Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870-1946 (Asao Monograph)

Changing Places

Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany Geoff Eley, Series Editor Series Editorial Board Kathleen Canning, University of Michigan David F. Crew, University of Texas, Austin Atina Grossmann, The Cooper Union Alf Lüdtke, University of Erfurt, Germany / Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea Andrei S. Markovits, University of Michigan Recent Titles Murder Scenes: Normality, Deviance, and Criminal Violence in Weimar Berlin, Sace Elder Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870 to 1946, Caitlin E. Murdock After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe, Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany, Dennis Sweeney The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture, Jennifer M. Kapczynski Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin, Sabine Hake Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland, James E. Bjork Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past, edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul B. Jaskot The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870 –1914, David D. Hamlin The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, edited by Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick Germans on Drugs: The Complications of Modernization in Hamburg, Robert P. Stephens Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750 –1830, edited by Ulrike Gleixner and Marion W. Gray Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany, Dagmar Reese Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany, Douglas G. Morris The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, edited by Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere, Keith Holz The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in NineteenthCentury Germany, Michael B. Gross German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It? edited by Agnes C. Mueller Character Is Destiny: The Autobiography of Alice Salomon, edited by Andrew Lees Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, Tina M. Campt State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State, Ulrike Strasser For a complete list of titles, please see www.press.umich.edu

Changing Places Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946

Caitlin E. Murdock

The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2010 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2o13 2012 2011 2010

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murdock, Caitlin E. Changing places : society, culture, and territory in the SaxonBohemian borderlands, 1870–1946 / Caitlin E. Murdock. p. cm. — (Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-472-11722-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Saxony (Germany)—Boundaries—Czech Republic—Bohemia. 2. Bohemia (Czech Republic)—Boundaries—Germany—Saxony. 3. Borderlands—Germany—Saxony—History. 4. Borderlands—Czech Republic—Bohemia—History. 5. Transnationalism—History. 6. Nationalism—History. 7. Saxony (Germany)—Social conditions. 8. Bohemia (Czech Republic)—Social conditions. 9. Saxony (Germany)— Politics and government. 10. Bohemia (Czech Republic)—Politics and government. I. Title. dd801.s352m87 2010 943'.2108—dc22 2009047784 ISBN13 978-0-472-02701-9 (electronic)

For my parents with love

Contents

Preface

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

chapter 1 Birth of a Borderland

17

chapter 2 A Region on the Move: Labor Migration and the Rethinking of Space, 1870–1914

33

chapter 3 “Every reason to be on their guard!” German Nationalism across the Frontier, 1880–1914

57

chapter 4 What’s in a State? Citizens, Sovereignty, and Territory in the Great War, 1914–19

81

chapter 5 The Ties That Bind: Economic Mobility, Economic Crisis, and Geographies of Instability, 1919–29

112

chapter 6 Connecting People to Places: Foreigners and Citizens in Frontier Society, 1919–32

131

chapter 7 Borderlands in Crisis, 1929–33

158

chapter 8 “No border is eternal”: The Road to Dissolution, 1933–38

181

Epilogue: Occupation, Expulsion, and Resurrection

202

Notes

213

Selected Bibliography

253

Index

265

viii

Preface

I ‹rst encountered the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands as a Fulbright fellow sent to Chemnitz, shortly after it ceased to be called Karl-Marx-Stadt. People in the United States and even the host family that collected me at the Chemnitz train station asked me what on earth I was doing there. Surely, they suggested, there were better places to be. But in retrospect, few places were more interesting at the time. Soon after my arrival, I joined some friends on a trip to the Czech Republic. It was Tag der Deutschen Einheit (German Unity Day), the new holiday to celebrate the 1990 uni‹cation. Stores in Germany were closed, and we joined a long line of cars—Trabis, Wartburgs, and Westautos—to do some discount shopping across the border. I was in Chemnitz to work on a project unrelated to the fall of communism, to Bohemia, or to borderlands. Yet as I dug around in libraries and archives, I found Bohemians everywhere. When I read historians’ accounts of Saxon history, the Bohemians vanished. I began to have a sense that there was a story here that no one was telling. This place that was considered the back of beyond by many people in the 1990s—West Germans, the Fulbright of‹ce, academics—had played a vibrant part in the modern Central European story. I quickly learned that people crossing the border to shop, work, and hike were not a peculiarly postcommunist phenomenon. Rather, they were reviving a pattern of frontier life that had ›ourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to vanish from of‹cial historical memory after World War II. The pages that follow aim to restore some part of that story and to show that Saxons’ and Bohemians’ impulse to explore one another’s towns, hiking trails, shops, and museums is but the continuation of a long European borderland tradition. This project that began when I ‹rst alighted in the Chemnitz train station has culminated as a book because of the generosity and support of numerous people and institutions. Research and writing was made possible

x

Preface

by ‹nancial support from the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, Stanford University, the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Stanford, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Mellon Foundation, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, the American Council of Learned Societies, and California State University, Long Beach. I am grateful for the help of the staff of the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv and of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden, where I became known as “Frau Murdock of the many book orders.” The archivists in the National Archives of the Czech Republic—in whose canteen I learned the Czech word for liver—provided invaluable assistance. So, too, did the staff of libraries and archives in Decín, Chemnitz, Bautzen, Leipzig, Berlin, and Prague. Most important of all have been the mentors, friends, and colleagues who have guided, encouraged, and challenged me along the way. Jim Sheehan and Norman Naimark proved superb teachers and advisors at Stanford. Rudolf Boch has provided invaluable support during several stints in Germany and made Chemnitz a place I return to for intellectual engagement. At various junctions, Cathy Albrecht, Karl Bahm, Houri Berberian, David Blackbourn, Chad Bryant, Holly Case, Gary Cohen, Jane Dabel, Anne Eakin Moss, Melissa Feinberg, Margot Finn, Eagle Glassheim, Peter Haslinger, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Christine Holbo, Andy Jenks, Elizabeth Jones, Tom Lekan, Ken Moss, Eric Oberle, Denise Phillips, Jim Retallack, Lise Sedrez, Wulf Wäntig, Larry Wolff, Tara Zahra, and the anonymous reviewers at the University of Michigan Press provided professional advice, put me onto critical sources, taught me to negotiate archives, and provided valuable feedback on this project. Pieter Judson has been a stalwart champion, teacher, mentor, and friend since the day I stumbled into his as-yet-unpacked of‹ce, demanding to know where I could do graduate work in Habsburg history. This book owes much to his generosity and insight. My greatest thanks go to my parents, Barbara and Gordon Murdock—my earliest readers, most rigorous (and tireless) editors, and un›agging cheering section. This book is for them.

Abbreviations

ADV AH AM BA GW HStAD KH MBLSRH MdI MfV MSP MV MV/R MZV/R MZV-VA NA NTSV PZU SkZ SOA Decín Sopade StAB StAC StAD StAL

Alldeutscher Verband Amtshauptmanschaft Aussenministerium Bundesarchiv Berlin Gesandtschaft Wien Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden Kreishauptmannschaft Mitteilungsblatt der Landesabteilung Sachsen der Reichszentrale für Heimatdienst Ministerium des Innern Ministerium für Volksbildung Ministerstvo sociální péce 1918–1951 Ministerstvo vnitra Ministerstvo vnitra Víden Ministerstvo zahranícních vecí Viden 1866–1910 Ministerstvo zahranícních vecí-vzstrizkový archiv Národní archiv Nemecky telocviciny spolek Varnsdorf Presidium zemský urad Praha Staatskanzelei Zeitungsausschnittsammlung Státní okresni archiv Decín Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade) Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Bautzen Stadtarchiv Chemnitz Stadtarchiv Dresden Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig

Introduction

A space is not a thing, but rather a set of relations between things. Henri Lefebvre1

“People who live in a borderland . . . know that the frontier gives you a peculiar perspective. You see the in›uence of two states and cultures come up against one another even as people move back and forth between the two sides,” wrote folklorist Curt Müller-Löbau in his 1920 collection of stories about the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands.2 Müller-Löbau was celebrating a frontier region de‹ned by a long-standing European political boundary that had divided Saxony and Habsburg Bohemia since 1635, the German and Habsburg empires since 1871, and Weimar Germany and Czechoslovakia since 1919. Müller-Löbau envisioned this borderland identity as both a long-standing local tradition and an experience shared by frontier residents throughout Central Europe. Yet in the early nineteenth century, few Saxons or Bohemians would have identi‹ed the territories on either side of the political border as a borderland. Travel restrictions, bad roads, and limited economic choices kept most people from straying far from where they had been born. Industrialization, the active engagement of the German and Habsburg Austrian states (Czechoslovak after 1918) with frontier communities, and large-scale cross-border traf‹c ‹rst emerged in the late nineteenth century, transforming adjacent territories into a shared region. Historians have paid great attention to the rise of bureaucratic nationstates in Europe, to the consolidation of national identity in Germany, and to national con›ict between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. Yet the same forces that spurred the rise of modern nation-states and economies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led Europeans to create new transnational relationships that tempered and competed with national

Central Europe, 1871

Central Europe, 1921–38

4

Changing Places

and state political loyalties. People in Bohemia and the German state of Saxony came to conceive of their common borderlands as interconnected territories where shared culture, family ties, landscapes, and economic interests often trumped national and political divisions. In the 1860s and 1870s, Central European states’ abolition of passport requirements, expansion of railway and communication networks, and rapid industrialization converged to make the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands more mobile and interconnected. Paradoxically, this ›uidity forced the German and Habsburg states to delineate territories, populations, and cultures as never before. These changes were part of a widespread transformation in late nineteenth-century Europe. Far from losing their attachments to speci‹c territories, Europeans on the move created new regional identities, embracing borderlands as critical places on their mental maps. In doing so, they challenged the primacy of politics and nationality in de‹ning territory, and they reconceived local cultures as elements of larger state, national, and international communities. They made borderlands the focus of battles over political rights, economic change, and national and transnational allegiances fought by local people, nation-states, and transnational communities. After World Wars I and II, these mental maps shaped Europe’s political and social transformation. In the 1990s, they reemerged in debates about the expansion and governance of the European Union. The story that follows is a transnational history of the birth, life, and death of a modern borderland—between Germany and Habsburg Austria and, after 1918, between Germany and Czechoslovakia—and of the changing perspectives of the people who lived there. It describes how MüllerLöbau’s borderlands emerged after the 1870s from a long-standing political frontier. It explores the tensions between mobility and territorial belonging, local interests and government control, nationalism and national indifference, and open and closed frontiers that have shaped modern societies around the world. The Saxon-Bohemian story demonstrates that modern borderlands emerged as distinct territorial, political, and cultural regions out of the struggles of many historical actors. Governments and smugglers, migrant workers and local police, bakers and tourists all participated in delineating the societies the political frontier either bounded or connected. Nationalist activists joined the fray, working to give speci‹cally national meaning to borders and frontier territories. When their goals complemented those of other historical actors, they gained ground. But when nationalist ideas challenged local interests, they often lost battles. In

Introduction

5

the 1930s and 1940s, nationalists allied with state power triumphed in de‹ning the borderlands, but they could do so only by dissolving the political frontier in 1938 and by removing German speakers from Bohemia in 1945–46. Borderlands are thus neither natural nor eternal. They are historically speci‹c human creations—every bit as changeable as their creators.

The Borderland Story The Saxon-Bohemian borderlands emerged as a modern cross-border region from the 1870s to 1914. The creation of the German Reich in 1871 turned the border into a division between a German nation-state and the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet in the decades that followed, industrialization, mass migration, and new political ideas brought people together in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, transforming a Central European political divide into an increasingly uni‹ed region. People had crossed the border in the past, but in limited numbers. Now German citizens and both Czech- and German-speaking Bohemians moved easily across and within the frontier region. German and Austrian citizens crossed the border to shop and work, and they even intermarried. Tourists treated the borderlands as a single region. Even nationalists built crossborder political networks. World War I shattered the transborder community. After the war, the governments of Germany and the new Czechoslovak nation-state regarded each other with suspicion. Both sides enforced citizenship and passport restrictions with new vigor. Nationalists stressed the importance of “national” territory for Czechs and Germans, declaring the ›uidity of the borderlands a threat. Local people were torn between nationalists’ demands for separation and their own cross-border social networks. But while people adapted to new state regulation of mobility and new rhetoric of national and political separation, they continued to insist on their local right to cross the frontier and participate in transnational communities. In the process, they convinced states to institutionalize borderlands—making them territories with distinct dimensions and legal standing. Finally, in the 1930s, Reich German, German-Bohemian, and Czech nationalists recast the region with a rhetoric of embattled borderlands that permeated schoolbooks, newspapers, and of‹cial correspondence on both sides. Nazi Germany declared the border both a bulwark against Slavic encroachment and an arti‹cial division of “German” territory. The Nazi fear

The Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands

Introduction

7

that the borderlands posed a threat was no longer entirely misplaced. Socialists ›eeing the Third Reich turned northern Bohemia into a center of efforts to undermine Nazism. In 1938, the region came under international scrutiny when Nazi nationalist demands culminated in the Munich agreement, the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the border’s dissolution. When the border was re-created after World War II, Czechoslovakia expelled German speakers from the Bohemian borderlands, destroying the multinational, bilingual, and interconnected communities that had thrived there, and made the idea that the border represented a national division into a reality. Yet since the end of the cold war, cross-border trade, tourism, cultural projects, and intermarriage have reappeared. A region that once seemed a mere episode in a forgotten and irretrievable past has become an institution of the European Union. Borderlands as Historical Space A glance at any modern political map reveals a plethora of borders delineating apparently discrete states, communities, and territories. Fredrik Barth argues that “boundaries persist despite a ›ow of personnel across them.”3 Yet the reverse is also true. Movement continues despite persistent borders and centralized states, creating frontier zones in which contact among groups is as important as their differentiation. As Henri Lefebvre argues, “visible boundaries . . . give rise to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity.”4 Thus modern borderlands—the territorial and cultural zones adjacent to these lines of division—are de‹ned not by barriers but by movement. It is the mobility of populations, political and cultural ideas, and material goods that creates lived frontier zones in places otherwise distinguished only by a few territorial markers. Even the greatest human-made barriers—from the Great Wall of China, to the Berlin Wall, to boundary fences in Arizona and Gaza—are testaments to the ›uidity of human societies, vain attempts to separate territories and communities that are fundamentally interconnected. Human interactions transform physical geography into distinct human territories. The borderlands that result are, as Renato Rosaldo observes, “sites of creative cultural production.”5 To understand the dynamics of borderlands, it is thus critical to examine them as constructed, permeable, and changeable spaces de‹ned by the intersection of their physical, historical, social, and discursive qualities. This book examines the human production of modern places through the lens of a particular border-

8

Changing Places

land.6 Yet the forces that created the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, catapulted them into the international limelight, destroyed them, and now offer the potential for their resurrection were neither unique to that region nor peculiar to frontiers. Rather, the borderlands were a place where European-wide phenomena of industrialization, mass politics and mobility, nationalism, and modern bureaucratic states became especially visible and volatile.7 Integrated, highly mobile borderlands were a new phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, but boundaries were not. Europe had long been divided into political units, trade networks, church territories, and linguistic zones.8 Some of these territories had clear borders—places where tariffs were collected, for example. But for others, such as linguistic or even administrative territories, the outer limits were often ambiguous. These territories rarely coincided. Linguistic regions, cultural networks, and church territories often straddled political boundaries. In the early modern period, despite battles over jurisdiction between church and state, for example, overlapping political and social spaces were considered normal. By the early twentieth century, Europeans’ understandings of borders and political territory had changed dramatically. New mobility and transportation made many Europeans treat political borders as naturally permeable. At the same time, states took on new importance as the chief unit of social, political, economic, and even national organization, intensifying efforts to survey, mark, and control their frontiers. Governments began to treat their territorial boundaries as national and economic borders as well. Yet in Central Europe, this convergence of social spaces was clearer in theory than in practice. National states had multinational populations, and access to the frontier was negotiated between central governments and local people, despite a pretense of central authority. Thus the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands retained a German-speaking majority, with Czechspeaking and bilingual minorities on both sides. In the 1920s, local of‹cials dictated the scope of of‹cial borderlands to their states and interpreted laws to ‹t local interests and conditions. Yet the conviction that mixed populations and ›uid cross-border contacts contradicted modern state and national identities made Central Europeans increasingly regard borderlands as places in which the fates of states, nations, and local traditions hung in the balance. Paradoxically, the same territories and borderland dynamics that states, nationalists, industrialists, frontier residents, and even international observers came to see as distinct and important by the 1930s have long

The Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands (Physical)

10

Changing Places

been rendered all but invisible by historians.9 Scholars tend to look for discrete objects of study—a state, a community, a particular social or cultural movement. Even when they examine interactions among communities, they often focus on con›ict rather than coexistence and interdependence. In European history, that means that borderland studies typically focus on disputed territories, such as Alsace, Tirol, or Poland; zones of national con›ict, such as the Habsburg “language borders” or the Pale of Settlement; or areas that have been characterized by mass violence and ethnic cleansing.10 Such studies are important. Yet they leave invisible the most common kind of modern borderlands—places where political boundaries have not moved, in which people are usually more inclined to cooperate than ‹ght, and in which populations resist clear categorization in terms of nationality, state af‹liation, political ideology, or economic status.11 This was especially true during the cold war, when Eastern and Western ideology rei‹ed nation-states and their post–World War II territories in historical discussion.12 Yet coexistence and con›ict are inseparable, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, persistent, porous boundaries proved the norm rather than the exception. Central Europeans and their states negotiated the interconnections of coexistence and con›ict in periods of dramatic historical change—industrialization, mass politics, economic crisis, world war, fascism, and ethnic cleansing—inscribing those relationships on physical and social landscapes even as they connected those landscapes to new transnational contexts. Their efforts demonstrate that the kind of cross-border relations that advocates of the European Union have hailed as proof of a new postnational Europe are in fact nothing new. Fluid borderlands were typical of late nineteenth-century Central Europe. They have become the most common kinds of border in Europe after the cold war. Yet there has been little examination of how they emerge and change. Using the study of space to connect crisis and continuity and to establish the relationship between the ›uidity of human interactions and the institutionalization of state and national identities requires both building on and moving beyond methodological, territorial, and chronological conventions. We all become frontier people when we allow political, economic, social, and cultural historical approaches to cross-fertilize, intermarry, switch sides, and operate situationally and opportunistically to tell a more nuanced story of the origins and dynamics of modern societies. This approach does not examine how discourse shaped behavior or how material conditions determined discourse. Rather, it examines how material, rhetor-

Introduction

11

ical, and cultural life are always interconnected and mutually in›uential. It demonstrates that to understand the crisis of the German in›ation, for example, one needs to understand not only the very real problems of food shortages but how multiple actors framed those problems in public debates and how ordinary people acted in response to the combination of material and rhetorical pressures. When Saxon villagers watched Bohemians buy out their bakeries, they turned to long-standing (and long-ignored) nationalist rhetoric, labeling their erstwhile “German brothers” as “foreign Czechs.” Those national monikers may have been invented and unstable, but the frustration—and the bread—were real enough.

Beyond Nations, Regions, and States Between the 1870s and the 1940s, the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands were home to a highly mobile, multilinguistic population. Germany and Habsburg Austria and, later, Germany and Czechoslovakia were each others’ most important trade partners, with most of the goods they traded originating in or passing through these borderlands. Bohemia became a critical source of labor for Saxony—one of Germany’s most important industrial regions. Industries on both sides produced for international markets. The borderlands also became hotbeds of socialist and nationalist political agitation that often crossed the frontier. These territories and their populations were simultaneously part of two countries, two national communities, regions within their states, a cross-border community, and international trade and political networks. They were a microcosm of transnational territory and community. By the 1930s, they straddled what Reich German nationalists declared was a fundamental divide between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. These characteristics did not make them either marginal or exceptional, as contemporary nationalists and subsequent scholars have often suggested of frontier and multinational regions. Rather, their multiple af‹liations and regional particularities combined to create an eminently normal Central European landscape. This book takes a transnational approach not simply by examining multiple states, national communities, and historiographies. Rather, it traces where states and nations succeeded and where they failed to de‹ne modern European societies. Recent scholarship on the late Habsburg Empire—and especially Bohemia—has challenged long-standing acceptance of the primacy of nationality and nationalism in modern Central Euro-

12

Changing Places

pean history.13 Indeed, far from dominating politics and society, Central European nationalisms competed with other af‹liations for peoples’ loyalties—regional, state, and transnational communities; socialism and economic interests—and often lost. Nationalism ‹nally seemed to win widespread acceptance in the 1930s borderlands because people saw it as a tool for negotiating dif‹cult and fast-changing conditions. Yet even then, nationalists and their governments could not agree on what it meant to be Czech or German, Saxon or Bohemian. Transnational analysis means examining borderland societies as a network of relationships among interest groups, populations, and institutions. It is not a rush to herald the demise of the “local,” the “national,” or the “state.” Henri Lefebvre argues, The local does not disappear, for it is never absorbed by the regional, national, or even world-wide level. The national and regional levels take in innumerable “places”; national space embraces the regions; and world space does not merely subsume national spaces but even . . . precipitates the formation of new national spaces. All the spaces, meanwhile, are traversed by myriad currents.14 These different social spaces and relationships are constantly shifting in relation to one another—changing character, increasing and decreasing in intensity, but rarely vanishing completely. This approach is especially new for German history. In 1981, James J. Sheehan challenged historians of Germany to think beyond the con‹nes of the post-1871 German nation-state.15 Since then, a number of scholars have taken up Sheehan’s challenge to consider the relationship of the regional to the national within the German Reich.16 Some historians of the Habsburg Empire have demonstrated that German nationalists outside the Reich developed ideas of German nationhood independently of the German state.17 Studies have explored high-level politics and trade among states.18 Others have examined German colonialism, overseas émigré communities, and German nationalist projects abroad.19 Most recently, there have been calls for considering German history in a “European” context.20 But no study has examined the innumerable connections that bound people and territories within the post-1871 German nation-state to adjacent ones outside it. Nor have studies of the Habsburg Empire, Czechoslovakia, or other modern European states examined such relationships. Yet these connections

Introduction

13

shaped twentieth-century European history profoundly. In the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, they reveal that Habsburg ideas of German nationhood and the dynamics of the Bohemian nationality con›ict shaped Reich German nationalist politics—a complete reversal of Rogers Brubaker’s idea of “homeland nationalisms” in which the German Reich is assumed to have in›uenced German nationalist movements outside its territory.21 They demonstrate the persistence of national ›uidity, ambiguity, and ambivalence in Germany long after uni‹cation and even under fascism, and they show how the 1938 Nazi annexation of the Czechoslovak “Sudetenland” became imaginable to local actors and political leaders alike. The Saxon-Bohemian borderlands offer new insights into the nature of modern states as well. Countless studies have argued that modern states found new ways to control their populations and territories, from policing and passports to social welfare and propaganda. This border was indeed home to far more police, customs stations, and legal regulations in the 1930s than it had been in 1870. After World War I, people were required to carry passports and work permits in the borderlands. Yet for much of that period, cross-border mobility grew along with government institutions. State power, territorial identity, and population mobility in the German Reich and Czechoslovakia were not simply dictated by central governments but were the products of constant negotiation between regional actors and their states. Even as states seemed to consolidate central power and to intervene in the details of local life, they were often forced to adjust their policies to ‹t local practice. During World War I, local people and of‹cials pressured the German and Austrian governments to both ful‹ll the promises of expanded state power and recognize regional traditions by creating of‹cial frontier districts in which cross-border mobility could continue. In the interwar period, the same people insisted not only that these districts be reinstated but that they had the right to decide which communities belonged in them. They accepted new limits on foreign labor but insisted that some workers and employers be exempted on the basis of nationality, economic need, and regional tradition. They adapted to states’ insistence that people clarify their national, political, and territorial allegiances through citizenship and censuses while continuing to traverse apparently strict political, national, and linguistic boundaries. Frontier people demonstrated over and over that their understanding of nationality, identity, and political and economic power remained rooted in speci‹c places—material and conceptual.

14

Changing Places

The Language of History Stories of intersecting peoples and territories are inherently complex. But in modern Central European history, the terms used to discuss populations, political and cultural territories, and state and national loyalties often obscure divided and overlapping loyalties, paper over the limits and weaknesses of nationalism, and portray nations, states, and territories as uni‹ed and self-evident when they were often anything but. At one time or another, for example, the German-speaking Austrians, Bohemians, and Saxons in this study all referred to themselves as “Germans.” Yet most German speakers in Bohemia did not identify with the German Reich, and German-Bohemian nationalists often despaired that Reich Germans failed to embrace their Bohemian neighbors as important conationals. In the following pages, I use the terms Saxon, Reich German, Austrian, Czechoslovak, and Bohemian to identify people according to their territorial origins and citizenship.22 These terms do not necessarily indicate linguistic ability, national af‹liation, or political conviction. Bohemians might speak German, Czech, or both. They might be nationalists, socialists, or apolitical. Similarly, when I refer to Czech-speaking or Germanspeaking Bohemians, I am indicating linguistic use without suggesting identi‹cation with a speci‹c national community or political position. However, when I refer to Czechs or German Bohemians, I mean those people who speci‹cally identi‹ed themselves with a national community. Czech, German-Bohemian, and Reich German nationalists used place-names to lay claim to particular territories and populations. Most communities and landmarks in the Bohemian borderlands have both German and Czech place-names—re›ecting the area’s long multilinguistic history. But late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century nationalists fought to establish their names and to downplay or even eradicate those of their national rivals. There are Czech versions of many Saxon place-names as well, but as we shall see, nationalists never fully succeeded in turning these into a subject of contention. Consequently, Bohemian places are mentioned here by both their Czech and German names, as in the case of Liberec/Reichenberg, unless, as in the case of Prague, there is an English alternative. Saxon communities are mentioned by their German names except in speci‹c instances where the Czech was used. Finally, in researching and writing this book, I have repeatedly encountered people who look blank at the mention of the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands but suddenly say after a little explanation, “Oh, the Sudeten-

Introduction

15

land!” The Sudetenland comprised only half of the borderland territory under discussion here. Nevertheless, this book helps to explain why the Sudetenland remains a familiar territorial designation, despite its absence from contemporary political or cultural maps. More important, it shows that the Sudetenland was a recent and inherently political invention that is of only limited use for understanding the borderland story. For much of the period in question, the Bohemian borderlands were known as northern Bohemia or sometimes as “German Bohemia,” because of the majority German-speaking population. German-Bohemian nationalist activists began calling Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking frontier areas the Sudetenland after World War I, in an attempt to create a uni‹ed national, territorial, and political identity. The designation always hinted at GermanBohemian irredentism, and it came into widespread use in the 1930s. In 1938, Nazi Germany used the idea of a uni‹ed Sudeten territory to win international approval for its occupation of Czechoslovakia’s frontiers. Consequently, in the pages that follow, the terms Sudetenland and Sudeten German are used only as examples of nationalist rhetoric or in referring to those people who speci‹cally self-identi‹ed as Sudeten Germans.

Persistent Frontiers Since 1635, the Saxon-Bohemian border has served as the political boundary between a series of states and political systems, a confessional border between Catholic and Protestant Europe, a line between northern and southern Europe, a ›ash point between the East and the West, a linguistic frontier between Czechs and Germans, an internal frontier in the cold war Eastern Bloc, and the outer limit of the European Union. Yet in all this time, it has never moved. In contrast, the lived social space of the SaxonBohemian borderlands is a more recent and a more volatile place. Although people, goods, and ideas had crossed the frontier for centuries, the borderlands ‹rst emerged in the late nineteenth century as a distinct place de‹ned by mass mobility and interdependence and then seemed to vanish after 1945. But since 1989, these borderlands have demonstrated the persistence and adaptability of social spaces, as well as humans’ penchant for movement and interaction. Local consumers, cultural organizations, universities, regional governments, and the European Union have revived cross-border contact and recognized the area as a cross-border region. This does not mean a return to the conditions that existed in 1913

16

Changing Places

or 1929. Nor does it mean the end of nationalism or nation-states. There are Saxons who will still assure you that northern Bohemia is “German” territory, and there are Czechs who staunchly defend their country’s decision to expel German-speaking Bohemians from Czechoslovakia after World War II. But there are also many who are eager to travel, to hike the mountain trails that crisscross the border, to learn each other’s languages and drink each other’s beer. At the beginning of the twenty-‹rst century, Central Europe is, in many ways, a very different place than it was at the beginning of the twentieth. Mass population movements, wartime destruction of cities, economic experimentation, consumer culture, industrial pollution, and environmental conservation have transformed social, political, and physical landscapes. Yet the impulse to connect with speci‹c places in the midst of mobility, the desire to seek out traditions of contact where change and dislocation are more apparent, and the ability to embrace local, national, state, and international communities and loyalties simultaneously were as apparent in 2000 as in 1900. Perhaps this modern place—and the myriad others like it—will survive after all.

Chapter 1

Birth of a Borderland

“I still see the great open place in the forest, ringed with vast spruce trees, where we were told that we had crossed the border,” wrote twenty-six-yearold Hans Christian Andersen after his 1831 trip to Saxony and Bohemia.1 Andersen was impressed that a state border, an institution that stood out impressively on maps, appeared invisible—almost irrelevant—on the ground. Had Andersen looked, he might have found one of the stone markers that identi‹ed the political frontier then as they do today. But by gazing at the forest around him, rather than hunting for stones among tree roots, Andersen discovered what local people already knew—that nineteenth-century Central European political borders were of limited relevance to the people who lived along them. Until the middle to late nineteenth century, international boundaries played little role in most peoples’ daily lives. Life centered on the village— expanded perhaps by occasional trips to a provincial market town. In the ‹rst half of the century, a variety of barriers impeded the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Austria still required people to carry internal passports for domestic travel.2 The northern German states, including Saxony, eased internal restrictions on their own citizens’ movement in the early nineteenth century, but Bohemian travelers needed permits to travel within Saxony.3 Until the 1830s and 1840s, most German states still required citizens to have passports to leave their territories.4 For those who traveled regularly—merchants, peddlers, journeymen, bargemen—crossing international boundaries meant paying tariffs and showing papers. But as strangers had to register with the police in every town where they stayed, 17

18

Changing Places

such controls were by no means peculiar to the frontier. For those who did not have to use the main roads, border controls were eminently avoidable. Peddlers and smugglers (often one and the same) crossed the “green border” on back roads and forest paths, bypassing the forces of law and order. The forces policing the borders were not especially formidable. Gendarmes and customs agents lived where they worked—so they knew their neighbors. The Saxon folklorist Curt Müller-Löbau observed that the nineteenth-century border was rigid “only to the super‹cial eye.”5 The state boundary was part of the local landscape and rarely an object of fear. In his stories about frontier life before World War I, Franz Rösler recalled a Saxon border guard who prevailed on local boys to bring him beer from the neighboring Bohemian pub, pretending not to know where they got it. The same boys used the border gate as a slide, and when “the old bear . . . was in a good mood, he let the youths sneak over the border in the evening.”6 Similarly, the Bohemian migrant worker Wenzel Holek described crossing the border many times in the 1870s and 1880s without encountering frontier of‹cials. The one time he mentioned being stopped, much to his surprise, the guards wanted to fumigate his clothing because of an outbreak of hoofand-mouth disease. With that done, they sent him on his way.7 Before the second half of the nineteenth-century, most Saxon and Austrian citizens never encountered the frontier. Those who did cross or lived along it knew the rules and how to avoid them. But the border was only one of many places where they ran into state restrictions. It played little part in debates about state identity, government roles, or citizens’ rights. Unlike many Central European borders, the boundary between Saxony and Bohemia was remarkably stable. Saxony and Habsburg Austria, of which Bohemia was part after 1526, had ‹rst put up border markers in 1534. The last major revision of the border had been in 1635, when Saxony acquired the Oberlausitz from Bohemia.8 By the time the German Empire was founded in 1871, the border’s physical location was well established. Saxon and Bohemian of‹cials cared that the frontier was policed and that tariffs were collected. They met periodically to review policies and maintain border markers.9 Routine cooperation characterized their mutual dealings. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the character of the territories adjacent to the Saxon-Bohemian political frontier changed dramatically. Small-scale cross-border contact had long been integral to Saxon and Bohemian frontier life. Smugglers had eluded customs of‹cials, manufacturers had shared markets and raw materials, and political and religious dissidents had crossed to escape arrest.10 But between the 1870s and

