German-speaking Central Europe Research Articles

Practicing Medicine on Shaky Grounds

Abstract The aim of this article is to reveal for the first time a broader participation of craft surgeons from German-speaking Central Europe in the enslavement trade. Using the Dutch and Danish enslavement trades as examples, the patterns and structures behind the recruitment of such ship’s surgeons will be illuminated. That this activity also had repercussions for the German-speaking hinterland will be illustrated using the example of a Prussian surgeon who published a manual for aspiring medical personnel on practicing aboard slaving vessels, based on his own experiences. His case demonstrates that in Germany, too, some medical practices were first tested aboard slaving vessels and subsequently found their way into general medical discourse.

How far has the digitization of medical teaching progressed in times of COVID-19? A multinational survey among medical students and lecturers in German-speaking central Europe

Background To ensure successful medical education despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for online instruction has substantially increased. Fast and efficient teaching in a digital format poses a great challenge for medical students and lecturers as well as the universities.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to capture the readiness of medical students and faculty members to participate in rapidly- evolving online education.MethodsThis cross-sectional study is based on two questionnaires distributed among medical students and associate deans for education in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Questions included decision- making questions, categorical questions, and open-ended questions, all addressing the frequency and format of the digital education offered, the perceived quality of digital education, and medical student satisfaction with digital education. Questions about missing content and areas for improvement from the perspectives of medical students were included. The associate deans were asked for their opinions about the impact of the pandemic on teaching, the organizational setup and implementation of digital education by universities, and plans for future initiatives.Results Three thousand and thirty medical students (m = 752 and f = 2245) from 53 universities participated in the study. The study showed that 92% of students were affected by the pandemic, and 19% of the students viewed the changes as entirely negative. 97% of the medical students were able to participate in digital courses, but only 4% were able to learn exclusively online. For 77% of the medical students, digital offerings accounted for over 80% of the education offered. In terms of content, medical students complained about a lack of practical teaching, such as contact with patients, lecturers, fellow medical students, and a poor perceived quality of teaching due to dubbing, frequent changeover of seminars, problem-oriented learning groups and in-person teaching, a lack of interaction possibilities and a lack of technical equipment, such as lecturers’ knowledge and server capacities, at the universities. Overall, almost half of the medical students (42%) rated the implementation of digital teaching at their universities as good or very good. Forty-one of the 53 associate deans responded to the questionnaire, and 35 felt medical education was influenced by the pandemic. The associate deans (80%; 33/41) felt that the digitalization of medical education was negatively influenced by the pandemic. Only 44% (18/41) felt that their universities were well or very well positioned for digital teaching. All the associate deans believe that digital teaching in medicine will continue after the pandemic.ConclusionsIn the German-speaking world, the rapid conversion of medical teaching to a digital format has been well implemented in many cases. The perceived quality of the implementation of digital education still lacks practical relevance and the use of new digital media, such as learning games, VR, and online question time. The digital format of medical education will likely continue beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Heretical refugees and persecution of German Waldensians, 1393–1400

ABSTRACT Historians of heresy and inquisition in late medieval German-speaking central Europe have long discussed the mobility and initiative of prosecutors – episcopal or mendicant inquisitors – as one of the main factors behind the intensification of anti-heretical activity during the 1390s and the early years of the fifteenth century. However, the mobility of heretical refugees produced by these inquisitions also constituted an important factor that helped to perpetuate anti-heretical violence. This article examines late medieval refugees by looking at two case studies involving individuals who left their home towns during the period of intensified persecutions of German Waldensians in the 1390s. Their itineraries demonstrate that Waldensian followers knew of the heretical communities in other cities and reveal the effect the refugees had on their host communities. Waldensian refugees contributed to destabilising local communities or attracting inquisitorial attention, which stoked religious violence and caused further waves of displacement.

Avant la « Solution finale ». Vers une histoire mondiale de la « Question juive » nazie, 1919-1945

