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Review
| Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics 1848–1948, by Jeremy King. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 304 pages with photos. $24.95, paper.
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| Nationhood has long preoccupied historians of Central Europe. In the twentieth century it proved a major political and social force, and after both world wars was a chief criterion for the creation of new states. Central European nation states and the historians who champion them often trace their national histories and legitimacy back to the distant past. Burt Jeremy King urges us to eschew ahistorical understandings of nations as ancient and ubiquitous. King joins other recent historians of the Habsburg Empire and its successor states in arguing that nationhood in its nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms was a modern phenomenon that is neither as natural nor as unproblematic as it first appears, and whose origins can be traced to the relatively recent past. Budweisers into Czechs and Germans examines the rise and development of national politics in the Bohemian city of Budweis/Budejovice. King uses a variety of published sources, especially newspapers, to trace metropolitan electoral politics, the career paths of major city leaders, political attempts to shape the electorate, and the central government's influence on local politicians' choices from 1848 to 1948. |
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The author argues that in 1848, and indeed, well into the 1860s, Budweis/Budejovice's population and electorate was divided among Czechs, Germans, and people he calls Budweisers who were able to move in both Czech and German circles, and who were committed to the Habsburg monarchy rather than to any nation. King argues that German and Czech national movements emerged in Bohemia in the second half of the nineteenth century with quite different understandings of nationhood, and in direct connection with contemporary political positions which, on the surface, seemed to have little to do with nationality. In the 1860s, liberal constitutionalists were in the German camp, conservative federalists in the Czech camp. Yet although these different political positions carried a national meaning, a vote in favor of one or the other did not necessarily indicate the voter's language or ethnicity. Nevertheless, as King demonstrates, ethnicity initially played a larger role in the self-definition of Czech nationalists than among Germans who took a more civic view of nationality. But understandings of nationhood changed over time. As the Habsburg government expanded suffrage rights, and as Budweis/Budejovice grew through in-migration from the countryside, demographics worked in favor of Czech national leaders' ethnic interpretation of nationality. By the turn of the century, German national leaders too were embracing an increasingly ethnic understanding of nationality. Leaders of both national movements made use of expanded freedoms of expression and association to build political constituencies and to nationalize the population. |
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After World War I and the creation of Czechoslovakia, Bohemian nationality politics shifted dramatically. Czechs had the clear upper hand and were able to combine ethnic and historical-territorial understandings to legitimate their new position as the political leaders of the Czechoslovak nation state. Germans, cast into the role of a national minority, embraced ethnic nationhood through necessity and with growing conviction. The third player in King's political triad—the Habsburg state—vanished after 1918. Yet as King demonstrates, extra-Bohemian politics continued to influence the Czech-German nationalities fight. The western Allies, the German Third Reich, and the Soviet Union all proved critical in shifting political advantage first to the Czechs, then to the Germans, and after 1945, back to the Czechs. |
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King chronicles Budweiser's shifts in attitude toward nationality from the 1860s, when national identities only surfaced in formal politics, to 1946, when nationality was equated with ethnicity and Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, he makes it clear that as starkly as these distinctions were drawn rhetorically by 1946, in practice many Bohemians continued to cross the lines between Czechness and Germanness, whether from political conviction, extra-national commitments, or pure opportunism. However, despite King's argument that Czech and German forms of nationhood were nether constant, nor representative of the whole of Budweis/Budejovice, non-national Budweisers stay mostly in the shadows of his story. This is both disappointing and understandable. King's point that many Bohemians were nationally "amphibious," is a critical one for understanding the dilemmas of the late Habsburg Empire and its national successor states. Attention to the difficulty of defining nationality and making national definitions stick, even in the era of rampant nationalism, is an essential corrective to the histories of Bohemia and modern Central Europe. Nevertheless, as King's work sometimes shows, it is hard to escape the strident and visible rhetoric of nationalists. More complex and less combative political identities and behavior are both harder to describe and more difficult to document. Jeremy King has written a provocative book that is not only a valuable addition to the historiography of Bohemia, but offers a detailed case study of the development and dynamics of nationhood. It should be of interest to scholars across geographic fields. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Caitlin Murdock |
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