Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 by Jeremy s> King (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 759 Professor Berend has given us a thought-provoking study. In any future edition, care should be taken that 'statnipravo' is not translatedas Rechtsstaat or Griinderzeit as the 'age of boosterism'. Anglo-American College, Prague Z. A. B. ZEMAN King, Jeremy. Budweisers intoCzechsandGermans. A LocalHistogyof Bohemian Politics, I848-I948. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and London, 2002. XV+ 284 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. C27.95. THE flood of works now appearing on personal and communal forms of identityin the Habsburglands includes a growingstreamof treatmentswhich arguefor the survivalof markedlylocal loyaltiesmuch longer than historians' incautious use of phrases like 'national question' or 'ethnic contest' would suggest. Recent examples are Conrad Klewing's analysis of Dalmatia, EleonoraBabejov'a's of Pressburg,and the latest(2003) Austrian Histogy Yearbook articles on Galicia. Jeremy King has made a particularlysubtle, thoughtful and stimulatingcontribution to this sub-genre. His starting-pointis the year I848, the 'springtimeof nations', as the cliche has it. Yet most inhabitantsof the southern Bohemian municipality called alternatively Budweis or Ceske Budejovicewere, he claims, at that time stillneither German nor Czech, but literally 'Budweisers',probably knowing both the languages which gave the two differentnames to their town, and feeling attachment to the place itself, ratherthan to any largernational community. Underpinning that stance was a traditionalcommitment to the ethnically neutral dynasty and its authorities; and these continued to moderate and arbitrate the clash of rival national camps over the next half-century and more. Some of King's most insightfulpages are devoted to party politics in Budweis, constantlyrefractedby native concerns, splinteringand regrouping as domestic issues were negotiated by the organs of executive and legislative power within Austriain the constitutionalera. Although explicit German and Czech allegiances gained ground, they suffered from their own internal divisions and from the continuing equivocation or amphibiousness of significant sections of society. On the eve of World War I a settlement roughlyon the lines of the largerMoravian compromiseof I 905 was about to be enacted in Budweis, recognizing the need for rival national selfidentifications ,yet witnessing to the scope for local solution of the resultant problems. The collapse of the Monarchy ostensibly left (besides a small Jewish community, now counted separately)only Czechs and Germans with the former in control. The number of 'Germans', i.e. of first-languageGermanspeakers , in Ceske Budejovice even fell below the 20 per cent threshold necessary for linguistic rights. Yet, King contends, there was still no straight duality especially when Hitler's Reich emerged from 1933 to complicate German loyaltieswithin and beyond Czechoslovakia.In the years from I938 onwards, numerous citizens trimmed with the political wind, declaring or seeking to declare themselves Germans during the time of the Protectorate and Czechs when expulsion threatened in I945. Ironically, the replacement of an ethnicby a racialcriterionfornationalallegiancenow fora spellrestored 760 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 some of the flexibilitywhich previous curial arrangementshad eliminated except, of course, for theJews. King brilliantlydemonstratesthe complexities and ambiguitiesinvolved in the ascriptionof ethnicity according to objective or subjectivecriteria,as the case might be, and the ways in which these were marshalledto servecompeting nationalprogrammes. Yethispurestsubject-matterremainstantalizinglyin the shadows.'Budweisers ', as King freely admits, are difficultto identify, as is the extent of that bilingualismwhich formed their prime defining characteristic.This seems to have been widespreadin Budweis,but littleclear evidence is suppliedfor it or for the intriguingsuggestionof the use there of a mongrel patois or pidgin. Censuses cast scarcely any light on the matter, since they allowed only one language to be recorded. It is probably impossible anyway, as we know from the imponderability of similar kinds of statisticselsewhere (e.g. those nearer home about knowledgeof Welsh),to measurewith any accuracythe sphereof application of such submerged vernaculars and the nature of associated linguistic symbiosis. Hardly easier to assess are the social and political implications. King's own sources may leave us wondering whether many Budweisers were really so ethnically indifferent, when as early as thei86os even culturalassociationslikethe town'schoirswere alreadyrivenby national strife, and when by the turn of the century mob violence became commonplace . The author's reliance on the local press, which usually had an axe to grind, may actuallyundercut his own argument here. And perhaps he is also too ready to assume the impartialityof all those...