| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Scott Spector. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle. (Weimar and Now, number 21.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 331.
Scott Spector's book is one of those works that historians claim to appreciate in principle but tend to avoid in practice, given what might at first appear to be the book's predominant reliance on literary modes of analysis. Procrastinators would do well to take the plunge, however, for Spector's work represents one of the most lucid and compelling analyses of the Central European fin de siècle cultural moment since Carl Schorske's Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980). Spector offers the attentive reader a radically revised and intellectually compelling framework for understanding many of the issues originally raised by Schorske. His conclusions are ultimately more useful for understanding Habsburg Central Europe than were Schorske's, not least since they are not tied to the narrow model of Vienna but rather to the classic location of nationalist political conflict, Bohemia.	1
In a work whose own scintillating literary style inscribes its author's new approaches to his subject, Spector focuses on a cultural moment he characterizes as exceptional. The Prague writers whose words he analyzes, German-speaking Jews of Franz Kafka's generation, found themselves in an increasingly untenable situation. Behind them lay the discredited German liberal certainties of their parents, while before them threatened radical nationalist communities from which, as Jews, they were ultimately barred. Trapped between such hostile and mutually exclusive certainties, these writers found little breathing space. Yet if nationalist politics in early twentieth-century Prague constituted itself in terms of battling cultures, that very figure of culture ultimately offered these writers myriad possibilities for confronting their nationalized world. Ironically, it was their cultural work that provided these Praguers a political escape route from an intolerable situation, giving them the means to theorize alternative visions to the stale liberal certainties behind them and the terrifying nationalist ones surrounding them.	. . .

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