Birth of a Borderland

19

1914, cross-border contact grew at an unprecedented rate, creating a new sense of regional community. The border receded further from prominence as the German and Austrian economies leapt into the industrial age, as legal and economic changes unleashed swarms of migrants and travelers, and as international markets and modern transportation networks burgeoned. Frontier regions became zones of opportunity. During this period, the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands emerged as a social, economic, and political dynamic with territorial dimensions. They were part of a rapid proliferation of overlapping spaces in which Saxons, Bohemians, and Europeans in general understood their lives in the late nineteenth century.11 Central governments became more prominent in regional administration; mass mobility made people view local communities through the lens of broader experience; nationalists promoted visions of nationally delineated social space and political territory; regional leaders rethought their regions’ relationships to states, nations, and European communities; and expanded foreign economic markets made industrial producers and regional of‹cials imagine their communities in an increasingly global context. This proliferation neither pitted different territorial conceptions and allegiances against each other nor produced tidy, predictable hierarchies. Rather, they offered historical actors multiple, overlapping ways in which to understand the spatial dimensions of their lives. Someone could be Austrian, Bohemian, Czech, a borderland resident, and an international industrial producer simultaneously, with each identity implying connection to a social and physical geography. Sometimes, one territorial context outweighed the others or even appeared at odds with another—forcing people to choose. Historical actors often disagreed about the relative importance of different af‹liations. But for the most part, frontier people consciously lived their lives at the intersection of these overlapping places. The borderlands became a place in their own right—intersecting with but never fully corresponding to the states and administrative regions the border de‹ned. But they also became representative of the many interconnected territories and communities that de‹ned modern Central European societies at the turn of the century. They were a microcosm in which the relationships among state, local, national, and transnational communities were most apparent and most volatile. They were a product and an impetus of the sweeping changes remaking European societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, few people in frontier towns, or central governments talked about “borderlands” before World War I. They

20

Changing Places

recognized a dynamic. Only later did they decide it should be labeled, mapped, and defended.

The Physical Landscape In 1870, the Saxon-Bohemian border extended, as it had since 1635 and still does today, from roughly Zittau and Hrádek nad Nisou/Grottau in the east to near Bad Elster and Aš/Asch in the west. For much of its length, the border runs along mountains, broken only by the Elbe River valley. Three distinct landscapes characterize the Saxon-Bohemian border (today that between Germany and the Czech Republic). Along the western two-thirds of the border lie two mountain ranges: the Elstergebirge/Halštrovské hory and the much longer Erzgebirge or Krušné hory. These mountains divide the Bohemian plain to the south from the increasingly ›at lands of northern Germany that stretch from central Saxony to the North Sea. The German and Czech names Erzgebirge and Krušné hory mean “ore mountains,” re›ecting the area’s rich mineral deposits, which ‹rst drew silver miners in the Middle Ages and later yielded tin, iron, cobalt, lignite, and, in the twentieth century, uranium.12 Rocky, with long winters, the mountains are bad for agriculture. Since the early modern period, the mountain people have been miners and craftspeople rather than farmers.13 The region’s mineral wealth and, later, its industries encouraged people to ‹nd ways in and out of the mountains. As a result, people in the mountains and foothills stayed in contact with the adjoining lowlands, even shaping their development, enabling highlanders to export their goods and to import food and raw materials.14 At the eastern edge of the Erzgebirge, the Elbe River cuts across the frontier. One of Europe’s great rivers, the Elbe has connected the Central European interior to the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. It has long been a major thoroughfare for people and goods in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands as well. In the late nineteenth century, the sandstone cliffs that ›ank the river near the border came to be known as the Saxon and Bohemian Switzerlands and attracted tourists from around Central Europe. Even in the twentieth century, the Elbe remained both a thoroughfare, alongside expanding road and railway networks, and a tourist destination. Finally, the easternmost part of the border runs through the Lusatian Mountains (Lausitzer Gebirge/Luzické hory), separating the Saxon Oberlausitz from northern Bohemia and running up against the “three-state

Birth of a Borderland

21

corner” where German, Czech, and Polish territory meet today. Lower than the Erzgebirge, these mountains form a rolling landscape that nurtured one of Central Europe’s earliest textile-producing regions.15 In the nineteenth century, the densely populated mountain villages began sprouting factories and smokestacks. Between 1880 and 1900, the rail lines criss-crossing the highlands grew by more than 50 percent.16 Cities in the foothills had long connected the highlands’ mineral wealth and manufacturing to more fertile and hospitable landscapes. But in the nineteenth century, these cities grew dramatically as large-scale industries expanded on highland manufacturing traditions. On the Saxon side, Dresden, Chemnitz, Zwickau, and Plauen were part of a string of foothill cities that housed textile, glass, machine, and chemical production centers. These cities also became portals through which highland goods—bobbin lace, wooden toys, musical instruments—passed on their way to international markets. On the Bohemian side, Liberec/Reichenberg, Ústí nad Labem/ Aussig, Teplice/ Teplitz, Most/Brüx, Chomutov/Komotau, Karlovy Vary/Karlsbad, and Cheb/Eger formed a similar chain. Industrial cities on both sides of the frontier grew enormously in the last two decades of the century. Ústí nad Labem/Aussig, for example, saw a population of around sixteen thousand in 1880 swell to over thirty-nine thousand by 1910, while Most/Brüx grew from ten thousand to over twenty-‹ve thousand in the same period.17 Such growth created new industrial landscapes. This study treats these cities, which built on the productive traditions of the mountains and connected frontier areas to the interior, as the outer limits of the borderlands.18 The geography of the Saxon-Bohemian border suggests a “natural boundary.” Yet, although distinct from the ›atlands to the north and south, the mountainous borderlands proved no obstacle to humans. The valleys are riddled with villages. Old industrial buildings are reminders of the region’s past importance in international markets, and the Elbe still carries cross-border traf‹c, as it has for centuries.19 The mountains characterize but do not dictate the political border. As Hans Christian Andersen found, borders, though important in human imagination, are not indelibly inscribed in the natural world.

The Political Landscape The Saxon-Bohemian border had proved one of Central Europe’s most geographically stable boundaries by the nineteenth century. Yet in the cen-

22

Changing Places

tury’s second half, Central Europeans on the frontier tested new ideas about the meaning and organization of political space, ideas that changed their relationships to their states, their localities, and their cross-border neighbors. By 1900, the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands played a very different political role than they had a century earlier. They became a periphery of the German nation-state, a frontier between adjacent empires, a hotbed of socialist revolution and conservative reaction, and a target for German nationalist agitation. Above all, the borderlands became a zone with its own peculiar political dynamics. In the ‹rst half of the nineteenth century, Saxony was a midsized country sandwiched between Central Europe’s most powerful states: Prussia and the Habsburg Empire. Bohemia was part of the Habsburg Empire. Both territories were considered part of Germany, a conglomeration of states de‹ned by former membership in the Holy Roman Empire and a shared high culture but home to a variety of political, economic, and religious traditions and a diversity of peoples and languages.20 Moreover, the balance of power among Central European states, ideas about state sovereignty, and conceptions of what de‹ned Germany were in ›ux. By midcentury, liberal ideals of constitutional government from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, an expanding economic and professional middle class, and new economic and labor networks sparked calls for political reform. In 1848, those calls spurred a wave of revolutions across Europe. Central European revolutionaries believed that states should be de‹ned in terms of national communities, rather than territorial sovereignty. The German camp convened a parliament in Frankfurt to merge Central Europe’s politically fragmented German territories into a modern constitutional nation-state. Concurrently, revolutionaries in Hungary, Croatia, northern Italy, and Prague proposed Hungarian, Italian, and Slavic political autonomy. Efforts to create national political territories re›ected a fundamental rethinking of political and cultural landscapes. They created a new need to de‹ne the German, Czech, and Hungarian nations whose representatives claimed a place in Central Europe’s political and cultural geography. Two models for a German state emerged in 1848: a Grossdeutschland (Greater Germany) that included both Prussia and Austria and a Kleindeutschland (Small Germany) under Prussian leadership that excluded Austria. Many revolutionaries understood the German nation in terms of the former Holy Roman Empire, a shared German high culture, and the ability of many peoples to assimilate to “Germanness,” a view that made the Aus-

Birth of a Borderland

23

trian half of the Habsburg lands seem necessary to any true German state.21 But 1848 also marked the emergence of the Czech national movement as a political force in Bohemia.22 Unlike their German counterparts, Czech nationalists argued that ethnolinguistic identity, rather than legal and political precedent, proved that Bohemia was not German at all and did not belong in a German state.23 Practical political considerations played a role as well. Neither Prussia nor Austria, the two German superpowers, wanted to cede power to the other in a grossdeutsch state. Furthermore, many German reformers eyed the Habsburg east with unease, certain it could neither be separated from Austria nor be considered German territory in political, cultural, or ethnolinguistic terms. Revolutionaries failed to create a German nation-state or win Czech political autonomy in Bohemia in 1848. Yet they set in motion a vigorous debate about the nature of states, territories, and populations in Central Europe, which continued unbroken until 1946 and has reemerged in European political debates since 1989. In June 1866 and 1867, the debate pitting a grossdeutsch state against a kleindeutsch state came to a head, establishing a formal realignment of Central European political territories that lasted until 1918. Tensions among the German states and Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s proposals for a new German national order led to war, with Austria-Hungary, Saxony, and the other signi‹cant German states on one side and Prussia on the other.24 When Prussia prevailed, Saxony was incorporated, ‹rst, into the Prussian-led North German Confederation and, in 1871, into the newly created German Reich. Austria, however, was barred from the new German nation-state. After its defeat, the Habsburg Empire faced renewed demands for domestic political reform. Hungarian leaders advocated a dualist monarchy split into separate Austrian and Hungarian administrative halves. Czech leaders argued for a federalist restructuring of the state. In 1867, the dualist model won, creating the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and relegating Bohemia to the Austrian half. Dualism also introduced constitutional government to Austria. It guaranteed equality of language as a basic civil right, expanded the voting franchise, and granted universal male suffrage in 1907. Liberals hoped the reforms would reduce nationalism’s appeal in the monarchy, and indeed, Austria-Hungary did not recognize nations as having legal status before World War I.25 Nevertheless, Dualism set the stage for citizens to imagine and create national social spaces and political territories within the supranational Habsburg state. Bohemian nationalists used language laws and the state census to give

24

Changing Places

their political claims spatial dimensions from the 1870s on, leading to the Bohemian nationality con›ict, also known as the Czech-German nationality con›ict. The census recorded “language of everyday use,” not nationality, and ignored bilingualism. But nationalists used census statistics on language use to measure and map national populations. By 1900, it was clear that Bohemia had a majority German-speaking periphery, a largely Czechspeaking interior, and increasingly linguistically mixed urban areas. Trouble emerged at the “language frontiers” where these territories intersected and where nationalists were alarmed to ‹nd it dif‹cult to distinguish Czech speakers and German speakers or to clearly delineate Czech and GermanBohemian territory. Nationalists saw these language frontiers as the places where people and territory could be won or lost for the nation.26 Between the 1880s and 1914, Czech and German-Bohemian nationalists fought to secure their “national property” by claiming ownership of individuals, whole communities, particular industries, and entire economic sectors. This idea of national property gave material dimensions to imagined communities. School buildings, monuments, “Czech” and “German” shops and theaters, street signs, and place-names became ways to stake out physical, cultural, and political space and to measure incursions by other national groups.27 By 1900, nationalists used street ‹ghting, national songs, and economic boycotts as well.28 Territorial gains—from local monuments to an administrative district—became ways for Czech and German-Bohemian nationalists to measure the abstract dimensions of political and cultural in›uence on the ground. As with the debates about a German nation-state, Dualism and Czech and German-Bohemian nationalist strategies were part of a proliferation of lived and imagined territories that neither directly challenged nor completely corresponded to existing states that characterized late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Central Europe. Ordinary people began to regard political units as things that could be rearranged, created, and dismantled. After 1871, Saxon and Bohemian frontier residents faced new political realities. The border was now a boundary between a German nation-state and a multinational Austria-Hungary. Suddenly, Saxony found itself, like Bohemia, an administrative unit in a larger state. Dualism and the founding of the German Reich marked a turning point, but not the end of territorial rede‹nition in the borderlands. In 1867, when Saxony joined the North German Confederation, 70 percent of eligible voters opposed joining a nascent German nation-state under Prussian leadership.29 Within a few years of German uni‹cation in 1871, Saxons began to accept their new

Birth of a Borderland

25

political position in a kleindeutsch community, as new freedoms of movement and settlement and the gradual replacement of regional legal codes with uniform Reich legislation made clear the economic and social bene‹ts of membership in a large state.30 Yet even as Saxony was integrated into the Reich, new cross-border political ties emerged. Traditional political institutions—parliamentary parties and state agencies—remained bounded by state frontiers. But by 1900, new forms of mass politics crossed state boundaries, creating popular visions of national and socialist communities with distinct territorial dimensions. German nationalists in the borderlands did not accept the German Reich founded in 1871 as the last word on German national unity. In the 1890s, Saxon and German-Bohemian nationalists again created a cross-border German nationalist politics. They imagined a territory of nationalist activism that both included and transcended the German and Austrian states. Similarly, Czech nationalists wanted to expand their efforts beyond traditional Czech linguistic territories; to assert a material, as well as a moral, presence throughout the Bohemian crown lands; and to promote Czech nationalist commitments outside Bohemia, as large- scale migration created a European Czech-speaking diaspora stretching from Vienna to Berlin. The nationalists were not alone. By 1871, Saxony was a center of the German labor movement, and after Bismarck’s ban was lifted in 1890, Social Democracy became the largest political movement in Saxony. Bohemian Social Democrats developed contacts with their Reich counterparts by way of Saxony as early as the 1870s.31 After the expansion of the Austrian franchise in 1897 and 1907, they succeeded in building a mass politics centered in the industrial borderlands.32 On both sides, nationalists and socialists created new cross-border political networks. They read each others’ publications, attended each others’ events, and adopted each others’ political rhetoric and strategies. Because the borderlands were focal points for the contradictions and interconnections of populations and ideologies created by nineteenth-century social, economic, and political changes, they became a land of opportunity for the mass political movements that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s. Saxon and Bohemian frontier territories were home to both rapid industrialization and the erosion of traditional manufacturing. They faced dramatic demographic changes as mass migration created an urban population explosion, a sharp rise in ethnic and linguistic diversity, and burgeoning supraregional contacts and communication. Some frontier people discovered advantages in these changes, while

26

Changing Places

others suffered from being plunged into an unfamiliar, constantly shifting economic and social landscape. The mix of opportunity and misfortune, coupled with a rapidly widening electorate, created perfect conditions for such mass political movements as socialism and radical nationalism to grow and prosper. Proximity to the border allowed these movements to pro‹t from the ideas and experience of their foreign neighbors and enabled them to challenge their states and use the frontier to escape censorship and legal prosecution. Southern Saxony and northern Bohemia emerged as centers of socialist agitation and nationalist con›ict, the products of their particular social and economic geographies and their mutual proximity. The borderlands also became places where people were most likely to resist national and state classi‹cation and to express regional, nationalist, and internationalist identities. Centralizing governments repeatedly had to bow to local peoples’ demands that the borderlands be governed by different, more ›exible standards than other areas. Most frontier people treated ›exible use of the multiple, overlapping territories in their region as a rational response to shifting circumstances. Some political leaders, especially radical nationalists, regarded such ›exibility as dangerous. In response, they radicalized their tactics and rhetoric to expand their constituencies and to seize opportunities to institutionalize their political visions at home and abroad.