When historians discuss the so-called “Jewish Question” (Judenfrage), it is almost always framed as a direct prelude to the “Final Solution” (Endlösung). By focusing on the Holocaust, it is often overlooked that the Final Solution emerged very late in the history of the Jewish Question. There was no comprehensive plan to murder European Jews until the start of Operation Reinhard in the winter and spring of 1941-1942, more than nine years after the Nazis seized power, nearly a quarter century after the foundation of the NSDAP, and at least a century after discussions of the Jewish Question began percolating widely across German and European politics, culture, and society. Equally as important, most victims of the Holocaust died in a period of just eleven months between mid-March 1942 and mid-1943. Collapsing the long and complicated history of the Jewish Question into the universal “vanishing point” of 1941-42 obscures as much as it reveals. Doing so ignores the fact that the Final Solution was the dominant scheme for fewer than three years and would almost certainly not have occurred––at least not to the same degree and scale––had some combination of these earlier “solutions” to the Jewish Question been deployed with greater efficiency or alacrity. To be sure, the very concept of a Jewish Question presupposes a problem to be solved, which in turn plays into the hands of anti-Semites and potentially encourages increasingly radical approaches. There is also no doubt regarding the culpability of the Third Reich in conceiving and carrying out the Final Solution. However, approaching the Nazi Jewish Question as merely a prelude to the Final Solution fails to account for decades of discussion, debate, and alternative methods that occurred in a transnational and often global context. The many strategies regarding the Jewish Question were defined by a variety of state and individual actors, only a minority of whom were German, much less (future) Nazis. Hence, neither the framing of the Jewish Question as a problem to be solved, nor the proposed solutions to that problem were possible without (geo) political, socioeconomic, cultural, and intellectual entanglements that extended beyond German-speaking Central Europe. These entangled histories of ethnicity, religion, and national identity; of disintegrating empires and emerging nation-states; of global capitalism and colonialism, and of race and space provide the context for the fundamental issues underlying any history of the Nazi Party’s Jewish Question.

Erich Heller’s Disinherited Mind: A Bohemian Jewish Germanist in Anglo-American Exile

Abstract This article examines the life and thought of Erich Heller, a prolific scholar of Austrian and German literature and philosophy. Born into a German Jewish family in the borderland of Habsburg Bohemia, Heller graduated from Prague’s German University, only to be forced to flee the Nazi invasion. He found refuge in Britain before moving ultimately to the United States where he taught for two decades at Northwestern University. Erich Heller’s physical and intellectual journey highlights both moments of conflict and cultural transmittance between German-speaking Central Europe and the Anglophone world. Heller was only half at home in the new world where he helped rehabilitated German and Austrian literature and thought abroad. The article explores Heller’s intellectual development throughout his voluntary and forced migrations and traces changes in his political and philosophical identity. Heller’s life, thought, and success are considered in two main contexts: that of his generation of Bohemian-born émigrés and of the postwar atmosphere in American higher education, in particular, the role of German-speaking scholars within it. It analyzes the way in which Heller understood his own transcendence within the national frames and its implication. The article answers two questions: What were the main contributing factors to Heller’s success in the postwar academic discipline German and Austrian Studies and what is the relevance of his teaching today?

Von Pfahlbürgern und Zugvögeln: Kontroversen um das deutsche Heimatrecht im 19. Jahrhundert

Modern nation-state building involved the rise of state citizenship and the decline of local membership that had characterized the pre-industrial world. In German-speaking Central Europe, however, this transition was neither quick nor smooth. Rather, the Heimatrecht (home law or home right), which tied people to their community of origin, remained significant throughout the nineteenth century. Recent scholarship on the concept of Heimat has largely ignored its legal history, assuming a rupture between “old” pragmatic-juridical and “new” sentimental-ideological understandings of the term. This article argues that no such clear separation is feasible. Centering on the founding phase of the German Empire, it discusses how the Heimatrecht was defined in the German states before 1871, why it became a bone of political contention between particularism and Prussia-orientated nationalism, and how it affected the lives of migrants. Finally, the article highlights a paradoxical continuity: modern state citizenship enlarged the legal Heimat, but perpetuated its core dilemma.

Pandemics and Political Development

ABSTRACTDo pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre ed. by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek

Reviewed by: Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre ed. by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek William N. West TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS IN EARLY MODERN THEATRE. Edited by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; pp. 320. Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre is one of the rare edited collections of essays that offers more than the sum of its parts. Severally, its chapters address a range of performance traditions in early modern Europe, some infrequently studied. Collectively, they demonstrate the variety of early modern performances and the lively interchange among traditions that made them possible. Most significantly, as brilliantly introduced and organized by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek, Transnational Connections articulates a sustained orientation towards performance in the early modern period and a powerful theory of a distinctive early modern strain of performance, native to no single place, inherently mobile, growing up as it passed among the nodal points of multiple communities—cities, regions, and contact zones; shared and diverging languages, identities, and creeds; as local as individual objects or events and as broad as continents and centuries. The result is a new and "explicit methodological approach" (7) to early modern performances that maps changes and differences across expanses of time, space, and culture. Transnational Connections plots early modern performance's decisive transgressiveness, in the literal sense of stepping across boundaries. The transnationality the title promises is not merely circulatory, moving from one fixed point to another—Italian performance styles in the Spanish peninsula, or English ones in German-speaking central Europe—but supranational. These diverse kinds of performances were born on the road. By being at home nowhere, or, in the case of performance styles that emphasized their foreignness, simply elsewhere, they seemed able to find a welcome everywhere. While the central concern of Transnational Connections is performances that developed outside other forms of community, its individual chapters show that any attempt to map this category must begin from the seemingly disparate particulars of performances, themselves only visible now in material remains—letters, scripts, implied gestures, in one memorable instance a shoe—that require effort and imagination to revive. Many chapters explore what Louise Clubb calls theatergrams, recurring scenes, situations, characters, gestures, and even gags, that appear across a spectrum of performances in early modern Europe, crossing every generic, linguistic, and class barrier. In the first chapter, "If the shoe fits, or the truth in pinking," for instance, Natasha Korda takes a shoe found in the excavation of The Rose Playhouse as "a point of convergence where the material, textual, theoretical and theatrical worlds meet" (29), then models how this quotidian object made precious by its time and place summons an inclusive past that runs through the representations of plays, the realities of continental traffic in goods and persons, and the peculiar substantial intimacy of the foot. This contextualization, Korda argues, "need not take the form of a utilitarian pairing" (37) in which details are reduced to expressions of the contexts within which they are nested. Korda's framing of the shoe suggests the methodological commitment to detail that all the chapters share. Further chapters of Transnational Connections reveal more supervenient qualities of performance arts over their materiality: what they are is enlivened by how they have entered into different worlds and what they uniquely carry with them. Performance may be particular among cultural productions for its insistence on showing off its borrowings, as Katritzky and Drábek argue: "Theatrum mundi is here understood not only as metaphor but even more as literal display" (7). They propose that we learn to reposition this aspect of early modern performance as a "cultural type" (17), a social, [End Page 435] aesthetic category rather than a temporal one. Although they do not develop this suggestion, it might distinguish this kind of early modern inter-theatre from more rooted, local forms like civic pageants and festive performances staged by a community for itself rather than by one, perhaps fleeting and temporary, perhaps more permanent but mobile, community for another. Drábek's chapter, "'Why, sir, are there other heauens in other countries?': The English Comedy as a transnational style," considers what was called "English comedy...

MarriageorProfession? MarriageandProfession? Marriage Patterns Among Highly Successful Women of Jewish Descent and Other Women in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German-Speaking Central Europe

AbstractThis study analyzes the marriage patterns of five hundred highly successful women in modern German-speaking Central Europe. Among the women at the very top of their professions, women of Jewish descent were more likely than non-Jewish women to marry while they pursued their careers. The results of our quantitative study—67.6 percent of women of Jewish descent married versus 51.6 percent of non-Jewish women—provide a unique body of data that complements and contributes to other research that identifies distinctive aspects of Central European Jewish life patterns: the high number of Jewish women university students, the importance of women of Jewish descent in a number of fields, and Jewish families as early adopters of a modern family form with a small number of children and intensive investment in each child.

Old Regime in a New World: Frankfurt’s Financial Market in the Nineteenth Century

AbstractDuring the final third of the nineteenth century, German-speaking central Europe emerged as one of the leading creditors of US governments and corporations. London, Amsterdam, and New York ...

Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? We address this question by examining the consequences of the most deadly pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347-1351). Our claim is that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if they impose sufficient loss of life so as to augment the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor repressive regimes (such as serfdom) become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. We test our theory by tracing out the local consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. We find that areas hit hardest by the pandemic were more likely to: (1) adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns; (2) exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics; and (3) have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler's National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic's fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

Theology and politics in the German imagination, 1789–1848

ABSTRACT This piece introduces a special issue of Global Intellectual History, on the theme of Theology and Politics in the German Imagination, 1789–1848. The essays in the issue proceed from a conference of the same name, held in Cambridge at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), in July 2017, which was supported by funds from the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub. The event was primed to consider the distinctive relationships between theology and politics, church and state, that emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany (and German-speaking central Europe). By focussing on figures, institutions, and events from this period – when a nascent ‘Germany’ was defining itself as a nation and a culture – we challenged the all too frequent reduction of religion in the modern world to an ideology which simply competes with politics. Instead, we sought to discuss the subtle and significant ways in which theology and politics interact and inform one another. During our opening roundtable discussion, panellists stressed the need to re-think the category of ‘nationalism’ as applied to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany.

