’s amusement.'* The mob broke windows, painted over Czech business signs, cut out

Violence in the Village 189 the Czech-language side of the posted railway schedule, and even dragged an unfortunate German forester from the bar in the Hotel Skala because the establishment was run by Thomas Worlicek, whom many German nationalists characterized as a Czech. The students led the mob to the store of the apothecary, another Czech, broke in, and eventually closed his store down. Later reports out of Kasperské Hory

suggested that the students had not only broken windows and masonry, but had also smeared excrement on the beseda." On Tuesday evening at around 7:30, District Commissar Pavlovsky, recently arrived with gendarme reinforcements from Schuttenhofen/

Susice and headquartered at the Hotel Skala on the town square, heard the sounds of an approaching party singing and drumming. It was a band of university students returning from an outing to neighboring Unterreichenstein / Dolni Rejstejn with some of the local “ladies.” Pavlovsky ordered the gendarmes to report to the square. Meanwhile, a fight broke out on another corner of the town square between several fraternity students, locals, and a Czech-speaking gendarme, Kucera. Publican Franz Haas, a notorious town rowdy, according to the Czechs, led the crowd in surrounding and beating the gendarme and threatening him with further violence even after he had fallen to the street. Arriving at the square, the reinforcements swiftly used their bayonets to break up the crowd. In the process Haas and road mender Friedl were stabbed, while bricklayer Oswald Kasperl sustained a wound to the hand. At Pavlovsky’s order the gendarmes eventually drove the crowd from the square. After repeated skirmishes and negotiations with student leaders, the crowd dispersed to the side streets, only to return singing a while later. At this point the military arrived from Schuttenhofen/Susice and took up positions in the town square until early the next morning. Czech nationalist accounts of this incident maintained repeatedly that the violence should not be attributed simply to a mob of uneducated peasant rabble or even to the drunken revels of some German nationalist fraternity students. Instead, they repeatedly stressed the collusion of the municipal government in fomenting anti-Czech violence. Among the leaders of the crowd on the eighth they claimed even to have witnessed Mayor Neumann, who was indeed present, as we will see. Czech nationalists held the leaders of the BoOhmerwaldbund and the town council responsible for whipping up the passions

190 Violence in the Village of German nationalists and targeting defenseless local Czechs. Equally disastrous was the apparent unwillingness of the town police and the town authorities to come to the aid of the beleaguered Czechs. Only

when the district gendarmes and later the dragoons arrived as reinforcements could the Czechs count on some protection. Although accurate about the ultimate responsibility of German nationalists for the events of 6-7 September and detailed in their assessment of the composition and leadership of the crowds, Czech nationalists predictably succumbed to the same kind of argument their opponents made in explaining events in Schuttenhofen/Susice. In the latter setting the attacks on Germans returning home from the festivities had indeed resulted from a justified popular anger of the masses against the perpetrators of the attack on the beseda the night before. It was this chaotic anger that Czech nationalists transformed into a focused picture of nationalist combustion among the allegedly nationalized population of this largely Czech-speaking town.

The German Account The German nationalist accounts of the events of 6-9 September reversed several of the assertions made by their Czech nationalist counterparts. The Germans claimed to have gathered in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory that weekend merely to celebrate their own community unity, not to stir up trouble against the national enemy. Citing examples from recent festivals in Pilsen/Plzen and Budweis/Budejovice, allegedly “spoiled” by Czech nationalist interventions, several newspapers reported that here too the Czechs had followed a nowfamiliar strategy for disrupting German celebrations. Already a week before the Bohmerwaldbund was to meet in Bergreichenstein, the Czech nationalist mayor of Schuttenhofen/Susice had petitioned the district administrator to prohibit the meeting. The mayor claimed that German nationalist travelers passing through his town on their way to the meeting would needlessly provoke the nationalist ire of the local Czech population. In such a case the mayor claimed that he could not guarantee public order. The district administrator had rejected this plea. How, asked German nationalist journalists, could the honorable Czech mayor have guessed that there would be trouble if he did not himself have a hand in planning it?!°

Violence in the Village 191 In a mirror image of Czech nationalist accounts, the German nationalists accused their opponents, mostly bourgeois civil servants, of organizing the masses to disrupt German events and make the disruption appear to be spontaneous. “Long before German festivals take place, the Czech population is stirred up, the attack is planned and roles distributed, so that no one will be caught after the fact. And those who do the planning are not to be found among Czech workingclass circles, or among Czech youths... it is members of the so-called better Czech society, civil servants, yes, even state bureaucrats.”'® Yet if the claims by the Czech mayor of Schuttenhofen/Susice regarding

the nationalist ire of the masses masked the organized involvement of bourgeois Czech leaders, then the German accounts were guilty of the same process when it came to Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory. Their own accounts portray the German mayor and other leaders as

attempting to restrain the (often-justified) nationalist wrath of the local populace, rather than stirring it up and giving it structure. According to newspaper reports, it was the Czech civil servants in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory who had provoked the Czech minority and encouraged it to attack the Germans, even as they prepared to leave the town. The newspapers told varying stories about the beseda incident, but all recounted the same story of an attack in Schuttenhofen/Susice the following day. According to the Pilsner Tagblaitt, as the Germans made their way home from the Bohmerwaldbund festivities on the night of the sixth, promenading on the streets as was their custom, Czechs in the beseda had assailed them with a veritable hailstorm of stones the size of a fist. Five Germans had been wounded, reported the paper, including lawyer Frankl. The whole provocation by the Czechs would have remained without further consequence had not District Chairman Anton Singer, “a fanatical Czech,” sent his secretary to Schuttenhofen to report that the Bergreichenstein Czechs were under mortal attack by the Germans." Deutsch-Bohmerwald reported a somewhat more detailed sequence of events for the night of the sixth. At around eleven o’clock, after an evening of parades, speeches, and refreshment, many of the visiting students were returning to their guest quarters when they were stopped by gendarmes who blocked their access to the Schulgasse, where the beseda also happened to be located. ‘The students protested that there was no other way to reach their quarters, and soon a crowd

192 Violence in the Village gathered. ‘Town councilor and police commissioner Fiedler attempted

to mediate the conflict, but with no success. He hurried back to the hotel where the festivities had taken place and returned to the Schulgasse with editor Preitischopf in tow, and the two attempted to calm the restive crowd. Before they could disperse the crowd, however, stones were thrown from the upper windows of the beseda. ‘The crowd demanded that the beseda be searched, and when Fiedler and Preitischopf tried to calm the crowd, more stones flew down, wounding two Germans, lawyer Frankl and a gymnast named Wurm. Fiedler entered

the beseda along with the gendarmes to investigate. In the pub they

found Judge Orhenstiel, District Chairman Singer (“too drunk to make himself understood”), Tax Administrator Kazda, “and a number of Czech ‘Ladies’ ” [sic]. While Fiedler again tried to calm the crowd,

Kazda emerged in front of the beseda and, in a manner highly unseemly for a Habsburg official, provocatively yelled “Na zdar” three times. (Yet another account had Kazda assembling a group of Czech apprentice boys in the beseda on the evening of the sixth for the purpose of stoning passing Germans. In this version Kazda yelled “Na zdar” three times from a second-floor window. ) At this point the paper claimed that a shot was suddenly fired from the beseda, but no one was hit. Witnesses later claimed to have seen the wife of notary Jiricka and her daughters throwing stones at the Germans from their private apartments. Only once the police commissioner and the district gendarmes had recorded statements from those present could peace be reestablished on the street. At four thirty in the morning, while the rest of the town slept, a young Czech employed by Singer on the District Council slipped off to Schuttenhofen

to rile up the Czechs there with false reports of a mortal attack on their brethren.'® German nationalist newspapers reported that the next day several

early travelers had been “insulted” on the road to Schuttenhofen/ Susice. Later that afternoon, having apparently been informed by their contacts in Bergreichenstein / KaSperské Hory about the approach of two wagons carrying German students, the Czechs of Schut-

tenhofen/Susice were ready with another hailstorm of stones. One coachman (“a seventy-year-old man!”) suffered a serious head injury, and was taken to a physician on the main town square. There a crowd waited for the students to emerge from the physician’s home in order

Violence in the Village 193 to threaten them further. According to the students’ accounts, the mayor of Schuttenhofen/Susice and his police refused to intervene, and it was only the coincidental actions of some district officials and gendarmes who happened upon this scene that spared the students

from a worse fate and helped them reach the railway station. According to the Pilsner Tagblatt, two Czechs had been arrested that day, a glazier and a student, but they were subsequently freed after giving their statements and were carried home in triumph on the shoulders of the crowd."

When news of this “cowardly attack” reached Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory (with the return of the coachman), concerned Germans gathered on the town square in front of the Czech-owned Hotel Skala to protest against Czech actions. Preitischopf held a speech deploring Czech action but counseling against any kind of violence, and the night passed quietly.” The students claimed to have visited Singer that day to inquire about reports that he had sent a telegram with an employee of his claiming that the beseda and a next-door house had

been completely demolished by German students. Singer swore to them that the telegram had said nothing more than “beseda attacked,” and that he had not sent his assistant to Schuttenhofen/SusSice for the purpose of stirring up the Czechs.?! The next day, Tuesday, the eighth, was in fact a holiday, which explains why some of the attendees at the Bohmerwaldbund festivities had remained the extra days in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Horry. In the evening crowds again assembled on the town square. The stu-

dents who spent the day on an excursion later claimed to have returned around 7:00 p.M., only to find a large and panicked crowd assembled on the square. A new and allegedly fanatic pro-Czech com-

missioner, Dr. Pawlovsky [sic], had just arrived with a company of gendarmes from Schuttenhofen/Susice. The students reported that because of the number of men, women, and children assembled on the square—some 100—they did not witness the attack on Kucera. In their report Pavlovsky’s gendarmes had suddenly appeared and quite unreasonably had attacked the peaceful crowd with a bayonet charge. Some of the German newspapers conceded that at one point the crowd may well have insulted a Czech gendarme, yet this mild provocation could not possibly have justified subsequent events. When District Commissioner Pavlovsky ordered the attack, the Deutsche Volks-

194 Violence in the Village zeltung reported that two innocent people who “coincidentally were passing by the Hotel Skala” (one of them Franz Haas) were seriously and seven others lightly wounded. The Pilsner Tagblatt gave by far the most detailed and pathos-laden account, conjuring up slaughter of innocents, women, children, and innocent bystanders. Allegedly, a

harmless crowd had gathered on the square in a repetition of the previous evening’s demonstration. Around eight o’clock a district political official had appeared with two gendarmes to disperse the crowd.

One of the gendarmes, Kanka from Schuttenhofen, had turned his bayonet on a child who was unable to get out of his way fast enough. At this, a “courageous man” had jumped forward to grab the child, “who otherwise would have fallen victim to the fanatic Czech.” As

others in the crowd surrounded the gendarme, the latter drew his sword and stabbed two men, Friedl and Haas. Both had to be carried from the square, and Haas died from his wounds. When the crowd witnessed this behavior, it attempted to disarm gendarme Kanka, who “accidentally wounded himself twice” in the confusion of the moment. He and the other gendarme then received reinforcements who mis-

treated the crowd heartlessly, stabbing at people and ripping their clothing. During this confusion a unit of dragoons from Klattau rode into the square.” Thinking that the military had come to aid the Germans, the unwitting populace greeted the dragoons with friendly cries of “Heil” as they approached the square. District Commissioner Pavlovsky, however, had other ideas for the troops. He commanded the military to clear the square again. To the shock of the unsuspecting crowd, the dragoons attacked without warning. Panic-stricken people, including women and children, fled right and left, trying desperately to hide in doorways and avoid being trampled by the horses. Deutsch-Bohmerwald

described the terror of the crowd in some pathetic detail, lingering on the horrific moment when those assembled on the square had realized that the dragoons had not arrived to protect them from the anger of the Czech gendarmes. The troops trampled an eleven-yearold boy to the ground and threatened to cut down a visiting tourist named Hempel. When Mayor Neumann attempted to intervene with (the allegedly Czech) Major Kukula, asking, “Would you permit me, Herr Major?” the officer replied harshly, “You are permitted nothing. Get out of here immediately!” Shocked by the officials’ rude treat-

Violence in the Village 195 ment of the Germans, the newspaper expressed the hope that these brave “defenders of the Fatherland” would soon have plenty of opportunity “to reflect on their coarse behavior in their next posting, perhaps to [the remotest corner of] Galicia.” A student delegation telegraphed the governor in Prague claiming that the gendarmes had unjustifiably drawn their swords and had wounded nine people “despite the fact that the students had calmed the populace the night

before.” The students demanded the immediate assignment of a German commissioner to Bergreichenstein. “Otherwise,” they claimed, “we can no longer guarantee order among the populace.” Here the students painted themselves both as the defenders and as the restrainers of a nationalist populace whose anger could not be contained.*®

On the next day the unfortunate Pavlovsky was indeed removed from Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory and replaced by two allegedly German commissioners from Prague, Schwarz and Leiner. That day as well, the last of the German students, twenty-six in number, traveled under heavy military escort to the railway station in Schuttenhofen/Susice. At the outskirts of the town they were met by reinforcements. Before they entered Schuttenhofen/Susice, the district administrator brusquely ordered them to remove their nationalist insignia and headgear from view. As they approached the town, they

found a large crowd waiting for them. When the military escort crossed the narrow bridge, some Czechs waded into the river to throw

stones from below. On the other side the crowd continued to attack the students with insults and stones until they eventually reached the safety of the station. Back in Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory gendarmes continued to patrol the streets for several weeks, although according to the German nationalists they had no reason to be there. Even Franz Haas’s funeral came off peaceably, despite government worries that it might provide hotheads with a new opportunity to demonstrate anti-Czech or antigovernment sentiments.** German nationalists understandably focused most of their attention on Pavlovsky’s bayonet charge and on the supposed ordeal suffered

by the university students as they traveled through Schuttenhofen/ Susice. The students portrayed themselves (and were portrayed in the press) more as a force for order than for disorder. They were highspirited young idealists who displayed level heads when the serious-

196 Violence in the Village ness of the situation required it. The students had supposedly attempted to mediate between the “people” and the authorities during the bayonet and cavalry attacks in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Horry. Yes, admitted both the students and the newspapers, the German stu-

dents had caroused a bit on the night of the sixth, singing nationalist songs in the streets. Such youthful exuberance in the cause of the nation could hardly be counted a sin, much less a provocation, by the few mean-spirited Czechs apparently bent on spoiling the Germans’ festival. For if young Germans were not free to sing their nationalist songs on the streets of a German village without fear of provoking Czech violence, then Germans everywhere had lost their freedom. In their narratives the German nationalist papers carefully positioned the students between the authorities and the “people” in order to emphasize the active participation of broader segments of the population in the disorders as well. The same accounts carefully limited the role of the students or the town’s leaders to one of restraining the ungovernable masses. In so doing, the German newspapers effectively turned the course of events on its head. Instead of carousing students whose public disorder had attracted participation by many local rowdies, it was the people who had rioted and the students who had attempted to keep the peace. When the German papers actually addressed the incident at the beseda, they countered Czech complaints of harassment by reiterating

two points. First, given their numerical superiority, the Germans might indeed have stormed the beseda had not the wise moderation of their leaders compelled them to hold back the angry crowds and seek legal remedy. This trope of German rational moderation in the face of severe provocation frequently appears as a refrain attached to German nationalist accounts of incidents involving potential violence, as we have seen with the Stachau/Stachy narrative. But for the civilized moderation of their leaders, claimed the papers, the Germans

might easily have won the day. The second point made in every German account was that there were no casualties among Czech speakers during the three days of excesses. This “fact” enabled German accounts simply to ignore Czech accusations of bullying attacks by German nationalist mobs such as those against defenseless

individuals such as Strnad and Smitek on the streets. The German nationalist explanation also conveniently ignored all questions of re-

Violence in the Village 197 sponsibility for damage done to Czech property, for broken windows,

destroyed signs, and painted graffiti during the entire period of 6 through 9 September. Unlike the Czech nationalist accounts that generally praised the actions of the gendarmes and military reinforcements to the detriment of the local police in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory, the German nationalists viewed the district gendarmes as tools of the allegedly Czech nationalist district bureaucracy. The Germans complained repeatedly that although the Czechs had supposedly caused the violence, it was a German-speaking population that was subsequently subjected to an ongoing military occupation. What other outcome could be expected, asked the German newspapers, eager to fit the events into their larger nationalist political claims, when the government consistently appointed nationally biased Czech-speaking bureaucrats to positions of power in linguistically mixed or Germanmajority frontier districts?”

Quoting Each Other Czech and German nationalist papers not only shared the same nationalist premise; they also quoted liberally from each other’s accounts of the violence. They did so partly to demonstrate to their own readers just how badly the enemy twisted the truth in its accounts. In a larger sense, however, the papers shared enemy accounts with their readers in order to help explain why such nationalist excesses had occurred in the first place. Apparently, neither side was confident enough that its readers completely shared its conception of a world divided into

mutually hostile nations. The papers could not assume that their readers would comprehend fully just why it was that Czechs or Germans would wish to attack each other in the first place. Thus the two sides worked to reinforce the believability of their own accounts by quoting the other’s accounts to show how the enemy manipulated the truth.

Czech newspapers reported that German accounts consistently avoided any mention of the original attack on the beseda, making the Czech response in Susice appear gratuitous and hostile, as if to deny the Germans their right to celebrate their festivals. The Czech papers further noted that while the Germans continuously promoted the lie

198 Violence in the Village that Czech civil servants had participated in violence against Germans,

the German papers refused to mention the leading role taken by German fraternity students, Bohmerwaldbund leaders, and town councilors in initiating the violence against Czechs. Furthermore, Czech newspapers found it curious that the German papers avoided all mention of the way in which students had intimidated, threatened, and even spat on Czech citizens in the streets of Kasperske Hory. Finally, several Czech newspapers implied that while the events in Susice were indeed unjustified, they were at least understandable. If German readers knew about what had been done to the Czech minority and its beseda in Kasperské Hory, the Czech response in Susice would not appear to be unprovoked.”® German critiques of Czech accounts focused on the Czech selfportrayal as helpless victims of German anger and long-standing Germanizing policies. German papers quoted extensively from Ndrodni listy to the effect that Czechs in Bergreichenstein feared for their lives when brutal German students had ganged up to threaten individuals in the street and to vandalize the beseda. One can imagine the effect of such lies on a gullible Czech public, opined the Pilsner Tagblatt. After all, the beseda turned out not to be damaged at all, and all the officials who intervened in Bergreichenstein did so on the side of the Czechs, not the Germans.?’ Deutsch-Bohmerwald even published a letter

purporting to have been written in Czech by a worker, J. Cervensky, and sent from Prague. The writer claimed to have overheard Pavlovsky

give the order to “cut down everything German.” “I heard this with my own ears. I am a Czech worker, but I don’t consider this deed of the Czech bureaucrats to be a good thing. They, Pavlovsky and Kazda, are Czech garbage.”**

The purpose of the newspapers was not simply to expose the lies of the opposition or even to explain how gullible people might possibly have been led to act. There is an even more complex game afoot

here. Both sides projected an image of their own moderation in the face of an extremist opponent. Both sides frequently expressed regret that the vicious lies circulated by the opposition papers, politicians, and administrators might have caused simple people to become enemies in the first place. If both sides spent an inordinate amount of space criticizing the acts of bureaucrats, it was not simply in order to gain redress from the government, although that was certainly a part

Violence in the Village 199 of it. They also aimed to blame fanatic bureaucrats, associational leaders, and politicians for the outrageous activism of the other side. Czech newspapers, for example, opposed what they termed the aggressive Germanization efforts of German nationalist associations and civil servants, but not the right of ordinary Germans to coexist with ordinary Czechs in Bohemia. The German newspapers in turn often cultivated the notion of ordinary Czechs as gullible in order to continue the convenient fiction of a Czech world divided into the good and bad Czechs. The good Czechs were those interested in obtaining

a German education for their children, for example, and the bad Czechs were nationalist fanatics determined to undermine the general good of society to achieve their narrowly political ends. While both accounts presumed that two mutually exclusive and completely nationalized peoples inhabited Bohemia, they also asserted that neither was fundamentally hostile to the other’s interest. It was therefore all the more shameful when radicalized civil servants, mayors, town coun-

cilors, or students on one side provoked the other to needless violence through shameless propaganda and agitation.

Government Accounts Government narratives generally undermined the self-confident normalcy exuded by the nationalist accounts.*? In government reports it was more the heat of the moment than nationalist premeditation that produced violent incidents. Here passions died down almost as swiftly

as they had flared up, and nationalist explanations played a much smaller role than in accounts by the newspapers, nationalist organizations, or nationalist town councils. This particular slant is not surprising for a government bureaucracy that recognized the legitimacy of nationalist claims only reluctantly. Government accounts tended to

minimize any deeper nationalist significance that might attach to these events. Where nationalist accounts linked disparate events across region, province, or country in order to frame them as component parts of coherent conspiracies, the district administrator painted a picture of individual incidents, quickly settled. Government reports were not necessarily any more reliable than those of the nationalists, since officials too were anxious to justify their own actions. The district administrator, the commanders of the dra-

200 Violence in the Village goons and the gendarmes—each had his own interest in disseminating a narrative in which social disorder of any kind was swiftly diagnosed and handled, and where the use of force was effective and minimal. The bureaucrats were also aware of the importance of public

opinion and the danger of appearing heavy handed in any contact with the public. In these situations the government had to appear to be as impartial and as competent as possible. For this reason alone, government accounts also engaged in their own form of exaggeration with regard to specific moments of violence where officials had to justify their forceful intervention to a skeptical hierarchy and to an even more skeptical public. Official reports certainly admitted that local incidents could have a nationalist component to them: the crowd in Schuttenhofen/Susice had indeed yelled anti-German slogans, and the Germans had held a nationalist celebration in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory. But the government focused on the actual facts of the violence and far less on the abstract motivations behind it. Nationalist accounts wanted to

portray violence as part of a larger, coherent political struggle in order to win broad popular support and to mobilize that support fully. Government accounts, however, refused to make the nationalist

leap of faith. The government and the military did not place these local incidents into the allegedly logical framework of a greater nationalist conflict in Austria. Although they recognized the existence of nationalist claims, they refused to treat them as anything more than the overheated rhetoric of particular political parties. Violence, when

it occurred, had more immediate and contingent explanations than the transcendent significance Czech or German nationalist agitators gave it.

Officials saw their task as that of preventing or at least minimizing

the effects of the spontaneous outbreaks that sparked disorder by identifying the leaders and then neutralizing the participants as swiftly as possible. District officials rarely mentioned the possibility of ongoing nationalist concerns. Instead, they were interested in restoring order as swiftly as possible so that local economic and social relations

would be disturbed as little as possible. The heated demands made by German newspapers and politicians for a new administrative district with a majority German-speaking population and German civil servants received scant mention. Much more important, for example,

Violence in the Village 201 was the need to prevent the disruption of monthly markets in the region that brought Czech- and German-speaking vendors and customers together. Official news of an attack on the beseda reached Prague early on the morning of 7 September. District council chairman Singer’s telegram informed the governor of an assault on the beseda that had left its windows smashed. By 8:30 the next morning the district administrator’s local office in Pisek had requested reinforcements of five gendarmes from Prague.*® That afternoon two more telegrams tersely informed Prague that security precautions were being taken after national excesses in Bergreichenstein and Schuttenhofen. A more detailed account of the day’s events related that on the morning of the seventh, private sources had brought news to Schuttenhofen of some kind of nighttime attack against the Czechs of Bergreichenstein. The

report also explained that visiting radical Czech nationalists had stirred up the mood of local Czech nationalists in Schuttenhofen a few days earlier. Now, on the seventh, a crowd had gathered on the town square to await the travelers returning from the German nationalist festivities in Bergreichenstein. Gendarmes had accompanied one group of travelers to the station. A second group, however, had driven straight to the town square in order to find medical attention for a coachman who had been struck by a stone thrown by an unknown perpetrator on the outskirts of town. As the students emerged from the physician’s house with the coachman, their provocative behavior had led to greater public excess, so that their lives had briefly been endangered. The fortuitous intervention of a district official and some gendarmes had reestablished order in the square. In the process two local youths had been arrested. The report added that a district commissioner was being dispatched to Bergreichenstein with two gendarmes to report on conditions there. A separate report confirmed that a crowd of several hundred had indeed assembled during the day, that the gendarmes had intervened, that arrests had been necessary, and that the (Czech nationalist) city government had discouraged the local police from intervening. Early the next afternoon (Tuesday, the eighth), the district admin-

istration reported that it had sent its entire force of gendarmes to Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory. This followed its own commis-

sioner’s evaluation of the situation there. Not long afterward the

202 Violence in the Village mayor's office in Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory itself telegraphed directly to Prague begging the governor to send serious military reinforcement to Schuttenhofen/Susice, “since traffic on all the roads is paralyzed, and,” in a dig at the district administrators, “the district administration in Schuttenhofen is unable to relieve the situation.” Periodic telegrams to Prague confirmed the tenuous preservation of public order in both towns. Finally, at 7:50 in the evening the district administrator could report the arrival of military reinforcements from Klattau/Klatovy. Fifty dragoons proceeded directly from Schuttenhofen/Susice on to Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory. That same evening Lieutenant Vycichl of the Second Provincial Gendarme Command, based in Prachatitz/Prachatice, submitted a detailed justification of his company’s limited use of force against civilians. When the gendarmes had arrived in Bergreichenstein, Commissioner Pavlovsky had ordered them to wait in the barracks just off the town square. Two gendarmes, Kucera and Kanka, had waited at Pavlovsky’s hotel headquarters on the square, ready to relay the commissioner’s orders to the rest in the barracks. At around 7:00 pm these

two had heard drumming and noise coming from the direction of Unterreichenstein / Dolni Rejstejn. As the noise increased, Pavlovsky had twice sent Kucera to the barracks with an order to assemble 1m-

mediately on the square, and then twice changed his mind. When Kucera returned to the hotel for the second time, he found several people in an agitated mood milling about in front. As Kucera approached the hotel, he was met by the daughter of the owner, who informed him that Pavlovsky again desired the gendarmes to assemble

in the square. Kucera returned once again to the barracks. At about the same time, Pavlovsky had sent Kanka as well to relay the same order to the barracks.*! Kucera hurried to the barracks, and Kanka followed. But the latter hardly made it more than forty feet in that direction. When the crowd noticed a running gendarme, it started yelling, “Strike him down!” Several men threatened Kanka with their walking sticks. As he turned

to face his attackers, a man named Haas grabbed his shoulders in order to throw him to the ground. Kanka used his bayonet to ward off the attack and wounded the attacker badly. As the crowd continued to attack him, Kanka wounded a second man. At this the crowd tried to wrench Kanka’s gun from his grasp, so that he found it necessary

Violence in the Village 203 to draw his saber. A certain Kasperl who attempted to break the saber suffered a wound to the hand. Now the crowd grabbed Kanka from behind, threw him to the ground, and beat him with fists and various

tools. Stunned by blows to the head, Kanka lost his saber. At this moment, as he returned from the barracks, Kucera heard yells of “Beat the scoundrel, stab him!” and so on and, using his bayoneted rifle to part the crowd, managed to reach Kanka. The official report here neither confirmed nor denied Czech claims that the crowd had accused Kanka of Czech sympathies during the attack.*? A few moments later the rest of the gendarmes arrived running from the barracks. Pavlovsky appeared and ordered them to fix their bayonets and clear the square. They managed to push the crowd back into the side streets, and Pavlovsky then sent the gendarmes back to the barracks. The lieutenant concluded his report by observing that the gendarmes

involved had behaved properly both before and during the use of their weapons. Meanwhile, Captain Anton Holick of the infantry reported that his

own company of 112 had arrived in Schuttenhofen/Susice on the evening of 8 September where they were joined by a squadron of dragoons under the command of Cavalry Captain Emanuel Kukula from Klattau/Klatovy.*? Enthusiastic cries of “Na zdar!” from a crowd

made up mostly of young people and children greeted the troops on the main square. Kukula led half the mounted squadron on to Bergreichenstein / Kasperskée Hory, while the rest was quartered in three buildings on the main square. Later that evening a smaller detachment of twenty-four dragoons under Unit Commander Grafek was sent to ensure order in the nearby village of Hartmanitz/Hartmanice. At 8:45, as Kukula’s half squadron approached Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory, it passed a coachman who reported that conditions in the town were bad. Kukula ordered the trumpet signal blown and his men to draw their sabers, and the dragoons proceeded into town

at a trot. About fifty meters from the square they were met by a howling crowd. Kukula halted his advance and rode with a small patrol to find a district official. He came upon Assistant District Commissioner Holl, who gave him the order to clear the square, which he did at once. After rallying the dragoons with a signal, he drew up a line with their backs toward the church in the middle of the square, facing the crowd that slowly reassembled. District Commissioner Pav-

204 Violence in the Village lovsky then commanded Kukula to clear the square a second time. No dragoon and no civilian, reported Kukula, was hurt during the operation. Afterward several individual students, as well as Mayor Neu-

mann, approached Kukula and tried to remonstrate with him. The captain did not allow himself be drawn into conversation but referred them to Pavlovsky, explaining that since he was on duty, he could only negotiate at the initiative of the district commissioner. Around one o'clock in the morning, at Pavlovsky’s order the dragoons withdrew from the square. Meanwhile, Grafek rode with his detachment of twenty-four dragoons to the village of Hartmanitz/Hartmanice, some ten kilometers to the northwest of Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory. Arriving after ten o'clock at night, they joined a force of gendarmes that had gotten wind of a possible attack by locals against a group of shopkeepers

traveling home to Schuttenhofen/Susice from a church festival in Eisenstein / Zelezna Ruda. Apparently, German nationalist youths in

Hartmanitz/Hartmanice believed that participants in the Bund der Deutschen [szc] festival in Bergreichenstein had been attacked and beaten by a crowd in Schuttenhofen, and according to rumor, two of the traveling shopkeepers had participated in the attack. The Hartmanitz/Hartmanice youths planned to ambush the travelers as they passed through the forest just outside the town, sometime after eleven at night.