The Economic Landscape Of all the developments that reshaped Saxons’ and Bohemians’ relationships to physical space and each other, emerging modern economic networks had the furthest reach and the longest-lasting effects. New economic networks cut across existing territorial categories, reshaping physical space and social dynamics. They provided the impetus for new political movements—powerful motivations for people across society to think and act beyond the bounds of local, national, and state communities. In the late 1800s, economic changes led frontier people and their states to treat the borderlands as a distinct region, with its own needs and dynamics, long before they labeled it as such. Industrialization, population growth, mobility, and expanding transport and communication networks transformed the landscape and peoples’ daily lives. Borderland people knowingly operated in economic territories that crossed political bound-

Birth of a Borderland

27

aries and even oceans. They elaborated on cross-border economic ties to form new social, cultural, and political relationships. Industrialization did not develop evenly across Europe but appeared ‹rst in areas with coal, transportation, raw materials, and labor. In areas ill-suited for agriculture, people were especially ready to turn to manufacturing and industry.33 Southern Saxony’s and northern Bohemia’s similar landscapes and natural resources produced economies that had more in common with each other than with other territories in their own states. As the two industrial regions developed, they increasingly depended on each other for raw materials, equipment, fuel, labor, and markets. Both Saxony and Bohemia had well-established mining, manufacturing, and industrial traditions by the late nineteenth century. Southern Saxony emerged as an important manufacturing region in the eighteenth century and was Germany’s foremost industrial region by 1861.34 By 1871, almost 52 percent of the Saxon population worked in industry, nearly twice the Reich average.35 Except for an industrial island around Leipzig in the north, Saxon industries were concentrated in the southern part of the state. Much of the early manufacturing had taken root in the mountainous border region, and the area along the frontier continued to support small workshops and specialized industries. By the late nineteenth century, larger-scale, mechanized industries had developed further inland around such cities as Dresden, Chemnitz, Zwickau, and Plauen. These industries, while not in the immediate border area, were close enough to import raw materials, coal, and labor from Bohemia. In 1909, in fact, the Saxon government noted that the state’s industries could no longer survive without Bohemian coal.36 As in other early industrial regions, textiles were Saxony’s ‹rst big industry. Saxony, Silesia, and Bohemia formed a linen-producing region in the eighteenth century, and by the late 1800s, Saxony’s textile producers had markets around the world.37 Saxony lost its edge as Germany’s leading industrial region to the Ruhr in the 1880s but remained important.38 Saxon industry began to diversify, especially in the machine and metal industries, creating new urban industrial areas. Saxony’s traditional crafts and light consumer industries—such as toys, lace, musical instruments, and basketry—stayed alive in borderland communities. While it lacked the coal that powered the Ruhr, Saxony’s regional industrial tradition kept its economy growing into the early twentieth century. The region’s industries relied on a skilled, mobile labor force and worked to maintain it. Their tradition of entrepreneurial innovation and ›exibility helped them adapt to changes

28

Changing Places

in local and international economic conditions. In the 1880s, for example, the Saxon towns of Markneukirchen and Klingenthal, already known for musical instruments, began producing banjos and harmonicas for American markets.39 Access to transportation was critical to Saxony’s economic success. As Paul Degering observed in 1907, “the denser the rail network, the denser the population, and the more prosperous the area’s trade and industry.”40 Saxony had invested early in railways, and by 1900, it had the densest transportation network in Germany and the densest population in Europe, particularly in the industrial south.41 A 1904 article in the Sächsische Industrieund Handels-Zeitung noted, “Ever since Aue was connected to the railway, its industries have blossomed.”42 While Saxony lacked native supplies of coal, labor, and some raw materials, many of these were available just across the border. Between 1880 and 1900, high demand doubled the volume of material—mostly coal and timber—shipped from Bohemia to Saxony on the Elbe.43 These factors won Saxony industrial success beyond what its native resources seemed to promise. Saxon industrial towns were such important exporters that the United States established consulates in Annaberg, Chemnitz, Glauchau, Plauen, and Zittau to enhance the ›ow of goods across the Atlantic. Bohemia, particularly its northern border region, experienced industrialization and economic growth patterns like those of Saxony. Bohemian industry emerged in the late eighteenth century from a similar tradition of rural craft production. Its manufacturing also began with textiles, primarily linen—a regional industry whose institutions it shared with neighboring Silesia and the Oberlausitz (part of Saxony after 1635).44 In contrast to Saxony, early Bohemian manufacturing originated on large aristocratic estates. Serious industrialization began after the 1780s, spurred by local entrepreneurs’ adoption of British technology, new population mobility that followed the abolition of serfdom in 1781, and new enterprises in textiles, glass, iron, and paper. By 1840, Austria was home to more cotton spindles than the entire German Customs Union, and Bohemia itself had more spindles than did Saxony.45 By 1910, Bohemia had the most industrial labor force in the Habsburg lands,46 producing 75 percent of Austria’s lignite, 94 percent of its anthracite, 84 percent of its cast iron, and 70 percent of its chemicals. Most Bohemian industry was in the northern borderlands. As the shift from small-scale craft production to large-scale mechanized industry gathered steam in the 1870s and 1880s, Saxon and Bohemian

Birth of a Borderland

29

frontier producers developed new ties to one another, adapting old manufacturing traditions to new economic realities. In 1878, Saxon and Bohemian manufacturing associations visited each other, and the Gebirgsverein für die sächsisch-böhmische Schweiz marketed local handicrafts to tourists.47 By the 1890s, some manufacturing sectors, such as hand-weaving, had dwindled in the face of mechanized factory production. Some, such as the Bohemian glass industry, produced luxury goods for established foreign export markets.48 Other manufacturing sectors such as musical instruments, toys, and Christmas ornaments—expanded for a time by taking advantage of new transportation networks and marketing strategies.49 Before World War I, border communities contained an economic mix of midsized mechanized factories and small-scale craft production. Many towns and villages specialized in a particular craft or industry. Sebnitz and Mikulášovice/Nixdorf, towns across the border from each other, both produced arti‹cial ›owers. They and other communities with specialized industries survived alongside large-scale industry so long as their products could not be duplicated more cheaply in factories and as long as they had ready access to railways and foreign trade.50 Sebnitz bought wire for making ›owers from Bohemia and exported its products as far as China and the United States.51 Lauter expanded its basket production in the 1870s and 1880s, when railways connected the town to markets as distant as the United States and Australia.52 But such communities remained vulnerable to changes in cross-border and international trade, fashion, and foreign competition. After machine-made lace displaced handmade lace, for example, the Erzgebirge’s bobbin lace makers experienced ‹rst a decline, then a boom driven by post-1900 Western European and American fashions, and ‹nally devastation by trade barriers during World War I.53 In the 1880s, southern Saxony and northern Bohemia supported many similar industries, including textiles and glass. But Germany’s industrial sector, including that in Saxony, was growing faster than Bohemia’s. Saxon and Bohemian industry became increasingly interdependent, but in general, Bohemia supplied coal, raw materials, and semi‹nished goods, while Saxon industry provided technology and ‹nished goods. Industrialization created unprecedented ›ows of people seeking work in borderland industries. Cities burgeoned, industrial suburbs popped up like smokestackstudded mushrooms, and frontier populations became increasingly diverse in citizenship and nationality.

30

Changing Places

Landscapes of Frontier Life As political and economic conditions created new trade and labor migration across the frontier, cross-border contact became everyday for frontier people. Border residents shopped, peddled their goods, sought work, and visited pubs and dance halls on both sides. Sometimes, one side of the border offered something missing on the other. Other times, people were lured by lower prices or higher wages than those at home. These choices entered frontier life in the 1870s and 1880s, partly because agreements between Saxony and Austria made the cross-border ›ow of people and some goods easier than before. When, for example, restrictions on Jewish merchants’ mobility and trade were lifted in 1869, many Jews from northern Bohemia moved to Saxony.54 In the 1880s, the governments agreed to build new rail lines across the border. The states aimed both to increase cross-border traf‹c and to monitor it more closely. Similarly, the two states stopped requiring citizens of either state to have travel documents for crossing the border, although Saxon border police were instructed to ask tactfully for some identi‹cation.55 Austria and Saxony agreed to allow people in border districts to import small amounts of goods, especially foods, duty free. Laws in 1879 and 1887 abolished tariffs on small quantities of grain, ›our, bread, meat, and butter. Consumers could bring three kilograms of ›our, three kilograms of bread, two kilograms of smoked meat, and two kilograms of butter per household each week. Every household received a book for recording its weekly imports.56 After 1900, the two states took further steps to ease tariffs and protect migrant workers and businesses operating on both sides from double taxation.57 Border residents had long made economic use of both sides of the border, but the new regulations made legitimate crossborder consumption feasible on a larger scale than before, when crossfrontier trade had required special permits or followed ancient smuggling traditions.58 By 1900, borderland residents from industrialists to day laborers had come to consider frontier communities’ economic interdependence an indispensable right and tradition. Saxons enthusiastically embraced their new freedom to shop across the border. Food prices in Bohemia were generally lower than in Saxony,59 and Saxons quickly exploited the difference. But not everyone greeted the new rules enthusiastically. Some Austrian producers predicted economic ruin if Saxons and Austrians were pitched into direct competition.60 In the 1880s and again in the early 1900s, Saxon borderland bakers protested the new

Birth of a Borderland

31

rules. They complained that cheap Bohemian bread and ›our drew Saxon consumers across the border, forcing Saxon bakers to lower prices. Bakers begrudgingly conceded that some working-class consumers needed the economic advantage of the lower prices in Bohemia. But they were much less sympathetic to their better-off neighbors’ use of the border. One letter to district administrators maintained that “the importers belong primarily to the better-situated border residents.” Another asserted “it is all the same whether it is workers, businessmen, industrialists, or bureaucrats; they all buy Austrian ›our.”61 The shift in bread consumption across the border had, the bakers argued, lowered their incomes by more than 50 percent.62 Bakers’ arguments suggest that they saw their customers’ defection more as an expression of greed than of economic necessity. They argued that the Saxon government should make the political frontier a protective economic boundary. Suggestions varied from stopping all food imports, to stricter monitoring of the amounts of foods people imported, to only allowing the neediest to import food. Saxon districts tried to monitor small-scale food imports to prevent abuses but took no more drastic measures, despite the bakers’ protests. Such protests came in waves. Border residents were sensitive to price ›uctuations and differences in quality.63 When it was in their interest, they crossed the border to shop; when not, they shopped at home. Disputes over cross-border bread consumption illustrated both the advantages and limits of economic integration along the Saxon-Bohemian border in this period. Consumers could shop both sides of the border, taking advantage of different price systems and supply networks, because small quantities of goods were exempt from taxes. But bakers and other producers had to buy grain and ›our in bulk, and limited to supply networks on their own side of the border, they had to compete with the other side.64 In contrast, producers who imported such materials as coal to run factories, kaolin for porcelain, and salt for food found the open border a boon, even with tariffs. Other developments also re›ected the bene‹ts and dif‹culties of interconnected borderlands. Saxon and Bohemian tourism promoters held joint regional meetings; attended each other’s festivals; created shared organizations, such as Gebirgsvereine für die sächsisch-böhmische Schweiz; and proposed to create a cross-border tourist region. They collaborated on projects, building bridges and marking hiking trails.65 In the 1890s, innkeepers in Johanngeorgenstadt petitioned the district for permission to play dance music until 1:00 a.m. on Sundays and holidays. Expanded industry had brought population growth and young people. Young workers

32

Changing Places

wanted entertainment. When it was scarce in Saxony, they crossed the border to Bohemian pubs, where the beer was cheaper and the music played later. Saxon innkeepers complained that Saxon restrictions on dancing hurt their business. Because the border and Bohemian pubs were so close, they told of‹cials, Saxon restrictions did little to uphold the local population’s morality. In fact, they hinted, as morality was in rather shorter supply just across the border, Saxon of‹cials would be well advised to ease local regulations to keep their constituents within Saxon jurisdiction.66 As with bread, the truth was that Saxon publicans worked in a different economic landscape than their potential customers and Bohemian competitors. State regulations limited their choices but left them to compete with people who operated by different rules.

Conclusion Had a frontier resident from 1800 suddenly found himself transported to 1900, he would have found a landscape with many recognizable elements that grew more unfamiliar the longer he stayed. He would have found certain dynamics strange: the freedom of cross-border movement and consumption, as well as the joint efforts of tourism promoters, Social Democrats, and nationalists. Yet these were the ones that the borderland people of 1900 defended as regional rights and traditions. They would have recognized—even embraced—some of their predecessor’s territorial ideas: the political frontier’s location between Saxony and Bohemia, the idea of a “German” Europe that did not conform to state boundaries. But borderland residents of 1900 overlaid these territories with others: “national” property, international markets, mass transportation networks, and integrated cross-border communities. These new conceptions of space were both the products and the engines of the political change, industrialization, and mass mobility that swept the region in the second half of the nineteenth century. They re›ected changing relationships between states and populations. By 1900, governments and their citizens were more involved in one another’s daily affairs than ever before. Frontier dynamics had become the product of endless negotiations and adjustments, and the borderlands were a place where state power could be most clearly manifested yet most visibly circumscribed and circumvented. Consequently, frontier people and their governments began to think of the borderlands as a distinct region.

Chapter 2

A Region on the Move Labor Migration and the Rethinking of Space, 1870–1914

In the 1890s, “a colorful crowd peopled the highways,” including “tramps, tinkers, gypsies, players, and beggars”—so wrote August Friedel about his travels in northern Bohemia and southern Germany.1 Czech- and Germanspeaking Bohemians, Prussians and Saxons, seasonal laborers, factory workers, and skilled craftspeople were crisscrossing the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the roads, rails, and waterways in search of work.2 A region was on the move. Trade, geography, and shared resources connected the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands throughout their long rise as manufacturing and industrial areas. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the movements of people, both individuals and populations, turned the borderlands into a distinct place on the map of modern industrial society. In the 1880s and 1890s, unprecedented labor migration transformed borderland communities. Migrants gained ‹rsthand experience of closely interconnected economic landscapes; they deepened economic ties by participating in an emerging cross-border labor market; they forged a denser web of social, cultural, and political interconnections than ever before. Their mobility focused new public and governmental attention on the borderlands and their industries and populations. Most were regional migrants, from southern Saxony, northern Bohemia, and western Silesia. Their migration de‹ned a modern region that bridged state and national boundaries just as these boundaries began to assume new political signi‹cance. Labor migration forged integrated multinational communities. It es33

34

Changing Places

tablished a belief in a “tradition” of cross-border ›uidity, as well as a pattern of regional resistance to central government intervention. But it also sowed the seeds of new nationalist conceptions of territory and community that found expression in anti-Czech politics.