Richard Schaukal in Netzwerken und Feldern der literarischen Moderne by Cornelius Mitterer

Reviews 216 linked this meaningfully with an examination of the three versions of Trakl’s poem on Novalis, and this second one in particular. This would have opened up possibilities for a more in-depth exploration of Trakl’s unique contribution to Neo-Romantic trends at the time, an overdue corrective of the all-too Expressionism-oriented interpretations of this enigmatic poet. Rüdiger Görner Queen Mary University of London Richard Schaukal in Netzwerken und Feldern der literarischen Moderne. By Cornelius Mitterer. Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, 149. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. 302 pp. £91.00. ISBN 978 3 11 061801 3. Richard Schaukal (1874–1942) is today mainly perceived as belonging to the Austrian Modernism of the 1890s and beyond. Although he is, in some aspects of his oeuvre, ‘wesensverwandt’ (p. 216) with protagonists of Young Vienna, he remained on the fringes of the movement socially and otherwise. Schaukal’s desire to distinguish himself is tangible throughout his correspondence; his public persona, carefully nurtured, was one of aristocratic exclusivity, in line with his most notorious literary creation, the ‘dandy and dilettante’ Andreas von Balthesser (1907). Stylistically, the use of Impressionist devices, short prose formats, translations and Nachdichtungen of Verlaine and other influential French poets, as well as his frequent opinionated use of the essay, identify Schaukal as very much part of the fabric of Austrian letters: his transition into the post-war world included a marked turn towards political conservatism. In spite of his aloofness and posturing, the realities of the literary marketplace and his own desire for recognition necessitated a wide range of contacts with colleagues and mediators. Mainly deploying network theory and a sociological toolkit derived from Pierre Bourdieu, Mitterer charts Schaukal’s attempts at accumulating social, cultural and symbolic capital, as well as his strategies for employing this capital to advance his status and manipulate the perception of him in his chosen field. Schaukal’s capital was at its height around 1900 — when his translations, poetry and prose collections were well received throughout German-speaking central Europe — only to wane shortly before the war. Mitterer draws on a broad concept of habitus to explain the ambivalent position of his subject and the often restrained reaction of contemporaries to this self-styled dandy with his precious sense of self-worth. In Schaukal’s interaction with some of the major literary figures of his time, blatant attempts at ingratiation and exploitation of a correspondent’s influence, an arrogant insistence on his own integrity and independence, and a proclivity to unmotivated offence coexist in very close proximity. This explains why most of his networking efforts were short-lived, contradictory (flattery in private, harsh criticism in public — or vice versa), asymmetrical and ultimately ineffective. The main corpus that Mitterer draws on is Schaukal’s correspondence. Three hundred of the nine hundred correspondents in his estate belong to the world of Reviews 217 literature in the widest sense, including not only fellow writers, but also editors, translators, illustrators and publishers, all potential arbiters of literary success. The list of only the most prominent names that Mitterer features reads like a Who’s Who of German letters of the time. It includes proponents of vastly different literary and ideological persuasions, generations, nationalities and social backgrounds — from Arthur Schnitzler to Richard Kralik, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach to Hermann Hesse. Other correspondents include Hermann Bahr, Franz Blei, Max Brod and further members of the Prague scene; Arno Holz, Adolf Loos, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rilke, Ferdinand von Saar, Hugo Salus, Heinrich Vogeler, Herwarth Walden, Stefan Zweig. Only a fraction of this material has been published before. Its richness allows Mitterer to reconstruct Schaukal’s efforts to seek opportunities in various political and artistic milieus. He established himself with some success in Munich modernist circles, but had less success with the George circle (not for lack of trying). Schaukal’s relationship to the narrower circles of Viennese modernism was fraught with conflict and unease: he professed kinship with Karl Kraus as another incorruptible mind, yet could not rise above his own increasingly explicit antisemitic inclinations. Many of these contradictions are convincingly explained by Mitterer as anachronisms, the results of incompatibilities (for example...

