Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2009 Czechoslovak Studies Associatio.

Overview

Throughout the nineteenth and into the early decades of the twentieth century, it was common for rural and working-class parents in the Czech-German borderlands to ensure that their children were bilingual by sending them to live with families who spoke the ""other"" language. As nationalism became a more potent force in Central Europe, however, such practices troubled pro-German and pro-Czech activists, who feared that the children born to their nation could literally be ""lost"" or ""kidnapped"" from the national community through such experiences and, more generally, by parents who were either flexible about national belonging or altogether indifferent to it. Highlighting this indifference to nationalism-and concerns about such apathy among nationalists-Kidnapped Souls offers a surprising new perspective on Central European politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Austrian, Czech, and German archives, Tara Zahra shows how nationalists in the Bohemian Lands worked to forge political cultures in which children belonged more rightfully to the national collective than to their parents. Through their educational and social activism to fix the boundaries of nation and family, Zahra finds, Czech and German nationalists reveal the set of beliefs they shared about children, family, democracy, minority rights, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Zahra shows that by 1939 a vigorous tradition of Czech-German nationalist competition over children had created cultures that would shape the policies of the Nazi occupation and the Czech response to it. The book's concluding chapter weighs the prehistory and consequences of the postwar expulsion of German families from the Bohemian Lands. Kidnapped Souls is a significant contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of modern nationalism in Central Europe and a groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which children have been the objects of political contestation when national communities have sought to shape, or to reshape, their futures.

Full Product Details

9780801477607

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Reviews

<p> Tara Zahra's finely researched, engagingly written book . . . makes two central points. First, exclusive national identification was neither a natural nor an inevitable development in multi-linguistic central Europe. And second, competing nationalists had to work hard to win the allegiance of 'nationally ambiguous' Bohemians and Moravians. The nationalists' persistent sense of failure motivated their nationalizing efforts as much as their successes. Zahra astutely focuses on nationalist campaigns for the 'souls' of school children in Bohemia and Moravia. Not only were schools a central battleground in conflicts between Czech and German nationalists over the control of public resources; they were also an active front in the struggles of both sides to eradicate national indifference. . . . Zahra's book makes many contributions to several different literatures, including comparative studies of nationalism, the history of the welfare state, and the history of pedagogy. Most striking for me, though, was her ability to write a truly Bohemian history, rather than a Czech or German one. Not only are Czech and German histories intimately intertwined in this book, they are in fact unthinkable without each other. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker's call to see nations as 'perspectives on the world' rather than 'things in the world' (p. 8), Zahra shows how Czech and German nationalist perspectives related directly to each other, finding meaning in their relationship to the other. The persistence of national indifference-the fuzzy margins between Czech and German national communities-maintained the salience of these national perspectives, while at the same time casting doubt on their substantive differences. -H-German, H-Net Reviews, February 2009

<p> Tara Zahra's finely researched, engagingly written book . . . makes two central points. First, exclusive national identification was neither a natural nor an inevitable development in multi-linguistic central Europe. And second, competing nationalists had to work hard to win the allegiance of 'nationally ambiguous' Bohemians and Moravians. The nationalists' persistent sense of failure motivated their nationalizing efforts as much as their successes. Zahra astutely focuses on nationalist campaigns for the 'souls' of school children in Bohemia and Moravia. Not only were schools a central battleground in conflicts between Czech and German nationalists over the control of public resources; they were also an active front in the struggles of both sides to eradicate national indifference. . . . Zahra's book makes many contributions to several different literatures, including comparative studies of nationalism, the history of the welfare state, and the history of pedagogy. Most striking for me, though, was her ability to write a truly Bohemian history, rather than a Czech or German one. Not only are Czech and German histories intimately intertwined in this book, they are in fact unthinkable without each other. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker's call to see nations as 'perspectives on the world' rather than 'things in the world' (p. 8), Zahra shows how Czech and German nationalist perspectives related directly to each other, finding meaning in their relationship to the other. The persistence of national indifference the fuzzy margins between Czech and German national communities maintained the salience of these national perspectives, while at the same time casting doubt on their substantive differences. H-German, H-Net Reviews, February 2009

Tara Zahra's finely researched, engagingly written book . . . makes two central points. First, exclusive national identification was neither a natural nor an inevitable development in multi-linguistic central Europe. And second, competing nationalists had to work hard to win the allegiance of 'nationally ambiguous' Bohemians and Moravians. The nationalists' persistent sense of failure motivated their nationalizing efforts as much as their successes. Zahra astutely focuses on nationalist campaigns for the 'souls' of school children in Bohemia and Moravia. Not only were schools a central battleground in conflicts between Czech and German nationalists over the control of public resources; they were also an active front in the struggles of both sides to eradicate national indifference. . . . Zahra's book makes many contributions to several different literatures, including comparative studies of nationalism, the history of the welfare state, and the history of pedagogy. Most striking for me, though, was her ability to write a truly Bohemian history, rather than a Czech or German one. Not only are Czech and German histories intimately intertwined in this book, they are in fact unthinkable without each other. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker's call to see nations as 'perspectives on the world' rather than 'things in the world' (p. 8), Zahra shows how Czech and German nationalist perspectives related directly to each other, finding meaning in their relationship to the other. The persistence of national indifference the fuzzy margins between Czech and German national communities maintained the salience of these national perspectives, while at the same time casting doubt on their substantive differences. H-German, H-Net Reviews, February 2009

Author Information

Tara Zahra is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

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