The Regionalism of Migration Historians have written extensively about long-distance migrations from Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. But although hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans emigrated to the United States and Latin America, even more stayed closer to home.3 These people, too, were on the move, creating a vast swirl of migration that de‹ned new European regions. Migrants took to the roads either because they were unemployed or because they needed better incomes to support their families. Their decisions hinged on individual circumstances, but their choices were shaped by large-scale changes in the states, societies, and economies in which they lived and worked. New roads, railways, and communication networks were critical for building regional relationships.4 So, too, were legal changes throughout Central Europe. In 1850, the German states, including Habsburg Austria, loosened passport requirements for travel among their territories. In 1865, Saxony, Bavaria, Hanover, and Württemberg went further, abolishing passport requirements for crossing their state boundaries. In 1871, free travel among German states became of‹cial policy in the German Empire. The abolition of internal passport requirements also made it much easier for workers from outside Saxony and Germany to cross the border legally.5 In Habsburg Austria, the abolition of internal passport requirements in 1857 and the loosening of residence laws in 1896 further eased the way for mass migration.6 These legal changes and the large-scale mobility they produced made possible the industrialization that swept the borderlands after the 1870s, transforming demographics, communities, and economies. Before 1914, factories and industrial communities on both sides of the Saxon-Bohemian frontier attracted people from nearby areas—often within a few days walk. By 1900, for example, fewer than half the people living in Ústí nad Labem/Aussig had been born there; a decade later, the proportion of native-born people had shrunk to less than a third. The vast majority of new residents came from neighboring areas of Bohemia.7 The

A Region on the Move

35

situation was similar in Chemnitz, a growing Saxon industrial center, where migrants came from nearby areas on both sides of the frontier.8 The borderland communities in which migrants worked and settled had existed for centuries. But large-scale migration transformed these communities, expanding urban landscapes and populations and changing social norms and networks. On both sides of the border, this migration created industrial communities whose inhabitants boasted a diversity of cultures, languages, and citizenships. In Bohemia, industrialization and large-scale labor migration brought Czech-speaking Bohemians from the interior to the majority German-speaking borderlands. By the 1880s, observers noted, northern Bohemian border districts were home to a growing Czech-speaking population.9 Although of‹cial statistics show only small Czech-speaking minorities in northern Bohemia, the populations of Ústí nad Labem/Aussig, Liberec/Reichenberg, and Teplice/Teplitz were likely about 20 percent Czech speaking by 1900; in some neighborhoods, the numbers were higher.10 Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, despite the rhetorical and statistical claims of both German-Bohemian and Czech nationalists, national identity was largely situational for many Bohemians in bilingual and borderland communities. They were used to moving between linguistic and cultural milieus.11 Although contemporary nationalists and subsequent historians have argued over the precise national demographics of northern Bohemia in the late nineteenth century, there is no question that northern Bohemian cities grew dramatically more diverse not only in language use but in their inhabitants’ birthplaces, occupations, and political af‹liations. In Saxony, labor migrants were primarily a regional phenomenon. Many workers came from German provinces farther east. Indeed, in 1899, landowners in western Silesia complained that Sachsengängerei (labor migration to Saxony) had left them with an inadequate workforce, a problem that they suggested might be curbed by raising the price of train tickets.12 But it was too late to stem the rising tide of migration. Industrialization and new infrastructure had created a demand for labor, a demand for work, and the means of bringing one to the other. New mobility transformed many communities and built both connections and rivalries among neighboring regions. Regional migration brought sweeping changes to the borderlands: burgeoning urban communities; landscapes transformed by construction, roads, and rail lines; the circulation of new political ideas; novel economic opportunities and challenges; and increasingly multiethnic, multilinguistic

36

Changing Places

populations. The story of societies transformed by the shift from rural to urban life and from agriculture to industry is familiar. But in this case, nineteenth-century migration connected existing village communities to new urban ones, rather than eroding ties between city and countryside.13 The Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had few large cities but myriad small towns and industrial villages. As migrants built regional social, familial, and economic networks, they connected the places they came from to those where they lived and worked. In the process, they kindled debates about communities’ relationships to larger states, nations, and economies.

Bohemians in Saxony In the 1870s and 1880s, the promise of better jobs and higher wages lured a small but growing stream of Bohemian migrants to Saxony. Labor migration was critical in collapsing political borders and differences of nationality, language, and confession. In these rapidly changing societies, people moved with remarkable freedom, demonstrating a ›uid sense of identi‹cation, both in their choice of physical location and in their community af‹liations. Not only did cross-border migrants bring their strength and skills to the places where they found work, but many Bohemians incorporated the southern Saxon borderlands into their native landscape, making themselves as at home there as in northern Bohemia. The multiple allegiances that widespread mobility created led borderland employers and some government of‹cials to counsel a policy of openness and mutual cross-border assistance, even when that put them at odds with their central government. Still, some Saxons and Bohemians demanded a halt to the spread of “foreign” in›uences. Most Bohemian migrants to Saxony came from the borderlands. Like their home communities, the vast majority were native German speakers, and the Czech speakers were frequently bilingual. These Bohemian migrants were not obviously out of place in Saxony, nor did they or their Saxon hosts see them as either Czechs or Germans. In the 1870s and even into the 1880s, Saxon of‹cials and the Saxon press often referred to anyone who was not a Saxon citizen as “foreign.” “Foreign labor” thus included Bohemians (German- or Czech-speaking Austrian citizens), Poles (who might be German, Austrian, or Russian citizens), and Silesians (Prussian citizens).14 By the 1880s and early 1890s, Saxon of‹cials and employers began to label people as “foreign” because they did not speak German, not

A Region on the Move

37

because of their citizenship or nationality.15 Thus, while Saxons might have considered Poles who were German or Austrian citizens foreign, they did little to distinguish German-speaking and bilingual Bohemians with Austrian citizenship from the rest of the local workforce and population. As in the rest of Germany after 1890, the term foreign labor in Saxony came to refer to Poles and Ruthenes. Bohemians appear to have been treated less as foreigners to be worried about, regulated, or excluded than were other, less numerous groups of migrants. Of course, working people had crossed the political border for centuries. Bohemian Protestants emigrated to Saxony during the Thirty Years’ War, journeymen had long included both territories in their Wanderjahre, and Saxon technical experts played important roles in Bohemian industrialization. Nevertheless, in the late nineteenth century, cross-border migration was different from before. Not only did it take place on a far greater scale, but it ›owed largely in one direction: south to north. Saxony’s industry proved faster growing, with more jobs and higher wages than in Bohemia, and was more attractive to labor migrants.16 Borders often act as mediators, but the areas they connect are rarely equals.17 Labor migration in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands revealed that connections can create inequality. Saxon industries grew faster than their Bohemian counterparts and proved the greatest draw for cross-border labor migrants. In his memoir, factory worker Wenzel Holek wrote that when he was a child in Bohemia in the 1870s, “my playmates often talked about their fathers who had gone abroad in search of work.”18 Later, his own father left for Saxony to look for work; and some years after, faced with unemployment, Holek did as well.19 Holek and his father found Saxony easily accessible, made the trip on foot, and found the work there little different from that in northern Bohemia. If work petered out or did not pay enough, they simply returned home to try another way to earn a living.20 Local catastrophes also sparked regional labor migration. In 1888, when the coal mines around Teplice/Teplitz ›ooded, newly jobless Bohemian miners sought work in Saxon mines near Zwickau and Oelsnitz.21 The ‹rst waves of Bohemian laborers to Saxony that drew signi‹cant comment were in such trades as tailoring in the 1870s and construction and railway building in the 1880s. In 1891, 461 out of 663 laborers on a railway construction site in Wolkenstein were Bohemian.22 Yet the promise of work was not always ful‹lled. In 1874, the Austrian tariff collector in Schneeberg reported that working-class Bohemian families were responding to newspaper advertisements for railway jobs in Pirna. Many soon re-

38

Changing Places

turned home, disappointed in their hope of ‹nding a living wage or any work at all.23 Still, people kept coming. They returned home to Bohemia with news of which Saxon factories were hiring. New arrivals sought out friends and relatives in Saxony for tips on ‹nding work.24 By the 1890s, Bohemians were a substantial part of the workforce in many Saxon towns and factories. Some settled permanently in Saxony but, even then, stayed in contact with family and friends in Bohemia, thereby linking the societies on both sides of the border.25 Many working-class Bohemians embraced southern Saxony as part of the home region where they lived and worked. But here, too, the inequality of cross-border relations was evident. It was Bohemian labor migrants who increasingly treated the borderlands as a single region. Relatively few Saxons crossed into Bohemia for work.26 For them, the industrial employment landscape lay north of the frontier.27 Some Saxons objected vigorously to Bohemian migrants. In 1890, Saxon construction worker Friedrich August Wilhelm Pfützner complained to the Saxon government, “Bohemians are descending [on Saxony] like locusts . . . [T]hey arrive daily not only by foot . . . but also by steamship and by train.”28 Pfützner’s complaints made it clear that Bohemian migrants were transforming both economics and less tangible social and cultural factors in the Saxon borderlands. Bohemians, Pfützner asserted, drove wages down. Moreover, he complained, they smoked on the job, changed the dynamics of workplace mealtimes, and spoke Czech on construction sites.29 In short, Pfützner tried to convince Saxon authorities that Bohemian migrants threatened all aspects of Saxon life. Although many of the details that irritated Pfützner (e.g., workplace language use and changing sociability on construction sites) appear to be minor, they point to the myriad small ways in which labor migration changed borderland life in the late nineteenth century. Pfützner’s letter prompted the Saxon Ministry of the Interior to investigate the question of Bohemian migration. In 1891, the ministry asked district governments whether Bohemian workers were showing up in their districts and whether they threatened Saxon workers and the Saxon economy. Reports con‹rmed that there was a lively in-migration of Bohemian labor to Saxon border districts and cities. Most argued that this migration was not a threat; the city council in Sebnitz even insisted that many borderland industries could not survive without Bohemian migrants. Factories in the immediate border area depended on Bohemian workers, but most Bohemians were employed in railway construction, building, and

A Region on the Move

39

brick making. A few of‹cials conceded that Bohemians competed with native Saxon labor and were probably helping to depress wages. But, of‹cials argued, this was not necessarily a bad thing. Many felt that Saxon workers had grown unreasonable in their demands for higher wages and better working conditions. In Dresden, while Social Democrats worried about Bohemian labor and while the police reported instances of “disturbances” and “excesses” to protest the presence of Bohemian migrants, district of‹cials described Bohemians as hardworking and well behaved.30 Dr. Walter Schelcher of the Saxon state railway commission suggested that Bohemian workers outnumbered Saxons in railway building partly because they had the experience and therefore the physical strength for the work. He argued that Saxon workers should not complain but should work harder if they hoped to compete with their Bohemian colleagues.31 The Saxon Ministry of the Interior concluded that there was no reason to limit Bohemian workers in Saxony. In fact, it argued that restrictions would hurt state railway building and that foreign labor protected employers from unreasonable demands by Saxon workers and Social Democrats. If domestic labor was hurt by the in›ux from Bohemia, it had, of‹cials suggested, only itself to blame.32 Such conclusions were in keeping with the combative mood of contemporary Saxon politics. Saxony had emerged as a hotbed of Social Democracy and union activism in the 1870s, while the Saxon middle-class establishment and the state government remained conservative, determined to limit Social Democracy’s political in›uence. In the 1880s, Social Democrats began making inroads against the traditional three-camp constellation of Saxon parliamentary politics: liberals, conservatives, and democrats. From the 1890s on, Social Democrats consistently won between 40 and 60 percent of the vote in Reichstag elections.33 Bohemian workers provided much-needed labor for Saxon industries, and employers wanted access to this labor. In 1898, employers with underwater construction projects in Grosscotta commented, “We wouldn’t be able to do this work without the Czechs. Our workers won’t do it.”34 Bohemians may have helped depress wages, but the effect was probably limited, since by the 1890s, many Bohemians, too, were involved in Social Democracy, and migrants were becoming more fully integrated into Saxon communities. In the 1890s, Bohemian workers branched out from construction work to skilled trades and industries in Saxony. Tailors’ apprentices and domestic servants in Annaberg were said to be overwhelmingly Czech speaking; numerous Bohemians were reported among Dresden’s tailors, cobblers,

40

Changing Places

and craftspeople; and fashionable upper-class Saxons preferred Bohemian cooks.35 Just how many people took part in this migration is hard to say, both because the Saxon state was slow to develop accurate census data on foreigners and because many migrants were never counted.36 But as table 1 shows, between 1880 and 1910, of‹cial German and Austrian statistics recorded a quintupling of the number of Austrian citizens in Saxony, far outpacing Saxony’s already remarkable population growth.37 By 1900, Austrian citizens constituted nearly 90 percent of Saxony’s foreign population and at least 3 percent of its total population.38 Austrian citizens, especially in borderland communities, were overwhelmingly from Bohemia, most from within twenty kilometers of the Saxon border.39 These numbers do not tell the whole story, especially where of‹cial records and statistics failed to recognize or record the most common kinds of foreign workers in the region. Before 1900, Saxon demographic statistics excluded some kinds of migrants, so thousands of people went uncounted.40 Because the Saxon censuses were conducted in December, for example, they did not include seasonal workers. Similarly, they neglected the many workers who lived in Bohemia and crossed the border daily to jobs in Saxony. Some Saxon companies also took advantage of their proximity to the border to hire Bohemian home workers, so they could sell ‹nished goods in the Habsburg monarchy without paying import tariffs.41 Such

TABLE 1. Official Saxon statistics on Austrian citizens living in Saxony, 1880–1910

Year

Austrian citizens

Total Saxon population

1880 1885 1890 1900 1905 1910

30,060 43,314 66,361 113,437 137,423 159,619

2,972,805 3,182,003 3,502,684 4,202,216 4,508,601 4,806,661

Source: Data from Zeitschrift des Königlichen Sächsischen Statistischen Bureaus, 1–2 (1886): 7; Lommatzsch, “Die Bevölkerung des Königreichs Sachsen,” 98; Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Königreich Sachsen, 36 (1908): 12; Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Königreich Sachsen 41 (1913): 16; Rauchberg, Die Bevölkerung Österreichs, 511; Zeitschrift des Königlichen Statistischen Landesamtes, 61 (1915): 2.

A Region on the Move

41

workers, although not part of Saxony’s population, constituted an important part of its workforce.42 Furthermore, Bohemian women, about half of all migrants, often married Saxon men, took their husbands’ citizenship, and disappeared from the ranks of foreigners.43 It is impossible to say precisely how many such workers came to Saxony from Bohemia every year, but a variety of sources suggest that short-term labor was plentiful and raised the Bohemian presence in some areas of Saxony signi‹cantly—particularly near the border—without being noted in of‹cial statistics. The impact of cross-border labor markets, especially in the immediate borderlands where workers often lived in Bohemia while working in Saxon industries, was dramatic. In 1908, the city council of Oberwiesenthal in Saxony pointed out, “Approximately three hundred men, women, and girls work in our three [glove] factories. Of those, at least two hundred live in Bohemia. The Engelstädter stocking factory employs sixteen workers, all of whom live in Bohemia; the Schreiter box factory’s employees are one-quarter Bohemians, as are the employees in the embroidery works.”44 Clearly, such numbers were important for borderland industries and for both Saxon and Bohemian borderland communities. Yet while Saxony came under increased pressure from the German central government to regulate foreign labor for “national political reasons,” borderland communities appear to have cared more that their industries had access to labor, that foreigners shopped where they worked, and that people who worked in Saxony contributed to the local tax base.45 As long as people contributed to local communities, their nationality and citizenship were of little concern. Why was it so easy for Bohemians to go to Saxony to work and even, by the turn of the century, to settle there in signi‹cant numbers? As we have seen, the erosion of tariff and passport barriers spurred labor migration within the borderlands, including that of Bohemians to Saxony. This migration really took off in the 1890s, the same period in which debates about foreign labor in Germany led to research and governmental regulation, particularly in Prussia.46 Yet these debates had remarkably little impact in the Saxon borderlands. Although framed as a national (and thus Reich-wide) concern, they focused on foreign Polish workers in eastern Prussian agriculture. As Bohemian industrial workers in the southern Saxon borderlands did not ‹t this picture, they enjoyed greater freedom from regulation than other foreigners did, until 1914. After 1900, labor and nationalist politics, rather than government policy, shifted public perceptions of Bohemian foreign labor. The 1903–4 Crimmitschau textile workers’ strike gave credence to the idea that Czech-