Jude oder preußischer Bürger? Die Emanzipationsdebatte im Spannungsfeld von Regierungspolitik, Religion, Bürgerlichkeit und Öffentlichkeit (1780–1847)

The period between 1750 and 1850 was a time of profound social and political transformation in which ‘the legal, social, cultural, and knowledge orders that had structured people’s lives for many generations rapidly lost meaning’ (Simone Lässig in a Discussion Forum on the ‘Vanishing Nineteenth Century in European History’, Central European History 51, 2018). The resultant unravelling of traditional institutions and cultural norms had a strong effect on the Jews in German-speaking Central Europe. This is particularly evident in late eighteenth-century Prussia, which saw both the formation of the Jewish Enlightenment and the emergence of wide-reaching public debates on the civic improvement of the Jews, initiated by Christian Wilhelm Dohm in 1781. A plethora of recent studies have already examined the development of these debates during the 1780s and 1790s. This enormously useful book by Anne Purschwitz adds to existing scholarship by taking a broader view of the Prussian public debates on the ‘Jewish question’ from their inception in 1781 throughout the Vormärz era until 1847.

Returning Chernivtsi to the Cultural Map of Europe: The Meridian Czernowitz International Poetry Festival

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and ‘ethnic unmixing’, guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger. Drawing on tropes, stories, and symbols emanating from lost layers of urban cultural diversity has been an important resource in post-socialist city branding in many cities in Eastern and Central Europe that saw significant ethno-demographic changes in connection with World War II. In Chernivtsi, this is usually framed by narratives emphasizing tolerance, cultural diversity, and Europeanness, notions that are prominent in myths about the city in German-speaking Central Europe. A common strategy here, found in municipal city branding and in commercial efforts to draw on the multiethnic past in restaurants and cafés, is to deemphasize difficult questions about what actually happened to the celebrated cultural diversity and soften or ignore the temporal break. The article analyses how the International Poetry Festival Meridian Czernowitz, that has taken place in Chernivtsi since 2010, works with the city’s culturally diverse past and its literary dimensions, drawing on tropes from both local multiculturalist narratives and on the Bukowina-Mythos popularised by intellectuals from German-speaking countries. Although the festival is not a venue for working through traumas, locating events in symbolically charged places such as the Jewish cemetery and highlighting Holocaust themes in poetry readings opens up for difficult questions where the lost cultural diversity might become something more than only a resource.

Gendering Central European History: Changing Representations of Women and Gender in Comparison, 1968–2017

A jubilee is the perfect time for a critical stocktaking, and this essay uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Central European History (CEH), the leading American journal of the history of “German-speaking Central Europe,” to explore the changing representations of women and gender in this journal since its founding in 1968. The declared aim of CEH was, according to the founding editor, Douglas A. Unfug, to become a “broadly rather than narrowly defined” journal that covers “all periods from the Middle Ages to the present” and includes, next to “traditional approaches to history,” innovative and “experimental methodological approaches.” As Kenneth F. Ledford, the third CEH editor (after Unfug and Kenneth D. Barkin), wrote in 2005, the journal should simultaneously reflect and drive “the intellectual direction(s) of its eponymous field.”

Intellectual, Institutional, and Technological Transitions: Central European History, 2004–2014

Volumes 38 to 47 of Central European History, which appeared from July 2004 to June 2014, represented years of fundamental transition in the life of the journal and of its sponsoring society: then the Conference Group for Central European History, now the Central European History Society. This fundamental transition manifested itself in three forms: institutional formality, both of the journal and of the Conference Group/Society; publishing organization and technology—from the ways in which the editor produced the journal to the ways in which the audience consumed the scholarship it published; and, last but not least, the intellectual focus and content of the history of German-speaking Central Europe that Central European History presented to scholars and students alike. Although the decade presented some unexpected and surprising challenges, all these transitions were already visible in July 2002 when I presented my proposal to become editor of Central European History to the Editor Search Committee, which consisted of Konrad Jarausch, Kees Gispen, and then-editor Kenneth Barkin.

Authoritarianism in Modern Germany History

Why study the history of modern German-speaking Central Europe? If pressed to answer this question fifty years ago, a Germanist would likely have said something to the effect that one studies modern German history to trace the “German” origins of Nazism, with the broader aim of understanding authoritarianism. While the problem of authoritarianism clearly remains relevant to this day, the nation-state-centered approach to understanding it has waned, especially in light of the recent shift toward transnational and global history. The following essay focuses on the issue of authoritarianism, asking whether the study of German history is still relevant to authoritarianism. It begins with a review of two conventional approaches to understanding authoritarianism in modern German history, and then thinks about it in a different way through G. W. F. Hegel in an effort to demonstrate the vibrancy of German intellectual history for exploring significant and global issues such as authoritarianism.

Habsburg History, Eastern European History … Central European History?

