Pieter M. Judson, Marsha L. Rozenblit, eds. Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Austrian History, Culture, and Society. xx + 293 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57181-175-2; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-57181-176-9.

Reviewed by Christopher J. Fischer (Department of History, Indiana State University)
Published on H-Nationalism (September, 2007)

Nationalism, Dictatorship, and the Search for Identity

From Danzig on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, East Central Europe has proven fertile ground for the study of nationalism and national identity. Constructing National Identity explores a variety of incarnations of nationalism in this region by largely focusing on the lands of the Austrian Empire and its successor states.

This collection derives from a 2000 symposium held at Columbia University, "Dilemmas of East Central Europe: Nationalism, Dictatorship, and the Search for Identity." The articles also serve as a festschrift for Istvan Deak, long-serving professor at Columbia and one of the preeminent scholars of East European, especially Hungarian, history. Written by former graduate and undergraduate students, the collection is a testament to Deak's long and fruitful career. The articles range from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, span much of East Central Europe, and utilize a wide variety of methodological approaches.

Editor Pieter Judson's introduction seeks to weave these disparate contributions together. The authors reject the premise of "the historical necessity either of nations or the nation-states" (p. 1). Judson argues that the essays instead probe how new nationalist ideologies were created, examine the diversity and contingency of national identities, and explore how such national identities intersected and conflicted with alternate identities. The lands of the Austrian Empire, where multilingual populations slowly transformed the realm into a multinational empire, Judson contends, help elucidate how the process of nationalization took place. Moreover, by giving greater attention to the local and regional contexts in which nationalization occurred, the authors fill in lacunae left by broader approaches (nation-building, state-building, modernization). Finally, the collection is meant as a study of how political activists creatively managed to put forward ambitious, though not always successful, plans of ideological nationalization. The results of such studies, Judson offers, "make us aware just how complex, multidimensional, and often unsuccessful, the nationalization process in Habsburg Central Europe could be" (p. 6).

The volume, whose chapters are arranged in chronological order, opens with three very diverse pieces. Michael Silber explores the controversy surrounding Emperor Joseph II's imposition of military service upon the empire's Jewish citizens in the 1780s. Silber convincingly argues that compulsory military service, with the attendant debates over the obligations and rights of Jewish citizen-soldiers (or perhaps here subject-soldiers), offered a means of envisioning a new form of Jewish membership in the Habsburg state. Jumping chronologically and spatially, Robert Nemes demonstrates how the 1848 revolution led to a reconfiguration of national symbolism in Budapest. Skipping on to the German territories, Daniel McMillan lays out how one of the key nationalist organizations in nineteenth-century Germany, the gymnastic club, developed competing discourses about the meaning of exercise, nationalism, and politics. A new discourse stressing health, character, and personal development began to dominate the more democratic and overtly political discourses. Perhaps pushing the argument a bit far, McMillan suggests the stress on biological language and the political emphasis on individual development presaged later developments in German history and marked a shift in the evolution of German political culture from the Western European norm.

The ensuing five chapters, strong articles which return to the subject of the Austrian Empire, best exemplify the approach laid out in the introduction. Drawing upon Anthony Cordoza's work on the Italian nobility, Eagle Glassheim explores how Czech-German nobles increasingly eschewed simple national identities (Czech or German) in favor of loyalty to the empire as a means of defending their position in society. Pieter Judson continues in the Czech vein. His tightly argued contribution, "The Bohemian Oberammergau: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire," examines how the town of Hoeritz/Horice promoted the passion play to bring economic development to the region, attract German tourists to town, and preserve the region's German heritage. The collapse of the empire did not end the productions, but shifted their meaning to a defense of German culture in the new Czech state. Judson concludes, however, that the national meaning of the plays may have been unclear to audiences. Remaining in the Czech territories, Cynthia Paces and Nancy Wingfield argue that before 1914, public spaces in Bohemia were often the subject of contested memory. In particular, pro-German groups erected statues to Joseph II despite protests by Catholic leaders that he had sought to secularize the empire; Czechs chose the religious reformer Jan Hus despite the fact that some Catholics considered him a heretic. After 1918, Czech nationalists, at times destroying precious works of art, claimed these spaces by removing those statues that evoked the former regime. Daniel Unowsky looks at the other side of the coin by analyzing how imperial authorities used Emperor Franz Joseph's 1898 Jubilee to promote loyalty to the empire. Supporters of the Jubilee feted dynastic loyalty as a means of (hopefully) mitigating the centripetal forces of nationalism. Claire Nolte concludes the pre-World War I articles by demonstrating that despite the immense growth of the Pan-Slavic gymnastic movement under Czech leadership, intra-Slavic differences weakened the gymnastic and the Pan-Slavic movements.