A small patrol rode in the direction of Eisenstein / Zelezna Ruda to meet the travelers on the road. When the rest of the troops and gendarmes heard loud singing coming from the same direction, they ordered the twenty-five to thirty youths who appeared to disperse. Expecting no further disturbances and still concerned for the safety of the Schuttenhofeners, the rest of the dragoons rode in the direction of Eisenstein / Zeleznd Ruda. No sooner had they reached the limits of the town than loud screaming brought them back to the center. There a small crowd had assembled on the street in front of a house and threatened its Jewish owners, the Adlers, because the wife

had evidently answered cries of “Heil!” with the Czech nationalist equivalent “Na zdar!” The troops managed to disperse the crowd, and except for some occasional cries of “Heil!” peace was restored.** When a coachman arrived with the oats for the cavalry horses, some youths threw stones at the cart, and the gendarmes had one of them,

Violence in the Village 205 a mason, arrested. The assembled crowd protested the arrest, complaining that those Czechs who had been arrested for throwing stones in Schuttenhofen had been immediately released. At around one o'clock in the morning the dragoons finally escorted the Schuttenhofen/Susice shopkeepers through town, where a small crowd yelled insults from the far side of the street. Afterward the crowd dispersed, and the dragoons found quarters in the local inns. One gendarme

warned that bad elements in town might try again to disturb the peace at the upcoming market, which several vendors from Schuttenhofen/Susice planned to attend. The next morning, back in Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory a detachment of dragoons under Cadet Commander Erich Brunner accompanied a group of German fraternity students to the railway sta-

tion in Schuttenhofen/Susice. Both Brunner of the dragoons and Holick of the infantry stationed in Schuttenhofen/Susice filed reports describing this journey of the last German nationalist students from Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory. Just after eleven o'clock, after a quiet morning in Schuttenhofen/Susice, a half company of infantry took up positions on the road outside the entrance to town to await

the arrival of the fraternity students. At around one o’clock in the afternoon the latter appeared with their military escort of dragoons. At the request of District Administrator Bohm, the students now removed their nationalist insignia and fraternity caps and rode bareheaded, some with normal hats or handkerchiefs knotted around their heads. Sergeant Major Kokes led the procession to the railway station via a detour. The students followed, heavily guarded on either side by the dragoons, while the infantry brought up the rear, guarding the wagon that carried the students’ baggage. When this convoy reached the town, the assembled crowds greeted the procession with screams, insults, and whistles, but according to

Holick, in the rear, the crowd attempted nothing more serious. Brunner, whose men guarded the students directly, told a slightly different story. At first the crowds blocked the streets, so that eight dragoons had to ride forward to clear the way. When the procession arrived at the river, the bridge was so narrow that the dragoons could

no longer flank the wagon. A corporal rode forward to clear the bridge and street beyond. Several people positioned on the banks of

the river and on a sandbar below managed to throw stones at the

206 Violence in the Village students. When the corporal reached the far side of the bridge, a stone hit his horse, and both animal and rider fell to the ground. Once the corporal had remounted, Brunner reported, the procession was not attacked again, although the crowds continued to shout insults until they reached the railway station. Only when the train with the students had pulled out of the station did the crowd disperse. At two thirty the units returned to the center of town, and all appeared to be quiet once again.*

How Nationalist? Government accounts of events often betrayed what at first appears to be self-consciousness about not favoring one side or the other in the nationalist dispute. On closer examination this apparent evenhandedness regarding national conflict indicates more a rejection of the nationalist dimension altogether than a formal desire to remain above the fray. The government avoided giving the nationalist interpretation of events too much credence by downplaying its significance, so what might appear to be an effort to mediate objectively between competing Czech and German nationalist claims reflected more an unwillingness to be drawn into their world in the first place. The nationalists and their press, after all, did not make life easy for local officials. It was not simply the endless complaints alleging partisanship on the part of this or that district official that harassed the district administrators. Between September 1907 and October 1908 alone the press reported countless provocations by one side or the other, at least six of which were alleged to have produced some degree of physical harm to those involved, and all of which were reported by the press as serious incidents. In some of these cases government officials documented the demonstrations or the injuries. In several cases, however, the press framed an incident whose nationalist content was questionable at best in order to prove that popular frustration with the enemy nationality produced a trend of growing nationalist violence.*®

Repeatedly, as we have seen with the imaginary incident in Stachau/Stachy as well, officials were also forced to investigate claims of incidents reported by nationalist newspapers that often turned out to

be spurious. Local officials wasted a great deal of their time re-

Violence in the Village 207 sponding retrospectively to these nationalist outrages often manufactured by the press and taken up by elected officials. The period directly after the outrages of Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory and

Schuttenhofen/Susice was no exception in this regard. District Administrator Bohm ’s reports to his superiors in Prague and Vienna generally downplayed the pathos-laden exaggerations found in nationalist reports of damage, injury, and conflict. As early as 9 September Bohm reported to Prague that only a few windows in the beseda had actually been smashed, and on 13 September he noted that several questions remained about the very claims of attacks on the beseda. As to the difficult passage of the fraternity students through Schut-

tenhofen/Susice on 9 September, Bohm ’s staffers who had intervened in the incident testified that stones could not possibly have wounded anyone. Despite German nationalist claims, the stones “had been thrown by young boys [who stood] at a significant distance from the action on the other side of the river or across the fields.” At most,

noted Bohm, if they hit anything at all, the stones tended to reach the feet of passersby. As to the putative nationalist anger of the inhabitants, Bohm attributed the volatile mood in town that week to recent agitation by some political radicals who had passed through

Schtittenhofen/SuSsice on 7 September and had held _ public speeches.*” But his use of the term “volatile” to describe the mood suggested that this mood, like others, would be of short duration. The district officials did not believe that the recent agitation of nationalist crowds reflected deeper sentiments among the larger rural populace. For this reason they were far more concerned to limit the momentary flare-up of disorderliness among the few in order to protect the longer-term interests of the many. Bohm, for example, repeatedly expressed his desire to ensure public order so that various regional markets, particularly those upcoming in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory and Hartmanitz/Hartmanice, could take place as planned. As each of these involved both Czech- and German-speaking

tradesmen and farmers from the entire region, Bohm wanted to ensure that no nationalist agitators would disrupt them. The German nationalist Pilsner Tagblatt inadvertently confirmed this when it reported that Czech-speaking market vendors from Schuttenhofen/ Susice had been heard to complain about the economic losses they sustained due to the nationalist violence. The newspaper cited this

208 Violence in the Village development gleefully, seeing it as the result of a conscious German nationalist boycott of Czech businesses. But in fact the vendors com-

plained that nationalist violence and unsafe roads had prevented them from attending certain markets in the first place, and not that Germans had threatened them with a boycott. This reading of the text undercuts the nationalist interpretive framework of the newspaper considerably. The attentive reader notes an utter lack of concern for the nationalist conflict in the plaintive testimony of the Schut-

tenhofen/Susice vegetable saleswoman who estimated that she had lost close to 100 crowns. Instead, it is her profound confusion as to why a significant source of income should be temporarily denied her that this report expresses. Bohm also brushed aside the complaints of German nationalist parliamentary deputies who interpellated the government either about the lax (Schuttenhofen) or exaggerated (Bergreichenstein) security measures he had taken. Noting that this interpellation reiterated the text of a resolution passed immediately after the events by the biased German nationalist town council, Bohm assured the governor that he had things well in hand. As in the case of the Stachau/Stachy incident cited earlier, the violent events of 6-9 September produced ongoing nationalist reports of outrages, each of which required subsequent government investigation to sift through the accusations. Nationalists depicted the ongoing mood in the region as extremely polarized. Popular nationalist anger, they claimed, had not dissipated with time. The following examples suggest the degree to which the newspapers themselves tried to raise the level of popular outrage even as they claimed simply to report it. One story that appeared frequently in the Czech nationalist press twice moved the governor of Bohemia to request an explanation from District Administrator Bohm. Narodni politika (and later Narodni listy) claamed that German landlords were unfairly terminating the leases of Czech renters in Kasperské Hory. ‘The papers accused several

landlords of engaging in this illegal policy of coordinated boycott, designed to drive Czech speakers from the town. After several investigations, one in October 1908 and another in the following March, Bohm reported that the press had painted conditions in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory “in an exaggerated manner.” Any brave talk of boycotting local Czech speakers had receded considerably

Violence in the Village 209 since its highpoint right after the September incidents. Two of the alleged victims of such boycotts had in fact decided to move out of town well before the excesses of September had even taken place. Another, a plumber, had decided to leave because of a general decline in business conditions. In none of these cases should any talk of a coordinated boycott be taken seriously. The fact that some Czech

speakers had decided to leave Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory around the time of the events of 6-9 September clearly had suggested great potential for depicting daily circumstances in polarized terms. In late September, at the time of Franz Haas’s burial, the Pilsner Tagblatt tried to stir up fresh outrage, alleging that a small group of German nationalist women traveling to Bergreichenstein for the funeral had been attacked and harassed. ‘The story combined several recognizable tropes (helpless German women devoted to the nationalist cause, stone throwing, publicly yelled insults at women of the bourgeois class, cowardly Czechs) in yet another pathos-laden narrative designed to keep nationalist blood at the boiling point. Evidently,

as their carriage had passed through Schuttenhofen/Susice, some loutish townspeople (Czechs) had hurled stones and ugly invective at the defenseless women.*® Once again District Administrator Bohm

reported after yet another thorough investigation that while two wagons had indeed passed through Schuttenhofen/Susice from Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory on their way to the train station on the day in question, he could obtain no information about any alleged

stone throwing. “[The lack of any evidence] was all the more remarkable,” wrote the district administrator knowingly, “since if such

an incident had in fact occurred in the town, it would have been impossible to hide the fact.” The claim that any mysterious women had attended the funeral was in itself utterly unfounded, Bohm added, since he himself had intervened to forbid any outsiders except

for one male representative of the BOhmerwaldbund to attend the Haas funeral.*? Once again the nationalist press had essentially created coherent and dramatic narratives from littke more than town gossip in order to reinforce an image of the countryside torn by ongoing nationalist conflict. The investigation questioned the overwhelming significance attributed to nationalist emotions in the countryside by the press, yet the newspaper did not print a retraction.

210 Violence in the Village Enter the Politicians The district government might well have succeeded in downplaying any larger significance attributed to local violence had it not been for the immediate interference in this case by well-known nationalist politicians. Not only the nationalist press but now regional politicians as well intervened to keep the case at the forefront of the popular imagination where it could be used for political ends. German nationalist officials such as Mayor Neumann, as well as the visiting fraternity students, had first telegraphed “their” parliamentary and diet politicians about their plight on Monday, 7 September. The students had also complained to Cabinet Minister for German Affairs (Landsmannminaster) Heinrich Prade that the district administration refused to guarantee their safe passage, and they had begged for government inter-

vention. Czech nationalists such as Singer had also telegraphed Prague about the attack on the beseda. In the town council session of 19 September 1908, local politicians

in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory published a resolution that summarized their account of events and served as the basis for the accusations and demands made by German nationalist politicians at every level. The resolution regretted that Czech nationalists had managed to create an incident in the otherwise quiet and peaceful town of Bergreichenstein that filled all Germans in Austria with indignation and diminished the trust of the German population in the fairness of the state administration. Laying the blame for the excess squarely at

the feet of the district administration, the council condemned the district’s “arbitrary” and provocative decision to close some streets on 6 September without obtaining the mayor’s agreement. This rude infringement of constitutionally guaranteed municipal autonomy, it was

claimed, had clearly angered the general populace and contributed to a mood of popular resentment on the night of 6 September. Had this needless infringement been avoided, the town might well have been spared the later incidents that cost human life and general unrest. Here the town council claimed to speak for the mood and feelings of the general populace, linking the riot to what it alleged, but could not prove, were generally held feelings in the region.*° The council condemned the actions of (allegedly Czech) District Commissioner Pavlovsky in particular. He had not considered it worth

Violence in the Village 211 his while to obtain the help of the (German) town police force and had rudely brushed aside Mayor Neumann’s offer to mediate the situation. Furthermore, Pavlovsky had ordered a bayonet charge against the harmless singing populace, and this had produced two severe and several lesser casualties. ‘The fact that no member of “another nation”

had been wounded until this point proved without a doubt that the town administration could have intervened far more capably and effectively to calm this dangerous situation."! The resolution demanded that the Czech civil servants in Bergreichenstein be removed immediately (their “unheard-of provocations will undoubtedly be established by the investigation”) and replaced with

Germans; otherwise the town could not guarantee that further excesses would not take place. At the same time, the town strongly de-

nied the false allegations circulating in the Czech press that responsible German civil servants, gymnasium professors, teachers, and even town council members had taken part in the excesses. The council used the incident to plead for the establishment of a German district administration with German civil servants that would detach

Bergreichenstein, Unterreichenstein / Dolni Reyjstejn, and Hartmanitz/Hartmanice from the Schuttenhofen/Susice district. Diet and parliamentary deputies made similar pleas, claiming that only this measure could truly guarantee the restoration of peace to the Bohemian Woods. Using the threat of further popular violence, all reiter-

ated the newspapers’ claim that only national separation could dampen the spontaneous nationalist anger of the masses.” Both Prade and his counterpart for Czech affairs in the cabinet, Agrarian Karel Prasek, complained directly to Minister President Beck, to Governor Count Coudenhove of Bohemia, and to the ministers of the interior and finance in Vienna. On 9 October the Czech Narodni jednota posumavska published an open memorandum to the governor detailing its accusations against German nationalists in Kasperské Hory.*® The repeated complaints by both sides betray a rote quality of ritual invocation made to cabinet ministers and other officials, who themselves must have been weary of hearing the same story cast in yet a new context. The politicians then embarked on wellpublicized fact-finding tours to Bergreichenstein / Kasperske Hory, setting in motion a series of official investigations that promised to keep their own media profiles high. The German nationalist depu-

212 Violence in the Village ties—led by Prade and Gustav Schreiner—repeatedly pressed the cabinet to create a new and specifically German-majority district in the region.** They organized a parliamentary interpellation ostensibly re-

garding general security issues in the Bohemian Woods region, but which (as District Administrator Bohm pointed out in a report mentioned earlier) simply repeated the anti-Czech complaints made by the German nationalist town council.*°

Schreiner, Prade, and a host of German nationalists returned repeatedly to the misdeeds of various Czech-speaking administrators as an ongoing pretext for promoting the creation of their new German district. They demanded that Pavlovsky be disciplined for having betrayed his duty to the state by allegedly siding with the Czechs during the bayonet attack of the gendarmes. The politicians grounded these accusations in the town council’s version of events, a version whose veracity the government would soon come to question. Pavlovsky was swiftly transferred to a new posting soon after the incident, although not to the farthest ends of Galicia, as some German nationalists had hoped, but rather to Blatna, a completely Czech-speaking district to the northeast of Schuttenhofen/Susice. Referring to Pavlovsky as “the first casualty of the bloody disturbances in Kasperskée Hory,” Narodni listy attributed his transfer to Schreiner’s fanatical intervention and

concluded that the Germans had the Bohemian governor in their pocket.*° Had that in fact been the case, however, the government would have divided the Schtittenhofen/SuSice district into two new German- and Czech-speaking districts, and this was not to be. Schreiner and Prade also demanded that the Finance Ministry discipline tax officials Ottomar Kazda and Adelbert Klecka, both of whom they accused of Czech nationalist agitation in flagrant violation of their professional obligations as employees of the state. An October memorandum from Schreiner that inquired for a second time into the fates of Kazda and Klecka argued that his own discussions with eyewitnesses in the town during a “fact-finding tour” had confirmed the unprofessional behavior of the two officials. Kazda, he reported, had indeed “thrown oil on the fire” through his provocative behavior toward the German population of Bergreichenstein (shouting “Na zdar!” three times to the crowd at the beseda). Klecka, meanwhile, had broken into the home of a tailor personally unknown to him on the day after the attack against the beseda. Klecka had then sat on a stool, had sung Czech songs, and had slammed his fist on the table until

Violence in the Village 213 his unwilling host had finally called the police. Schreiner threatened that if these two “Czech agitators” were not removed from their positions, the issue might cause the government problems. “Since [the matter] has assumed a symptomatic meaning [among the public], it might well play a role in the current negotiations between the government and the Germans.”*” Here Schreiner referred to the attempts

by the government to negotiate the participation of German and Czech nationalist parties in the upcoming session of the Bohemian Diet. Czech nationalist deputies too kept up a steady drumbeat of demands for greater protection for the exposed Czech national minority in Kasperské Hory and continued to denounce the mayor’s office there for spreading lies about the incident in order to destroy the careers of hardworking Czech officials. As we have seen, the governor had indeed sent two special commissioners from Prague, Schwarz and Leiner, to maintain order in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory for the next few months. German nationalists generally hailed this decision because the two commissioners were perceived as having “German” loyalties. At the same time, the governor had instigated a judicial investigation to be carried out by the local district court in Pisek. Czech nationalists praised this move because the judges who sat on the court in Pisek were viewed as friendly to Czech nationalist interests. While politicians such as Prade and Schreiner actually represented the interests of German nationalists, the government treated them more as representatives of the larger German-speaking population. Although this distinction may appear insignificant to us, it illustrates the very different assumptions on which the government and nationalist politicians based their respective actions. For the nationalist politicians, the incident involved two utterly distinct nations struggling against each other and looking

to the government for fair and impartial treatment. To the government, the politicians represented the linguistic interests of their constituents as they related to questions around schools or administration. In every other way the government did not wish to distinguish between the two populations in the way the nationalist politicians did.

“He Did Not Observe the Necessary Discretion” Governmental unwillingness to admit that the incidents carried any larger nationalist import is also clear from the actions taken in the

214 Violence in the Village cases of officials judged to have misbehaved. District Administrator

Bohm continued to report to the governor the results of his own investigations and his explanations for the various incidents raised by the German and Czech nationalist deputies. Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry notified the governor on 25 September that it had decided to transfer Klecka to another post, but that it was awaiting the outcome of further investigations to decide on Kazda’s fate.** The ministry kept the decision confidential, since it did not wish to appear to bow to the public demands of one set of nationalists.“ On 24 November a Finance Ministry official in Prague reported at

greater length to the ministry in Vienna. Noting that in such situations people too often gave in to the heat of the moment without calmly considering the effects of their actions, it had decided to reprimand Klecka and to transfer him to another post. The situation regarding Kazda was more complicated. Kazda had an unblemished record and a reputation as a calm and prudent individual. According to testimony given by the mayor on 15 October, Kazda had been present inside the beseda on that fateful night and had called out “Na

zdar!” in the hallway three times to those inside. One week later, however, the mayor had altered his testimony to paint Kazda’s actions in a more serious light. Now he was accused of having rushed outside as the town officials were trying to calm the excited mob and having yelled “Na zdar!” directly to the larger crowd. If this were true, Kazda might be directly responsible for having provoked the angry mob to enter the deseda in the first place. Finance Ministry officials regretted

that Kazda had not observed “the necessary discretion that a civil servant is bound to uphold, particularly in the face of an excited mob,” and they determined to transfer him as well. They noted, however, that this transfer need not take place immediately, since all the

evidence presented so far had come from only one side, and the mayor had apparently furnished two different versions of events.°° In January 1909 the chief of the State Fiscal Office in Prague wrote

again to the Vienna ministry arguing that because he had offered different versions of events, the mayor’s testimony would have to be discounted altogether. Kazda would be transferred, but the Prague

official recommended that the transfer not take place too quickly, since it would create the impression that the government had given in to public pressure. The Prague official could not resist adding that

Violence in the Village 215 in Bohemia the increasing number of irrelevant factors (he meant

nationalist issues) influencing the placement of personnel had reached such a critical point that “the freedom of movement of the administration to pursue its regular course of business had become severely hampered.” The Prague official added that in addition to Kazda, only one other finance official remained in Bergreichenstein who was of the “Bohemian [Czech] nationality,” and his behavior was unimpeachable.*! The latter point was important because the German nationalist goal had extended well beyond the removal of Kazda and Klecka. Failing to obtain a new district, German nationalists hoped at least to have those two officials replaced with German-speaking officials. The Prague official had already noted that the issue of replace-

ment would have to be dealt with carefully. He conceded that the town was indeed overwhelmingly German speaking but pointed out that the surrounding district was almost evenly divided between speakers of both languages. Logically, a finance administrator would have to know both languages. As a political appointment, the position

had already been the subject of intense lobbying efforts by both Prasek and Prade. Not surprisingly, Prasek demanded a bilingual ap-

pointment, while Prade wanted a German-speaking successor to Kazda.*” Clearly the provincial government saw the logic in a bilingual appointment, but inevitably the German nationalists would have characterized such an appointment as favoring Czech nationalist interests.

Nationalist activists tried to shape perceptions of normal daily events by presenting them in a narrowly defined and radically different symbolic framework. Newspapers, local and regional politicians, and associational leaders all drew specific nationalist conclusions from the messy series of violent incidents that had taken place in September 1908. They fit them into an explanatory context that lent considerable legitimacy to nationalist claims. Conclusions that may well have appeared logical to readers and followers at the time, however, can now, a century later, be more fully interrogated. Perhaps the most important of these was the conclusion that incidental violent behavior reflected a widespread nationalist frustration that seethed just below the surface of local society. This sense of barely submerged frustration was allegedly grounded in a shared sense of community victimhood. In the case of Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory, for example, na-

216 Violence in the Village tionalist narrative options all produced an inexorable conclusion: that one arrogant local population oppressed the other in the latter’s legitimate hometown. To add insult to injury in this case, the presumptuous members of the German Bohmerwaldbund had even demanded

safe passage through Schuttenhofen/Susice from the very Czechs whose beseda they had so recently despoiled. Conversely, in Schuttenhofen/Susice the arrogant town government had done its best to prevent the Bohmerwaldbund from even holding its annual convention in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory.*® In both cases nationalists claimed that desperate rural people had

finally lashed out against an enemy that oppressed them on a daily basis. In the more extreme German nationalist version, bourgeois educated students and associational leaders had worked tirelessly to maintain order by restraining the disorderly, if justified, anger of the masses. In fact, from government and even German nationalist accounts, it is not hard to see that the opposite had taken place. It was those very students and bourgeois elements that had created the incidents in the first place. Other people certainly joined in at various times, but they were neither instigators nor even prime movers. The events of 6—9 September certainly demonstrated that under the right conditions, many people in the region could be moved to gather in crowds, to demonstrate, to yell nationalist slogans, or to throw stones. Even in the face of preventive measures taken by worried authorities, younger men, nationalist students, and local movement leaders could still be counted on to throw themselves into the fray. Those arrested

in Schuttenhofen/Susice and Hartmanitz/Hartmanice and subsequently tried at Pisek for disorderly behavior, as well as those wounded in the fighting in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory, for example, were typically young men in their twenties who came from local towns or villages.**

Viewed from the perspective of those government reports, nationalist conflict seems to have existed next to and often intertwined with other conflicts, but it never constituted a socially universal conflict on its own terms. Nationalist viewpoints were available to anyone in rural Austria who wished to adopt them. Public insults, barroom brawls, vandalism to property—each of these might well be accompanied by or later justified by some form of nationalist rhetoric. There is, however, a significant difference between recognizing the availability of

Violence in the Village 217 one discourse among many and presuming that one discourse has become normative for society. In this case nationalist conflict may have provided a kind of entertainment for all, but it was an entertainment one could freely enter into and freely leave at any time. We need only scratch the surface of newspaper and politicians’ accounts to locate the carefully structured, limited, and planned nature of the situations that produced those incidents that nationalists subsequently presented as spontaneous. And when they could not plan them, nationalists made them up retrospectively out of commonsense, half-truth versions of local events. It was hardly a coincidence, nor

was it a sign of spontaneous nationalism, that the violence in Berereichenstein / Kasperské Hory accompanied the annual Bohmerwaldbund convention. Although club leaders had not planned violence, both they and their nationalist opponents created a situation

that typically produced some kind of incident. Those loud and drunken German speakers who roamed the late-night streets, many of them students from out of town, sought a convenient way to act out the nationalist commitment to which they had pledged themselves only a few hours earlier. The speeches and parades they had experienced had not urged Germans to violence, but they had used a war-

like rhetoric to conjure a dual sense of national pride and of selfassertion. The few Czech speakers who had gathered in the beseda that

night represented that enemy: the politicians in Prague and Vienna who stealthily plotted the downfall of the unsuspecting German nation. It is hardly surprising that as the festivities drew to a close, local rowdies, led by out-of-town students, felt entitled to control the streets and to bully the Czech-speaking minority or even to focus some brief attention on the beseda. Nor is it surprising that the occupants of the

beseda may have taunted the street rowdies from the safety of the upper floors. Until this point involvement in the conflict was limited to self-confessed nationalists.

In their presentations of this incident, however, the nationalists transformed the actors and thereby the meaning of the events. It was no longer the nationalist minority (on either side) that had acted, it

was “the people.” This understanding of events required a breathtaking leap of faith on the part of the reader. This also constitutes the larger question for historians: whether the violence perpetrated against the Czechs in the beseda or the German travelers in Schutten-

218 Violence in the Village hofen/Susice should be considered the mark of an ongoing and broadly shared national anger. Allegations that the beseda had been destroyed, for example, would certainly have seemed an especially violent act directed toward people who spoke Czech. Although it was untrue, it is not surprising that this kind of rumor might well have provoked a reaction, even among those for whom nation itself, as expounded by the politicians, normally meant very little. The same might be said for those assembled in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory who heard the news from Schuttenhofen/Susice and then faced the military. Why many other people joined in the violence is not difficult to understand. What is harder to locate is the deeper meaning of such events for those who were not already committed nationalists or members of associations. The nationalist complaint that it was no longer possible to hold a celebration without encountering the subversive efforts of the opponent created yet another totalizing interpretation of events whose significance actually touched relatively few people. This interpretation was meant to remove the focus from the nationalists’ responsibility for their own difficulties and to recount these injuries as if they applied to entire populations. Disingenuously the nationalists asked why each group could no longer hold its own festivities without being subject to disruptions planned by the other. In so doing, the German nationalists, at least, made national separation sound possible, plausible, reasonable, and even desirable whenever violence broke out. Yet the very nature of their festivals implied specific claims made for the national identity of local spaces, places, or territories and thus obliged each side to assert its ultimate ownership against the efforts of the other side. Clearly it was not local society that required separation in order to survive; it was the local nationalists who required it. As long as nationalists could convince the authorities or the reading public that they represented entire populations, the logic of their interpretation appeared to be flawless, so flawless that most historians have agreed with it. The claim that this loosely connected chain of violent events reflected some kind of spontaneous (yet coherent) nationalist uprising in a rural district well suited the needs of nationalist activists. It was they themselves who, as this book has argued, tried hard to create those very nations that admittedly did not yet fully exist in much of rural Austria.

SEVEN

The First World War and Beyond Lhe Transformation of the Language Frontier Absolute Justice too is a sowing of dragon’s teeth. —Joseph Roth, The Emperor’s Tomb [1938],

trans. John Hoare (2002)

WHEN WAR BROKE OUT IN the summer of 1914, nationalist associa-

tions of all kinds scrambled at first to bring their rhetoric in line with popular wartime patriousm. Exhortations to heightened social unity and dynastic loyalty made by military and civilian leaders alike required nationalist activists to emphasize their own commitment to a united war effort, while muting for a time their more aggressive attacks on each other.' Nationalists on all sides believed that they might gain important long-term advantages from thei active participation in the domestic war effort. They also saw war as the factor that might finally shake up domestic politics enough to make their visions of a radical new setthement of the national conflict possible. German nationalists, for example, viewed Austria’s wartime alliance with Germany as a promising factor that would strengthen their own relative position in Bohemia vis-a-vis Czech nationalists. At the level of high politics and administration, at least, their expectations were not disappointed. During the war Austria-Hungary’s German ally and its military leaders wielded a strong influence on Austrian foreign and domestic policy. Austria-Hungary’s own military bureaucracies often relied on prewar stereotypes that cast doubt on the patriousm of cer-

tain linguistic groups (Czechs, Croats, and Serbs), and they often treated them with unwarranted suspicion that bordered on hostility.° If much warume policy favored German nationalist administrative de219

220 The First World War and Beyond mands, however, daily events on the ground rarely favored German speakers as such. Outside events such as the German alliance, the death of Emperor Francis Joseph, or the Russian Revolution alternately gave other nationalist groups hope that the realization of their particular political vision was also at hand. Daily life on the rural language frontiers appears to have encompassed several contradictory developments during the war years. Rural frontier regions did not necessarily suffer deprivation to the extent their urban counterparts experienced it. If people on the rural frontiers were less likely to starve or to encounter a growing refugee population, they nevertheless lost family members to war and captivity, faced economic hardship, and were subject to seemingly arbitrary policies of government regulation and requisition. There is no doubt

that inhabitants of the frontier regions became more politicized during the war, but this politicization produced far fewer incidents of

nationalist violence than had been the case before the war. What social unrest did occur manifested itself far more often in demonstrations around specific labor and food-rationing issues. In times of death, captivity, scarcity, and unrest, a nationalist perspective could

only resonate with the public if it provided a lens through which people might make sense of their particular circumstances, when it provided them with compelling explanations for the particular forms of material hardship they endured. Questions that preoccupied the politicians, such as how Bohemia ought to be ruled after the war, held little meaning for most people when compared with more pressing issues Of personal survival. At the same time, however, nationalist activists, associations, and press eventually encouraged people to understand government incompetence (food distribution) or government harassment (social discipline, censorship) in terms of national bias.* War had swiftly brought with it a militarization of Austro-Hungarian society and economy, as well as a truce in the daily politics of nationalist conflict. At the outset, the ill-fated dictatorial Austrian premier,

Count Karl Sturgkh, had urged nationalists to respect the national status quo and to postpone discussing any changes to it until after the war.* Indeed, early in the war Czech and German nationalists from Bohemia vied with each other to put patriotism ahead of nationalist bickering. Many Czech nationalist newspapers explicitly proclaimed their loyalty to the dynasty and to the empire, hoping in part to use

The First World War and Beyond 221 their wartime patriotism as a bargaining chip to gain increased political autonomy for the Bohemian Lands after the war. Gradually, however, German nationalists began to portray Czech nationalists as unpatriotic in their daily utterances and actions. Austria-Hungary’s harsh new military bureaucratic absolutism also shared with German nationalists traditional and unwarranted suspicions about the loyalty of

some language groups in the monarchy. These suspicions played themselves out, for example, in the recurring suggestion that Czechor Serb-speaking troops could not be trusted to fight for AustriaHungary, and that they would surrender too easily, preferring captivity to patriotism. Although units with significant numbers of Czech-

speaking soldiers performed capably in the early stages of the war, Alon Rachamimov’s study of military censorship demonstrates that government administrators generally treated Czech speakers as potential traitors. This tendency became pronounced with the furious spate of scapegoating engendered by Austria’s early defeats on the eastern front in 1915. German nationalists (among others) promoted rumors that some Czech units had surrendered to the Russians near Zborow without putting up a fight. Ironically, in later years Czech nationalist ideologists retrospectively promoted these same misleading stories and made them a key mythological component of the

anti-Habsburg and anti-German ideological foundations of the Czechoslovak nation-state. For many Czech nationalists, the purported

rebellion by Czech soldiers provided their own revolution with the elements of a popular uprising and added an element of popular legitimation to a regime change in 1918 that was accomplished as much from above as it was from below. For German nationalists, in turn, the myths of Czech desertion continued to feed the belief in a dishonorable Czech military betrayal long after the war had brought down the monarchy.’ Few historians have evaluated the role of nationalist activism in daily

life on the home front during the war. Most have preferred to focus on the activism of the exile leaders, debates over the relative loyalty of Czech-speaking troops, or the reform plans debated in the Austrian Parliament after 1917. This section can give only a brief overview of what remains a significant area for future historical research.® As the war continued well beyond Christmas of 1914, bringing unexpectedly high casualties and military stalemate in its wake, nationalist associa-

222 The First World War and Beyond tions modified their forms of activism, adapting their rhetoric and policies to the altered conditions. In doing so, they implicitly recognized the increasingly extreme demands made by the war on Austria’s

civilian population, demands that superseded the forms of personal sacrifice the nationalists had themselves traditionally demanded of their followers. Nationalists struggled to maintain their relevance to Austrian society by volunteering their own resources for war-related work and held their more extreme nationalist projects in reserve for the postwar world. This involved constantly renegotiating a delicate balance between pursuing their nationalist goals, on the one hand, and participating in a culture of civic patriotism fostered by the state,

on the other hand. Full frontal attacks on the domestic national enemy risked being interpreted by many Austrians as unpatriotic or selfish at a time when thousands of young men of all languages, all faiths, and all nationalist persuasions routinely sacrificed their lives for the emperor.’ Nationalists certainly found plenty of opportunities to move their agendas forward during the war, but they had to compete carefully with rivals who were eager to demonstrate their own high degree of patriotism. In this quest, German nationalists, as we have seen, had considerable advantages over their Czech and Slovene nationalist rivals, at least until 1917.