42

Changing Places

speaking Bohemian migrants threatened Saxon society. The Crimmitschau strike captured the German public’s imagination. German organized labor and Social Democrats battled to win new rights for labor, while employers accused organized labor of endangering Germany’s social order and industrial production. Kathleen Canning has shown that larger debates about gender and labor played out in the Crimmitschau con›ict. But the strike also highlighted tensions over foreign labor.47 Both the proximity of Bohemian factories and the prevalence of Bohemian labor in Saxony became central to the debates. Workers and social reformers in Saxony deployed nationalist rhetorical tropes, claiming, on the one hand, that Austrian workers had a stake in the defense of “German labor” and, on the other hand, that foreign—speci‹cally Czech—laborers endangered the livelihoods of honest German workers. The issue of “Czech foreign labor” proved primarily rhetorical—strikebreakers were rarely Czech-speaking Bohemians—but the strike left a stain on the reputation of Czech-speaking Bohemians that still surfaces today. When Crimmitschau textile workers went on strike in August 1903, their employers responded with a lockout and an aggressive campaign to recruit strikebreakers from neighboring Bohemia and Bavaria, as well as from Saxony.48 Industrialists seized on the Crimmitschau strike as a chance to use new regional and international labor markets to undermine the German labor movement. They argued that raising wages and cutting working hours would make them uncompetitive with northern Bohemian textile mills just across the frontier.49 Strikers, too, understood that the new dynamics of the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands gave the Crimmitschau con›ict supraregional and even international dimensions. They responded with a dual rhetorical strategy—declaring the strike a critical struggle for German national labor, on the one hand, and invoking socialist internationalism, on the other. They appealed to fellow workers in Germany and Austria and particularly Bohemia to support the strike on behalf of “German labor” and not come to Crimmitschau as strikebreakers. But they also targeted Czech-speaking Bohemian workers, distributing Czech-language posters in Bohemia and arguing that Social Democracy and labor reform bridged differences in nationality and citizenship.50 These efforts succeeded, winning them material and rhetorical support for the strike from working-class and socialist organizations in Bohemia.51 But even as they wooed their Bohemian comrades with protestations of international working-class solidarity, strikers, Social Democrats, mid-

A Region on the Move

43

dle-class social reformers, and their supporters also embraced antiforeign and speci‹cally German nationalist rhetoric, portraying strikebreakers as Czech speakers recruited directly from Bohemia.52 These accusations re›ected a nationalist emphasis in broader German debates over questions of labor and social reform, as suggested by Reich German liberal reformer Lujo Brentano. We have been working for decades to settle Germans in Posen in order to control the Polish element. We speak of the necessity of protecting national labor, . . . yet in order to gain the upper hand in the ‹ght over work conditions, . . . we are now importing workers of foreign nationality from Galicia and Bohemia in order to triumph over German workers! What has happened to the defense of national labor? Or do we want to transform Crimmitschau into a Czech enclave as Dortmund is already a Polish one?53 Brentano was one of the founders of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, which had declared in the 1890s that Polish immigrants threatened to overrun the Prussian east. His comments on the Crimmitschau case demonstrate that both Reich German social reformers and German nationalists were beginning to cast Czechs in a role like that they had already assigned to Poles and were arguing that the threat of foreign inundation applied to the whole Reich, not only to Prussia. Their rhetoric framed the Saxon-Bohemian border as another German bulwark against an encroaching Slavic menace. Reich German Social Democrats, too, were divided between advocating equal rights to all workers, domestic or foreign, and warning that internationalism threatened German workers.54 Despite this rhetoric, most strikebreakers were neither from Bohemia nor Czech speakers. In January, as employers stepped up their recruitment of strikebreakers in the last tense weeks of con›ict, a count of workers on the job in Crimmitschau found that of 2,624 workers, only 470 came from outside Saxony. Among these were 75 Bavarians, 68 Bohemians, 42 Galicians, and 1 Russian.55 Employers had tried repeatedly to recruit labor from Bohemia, but with little success. The frustrated representative of the company J&L Birkner complained in December 1903 that strikers were scaring off potential workers by threatening violence to any “Bohemian dogs” who tried to take up work in Crimmitschau. Strikers combined both force and persuasion with potential strikebreakers, pelting them with stones wrapped in strike posters.56

44

Changing Places

At the same time, working-class newspapers in Bohemia and newspapers aimed at Bohemian workers abroad exhorted their readers not to become strikebreakers, publishing lists of strikes in Germany and urging their readers to avoid those areas. By 1904, even the Austrian government warned northern Bohemian workers to be leery of Saxon labor recruiters. Such warnings were effective. Bohemian workers often resisted Saxon labor agents’ attempts to recruit them when a strike was on or even suspected.57 Employers at a spinning mill in Liebschwitz found that Bohemian workers whom they recruited in 1903 refused to come to work once they learned that a strike was on. In 1904, employers in Freiberg found that Bohemian workers were reluctant to accept work there, fearing they were being sought as strikebreakers in Crimmitschau or elsewhere.58 The Edmund Ulrich dyeworks in Crimmitschau asserted that while the company had successfully recruited labor from Bohemia in the past, rumors that girls were being locked in factories, chained to machines, and falling victim to industrial accidents now discouraged potential workers from going to Saxony.59 Whether such rumors had originated among strikers or Bohemian Social Democrats or had sprung up on their own, they seem to have been effective deterrents. Most strikebreakers in Crimmitschau were native Saxons, while Bohemian workers resisted recruitment to Crimmitschau. Why, then, is the strike’s failure associated with Czech migrants? By 1900, Czechs had come to symbolize all foreign labor in Saxony, despite being outnumbered by their German-Bohemian countrymen. At Crimmitschau, German organized labor sought to show united opposition to big capital. The strikers’ German nationalist rhetoric made admitting that the “traitors” undermining the strike effort were fellow Saxons and Germans embarrassing. This rhetoric encouraged strikers and labor leaders to blame people they portrayed as national outsiders. Furthermore, the portrayal of strikebreakers as Bohemian was consistent with employers’ recruitment efforts, although not with Bohemian workers’ responses to recruitment. The association of Czech-speaking Bohemians with the strike may have been strengthened by Reich German Social Democrats’ belief that low wages in the northern Bohemian textile industry kept Saxon wages low and working hours long.60 The tactic worked. After Crimmitschau, Saxon public opinion regarded Czechs as strikebreakers. To this day, Saxon popular memory associates Czech workers with the failure of the Crimmitschau strike.61 After the Crimmitschau strike, public acceptance of the idea that foreign labor was a problem in Saxony seems to have grown. Moreover, after

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45

1900, Prussia and the Reich government pressured Saxony to embrace regulations for foreign labor similar to the Prussian ones, arguing that the issue was of national political importance, since Poles (and some other foreigners) threatened to undermine the German character of the Reich. Faced with these joint pressures, the Saxon government made motions toward regulating foreign labor, despite protests from local of‹cials and industrialists that foreign workers kept Saxon borderland industries competitive and that nationality was not a pressing issue.62 In 1908, the Saxon government approved the use of work permits color-coded by nationality for foreign Poles and Ruthenes, who composed a tiny part of the Saxon industrial workforce.63 In 1910, it passed new rules that required all foreign workers to have work permits.64 In 1912, Saxony bowed to Prussian demands that required foreign Polish workers to leave the country every December. Still, the Saxon government asserted repeatedly that foreign workers posed no national threat and that Saxon economic and political interests were more important than those of the Reich government. The Saxon Ministry of the Interior observed in 1911, “Foreign Poles do not present a real problem in Saxony at the moment . . . , but the ministry is in principle willing to consider . . . adopting the Prussian regulations for foreign Polish workers insofar as they can be brought into line with conditions in Saxony.”65 When Prussia suggested that Saxony should further extend the restrictions to include Czech speakers, the Saxon ministry observed, Although for Saxony there is a greater Czech threat than a Polish one, it is not a pressing problem. The Czechs, a relatively small Volk compared to the Poles, already live in a German populated territory and do not have the Poles’ power of expansion, in part because economic conditions in their own land are good and they are therefore under less pressure to emigrate. They are no danger to the German population . . . Furthermore, mass regulation could be construed as unfriendly toward our neighbor state of Bohemia and could cut us off from the German Bohemians.66 The Saxon government considered good relations with Bohemia and with Saxony’s economic partners in the Bohemian borderlands far more important than any non-German national in›uences that might cross the frontier with labor migrants.67 Although the Saxon state appeared to cooperate with the central government, its policies suggested that it regarded foreign workers much as did other local actors, such as industrialists. Sax-

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ony tempered its new regulations by exempting domestic servants and people with Austrian identi‹cation papers in German from having to obtain work permits. In practice, this exempted almost all Bohemians. Similarly, in 1909, the district government in Löbau, in the Oberlausitz, suggested that Saxony create an of‹cial border zone within which industries could hire Bohemian workers without restrictions.68 Industrialists, too, resisted restrictions on migrant labor. In 1913, the Organization of Employers in the Saxon Textile Industry argued, “For Saxony as a highly industrial land and as a borderland, [access to foreign labor] is especially important.” The organization also pointed out that limiting Polish labor was likely to lead to restrictions on other foreign workers, which would be much worse for Saxon borderland industries that depended on Bohemians. The Saxon government kept the new rules but promised to enforce them gradually.69 Saxony’s restrained approach to restricting foreign workers put it at odds with the German nationalist tone of Prussian and Reich German debates about foreign labor. The Deutsche Arbeiterzentrale, a quasi-governmental organization in charge of issuing work permits to foreigners, complained that “the Saxon government was trying to accommodate the German Bohemians.” The organization pointed out that exemptions for people with German-language Austrian documents in no way excluded Poles, Ruthenes, Czechs, Italians, and other non-Germans. It urged, apparently without effect, that regulation be applied more clearly on the basis of nationality.70 The Saxon government and the Deutsche Arbeiterzentrale demonstrated fundamentally different views of foreign workers. The Saxon state treated these people as citizens of an allied state with which it had close political and economic ties. The Deutsche Arbeiterzentrale, in contrast, dismissed citizenship as a way to de‹ne foreigners, emphasizing the far more slippery category of nationality instead. Although Saxony never formally regulated foreigners by nationality during the Kaiserreich, nationality and foreign labor did emerge in public debate in the decade before World War I. The Saxon central government refused to differentiate foreigners by nationality, but Saxon district and local of‹cials demonstrated real diversity of opinion on the subject. In 1909, for example, the Kamenz district suggested that since work permits would be required for Poles and Ruthenes, it would be good to extend them to Czechs and Italians,71 yet Bautzen district of‹cials argued, “[Bohemian workers] almost always have intelligible papers, in German or in both German and Czech, so that there is no dif‹culty establishing their identities.

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Furthermore, some of these workers have been in the district for years, indeed for decades; some have settled here and established homes and families. For such workers, permits would pose a hardship. The same is not true of those workers who do not speak German or who have only recently arrived and do not have German-language papers.”72 Some of‹cials embraced the idea that foreign migrants and foreign citizens threatened Saxon communities; others argued that as long as foreigners were willing and able to participate in German-speaking society, they were welcome. Historians have emphasized the restrictions Germany imposed on foreign workers after 1890. But in the Saxon case, the restrictions either did not exist or were riddled with loopholes. Even in an age of emerging German nationalism, Bohemian labor migration to Saxony remained remarkably unhindered up to World War I.

Foreign Workers Bohemian migrants to Saxony joined an increasingly diverse workforce. Wenzel Holek described his arrival at a Dresden glass factory in 1904 as follows: “I got off my bicycle, exhausted [from the trip across the border], listened . . . and heard Polish, Russian, Czech, and German all together.”73 This mix of nationalities and citizenships was commonplace, Holek observed: “The international character of the factory meant that it was not uncommon to ‹nd three nationalities together in one apartment.” His sister’s household, where he ‹rst stayed in Dresden, was, in classic Bohemian borderland tradition, bilingual German and Czech. When he took a job in a brickworks later that year, he was again working with Bohemians.74 The Bohemians who found work and settled in Saxony had decided advantages over other foreign workers in Germany. They were overwhelmingly German speaking, either native speakers or, like Wenzel Holek and his family, from the Czech-German bilingual milieu of northern Bohemia. Most had identity papers in German. As German speakers, these migrants were not greatly different from those from Prussia or other regions of the German Empire. They migrated short distances and had worked in the same industries that were common in Saxony—useful experience in a labor market that valued skill. Such migrants are almost impossible to identify in the period before World War I, precisely because they had excellent protective coloration. Before World War I, citizenship seems to have been of limited concern

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to the Saxon public and government. German nationalists largely ignored German-speaking Bohemians in Saxony. They objected to Czech-speaking migrants not because they were Austrian citizens but because they were Czech. For German-speaking Bohemians, this made the Saxon-Bohemian border highly permeable. In his memoir, August Friedel summed up his move from Bohemia to Saxony by saying, “In 1894 I came to Neugersdorf.”75 Apparently, there was little more to the move than arriving and ‹nding work. Thus, although German-speaking Bohemians showed up as foreigners in citizenship statistics, in most ways they blended easily into their surroundings. German-speaking Bohemian migrants who stayed in Saxony for any length of time were likely to join Saxon associations. August Friedel and Wenzel Holek, for example, joined the Saxon labor union and Social Democratic movements.76 Furthermore, many married Saxons, thus integrating themselves into Saxon borderland society.77 Other migrants carved out their own cultural and political space in Saxony. Czech associations emerged earlier—beginning in the 1860s—than German-Austrian organizations, and the former appear to have been more numerous, despite the fact that Czechs were a minority among Bohemians in Saxony. Vlastimil, the ‹rst Czech association in Dresden, was founded in 1864. In 1878, it had sixty members, comprised of tailors’ or cobblers’ apprentices in their twenties and thirties, typical Bohemian labor migrants for the 1870s.78 Vlastimil, like other diaspora Czech associations in Germany and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century, aimed to create a realm of Czech sociability, to promote self-improvement through educational and social life, and to maintain a sense of connection to the fatherland among Czech speakers abroad.79 In the 1870s, these organizations sought to keep alive the Czech and Slavic consciousness expressed in 1848, not to promote radical nationalism. In 1872, Vlastimil hosted the International Conference of Czech Associations Abroad, an event that, according to of‹cial estimates, brought nine hundred Czechs to Dresden. Vlastimil also served as a model for other Czech associations in Saxony.80 By the 1880s, a variety of Czech associations had appeared in Saxon towns. All were working-class groups, re›ecting the realities of a Czech community drawn to Saxony through labor migration.81 Like other working-class associations in Saxony and Bohemia, they often organized around activities such as singing, cycling, or gymnastics. They put on plays and held concerts.82 Associations held festivals, inviting not only their own members and their families but other Czech associations in Saxony. For big

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anniversary festivals, they invited groups from Bohemia as well. Such organizations kept ties to Bohemia on behalf of their membership and the wider Czech-speaking community in Saxony. Many of these associations had a Social Democratic bent or were suspected of having one by the Saxon police. In some cases, their very foreignness helped them stay politically active and maintain ties to Bohemia. During the era of the Anti-Socialist Laws in Germany (1878–90), Czech associations maintained contact with Social Democrats in Bohemia. They were able to address Social Democratic topics more boldly than could German associations, since they conducted meetings in Czech, which the Saxon police could not understand.83 Ultimately, however, the Saxon police grew suspicious. In 1885, they dissolved Dresden’s Ceský klub and deported many of its members on charges of socialist activity. Even after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890, most Czech groups, like workingclass associations generally, declared themselves apolitical in order to avoid police attention.84 Yet the fact that these organizations were active in Saxony demonstrates that Saxon police did not automatically treat them as a threat. When they were targeted, it was for socialist politics, rather than foreign nationality. By 1900, a more nationalist emphasis appeared in Czech associations in Saxony, re›ecting the radicalization of Czech nationalism in Bohemia.85 The gymnastics association Sokol, founded in Dresden in 1890, had about two hundred members until World War I. The Austrian government reported that Sokol received support, including money and books, from the Young Czech Party in its early days. In return, in the ‹rst decade of the twentieth century, Sokol raised money in Saxony to build a Czech gymnastics hall across the border in Podmokly/Bodenbach, sent its members to Sokol festivals in Prague, and invested in Czech cultural and political life in northern Bohemia.86 By that time, there was a clear shift in the kinds of Czech-speaking Bohemians coming to Saxony in search of work. In the 1880s and 1890s, migrants had been primarily craftspeople or unskilled construction workers; by the turn of the century, most were factory workers. This shift was re›ected in Czech associational life. In 1908, Vlastimil, the oldest Czech association in Dresden, split ranks. The older members— craftspeople and skilled workers—wanted the group to retain its traditional character, protecting the moral standards of its membership and discouraging assimilation into German society. But younger members had more radical nationalist views and split off to form the “new Vlastimil,” taking with them two-thirds of the older association’s membership.87

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Despite the prominence of nationality politics in Germany and the Habsburg Empire by 1900, most Bohemian migrants did not participate in them, moving instead between national milieus. Being in Saxony, where the Czech-German nationality ‹ght was not prominent in daily life and politics, probably made this easier. The number of Czech associations in Saxony continued to grow at the turn of the century, appearing in all major and many minor Saxon cities, especially near the Bohemian border. Still, Saxon of‹cials asserted that while only a small minority of Czech speakers were involved in these associations, many participated in German associations or abstained from associations altogether—an assessment with which Czech observers concurred.88 Some speci‹cally German-Austrian associations appeared in Saxony after 1900. Although the Saxon police paid little attention to these groups and thus did not leave extensive records, the presence in Chemnitz of the Union of the German-Austrian Associations in Saxony (Landesverband der Deutsch-Oesterreichischer Vereine in Sachsen) suggests that there were multiple associations of this kind. These organizations of‹cially represented all German speakers from Cisleithania, but like the local Germanspeaking Austrian population, they appear to have been German-Bohemian in membership and focus. These groups tried to maintain Austrian and Bohemian identity among people living in Germany and to support German-Bohemian nationalist efforts in Bohemia. German-speaking Bohemians were probably even more likely than Czech immigrants to integrate into their Saxon surroundings, and Chemnitz’s Union of German Austrians in the German Reich (Deutsch-Oesterreichischer Bund im Deutschen Reich) clearly welcomed members who had taken German citizenship. Citizenship should pose no barrier to German-Austrian (or German-Bohemian) identity.89 After the war, when citizenship took on new meaning, German Bohemians and their associations emerged from the woodwork.

