Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: a local history of Bohemian politics, 1848-1948

Abstract

Jeremy King. into and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2003. 376 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $39.50, cloth.Do historians need yet another reminder that nations are a product of political nurture rather than human nature? Twenty-five years ago, Gary Cohen demonstrated that Czech and Gentian national communities in Prague reflected not primordial cultural and linguistic attachments but far more mundane social and political forces. Ten years later, thanks largely to Benedict Anderson, it became conventional wisdom among scholars of nationalism that nations are imagined In into and Germans, King pushes these constructivist insights to their logical conclusions, with fresh results. Through a local study of in the Southern Bohemian town of Budweis/Budejovice, King rewrites the grand narratives of Habsburg, Czech, and German history with non-national actors, namely Budweisers and the Habsburg state itself, at the fore. The town of Budweis/Budejovice provides a rich setting for King's larger story, which spans four state regimes and one hundred years of Bohemian politics, during which the grandchildren of Budweisers gradually became and Germans.Embedded in King's story of nationalization in Budweis/Budejovice are several critical interventions in the field of nationalism studies. First, King challenges scholars to abandon the term ethnicity as a category to describe pre-national or pre-political cultural and linguistic communities. Ethnicity, he argues, has served to rehabilitate the primordial and teleological narratives of so-called national awakeners themselves. Language use in Budweis/Budejovice was highly situational for much of the nineteenth century, and the language a person spoke in 1848 hardly corresponded to a distinct cultural, religious, ethnic, or class affiliation, or determined the national affiliation of his or her descendents. The loyalties of King's many of whom were bilingual, were far more likely to centre on the town of Budweis/Budejovice itself, religion, and the supranational Habsburg dynasty than on language use or ethnicity. and are therefore not selfevident, pre-constituted cultural or political groups in King's account. Rather, Czechness and Germanness emerged and were transformed through political battles at the local, imperial, and (after 1918) national and international levels.Within both Czech and German nationalist movements, civic, ethnic, racial, and historical-cultural strands have come to the fore at different historical moments, as each movement sought to cast its nationalizing net over the greatest number of non-nationalized citizens. As King makes clear, many could and did chose between national communities, and some even changed their national affiliation more than once with shifting political and economic fortunes. Such individuals were not Czechified Gentians or Germanized Czechs as nationalists polemically claimed. They were rather Budweisers, individuals who had no firm sense of national affiliation.Second, King argues convincingly that the contest to transform into and Germans was a battle for the state. By sweeping through one hundred years of local, imperial, and national politics, King narrates Bohemian as a dynamic contest for Habsburg succession, for a redefinition of the nature of politics (p. 210). King shows how the supranational Habsburg state set the rules and created the framework in which nationalization took place. Czech and German nationalist movements alike competed to demonstrate their loyalties to the Habsburg state and to win state resources in battles over language rights, schools, and the civil service. …