Even if nationalists had not committed themselves to patriotic forms of activism, the harsh material demands of the war would have enforced a kind of moratorium on their traditional activities anyway. Association budgets and memberships shrank, and members who remained at home turned their attentions increasingly away from their national communities and toward ensuring their personal survival. The war destroyed whole classes of leadership in the national associations as well. Even where nationalist activism continued as before, it became more bureaucratized as leaders gradually lost touch with their local bases. Wartime conditions limited the activism of association

members who often were drafted into the military or turned their attentions to patriotic causes. Several of the most energetic nationalists—young men—had volunteered or were called up for military ser-

vice almost immediately, and many of them fell in battle. When women were mobilized for war work and public employment, this too detracted from the efforts of groups that had depended in large measure on women’s associational activism.’ In response, the nationalist

The First World War and Beyond 223 associations tried to adapt their programs to wartime conditions more

fully. In place of grand prewar projects to promote settlement, national banks, school expansion, festivals, or tourism, associations took up new projects, reorienting their activism toward welfare projects to aid wounded veterans, fatherless families, dislocated refugees, and an alleged epidemic of increasingly delinquent youth. Yet despite these

much-publicized efforts, associations remained in something of a holding pattern for most of the war, hoping to conserve their economic resources for the postwar settlement, when they could finally return to their previous efforts. Already in 1914 the Bohmerwaldbund and the Sudmark canceled their annual conventions out of respect for the events of the war; for the Sudmark this meant canceling the organization’s long-planned twenty-fifth-anniversary jubilee celebrations. In 1915 the Bohmerwaldbund held a so-called Kriegstagung or War Council in place of its an-

nual convention. “Unfortunately, so many of our members— especially those on the Executive Committee—have been called up by the military, so this year’s convention had to be canceled,” announced the Bohmerwaldbund in 1916. When it was canceled again in 1917, the organization admitted with some frustration that “a year ago no one could have imagined that the war would have lasted this long.”®

All the nationalist organizations experienced comparable problems. Not only were members and leaders called up for military service, but given the uncertainty of wartime conditions, even those left behind had to put most forms of their activism on hold. “Every kind of carefully developed plan, every rational form of work must end in

confusion, because of the [unpredictable] length of the war,” lamented a B6hmerwaldbund report in December 1917, in another moment of open frustration. Despite the alleged enthusiasm of those

left behind on the language frontier, claimed the association, “our work has suffered.” For those who remained, it was hard enough to do their regular work, much less to keep up with their nationalist volunteer work. Attendance at local meetings fell precipitously, and the declining number of active members raised far less money than they had before the war. Furthermore, those Austrians who continued to belong to nationalist associations preferred to donate their funds to war-related projects. So the organizations adopted a less confron-

224 The First World War and Beyond tational rhetoric while developing new patriotic initiatives to attract donations. Already in the autumn of 1914 the German School Association had moved in this direction by downplaying nationalist conflict and advising local branches to hold so-called fatherland evenings, patriotic meetings where the organization could explain to its members the reasons for the war. At such meetings members would join in singing patriotic songs, and a lecturer would discuss the sacrifice all Austrians were called upon to make for the sake of their “freedom, their culture,” and “a long-term peace.”!? Although nationalist conflict had all but disappeared from ritual practice of this nature, it was replaced by an emphasis on Austrian freedom and culture, characteristics that implicitly stood in for German nationalist values. If nationalist rhetoric became more patriotic and less confrontational in the early years of the war, nationalist activism also adopted new wartime policy goals

directed toward strengthening national communities internally, rather than expanding their influence externally. Both the Sudmark and the Bohmerwaldbund continued their programs to help local farm economies, but they added new priorities, such as raising money to build homes for displaced veterans, hiring local community nurses, and contributing to youth welfare programs (given the alleged wartime rise in youth delinquency). By 1917 funds for such war-related projects totaled 30 percent of the BOhmerwaldbund’s annual budget,

while funds spent on purely economic projects received 8 percent and nationalist projects received 15 percent."! Not surprisingly, the war wreaked havoc on Bohmerwaldbund efforts to promote tourism. Expenditures on tourism fell from around 13 percent of the budget in 1915 to 6 percent of a diminished budget

in 1917. In 1915 the organization still hoped to be able to foster wartime tourism at least to some limited degree, and it had kept many of its hostelries open and in good repair, anticipating the quick return of tourists at the end of the war. For this reason it complained in 1915 that strict new passport regulations hindered travelers to the Bohe-

mian Woods from across the Bavarian border. Student hostels too were underused in 1915, and two of them in Budweis/Budejovice and

Pilsen/Plzen had been requisitioned to serve as reserve hospitals. Nonetheless, in 1915 some intrepid local branches had actually charted new path-marking systems for hikers in the region.'? By 1916

The First World War and Beyond 225 the Bohmerwaldbund’s expectations for tourism had clearly fallen, and it reported that only some gymnasium students from other parts of Bohemia had visited the Bohemian Woods.'® In 1917 the organization admitted that severe “difficulties in pro-

visioning the region adequately” made any visits by students or summer vacationers to the region impossible.'* In that year almost all the funds spent on tourist purposes in the budget went to the upkeep of the darkened theater in Horitz/Horice. By 1918, local town coun-

cils too warned all potential visitors that they could no longer distribute ration cards to summer guests.'° The decline in investment by the Bohmerwalbund in tourism of course paralleled the considerable

loss of extra annual income that local inhabitants who had rented rooms to summer visitors had counted on to make ends meet. The Sudmark continued to report during the war on the alleged progress of its various nationalist projects, especially the settlhement program in South Styria, but the intentionally vague language of these reports suggested the emptiness of their optimistic claims. Here too, instead of speaking of real “advances” in the nationalization of the frontier, it would be more accurate to characterize the organization

as sitting in a holding pattern. True, in March 1915 the Sudmark reported having settled a family of five in a community near St. Egydi,

but this one exception may have already been planned before war had broken out. By 1917 the Sidmark had adapted its program more fully to the demands of war, but in ways that bolstered its commitment to nationalizing the language frontier. Under the category of “settle-

ment work,” the Sudmark now raised funds to build homes for displaced veterans, several of which it planned to locate in linguistically mixed villages in South Styria and neighboring Carinthia. As in the case of orphans or retirees, groups that were allegedly unbound by family or business ties to a particular place, the wounded veteran now constituted the perfect human material for resettlement schemes. Vet-

erans’ increased presence on the frontier, it was imagined, would strongly promote local German national interests." Ideologically the Sudmark continued to promote interest in the language frontier as a region of future significance to the German nationalist cause in Central Europe, explaining that “after the war the systematic setthement of the language frontier will become an even more important necessity.”'” The Tiroler Volksbund too framed the

226 The First World War and Beyond future promotion of German settlement in the region around Trent in terms of postwar needs. Arguing that both the state and German nationalists had allowed regional Italian nationalists far too much leeway before 1915, Edgar Meyer (famed veteran of the 1907 battle of Calliano related in Chapter 5) called for the systematic Germanization of the region. In doing so, Meyer added an argument that framed the significance of the language frontier in a new light that would become critical during the interwar period. For Meyer, the danger posed by Italian nationalism in Trent had less to do with the German national loss of territory or people on the language frontier and everything to do with the proximity of the political border. A methodical policy of Germanization, he argued, would prevent political traitors from subverting Austria’s interests in times of both war and peace. The government had other ideas, and it confiscated the first edition of Meyer’s pamphlet."®

As part of its ideological attempt to maintain popular interest in the language frontier, the Sudmark frequently reported on wartime life on the language frontier. Its magazine explained that in wartime it was especially important to ensure the survival of the settlers. Readers learned in some detail about the daily trials faced by the settlers in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij during the war, and about their contribution to Austria’s war effort. And once again, as in earlier times, tales of life on the language frontier often faded into tales of life in rural Austria. It is not at all clear to what extent the kinds of problems suffered by the settlers in the Windische Buhel (labor shortages, seed shortages, natural disasters) differed from the wartime effects of life in any rural district. Nor is it apparent why urban nationalists should

have cared more about the fate of these rural Austrians as opposed to others. Nevertheless, throughout the war the Sudmark loudly proclaimed its undying loyalty to the settlers and provided them with funds for fruit trees, pigs, and seed. In 1915, for example, the Sudmark reported that St. Egydi / Sv. [lj had been hard hit by a severe hailstorm and that the organization had intervened to help replace the devastated fruit trees and vineyards. Additionally, the first page of every Sudmark magazine issue profiled the association’s war dead in a “table of honor,” always highlighting deaths among settler families.

In 1917 the magazine pointed to the extraordinary sacrifice of one settler family in St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj, the Trumpps, noting that the family

had now lost three of its sons in the fighting.'

The First World War and Beyond 227 However much nationalist organizations attempted to stay afloat by

adapting their own aims to the contingencies of the war, interest in their particular activities and willingness to contribute to their causes waned considerably.?° This was not simply due to wartime exhaustion,

as some historians such as Jan Kren have argued, although that was certainly a critical factor in shaping the attitudes of peasants and the rural Mittelstand.*! Government censors frequently reported an absolute lack of interest in politics among those populations as they focused their efforts on daily and future survival.?? Individual outbursts against the authorities or against those perceived to have profited from the misery of the poor might occasionally be couched in nationalist language. More often, however, nationalist feeling counted little when survival was at stake. In 1918, for example, a bitter Sudbohmische Volkszeitung reported that the widow of Franz Haas, the lone

fatality in the 1908 riots in Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory, had sold her inn (the “German Rhine”) “to Czechs.” Given the financial support she had received in previous years from German nationalist associations, her alleged ingratitude toward her nation appeared incomprehensible to the newspaper.*? Middle-class Austrians who maintained an interest both in the war and public life were less concerned

with nationalist issues and increasingly with declining social conditions, food scarcity, and their social consequences, such as perceived youth delinquency. In her study of nationalist youth welfare institutions, for example, Tara Zahra demonstrates that such organizations absorbed the energies, interest, and financial support of increasingly

large numbers of people during the war, support that, contemporaries noted, might otherwise have gone to more traditional nationalist associations. As the Czech School Association fell into debt, for example, or local branches of the German School Association failed to collect membership dues, Czech and German nationalist welfare institutions, by contrast, were increasing their budgets significantly. Zahra notes that in 1917, partly in response to the Russian Revolution, the Austrian state actually gave those Czech and German nationalist institutions a mandate to run youth welfare services in the Bohemian Lands.** This nationalization of welfare in the Bohemian Lands clearly contributed to a larger nationalization of troublesome wartime social issues. Food shortages, labor conditions, and deteriorating infrastructure all became understood through the lens of nation as nationalist organizations gained key responsibilities for distributing aid. This de-

228 The First World War and Beyond velopment did not necessarily nationalize populations, but it did implicate the nation in daily life far more effectively than nationalist activists had ever been able to do in the years before the war. As social conditions increasingly broke down the imagined wall between public and private life, as women and children became mobilized for their very survival, it was often “the nation” that stepped in to offer several kinds of assistance to families. What consumer goods, tourism, and an intrusive press had failed to accomplish for the nationalists, a world war had finally achieved: the destruction of an ideologically normative public/private dichotomy. The wartime provision of welfare created vast new opportunities for nationalist activists in some regions by giving them greater access to the so-called private sphere. This suggests that any rise in nationalist sentiment during the war years had little to do with the traditional activism of the older associations whose work ultimately remained apart from the concerns that dominated the lives of ordinary Austrians during the war. These newer forms of making the nation relevant to people’s lives through the distribution of welfare benefits certainly brought the nation into the lives of individuals far more effectively than had the other forms of organization, but did this nationalize the peoples of the language frontiers? Did welfare nationalists persuade in-between people, side switchers, or national hermaphrodites to adopt a permanently fixed national identity? Posing this question of course presumes that at some point an ineluctable

transformation from nonnational to national actually took place, making the question an exercise in nationalist teleology. If we examine instead the contingent nature of situational identity choices in 1918, the question focuses less on a final outcome and more on the

particular meanings attached to national identity by people who adopted it at that moment. Most people heard the powerful exhortations of nationalist politicians that laid the blame for extreme social and economic ills on an allegedly nationalist oppressive system in Austria-Hungary. And if the revolutions of 1918-19 have been understood as national revolutions, it is largely because nationalists succeeded in making their discourse the lens through which social issues were understood, thanks in turn to the policies of the supranational Austrian state. Nevertheless, 1918 did not represent an endpoint in the process of nationalization, as antigovernment Czech and German

The First World War and Beyond 229 nationalists in interwar Czechoslovakia well understood. National loyalty on the language frontier, as several recent historians have demonstrated, remained highly contingent and mutable down to 1945. It is not difficult to imagine that the experience of extreme wartime

hardship had brought the nation into more people’s lives by 1918. Both the militarized imperial regime and its nationalist opponents had increasingly framed events in nationalist discursive terms that left

few rhetorical alternatives available to those who protested against labor conditions, poor rationing, or military injustice. And as we have seen, in Bohemia Czech and German nationalist welfare institutions often made the difference between personal survival and calamity. At the same time, if people had come to see themselves on one national

side or another by the end of the war, this did not necessarily mean an end to bilingualism, to regional forms of self-identification, or to so-called side switching. Whatever meanings the inhabitants of linguistically mixed regions attached to the idea of national identity during the war depended on the situation in which they had embraced such identities. People on the language frontier who embraced a national identity in 1918 often did so for quite locally specific reasons. They did not make the commitment with the kind of absolute finality that nationalist historians would like to imagine. Rather, they made the commitment in terms of the world they knew best, one in which real-life situations demanded the skills of bilingualism, and the profession of one national identity or another did not prevent local socialization, commerce, or even the most intimate form of mixing, intermarriage, among nations. Bilingual Czech speakers did not finally “realize” their Czechness once and for all, and they were not suddenly “free” to do so, as the Czechoslovak government often retrospectively claimed. B1-

lingual German speakers too did not awaken to the more profound personal implications of their German-language use. Most simply found that the situation demanded national professions from them if they were to receive goods and services from the collapsing state and its SUCCEeSSOTS.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the contemporary observations of the Viennese socialist and educational reformer Robert Scheu, who visited several regions of Bohemia in the summer and early autumn of 1918 to obtain a clear picture of Czech and German national re-

230 The First World War and Beyond lations.”? During his travels, from July through September of that year, Scheu visited several towns in the southern Bohemian language frontier region, as well as purely Czech-speaking regions and the provin-

cial capital Prague. He spoke with local civil servants, businessmen, priests, teachers, and peasants and with German and Czech nationalist

politicians. While the latter (including Karel Kramar) presented Scheu with a picture of ongoing conflict and imminent political trans-

formation, the former groups offered a far less nationalized picture of personal identities, loyalties, and daily lives. Repeatedly his interlocutors told Scheu that neither the Czech- nor the German-speaking peasantry was nationally engaged. In the mixed-language region surrounding Prachatitz/Prachatice, for example, Scheu learned from several bilingual peasants who called themselves Czech, or “Bohemian, that they routinely sent their children to different schools in alternating years in order that they might achieve fluency in both

languages. Not only that, it also seemed that German-speaking farmers routinely trusted their savings to a local Czech nationalist savings bank in Prachatitz/Prachatice. And despite the clear disapproval of politicians on both sides, sons and daughters of Czech- and German-speaking families outside Prachatitz/Prachatice continued to marry each other.*° In Marienbad / Marianske Lazne a German-speaking businessman

explained to Scheu that the Czech peasantry in the region was not politically engaged, and that relations between Czech- and Germanspeaking peasants in the region were unremarkable. Furthermore, Scheu learned that the local consumer associations in both Czechand German-speaking towns had banded together during the war in order to ensure regular provisioning of a region that depended so fully on tourism for its survival. In Krummau/Krumlov Scheu learned that the choice of a national identity among the educated classes often

depended on coincidence. Several times Scheu heard of families whose two sons had adopted different national identities. In Pilsen/ Plzen the director of a Czech-language commercial school described several local families who could not even say whether they were Czech or German.

Several businessmen and civil servants explained to Scheu that when they had encountered local trouble with demonstrations or riots during the war, the most popular complaints had focused on ques-

The First World War and Beyond 231 tions of fairness in provisioning and rationing, not on issues of nationalist conflict. Scheu himself noted that in retrospect he had not encountered much specific hatred of Germans by self-proclaimed Czechs, but rather that he had heard many Czech-speaking citizens, exhausted by the war, blame specifically German civil servants, German military leadership, or a general German administration for their wartime woes. While he and many of his informants believed that the war had generally politicized people in the region, this trend had apparently only translated into nationalist feeling when it came to the admittedly increasing number of complaints about admuinistra-

tors. Scheu left the region in September 1918 regretting the tragic history of conflict that had poisoned relations among what he and his more educated informers considered to be the two peoples of Bohemia. His account, however, suggests that the level of nationalist

commitment among Bohemians on the southern language frontier had not changed significantly during the war years. In evaluating Scheu’s observations, the issue does not come down to one of national objectivity. Scheu was remarkably open to the views of Czech nationalists on the Bohemian question, and he admitted his

own ignorance with regard to the feelings of “smaller nations” in Central Europe. Like most of his contemporaries, he was certainly not predisposed to find examples of bilingualism or side switching among the inhabitants of Bohemia. In fact, his own conclusions ignored the interesting evidence for ongoing national indifference or linguistic hermaphroditism among the peasantry of southern Bohemia that he had collected. For all his socialist credentials and sympathies, Scheu, like others, preferred to understand the examples of

national indifference he encountered largely in paternalist class terms. Such indifference reflected the alleged ignorance, provincialism, and inexperience of the peasantry, not the assertion of its own peculiar cultural requirements. It was easy for Scheu to partake of the attitude of his interlocutors that framed peasant indifference in terms of an attractive naivete that hearkened back to earlier times. This allowed him to express sympathy for a virtuous peasantry even

as he established a common bond with his largely educated and middle-class informants. If we listen to Scheu’s own observations without adopting his conclusions, we hear the occasional voices of peasants who knew very well about nationalist conflict in a changing

232 The First World War and Beyond world and accommodated themselves minimally to its requirements, but who also continued to reject most of its essential presumptions. One of the few Czech-speaking peasants Scheu met, a well-to-do farmer in the Budweis/Budeéjovice region, formulated his views on nationalism in terms of the parallel social worlds in which he moved. On the one hand, this peasant assured Scheu that no enmity at all divided the rural people of both nations in the region. On the other hand, he explained that politically, the emperor should confer upon the Kingdom of Bohemia the kind of political autonomy enjoyed by the Kingdom of Hungary so that the Czechs could be free.?” One view reflected his ongoing experience of traditional local social relations,

while the other expressed the views shared by the educated and middle-class people with whom he had increasing commercial and social contacts. If the war had helped make contingent nationalists of frontier folk,

it had certainly made the issue of frontier territory into a new kind of political problem that appeared to nationalists to require far more radical solutions. As we have seen in the case of the Tyrol, nationalist struggle on the frontier now became understood in terms of contests

between states rather than nations. Wherever the language frontier coincided with a political border, the conflict became understood in terms of patriotism, civic loyalty, or political treachery. Nationalists transformed a local competition between nations into a struggle between sovereign states, casting the internal foe as an irredentist fifth column whose very existence threatened not only the other nation but now the state as well. In the 1920s the number of state borders multiplied considerably, and all three of the language frontier regions under consideration here—South Styria, southern Bohemia, and South Tyrol—became state border regions as well. Suggestions to physically transfer hostile populations from border regions to the interior were still limited during the First World War, but could be heard

with greater frequency during the interwar period. Where once settlement and colonization had sufficed to promote a nation’s interest, now removal seemed a possible solution to the problem of hostile minorities.”

The First World War and Beyond 233 Revolution and Nationalization on the Frontier The debilitating effects of the First World War on Austro-Hungarian society brought down the monarchy in the fall of 1918. After 1918 both the victors and the vanquished engaged in brilliantly creative mythmaking exercises that aimed to replace the social effects of the war with the mythical power of nationalist conflict in public memory.

Invoking a kind of perverse logic, nationalists linked these phenomena, war and nationalism, with a third phenomenon, the alleged social revolution. For the victors, this combination offered critical proof that their nationalist triumph was simultaneously a popular triumph. Their powerful presentation of the nationalist victory as an expression of popular democracy served to naturalize the postwar settlement in terms of powerful nationalist teleologies. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the newly enlarged Romania and Italy each claimed to be a nation-state whose existence represented the outcome of a natural process of national awakening among the formerly oppressed nations (and classes) of Habsburg Central Europe. The war had constituted the final stage in their liberation. For most nationalist activists, the world of the postwar settlements rested on the realization of their dearest visions or their worst nightmares. The temptation to understand the outcome as a kind of predestined fulfillment of one group’s long-desired demands, accomplished by realizing its opponent’s worst fears, is understandable, since this is how nationalists after 1918 portrayed their struggles. Yet it was

not until the last year of the war that the possibility of replacing the Habsburg Monarchy with brand-new states had even begun to emerge as a serious option, either for most Czech speakers (in the case of Czechoslovakia) or for the Allies. It was largely not until the summer of 1918 that the Allies openly and finally endorsed such an outcome. During much of the war, most nationalists had continued to imagine the eventual postwar period in terms of reforming the familiar existing structural framework, rather than in terms of its disappearance altogether. When the monarchy collapsed in October 1918, the regional nationalist committees that had been preparing for this contingency swiftly moved to proclaim new regimes while simultaneously working to contain social revolution. Thomas Masaryk had already proclaimed

234 The First World War and Beyond a provisional government of Czechoslovakia on 26 September in Paris, and on 15 October the French government recognized the new independent state. On 28 October Czech nationalist leaders in Prague proclaimed the founding of a Czechoslovak Republic and immediately began organizing military forces from local militias and local imperial garrisons. (Upon his abdication Emperor King Charles had released the troops from their oath of loyalty to the dynasty, enabling them to

enter the service of the successor states.) On 29 October German nationalist parliamentary deputies in Vienna proclaimed the creation of German Bohemia (Deutschbohmen) and declared its adherence to the new German Austrian state. A Sudeten German provincial gov-

ernment centered at Troppau/Opava organized itself, while in southern Bohemia German nationalists in the Bohemian Woods declared their adherence to Upper Austria. The provincial regime in Linz immediately sent representatives to organize the administration of Upper Austria’s new territories. On 3 November German nationalists in southern Moravia declared their own adherence to the neighboring province of Lower Austria. In the south, meanwhile, the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) claimed all of South Styria up to and beyond the language frontier at the Windische Buhel and the Mur/ Mura River. German nationalists from the region turned to Vienna for help, demanding that the disputed territory between the Drau/ Drava and Mur/ Mura rivers be included in German Austria, especially the city of Marburg/Maribor. Although Vienna had no intention of relinquishing South Styria, the struggling new Austrian government also had no military forces of its own to send, and Socialist chancellor Karl Renner directed the Styrian provincial government in Graz to intervene militarily to protect the Marburg/Maribor region for Austria.2” To the west in the Tyrol, Italy demanded Austrian territory stretching as far north as the Brenner Pass, well north of the language frontier region around Trent that Austria might have ceded earlier in 1915 in exchange for a guarantee of Italian neutrality. The truncated German Austrian state argued for the inclusion of all those contiguous territories with a majority of German speakers in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the north and in Styria, Carinthia, and the Tyrol in the south. Following the argumentation set down by President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points, German nationalist

The First World War and Beyond 235 activists demanded national justice based on science (statistical studies such as the 1910 census, itself a controversial document) and on institutions of democratic self-determination such as plebiscites.*° Pre-

cisely because national identity would not necessarily have deter-

mined local loyalties in any plebiscites at the time, German nationalists believed with good reason that, at least in the south, traditional loyalty to Austria, combined with local commercial links, would tip the balance in mixed-language regions in their favor. In most cases, however, two very different factors determined the final outcome. First, whoever held power at the local level managed to assert the more compelling claim. These were usually the military units of the successor states, since the Allies had limited the rights of the vanquished to fight, and the new Austrian government could only rely on the organization of local Volkswehr units in widely geographically dispersed regions. Second, for strategic purposes the Allies overlooked claims by the defeated states that, according to contemporary principles of national self-determination, appeared to be compelling and legitimate. No outcome could be allowed that would strengthen Germany or its allies. Many decisions that favored the successor states were taken for purely strategic geographic reasons, even where the

outcomes blatantly contradicted principles of national selfdetermination. The settlements did, however, make minor local adjustments that favored German Austria after holding plebiscites in southern Carinthia and on the Hungarian border. For all these reasons, military units of the successor states, some with Allied support, rushed to occupy each language frontier in the former monarchy as swiftly as possible. In the Bohemian Lands Czech

nationalist units began to occupy both frontier areas and Germanlanguage-majority regions immediately after proclaiming the Czechoslovak Republic. In early November German nationalists in Reich-

enberg/Liberec and Vienna attempted to respond to these military actions by organizing people’s defense militias (Volkswehr) to protect

German-speaking regions from Czech assaults. Nevertheless, the forces of the new Czechoslovak government were much larger, far better organized, and far more effective, and they soon controlled regional rail systems, as well as food provisions. War had exhausted the populace as well, making it difficult to rally volunteers for a new war.*! On 14 November the same garrison in Pisek that had pacified

236 The First World War and Beyond Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory and Schuttenhofen/Susice in 1908 now occupied Prachatitz/Prachatice. One week later an advance

Czech unit dressed in German Austrian uniforms and according to German nationalist accounts “speaking perfect German” removed the new Upper Austrian district administrator from Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory to Schuttenhofen/Susice. There he was examined and sent on to Prague, where he was released after a week. Meanwhile 250 Czech soldiers from Schuttenhofen/Susice occupied Bergreich-

enstein / Kasperské Hory itself on 22 November, taking thirteen middle-class citizens with them to Schuttenhofen/Susice, allegedly as a guarantee for the good behavior of the town. The thirteen, however, returned home the next day having spent the night safely in the Hotel Krone.** In Horitz/Horice one veteran remembered that on his return home in late November he found things quiet in his village. This changed, however, two weeks later when a Czech military unit arrived, combing the region for hidden weapons. Although this veteran, Joseph Mugrauer, remained in Horitz/Horice until 1946, several of his comrades escaped across the border to Upper Austria in December 1918, where they found work with the Upper Austrian police and later in the Austrian army.** Tensions flared in March 1919 when German nationalists organized demonstrations in several frontier cities and towns to mark the opening of the new German Austrian Parliament. German nationalists in the Bohemian Lands had been prevented from electing deputies to this body, and they responded by protesting in the streets. Czechoslovak troops in some towns fired on the largely unarmed crowds, leaving fifty-three dead and over eighty wounded. In Horitz/Horice Mugrauer recalled that there had been no shooting

because the local gendarme post was commanded by a German speaker who had persuaded local demonstrators to disperse.*4 In the south, Slovene nationalist militia units from Laibach/Lju-

bljana occupied the three major centers of South Styrian German nationalist politics, Marburg/Maribor, Cilli/Celje, and Pettau/Ptui. Already on 1 November, before the armistice had even taken effect, Major Rudolf Maister, a Slovene nationalist and Austrian commander

of the militia in Marburg/Maribor, had taken control of all military forces in order to build a Slovene Styrian border division.* In late November his units moved northward from Marburg/Maribor to occupy the north bank of the Mur/Mura River, including the towns of

Radkersburg/Radgona and Spielfeld/Spilje. Although the new

The First World War and Beyond 237 German Austrian government had authorized provincial leaders in Graz to protect German communities in the south, the provincial leadership lacked any significant force of its own, and it negotiated a temporary truce, giving Slovene nationalist forces de facto control over the territory they occupied. Maister, now a general in the army of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, proceeded to consolidate his regime in Marburg/Maribor. He replaced striking German railway and postal workers with Slovene nationalists, fired Austrian civil servants, requisitioned their homes, and, fearing resistance, began taking hostages among German nationalist citizens of Marburg/Maribor in January 1919. On 27 January an Allied deputation, the Miles Mission, visited Marburg/Maribor to gain a firsthand

impression of the national situation in the region. While the deputation met with Maister in the city hall, a large crowd gathered outside

to protest the Slovene nationalist occupation of the city. When the crowd apparently threatened a Yugoslav officer, gunners positioned

on the roof opened fire on the demonstrators, killing eight and wounding twenty. After this “Bloody Sunday” Styrian Volkswehr units

attacked Slovene garrisons along the north bank of the Mur/Mura. Miles himself recommended drawing the border so that Marburg/ Maribor and the communities north of the Mur/Mura River would be included in Austria, writing that “there are many Slovenes along the border who really want to remain with Austria.”°° Not until July 1920, however, did German Austria regain control over the communities north of the Mur/Mura river including Radkersburg/Radgona. Marburg/Maribor remained in the new Yugoslavia. In neighboring Carinthia the German Austrians had better luck. Allied commissions recommended the return of the region around Klagenfurt to Austria, with plebiscites to determine the exact border. Although the Allies

ultimately appeared to ignore the plight of the Marburg/Maribor German speakers, it is instructive to note that even Miles and his experts could determine no logical frontier between Germans and Slovenes in the region. Admitting that Marburg/Maribor was itself a majority German-language island surrounded by a majority Slovenespeaking population, Miles found it impossible to determine the nationality of many individuals he had interviewed on the language frontier between the Mur/Mura and the Drau/Drava, since bilingualism in the region was so strongly rooted.*” Some activists and historians claimed subsequently that a plebiscite

238 The First World War and Beyond would have assigned the entire region between the Drau/Drava (Marburg/Maribor) and the Sava River (Pettau/Ptui) to German Austria. They argue that the majority of the Slovene-speaking and bilingual peasantry would have preferred joining Austria for economic and cultural reasons.** While it is impossible to evaluate this claim, it remains true that plebiscites in Carinthia produced clear pro-Austrian majorities even among Slovene speakers, and that the Stajerc party of proAustrian Slovene speakers had been a growing political force in the region before the war. The larger point that the historian should take both from these debates and from the Miles Mission’s observations is that many peasants imagined their future in terms of the framework of their past. Under the monarchy even nationalist divisions had not torn villages from their regional connections. Furthermore, as with peasants elsewhere in the monarchy, and as we have seen throughout this book, national identity mattered far more to a rural intelligentsia than it did to the larger population.’

Under the Nationalizing State In the postwar world of self-styled nation-states, the term “language frontier” gained some new meanings. Previously the “language frontier” had conjured a picture of struggling nations where individual language use marked the location of the mobile frontier that divided them. In the prewar multicultural empire nations had fought to nationalize territories by peopling them with as many self-professed nationalists as possible. After 1918, however, activists and governments increasingly emphasized the claim that the fixed political borders between states should determine questions of language use on either side. The nature of the equation between language use and national territory had clearly shifted. Now the political identity of the territory (to which state it had been awarded) determined the national language its inhabitants should use, and ascription replaced choice to a far greater extent in determining national identities. One’s address on one side of the new state boundary or on the other served ideally as the new form of national ascription. Those who still did not conform to the correct national identity were now stigmatized as national minorities, usually people with fewer political, social, or economic rights than those exercised by members of the political nation that surrounded them.

The First World War and Beyond 239 Despite the apparent triumph of a nationalist point of view in the postwar settlements, the very abruptness of the transition from multicultural empire to nation-states lent the settkements an air of impermanence. Given the power and legitimacy of the national self-

determination rhetoric, what would prevent future international agreements from altering the map to rectify borders in favor of the defeated states (Germany, Austria, Hungary) once they had rejoined the larger community of nations? The newly constructed diaspora of German speakers outside Germany or of Hungarians outside Hungary—themselves a by-product of the nationalist setthkements—might someday gain a sympathetic audience for their complaints. In theory,

a brand-new dispensation might redress their complaints by readjusting national frontiers in the region one more time, thereby transforming the triumph of the victors into their humiliation. For this reason, mixed-language border regions and their treatment became a critical issue in the domestic policies of the successor states.*° The

Habsburg state had harbored no strategic interest in nationalizing mixed-language border regions. By contrast, its successors had every intention of transforming linguistic conditions on the language frontiers in their own favor and as quickly as possible. ‘The postwar victors feared the potentially disruptive political activism of the national minorities who lived within their new borders. Ridding such regions of bilingualism or of national minorities by homogenizing their populations would give a kind of permanent legitimacy to the new political borders in a world that made national self-determination the arbiter of every political conflict. So while each successor state proudly called itself a nation-state, it would be far more accurate to refer to them all as nationalizing states. Each new or newly enlarged successor regime presided over a so-

ciety that completely failed the test of national homogeneity according to the two factors that had become the key determinants of national identity for nineteenth-century nationalists: language use and religious practice. Linguistic and religious heterogeneity had presented no problem to a state such as prewar Austria that had recognized several official languages and religions and that had not identified citizenship status or patriotism with any single one of them. But legitimacy for the new regimes of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the newly enlarged Italy and Romania rested squarely on their claims to embody a single nation. Each regime faced the challenge

240 The First World War and Beyond of maintaining national hegemony while weakening, transforming, or

if necessary eradicating substantial populations that did not view themselves as part of the nation.*! Maintaining national hegemony often meant transforming the indifference of those they claimed to represent into a more active nationalist stance as well. For this reason, Sstate-sanctioned nationalists in several of the successor states tried to

rally support by portraying themselves as victims of a continuing German oppression that persisted even though the Germans now constituted a minority. At the same time, the new governments in each of these states faced potential opposition from more radical nationalist groups within the new “majority” nation who vigorously challenged the government’s national credentials at the first sign of tolerance for minorities.