Migrants and National Identity Bohemian migrants may have ignored national issues and acculturated to local communities when they crossed the Saxon border. But their presence provided fodder for German, German-Bohemian, and Czech nationalists. In 1909, the Czech association Vlastimil in Dresden invited guests from Bohemia to celebrate its forty-‹fth anniversary. The German-Bohemian na-

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tionalist press reported the invitation with alarm, asserting that Czechs were planning to “agitate” in Saxony. But Saxon police sent to observe the visitors described a reassuring scene: “Fifty Austrian Czechs, most older and respectably dressed, arrived at the [Dresden] train station and were met by members of the association Vlastimil. In part because of the heavy holiday traf‹c, the arrival of this group of ‹fty was not very conspicuous, but the Czechs themselves carefully avoided anything that might have drawn attention to them.” The Dresden police observed that despite a sharp rise in Czech-speaking immigrants, there had been no signs of Czech nationalist agitation.90 Czech nationalist leaders worried about the effects of migration on their countrymen. In 1904, the publication Ceský vystehovalec (Czech Émigré) appeared, published in Prague and intended to keep Czechs abroad in touch with their Czech identities and Bohemian politics. Vystehovalec covered news of Czech working-class émigrés all over the world, from Cleveland and Buenos Aires to London and Paris. But most of its coverage from 1904 to the 1920s related to Czech speakers working in Germany. It included reports of associational activity, German labor law, advertisements for Bohemian restaurants, Czech-friendly accommodation, and other goods and services in German cities. While advertisements and articles related to Czech speakers in Germany covered the whole Kaiserreich, Saxony was overrepresented, re›ecting its importance for Czech migrant labor. Vystehovalec also emphasized the signi‹cance of Czech-speaking labor to the development of German industry, claiming that Czech-speaking workers were critical to German industrial success, especially in textiles and mining.91 Fears that Czech speakers in Germany risked assimilation and denationalization ran through the pages of Vystehovalec. A 1905 article declared, For no one does the question of nationality and internationality have such practical importance as for Czech workers who live outside the [Bohemian] borders, particularly in Germany, not only because of the national con›ict at home between bourgeois Czechs and Germans . . . [but because] workers in Germany are predominantly in the camp of international socialism.92 The implication was that Germany’s internationalist working-class milieu would erode Czech workers’ national identities. Czech-speaking migrants in Saxony did not have Czech nationalist organizations either supporting them or chiding them for anational behav-

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ior. Moreover, they had good reasons to downplay nationalist sentiments, since obvious expressions of nationalist consciousness attracted Saxon authorities’ suspicions. But there were other reasons why migrants were probably less drawn to overt nationalism or national identity. Like immigrant groups elsewhere, those who chose to stay in Saxony wanted to acculturate. That acculturation alarmed Czech nationalist leaders. As Vystehovalec noted in dismay, some children of Czech-speaking émigrés were growing up with no knowledge of their mother tongue.93 Wenzel Holek corroborates this loss of language skills, though without sharing nationalists’ horror: “The Germanization of the children happened . . . quite naturally and completely. The mother and father speak to their children in their native tongue, but the children reply in the language that they hear on the streets and in school, that is, in German.”94 Acculturation contributed to Czech associations in Saxony being much less stridently nationalist than their counterparts in Bohemia. A letter to Vystehovalec complained that Czech groups in Saxony failed to demonstrate national political maturity. The writer declared in dismay that members of the association Sokol in Dresden had participated in the king of Saxony’s birthday celebrations and that Czechs abroad discredited themselves by showing solidarity with German Social Democrats.95 In 1910, the Czech National Council in Prague conducted a survey about Czech-speaking émigrés and concluded that emigration worked against the national cause: “Émigré colonies are signi‹cant for the nation only as long as their sense of national solidarity is not extinguished, and it is therefore [our] duty to preserve that national consciousness.”96 But Czech nationalist groups found “preservation” an uphill battle. Czech associations’ behavior in Saxony and Czech nationalists’ concerns about Czech-speaking émigrés suggest that German nationalists’ fears of “Czechization” in Saxony were unfounded. While there doubtless were nationalists among the Czechs in Saxony, most Czech-speaking émigrés and even associations that professed a nationalist agenda showed little of the militant nationalism found in Bohemia between the 1890s and 1914.97 Most Czech-speaking workers probably did not join associations or joined German, rather than Czech, groups.98 While they accepted Saxony as part of their region for employment and daily life, they were less likely to import Bohemian politics than were their German-Bohemian nationalist countrymen. Thus, before World War I, the Saxon-Bohemian border served as a barrier to Czech nationalist politics, but not to Czech speakers. As the next chapter shows, German-Bohemian nationalist politics did

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cross the border, transporting the issues and tactics of the Bohemian nationality ‹ght to Saxony.

Confession and Migration Bohemians crossed a confessional as well as political boundary when they went to Saxony. Since the Thirty Years’ War, Saxony had been overwhelmingly Lutheran, Bohemia primarily Catholic. The situation was complicated in 1697, when the Saxon elector, August the Strong, converted to Catholicism to become king of Poland. Thus the Saxon royal house was Catholic, as were the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in the Oberlausitz. But as with associational life, late nineteenth-century migrants found ways to form their own religious communities or assimilated to their new surroundings, simultaneously making themselves part of Saxon borderland society and forging community ties across the border. Saxony was still 95 percent Lutheran in 1910, but in many border communities, Catholics became a noticeable part of the population.99 Bohemian migration contributed to a huge rise in numbers of Catholics in Saxon frontier communities in the late nineteenth century. In the Zwickau district, the Catholic population doubled between 1861 and 1875, growing more rapidly in the years that followed, most dramatically after 1890.100 In Dresden, the Catholic population increased 25 percent between 1890 and 1895, largely from in-migration of Austrian citizens.101 In Plauen, it grew from 1,750 people in 1895 to over 4,000 in 1900. The parish of Plauen wrote in 1902, “The number of Catholics is growing particularly in industrial areas immediately adjacent the two Catholic lands (Bohemia and Bavaria).”102 The Saxon government and local communities were slow to respond to this Catholic population surge with funding for Catholic clergy, churches, and schooling. Nineteenth-century borderland Catholic communities were easy for of‹cials in Dresden to ignore, because many were foreigners whose numbers ›uctuated with seasonal labor migration. In the 1890s, attendance at Catholic Mass in Auerbach typically grew from two hundred to ‹ve hundred during the summer. In 1898, the Plauen city council reported, “In the summer many hundreds of Bohemian workers come here and to the neighboring villages.”103 So church services were overcrowded, and the clergy was overextended. By 1900, Catholic communities changed to re›ect the growing num-

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bers of Bohemian migrants settled in the Saxon borderlands. The state began to change its policies as well. In 1901, the Catholic vicariate apostolic of Saxony appealed to the Ministry of Culture for funding for a bigger Catholic church in Plauen, something it had been requesting for a decade. The burgeoning Catholic community had become an established part of Plauen’s social landscape: “Because of the large growth in working-class Catholic families, the need for a bigger church has grown so great that construction can no longer be delayed. Although in the past church attendance dropped off in the winter, last winter there was no appreciable decline.”104 In 1902, the vicariate apostolic requested a chaplain for Adorf because of the growing Catholic population there.105 By 1908, Auerbach’s Catholic community was established enough to raise funds to buy land for its own church, which had been impossible when the community was mainly comprised of transitory, low-wage workers.106 These populations grew more stable by 1900, as migrants settled in the Saxon borderlands, reshaping the local religious landscape. Saxony ‹nally began to help build churches and ‹nd clergy for growing Catholic communities in the early twentieth century, but change came slowly, partly because, while Saxon law of‹cially tolerated Catholicism, it also made practice dif‹cult. An 1876 law required clergy in Saxony to be Saxon citizens, yet in an overwhelmingly Protestant state without Catholic seminaries, Saxon priests were few. In some border communities, Catholics tried to import Bohemian priests to lead religious services and children’s religion classes. Some succeeded in winning cross-border help from Bohemian dioceses, but Saxon of‹cials blocked some attempts by invoking the 1876 law.107 Still, people found ways to use the different confessional jurisdictions on either side of the border. Catholics in the Saxon borderlands often crossed into Bohemia to attend church and petitioned the Saxon government for permission to send their children to Catholic schools in Bohemia. Bohemian frontier communities were ›exible about taking on such schoolchildren.108 For Bohemian families, this was another way to preserve and build cross-border ties. Saxon of‹cials usually gave permission for children to attend Bohemian schools for religious reasons but balked when Catholic instruction was available on the Saxon side of the border, even if the children were Austrian citizens.109 At a time when states were trying to win the loyalties of increasingly politicized populations, of‹cials may have worried that too much cross-border experience would undermine people’s dedication to Saxon communities.110 From local school inspectors to the Ministry of Culture, Saxon

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of‹cials often dragged their feet when asked to help rapidly growing Catholic communities. But it is noteworthy that of‹cials and the press in the “Land of Luther” did not focus more attention on the fact that Bohemian migrants were creating a visible Catholic population in communities once celebrated as bastions of Protestantism. Perhaps the state’s Catholic royal house discouraged overt anti-Catholicism, or perhaps migrants and their religious practice did not strike most Saxons as threatening. As much as Bohemian migrants played a critical role in creating a more visible Catholic minority in the Saxon borderlands by the turn of the century, many migrants also acculturated in religious practice as in other aspects of life. In 1908, the Auerbach district reported that many Catholics in the Klingenthal area were converting to Protestantism and requesting burial in the town’s Protestant cemetery.111 Catholic Bohemians who applied for Saxon citizenship from the 1890s on were often in “mixed” confessional marriages, raising their children as Lutherans.112 After 1900, a sharp rise in the number of Austrian citizens applying for Saxon citizenship in situations where the whole family was Lutheran suggests that more people may have been converting either as they acculturated into their communities or because they thought conversion would make naturalization more likely.113 In religion, as in industrial employment, the new openness of the late nineteenth-century border not only promoted the mixing of populations and cultural characteristics but also encouraged people to use resources on both sides of the frontier. The border’s new ›uidity was largely responsible for the growth of Saxon Catholic communities but also made it easier for those communities to maintain their religious practice in a primarily Protestant land. Yet Bohemians who settled in the Saxon borderlands, married Saxons, and otherwise acculturated to their new surroundings were more likely to convert to Protestantism than were their more transitory compatriots. As was their wont with Bohemian migrants, the Saxon government and community leaders seem to have felt that it was worth keeping an eye on growing Catholic communities but that they did not require intervention.

Conclusion In the last decades of the nineteenth century, labor migration made Bohemian workers reimagine their home territories in new ways that con-

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nected both rural and urban life, as well as Bohemian and Saxon territory. By working, building associational networks, and attending church on both sides of the border, migrants helped create cross-border communities. Their presence furthered cross-border connections, as Saxon industrialists, local of‹cials, and the Saxon state government came to regard a porous border as crucial to their interests. Nevertheless, the regional ties that migration fostered also challenged nationalist politics on both sides of the border. These ideologies blamed migration for denationalizing German and Czech territories and identities. Bohemian labor migration played into Reich German anxieties about foreign labor. Although Saxon of‹cials insisted that Bohemian migrants were a threat neither to local communities nor to the German state and nation, they were forced to adopt at least the appearance of concern about crossborder migration and national diversity. Thus, while migration helped to dissolve the border for many borderland residents, it cast the border into new relief for some nationalists and politicians on either side.

Chapter 3

“Every reason to be on their guard!” German Nationalism across the Frontier, 1880–1914

Between the 1880s and 1914, a new kind of politics emerged in the borderlands. Geographic and social mobility, mass communication, and an expanding political franchise made formal politics relevant to a broader swath of society than ever before. At the same time, they politicized society itself. Social Democrats were the greatest bene‹ciaries of this new, multifaceted mass politics. But nationalist activists—both Czech and German— also sought to shape popular political debates outside electoral politics. In the years leading up to World War I, activists founded nationalist associations and honed a radical political rhetoric that described national communities unbounded by contemporary states. Nationalist activists never attracted the mass followings that Social Democrats did before the war.1 They failed to convince the majority of people that national allegiances should dominate modern life. Nonetheless, their efforts proved critical in the long run. They coined national language, de‹ned national territory, and gave social and cultural interactions national meaning. They established cross-border networks, demonstrating that politics were no longer bounded by individual states. Their meetings, mass media, and social networks guaranteed that the German and Austrian public knew nationalist rhetoric. When crisis struck after World War I, people who had shown little interest in nationalist politics before now embraced that rhetoric as a way to understand a rapidly changing social and political landscape. This chapter explores how German-Bohemian and Reich German nationalist activists worked to reframe the borderlands as endangered German national space, using Czech activists and each other as models and 57

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foils. Despite Reich Germans’ claims to represent the German nation, many of the tactics they used in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands originated outside of Germany.2 While Czech, Reich German, and GermanBohemian nationalists developed distinct movements, they did so as members of their local communities and in close communication with each other. German-Bohemian nationalists had emerged in the 1870s–80s, largely in response to a Czech nationalist movement that had already come into its own in the 1860s. They frequently appropriated ideas and tactics from their Czech counterparts.3 As German nationalist activists developed a political network that spanned the Saxon-Bohemian border in the 1890s, Saxon nationalists, in turn, modeled many of their tactics on those of their Czech and German-Bohemian neighbors.4 Late nineteenth-century nationalists promoted the idea that national loyalties should be the primary organizing principle not only of formal politics but of education, consumption, travel, culture, and associational life.5 They worked to convince states and ordinary people that speci‹c landscapes, territories, and communities had national meaning that required protection. In the 1880s and 1890s, Czech activists focused on Central Bohemian towns and on Bohemia’s bilingual rural areas that they dubbed “language frontiers.” By the 1890s, German activists—in Bohemia and the Reich—argued that the same con›ict that supposedly raged in the language frontiers threatened the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands as well.6 Between 1890 and 1914, German-Bohemian and Reich German activists fought to win cultural and political control of the borderlands. They tried to distinguish “German” from “Czech” territory, insisting, often unsuccessfully, that “German places” be called only by German names and that people traveling through them speak only German and buy German goods with German labels. By reinforcing an unambiguous German national identity of spaces, they believed they could bolster German national consciousness. They also claimed that any expression of Czech culture or even of national indifference could erode a territory’s national character. Nationalist activists were ›exible in their tactics, seizing on new technology, forms of organization, and political conditions to promote a remarkably static vision of Central Europe. They sought to ‹x the national meanings of territories permanently, taking advantage of modern mobility—of populations, communications, culture, and political ideas—to do so. Far from conservatives trying to preserve an old way of life, Saxon and German-Bohemian national activists were modern political radicals at-

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tempting to transform their societies. They warned of the dangers of mobility when it applied to Czech speakers, socialists, and others they considered inimical to the German national cause, but they embraced mobility as critical when it served their own ends. Saxon and German-Bohemian nationalists traveled the expanding rail networks as public speakers, both to learn from and to support other nationalists’ efforts. They used the improving postal systems and burgeoning press to circulate ideas and build social and political networks. They embraced associational life to promote nationalist ideas outside of formal politics. Before 1914, nationalist activists’ attempts to persuade their neighbors and compatriots to experience the borderlands as contested national space were repeatedly frustrated by local populations’ failure to wholeheartedly embrace nationality as the guiding factor in everyday life. Many locals appeared more attentive to regional identities, local traditions, confessional communities, and family and economic needs. Nevertheless, nationalist activists promoted a vision and rhetoric of national con›ict that became quite familiar, if not popular, by 1914 and that gained wide resonance in the 1930s.

