"Each nation only cares for its own": Empire, Nation, and Child Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1918

Abstract

IN THE FALL OF 1917, Franziszka Pollabrek, a Czech-speaking factory worker, was at her wits’ end. In a scathing letter to the Austrian Ministry of Education in Vienna, she demanded that the state do something about her incorrigible teenage sons. Pollabrek expressed her frustration with the state’s inaction in the face of what she perceived to be a disturbing wartime social crisis: “My boys will become nothing but thieves, liars, and murderers if you, dear Sirs, don’t intervene soon,” she warned. “The fathers are in the military, the male teachers are mobilized, and I work in the factory. You want to do nothing, so where should I begin? Since you have taken away their father, why don’t you take the children as well, let the boys be locked up or shot, so that I don’t have to see them anymore.”1 Pollabrek was not alone. Across Europe, citizens depicted the upheaval of World War I through stories of broken families, absent fathers, negligent mothers, and delinquent children, and they demanded action from the state.2 In the Bohemian lands (the Austrian crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), German and Czech nationalist child welfare activists took the initiative in responding to these demands. As a nationally segregated child welfare system developed and expanded in this region between 1900 and 1945, nationalist social welfare activists created and transformed imagined boundaries between public and private, as well as relationships between state and nation in the context of a multinational empire.3