Although historians have long debated the different fates of minority populations in interwar Europe, their approach presumes that by 1918 populations had become fully nationalized, and they overlook the possibility that minorities existed more in the minds of nationalist

rulers than as some real and quantifiable phenomenon. People assigned so-called minority-group status certainly developed an increased consciousness of this legal status simply because of new laws regulating schooling or commerce that affected some aspects of their daily lives. Yet a close examination of postwar rural societies in Habs-

burg Central Europe suggests that in the 1920s and 1930s many people who even shared the “correct” language or religion of the nation-state in which they found themselves continued to be indifferent to nationalist identity. They often had to be nationalized themselves. Yet the nationalization process whose roots originated in imperial Austria did not proceed any more effectively or swiftly simply because new national governments now lent it their support. The new

regimes in the 1920s projected their anxieties about nationalization onto the populations in linguistically mixed regions, yet their policies, assisted by the continued activism of radical nationalist associations, met with mixed results during the interwar period.” At one end of the spectrum, the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) immediately adopted harsh measures

to force the German speakers of South Styria either to emigrate or to assimilate. Local administrators for the new state expropriated the property of German nationalist organizations such as the Sudmark or the School Association, closed their schools, outlawed even private

The First World War and Beyond 241 schooling in German, outlawed the use of German in public life, outlawed all German cultural associations, and took over all local municipal administrations. In the entire region of Slovenia, for example, some 200 German cultural and social associations were closed down and their funds expropriated by Slovene officials.** The most egre-

gious example of anti-German confiscation involved the German House in Cilli/Celje, a large and ornate late Victorian structure that housed German nationalist social life and had been constructed with funds raised by the German nationalist community. Local German nationalist activists fought the confiscation unsuccessfully in the courts, claiming that it violated the minority-protection treaties of 1919. In 1930, with the help of Germany and Austria, activists took the case to the League of Nations in Geneva and forced the Yugoslav government to settle the embarrassing case.*4 As early as November 1918 the new rulers had also nationalized

the civil service, fired German-speaking railway workers, postal workers, teachers, and provincial civil servants (including those from the region who were posted elsewhere in Austria), and replaced them

with reliable Slovene speakers. German nationalists in Austria recounted horror stories about the innocent wives and children of these civil servants who overnight had lost their apartments in Marburg/ Maribor and had been thrown out, destitute, on the street. Technically speaking, the Treaty of St. Germain offered residents of both Austria and Yugoslavia a legal option to choose citizenship in either state and thus to emigrate to the state of choice. Some scholars estimated that within a year of the war’s end as many as 14,000 German speakers had either been forced into exile or had chosen migration from the city of Marburg/Maribor alone. Most, however, estimate the number of €migrés at a few thousand. All of the new government’s radical measures, designed to produce a form of national or ethnic cleansing, appear to have achieved the desired effect, as the 1921 census figures for Slovenia demonstrated. The new region included the former Austrian Crown land of Carniola, Styria south of the Mur/Mura River, and some southern regions of Carinthia. The Yugoslav census counted

a total of 41,514 people (4 percent of the total) in this region who claimed German as their “mother tongue,” down from 106,000 (10 percent of the total) who had claimed German as their language of daily use in 1910.*

The new authorities believed that many of those on the frontier

242 The First World War and Beyond who had called themselves “German” in the years before 1914 were actually Germanized Slovenes, and their harsh new school policies aimed to revive the use of the Slovene language in such families. As early as 1918 a Ljubljana Commission for Education and Religion required that all instruction in all schools be held in Slovene. The new law guaranteed that public or private minority schools might be organized in cases where a large-enough number of school-age children from minority nations were present, but made the Slovene language a required subject of study. The practical application of this law was constrained by the way in which the state ascribed minority Status to its German- or Magyar-speaking citizens. Unlike the situation before 1918, under Yugoslav law the individual family father did not

own the right to define national identity for himself or for his children. Rather, the state was required to investigate the authenticity of any claim to minority status. Parents who wished to send their children to schools that offered classes in German had to be able to prove that they were themselves of German descent, starting with the question of their family name. Children with Slovene family names were automatically assigned to Slovene-language schools despite the pro-

tests of their parents. Thus children of so-called mixed marriages, children of German-speaking parents with a Slovene-sounding name, or children of parents who traditionally desired for them a bilingual education were prevented from attending a school that offered bilingual instruction.” Although German speakers had constituted a minority of the pop-

ulation in prewar St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj, the school there continued to offer German-language classes until the 1934-35 school year, unlike

the situation in other communities that had reported a majority of German-language speakers in 1910. Ironically, it appears that the

German names of the Sudmark settlers ensured the survival of German schooling there, even as this option was banned in other communities that registered a much larger percentage of German speakers. This also demonstrates that several Sudmark settlers and their descendants clearly had not abandoned the region for German Austria or the German Reich after the war. The survival of a Protestant religious community both in St. Egydi / Sv. [lj and in Marburg/Ma-

ribor testified to their presence throughout the interwar period.*’ However, the personal significance of their national identity to the

The First World War and Beyond 243 German-speaking farmers of St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj may not have been as

important as German nationalists would have liked to believe. In 1934, for example, parents of the children who attended Germanminority classes in St. Egydi / Sv. Ilj told the local school inspector that there was no need to continue German instruction, “since the children are gradually learning more in the Slovene class.”* At the same time, many local Slovene nationalists complained bitterly throughout the interwar period that the regime had not done nearly enough to diminish German influence in the frontier region and that Germans continued to occupy an economically privileged position in the new Slovenia.*” We will encounter this victor’s language of victimization more fully in interwar Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless,

in an interesting phenomenon, hard-core victorious nationalists in Czechoslovakia, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia continued to ascribe considerable economic power to frontier German, Hungarian, or Jewish minorities in their midst and to cast the majority nation in the role of victim. Slovene nationalists could point to ominous signs

of a German revival by the mid-1920s. Already in 1922 German speakers in Marburg/Maribor founded the Political and Economic Association of Slovenian Germans, which gained a membership of some 3,000 Marburgers within six months. The 1924 municipal elec-

tions in Cilli/Celje, Marburg/Maribor, and Pettau/Ptui produced vote totals for German-friendly parties or coalitions that dwarfed the

official census statistics for German speakers in those towns, suggesting that the alleged lines between nations were less clear than official Yugoslav statistics suggest.*° By the late 1920s German speakers

had gained some rights to organize a cultural associational life. In Italy, too, the existence of a substantial German-speaking population numbering over 200,000 so close to the border with Austria elicited harsh pacification measures both from the postwar liberal regime and its Fascist successor. Unlike the successor states and Romania to the east, Italy was not obliged to accept the minority rights provisions of the peace setthement. In the 1920s Mussolini hoped to nationalize the region through administrative Italianization of the civil service, courts, and the school system. In the early 1930s the Fascist regime initiated an ambitious industrialization scheme designed to attract thousands of Italian immigrants to Bozen/Bolzano and its surroundings, thereby forcing the swift creation of an Italian majority in

244 The First World War and Beyond the region. Neither the liberal regime of the early 1920s nor its Fascist

successor adopted the kind of open brutality against the Tyrol’s German speakers that they employed against the Slovenes and Croatians in Venezia Giulia, for example. Nor did the South Tyroleans

suffer the kind of lawless expropriation visited upon the German speakers of Slovenia. The Italian Fascist ideologist Ettore Tolomei famously considered the German minority to be a harmless leftover of

the Habsburg regime that would soon fade away in the face of an elite, urban Italian culture.°' Nevertheless, German nationalist organizations in Austria and Germany worked hard to publicize the plight of the South Tyrolean Germans. From the start, the Italian government sequestered several Tyrolean border communities, placing them off limits to visitors or tourists. Additionally, the government expropriated the mountain huts of the Austrian Alpine Association.” Yet at least until the Fascist takeover in 1923, the Bozen/Bolzano branch of the German School Association was allowed to maintain its kindergartens and private schools.** After that, German nationalists in the South Tyrol complained bitterly in Austrian and German journals about the brutal “Polish” methods used on them by the Fascist regime. This kind of complaint targeted the many German tourists who allegedly gushed over the friendly wel-

come they received in Florence or Rome, forgetting that the same delightful people were actively brutalizing their German brethren in Bozen/Bolzano.™ “Imagine,” wrote one Tyrolean activist, “that the owner of an attractive hotel is holding members of your own family hostage in one of the rooms, torturing them daily in the most inhuman manner. Still you patronize this hotel, enjoy yourself there, and even pay the owner good money.” German tourists would not be dissuaded from their vacations in Italy, so German nationalists en-

couraged them to patronize German-owned establishments and to follow the “Ten Commandments of the Traveler to the South.” The commandments suggested that a good nationalist would speak only German in Italy, use only German place names when inquiring for directions, and demand German-speaking service and menus in restaurants. Finally, the commandments urged the tourist to observe closely incidents where German-speaking locals were mistreated and

to recount these incidents to friends at home. “Tell your friends,” advised the commandments, “that it is wrong not to travel to South

The First World War and Beyond 245 Tyrol because it is oppressed, but that it is our duty to visit German areas first, whenever we travel abroad.” As before the war, leisure habits and the business of tourism were pressed into service for a higher purpose by committed nationalists.*° The postwar situation on the language frontier in Czechoslovakia was shaped largely by a combination of competing factors that held each other in check, at least in the decade spanning the mid-1920s until the mid-1930s. Both the constitutional structures of the new state and its leaders’ proclaimed commitment to democratic practice enabled most German nationalist organizations to continue their activities under the new regime. Additionally, many German-speaking chil-

dren continued to have access to German-language schools, a German-language press flourished, and German nationalist parties competed successfully in both local and statewide elections. After 1926 ministers representing German nationalist parties even joined the governing coalition and retained an influential voice in public affairs down to 1938. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia remained legally a nation-state and not a multinational state. ‘The laws that gave

rights to various language groups represented the concessions of a majority to a minority. The government was not an arbiter that could stand without prejudice above national conflict, as had legally been the case under the monarchy.”® This placed clear limits on the abilities of Czechoslovakia’s institutions to assure the democratic practice and outcomes that its leaders promised. Czech nationalist politicians and organizations lobbied intensively against any measure that they perceived might serve alleged

alien German or Hungarian nationalist interests. In such cases they essentially argued that the individual exercise of democratic rights always came second to the needs of a now legally recognized body, the nation. When German or Magyar speakers demanded schooling in their own languages, their demands were understood not as the exercise of rights by individuals, but as group demands that threatened to diminish the status of the ruling nation. Government administration at the local level frequently treated those whom it claimed belonged to such national minorities (as well as nationally indifferent or ambivalent people) with considerable harshness. Parents in Mo-

ravia, for example, did not have an automatic right to send their children to a minority school—as in Yugoslavia, they were subject to

246 The First World War and Beyond an official investigation and were obliged to prove their minority identity, often on the basis of ascribed characteristics. But this also suggests

that the degree to which the promise of minority rights may have failed in practice had as much to do with the difficulties of categorizing real individuals as it did with the credibility of the state’s democratic intentions. The state had an interest in increasing the category of those who belonged to the nation, and the Czech nationalist movement had traditionally deplored side switching, characterizing it in nationalist terms as Germanization.°’ Given these concerns of the Czechoslovak nation-state, it is equally

important to point out that there was as yet no united Germanminority community interest in Czechoslovakia, although plenty of

nationalists hoped to create such an interest. In 1918 Germanspeaking communities in Czechoslovakia were neither politically nor culturally unified. In the prewar period they had identified themselves

and acted as the German speakers of Silesia, northern Moravia, southern Moravia, the Iglau language island, the Sudeten Mountain region, western Bohemia, or the Bohemian Woods. They had combined these highly local forms of identity with their loyalty to imperial Austria, as Karl Bahm has pointed out, but few had considered themselves to be “Sudeten Germans.”°* Even the concept of Deutschbohmen,

so proudly proclaimed by prewar guidebooks and tourist bureaus, rested on the nationalist imagination and hardly constituted a cultural, administrative, or economic unity. And as they had under the empire, German speakers in the new Czechoslovakia were a politically diverse group as well, voting for several parties from Communist and Social Democrat to bourgeois nationalist, Agrarian, and Christian Social. With the fall of the monarchy, where did these German speakers belong? What was their nation, what was their nation-state? Once their

continued link with the German Austrian Republic had been ruled out, many German speakers simply accepted an identity as Czechoslovakian Germans. Certainly most German-speaking leaders of business and industry had viewed the possibility of being joined to Ger-

many and facing severe competition or being cut off from their market links in the Bohemian interior with some trepidation in November 1918. Even the strongest nationalists submitted to a situational determination of their identity. Not until German speakers in

The First World War and Beyond 247 Czechoslovakia began to feel the effects of the Great Depression and, later, of Nazi rhetoric did many come to see themselves as forming a united German diaspora community.”®

Not surprisingly, the reconstituted German nationalist organizations stepped in almost immediately to create that missing sense of community identity and shared public culture among all Germanspeaking communities in Czechoslovakia. ‘The German School Association was refounded in Czechoslovakia as the German Kulturver-

band, while the Bohmerwaldbund and the Bund der Deutschen Bohmens continued their traditional functions, albeit with diminished membership numbers and funds. Several times in the interwar period these organizations attempted to forge a closer unity with each other and to speak in unified tones for a single German community. Yet even among nationalists, regional and ideological differences made such unity impossible to achieve. To take one obvious example, both the Kulturverband and the Bohmerwaldbund continued their prewar tradition of including German-speaking Jews actively in their community efforts, while the Bund der Deutschen maintained its traditional anti-Semitic posture that defined Jews racially as outsiders to

the German community. Not surprisingly, when Nazi occupiers marched into Budweis/Budeéjovice in the spring of 1939, they removed the commemorative bust of Josef Taschek from its place of honor in the Deutsches Haus. At the level of the Bohemian Woods language frontier we can see several of these contradictory elements in motion throughout the decade of the 1920s. On the whole, German speakers experienced the intrusion of Czechoslovakia largely in terms of economic stipulations (new tax codes and business requirements), annoying symbolic demands, and school issues. The example of a small town of German speakers such as Horitz/Horice presents an instructive example of how the new state both made its presence known and left many conditions pretty much alone. According to Mugrauer’s memoir, in 1919 the new government imposed stiff taxes and used the building of one bankrupted artisan firm to house a new Czech-language school, although only one Czech-speaking child lived in Horitz/Horice at the time. The new authorities soon replaced the handful of village postal and railway workers with Czech-speaking appointees, replaced some

248 The First World War and Beyond teachers in the German school with bilingual staff, and replaced the few local German-speaking gendarmes with Czech speakers. All of these changes provided pupils for the new school. Czechoslovakia had established at least a beachhead presence in this frontier town. The constant prewar complaint in the nationalist press and associations about Czech nationalist incursions into regions that were not theirs was transferred to the new Czechoslovak government. Its existence, especially in its early years, seemed driven by the old nationalist desire

to make life as difficult as possible for the national opponent. Yet Mugrauer’s account of village life in the interwar years suggests that

once this Czech outpost had been established, very little changed. Politically, the town continued to elect only “authentic Horitzers” to the municipal council, and despite allegedly well-financed efforts by the twenty-eight Czech speakers, no Czech speaker gained election.” If Mugrauer remembered continuities in village life after the de-

mise of the monarchy, nationalist activists in the region continued their own tradition of casting every event and development in nationalist terms. The challenges German nationalists believed they faced were daunting. On one rhetorical level they had to protect the rights of German nationals against all incursions by power-hungry Czechs. But more disturbingly, German nationalists faced the possibility of

internal decline, whether cultural or demographic. So-called side switchers or in-between people who had aligned themselves with German speakers in the prewar censuses now frequently joined the Czechs or found themselves increasingly pressured by the new regime

to do so. German nationalist rhetoric turned inward in the 1920s to try to conserve what resources the German community possessed. This required a continuation of prewar policies that framed every local event in terms of larger national issues. Whether or not villagers

consciously held a German national identity, nationalists reminded them ceaselessly that those who spoke German and not Czech were treated as outsiders whenever they left their local Hezmat to venture into Czechoslovak national society. Furthermore, whether or not villagers had thought much in terms of a German national identity before the war, nationalists reminded them of every petty way in which the law assigned them a second-class status. In Horitz/Horice this applied particularly to the revival of the passion-play tradition in 1923.

The First World War and Beyond 249 It took some years before the Bohmerwaldbund began encouraging tourists to return to the Bohemian Woods. The tourist economy that had been carefully nurtured before the war was ruined. In addition

to the usual postwar problems of inflation, shortage, and disease, many families suffered increased poverty without the additional income that lodging the Sommerfrischler had brought them. Furthermore, with the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Bohmerwaldbund had lost many of its non-Bohemian members and over half its revenues. It was not until 1921 that the village council even considered attempting to revive the passion play, after a series of town meet-

ings demonstrated the continued interest of the villagers. Not surprisingly, a few weeks before the opening of the new production in 1923, the local German press complained bitterly that the revival of the passion play had caused the Czechoslovak state to recategorize Horitz/Horice as an official tourist destination. This act was understood as a kind of nationalist punishment for the village, since it required that all restaurants and inns carry bilingual signs, that each be equipped with bilingual menus, and that each hostelry employ at least one person who spoke the Czech language. In some contexts such a

requirement might seem practical and even useful for promoting tourism, but in this case it was held up as a typical example of a hostile Sstate’s unjustified meddling.”

In the interwar years the organizers of the play viewed it less ambitiously than had their pre-1914 predecessors. Under the monarchy it had seemed a viable ambition to build a successful tourist and vacation industry in the Bohemian Woods based on the natural beauty of the region and anchored by the growing fame of the passion play. After the war the general collapse of local economies doomed the budding tourist industry. The mutual suspicions that governed relations among the new neighboring states made travel and tourism far more difficult in the postwar years than they had been before 1914. And while the world-famous spas of Bohemia or the ski regions of the Tyrol continued to attract their traditionally upper-bourgeois clientele even in reduced circumstances, bargain destinations such as the Bohemian Woods saw their business evaporate. A brochure published by the Bohmerwaldbund in the early 1930s made what reads today as a desperate plea for outsiders to return to the unfortunate region, hard

250 The First World War and Beyond hit by war and now by economic depression.®* The Austrian journal Sudetendeutschland published frequent and often-lurid accounts of economic misery in the Bohemian Woods during the depression. In August 1933, for example, the journal expressed its shock at the unbe-

lievable story “that children of the unemployed had died of starvation” in the border town of Eisenstein / Zelezna Ruda.® Mugrauer too remembered that the depression years had brought far too few visitors to Horitz/Horice for the passion play. Echoing a frequent German nationalist refrain, Mugrauer attributed the decline in tourists from neighboring Austria and Bavaria to Czech-imposed difficulties at border crossings. By contrast, other nationalists and their publications reported that the play remained a popular success in these years and encouraged tourists from German-speaking Europe to attend.” If German nationalists continued to worry about the ineluctable Czechification of their conationals, radical Czech nationalists expressed frustration with their government’s unwillingness to promote colonization efforts more forcefully in language frontier regions or those such as Horitz/Horice, where Czech speakers constituted a tiny minority of the population. The Czech nationalist associations of the interwar years continued to indulge in a harsh rhetoric organized around themes of aggressive colonization and defensive victimization,

both inherited from their prewar arsenals under the Habsburg state. Like their German nationalist counterparts, these organizations too had lost members and money during the war. Like a phoenix from the ashes, they arose victorious after the war and gradually rebuilt their networks during the 1920s. The nationalist organizations did not view the creation of Czechoslovakia as the fulfillment of their program or an excuse to relax their efforts on the frontiers. On the contrary, they de-

manded a policy-making role from an often-reluctant government. Their efforts focused on rooting out local injustices that German speakers continued to perpetrate against Czech speakers in those mixed-language regions to which most Czechs allegedly paid scant attention. “The religious and national minorities in our state are not oppressed,” claimed one typical petition in 1922; “on the contrary, it is usually members of the Czechoslovak nation who have every reason for dissatisfaction. It has not yet been possible in the short period since the revolution to end all the injustices that were built up under Austria-

The First World War and Beyond 251 Hungary.” As Peter Haslinger has noted, these Czech nationalist associations offered a compelling alternative narrative to the triumphant tale of victory proclaimed by official state ideologists. The associations demanded concerted action against German and Magyar communities in order to support Czech interests in mixed-language regions. This involved the “cleansing of Germanized regions of all German and Austrian names for streets, town squares, buildings, monuments, etc.,” as

well as forbidding “the use of German flags and songs in public performances” and the founding of a censorship office.®’

The government maintained an uneasy relationship with these associations, accepting their support when needed, but usually ignoring their most radical demands, whose fulfillment it was feared would cause embarrassment to Czechoslovakia on the international stage. In some regions, with regard to issues such as land reform or schooling in mixed-language regions, the government conceded a semiofficial role to the nationalist associations. ‘The organizations denounced allegedly Czech families who tried to claim a German identity in order to send their children to German-language schools, for example, and they often influenced the local distribution of confiscated lands. Furthermore, these nationalist organizations encouraged the adoption of the new, more state-oriented understanding of the significance of the frontier regions. Linking the interest of local Czech-speaking minorities in majority German-speaking regions to the state interest, nationalists depicted their communities as a sure (and inexpensive) guarantee of the state’s border security. In the German Austrian Republic, where German nationalist activism had experienced no government limit during the tumultuous period from 1919 to 1923, both the Sudmark and the German School

Association produced vibrant propaganda while reorienting their goals toward the demands of the new situation. Their publications bemoaned the miserable fate of Germans in the postwar world and aggressively promised revenge in the not-too-distant future. Both organizations, but especially the Sudmark, retreated into a kind of masochistic fantasy world, where cruel events confirmed the most radical prewar volkisch nightmares, punishing the Germans for their national indifference. They indulged in a pathos-ridden rhetoric of the powerless, often attributing the tragedy of 1918 to national disharmony born of German complacency, as the following poem suggests:

252 The First World War and Beyond German mountains red with shame, Can't understand from whence this scandal came. One figure in the Landscape doesn’t seem to care, German from a German land, that figure is you!®

Several writers urged the Germans now finally to put aside their traditional small-minded habits of particularism for the sake of a future victory. “For every four Germans who call themselves nationalists,

at least three of them define the nationalist interest in completely different ways.””” Others compared German disunity with the high degree of unity that characterized the successful Polish, Czech, and

Italian nationalist movements.” Stull other German nationalists blamed the enemy’s dishonor, lack of culture, and even treachery for the disaster, building on wartime myths of Slav treason. Both the Sud-

mark and the School Association exhorted Germans to rededicate themselves to the nation, to make nationalist sacrifice in every aspect of daily life, and never to forget the lost territories and people.

If Habsburg Austria had lost over 50 percent of its territory and people to the successor states in the postwar settlement, the School As-

sociation and the Sudmark had forfeited their considerable investment holdings in land, buildings, and capital on those frontiers as well. Since Austria had surrendered its significant language frontier regions, it could be argued that both organizations had lost their main justification for existence. Were minority schools necessary in the new German Austrian Republic? Where were settlements any longer re-

quired to link German-language islands to the German-speaking heartland? It therefore seems more than a little ironic that the Sudmark in particular now rededicated itself even more obsessively than before the war to nationalizing the frontier. One explanation is that here, as elsewhere, the term “frontier” had gradually come to assume radically different connotations. The Habsburg Monarchy had provided a framework in which organizations such as the School Association had worked hard to promote a common national purpose among diverse German-speaking communities. The nationalist associations had encouraged German speakers throughout the monarchy to learn what they shared in common with their conationals throughout the monarchy. The so-called frontier regions, where Germans came into contact with other nations, had constituted special settings for a par-

The First World War and Beyond 253 ticularly exaggerated sense of nationalist activism. Now, in a stunning

act of geographic, cultural, and social reorientation, all of German Austria itself became understood as a frontier land. The term Sprachgrenze or language frontier was gradually abandoned for a new focus on Grenze and Grenzler, the borderland and its people.

As the Sudmark ideologists reoriented their focus away from the empire that was no more and westward toward Germany, they made the linguistically homogeneous German Austria emblematic of the many new German diaspora communities scattered throughout East Central Europe, from the Tyrol to the former Bukovina. What had

once constituted language islands or centers of German culture within the framework of imperial Austria now became known as German diasporas, cut off by state borders from contact with each other and with the German metropolis. This radical transformation made Anschluss with Germany the only logical political goal for nationalist politics. In preparation for such a future day, Austrians had first to become nationalized, that is, to become steeped in their own Great German national cultural heritage. They must also become fully committed to its realization.” As these formerly metropolitan people themselves became understood as the peripheral Grenzler or frontier folk of a larger imagined German imperium, they did not give up their former identities com-

pletely. Rather, nationalists reformulated these identities using familiar-sounding terms that retrospectively imagined the Germans of Habsburg Austria as having always constituted Germany’s diasporic offshoot in the East. Nationalists built on forty years of layered meanings that had been assigned to the language frontiers as they devel-

oped a new concept of German identity for Austrians. On the one hand, they developed new contacts with German nationalist organizations within Germany, sponsoring exchanges of children, for example, with families who lived in the troubled Ruhr region or publishing pamphlets that emphasized the future place of Austria inside a renewed Germany.’”*? On the other hand, they exhorted Austrians not to forget the border communities they had lost to the successor states in 1918. The Sudmark, for example, sponsored traveling slide shows in the 1920s that depicted the lost towns of South Styria. Sud-

mark nationalists also took up a modified form of their earlier activism in the Burgenland, the small new province in the East that

254 The First World War and Beyond Austria had gained from Hungary at the peace settlement. At a celebration of the Sudmark’s thirty-fifth year in June 1924, the program offered two possible day excursions that linked old practice with new fields of work. One was a trip to Heiligenkreuz in the Burgenland, and the other was a trip to Radkersburg and the Slovene border.” The Sudmark commissioned tourist guidebooks of the Burgenland (no histories of this made-up region in West Hungary yet existed), and it sponsored school trips designed to better acquaint Austrian youth with the province and to give Burgenlanders a clearer sense of their membership in a greater German community.” As one author explained to the membership, “It is both our volkisch and our civic duty to visit the inhabitants of this delightful region as often as possible. We must show them that we are their nearest relatives, according

to our shared tribal customs and culture, and not aliens who intend to exploit them.””° The Sudmark funded local libraries and any cultural folk program that might encourage the largely rural Burgenlanders to accept their new identities as Germans. All these varied activities came together in new ritual practices of the German nationalist associations in the 1920s. In the spring of 1923 the Sudmark, in concert with several other organizations, planned a

Grenzland Woche or Borderland Week throughout Austria. Local branches were encouraged to hold commemorative festivals that would remind all Austrians that “fate has made us into a frontier people. Our task is to keep watch, that in the course of political developments no further pieces of the precious German body are torn from us.” This meant remembering the millions of Germans who now

lived on the wrong side of the political borders, but it also meant strengthening the internal will of Austria’s Germans to act as a united bulwark against further aggression. All German cultural associations were encouraged to participate with displays of German musical or gymnastic talent. Wherever possible, speakers should lecture about the borderlands; where no available speakers could be found, the Sudmark recommended out-loud readings of some of its own publications on borderland issues. In advance of the festival the organization pub-

lished a special journal with articles devoted to every German minority group in Europe. During the week every branch should collect donations to support the work of the Sudmark; schoolchildren, the organization advised, could do the collecting. Kok ok

The First World War and Beyond 255 At 11:30 PM on 30 September 1938, the night before the intended German advance into the Sudetenland, all twenty-eight of Horitz/ Horice’s interwar Czech-speaking inhabitants boarded a bus and departed for Budweis/Budejovice. Those who cast their lot with Czechoslovakia removed themselves from this frontier town on the periphery and headed to the Czech center of Bohemia. This political choice by twenty-eight villagers was, of course, understood, reported,

and even motivated in terms that highlighted the individual’s sense

of national belonging. The Czech speakers left and the German speakers stayed behind. We do not know, for example, whether any

of the remaining Horitzers spoke Czech in addition to German, whether any of them had married Czech-speaking spouses, or whether any of the remaining Horitzers had ever sent any of their children to

the local Czech-language school. It is only common sense, and not historical fact, that sees this event in terms of the unmixing of two bordering nations. And when the border between those imagined nations moved eastward, so did the imagined problem of mixing, national hermaphrodites, and side switchers. Two imperial neighbors of the region, Nazi Germany and the Soviet

Union, attempted to shape the national composition of the region using strategies of a kind the interwar nationalists could only have dreamed of. The full brunt of Nazi racial science and the tireless efforts of its bureaucrats were frequently brought to bear on the important goal of correctly categorizing local populations. Yet even the dictatorial and violent efforts of two empires could not easily unmix the frontier. In part this was because Nazi Germany and the Soviet

Union faced the same challenges that had bedeviled turn-of-thecentury nationalists in Austria: the inability to make national categories compelling to the people who were to represent them. The Jews of the former Habsburg language frontier regions certainly were eradicated, but Czech speakers and German speakers, Slovene speakers

and German speakers, and Italian speakers and German speakers could not so easily be parted from one another. Or rather, to adopt a less nationalist version of events, national indifference and the strength of local loyalties often made unmixing an exercise in futility. Those offered the choice between local identities and nationalist ones frequently chose the former at the expense of potential benefits that

might accrue from adherence to the latter. German speakers in the Tyrol, for example, at first greeted the opportunity to migrate from

256 The First World War and Beyond their Hezmat to the Reich with enthusiasm, but as the time drew closer to make the move, the so-called Option lost its attractiveness.” If the First World War had produced self-styled nation-states in the region, it was largely the radical population practices of the Germans and the Soviets (and those who followed their examples) during the Second World War that left the region divided among more fully, if still not completely, nationalized societies. The expulsions and transfers that followed the conclusion of the war raised the issue of national

belonging all over again and, as in earlier periods, could not easily be resolved. Nationalist activists themselves knew who should stay and

who should be expelled after 1945, but their efforts to codify this knowledge only produced conflict and confusion.” So strong is the power of the nationalist myth that even today commonsense logic tends to support the apparent truth of its assertions. Any problems created by the post-1918 settlement, for example, still tend to be blamed on the impossibility of consistently applying the ineluctable principles of national self-determination to regions that were literally ethnic mosaics. From the vantage point of a nationalized world, it was not the underlying logic of the postwar settlement but rather the path-

ological ethnic makeup of the region that determined the settlement’s failure. Additionally, the inconsistent application of the settle-

ment’s principles, the shortsighted vindictiveness displayed by its authors, and even their ignorance of the facts on the ground also allegedly undermined the setthement’s legitimacy. ‘The frontier qual-

ities of the region simply defied the clear logic of a normalized national solution. In other words, the victors had the right idea, they simply did not practice it consistently, and pathological local conditions often prevented them from practicing it consistently. Even critics from the defeated states tended to contest the setthkement on its own

terms, questioning why minority populations that belonged to their own nations should be trapped inside the borders of another nationstate. And no postwar political movements agitated for a return to a multicultural empire in the region. From a position outside the normative logic of the nation-state, the 1918 and 1945 settlements seem to have relied to a perplexing extent on the claims and promises of nationalist activists, claims that subsequent events almost always disproved. It was precisely those frontier areas that have been the subject of this book that were worst served

The First World War and Beyond 257 by the imposition of nationalist and nationalizing state frameworks on

Habsburg Central Europe. Their populations were most frequently targeted for forced nationalization, and when that failed, they frequently became the objects of fantasies about the wholesale movement of populations in and out of specific frontier regions. The point of this analysis has been to demonstrate that it was not the intrinsic qualities of societies known as borderlands that produced this outcome in any way. The very frontier identities assigned to these regions were themselves inventions of nationalist activists intent on

creating the objects for their policies of nationalization. If this nationalizing intent is clear, it should also be clear that it was nationalist activism that produced the illusion (however compelling) of the very “borderness” of these regions. Differences in language use or religious

practice did not produce frontiers in the modern nationalist sense. Nationalist activism, in concert with war and occupation, produced both the frontiers and the horrific internal nationalist violence that characterized them in the 1940s. The activists and their activism constitute far more fruitful subjects for our analysis than do their illusory creations, the frontiers or borderlands. If we look to sources beyond those created by the nationalists, if we dissociate ourselves rigorously from nationalist assumptions, and if we attempt to hear what we can of the experiences of the populations of these regions, we may perhaps liberate ourselves from the unnecessary discursive prison that nationalists around us continue to re-create.

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Abbreviations

AHY Austrian History Yearbook AVA Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv

BB Bundesarchiv Bayreuth BZ Bozner Zeitung (Sudtiroler Tagblatt) CEH Central European History DB Deutsch-Bohmerwald (Prachatitz) DBZ Deutsche Bohmerwald Zeitung (Krummau) DKD Der Kampf ums Deutschtum DV Deutsche Volkszeitung (Reichenberg)

DW Deutsche Wacht DZ Deutsche Zeitung

GE Getreue Eckart

HHSA Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv (Vienna) MDB Miittheilungen des Deutschen Bohmerwaldbundes MDS Mitteilungen des deutschen Schulvereins MVDTB Mitteilungen des Vereines deutscher Touristen Brunn MVS Mitteilungen des Vereons Sudmark

MZ Marburger Zeitung NFP Neue freve Presse (Vienna)

NL Narodni listy NP Narodni politika

PL Pravo lidu

PT Pilsner Tagblati 259

260 Abbreviations RGBI Reichsgesetzblatt fur die im Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und Lander

SBV Sudbohmische Volkszeitung

SLA Steiermarkisches Landesarchiv SP Sudsteierische Post (Slovene nationalist) SUA Statni ustredni archiv (Central State Archive, Prague)

Notes

1. Languages, Territories, Politicians, and People 1. J. Zemmrich, Sprachgrenze und Deutschtum in Bohmen (Braunschweig, 1902), 1.

2. Mark Cornwall, “The Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border, 1880-1940,” English Historical Review 109 (1994): 914-951. 3. See, for example, Zemmrich, Sprachgrenze, 67. Anecdotal and analytic

evidence on the prevalence of so-called intermarriage among inhabitants of linguistically diverse rural regions is plentiful, including, most recently, the Austrian Czech project “Verfeindete Bruder an der Grenze: Sudbohmen/Sudmahren/Waldviertel/Weinviertel—Die Zerstorung der Lebenseinheit ‘Grenze,’ 1938 bis 1945,” led by Hanns Haas (University of Salzburg). Peter Mahner, “Grenze als Lebenswelt: Gnadlersdorf (Hnanice), ein sudmahrisches Dorf an der Grenze,” in Peter Haslinger, ed., Grenze im Kopf: Beitrage zur Geschichte der Grenze in Ostmitteleuropa (Vienna, 1999), 67-102. See also Petr Lovoziuk, “Karlov/

Libinsdorf: A Village in Discourse, a Discourse in a Village. Preliminary Research Report,” in Zdenek Uherek and Jan Grill, eds., Freldwork and Local Communities. Prague Occasional Papers in Ethnology 7

(2005): 146-173. 4. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990); Miroslav Hroch, Soczal Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (New York, 1985).