Germany and all things German have long been the primary concern ofCentral European History(CEH), yet the journal has also been intimately tied to the lands of the former Habsburg monarchy. As the editor stated in the first issue, published in March 1968,CEHemerged “in response to a widespread demand for an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe,” following the demise of theJournal of Central European Affairsin 1964. The Conference Group for Central European History sponsoredCEH, as well as the recently mintedAustrian History Yearbook(AHY). Robert A. Kann, the editor ofAHY, sat on the editorial board ofCEH, whose second issue featured a trenchant review by István Deák of Arthur J. May'sThe Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918. The third issue contained the articles “The Defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the Balance of Power” by Kann, and Gerhard Weinberg's “The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Balance of Power.” That same year,East European Quarterlypublished its first issue.

Handbuch der deutschen Literatur Prags und der Böhmischen Länder by Peter Becher Steffen Höhne Jörg Krappmann Manfred Weinberg

Reviews 271 British Library, 2014]). Other censors were simple bureaucrats, and at least one, apparently, exploited his position to read pornographic books before banning them. Even if some censorship is defensible, however, such ‘Bevormundung’, as Bachleitner calls it, is hardly the way to create a mature and enlightened public. It also makes prohibited works seem excessively attractive. Revealingly, censors objected to popular fiction about robbers, ghosts, and so on, because they stimulated the imagination (‘weil sie nur “die Einbildungskraft spannen und beschäftigen”’, p. 104). A more cynical policy would have encouraged adventure fiction to divert people from thinking about real discontents. The case studies partly confirm expectations. They show that negative remarks about Catholicism, whether in Schiller or Fenimore Cooper, led to prohibitions. Pleas for religious toleration were inadmissible: Nathan der Weise and Goethe’s Brief des Pastors von *** an den neuen Pastor zu *** were banned. We also learn something about eighteenth-century reading practices. Wieland’s Agathon incurred disapproval even from the sophisticated van Swieten because of Hippias’s defence of materialism, even though the context shows that Wieland intends his philosophy to seem tempting but reprehensible. Particularly instructive is the case of Werther. It was banned on publication because it might encourage suicide (and there is strong though not conclusive evidence that it did prompt several suicides). In 1786 the ban was lifted, on the grounds that people were less likely to commit suicide from unrequited love than because they were hopelessly in debt or afraid of being punished for fraud, but in 1803 the ban was restored. Bachleitner argues that the habit of reading saints’ lives with a view to imitatio transferred itself to secular literature, supported by the new eighteenth-century practice of empathetic reading. One might extrapolate to the conclusion that the concept of specifically aesthetic experience was only gradually developing. These are just a few of the rewards to be gleaned from this rich and amply documented study. Ritchie Robertson The Queen’s College, Oxford Handbuch der deutschen Literatur Prags und der Böhmischen Länder. Ed. by Peter Becher, Steffen Höhne, Jörg Krappmann and Manfred Weinberg. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017. 445 pp. Hardback €102.80; ebook €69.95. ISBN 978–3476 –02579–1. It is probably apt to say at the outset that this handbook has an extremely ambitious goal: to do justice to the complexities and intricacies of such rich and diverse a literary landscape across long periods of gradual change as well as the most radical of historical caesuras. The ‘Bohemian lands’ of the title are defined as the area traditionally belonging to the Bohemian crown, namely the kingdom of Bohemia, the margraviate of Moravia and the individual territories of the formerly Polish duchy of Silesia (Přemysl) which became Bohemian vassals during the late Middle Ages. Lusatia and the Silesian duchies seized by Prussia in the First Silesian War (1740–42) do not feature in this volume. The Reviews 272 periods covered are thus the era of Habsburg rule over Bohemian lands since the age of Enlightenment, the Czechoslovak Republic 1918–38 and the Nazi period following German annexation of the Sudetenland and the formation of a Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia. As a ‘Nachklang’, remnants of Bohemian German culture after 1945 inside and outside communist Czechoslovakia receive due consideration. This temporal restriction is appropriate as it allows concentration on significant modern developments such as the formation of ‘national’ literatures in the context of emerging modern societies, the configuration around distinct political entities with (multiple) centres and peripheries, and the investigation of these areas’ relationships with external cultural reference points such as the metropoles of German-speaking central Europe. The list of authors at the end of the volume (pp. 418–27) gives an impression of the scale of the task. It comprises close to 700 names including authors who left the region early and made a reputation for themselves elsewhere (such as Rilke and Werfel), authors whose work seems intimately linked to their place of origin but in a manner difficult to define (such as Franz Kafka), authors who were not native to the area, but whose work reflects its conditions and characteristics (such as Ferdinand von Saar...