Alon Rachaminov and Marsha Rozenblit present case studies from the First World War. Rachaminov analyzes how Austrian imperial censors categorized and assessed the mounds of letters sent by Austrian POWs. According to Rachaminov, imperial authorities deemed some nationalities more loyal than others, which led to a differentiated system of censorship among the empire's many peoples. Rozenblit explores the complicated loyalties of Austria's Jews, many of whom maintained a tripartite loyalty to the empire, one of the empire's nationalities, and their own Jewish communities. The prospect of Austrian defeat threatened this identity, making Jewish communities far more supportive of the Austrian war effort; the collapse of the monarchy left the empire's Jews struggling to reconfigure this complex, layered identity.

Two articles on Hungarian nationalism address the interwar period. Paul Hanebrink shows how faith and nation were combined to create a distinct vision of Hungary as a "Christian nation." For some Hungarian nationalists, Hungary’s traditional opposition to its non-Christian neighbors marked a special national mission. Moreover, by returning to the Christian values lost in the nineteenth century, the country would take a particularly Hungarian path to modernity, and thus eschew falling prey to fascism or communism. David Frey's contribution, "Just What is Hungarian?" details how Hungarian nationalists largely failed to impose a distinctive Hungarian style on the nation's film industry. Attempts to replace cosmopolitan fare aimed at the urban middle classes with stories of Hungary's past or celebrations of its peasantry foundered on the rock of commercial viability. Indeed, with few exceptions, the only success enjoyed by Hungarian nationalists came with the exclusion of Jews from Hungarian filmmaking.

The final three chapters deal with World War II and its legacies. The first two contributions, penned by Patricia von Papen-Bodek and Peter Black, offer perspectives on collaboration in Eastern Europe. While both articles provide important additions to comprehending how the Holocaust unfolded on the ground, both also feel shoe-horned into the collection. Papen-Bodek underscores the importance of the Hungarian Institute for Research into the Jewish Question in communicating new strands of anti-Semitism into Hungary, and later, planning and justifying the deportation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews. Black explores the development and deployment of the Sonderdienst, an ersatz police force comprised largely of ethnic Germans in Poland that helped procure expropriated goods, ran internment camps for Polish prisoners, and occasionally assisted with deportations during "Operation Reinhard." Black details how German authorities, despite internal differences over control of the units, all hoped the Sonderdienst would attain the goal of creating "'engaged members of the German Volk'" (p. 248). Benjamin Frommer's contribution, "Getting the Small Decree," concludes the volume. This article offers a fascinating study of how nationalism merged with postwar purges in Czechoslovakia. The October 1945 Small Decree, aimed at punishing "'crimes against national honor'" (p. 269), created an elastic definition of collaboration. Czech citizens could be fined, censured, or jailed by rather arbitrarily created tribunals not only for collaborating, but for continuing social relations with ethnic Germans, even if those "ethnic Germans" were in fact Czech citizens. Frommer contends that the Small Decree, taken in conjunction with deportations and trials of more traditionally defined collaborators, allowed the Czech government to further refine definitions of membership in the Czech nation.

Constructing National Identities offers a number of insightful articles into nationalism in the Austrian Empire. Readers unfamiliar with the broad contours of Eastern European history may want to peruse a general history of the late Austrian Empire before delving into the volume. The nature of the collection makes the overall effect a bit disjointed as some themes, and some areas, receive far more attention than others; perhaps the editor might have arranged the articles by region rather than chronologically. The collection offers an engaging if eclectic path through the history of nationalism in East Central Europe and stands as a tribute to Istvan Deak.

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Citation: Christopher J. Fischer. Review of Judson, Pieter M.; Rozenblit, Marsha L., eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. September, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13587

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