5. For a recent version of this argument in a different provincial context (Galicia) and referring to a different period (interwar Poland), see 261

262 Notes to Pages 3-6 Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithu-

ania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, Conn., 2003), especially 150153.

6. Helmut Fielhauer, “Kinder ‘Wechsel’ und “‘Bohmisch-Lernen’: Sitte, Wirtschaft und Kulturvermittlung im fruhen niederosterreichischentschechoslovakischen Grenzbereich,” Osterreichische Zeitschrift fiir Volks-

kunde 81 (1978): 115-148; Robert Luft, “Nationale Utraquisten in Bohmen: Zur Problematik ‘nationaler Zwischenstellungen’ am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Maurice Godé, Jacques Le Rider, and Francoise Mayer, eds., Allemands, Juifs et Tcheques a Prague (Montpellier, 1996), 37-51; Mahner, “Grenze als Lebenswelt,” 75-76; Tara Zahra,

“Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1945,” CEH 37 (2004): 499-540, especially 503-504; Christian Promitzer, “The South Slavs in the Austrian Imagination: Serbs and Slovenes in the Changing View from German Nationalism to National Socialism,” in Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York, 2003), 186. Karl Renner

famously recalled this childhood practice of exchange in his memoir, An der Wende zweier Zeiten: Lebenserinnerungen (Vienna, 1946), 7, 45, 76.

On bilingualism among working-class children, see also Heinrich Holek’s memoir, Unterwegs (Vienna, 1927); and Karl Bahm’s masterful analysis in “Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe,” AHY 29 (1998): 19-35.

7. Maria Kurz, “Der Volksschulstreit in der SUdsteiermark und in Karnten in der Zeit der Dezemberverfassung” (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 1986). 8. Tara Zahra, “Your Child Belongs to the Nation: Nationalization, Germanization, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2005), 2-3. See also the references to a Czechsponsored exchange advertised in a German nationalist magazine in 1934: “Fereienaustausch tschechischer gegen deutsche Kinder,” /ugendfursorge (1934), 190. On indifference to nation see also Petr Lozoviuk, “K problematice ‘etnické indifference’ (Priklady z ceského jazykového postiedi),” Cesky Lid 3 (1997): 201-212. 9. Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 18611914 (Princeton, N.J., 1981), noted patterns of assimilation by Czech or German speakers into “national communities” that were based on several social considerations, of which language use was rarely decisive. On nineteenth- and twentieth-century assimilation patterns in

Notes to Pages 6-8 263 general, see Jiri Koralka, Tschechen 1m Habsburgerreich und in Europa,

1815-1914 (Munich, 1991), 93-95. For a contemporary nationalist analysis of national assimilation patterns and demographics based on census data, see Heinrich Rauchberg, Der nationale Besitzstand in Bohmen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1905). Jeremy King’s Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1545-1948

(Princeton, N.J., 2002) examines the particular forms and dynamics of nationalist activism that produced a nationalization of local politics in the southern Bohemian town of Budweis/Budeéjovice. 10. Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, Ind., 2001), 112-152. 11. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York, 1996), 15-16. See also several of

the enormously useful essays in Brubaker’s Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

12. Much of the literature that sought to distinguish so-called ethnic forms of nationalism from civic ones derived from Hans Kohn’s The Ideal of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origin and Background (New York,

1944). Later works in particular tended to link civic forms of nationalism to Western Europe and ethnic forms to a less advanced Eastern Europe and Asia. Contrast, for example, the arguments in Rogers Brubaker’s early work on nationalism and citizenship, Crtizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), a work very much in the older tradition, with Brubaker’s more insightful essay, “ ‘Civic’ and ‘Ethnic’ Nationalism,” in Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 132-146.

13. See Gary Cohen, “Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and Government in Late Imperial Austria,” AHY 29 (1998): 37-61. For a useful comparison with conditions and practices in imperial Germany, see Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J., 2000). 14. In a typical example of wrongheaded logic that makes nation a required component of modernity, Philip Ther has suggested that the very multilingual character of the Austrian Empire produced illiberal movements among Germans opposed to democratic reform. See Ther, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe,” CEH 36 (2003): 45-73, especially 56. 15. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. 16. A strongly articulated version of this narrative is Solomon Wank, “The

264 Notes to Pages 8-9 Habsburg Empire,” in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, Colo., 1997). 17. Lothar Hobelt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler: Die deutschfretheitlichen Parteen Altosterreichs, 1S82-1918 (Vienna, 1993), 180-186.

18. For examples of this dynamic of conflict within the Czech and German nationalist movements, see Catherine Albrecht, “The Rhetoric of Economic Nationalism in the Bohemian Boycott Campaigns of the Late Habsburg Monarchy,” AHY 32 (2001): 47-67; Hobelt, Kornblume und Kavseradler; Pieter M. Judson, “ “Whether Race or Convic-

tion Should Be the Standard’: National Identity and Liberal Politics in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” AHY 22 (1991): 76-95; Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in

the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 223-265; T. Mills Kelly, “Taking It to the Streets: Czech National Socialists in 1908,” AHY 29 (1998): 93-112; King, Budweisers, 62-147. 19. Peter Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building, National Self-Perception and Politics, 1780-1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Aarhus, 1994); Laurence Cole, “Fur Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland”: Nationale Identitat der deutschsprachigen Bevolkerung Tirols, 1860-1914 (Frankfurt am Main,

2000). Cole demonstrates that in the Tyrol concepts of German national identity often assumed specific qualities that gave them little in common with concepts of Germanness in other parts of the monarchy.

20. The laws governing communal autonomy issued by Count Franz Stadion in 1849 gave communes a limited right of self-government that included the right to elect representatives and to determine membership in a community. The liberals’ communal autonomy law of 1862 built on the principles elaborated in the earlier Stadion law. See Werner Ogris, “Die Entwicklung des Osterreichischen Gemeinderechts im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Wilhelm Rausch, ed., Die Stadte Mitteleuropas wm 19. Jahrhundert (Linz, 1983), 85-90. For an excellent analysis of how liberals used this limited communal autonomy to pursue their broader programs in the Tyrol starting in the 1850s, see Thomas Gotz, Burgertum und Liberalismus in Tivol, 1840-1873: Zwischen Stadt und Region, Staat und Nation (Cologne, 2001).

21. On the liberal system of communal autonomy and how it functioned, see Jiii Klabouch, Die Gemeindeselbstverwaltung in Osterreich, 1848-1918 (Vienna, 1968); Gustav Kolmer, Parlament und Verfassung in Osterreich, vol. 1 (Vienna, 1902), 113-115; Josef Redlich, Das Wesen der osterreichwschen Kommunal-Verfassung (Leipzig, 1910). I translate the term Be-

zirkshauptman as “district administrator.” Jeremy King, for example,

Notes to Pages 12-16 265 uses the more literal “district captain” to refer to the same office. See King, Budweisers, 50.

22. Voters in the autonomous communes were generally divided into two or three voting classes or curiae, usually based on how much tax they paid, with the poorest citizens often left unenfranchised. Each class elected the same number of delegates to the town council. 23. After a compromise was reached that gave Galicia’s Polish nobility considerable provincial autonomy, Polish replaced German at the University of Lemberg/Lw6w/L’viv and as the internal language of the administration. 24. King, Budweisers, 114-115. 25. On the Budweis/Budéjovice Compromise, see King, Budweisers, 137— 147. On the Moravian, Bukovinan, and Galician compromises, as well

as elements in the administration of several provinces that incorporated the concept of separation between nations, see Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitaten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung

Osterreichs, 1848-1918 (Vienna, 1985), especially 200-240. 26. King, Budweisers, 58-59. The best general work on the imperial census remains Emil Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altosterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation: Die Sprachenstatistik in den zisleithanischen Volkszahlungen, 1880 bis 1910 (Vienna, 1982). In his Politecs of Ethnic

Survival, 86-139, Cohen offers an excellent analysis of the census using specific examples from Prague. See also Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung.

27. In the 1880 census 37.17 percent of Bohemians reported their language of daily use as German and 62.79 percent as Czech. For Moravia, the statistics were 29.38 percent German and 70.41 percent Czech, while in Silesia 48.91 percent reported German, 22.95 percent Czech, and 28.13 percent Polish. For Styria, 67 percent reported German and 32.74 percent Slovene, and in the Tyrol 54.39 percent reported German and 45.44 percent reported Italian. In the city of Trieste, Italian was reported by 73.76 percent, while 21.79 reported Slovene and 4.27 percent reported German. In Cisleithania as a whole, 36.75 percent reported German as their language of daily use, 23.77 reported Czech, 14.86 percent reported Polish, 12.81 percent reported Ruthene (Ukrainian), 5.23 percent reported Slovene, and 3.07 percent reported Italian. See “Tabelle 1: Die Bevélkerung der Kronlander Cisleithaniens nach der Nationalitat und nach der Umgangssprache, 1851-1910,” in Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848-1918, vol. 3, Die Volker des Reiches (Vienna, 1980), 138-139.

266 Notes to Pages 16-21 28. Original appeal, May 1880, in HHSA, Nachlass Pichl, carton 27. On the founding of the organization, see also August Wotawa, Der deutsche Schulverein, 1S80-1905 (Vienna, 1905), 8-12; and William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, Conn., 1974), 168-169.

29. Anna Drabek, “Matice ceska und matice moravska: Ihre Bedeutung fur die kulturelle und die nationale Entwicklung der tschechischen Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Ferdinand Seibt, ed., Vereenswesen und Geschichtspflege in den bohmischen Laéndern (Munich, 1986), 71-96;

Roman Zaoral, “Die tschechischen und deutschen Schulvereine in Bo6hmen am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Germanoslavica 2 (1995): 107— 115; Hannelore Burger, Sprachenrecht und Sprachengerechtigkeit 1m osterreichischen Unterrichtswesen, 1867-1918 (Vienna, 1995), 90-91; Andreas Moritsch, “Dem Nationalstaat entgegen (1848-1914) ,” in Andreas Moritsch, ed., Alpen-Adria: Zur Geschichte einer Region (Klagenfurt, 2001), 339-406, especially 390; Emanuel Radl, Der Kampf zwischen Tschechen und Deutschen (Reichenberg, 1928), 140-141. An earlier

Italian school association, the Pro Patria, had been founded in 1886 and dissolved by the police in 1890 for illegal activity. 30. On the Narodni jednota posumavska, see Jiri Pokorny, “Tschechischer Bohmerwaldbund—Narodni jednota posumavska,” in Spojujict a rozdelucict na hranict (Ceské Budeéjovice, 1992), 121-124. Of the four narodnt jednoty, two operated in Bohemia (the Narodni jednota severo-

ceska for northern Bohemia, the Narodni jednota posumavska for the Sumava or Bohemian Woods region in the south), and two operated in Moravia. Milos Horejs, “Die nationalen Schutzvereine in Bohmen, Mahren und Schlesien (1900-1938) ,” in Eduard Kubu and Helga Schultz, eds., Wirtschaftsnationalismus als Entwicklungsstrategie ostmitteleuropaischer Eliten: Die Bohmischen Lander und die Tschechoslovakei in verglei-

chender Perspektive (Prague, 2004), 200-204, 215-217. On the Tiroler Volksbund, see Alois Thaler, “Der Tiroler Volksbund: Wollen und Wirken” (Ph.D. diss., University of Innsbruck, 1962).

2. Schoolhouse Fortresses 1. GE (1907), 275-276. 2. Peter Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building, National Self-Perception and Politics, 1780-1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of Aarhus, 1994); Vladimir Macura, “Problems and Paradoxes of the National Revival,” in Mikulas Teich, ed., Bohemia in History (Cambridge, 1998), 182-197; Hugh L. Agnew, “Czechs, Germans, Bohemians? Images of Self and

Notes to Pages 22-24 267 Other in Bohemia to 1848,” in Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York, 2003), 56-77.

3. Czech nationalists too depicted language frontiers as special components of the larger national territory, territories to be won back from earlier German colonizers and restored to their rightful owners. They depicted the people of the frontier or hranicart both as the embodiment of the nation and as the instruments of its reconquest from German intruders. For excellent examples of this attitude, see Mark Cornwall, “The Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border, 1880-1940,” English Historical Review 109 (1994): 914-951, especially 917-923. 4. Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Expertence, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1545-1914 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 59-67; Judson, “Frontiers, Forests, Islands,

Stones: Mapping the Geography of a German Identity in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1900,” in Patricia Yeager, ed., The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 382-406. 5. In urban or industrialized language frontier regions the lines between national communities were less malleable by 1900, given the active and long-term presence of several associations whose activism focused on the integration of any potential conationals into the national community. Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1981), 86-139. Linguistically

mixed rural regions, however, remained nationally malleable, and nationalist associations had a far harder time establishing themselves and mobilizing local members there than they did in urban or industrial regions. 6. Tara Zahra, “Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 19001945,” CEH 37 (2004): 499-540, especially 501-513. 7. Paragraph 3 of article 19 of the Austrian Constitution stated that “in provinces inhabited by more than one Volksstamm, public educational institutions should be set up so that each Volksstamm has the means to an education in its own language without being forced to learn a second provincial language.” RGBI 142 (1867). Although the clause was originally devised to protect Bohemian German speakers from being forced to learn Czech, it was frequently and successfully invoked by anti-German Slovene nationalists in South Styria and antiItalian Croatian nationalists in Istria to challenge the existence of socalled utraquist or bilingual primary schools. A related issue that

268 Notes to Pages 24-27 brought frequent court challenges was the adoption in some provinces or localities of requirements to learn the second provincial language in middle schools and Gynmnasien. For an excellent analysis, see Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitaten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Osterreichs, 1848-1918 (Vienna, 1985), 166, 177-

183. In Galicia an 1867 law that predated the constitution by six months required that in mixed-language regions each pupil take courses in the second language in primary and middle schools. Despite the questionable constitutional legitimacy of this requirement, the law remained on the books. As with other issues relating to language use in Galicia, the autonomy negotiated by Galicia’s Polish nationalist rulers at the time of the writing of the constitution ensured for them a relatively selective enforcement of several imperial laws. 8. Hannelore Burger, Sprachenrecht und Sprachgerechtigheit im osterreichischen Unterrichtswesen, 1867-1918 (Vienna, 1995), 100-113. See also

the discussion of school laws and the responsibilities and powers of local and district school boards in Maria Kurz, “Der Volksschulstreit in der Sudsteiermark und in Karnten in der Zeit der Dezemberverfassung” (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 1986), 6-27. Many communities did not demand minority schools because they mistakenly feared that they would have to assume the burden of the extra costs. 9. This theme (the national schoolhouse as staking a territorial claim) is also evident in the memoirs of Sudeten Germans in the BB, Ostdokumentation, Dokumentation der Sudetendeutschen Gemeinden. 10. Erwin Barta and Karl Bell, Geschichte der Schutzarbeit am deutschen Volks-

tum (Dresden, 1930), 18. For the German School Association proclamation, DZ, 16 June 1880. See also Judson, Excluszve Revolutionaries, 207-215.

11. An early and transitional example of the new use of the term “language frontier” can be found in Hans Leck, Deutsche Sprachinseln in Walschtirol: Landschaftliche und geschichtliche Schilderung (Stuttgart,

1884). Although ostensibly published in support of the efforts of the German School Association, the work itself focuses specifically on German dialects and their origins in valley and mountain village communities of the South Tyrol. 12. For an excellent discussion of this transformation in understanding, using a Bohemian example, see Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 18545-1948

(Princeton, N.J., 2002), especially 18-22. 13. Emil Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altosterreich zwischen Agitation und As-

Notes to Pages 27-34 269 semilation: Die Sprachenstatistik in den zisleithanischen Volkszahlungen,

1880 bis 1910 (Vienna, 1982). 14. On the developing concept of national property, see Cornwall, “Language Border”; Pieter M. Judson, “ ‘Not Another Square Foot!’ German Liberalism and the Rhetoric of National Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” AHY 26 (1995): 83-97. 15. Judson, “Frontiers.” The same strategy was used by Polish nationalist organizations in Galicia after the First World War to buttress claims to

territory where arguments based completely on language did not suffice. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine,

Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, Conn., 2003). 16. DKD 2 (1913): 24. 17. Ibid. 18. Heinrich Rauchberg, Der nationale Besitzstand in Bohmen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1905); J. Zemmrich, Sprachgrenze und Deutschtum in Bohmen (Braunschweig, 1902). Rauchberg’s work was excerpted, among other places, in the Prague magazine Deutsche Arbeit, while Zemmrich’s appeared in the German School Association’s Getreue Eckart. 19. Zemmrich, Sprachgrenze, 7. 20. Ibid., 7-10. The issue of who controlled a municipality in a census year was also critical to debates about bilingualism among German and Slovene nationalists in rural and urban parts of South Styria. See Chapter 4 for a fuller discussion of this issue. 21. Zemmrich, Sprachgrenze, 67. Cornwall notes similar concerns expressed by German nationalist leaders about the apathy or indiffer-

ence to nation they encountered in other rural regions of Bohemia as well. Cornwall, “Language Border,” 927. 22. For an example, see the map “Nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1848” in Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (New York, 2001), xii. 23. Brix, Die Umgangssprachen; Cohen, Politics of Ethnic Survival; Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung.

24. Zemmrich, Sprachgrenze, 1.

25. Rauchberg, for example, noted that industrializing regions tended to experience by far the most significant migration (and more alterations in the local linguistic balance), especially once Czech nationalist organizations began working to prevent assimilation of Czechspeaking workers to German. Rauchberg, Der nationale Besitzstand, 666690.

26. This trope obviously served urban nationalist activists who sought to

270 Notes to Pages 35-44 mobilize potential supporters more fully by shaming them to action. See the views expressed in the article “Zwecks Vermehrung des deutschen Fremdenverkehres,” MVS (1912), 150-151. 27. Rudolf Hans Bartsch, Das deutsche Leid: Ein Landschafts-Roman (Leipzig, 1912), 204-205.

28. For other examples of this literature see “Szenen aus der Tragodie Ferdinand Bernts ‘Zeischen zwei Sprachen,’ ” Deutsche Arbeit 4 (1905): 505-514; Fritz Mauthner, Der letzte Deutsche von Blatna: Erzahlungen aus Bohmen (Berlin, 1913). Scott Spector offers a brief and excellent analysis both of Mauthner and this work in Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle (Berkeley, Calif., 2000), 38, 78-79. See also Rudolf Jaworski, “Les ‘romans frontaliers’ allemands des sudétes, 1918-1939: Entre politique et trivialite,” Cultures d'Europe Centrale 4 (2004): 126-139. 29. Bartsch, Das deutsche Leid, 433. 30. “Zwecks Vermehrung des deutschen Fremdenverkerhres,” MVS (1912), 150. 31. Bartsch, Das deutsche Leid, 274. 32. Armand von Dumreicher, Stidostdeutsche Betrachtungen (Leipzig, 1893), 33.

33. Franz Hollriegl, Eine deutsch-bohmische Fahrt (Vienna, 1884), 1. 34. Deutscher Volks-Kalender fiir Schlesien (1898) , 92-96. 35. Zemmrich, Sprachgrence, 67.

36. “Das Deutschtum in Grenzorten,” GE (October 1903), 169. 37. “Streiflichter,” GE (January 1904), 3. 38. MVS (1911), 34. 39. [Rudolf Fiedler], “Wie der Schneiderflori wieder deutsch geworden ist,’ DKD 3 (1913): 42-44. Fiedler later served as chief of education in Gauleiter Konrad Henlein’s Sudetenland administration. 40. On language use and requirements in the Bohemian civil service, see Karl Hugelmann, ed., Das Nationalitatenrecht des alten Osterreich (V1-

enna, 1934), 329-357. Although by 1900 Prague had long been governed by a Czech nationalist municipal government, activists there continued to worry that many Czech parents sent their children to German-language schools, and they threatened such Czech speakers with both boycotts and blacklisting. Zahra, “Reclaiming Children,” 507.

41. “Ein Gelegenheitsstuck zur Feier des 25jahrigen Jubelfestes des Deutschen Schulvereins,” GE (1905), 182-186. 42. For this paragraph and the next, DKD 2 (1913): 24-29. For a similar essay, see GE (1908), 252.

Notes to Pages 44-47 271 43. DKD 2 (1913): 25. 44. Ibid. 45. The School Association generally included a proviso in takeover contracts that unless the language of the school remained German, the school would revert to association ownership. 46. “Zur windischen Hetze in St. Egydi,” MZ, 9 May 1905, 5. The German School Association also intervened in villages where a traditional German-speaking majority faced a small but steadily growing minority of non-German speakers. 47. The association estimated that in 1912 it ran 108 kindergartens with 125 classes, and that it gave significant financial support to another 114. DKD 2 (1913): 26. 48. GE (1906), 163. Kindergarten teachers who also supported a longer vacation were reminded that their jobs were substantially easier than those of regular schoolteachers. For an excellent discussion of the specialized purposes of German kindergartens in Moravia after 1905, see Zahra, “Reclaiming Children.” 49. Peter Mahner, a member of an Austrian-Czech scholarly collaboration that studied southern Moravian cultures, notes the phenomenon of Wechsel and other relations between Czech and German speakers that continued through the 1930s in the southern Moravian village of Gnadlersdorf/Hnanice. “Grenze als Lebenswelt: Gnadlersdorf (Hnanice), ein sudmahrisches Dorf an der Grenze,” in Peter Haslinger, ed., Grenze 1m Kopf: Beitrage zur Geschichte der Grenze in Ostmat-

teleuropa (Vienna, 1999), 67-102. Christian Promitzer maintains that early government demographers from the 1860s pointed approvingly to traditions such as the Kindertausch/handl as examples of harmony among language groups. “The South Slavs in the Austrian Imagination: Serbs and Slovenes in the Changing View from German Nationalism to National Socialism,” in Nancy M. Wingfield, ed., Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York, 2003), 183-215. 50. Robert Scheu, Wanderung durch Bohmen am Vorabend der Revolution (Vienna, 1919), 115, 200. One Czech-speaking peasant couple told

Scheu that they wanted their children to have enough schooling in Czech to be able to communicate with them by letter, but that after the first elementary-school years they planned to send their children to German-language schools. 51. Kurz, “Der Volksschulstreit,” 131-135. This case was further complicated by fears that if the Sauerbrunn/Slatina children gained their own school, the Heiligen-Kreutz / Sv. Kriz district would lose signifi-

272 Notes to Pages 47-48 cant tax revenue for funding construction of the school it was currently building. The case reached the Austrian Administrative Court, which declined to rule on the issue of the right of the Sauerbrunn/ Slatina children to their own school and returned the case to the Provincial School Commission. The commission eventually ruled in favor of the Sauerbrunn/Slatina parents but eased the concerns of the other district by contributing more funds to the completion of its new school. 52. The distinctive school situations in South Styria and Carinthia during this period are instructive. Slovene was the language of use reported by a two-thirds majority of the population in South Styria. Already in

the eighteenth century the government had founded primary schools with Slovene as the sole language of instruction, and bilingual schools were common before the liberal school reforms of the 1860s. After 1869 Slovene nationalists opposed the continuation of utraquist or bilingual schools, seeing them as detrimental to the founding of more specifically Slovene-language schools. German nationalists were less strongly opposed to such bilingual schools because they constituted an improvement on Slovene-language schools. In neighboring Carinthia, however, the situation was reversed. There a politically weak Slovene-speaking minority had no tradition of Slovene-language schools, and its leaders considered bilingual schools to be an improvement over German-language schools. German nationalists in turn lobbied to prevent the founding of bilingual schools. For a detailed analysis of school politics in both provinces, see Kurz, “Der Volksschulstreit,” especially 564—566.

53. For Slovene-language and utraquist school statistics, see Hugelmann, Nationalitatenrecht, 481-482. For the number of German-language schools in South Styria, see Kurz, “Der Volksschulstreit,” 568. See also Arnold Suppan, “Die Untersteiermark, Krain und das Kustenland zwischen Maria Theresia und Franz Josef (1740-1918) ,” in Suppan, ed., Deutsche Geschichte 1m Osten Europas: Zwischen Adria und Kara-

wanken (Berlin, 1998), 327.

54. Tara Zahra has demonstrated the same for Moravians after the Compromise of 1905 in her analysis of the so-called Lex Perek and subsequent annual school reclamations in “Reclaiming Children.” 55. DKD 2 (1913): 28. This language strongly resembles that later employed by the Nazi administration of both the Sudetenland and the Protectorate to determine which Czechs should be admitted to German schools. ‘Tara Zahra, “Your Child Belongs to the Nation: Nationalization, Germanization, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands,

Notes to Pages 50-52 273 1900-1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2005), especially 464— 539.

56. MDS 16 (1885): 13. 57. August Wotawa, Der deutsche Schulverein, 1880-1905 (Vienna, 1905); Pieter M. Judson, “Whether Race or Conviction Should Be the Standard: National Identity and Liberal Politics in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” AHY 22 (1991): 76-95. The defeat of the anti-Semites resulted in a few high-level defections, including Georg von Schonerer and his wife, who left to found their own ill-fated anti-Semitic school association. 58. Burger, Sprachenrecht, 89-90, wrongly characterizes the German School Association as anti-Semitic in character by 1900. For a similar view, see Carsten Lenk, “ “Unbedingt fortschrittlich und in allen Dingen national’: Der Deutsche BOhmerwaldbund, 1884-1938, und die Interessen des Budweiser Burgertums,” in Kurt Droge, ed., Alltagskulturen in Grenzrdumen (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 45-78. 59. The text of the debate is reproduced in MDS 59 (1898): 16-19. Jews remained important in the work of both the German School Association and the BOhmerwaldbund down to 1918 and in the post-1918 Kulturverband in Czechoslovakia. 60. Verhandlungsschrift uber den 1. Deutschen Schutzvereinstag in Wien am 3.,

4., 5. und 6. Janner 1908 (Vienna, 1908), 58-60. 61. In fact, Jewish nationalists in Galicia and Bukovina challenged the census, demanding the addition of a Jewish category. These attempts were rejected by the courts, as was the attempt to establish a Jewish nationality for legal purposes. The courts argued that since language use defined nationality in Austria and Jews in the empire spoke diverse languages, they did not make up a nation. See Dietmar Baier, Sprache und Recht im alten Osterreich: Artikel 19 des Staatsgrundgesetzes vom 21. Dezember 1867, seine Stellung im System der Grundrechte und seine Ausgestaltung durch die oberstgerichtliche Rechtsprechung (Munich, 1983);

Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung, 75-80; Gerald Stourzh, “Galten die Juden als Nationalitat Altosterreichs?” in Anna M. Drabek, M. Eliav, and G. Stourzh, eds., Prag-Czernowitz-Jerusalem (Eisenstadt, 1984), 73-117. 62. For a discussion of politics in Galicia, where Polish and Ukrainian nationalists sought electoral alliances with Jewish parties on occasion, see Leila P. Everett, “The Rise of Jewish National Politics in Galicia, 1905-1907,” in Andrei S. Markovits and Frank E. Sysyn, eds., Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism: Essays on Austrian Galicia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 149-177. 63. “Schulwandschmuck,” GE (1907), 54-56. For a further description of

274 Notes to Pages 52-64 the school interiors and photographs of seventeen German School Association schools, see DKD 2 (1913): 26-28. 64. DKD 2 (1913): 29 65. Zemmrich, Sprechgrenze, 1. 66. For this and the following paragraph, DW, 22 May 1884, 1-2, 4—5; SP, 21 May 1884, 1-2. The Sudsteierische Post was a politically moderate

Slovene nationalist newspaper published in German in Marburg/Maribor. 67. I was unable to locate alternate names or spellings for these two places, or for Roscha, mentioned later. 68. MZ, 29 July 1906, 3. 69. K.k. statistische Zentralkommission, ed., Gemeindelexikon der 1m Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und Lander bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszahlung vom 31. Dezember 1900, vol. 4, Steiermark (Vienna,

1904), 252. MZ, 7 January 1906, 3. 70. For the account in this and the following paragraph, see MZ, 31 July 1906, 3; DW, 1 August 1906, 4; DW, 2 August 1906, 4; “Der windische Uberfall auf unsere Schulkinder in Lichtenwald,” GE (1906), 157158. Police promptly arrested one of the Germans who, it was claimed, had been attacked. 71. SLA, Prasidium der KK steierm. Statthalterei, 573, Betreff: Lichtenwald, Schutz fiir die deutsche Vereinsschule, 1906-1907. 72. For this and the following paragraphs, see reports in DW, 26 September 1908, 5; DW, 3 October 1908, 1-2; GE (1908), 288-289. 73. GE (1908), 335. 74. GE (1906), 81. 75. GE (1904), 14. 76. “Die tschechische Kulturtat von Stickau. (mit 2 Bildern.),” GE (1909), 1-3. 77. GE (1904), 196. 78. Small wonder that the German School Association paid the teachers in its private schools an extra allowance if they served in communities where national conflict was reported to be particularly intense. 79. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York, 1996), 19.

80. Jiri Koralka, “Das Nationalitatproblem in den bohmischen Landern, 1848-1918,” Osterreichische Osthefte 5, no. 1 (1963): 9.

81. The same, unfortunately, could not be said for Austrian provinces such as Galicia or Dalmatia, where the nationality conflict failed to produce more schools and comparably high literacy rates.

Notes to Pages 66-71 275 3. Encounters on the Rural Frontier 1. Originally the School Association had hoped to rely on reports from local correspondents, but this soon proved impractical, as few early members of the organization came from the targeted regions of Austria. Nor did the structural implementation of the formation of local branches solve the problem of finding local expertise. August Wotawa, Der deutsche Schulverein, ISSO-1905 (Vienna, 1905), 13.

2. See, for example, MDB 2 (1885): 32; MDB 15 (1888): 191; “Ruckschau uber die zwanzigjahrige Tatigkeit des Deutschen BOhmerwaldbundes,” MDB 47 (1904): 3. 3. On literacy rates in the Austrian half of the empire, see Gary B. Cohen, Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1545-1918

(West Lafayette, Ind., 1996), 64; Peter Urbanitsch, “Die Deutschen in Osterreich: Statistisch-deskriptiver Uberblick,” in Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1845-1918, vol. 3, Die Volker des Reiches (Vienna, 1905), 76-79; Jiri Koralka, “Die Tschechen,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie, vol. 3, 510-513. The literacy rate for the Austrian Empire as a whole in 1910 stood at 83.5 percent, in part because the rates for Galicia and Bukovina (58 percent) and Dalmatia and Istria (67 percent) were far below the rates in the hereditary and Bohemian Lands; those came close to 100 percent. 4, Although conservatives were unable to repeal the liberal school laws, they were able to amend them in 1883 to allow children in the final two years of school to attend school for half a year only. William Jenks, Austria under the Iron Ring, 1879-1893 (Charlottesville, Va., 1965), 122-140. 5. On the rise of the agrarian political parties, see Lothar Hobelt, Kornblume und Kaiseradler: Die deutschfretheitliche Parteren Altosterreichs, 1882-

1918 (Vienna, 1993), 229-241. On the Czech Agrarians, see Bruce Garver, The Young Czech Party, 1874-1901, and the Emergence of a Multtparty System (New Haven, Conn., 1978). 6. See Tatigheits-Bericht uber das 9. Bundesjahr des Deutsch-osterreichischen

Bauernbundes (1908), 3, 18-20, 26-32. See also the newspaper Der Dorfbote: Ein Wochenblatt zur Belehrung und Unterhaltung fur das deutsche

Landvolk, a weekly published in Budweis/Budéjovice by agrarian political leader Franz X. Reitterer. 7. “Ruackschau Uber die zwanzigjahrige Tatigkeit des Deutschen Bohmerwaldbundes: Fur die 20. Hauptversammlung berichtet vom Obmann Josef Taschek,” MDB 47 (1904): Beilage, 2-3, 9. On concerns about German emigration from the region, see also Carsten Lenk, “ ‘Un-

276 Notes to Pages 71-74 bedingt fortschrittlich und in allen Dingen national’: Der Deutsche Bohmerwaldbund, 1884-1938, und die Interessen des Budweiser Burgertums, in Kurt Droge, ed., Alltagskulturen in Grenzraumen (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 52. 8. MDB 2 (1885): 31. Taschek also concluded that such periodic research trips should be required policy for members of the executive committee. 9. On Bohac (and others), see Mark Cornwall, “The Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border, 1880-1940,” English Historical Review 109 (1994): 914-951. 10. MDS 4 (1882): 5; MDS 7 (1883): 5. 11. On the Narodni jednota posumavska, see Jiri Pokorny, “Ischechischer Bohmerwaldbund—Narodni jednota posumavska,” in Spojusict a rozdelucict na hranici (Ceské Budéjovice, 1992), 121-124.

12. Demographic experts, for example, often studied the highly industrialized regions in northern Moravia and Silesia as critical sites of linguistic mixing among Czech-, German-, and Polish-speaking workers. 13. ‘Taschek noted that in 1884 “the Germans of the Bohemian Woods were organized in very few associations; a few singing groups, gymnastics clubs, agrarian and voluntary firefighters’ clubs, and that was the entire range of associational life.” “Ruckschau,” MDB 47 (1904): 3. The development of a Slovene nationalist organizational network in different regions is briefly discussed in the following works: Arnold Suppan, “Zwischen Assimilation und national-politischer Emanzipation: Die Karntner Slowenen vor und im Ersten Weltkrieg (19031918) ,” Osterreichische Osthefte 20 (1978): 292-318; Hannelore Burger, Sprachenrecht und Sprachengerechtigkeit 1m osterreichischen Unterrichtswesen,

1867-1918 (Vienna, 1995), 91, 117-125; and Janko Pleterski, “Die Slowenen,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie, vol. 3, 801-838. For a German nationalist perspective on Slovene nationalist activism in South Styria, see Hugo Suette, Der nationale Kampf in der Stidstecermark (1867-1897) (Munich, 1963). 14. MDB 25 (1891): 250-251. 15. Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Expertence, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1845-1914 (Ann

Arbor, Mich., 1996), 258-260. See also the analysis of German associational activity published by Franz Perko, “Die wirtschaftlichen Schutzvereine Bohmens,” Deutsche Arbeit 4, nos. 9-10 (1905), especially 564, 610.

16. Bohmerwaldbund leaders introduced basket weaving to the region, establishing a course for apprentices in 1886. Already in 1889, how-

Notes to Pages 75-78 277 ever, Bund leaders complained that the inhabitants had not taken proper advantage of the opportunities offered them. MDB 8 (1886): 105; MDB 15 (1888): 193-194. 17. “Bericht des Wanderlehrers V. Heeger,” MVS (1905-1906), 26. 18. For a discussion of the village elite of an earlier period, see Hanns Haas, “Postmeister, Wirt, Kramer, Brauer, Muller und Wundarzt: Tragerschichten und Organisationsforme des Liberalismus; Das Salzburger Beispiel—vom fruhen Konstitutionalismus bis zum Kulturkampf,” in Ernst Bruckmuller, Ulrike Docker, Hannes Steckl, and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Burgertum in der Habsburgermonarchie 1 (Vienna, 1990), 257-273. By 1900 this rural social group had largely been displaced in its leadership of local political and nationalist associational life by white-collar workers, civil servants, and teachers, especially in Bohemia. 19. Karl Megner, Beamte: Wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte des k.k.

Beamtentums, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1986). 20. Rudolf Hans Bartsch, Das deutsche Leid: Ein Landschafts-Roman (Leipzig, 1912), 270. 21. Bericht viber die Tatighert des Bundes der Deutschen in Bohmen (Prague,

1896 and 1909). I am grateful to Tara Zahra for her assistance with the statistics. The 1909 statistics include the Upper Austrian city of Linz in the Bohemian Woods region, and that city’s numbers have also been removed for the purpose of statistical comparison. The fortytwo branches included nine that had been founded too recently to be included in the membership statistics. With the addition of Budweis/ Budejovice, Krummau/Krumlov, and Linz, the membership for the region totaled 3,076 in 1909. 22. On the figures for the Narodni jednota posumavska, see Zprava o cinnostt Narodni jednoty posumavské za devaty rok 1892-1593 (Prague,

1893), 27-58. 23. A 1913 Sudmark survey of individual branches gave membership numbers and financial data for each. The survey attempted to analyze the membership of individual branches according to ten categories: worker, physician, farmer, civil servant/teacher, manufacturer, commerce, student, private, women, corporate members, and “other.” In the case of Styria’s 221 branch organizations, for example, only 107 reported their membership according to these categories. Smaller

rural branches (such as that in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij) tended not to report their membership according to occupation. See MVS (1913), 175211.

24. Karl Hugelmann, ed., Das Nationalitatenrecht des alten Osterreich (V1-

278 Notes to Pages 78-81 enna, 1934), 371. The growth was equally swift in secondary educational institutions, both in the conventional Gymnasien and in the new Realschule. For statistics for the empire as a whole, see Cohen, Education, 56, 65. 25. See, among others, Burger, Sprachenrecht, 39-43; Hugelmann, Natzonalitatenrecht, 373.

26. For examples of the ways in which teaching offered single women of the Miitelstand and higher classes both job opportunities and social mobility, see the journal Mitthelungen des Vereines der Lehrerinnen und Erxzieherinnen in Osterreich, especially the earlier volumes from the

1880s. See also Renate Flich, “Aufbruch aus der Fremdbestimmung— die Burgerin auf der Suche nach ihrer Identitat,” in Hannes Stekl, Peter Urbanitsch, Ernst Bruckmuller, and Hans Heiss, eds., “Durch Arbert, Besiiz, Wissen und Gerechtigheit”: Burgertum in der Habsburgermonar-

chie, vol. 2 (Vienna, 1992), 346-352; Pieter M. Judson, “Deutschnationale Politik und Geschlecht in Osterreich 1880-1900,” in David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes, eds., Frauen in Osterreich: Beitrage zu threr Situation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1993), 32-47. 27. Ernst Henwang, Landschule und Landlehrer im Dienst der bildenden Kiinste (Leipzig, 1920), 18. 28. The Kulturkampfin Austria barely resembled its German counterpart. Those whose legislation challenged the traditional powers of the church in Austria, for example, generally saw themselves as good Catholics. For an excellent introduction to the dimensions of the Austrian Kulturkampf, see Max Vogler, “Religion, Liberalism, and the Social Question in the Habsburg Hinterland: The Catholic Church in Upper Austria, 1850-1914” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005). 29. DB, 16 August 1908; GE (1905), 193. 30. Dr. Josef Spindler, De deutsche Schulvereinsschule in Wrschowitz: Geschichte einer deutschen Schule im tschechischen Sprachgebiete, nach den Acten

erzahlt (Leipzig, 1898). For an example of Czech documentation of German sabotage in the hard-fought area around Mies/Stribro, see Robert Scheu, Wanderung durch Bohmen am Vorabend der Revolution (Vi-

enna, 1919), 79; Cornwall, “Language Border.” 31. DKD 2 (1913): 29. 32. Wotawa, Schulverein, 33-34. The association paid premiums for each teacher into an insurance fund for twenty-five years (an insurance fund required less starting capital than would have been the case for a pension fund). Women who taught in School Association kindergartens received less generous benefits. They had the option of contrib-

Notes to Pages 81-85 279 uting to a pension fund themselves, but the association made only a onetime 100-crown contribution after ten years of service. 33. DKD 2 (1913): 26. The association paid teachers at a rate comparable to the lowest three levels of state bureaucrats. This increased their pay above the official pay scale for Austrian public school teachers. 34. MDB 8 (1886): 100. 35. A. Freiinger, “Die deutchen Schutzvereine und die Lehrerschaft,” MVS (1909), 82.

36. “Die nationale Tatigkeit der Lehrerschaft,” Deutsch-Mahrische Schulblatt (1910), 234. 37. Frantisek Joklik, O pomérech ceského narodnitho skolstvt a ucitelstva v kralovstvi ceskem (Prague, 1900), 129.

38. “Deutschmahrens Lehrerschaft im Dienste deutscher Schutzarbeit,” MVS (1909), 84.

39. Close to three-quarters of the lectures given by Bohmerwaldbund Wanderlehrer in 1885 dealt with nationalist themes, while the other lectures were specifically economic in nature (“Concerning the Mistakes Made in Farming Small Holdings”). Over time, economic themes far outnumbered the nationalist ones. “Uebersichts-Tabelle der Wandervortrage,” MDB 2 (1885): 33. On lecture topics chosen by the local Czech Narodni jednota posumavska, see Zprava o cinnosti Narodnt jednoty posumavské za dvacaty rok 1906-1907 (Prague, 1906), 119-128. 40. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 157-159. 41. Tatigheitsbericht des Bundes der Deutschen in Bohmen, 1909 (Prague, 1910), 4. 42. Deutscher Volkskalender fur die Iglauer Sprachinsel, 1899 (Iglau, 1898), 140-141.

43. MVS (1905-1906), 24-25. The numbers include libraries in bigger cities such as Laibach/Ljubljana and Marburg/Maribor with holdings of 2,000 to 3,000 volumes. Most of the rural libraries supported by the Sudmark had collections of 100 to 500 volumes and a handful of borrowers. In general, the number of borrowers was relatively small for all the libraries. The number of books borrowed annually suggests that the libraries had small numbers of highly devoted patrons. 44. See Scott Spector’s superb and innovative analysis in Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle (Berkeley, Calif., 2000), 36-67. 45. Zprava o cinnosti Narodni jednoty posumavské za devaty rok 1892-1893 (Prague, 1893), 15-16; Zprava ocinnosti Narodnt jednoty posumavské za dvacaty rok 1906-1907 (Prague, 1907), 81-89, 118. 46. Scheu, Wanderungen, 112-113.

280 Notes to Pages 85-96 47. “Stadtgemeinde Bodenbach, Ortsschulrate der Stadtegemeinde Bodenbach,” AVA, VGH, Sig. 2, Karton 36, Aktenbund 2/154, 1910. 48. MZ, 21 January 1905, 3. 49. “Fin deutscher Zukunftsort in Untersteiermark,” MVS (1913), 423. 50. Megner, Beamte, 245-256. 51. Ibid., 267. Czech-speaking candidates tended to enter the civil service before studying at the university, while German-speaking candidates spent some years at a university before beginning a career. 52. For the imperial bureaucracy numbers, see Hugelmann, Nationalitatenrecht, 280.

53. Laurence Cole, “The Emergence and Impact of Modern Tourism in an Alpine Region: Tirol, c. 1880-1914,” Annals di San Michele 15 (2002): 31-40; also Cole, “How Modernity Came to the Alps: The Emergence and Impact of ‘Tourism in German-Speaking Tirol, c. 1880-

1914” (paper presented to the Seminario Permanente di Etnografia Alpina, May 2000), 6. 54. K.k. statistische Zentralkommission, ed., Gemeindelexikon der 1m Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und Lander bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszahlung vom 31. Dezember 1900, vol. 9, Bohmen (Vienna, 1904),

756-766. The surrounding judicial district (about one-third of the Schtittenhofen administrative district) was 47 percent Czech speaking and 53 percent German speaking. 55. Josef Messner, Prachatitz: Ein Stadtebild (Pilsen, 1899), 180-181; Scheu, Wanderungen, 102-120. See also Gunther Fehr’s children’s novel about school life in Prachatitz/Prachatice, Wiener Buben 1m Bohmerwald (Vienna, 1908). 56. DB, 19 July 1908, 6. 57. Several articles and membership lists in Poswmavi, the publication of the Czech nationalist Narodni jednota posumavska, document the leading role taken by lawyers and civil servants in the local branches

of that organization. See, for example, the list of local branches and officers in Posumavi 4, no. 5 (1906): 32-80; and Posumavt 5, nos. 5-6 (1907): 31-78. 58. DB, 5 January 1908, 5. 59. “Bergreichenstein: Neujahrsbetrachtungen,” DB, 12 January 1908, 6. 60. DB, 31 May 1908, 5. 61. DB, 29 March 1908, 4. 62. DB, 10 May 1908, 5. 63. DB, 31 May 1908, 5. 64. DB, 26 July 1908, 6. 65. DB, 10 May 1908, 5. 66. DB, 7 June 1908, 3. Interestingly enough, the German nationalist

Notes to Pages 96-107 281 Marburger Zeitung made exactly the same argument in 1913 when it too demanded that the South Styrian city of Marburg/Maribor build a swimming pool. MZ, 5 June 1913, 5; MZ, 1 July 1913, 5. 67. DB, 26 July 1908, 6. 68. DB, 26 April 1908, 5. 69. DB, 19 July 1908, 2. 70. DB, 31 May 1908, 5. 71. Singer was also chair of the local branch of the Narodni jednota poSumavska. Posumavi 4, no. 5 (Prague, 1906): 27, 40-41. 72. DB, 23 August 1908, 5. 73. DB, 14 June 1908, 6. 74. DB, 23 August 1908, 5. 75. Ibid. 76. “Gewissensforschung,” DB, 13 September 1908, 5. 77. MDB 15 (1888): 191.

4. Reluctant Colonists 1. In German, St. Egydi is also referred to as St. Egidi. In Slovene, it is alternately known as Sveti [lj or Sentilj. 2. Rudolf Hans Bartsch, Das deutsche Leid: Ein Landschafts-Roman (Leipzig, 1912), 403-404.

3. Eduard Staudinger, “Die Sudmark: Aspekte der Programmatik und Struktur eines deutschen Schutzvereins in der Steiermark bis 1914,” in Helmut Rumpler and Arnold Suppan, eds., Geschichte der Deutschen wm Bereich des heutigen Slowenien, 1845—1941 / Zgodovina nemcev na ob-

mocju danasnye slovenie, 1848-1941 (Vienna, 1988), 130-154, especially 147.

4. Ottokar Schubert-Schuttarschen and Paul Pogatschnigg-Peinenbach, Die deutsche Mark am Siidmeer (Trieste, 1904), 58; PogatschniggPeinenbach, “Deutsch-Triest,” MVS (1906-1907), 252. On the rise of a

tourism industry in the region, see Peter Jordan and Milena Persic, eds., Osterreich und der Tourismus von Opatya (Abbazia) vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg und zur Mitte der 1990er Jahre (Frankfurt am Main, 1998).

Statistics indicate that while several German-speaking Austrians vacationed in Abbazia/Opatia, the great majority of the region’s tourists in fact came from Hungary. See Helene Mihajlovic, “Die Gaste Abbazias vor dem ersten Weltkrieg,” in Jordan and Persic, Opatija, 160164.

5. MVS (1914), 250. 6. Maria Kurz, “Der Volksschulstreit in der Sudsteiermark und in Karnten in der Zeit der Dezemberverfassung” (Ph.D. diss., University

282 Notes to Pages 107-110 of Vienna, 1986), 564-573, especially 566. In Carinthia, where the provincial government generally managed to prevent the founding of Slovene-language schools, Slovene nationalists viewed utraquist schools more positively. 7. MZ, 3 May 1908, 1. On the Stajerc newspaper and party, see August Plachki, Die Deutschen in Unterstetermark: Geschichte und Schicksal des steierischen Unterlandes (Graz, 1928), 6-7; Vasilij Melik, “Die Wahler-

folge der Deutschen, Italiener und Slovenen in Laibach, ‘Triest, Marburg an der Drau und anderen krainischen und untersteierischen Stadten in den Jahren 1848-1927,” in Andreas Moritsch, ed., AlpenAdria-Staddte im Nationalen Differenzierungprozess (Klagenfurt, 1997) , 57110.

8. On Feichtinger and the story of farmer Franz, see Erwin Barta and Karl Bell, Geschichte der Schutzarbeit am deutschen Volkstum (Dresden,

1930), 33-34. For an authoritative and brief history of the Sudmark in Styria, see Staudinger, “Die Sudmark.” Friedrich Pock’s Grenzwacht wm Stidosten: Ein halbes Jahrhundert Suidmark (Graz, 1940) tells the history from the viewpoint of a German nationalist and anti-Semitic participant. Heidrun Zettelbauer, “Die Liebe ser euer Heldentum”: Geschlecht und Nation in volkischen Vereinen der Habsburgermonarchie (Frankfurt am

Main, 2005), examines the history of the Sudmark in some detail from the perspective of gender analysis. 9. The organization established itself only with some difficulty in the ultra-Catholic Tyrol and later deferred to the Tiroler Volksbund. 10. Barta and Bell, Schutzarbeit, 38. For a general overview of Sudmark income and expenditures from 1890 through 1913, see “Ubersicht tiber die Entwicklung des Vereines,” MVS (1914), 196-197. 11. “Tatigkeitsbericht des Besiedlungs- und Bodenschutz-Ausschusses,” MVS (1914), 234; and “Ubersicht tiber die Entwicklung des Vereines,” MVS (1914), 196-197. 12. By 1901 the German School Association minority school had been successful enough to be converted to a state-supported school. Pistor, who served on both the St. Egydi / Sv. Uj School Board and the Marburg/Maribor District School Board at this point, led the conversion effort. See GE (1908), 193; Kurz, “Volksschulstreit,” 121-127. On the impressive (“stattlich”) qualities of the School Association school in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij, see Kurz, “Volksschulstreit,” 121, 571. 13. MVS (1907-1908), 288; Pock, Grenzwacht, 32. 14. K.k. statistische Zentralkommission, ed., Gemeindelexikon der 1m Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und Lander bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszahlung vom 31. Dezember 1900, vol. 4, Steiermark (Vienna,

Notes to Pages 111-123 283 1904), 182-183. The larger St. Egydi / Sv.[j district included the hamlets of Altenberg / Stara Gora and Grassnitz/Krsnica as well. ‘The total district population was 1,097, of which 267 were listed as German speakers. 15. MVS (1911), 409. 16. MVS (1906-1907), 8; MZ, 5 January 1905. 17. MVS (1911), 410-411; MVS (1914), 97. 18. MVS (1907-1908), 387; MVS (1911), 410-411, for the quotation; MVS (1912), 328. 19. MVS (1914), 96-97. 20. MVS (1907-1908), 288. The Sidmark had advertised for settlers in Protestant regions, but claimed not to have specifically invited Protestants.

21. MVS (1910), 284. Reproduced here also is the text of a petition to the Marburg diocese to provide St. Egydi with a regular possibility of confession in German. 22. MVS (1907-1908) , 288-289. 23. Quoted in MVS (1910), 1. 24. Quoted in MVS (1910), 2-3. 25. MVS (1910), 2. The committee added that if these accusations of a crypto-Protestant conspiracy were indeed true, then the newspapers

of the Catholic Center Party in Wurttemberg must have rejoiced at the “Protestant emigration.” 26. The German nationalist press often chided those greedy Germans who supposedly took financial advantage of the efforts of the German protective associations by forcing them to buy their property at inflated prices. See, for example, DV, 2 May 1906, 2. 27. “Die Besiedlungsarbeit der Sidmark (Eine Aufklarung zur Steuer der Wahrheit) ,” MVS (1910), 282. For more on the inflation issue, see MVS (1910), 295.

28. For this paragraph and the next two, MVS (1910), 283. 29. MVS (1911), 55. 30. “Zur Kolonisationsarbeit der Sudmark,” reprinted in MVS (1914), 97. 31. “Tatigkeitsbericht des Besiedlungs- und Bodenschutzausschusses,” MVS (1912), 222. 32. W. Frank, “Eine Fahrt in die Windischen Buheln,” MVS (1912), 328.

33. MVS (1911), 410-411. For a retrospective and positive account of the 1911 controversy, see also MZ, 3 April 1913, 1. The newspaper also refuted claims that the settlement process in St. Egydi / Sv. Ij had been slowed because of fears about alienating Catholics in the region. 34. “Tatigkeitsbericht des Vereins Sudmark fur das Jahr 1913, Bericht des

284 Notes to Pages 124-132 Bankausschusses,” MVS (1913); Staudinger, “Sudmark,” 151. The bank was inspired to some extent by the Czech nationalist Zivnostenska bank in Bohemia. 35. “Zur Berufswahl: Deutsche Junglinge, werdet Landwirte!” MVS (1912), 326-327. This explicit interest in strengthening rural life was not necessarily shared by other German nationalist organizations in the Habsburg Monarchy. 36. “Handwerkeransiedlung,” MVS (1911), 296-297. The family with only one person was a widowed seamstress. 37. “Arbeiteransiedlungen,” MVS (1911), 298; “Ein deutscher Zukunftsort in Untersteiermark,” MVS (1913), 423.

38. On the popularity of Graz among retirees, see William Hubbard, Auf dem Weg zur Grossstadt: Eine Sozialgeschichte der Stadt Graz, 1850-1914

(Munich, 1984); “Einige Worte zur Besiedlungsfrage,” MVS (1909), 481.

39. “Die Vermittlungstatigkeit im Dienste der Besiedlung,” MVS (1911), 297-298. 40. MVS (1912), 135. 41. “Zur Ansiedlung auf dem Lande: Ein ernstes Wort an Ruhestandler, Rentner und sonstige Privatleute,” MVS (1912), 133-135. 42. “Bericht tiber die Siedlungsarbeiten,” MVS (1907-1908), 387. 43. Hugo Scherbaum, “An der Sprachgrenze,” MVS (1911), 40. 44. MVS (1911), 411. 45. MVS (1906-1907), 273. This visit was to be followed by the first Stidmark tour, a ten-day extravaganza that would have taken participants across South Styria, Carniola, and Carinthia. Sudmark Wanderlehrer Viktor Heeger was to have been the guide. The tour never took place since no members responded to the offer. Members were, however, highly interested in visiting the Sudmarkhof in St. Egdyi / Sv. Ij, and this outing was a success. 46. MVS (1909), 309; MVS (1912), 297. 47. Frank, “Eine Fahrt,” 327-328. 48. Ibid., 328-329. 49. “Reichsdeutsche Schutzvereinler im Sudmarkgebiet,” MVS (1913), 399400; MVS (1913), 259; “Ausfluge und Reisen,” MVS (1914), 252; MZ, 2 August 1913, 4; MZ, 30 August 1913, 2; MVS (1914), 252. 50. “Mannheimer Wandervogel in St. Egydi,” MVS (1913), 400. On Bartsch’s influence, see Arnold Suppan, “Die Untersteiermark, Krain und das Kustenland zwischen Maria Theresia und Franz Joseph (17401918),” in Suppan, ed., Deutsche Geschichte 1m Osten Europas: Zwischen

Adria und Karawanken (Berlin, 1998), 341.

Notes to Pages 132-137 285 51. MVS (1914), 252. 52. MZ, 26 April 1908, 4; MZ, 6 September 1908, 2; MZ, 17 July 1913, 2; MZ, © September 1913, 3. 53. Quoted in MVS (1907-1908), 388. 54. “Slowenische Grenzbeschreibungen und Anklage,” MVS (1913), 443.

Beg’s reports mirror the local reports made by German nationalists in Sudmark publications in tone and style, suggesting the ways in which nationalist movements used a common discursive nationalist framework. 55. MVS (1914), 234.

56. “Der kampf um St. Egydi,” MVS (1910), 41. On similar events in Zirknitz/Curknice, see “Ein Wahlsieg,” MVS (1914), 72. 57. Karl Hugelmann, ed., Das Nationalitatenrecht des alten Osterreich (V1enna, 1934), 467. 58. For a useful survey of German and Yugoslav historians’ writing on the pre- and postwar censuses in this region, see the essays by Emil Brix, Janko Pleterski, Arnold Suppan, Vladimir Klemencic, and Vasiliy Melik in Rumpler and Suppan, Geschichte der Deutschen. 59. Speztalortsrepertorium der osterreichischen Lander: Bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszahlung vom 31. 12. 1910, vol. 4, Steeermark (Vienna,

1917), 95. In 1913 the Sidmark reported that it had stepped up efforts to gain citizenship rights for settlers, and that in 1912 it had managed to gain the right to vote for twelve of them. MVS (1913), 224.

60. Peter Urbanitsch, “Die Deutschen,” in Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1S45—1918, vol. 3, Die Volker

des Reiches (Vienna, 1980), table 1, 38-39; Arnold Suppan, “Slowenen und Deutsche in Krain, der Untersteiermark und in Slowenien in den Volkszahlungen von 1880, 1910, 1921 und 1931,” in Rumpler and Suppan, Geschichte der Deutschen, 314-315; Emil Brix, Die Umgangssprachen in Altosterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation: Die Sprachenstatistik in den zisleithanischen Volkszahlungen, 1880 bis 1910 (Vienna, 1982), 153-166, 440; Hugelmann, Nationalitdtenrecht, 467

61. Quoted in Emil Brix, “Zahlenmassige Prasenz des Deutschtums in den Sudslawischen Kronlandern Cisleithaniens, 1848-1918,” in Rumpler and Suppan, Geschichte der Deutschen, 56. The first Yugoslav census

taken in 1921 counted 93.5 percent Slovenes and 5.5 percent Germans in the Marburg/Maribor region (excluding the city), as opposed to 79.6 percent Slovene speakers and 19.3 percent German speakers in the Austrian census of 1910. 62. Sudmark and Slovene nationalist ideologies preferred not to recog-

286 Notes to Pages 140-144 nize the importance of persuasion in determining language use or national affiliation. Yet nationalist practice, more opportunistic than not, seems to have been oriented precisely in this direction. 63. MVS (1911), 33.

5. Tourism to the Rescue 1. Pieter M. Judson, “The Bohemian Oberammergau: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire,” in Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York, 2004), 89-105.

2. On tourism and European national identity, see, for example, Rudy Koshar, “ “What ought to be seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 1 (1998); Patrick Young, “La Vielle France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring Club de France and the French Regions, 1890-1918,” in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (New York, 2002), 169-189. For good examples of how the concept of

Heimat tied a particular regional identity to a larger national one in Germany, see Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wirttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). 3. See, for example, the publication Reise und Sport, originally the Osterreichische illustrierte Alpenzeitung, whose lavish illustrations, frequent

supplements, and international readership bespoke a far bigger budget and readership than any comparable German or Czech nationalist tourism journal. Although Reise und Sport praised German cultural achievement and listed several German nationalist organizations among its sponsors, it clearly aimed to avoid nationalist conflict. In 1911 the Sudmark attacked Reise und Sport, claiming, for example, that Czech nationalist banks had financed it. MVS (1911), 353. 4. Josef Stradner, Der Fremdenverkehr, 2nd ed. (Graz, 1917), 100.

5, German nationalists often adopted or modified strategies that had already been tested by their Czech nationalist opponents, including their emphasis on tourism. See, for example, Pavla VoSsahlikova, “Bad-

ertouristik: Inre Bedingungen und ihre Form in Osterreich-Ungarn bis zu dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” unpublished manuscript. I thank Dr. Vosahlikova for sharing the results of her research on Czech nationalist efforts to establish spas that would compete with the traditionally German-dominated spa towns in Bohemia. See also Peter Jordan and Milena PerSic, eds., Osterreich und der Tourismus von Opatya (Abbazia)

Notes to Pages 145-151 287 vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg und zur Mitte der 1990er Jahre (Frankfurt am

Main, 1998). On German nationalist efforts linked to alpine tourism, see Rainer Amstadter, Der Alpinismus: Kultur—Organisatton—Politik (Vienna, 1996); and Laurence Cole, “Fur Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland”: Nationale Identitat der deutschsprachigen Bevolkerung Tirols, 1860-1914

(Frankfurt am Main, 2000). On the local escalation of nationalist division of the tourism industry in the South Tyrol around 1900, see Michael Wedekind, “La politicizzazione della montagna: Borghesia, alpinismo e nazionalismo tra Otto e Novecento,” Archivio Trentino 2 (2000): 19-52. There is now a growing literature on the institution of the Sommerfrische in Austria, but nothing yet that connects it explicitly to nationalist concerns. Hanns Haas, “Die Sommerfrische—Ort der Burgerlichkeit,” in Hannes Steckl, Peter Urbanitsch, Ernst Bruckmuller, and Hans Heiss, eds., “Durch Arbeit, Besitz, Wissen und Gerechtigkeit”: Biirgertum in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 1992): 364-377.

6. Catherine Albrecht, “The Rhetoric of Economic Nationalism in the Bohemian Boycott Campaigns of the Late Habsburg Monarchy,” AHY 32 (2001): 47-67. 7. Wilhelm Rohmeder, “Gasthauser in den sprachlichen Grenzgebieten Sudtirols, welche deutschen Reisenden zu empfehlen sind,” Alt deutschen Blatter, Sonder-Abdruck 25 (n.d.), 1-12. The guide was frequently republished in the decade before 1914. 8. MVDTB 2 (1903): 8. 9. “Zwecks Vermehrung des deutschen Fremdenverkehres,’ MVS (1912), 150-151. 10. “An unsere Leser!” MVDTB 1 (1903): 1.

11. “Volkische Ferialarbeit fur unsere Sommerfrischler Touristen und Studenten,” MVS (1909), 329. 12. Viktor Heeger, “Die erste Sidmarkreise,” MVS (1906-1907) , 273275.

13. Wilhelm Rohmeder, Das Fersenthal in Suid-Tirol (Freiburg i. Breisgau, 1901); Das deutsche Volkstum und die deutsche Schule in Suidtirol (Vienna, 1898), vii.

14. MDB 6 (1886): 77. In 1886, for example, the vandalism of path markers became a way for rival German nationalist groups to battle each other over the question of how to define the nation. In 1903 the politically moderate Osterreichische Touristen-Klub in Brann/ Brno took its more radical and anti-Semitic German nationalist rival, the Verein deutscher Touristen, to court, accusing the latter of vandalizing markers in the forests of Furst Schonburg. See MVDTB 3 (1903): 6-7.

288 Notes to Pages 152-159 15. Hans Kramer, “Der ‘Argonautenzug’ der Deutschen nach Pergine oder die ‘zweite Schlacht von Calliano,’ 1907,” Mitteilungen des Ober6sterreichischen Landesarchiv 8 (1964): 330-341.

16. “Hauptbericht uber die Thatigkeit des Deutschen BOhmerwaldbundes fur die XVII. Hauptversammlung am 7. September 1902 in Neuern, verfasst und erstattet von Bundesobmann Josef Taschek,” MDB 45 (1902): Beilage, 10. See also “Sommerfrischler,” DB, 10 May 1908, 5. While some retailers might have been happy to gain the income generated by tourists of any linguistic background, Taschek and other German nationalists could only see the presence of the enemy as a threat to national survival. 17. “Zprava pokladni za spravni rok 1905-1906,” Posumavi 4 (1906): 117; Bastitv Pritvodce Sumavou 1920, quoted in Miloslav Martan, Sumava na starych pohlednicich, vol. 2 (Strakonice, 1997), 94. 18. DB, 24 May 1908, 4; DB, 7 June 1908, 3; Bastiév Priivodce Sumavou 1920, quoted in Sumava na starych pohlednacich, vol. 2, 94. 19. “Von der Burg Persen,” MVS (1913), 114. 20. See, for example, Von der Sprachgrenze (1894); Fuhrer durch den Bohmerwald (Budweis, 1909).

21. Quoted in S. Rieger, “Slowenische Grenzbeschreibungen und Anklagen,” MVS (1913), 444. 22. MVS (1906-1907) , 56-57. 23. “Das tschechische Fiasko im Riesengebirge,” DV, 1 February 1908, 4. See also “Hotel Seifera: Eine Tat deutscher Selbsthilfe,” MVS (1913), 1.

24. MVS (1911), 84. 25. MVS (1906-1907), 218-219. 26. MVS (1907-1908), 5. 27. MVS (1912), 104.

28. On the Tyrol, see Laurence Cole, “The Emergence and Impact of Modern Tourism in an Alpine Region: Tirol, c. 1880-1914,” Annal di San Michele 15 (2002): 31-40. See also Jordan and Persic, Opatiya. 29. ‘The Bohmerwaldbund never adopted an anti-Semitic stance, and one of its executive leaders for over thirty years was a Jewish lawyer in Budweis/Budejovice, Israel Kohn. On the moderate ideological stance of the organization, see also Carsten Lenk, “ ‘Unbedingt fortschrittlich und in allen Dingen national’: Der Deutsche Bohmerwaldbund, 1884-1938, und die Interessen des Budweiser Burgertums,” in Kurt Droge, ed., Alliagskulturen in Grenzraumen (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 45-78. 30. MDB 56 (1913): 3.

Notes to Pages 159-164 289 31. For population statistics, see k.k. statistische Zentralkommission, ed., Gemeindelexikon der im Reichsrate vertretenen Konigreiche und Lander bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszahlung vom 31. Dezember 1900,

vol. 9, Bohmen (Vienna, 1904), 756. For further descriptions and statistics, see Durch Deutschbohmen (Eger, n.d.) , 34—36; Grieben Reisefuhrer, Band 99, Bayerischer u. Bohmerwald (Berlin, 1939), 200. The village’s

population seems to have remained stable until the Second World War. In 1939 Grieben listed the population as 1,157. 32. For the founding date of the Horitz association, the membership, and the president, see MDB 15 (1888): 177. On Mugrauer and the rehearsals at his inn, see DBZ, 18 May 1893, 158. 33. MDB 11 (1887): 135. On the German nationalist cult of Joseph II in Bohemia, see Nancy M. Wingfield, “Statues of Emperor Joseph II as Sites of German Identity,” in Maria Bucur and Nancy M. Wingfield, eds., Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central

Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, Ind., 2001), 178-205. See also Zdenék Hoyda and Jiri Pokorny, “Denkmalkonflikte zwischen

Tschechen und Deutschbohmen,” in Hanns Haas and Hannes Steckl, eds., Burgerliche Selbstdarstellung: Stadtebau, Architektur, Denkmdler (Vi-

enna, 1995), 241-252. 34. Johann Josef Ammann, Das Passionsspiel des Bohmerwaldes: Neubearbeitet auf Grund der alten Uberlieferungen (Krummau, 1892). Ammann gives a

detailed history of the Grollhesl text, as well as of its colorful performance history, iv—vili, and he offers a useful discussion of how the Horitz/Horice text differed from the text for the Oberammergau play.

35. Ibid., vii—viii, xi-xv. Ammann noted that before the completion of the railroad connection, return trips from Krummau/Krumlov to Horitz/ Horice “were trying tours” that could take up to six hours. 36. MDB 35 (1893): Beilage, “Hauptbericht der neunten Hauptversammlung,” 239-240; Petr Jelinek, Mystertum Hoericense—Das horitzer Passtonsspiel 1m Bohmerwald, trans. Ivan Slawik (Krumlov, 1991), 6. The

final cost of the theater to the league surpassed 60,000 crowns. See “Das BOhmerwald-Passionsspiel in Horitz,” MVS (1912), 132; Ammann, Passionsspiel, Xv, XXI—XXI1.

37. Karl Baedeker, Osterreich (ohne Galizien, Dalmatien, Ungarn und Bosnien) (Leipzig, 1910), 328. 38. “Horitzer Glossen,” DBZ, 24 August 1893, 270. 39. MVS (1912), 133; Jelinek, Mysterrum Hoericense, 6. On Crown Princess Stephanie’s visit and the Schwarzenbergs’ private pavilion, MDB 37 (1895): Beilage, 9.

290 Notes to Pages 164-167 40. DBZ, 19 September 1896, 304; DBZ, 21 June 1912, 287. Taschek’s wife Marie Taschek had been named the “protectress of the flag” (Fahnen-

pathin) of the Horitz corporation at the time of the flag’s dedication (Fahnenweihe). DBZ, 27 June 1896, 208.

41. For an excellent account of peasant initiative in the rural modernization process in nineteenth-century France, see Michael Burns, Rural Society and French Politics: Boulangism and the Dreyfus Affair, 1SS6—1900

(Princeton, N.J., 1984). 42. On the early organization of the tourism industry in Cisleithania, see Stradner, Premdenverkehr; Arthur Muller, Das Problem des Fremdenverkehres in Osterreich: Psychologisch-propagandistische Betrachtungen (Vienna,

1909); and, more recently, Gunther Burkert, “Der Beginn des modernen Fremdenverkehrs in den Oosterreichischen Kronlandern: Foderalistische und nationale Elemente als bestimmende Faktoren,” Schriftenrethe der Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte,

vol. 2 (Graz, 1981), 1-72. 43. By 1914 almost every Crown land had such a Landesverband. Burkert, “Der Beginn,” 14-26; Stradner, /remdenverkehr, 96. 44, Stradner, /remdenverkehr, 90-96; Cole, “Modern Tourism”; Alois Lasser, 100 Jahre Fremdenverkehr in Tirol: Die Geschichte einer Organisation

(Innsbruck, 1989). 45. See, for example, Tiroler Verkehrs- und Hotel-Buch, herausgegeben vom Landesverband ftir Fremdenverkehr in Tirol (Innsbruck, 1905); Nach Stevermark! Jahrbuch des Landesverbandes fur Fremdenverkehr: Nachweisung von Sommerstationen in Stecermark (Graz, 1904); Steirisches Verkehrsbuch: Herausgegeben vom Landesverband fur Fremdenverkehr in Steiermark mit einem Vorworte von Peter Rosegger (Graz, 1912-1913). The men who ran the

provincial organizations often played important roles in local German nationalist associational life, the most notable example in Bohemia being Josef Taschek, mayor of Budweis/Budejovice, vice president of the Provincial Association for Tourism in German Bohemia, and chair of the Deutscher BOhmerwaldbund. 46. Rohmeder, Gasthdauser, 10. 47. MVS (1911), 56. 48. BZ, 10 January 1907, 3. 49. See Fremdenverkehrs-Nachrichten des Landesverbandes fur Fremdenverkehr in

Deutschbohmen | (Karlsbad, 1905). Both Czech and German organizations were recognized and funded through the Railway Ministry and later through the Ministry of Public Works. On the situation in Tyrol, see Burkert, “Der Beginn,” 16. 50. One major difference between the umbrella tourism organizations

Notes to Pages 168-171 291 and other nationalized institutions was that the former were essentially privately organized, whereas the latter were provincial state institutions. 51. Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 114.

52. On the national compromises, see King, Budweisers, 137-147; Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitaten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Osterreichs, 1848-1918 (Vienna, 1985), 187-240. 53. Fremdenverkehrs-Nachrichten des Landes-Verbandes fiir Fremdenverkehr in Deutschbohmen 4 (1910): 5.

54, Although demands for the creation of a Slovene university in Laibach/ Ljubljana or the addition of an Italian-language faculty to the University in Innsbruck dominated nationalist debate among Slovene and Italian nationalists, local groups were not always unambiguously opposed to the institution of local German schools, for example. Many Slovene speakers in South Styria, as we have already seen, continued to view German-language schools as a vehicle for social advancement decades after Czech nationalists had abandoned this idea. 55. Laurence Cole, “How Modernity Came to the Alps: The Emergence and Impact of Tourism in German-Speaking Tirol, c. 1880-1914” (paper presented to the Seminario Permanente di Etnografia Alpina, May 2000), 6. See also Cole’s highly insightful discussion (“Kommerzielles und heimatbewusstes Image: Jahrhundertfeier und Tourismus” and “ ‘Peasants into Austrians’?”) in his “Fur Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland.”

56. In 1903, for example, 73 percent of all tourists to the Tyrol came from the German Reich, and 46 percent of all Reich German tourists who visited the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy traveled to the Tyrol. For these and annual statistics by province, see Franz Bartsch, “Einfluss der Wanderbewegung und des Fremdenverkehrs auf die Zahlungsbilanz Osterreich-Ungarns,” Mitteilungen des k.k. Finanzminis-

terums 17 (1911): 125-183. According to the Finance Ministry, the annual number of tourists in Austria as a whole grew from 2.5 million in 1903 to over 4.5 million in 1910. 57. On the complex and distinctive history of German nationalist identity in Tyrol, see Cole, “Fur Gott, Kaiser und Vaterland.”

58. For a suggestive consideration of the ways in which tourism affected social life and economic structures in Austrian small towns and villages, see Hans Heiss, “Tourismus und Urbanisierung: Fremdenverkehr und Stadtentwicklung in den Osterreichischen Alpenlander bis 1914,” in Alois Niederstatter, ed., Stadt—Strom—Strasse—Schiene: Die

292 Notes to Pages 172-186 Bedeutung des Verkehrs fur die Genese der mitteleuropaischen Stadtelandschaft

(Linz, 2001), 217-246. 59. For complaints to the Landesverband, see, for example, FremdenverkehrsNachrichten des Landes-Verbandes fur Fremdenverkehr in Deutschbohmen 3

(1910): 5-7. 60. MDB 11 (1887): 128; MDB 12 (1887): 155. 61. “Ruckschau uber die zwanzigjahrige Tatigkeit des Deutschen Bohmerwaldbundes: Fur die 20. Hauptversammlung berichtet vom Obmann Josef Taschek,” MDB 47 (1904): Beilage, 12. 62. “Bericht uber die Hauptversammlung des Deutschen Bohmerwaldbundes am 27. August in Prachatitz,” MDB 48 (1905): 9. 63. Baedeker, Osterreich, 328. 64. Raoul Auernheimer, “Auf der Reise nach Horitz,” NFP, 2 August 1908, 2; DBZ, 21 August 1908, 271. 65. “Wandervogel und Jugendwandern,” DKD 2 (1913), 30. 66. MVS (1910), 36, 103. 67. MVS (1912), 116-117.

6. Violence in the Village 1. I use the terms “district administrator” for Bezirkshauptmann and “district administration” for Bezerkshauptmannschaft. These administrators, appointed by Habsburg authorities, served as an institutional check on elected municipal governments. Jiri Klabouch, “Die Lokalverwaltung in Cisleithanien,” in Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1845-1918, vol. 2, Verwaltung und Rechtswesen (Vienna, 1975), 270-305.

2. SUA, Prague, Prezidium mistodrzitelstvi (PM) 1901-1910, carton (kt.) 3641. The same report appeared in Bohemia, 29 April 1908, and in DV, 1 May 1908, 2. I could find no account of this incident in the Czech nationalist press. 3. The governor also noted that the gymnasts had not obtained the necessary advance permission for their outing (see marginal notations on the document). SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. District Administrator Bohm noted further that since the gymnasts had failed to obtain prior permission to make the trip, as indeed the law required them to do, the district had no official record of the trip and thus no knowledge of any alleged incident. 4. NL, 13 September 1908, 1. See also “Meister der Verhetzung,” PT, 15 September 1908, 1. 5. The allegedly “German landlord,” Thomas Worlicek, was considered

Notes to Pages 186-193 293 by some German nationalists to be a Czech nationalist, and according to their accounts, most Czech visitors to the town preferred to stay at his hotel. 6. See the memorandum “Pamétni spis outrpeni Cechti a nasilnostech nemeckych, pachanych na ceské mensine v Horach Kasperskych ve dnech 6. az 12. Zari 1908,” SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. On the alleged Germanization of the town, see the tour guide Bastviv Pruvodce Sumavou (Prachatice, 1920), quoted in Miloslav Martan, Sumava na starych pohlednicich, vol. 2 (Strakonice, 1997), 94.

7. The PT implicitly welcomed Czech speakers who assimilated into a German national community. “Der Kampf um Bergreichenstein,” originally published in PY, reprinted as a Beilage to DV, 26 September 1908. 8. DV, Beilage, 26 September 1908. 9. The following account is taken from a Narodni jednota posumavska memorandum submitted on 9 October 1908 to the governor of Bohemia, also published in Budivoj, 15 October 1908, 4, and from “Pamétni spis.” 10. The district council included several villages in the region and had a Czech nationalist majority in 1908, while the town council had a large German nationalist majority. Singer later became the town’s first Czech nationalist mayor under the First Czechoslovak Republic. 11. I was able to locate the telegram among several official telegrams sent from the town and neighboring localities to the district administration in Schuttenhofen/Susice over the course of the next few days. SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 12. “Pamétni spis.” 13. Telegram, 7 September 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 14. “Pamétni spis,” 5. The Hotel Skala had originally housed the beseda, but because of a disagreement between Worlicek and the Czech nationalist community, the beseda had relocated to the house of notary Jiricka. DV, Beilage, 26 September 1908. 15. DV, 9 September 1908, 2. 16. Ibid. 17. PT, 12 September 1908, 2. The name of Singer’s assistant changes in various accounts. 18. DB, 13 September 1908, 2. 19. PT, 11 September 1908, 2. See also “Bericht tiber den Uberfall in Schuttenhofen auf die 3 Vertreter der “Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten in Prag’,” MDB 51 (1908): 10-11. 20. DB, 13 September 1908, 3. The visitors evidently telegraphed both to

294 Notes to Pages 193-206 the governor of Bohemia and to various German nationalist diet and parliamentary deputies demanding that they guarantee the safety of travel. This may help explain why, according to the newspaper accounts, the crowd believed the next day that the military reinforcements had in fact arrived to protect the Germans. 91. “Denkschrift der deutschen Studenten tiber die tschechischen Uberfalle in Bergreichenstein und Schittenhofen am 6., 7. und 8. und 9. September 1908,” MDB 51 (1908): 8-10. 22. PT, 10 September 1908; PT, 12 September 1908; DV, 11 September 1908, 2. DB, 13 September 1908, 3, echoed the claim that a fanatical Czech commissioner had ordered the bayonet attack against a harmless crowd that was “merely singing German songs.” 23. DB, 13 September 1908, 3. DV, 10 September 1908, 2, claimed that Hempel had been knocked to the ground and his life threatened by a gendarme; telegram, 8 September 1908, 21:00, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 24. DB, 13 September 1908, 2-3; DV, 11 September 1908, 2; PT) 11 Sep-

tember 1908, 2; PT, 12 September 1908, 2. 25. NL, 13 September 1908, 1; DV, 10 September 1908, 2, quoted also from reports taken from PT, 8-9 September 1908. 26. Politik, 9 September 1908, Abendblati, 2; PL, 9 September 1908. 27. PT, 15 September 1908, 1. 28. Letter translated from the Czech and reproduced in German in DB, 13 September 1908, 4. 29. ‘These included accounts written by District Adminstrator Bohm of Schuttenhofen/Susice and his staff, by the military operatives and gendarmes who filed reports justifying their use of force, and by the ministries that investigated the behavior of their civil servants. 30. Events were complicated by the fact that at the time of the violence, District Administrator Bohm was returning from a trip to Trieste. 31. “Waffengebrauch Bergreichenstein,” 8 September 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. The report was then submitted to the governor’s office a week later, on 15 September. 32. According to the same report, gendarme Kanka sustained a mild head wound that nevertheless would likely take a long time to heal. Another gendarme sustained a skin abrasion on the back, caused by a blunt tool. 33. The dragoons were from the Thirteenth Regiment (Eugene of Savoy).

34, The next day one of the windows in the Adlers’ house was discovered to have been smashed by a stone. 35. Bohm cautioned the troops that demonstrations might still break out

Notes to Pages 206-212 295 in the evening, particularly after the close of a local factory, where nearly 200 men worked, but none did. 36. As part of the research for this chapter, I examined both the DeutschBohmerwald and the Deutsche Volkszeitung for accounts of such incidents

in smaller Bohemian towns and villages over a period of fourteen months in 1907 and 1908. The following dates (excluding many articles on the violent incidents recounted in this chapter) carry the main claims about such incidents: 8 September 1907 (Prachatitz/Prachatice), 15 February 1908 (Rochlitz), 2 and 3 March 1908 (Budweis/ Budéjovice), 1 May 1908 (the Stachau/Stachy incident), 9 July 1908 (Bruh), 5 (Deutsch Gabel), 6 (Aussig / Usti nad Labem), 28 (Gablonz), and 31 August 1908 (Hruschau in Moravia), and 13 (Rochlitz) and 25 September 1908 (Braunnau and Polaun). An examination of the Deutsche Wacht in South Styria for the same period yields an apparently endless stream of reports about Slovene speakers intimidating German speakers (a young boy playing the “Wacht am Rhein” on his new trumpet is beaten by Slovene youths, Slovene men spit at German women on the streets, and so on). These reports precede the violent events in Pettau/Ptui and Laibach/Ljubljana in September 1908.

37. Reports from Bezirkshauptmannschaft Schtittenhofen to Statthalterei Prague, 9 and 13 September 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. Bohm’s deputies had mistakenly reported that the attack on the beseda occurred on the night of 5 September. As late as 13 September Bohm still complained that accounts of the attack obtained by his own investigators (as well as those in the press) had been based largely on hearsay. 38. Phonogramm, Ministerium des Innern, 23 September 1908, quotes the newspaper report. SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 39. “Angebliche Steinigung deutscher Frauengaste,” 23 September 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 40. “Die Gemeindevertretung von Bergreichenstein hat in ihrer Sitzung vom 19. September 1908 nachfolgende Entschliessung gefasst,” SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. This was the previously quoted “Pametni spis.” 44. Gustav Schreiner to the Governor in Prague, 15 October 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 45. “Interpellation betreffend Sicherheitsverhaltnisse in Bergreichenstein,” 26 September 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 46. “Prelozen z trestu ze SuSice do Blatne,” NL, 29 September 1908, 3.

296 Notes to Pages 213-219 Letter from Schreiner to k.k. Statthalter, Prague, 15 October 1908, regarding Pavlovsky; Pavlovsky, “Aufklarung” to Statthalterei Praesidium, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 47. “EKuer Exzellenz,” 23 October 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 48. “Praesidium der k.k. Finanz-Landes-Direktion an das k.k. Statthaltereiprasidium in Prag, 25 September 1908,” SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641.

49. “Euer Exzellenz,” 23 October 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. Unaware of this decision, Schreiner again demanded that both be disciplined in the letter of 23 October quoted earlier. The minister had noted briefly in the margin, “Klecka [already] transferred, Kazda still being negotiated.” 50. Report of 24 November 1908. Kazda had actually sought a transfer as early as July 1908. 51. Praesidium der k.k. Finanz-Landes-Direktion, “Excesse in Bergreichenstein,” 14 January 1909, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 52. Prasidium der k.k. Finanz-Landes-Direktion, “Kazda, Ottomar, Steuerverwalter und Klecka, Adalbert, Steuerpraktikant in Bergreichenstein: Beteiligung an dortigen Exzessen, 24 November, 1908,” SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641. 53. The town government had also attempted on numerous occasions to close down the last remaining German School Association school, refusing to give the organization the necessary permits for its new school building. 54, K.k. Bezirkshauptmann Schuttenhofen Betriff, “Gerichtsverhandlungen gegen Schuttenhofner Exzedenten,” 11 October 1908, SUA, PM 1901-1910, kt. 3641.

7. The First World War and Beyond 1. A thoughtful exploration of the complex meanings attached to wartime concepts of social unity is Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (New

York, 2004). Healy analyzes changing domestic understandings of wartime terms such as “sacrifice” and “unity,” although, given her focus on Vienna, she does not directly address them as they might relate to the politics of nationalist conflict. 2. Alon Rachamimov, “Arbiters of Allegiance: Austro-Hungarian Censors during World War I,” in Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York, 2004), 157-177.

Notes to Pages 220-226 297 3. Jan Kren, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft: Tschechen und Deutsche, 1780-1918,

trans. Peter Heumos (Munich, 1996), 395. Kren cites Robert Scheu’s account of discussions with local Czech and German speakers in southern Bohemia during the summer of 1918. Robert Scheu, Wanderungen durch Bohmen am Vorabend der Revolution (Vienna, 1919).

4. Sturgkh had already prorogued the Austrian Parliament in the spring of 1914 and the Bohemian Diet in 1913. Kren, Konflikigemeinschaft, 294-298. 5. See the excellent analysis of this issue by Jeremy King in Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1845-1948

(Princeton, N.J., 2002), 148-150. 6. An analysis of changing nationalist viewpoints in Bohemian society during the First World War that goes beyond what was simply printed in the nationalist press remains a major gap in the historiography. See, for example, Otto Urban’s account in Die tschechische Gesellschaft, 1845-1918 (Vienna, 1994). 7. The nature of imperial statistics, in which deaths were recorded on the basis of the languages used by soldiers, also offered nationalists the opportunity to compare relative rates of national sacrifice. 8. Maureen Healy, “Becoming Austrian: Women, the State, and Citizenship in World War I,” CEH 35, no. 1 (2002): 1-37. 9. MDB 58 (1916): 1. 10. GE (1914), 291. 11. Funding for community nurses constituted 13 percent of total expenditures, while funds for veterans’ homes and the purchase of war bonds covered the rest. “33. Hauptbericht uber die Tatigkeit des Deutschen BOhmerwaldbundes,” MDB 59 (1917): 5-6. 12. “Bericht Uber die 31. Hauptversammlung,” MDB 57 (1915): 5. 13. “32. Hauptbericht,” MDB 58 (1916): 6. 14. “33. Hauptbericht,” MDB 59 (1917): 5. 15. “Hartmanitz (Keine Sommerfrische),” SBV, 2 June 1918, 6. 16. MVS (1917), 145. The national selfidentification of the veterans was never discussed. 17. “Die Besiedlungsarbeit wahrend der Kriegszeit,” MVS (1915), 39. 18. Edgar Meyer, Zur kiinftigen Gestaltung Svidtirols (Graz, 1917). For another such proposal, see “Deutsche Handwerker fur Welschtirol,” BZ, 25 July 1918, 4. 19. MVS (1917), 1. Interestingly, in this case all three sons, German settlers, fell in Flanders while serving in the German army. It is unclear whether they were called up into the German army because their settler parents had not yet gained Austrian citizenship.

298 Notes to Pages 227-236 20. NP, 3 August 1917; Tara Zahra, “Your Child Belongs to the Nation: Nationalization, Germanization, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2005), 267-269. 21. Kren, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 337.

22. See, for example, “Stimmung and wirtschaftliche Lage der Osterreichischen Bevolkerung im Hinterland,” Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, Neue Feldakten, Armeeoberkommando GZNB, kt. 3751, no. 4647. 23. “Bergreichenstein (Nationales),” SBV, 20 January 1918, 7. 24. Zahra, “Your Child,” 241-315. 25. Robert Scheu explained the purpose of his trip in Wanderungen, 5. I examine Scheu’s observations from this period not because I consider them true or even typical but rather because, as with nationalist discourse, they inadvertently betray several revealing points about rural people who otherwise left no record of their beliefs. 26. Ibid., 108, 113, 115, 200-201. 27. Ibid., 15-16. 28. The French government seems to have led the way in this case with its policies for postwar Alsace that involved national ascription of citizens, identity cards, and expulsions. Laird Boswell, “From Liberation to Purge Trials in the ‘Mythic Provinces’: Recasting French Identities in Alsace and Lorraine, 1918-1920,” French Historical Studies 23, no. | (2000): 129-162. 29. August Plachki, Die Deutschen in Unterstetermark: Geschichte und Schicksal des steverischen Unterlandes (Graz, 1928), 13-14.

30. See the collection of pamphlets by Austrian academics and activists edited by August Ritter von Wotowa, Flugblatter fiir Deutschosterreichs Recht (Vienna, 1919).

31. For accounts of Czechoslovak occupation of the newly proclaimed territory of German Bohemia see Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Archiv der Republik, Landesregierung Deutschbohmen 1918-1919, kt. 5, II, IV, VII, XII, XIV, kt. 6, XIV. See also “Prachatitz (zu Deutschosterreich),” “Winterberg (Ischechoslowaken in der Stadt) ,” “Winterberg (Gewaltherrschaft der Ischechoslowaken in Sudbodhmen),” and “Bergreichenstein (Besetzung Bergreichensteins durch die Tschechoslowaken),” SBV, 1 December, 1918, 7; “Die Tschechen in Sidbéhmen,” SBV, 8 December 1918, 2; “Ischechische Ubergriffe,” DV, 1 December 1918, 4; “Reichenberg von den Tschecho-Slowaken besetzt,” DV, 16 December 1918, 1. 32. “Bergreichenstein (Besetzung Bergreichensteins durch die ‘Tschechoslowaken),” SBV, 1 December, 1918, 7.

Notes to Pages 236-240 299 33. BB, Ostdokumentation, Dokumentation der Sudetendeutschen Gemeinden, [V/2, 43. Only a few weeks before the village had been struck by the Spanish Influenza epidemic. “Horitz,” SBV, 20 October 1918, 7.

34. BB, Ostdokumentation, Dokumentation der Sudetendeutschen Gemeinden, [V/2, 43. See also Karl Bahm, “The Inconveniences of Nationality: German Bohemians, the Disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Attempt to Create a Sudeten German Identity,” Nationality Papers 27, no. 3 (1999), especially 388-392. 35. See Maister’s proclamations “Bevolkerung der Stadt Marburg,” MZ, 31 October 1918, 1. 36. Siegfried Beer and Eduard Staudinger, “Grenzziehung per Analogie: Die Miles Mission in der Steiermark im Janner 1919: Eine Dokumentation,” in Stefan Karner, ed., Als Mitteleuropa Zerbrach: Zu den Folgen des Umbruchs in Osterreich und Jugoslawien nach dem ersten Weltkrieg

(Graz, 1990), 135, 147. 37. Ibid., 139-140, 147-148. 38. For a contemporary statement of this argument, see Fred du Bois, “Warum Pettau und Umgebung zu Deutschosterreich gehoren mussen,” in Wotowa, Fugblatier, no. 30. 39. For the case of Slovene speakers who opted for Austria, see Rolf Worsdorfer, “Ethnisch-nationale Differenzierung in den Ostalpen: ‘Deutsch-Windisch-Slowenisch’ (1920-1991),” in Michael G. Muller and Rolf Petri, eds., De Nationalisterung von Grenzen: Zur Konstruktion nationaler Identitat in sprachlich gemischten Grenzregionen (Marburg, 2002), 137-160.

40. See the exemplary analysis of this process in Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 191S—1930 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995).

41. On this process in France, for example, see Boswell, “From Liberation to Purge Trials,” 129-162. Timothy Snyder argues that the new Polish and Lithuanian states in 1918 might have organized themselves along the lines of early modern federalist nations to encompass several linguistic and religious groups, according to the model of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Instead, ethnic nationalism determined the shape of both states, and linguistic or religious minorities became understood as outsiders in the nation. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New

Haven, Conn., 2003). 42. Petr Lovoziuk, “Karlov/Libinsdorf: A Village in Discourse, a Discourse in a Village. Preliminary Research Report,” in Zdenek Uherek and

300 Notes to Pages 241-242 Jan Grill, eds., Fieldwork and Local Communities. Prague Occasional Papers in Ethnology 7 (2005): 146-173.

43. Arnold Suppan, “Zur Lage der Deutschen in Slowenien zwischen 1918 und 1938: Demographie—Recht—Gesellschaft—Politik,” in Helmut Rumpler and Arnold Suppan, eds., Geschichte der Deutschen 1m Bereich des heutigen Slowenten, 1848-1941 / Zgodovina Nemcev na Obmocju Danasnyje Slovenye, 1S45—1941 (Vienna, 1988), 196. See also con-

temporary studies, some commissioned by nationalist organizations, e.g., Adolf Lenz, Die deutschen Minderheiten in Slowenien (Graz, 1923); and August Patterer, Dze Deutschen in Slowenien, Flugschriften des Ver-

eines Sudmark uber das Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum, No. 2 (Graz, 1923). The latter reproduces the text of Yugoslav law on minorities and contrasts it to the Yugoslav treatment of the German minority in the realms of economics, politics, culture, and administration. 44. Suppan, “Zur Lage der Deutschen,” 185-187; August Plachki, Die Deutschen 1n Unterstertermark; Ein Notschrer der Deutschen in Slowenien (S.A.S.): Wie aus dem Deutschen Haus in Cilli ein “Celyski Dom” gemacht

wurde! (n.p., n.d.). The corporation Deutsches Haus had provided in advance for its sale, with the money supposedly going to the Sudmark, in the case of its dissolution. The Yugoslav government settled the case in 1930 (Germany and Austria had supported the petition to the League), offering as compensation an endowment for Germanlanguage education and a loosening of conditions for minority schools.

45. Suppan, “Zur Lage der Deutschen,” 172. In South Styria the Germanspeaking population apparently fell from 72,911 in 1910 to 21,786 in 1921. The census results were disputed by German nationalists, who nevertheless agreed that harsh and unfair Yugoslav policy had contributed to a significant decline in German speakers in the region. 46. Andrej Vovko, “Das Minderheitenschulwesen in Slowenien im Zeitabschnitt des Alten Jugoslawien,” in Rumpler and Suppan, Geschichte der Deutschen, 255-272. Vovko adopts a nationalist approach to the issue of Germanization and provides a misleading picture of Habsburg prewar policy in the region. Nonetheless, his essay gives a useful overview of the legal and institutional aspects of Yugoslav educational policy in the region from 1918 to 1941. On the name policy and the Opposition it raised in German nationalist circles, see also Suppan, “Zur Lage der Deutschen,” 203. For a contemporary German nationalist account, see also Patterer, Die Deutschen in Slowenien, 9.

47. Suppan, “Zur Lage der Deutschen,” 234.

Notes to Pages 243-247 301 48. Petition to the district school inspector, quoted in Vovko, “Minderheitenschulwesen,” 268. 49. Vovko, “Minderheitenschulwesen,” 255. 50. Suppan, “Zur Lage der Deutschen,” 199. 51. Hans Heiss, “Fortschritt und Grenzen des Regionalismus: Sudtirol nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Muller and Petri, Nateonalisrerung von Grenzen, 204-205. Also (cited by Heiss), Brunello Mantelli, Kurze Geschichte des italhenischen Faschismus (Berlin, 1998), 18; Gisela Framke, Im Kampf um Siidtirol: Ettore Tolome: (1865-1952) und das “Archivio per V’Alto Adige’ (Tubingen, 1987). See also the many insightful essays on

regional Italianization policies, school politics, cultural life, and economy in Gottfried Solderer, ed., Das 20. Jahrhundert in Siuidtzrol, vol. 2, Faschistenbeil und Hakenkreuz (Bolzano, 2000). 52. Sudetendeutschland: Zeitschrift fiir die sudetendeutsche Bewegung im Aus-

lande (November 1927), 7. 53. Erwin Barta and Karl Bell, Geschichte der Schutzarbeit am deutschen Volks-

tum (Dresden, 1930), 86-87. Often the liberal Italian regime was more concerned with maintaining order than with imposing radical nationalization programs. See Maura E. Hametz, “The Nefarious Former Authorities: Name Change in Trieste, 1918-22,” AHY 35 (2004): 233-253. 54. “Nochmals ‘Italien-Relsen’,” Sudmark-Bundeszeitung no. 9 (1924): 5. 55. “Den Italien-Fahrern zur Beherzigung!” Sudmark-Bundeszeitung no. 3 (1925): 10-11. 56. For an excellent discussion and analysis of language law and institutional conditions in the first republic, see Jaroslav Kucera, Minderheit wm Nationalstaat: Die Sprachenfrage in den tschechisch-deutschen Bezie-

hungen, 1915-1938 (Munich, 1999). 57. Tara Zahra, “Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 19001945,” CEH 37, no. 4 (2004), especially 514-525. For a detailed analysis of the Czech nationalist collective understanding of democracy and democratic rights, see Zahra, “Your Child,” 316-390. 58. Bahm, “Inconveniences of Nationality.” 59. Pieter M. Judson, “When Is a Diaspora Not a Diaspora? Rethinking Nation-Centered Narratives about Germans in Habsburg East Central Europe,” in Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin, eds., The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (Ann Arbor,

Mich., 2005), 219-247. 60. Carsten Lenk, “ “Unbeding fortschrittlich und in allen Dingen national’: Der Deutsche BOhmerwaldbund, 1884—1938, und die Inter-

302 Notes to Pages 248-256 essen des Budweiser Burgertums,” in Kurt Droge, ed., Alltagskulturen in Grenzrdumen (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 77—78. Taschek himself did not live to see the German occupation of the Sudetenland and the Protectorate. He died on 29 January 1938. 61. As many as eight German parties were represented on the municipal council. BB, Ostdokumentation, Dokumentation der Sudetendeutschen Gemeinden, IV/2, 43. 62. SBV, 6 May 1923, 7. 63. Der Bohmerwald: Ein Paradies fur Naturfreunde das Jedem etwas bietet

(Budweis, ca. 1930). 64. Sudetendeutschland: Zeitschrift der sudetendeutschen Fretheitsbewegung (July/

August 1933), 9. 65. See, for example, Sudetendeutschland: Zeitschrift der sudetendeutschen Fretheitsbewegung (May 1933), 8.

66. Quoted in Peter Haslinger, “Imagined territories: Nation und Territorium im tschechischen politischen Diskurs, 1889-1938” (Habilitationsschrift, University of Freiburg, 2004), 303. 67. From a petition of the Narodni jednota poSumayska and its allies in 1921, quoted ibid, 308. 68. Ibid., 304. Haslinger cites several excellent examples in his chapter 4 section titled “Regionale und lokale Dimensionen des GrenzlandDiskurses in der Zwischenkriegszeit: Das Milieu der tschechischnationalen Schutzvereine.” 69. Sudetendeutschland: Zeitschrift fur die sudetendeutsche Bewegung im Aus-

lande (September 1927), 16. 70. “Wandlungen des deutschen nationalgefthles,” Stidmark (1922), 145. 71. “Gedanken zur Volksgemeinschaft,” Siidmark (1922), especially 6-7. 72. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York, 1996); Judson, “Diaspora,” especially 238-241. 73. On child exchanges, see Stidmark-Bundeszeitung 4 (1924): 5. 74. Ibid. 75. Stidmark-Bundeszeitung 9 (1924): 3-4. 76. Robert Sieger, “Burgenlandische Eindrticke,” Stidmark (1922), 2277. 77. Analyses of Nazi Germanization policy and its contradictions in the Sudetengau and the Protectorate are Chad Bryant, “Either German or Czech: Fixing Nationality in Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1946,” Slavic Review 61, no. 4 (2002): 683-706; and Zahra, “Your Child,” 464— 634. In particular, Zahra analyzes the little-known phenomenon of “Reich German Czech nationalism” encouraged by Nazi occupation authorities starting in 1943. See also Ralf Gebel, Hezm ins Reich!

Notes to Page 256 303 Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland (Munich, 1999), and Volker Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen 1m NS-Staat: Politik und Stimmung der Bevolkerung im Reichsgau Sudetenland (Essen, 1999).

78. See, for example, Benjamin Frommer’s work on postwar attempts to distinguish between crimes against the Czechoslovak state and crimes against the Czech nation. Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York, 2005).

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Index

Abbazia/Opatija, 105, 124, 131, 157 Austria-Hungary, 105, 219, 228, 233; Adriatic Sea, 101, 105, 143, 150, 156, and tourism, 144

175 Austrian Riviera, 156, 157, 175

Agrarian parties. See Political parties

Albrechtsried, 96 Baedeker guides, 151, 162, 172 Alpine Association, 156 Bahm, Karl, 246 Ammann, Johann Josef, 161 Baltic Germans, 108

Anti-Semitism, 49-51, 121-122, 143, Bamberg, 115 162, 163, 247, 273nn57,58, 288n29 Bartsch, Rudolf Hans, 34~36, 37, 39,

Arco, 167 76, 100, 101, 129, 131, 135, 140 Aryan paragraph, 51, 121 Bauernbund. See Deutsch-

Association for Tourism (Landesver- Osterreichische Bauernbund band fur Fremdenverkehr): in Bo- Bavaria, 158, 224, 250 hemia (Czech), 167; in German Bo- Beck, Max Vladimir Freiherr von (Aus-

hemia, 154, 167, 169, 172, 176; in trian minister president), 211

Styria, 165; in ‘Tyrol, 165 Beg, A., 133, 155

Auernheimer, Raoul, 173 Benetzko, 56

Aussig / Usti nad Labem, 169 Bergreichenstein / Kasperské Hory, 89Austria, Cisleithania, 78, 142, 143, 153, 99, 142, 152-153, 177-179, 181-218, 155, 157, 158, 164, 168, 175, 210, 227; beseda, 177, 186, 187, 188, 189, 221, 226, 229, 238, 239, 240; and col- 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198, lapse, 8, 221, 228, 233, 252; and in- 201, 207, 214, 216-218, 236; casualfrastructure, 143, 158, 165, 169; and ties, 178, 227; Hotel Skala, 189, 193, national compromises, 168; rural 194; Karlsberg/KaSperk, 93, 94, 152;

regions of, 67-76 Mayor Neumann, 189, 191, 194, 204,

Austria, German (First Republic), 129, 210-211, 214 136, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, Berlin, 120, 130, 131 242, 244, 246, 250, 251, 252, 253; as Bilingualism, 2, 3, 5, 6, 14, 21, 33, 39,

a borderland, 253-254; Second Re- 43, 46, 63, 64, 102, 119, 120, 229,

public, 101 231-232, 237, 238, 239, 248, 249; and 305

306 Index Bilingualism (continued) Calliano, 151, 166, 226 census, 27, 29-31; and education, 47, Carinthia, 3, 48, 66, 84, 105, 106, 108,

48, 64, 107, 230, 242 122, 124, 133, 134, 156, 165, 225, Bismarck, Otto von, 127 234, 235, 237, 238, 241

Blatna, 212 Carniola, 28, 84, 106, 107, 108, 241 Bodenbach/Podmokly, 85 Castel Pergine. See Burg Persen / Castel

Bohaé, Antonin, 71 Pergine

Bohemia, 3, 4, 16, 21, 24, 28, 29, 30, Censorship, 220, 221, 226, 227, 251 31, 33, 42, 49, 51, 64, 66, 69, 71, 78, Census: of 1880, 15, 23, 27, 139, 84, 85, 87, 103, 106, 122, 125, 137, 265n27; of 1890, 29, 139; imperial, 144, 150, 151, 154, 157, 160, 167—- 14, 15, 23, 27, 29-30, 32, 40, 41, 134, 169, 177-218, 219, 227, 229, 230- 135, 137, 152, 265n26; of 1900, 56,

232, 234, 235, 246, 255 110, 139, 159; of 1910, 32, 135-139, Bohemian Woods, 4, 5, 32, 39, 47, 66, 235, 241; Yugoslav (1921), 137, 241 69, 71, 76, 84, 88-98, 141-143, 150- Charles I/IV (emperor-king) , 234 152, 154, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, Charles IV (emperor), 153 163, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, Cheb. See Eger/Cheb 224, 225, 230-232, 235, 246, 247, Child exchange, 3, 37, 46, 253

249, 250; violence in, 177-218, Children, 22, 24, 26, 38, 41, 42, 43, 45,

295n36 46-49, 54, 57-58, 60-62, 64, 78-80,

Bohm (district administrator), 178, 125, 152, 194, 242, 245, 250, 253, 190, 195, 199, 205, 208; reports of 254, 271n50, 280n55; orphans, 103

(1908), 184, 201, 207, 209, 212, 214 Cilli/Celje, 29, 55, 59, 101, 122, 125,

Bohmerwald. See Bohemian Woods 126, 137, 236, 243; German House, Bohmerwaldbund. See Deutscher Boh- 241, 300n44

merwaldbund Citizenship, 114, 126, 130, 135, 239

Bosnia, 96 Civil servants, 69, 74, 76, 78-79, 90, 91Bozen/ Bolzano, 243, 244 93, 96, 125, 198, 200, 201, 206, 211,

Bozner Zeitung, 167 231, 237, 241, 280n57; and nationBrenner Pass, 234 alism, 86-88, 172, 186, 191, 192, 197, Brezice. See Rann/Brezice 199, 211-215, 230 Brix, Emil, 33 Civil service, 42, 86, 150, 199, 241, 255 Brno. See Brunn/ Brno Cohen, Gary, 6, 33 Brubaker, Rogers, 6, 263nn11,12 Cole, Laurence, 170, 171, 264n19

Brunn/Brno, 34, 149, 169 Communes, autonomy, 9, 264n20 Brunner, Erich (cadet commander), Compromise: Budweis/Budeéjovice, 14;

205, 206 Bukovinan, 14; Galician, 14, 265n25;

Budapest, 86, 125 Moravian, 13, 14; national, 168

Budweis/Budéjovice, 66, 71, 76, 159, Constitution: 1849, 12; 1867, 4, 11, 24, 162, 163, 172, 190, 224, 247, 255. See 26, 267n7

also Compromise Coudenhove, Karl (count, governor of Budweis-Salnau railway, 159, 161, 162 Bohemia), 183, 195, 201, 202, 211-

Bugge, Peter, 21 213 Bukovina, 49, 51, 122, 144, 253, 273n61 Cyril and Methodius Association

Bund der Deutschen in BOhmen (Druzba Ciril-Metod), 16, 133, 155 (League of Germans in Bohemia), Czech nationalist associations (narodni

17, 76-77, 83-84, 94, 247 jednoty), 17, 250

Burgenland, 253, 254 Czechoslovakia, 174, 221, 229, 233, 234, Burg Persen / Castel Pergine, 153, 171 239, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249,

Index 307 250, 251, 255; expulsions from (1945- 135, 167, 236, 243; curial voting, 12,

48), 22, 256 69, 110, 134-136, 265n22; franchise

Czech School Association (Ustiéedni for, 9, 11, 69, 114, 135 matice Skolska), 16, 43, 46, 49, 63, Eleonorenhain/Lenora, 183, 185

80, 81, 82, 104, 227 England, 144

Ethnic cleansing, 103 Dalmatia, 175, 274n81

Das deutsche Leid, 34-36, 76, 100, 131 Fascism, 243, 244

Deutsch, Ludwig, 162 Feichtinger, Joseph, 108 Deutschbohmen, 153, 154, 169, 234, 246; Fiedler, Rudolf, 40, 53, 63, 270n39 provincial government of, 234, 235 First World War, 8, 174, 219-233, 235, Deutsch-Bohmerwald, 89, 92-99, 191, 194, 256; food shortages, 220, 225, 226,

198 227, 228, 231; mobilization of

Deutscher BOhmerwaldbund (German women, 222; social unrest, 220, 227, League for the Bohemian Woods), 230, 231; welfare activism, 223, 224,

17, 50, 64, 70-74, 81-82, 98, 103- 227, 228 104, 141-143, 151, 152, 156-164, Frais, Karl, 111, 127, 128 171, 172, 173, 175, 187, 189, 191, France, 7, 105, 143, 234, 298n28 193, 198, 209, 216, 247, 249, 276- Francis Ferdinand (archduke), 163 277016, 288n29; during First World Francis Joseph (emperor), 144, 220

War, 223, 224, 225 Frankfurt am Main, 169

Deutscher Kulturverband, 247 Frederick the Great, 127 Deutscher Schulverein. See German

School Association Galicia, 13, 28, 49, 51, 122, 195, 212, Deutsches Jahrbuch fiir Osterveich, 155 265n23, 268n7, 269n15, 273nn61,62, Deutsche Volkszeitung Reichenberg, 193 274n81, 275n3

Deutsche Wacht, 59 Gellner, Ernest, 7

Deutsch-6sterreichische Bauernbund Gendarmes, 55, 58, 60, 152, 178, 183, (German-Austrian Farmers’ Associa- 184, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 197,

tion), 69-70 201, 203, 204, 205, 248

Deutschosterreichische Bodenbank German Association for Iglau, 84 (German Austrian Land Bank), 123 German Austria. See Austria, German

Diet, 34, 69, 109; Bohemian, 9, 178, (First Republic)

210-211, 213 German Bohemia. See Deutschbéhmen

Dolni Rejstejn. See Unterreichenstein / German League for the Bohemian

Dolni Rejstejn Woods. See Deutscher BOhmerwald-

Drau/Drava River, 105, 111, 122, 130, bund

132, 133, 234, 237, 238 German Nationalist Gymnastics Associa-

Dresden, 169 tion (German version), 151, 183-184 Druzba Ciril-Metod. See Cyril and Meth- German School Association, 16, 25, 28,

odius Association 39, 41, 42-48, 49-50, 52, 54, 57, 59,

Dumreicher, Armand von, 36 63, 66, 71-72, 74, 81, 108, 240, 244, Durch Deutschbohmen, 152, 154 247, 251, 252, 271nn45,46; and antiSemitism, 49-51, 273n58; commemo-

Eger/Cheb, 169 rative postcards/stamps, 19, 20, 21,

Egydi Tunnel. See St. Egydi / Sv. Ij / 59; founding, 25-26, 118; schools, 48,

Sentiljj 52, 56-57, 80, 86, 109-110, 112, 125,

Eisenstein / Zelezna Ruda, 85, 204, 250 130; and violence to schools, 55-60; Elections, 107, 110, 114, 119, 120, 134, and war, 224, 227

308 Index

149 159

German Tourist Association of Brunn Jews, 38, 49, 50, 51, 52, 121, 204, 243, (Verein deutscher Touristen Brinn), 247, 255, 273n59; and census, 31-32, Germany, 7, 105, 108, 114, 144, 153, Jihlava. See Iglau/Jihlava 170, 219, 220, 235, 239, 242, 246, Joklik, Frantisek, 66, 82

253. See also Nazi Germany Joseph II (emperor), 95, 127, 160 Getreue Eckhart, 39, 45, 57

Gorz/Gorizia/Gorica, 29 Kalsching/Chvalsiny, 161 Graz, 34, 107, 108, 109, 110, 125, 130, Karl I/IV. See Charles I/IV

131, 143, 165, 237 Karlsbad / Karlovy Vary, 167, 169

Grazer Volksblatt, 116 Karlsberg/Kasperk. See Bergreichen-

Grollhesl, Paul, 161 stein / Kasperské Hory

Gross, Gustav, 50, 51 KaSperské Hory. See Bergreichenstein / Guidebooks. See Baedeker guides; Durch Kasperské Hory

Deutschbohmen; ‘Tourism Kazda, Ottomar (tax administrator), 192, 198, 212, 214, 215

Haas, Hanns, 77 Kindergarten, 45, 46

Hainisch, Michael, 129 Kindertausch. See Child exchange Handl. See Child exchange King, Jeremy, 6, 13, 14, 168, 263n9,

Hartmanitz/Hartmanice, 90, 178, 203, 264-265n21

204, 207, 211, 216 Kirschlag, 172

Haslinger, Peter, 251 Klagenfurt, 109, 131, 237

Healy, Maureen, 296n1 Klattau/Klatovy, 178, 194, 202, 203

Heeger, Viktor, 74-75 Kohn, Israel, 164, 288n29

Heilbrunn, 114 KoroSsec, Anton, 107 Heiligenkreutz, 254 Kramar, Karel, 230

Heim ins Reich, 102 Kraus, Viktor von, 26, 66, 71, 72

Holick, Anton (captain), 203, 205 Kren, Jan, 227

Hollriegl, Franz, 36 Krummau/Krumlov, 76, 159, 161, 162,

Holocaust, 102 164, 172, 173, 230

Horitz / Horice na Sumavé, 141, 143, Kukula, Emanuel (captain), 203, 204 159-162, 164, 170, 172-175, 250, 255; Kulturkampf, Austrian, 42, 79, 278n28 festival corporation, 164; festival the-

ater, 141, 160, 161-162, 170, 225; Laibach/Ljubljana, 106, 131, 236, 242; film production, 163-164; after First 1908 riots, 58—59 World War, 174, 236, 247, 248; pas- Lake Garda, 167 sion play, 141, 143, 149, 159, 160- Landesverband fur Fremdenverkehr. See 161, 163-164, 174, 176, 248, 249; vil- Association for Tourism lage council, 160, 162, 164, 248, 249 Language: of daily use, 14, 27, 31, 136;

Hungary, 7, 114, 235, 239, 254 Badeni ordinances, 37, 73; Ladin, 106; of signs, 25, 91, 94, 95, 249, 251;

Iglau/Jihlava, 84, 246 Yiddish, 14, 51

Indifference to nation. See National Language frontier, 28, 125, 128, 140,

identity 147, 149, 156, 185, 219, 229, 230,

Istria, 29, 105, 108, 175 237, 238, 243, 244, 250, 251, 252,

Italy, 144, 175, 233, 234, 239, 243, 244, 256, 257; and census, 14, 15, 29, 30-

301n53 31, 119, 136, 137, 159; characteristics, 2, 6, 20, 22-23, 25, 29, 33, 35,

Jahn, Ludwig, 95 126-127, 131-132, 230-232, 254;

Jazykova hranice. See Language frontier conception, 4, 5, 10, 17, 18, 19-22,

Index 309 25, 26, 36, 53-54, 63, 65, 100, 124, Militias (1918), 234, 235, 236, 237 140, 153, 226, 231-232, 238, 252, Ministry, 183; of Finance, 211, 214, 215;

253, 254; fiction about, 34-41, 53, of Interior, 183-185, 211; of Public 131; inhabitants, 33-35, 39, 45, 93, Works, 165; of Railways, 165 118-120, 124, 131, 133, 138, 155, Modernization, 3, 7-8, 67-68, 70, 82, 165, 170, 173, 176, 179-218, 220, 84, 88-99, 143, 164, 165, 170 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 238, 240, Monuments, 25, 95, 160, 251 253, 254, 255; and political borders, Moravia, 3, 13, 16, 28, 29, 34, 37, 48,

226, 232, 235, 237, 238, 239, 251, 64, 83, 84, 103, 122, 125, 137, 144, 254, 255; rural, 1, 18, 23, 30-32, 35- 151, 154, 168, 234, 245, 246. See also

41, 81, 99, 102, 107, 108, 157, 173, Compromise 179-218, 220, 226, 231, 232, 238, Mur/Mura River, 111, 130, 234, 236,

267n5; and war, 223, 225-226, 230- 237, 24]

232 Mussolini, Benito, 243 League of Nations, 241

Lega Nazionale. See National League Narodni jednota posumavska (Czech

Leitmeritz/Leitomérice, 169 Association for the Bohemian

Lenora. See Eleonorenhain/Lenora Woods), 64, 72—73, 76, 84, 91, 103Liberals: and constitution, 12; Czech, 104, 152, 211, 280n57 68; German, 12, 15, 16, 24, 68-69; Narodni listy, 185, 187, 198, 208, 212 and religion, 42, 68-69, 79; and rural Ndarodni politika, 208 world, 2, 42, 68-70; and schools/edu- —- Narodny jednoty. See Czech nationalist as-

cation, 2, 13, 24, 42, 68-70, 78, 83 sociations Liberec. See Reichenberg/ Liberec Nas Dom, 132 Libraries, 83-84, 96, 106, 254, 279n43 National identity, 32, 56, 142, 145, 174, Lichtenwald/Sevnica, 56-59, 63, 126 228, 229, 238, 253; ascription of, 13,

Linz, 234 49, 242, 245-246; and education, 24, Linzer Volksblatt, 115, 117-118 42-52, 79-84, 107; flexibility of, 5, 22Ljubljana. See Laibach/Ljubljana 23, 49, 115, 119-120, 121, 135, 136, Los von Rom movement, 114, 116-117 137, 138, 139, 155, 180, 183, 228, Lower Austria, 84, 108, 114, 117, 122, 229, 230, 231, 243; indifference to, 2,

124, 234 3, 5, 20, 32, 33, 39-40, 43, 44, 53, 68,

Ludwig Viktor (archduke), 163 91, 93, 102, 103, 120, 143, 145, 147, 180, 208, 230, 240, 243, 245, 251,

Mahrenberg/Marbeg/Radlje, 111, 133 255; and landscape, 19, 36, 65, 95,

Maister, Rudolf, 236, 237 129, 131-132, 145, 150-153, 170, 173;

Mannheim, 131 and language, 31, 49, 135, 137, 230, Marburg/Maribor, 86, 100, 101, 103, 238, 239, 257; and minority status, 105, 107, 111, 116, 118, 122, 125, 240, 242, 243, 245, 248, 250; racialist, 129, 131, 132, 137, 234, 236, 237, 106, 121-122, 159, 255; and religion,

238, 241, 242, 243 102, 103, 108, 115-116, 118, 119,

Marburger Zeitung, 85, 107 160, 171, 239, 257; and Stidmark setMarienbad / Marianské Lazné, 230 tlers, 101, 115, 118-121, 130-132,

Masaryk, Thomas, 233 135, 139-140, 2429-243

Meyer, Edgar, 151, 166, 167, 226 Nationalist associations, 16, 17, 25, 39,

Miles, Sherman, 237 64-65, 66-67, 71-73, 79, 83, 85, 94,

Miles Mission, 237-238 97, 104, 106, 124, 133, 136, 155, 157, Military, 178, 189, 190, 194, 195, 196, 169, 171, 199, 219, 227, 241, 243, 197, 199-200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 245, 247, 248, 250, 251; local mem-

219, 221, 222, 234, 235, 236, 237 berships, 73-77, 82-83, 186, 222,

310 Index Nationalist associations (continued) 160, 162, 163, 171; and rural popula227, 243; in war, 222-227, 229. See tions, 23, 30, 31-34, 39, 54, 66-99,

also individual associations 107, 108, 124, 130, 143, 172-176, 179Nationalist fiction, 34-41, 43, 53, 63, 218, 248; and schools, 13, 25, 42-63,

76, 100, 131 104, 107, 242; and side-switchers, 23,

Nationalist politicians, 178, 199, 210- 31, 39-42, 49, 102, 103, 113, 115,

215, 217-218, 230 116, 118-120, 135, 137, 138, 139,

Nationalists: and anti-Semitism, 49-51; 155, 180, 184, 228, 230, 231-232, and boycotts, 145-147, 155, 157, 175, 248, 255; and signs, 25, 91, 94, 95, 181, 208-209, 244; and census, 14, 186, 188, 197, 249, 251; Slovene, 4, 15, 23, 27, 31, 41; and colonization, 13, 16, 28, 29, 35, 36, 40, 42, 47, 55, 29, 34, 35, 101, 103-106, 111-140, 57-59, 72, 83, 106, 107, 110, 118, 150, 250, 254; and conflict, 10, 33, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 155, 53, 57-58, 90-91, 128-129, 177-218; 169, 236, 237, 240, 243; and territoriand consumerism, 65, 94, 95, 131- alization, 27-28, 54, 65, 71, 84, 104, 132, 141-176, 228, 244-245; Czech, 130, 132, 140, 144-145, 150-154, 4,8, 13, 16, 21, 26, 28, 29, 37, 40, 169, 225, 226, 238, 252; Ukrainian, 42, 56, 60, 61, 66, 68, 69, 72, 79, 80, 13, 273n62; and violence, 177-218, 83, 84, 85, 90-91, 93, 94, 98, 103, 236, 237, 257, 295nn36,37; and war

144, 152, 155, 163, 167, 174, 177- work, 223-228 218, 219, 220, 221, 229, 231, 234, National League (Italian National Asso245, 246, 250, 251, 252, 267n3; and cation), 16, 153 education, 23-24, 42-63, 64-65, 70, National property (Nateonalbesitzstand, 78-84, 96; German, 4, 8, 15, 16, 21, narodni majetek), 27, 30, 38, 39, 154 25-26, 27-28, 30, 36, 39, 40, 42, 47, Nazi Germany, 103, 136, 247, 255, 256 55, 59, 68-70, 72, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, Neue Freie Presse, 173 88, 90-93, 96, 98, 103, 106, 107, 110,

120-121, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, Oberammergau, 141, 161 144, 147, 152, 160, 163, 166, 167, Ohorn, Anton, 81 169, 174-176, 177-218, 219, 220, Opatija. See Abbazia/Opatija 221, 222, 226, 229, 234-235, 240, Opava. See Troppau/Opava 244, 245, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252; Ornig, Joseph, 107 Hungarian, 245; Italian, 4, 13, 16, 28- Osterreichische-ungarische Monarchie in

29, 116, 153, 166, 167, 169, 226, 243- Wort und Bild, 163 244, 252; Jewish, 273n61; and labor exchanges, 124-125; Ladin-speaking, Parliament: German Austrian, 236; im-

106; and local economy, 46, 69-74, perial (Reichsrat), 4, 9, 26, 34, 66, 83, 92-93, 98, 141-143, 146, 153- 69, 109, 137, 181, 210-211, 221; 159, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, Kremsier/Kromeriz (1848-49), 12 176, 276-277n16; and migration, 30, Passion play. See Horitz / Hofrice na Su-

75, 77, 85-86, 123-127, 135, 138, mave 146, 152, 158; and modernity, 8, 15, Patriotism: of different language 67-68, 70, 73-74, 82, 84, 88-99, 142, eroups, 219, 221; dynastic, 144, 219, 158, 169-172; and national compro- 220, 222, 224, 232, 239 mises, 168; and the nationally unde- Pavlovsky, Vaclav (district commiscided, 106, 120, 145, 230; and net- sioner), 189, 193, 194, 195, 198, 202, works, 75, 131, 171-172; Polish, 13, 203, 204, 210-212 28, 51, 252, 273n62; and religion/ Pettau/Ptui, 29, 58, 101, 107, 122, 125,

priests, 40, 79, 106, 114-119, 134, 137, 236, 238, 243

Index 311 Pilsen/Plzen, 190, 224, 230 Rachamimov, Alon, 221 Pilsner Tagblatt, 186, 191, 193, 194, 198, Radkersburg/Radgona, 236, 237, 254

207, 209 Radlje. See Mahrenberg/Marbeg/

Pisek, 213, 216, 235 Radlje

Pistor, Egon von, 109, 282n12 Rann/Brezice, 58, 109, 122

Plebiscites, 235, 237 Rauchberg, Heinrich, 30, 44, 71, 154, Podmokly. See Bodenbach/Podmokly 269nn18,25

Pola/Pula, 131, 155, 175 Reichenberg/Liberec, 169, 235 Poland, 103, 233, 239, 243, 299n41 Renner, Karl, 234 Political and Economic Association of Revolutions: 1848, 12; 1918, 228, 233,

Slovenian Germans (Politische und 250; Russian, 220 wirtschaftliche Verein der Deutschen Riesengebirge, 154 in Slowenien / Politi¢no in gospodar- Rohmeder, Wilhelm, 146-147, 150-151, sko druStvo Nemcev v Sloveniji), 243 155, 166, 167, 176 Political parties: Austrian Social Demo- Romania, 233, 239, 243

cratic Party, 69, 76; Christian So- Roscha, 60, 274n67 cialism, 76, 114; Czech Agrarian Rosegger, Peter, 173 Party, 69, 70, 211; in Czechoslovakia, Ruhr, 253 246; German Agrarian Party, 69, 70; Russia, 108, 220. See also Soviet Union German nationalist, 134; German na-

tionalist in Czechoslovakia, 245; St. Egydi / Sv. Ij / Sentiljj, 44, 100German Progressive Party, 69; Slo- 101, 107, 108-140, 225, 226, 242, vene Catholic Populist Party, 107, 243; census statistics, 110, 134-136; 110, 114, 132, 134; Slovene Liberal village council, 110, 115, 132, 134, Party, 107; Stajerc Party, 107; Young 138; visitors to theme park, 127-132, Czech Party, 69; in Yugoslavia, 243. 148

See also Liberalism St. Georgen an der Sudbahn / Sv. Jury

Posen/Poznan, 115 na juyni zeleznici, 54-55, 133 Prachatitz/Prachatice, 47, 85, 89-98, Salnau / Zelnava, 85, 159 142, 202, 230, 236 Salzburg, 77, 123

215 272n51

Prade, Heinrich, 52, 210, 211, 212, 213, Sauerbrunn/Slatina, 47-48, 271-—

Pragerhof/Pragersko, 85-86, 125 Sava River, 101, 238 Prague, 34, 69, 91, 167, 169, 178, 183, Scheu, Robert, 47, 229-232, 271n50 187, 188, 195, 201, 202, 207, 210, Schiller, Friedrich, 95, 130

214, 217, 234 Schonerer, Georg von, 37, 49, 114,

Prasek, Karel, 211, 215 273n57

Press: nationalist, 10, 20, 45, 53-61, 63, Schools, 24, 25, 32, 36, 42, 52, 58, 64, 89-99, 106, 119, 128, 132, 155, 162, 65, 68, 70, 74, 78, 80, 90, 93, 95, 104,

163, 177-210, 215-218, 220, 245, 150, 151, 230, 240, 242, 247, 251; bi248, 249; religious, 114, 116-117, lingual/utraquist, 47-48, 107, 242, 162, 163. See also individual newspapers 272nn5?2,53, 282n6; curriculum, 78;

and journals Jewish, 49, 50, 51, 52; legislation on, Protestants, 112, 114-117, 119, 132, 24, 78; minority, 24, 25, 28, 43, 44, 135, 171, 242, 283n20. See also Los 48, 54, 55, 56-57, 60, 63, 64, 72-73,

von Rom movement 79-81, 105, 130, 242, 243, 244, 245,

Prussia, Germanization programs, 115, 252; nationalist depictions, 22, 41, 53;

127 violence against, 25, 41, 53-63, 181

Ptui. See Pettau/Ptui Schreiner, Gustav, 211, 212, 213

312 Index Schittenhofen/SuSice, 80, 90, 92, 177- Semitism, 51, 121-122; and Catholic 179, 184, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, Church, 101, 114; during First World 194, 195, 197, 200-205, 207-209, War, 223, 224, 225, 226; founding,

211, 212, 216-218, 236 101, 108; membership statistics,

Schwarzbach / Cerna v PoSumavi, 159 277n23; and retirees, 123, 125-127;

Schwarzenberg family, 163 settlement program, 100-105, 108—Second World War, 255-256 140, 155, 169-170, 225, 226, 242; Sentilj. See St. Egydi / Sv. Ij / Sentiljj sponsored visits to the language Sevnica. See Lichtenwald/Sevnica frontier, 127-132, 149, 153, 254, Silesia, 16, 28, 33, 48, 66, 84, 125, 137, 284n45

144, 154, 234, 246 Sudmarkhof, 112, 128, 130, 131, 132

Singer, Anton, 96, 188, 191, 192, 193, Suffrage. See Elections

201, 210, 281n71 Sumava. See Bohemian Woods

Slatina. See Sauerbrunn/Slatina Summer vacationers, 89, 94-95, 97-98,

Slide shows, 84, 253 155, 156, 158, 162, 172, 173, 225, Slovenia, 101, 136, 240, 241, 243, 244 249

Sokol/Slovene, 58 Supreme Administrative Court (VerfasSommerfrische. See Summer vacationers sungs Gerichtshof), 13, 24, 85,

Sonderweg, Austrian, 8 272n51

Soviet Union, 255, 256 Susice. See Schuttenhofen/Susice Spector, Scott, 270n28, 279n44 Swabians, 114, 131, 132. See also Wirt-

Spielfeld/Spilje, 111, 236 temberg Sprachgrenze. See Language frontier

Stachau/Stachy, 183-185, 196, 206 Taschek, Josef, 66, 71, 152, 157, 158,

Stajerc, 107, 238 159, 162, 163, 164, 172, 247, 302n60

Stephanie, Crown Princess Widow, 163 Teachers, 24, 74, 81, 88, 90, 188, 248,

Stickau, 56, 61 271n48, 278nn26,32; and nationalist

Stifter, Adalbert, 95 activism, 66, 76, 77-84, 93, 172, 211, Stourzh, Gerald, 33 230; training, 78-79; and violence, 54— Students, 173, 177, 187, 189, 192, 193, 63, 81; Wanderlehrer (traveling

194, 195, 196, 198, 205, 206, 210, teacher), 83, 131, 133, 155, 279n33;

216, 224, 225 women, 78-79, 278n26, 278-279n32

Sturgkh, Karl (count), 220 Ther, Philip, 263n14

Styria, 3, 4, 5, 29, 35, 36, 44, 47, 48,54, Thun, Franz (count), 163 64, 76, 84, 101, 104, 106-108, 113, Tiroler Volksbund (Tyrolean Peoples’

114, 115, 118, 122, 124, 126, 133, Union), 17, 118, 146, 151-152, 225 136, 137, 160, 165, 169, 170, 225, Tolomei, Ettore, 244

232, 234, 240, 241, 253 Tourism, 74, 86, 89, 92-98, 131, 147Sudbahn railway, 55, 85-86, 105, 110, 148, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169,

125 170, 172, 173, 244, 246, 249, 250;

Stidbohmische Volkszeitung, 227 Adriatic, 105, 156, 157; guidebooks,

Sudetendeutschland, 250 145, 146-147, 150-155, 158, 173,

Sudetenland, 154, 234, 246, 255. See 185, 246, 254; hiking, 151, 158, 173,

also Deutschbohmen 224, 287n5; and historic preservation,

Stdmark, 17, 39, 51, 73, 74-75, 82, 84, 93-94, 96, 98, 142, 152, 153; nation85, 106, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 153, alist, 141-176, 244-245, 254; and war,

156-157, 158, 162, 171, 240, 251, 224, 295 252, 253, 254, 282nn8,10; anti- Treaty of St. Germain, 241; minority

alcoholism campaign, 124; anti- rights, 243, 246

Index 313 Trentino, 108, 114, 146, 150-152, 153, Volksbibliotheken. See Libraries

167, 226, 234. See also Tyrol Volkswehr. See Militias

Trieste, 105, 131, 175 Vorarlberg, 144 Troppau/Opava, 234

Turk, Karl, 37-38, 39 Wanderlehrer. See Teachers Tyrol, 4, 5, 26, 29, 106, 108, 114, 117, Wastian, Heinrich, 131 118, 146, 150-153, 156, 157, 165, Weitlof, Moritz, 72 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 226, 232, Wilson, Woodrow, 234

234, 243-245, 253, 255, 256, Wiltschko, Jordan, 164

291nn56,57 Windische Bithel, 111, 122, 126, 130, 133, 226, 234

United States, 164 Winterberg/Vimperk, 89, 184-185 Universities, 13 World War I. See First World War Unterreichenstein / Dolni Rejstejn, World War II. See Second World War

178, 189, 202, 211 Wirttemberg, 101, 114, 130, 283n25

Upper Austria, 108, 119, 234, 236

Usti nad Labem. See Aussig / Usti nad

Labem Yugoslavia (Kingdom of the Serbs,

Ustiedni matice Skolska. See Czech Croats, and Slovenes), 135, 136, 233,

School Association 234, 237, 239, 240, 241, 245

Vaterland, 163 Zahra, Tara, 227, 272n54 Venezia-Giulia, 244 Zborow, 221 Verfassungsgerichthof. See Supreme Ad- Zelezna Ruda. See Eisenstein / Zelezna

ministrative Court Ruda

Verstovsek, Karl, 137 Zelnava. See Salnau/ Zelnava Vienna, 16, 25, 34, 36, 65, 69, 84, 90, Zemmrich, J., 1, 2, 30-33, 39, 44, 53,

109, 110, 125, 131, 157, 178, 183, 71 207, 211, 214, 217, 234, 235 Zierberg/CerSak, 39, 65

Vimperk. See Winterberg/Vimperk Zirknitz/Curknice, 134

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