The Rise of National Activism “Hither” and “Yon” Czech nationalism emerged in the 1820s and 1830s as a cultural and linguistic movement in the towns and cities of central Bohemia.7 Activists wrote Czech dictionaries, Czech histories, and a Czech encyclopedia. By the end of the 1860s, they had established a Czech national press, Czech associations, and Czech theater, music, and literature.8 They expanded their efforts in the 1860s, building a distinctively Czech economic sector and participating in local electoral politics. Nineteenth-century Czech national leaders did not question Habsburg sovereignty, but they claimed local and regional autonomy within the empire, de‹ning a Czech national community in opposition to an assumed German national community. Czech nationalists claimed that the historical state rights (Staatsrecht or státní pravo) of the Bohemian crown lands granted the Czech-speaking majority rights to the whole territory.9 They competed with German-Bohemian nationalists for speci‹c territories and populations. Yet Czech nationalists differed fundamentally from their German opponents on the terms of the con›ict. German Bohemians tried to

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de‹ne distinct German national space within Bohemia. Czechs insisted that all of Bohemia belonged to the Czech nation. German speakers, they asserted, were mere colonizers. In response to the Czech national movement, debates over German uni‹cation, Austria’s exclusion from the North German Confederation after 1866, and German liberals’ waning political in›uence from 1848 into the late 1870s, some German-speaking Bohemians began thinking of themselves in national terms like those of the Czechs. Before the 1860s, German liberals had de‹ned German nationhood in Austrian politics in terms of civic virtue and political centralization. They had viewed themselves as a Staatsvolk, unbound by speci‹c territories and above the competing demands of mere interest groups, such as the Czech nationalists. But between the 1860s and 1880s, German-Austrian liberals produced a new vision: an ethnolinguistically de‹ned German nation that competed politically with other national groups, including the Czechs.10 They began carving out distinctively German national space within the monarchy. The 1860s thus marked the beginning of the Bohemian nationality con›ict as a far-reaching political and cultural phenomenon. In the 1880s and 1890s, Czech and German-Bohemian nationalist activists competed to win “national ownership” of people and territory in Bohemia.11 German-Bohemian nationalist associations like those of the Czech national movement multiplied rapidly in the 1880s, positioning themselves as a defense against Czech encroachment.12 These organizations—such as the Union of the Bohemian Woods (Böhmerwaldbund), the Union of Germans in Bohemia (Bund der Deutschen in Böhmen), and the German School Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein)— worked outside formal politics to win mass support for their causes and recruited participants across regions and social classes.13 Bohemian nationalist activists of both stripes used cultural, economic, and political strategies to win support. They exploited the expanding voting franchise to widen their engagement with formal politics, urged their national adherents to move to “endangered” areas, and protested the in-migration of the competing national group. They used German- and Czech-language schooling to nationalize children, manipulated census data to prove that localities had particular national characters, fought over language use in public spaces, and launched economic boycotts of Czech and German goods and businesses.14 Activists focused on the local level, stressing the importance of every school, street sign, and community in the nationality ‹ght. They argued that national gains and losses in speci‹c lo-

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calities had serious rami‹cations for wider national, regional, and state communities.15 Nationalist activists promoted the myth that Bohemia was irreconcilably divided between Czechs and German Bohemians. But conditions on the ground thwarted them repeatedly. Aside from language, there was little difference between Czech- and German-speaking Bohemians.16 Much of the Bohemian population was bilingual and hard to classify in national terms. Nationalist activists also had to compete with Bohemians of other political convictions: socialists, conservatives, Catholics, agrarians, and liberals. Activists succeeded in making nationality a central issue in Bohemian politics and society but failed to make all Bohemians think and act in national terms. Ultimately, Bohemian nationalist activists fought to improve their “side’s” relative position within the Habsburg system, rather than against that system. They conceived of their movements as carrying out national work in a situation where, unlike in Germany, there was no state to do so. Reich German nationalist activists, in contrast, emerged in the 1880s and 1890s as an opposition movement; they took on national work they believed the state was failing to do.17 They criticized state policy, traditional conservatives, liberalism, and the political left. They emphasized the disconnect between the boundaries of the German state and those of the German Volk. By addressing issues that mainstream parties refused to tackle, they de‹ned their own national efforts as distinct from and even in opposition to policies of the German state.18 Saxony’s nationalist activist organizations—including the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband); the German School Association, which became the Association for Germans Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland) in 1908; and the Gustav Adolf Verein—used publications and social and political networks to promote the idea that nationalist concerns should inform every sphere of life. By distinguishing themselves from the German state, they could make the nationalization of populations and territories a project that extended across political borders. Reich activists de‹ned national interests in local and regional terms, arguing that people should consider the national implications of every festival, every purchase, every migrant. As members of the communities in which they agitated, they maintained that local and regional events, conditions, and relationships shaped the broader German national community. By 1914, there was widespread acceptance of radical Pan-German nationalism on the German right. But alliances and consensus among Reich Ger-

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man activist organizations remained tenuous, more substantial in appearance than in reality.19 In the Saxon borderlands, this local focus led nationalist activists to embrace the rhetoric of the Bohemian nationality ‹ght and to argue that German national interest spanned the political frontier. Saxon activists pirated Bohemian nationalists’ arsenal of rhetorical and political strategies. But they also used the Bohemian con›ict to mobilize a sense of urgency in the nationalist cause, winning new supporters and endowing the borderlands with national meaning that would be recognized not just locally and regionally but in government policy and international relations. Of course, Saxony was not the only region in Germany where people connected the local to the national by drawing on ideas, historical precedents, and legal traditions from outside the Reich’s borders.20 Unlike the Pfalz or Saarland, however, the importation of German-Bohemian national and political ideas to Saxony was not the result of traditions drawn from an earlier military occupation. Rather, it resulted from contemporary cross-border interaction and political appropriation.

German-Bohemian Nationalists Look to Saxony In the 1880s and 1890s, German-Bohemian and Czech national activists concentrated their efforts on Bohemia’s “language frontiers.”21 They argued that frontier regions, where different nationalities, communities, and economic systems came together, should be understood as places where con›icts affecting entire states and societies erupted and where political and cultural loyalties were both most volatile and most essential. Bohemian nationalist activists usually identi‹ed the language frontiers as lying within Bohemia’s political borders, but as national competition escalated in the 1890s, German-Bohemian activists began to look for outside backing, particularly from the German Reich.22 For activists in northern Bohemia, Saxony was not only the nearest part of the Reich but an area whose many ties to northern Bohemia provided networks through which to rally support. German-Bohemian nationalist activists began to equate the dynamics of the Bohemian language frontiers with those of the borderlands between Saxony and Bohemia, the German Reich and Habsburg Austria. They argued that to understand the threat to those borderlands, local people and governments should be more aware of the national peril of frontier areas and of the national agendas of their neighbors.

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“Czech nationalist leaders not only want the Czechization of Bohemia, Moravia, Austrian Silesia, and Austria . . . they also intend to Czechify any part of Germany where Slavs once lived,” wrote the Trautenauer Wochenblatt in 1895. German-Bohemian activists were the ‹rst to warn that the threats plaguing the Bohemian language frontier were seeping into Saxony. The article explained that it was “impossible to know just how far the Czech propaganda in Saxony goes” but that it was obvious that Czech nationalists “want to absorb the Saxon city of Bautzen into a Czech empire.”23 German-Bohemian nationalists made such arguments to heighten the importance of their own cause in Bohemia and to rally support from within the German Reich. They also sought to convince Reich German nationalists, especially in neighboring territories, that their own national, political, and economic interests were tied to the outcome of the nationality con›ict in Bohemia. In 1898, for example, Josef Taschek, the mayor of Ceské Budejovice/ Budweis and leader of the Böhmerwaldbund, called on Reich Germans to recognize German Bohemians’ struggle against national opponents in the Bohemian Woods, to help build the region’s economy, and to cultivate national consciousness among the local German-speaking population: “It is now essential that our fellow Germans in the Reich help us make this area thrive.” To this end, Taschek suggested that Reich German national activists encourage Reich German travelers to visit the Bohemian Woods.24 Such efforts and the development of cross-border institutional networks acquainted Reich Germans with the Bohemian nationality ‹ght and made Bohemians pay new attention to the German Reich.25 By 1900, German-Bohemian nationalists began warning that if Czech activists were willing to violate the language border within Bohemia, they would not balk at crossing the political boundary between Saxony and Bohemia.26 Those alarms served two purposes. First, they suggested that Saxons—and Reich Germans in general—could not feel safe from national threats simply because they lived in a different country from their Austrian brethren. Second, they reinforced German-Bohemian nationalists’ message that Czech activists would stop at nothing to further their cause. The German-Bohemian nationalist press also tried to demonstrate that Saxony faced a threat of “Czechization,” the term used to describe Czech incursions into what they considered German-speaking territory in Bohemia. After 1900, they ran numerous stories of apparent Czech violations of Saxony’s German character, emphasizing the same issues they raised for Bohemia: demographic change, cultural and linguistic denation-

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alization, and thus a need for greater national consciousness and vigilance. German-Bohemian nationalists sought to make the Bohemian nationality ‹ght relevant to their Saxon neighbors not just because of abstract ideas of national community but for practical local reasons. Bohemian labor migration to Saxony offered German-Bohemian nationalists an opportunity to convince Reich Germans that they faced national threats like those facing German speakers in Bohemia. Bolstering their argument that Reich Germans should regard “Czech” rather than “Bohemian” migration as a threat, they referenced political developments in the Reich, particularly the belief that strikebreakers at Crimmitschau had been Czech. Czechization was thus a menace that crossed class, regional, and political lines. In June 1905, the Prague-based German-language paper Bohemia broke a story about Czechization in Saxony that received great play on both sides of the border. The paper asserted that an in›ux of Czech workers had Czechi‹ed the Saxon town of Ostritz. The article asserted that one thousand Czechs were living in Ostritz, a town with a total population of only three thousand. This situation, it suggested, must inevitably lead to con›ict between Czechs and Germans, like that in Bohemia.27 The article, reprinted or paraphrased in papers throughout Saxony, caught of‹cials’ attention in both Prussia and Saxony. The Prussian government promptly asked the Saxon Foreign Ministry whether the newspaper stories were true. Not surprisingly, Saxon of‹cials concluded that the reports were greatly exaggerated. They found that Ostritz had a population of 2,822, of whom 404 were Czech-speaking workers.28 Some years before, the jute spinning factory in Ostritz had recruited Bohemian workers both to make up a labor shortfall and to keep wages low.29 The district government in Bautzen, in whose jurisdiction Ostritz fell, conceded that migrant labor had not proved entirely satisfactory. Nevertheless, Bautzen of‹cials maintained that excited reports of Czechization in Ostritz were overstated. The town was not part of a large-scale trend, they insisted, and nearby communities housed “Bohemian workers, but no Czechs.”30 The socialist press similarly refuted the claims of mass Czechization and national con›ict in Ostritz.31 Although Saxon of‹cials declined to treat the Ostritz case as a crisis, German-Bohemian and Saxon nationalists’ insistence on the dangers of “foreign” migration and demographic change had some effect. Of‹cials conceded that Czech speakers in Ostritz, as well as those in nearby textile factories in Hainitz and Zittau and glassworks in Bischofswerda, while fewer than popularly supposed, were worth watching.32 In doing so, they

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acknowledged nationalists’ arguments that foreign labor migration could potentially change the German nature of Saxon communities. The German-Bohemian nationalist press also reported examples of what it claimed were cultural attempts to denationalize Saxon territory. The newspapers detailed the activities of Czech associations in Saxony, interpreting every meeting or festival as an attack on Saxony’s German character. In 1907, the Aussig-Karbitzer Volkszeitung reported that an upcoming Dresden festival for the bene‹t of “Czech-national Saxony” proved that “Czech agitation is even reaching beyond Bohemia into Saxony.”33 Similarly, in 1910, the Leitmeritzer Wochenblatt accused Czech associations in Dresden of nationalist subversion. But when the Pan-German League used the article to demand action, the Dresden police insisted that Dresden’s Czech-speaking community and associations did not pose a threat.34 In 1910, Bohemia reported in an article entitled “Czech Saxony” that it had come by “a document that would be downright funny, if . . . it did not demonstrate the lengths to which of‹cials in Prague are willing to go to advance the Czech nationalist cause.” It seemed that new Austrian postal regulations included Czech versions of Saxon place-names. The paper observed, “The authors appear to have retroactively incorporated the Kingdom of Saxony into the lands of the Bohemian crown.”35 Bohemia asserted that language use, even at a distance, shaped the national identity of territories. At the same time, the paper implied, without evidence, that Czech of‹cials were outrageous enough to contemplate territorial revisions in the borderlands. Czech nationalists, of course, argued that placenames in the Bohemian borderlands were being systematically Germanized, adopting a tone of besieged alarm at odds with the annexationist hubris that German nationalists attributed to them.36 German-Bohemian nationalists made it clear that Saxons were in danger of denationalization, not only from Czechization but because of their own failure to address national issues. The activists described Saxony much as they characterized their own language frontiers, as areas critical to the German national cause but where, regrettably, the local population had to be awakened to its national duties.37 In 1907, the Aussig-Karbitzer Volksblatt complained, “The national dullness common in Reich German circles has been demonstrated yet again in Saxony. The Leipzig city council has been so shameless as to entertain the Music Association of Czech teachers from Moravia. And this is supposed to teach the Czechs to respect Germans!”38 In making such critiques, German-Bohemian activists aimed to teach Reich Germans to perceive national challenges in daily life, as well as

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formal politics. They implied that the Reich’s claims to status as the German nation-state did not necessarily make its citizens conscious participants in German nationhood. Indeed, they hinted, true German national consciousness was best found outside the Reich, where Germans engaged in daily battle to defend their territories and cultural identities from national enemies. German-Bohemian nationalists were eager to highlight occasions when Reich Germans did engage with the Bohemian nationality ‹ght. For example, in 1909, the Nordböhmische Volkszeitung reported approvingly that the Dresden Pan-German League had organized a trip across the border to Decín/Tetschen in support for German Bohemians.39 While German-Bohemian activists portrayed Czech nationalist efforts as especially ominous when they extended outside Austrian territory, they applauded support from abroad as proof that Reich Germans understood the international importance of the German-Bohemian national cause. When Saxons did adopt tactics from the Bohemian nationality con›ict, they sometimes ran afoul of German-Bohemian activists. In 1898, for example, the Deutschnationaler Verein in Jablonec/Gablonz complained about efforts in Saxony—led in part by the Pan-German League—to ease German-Bohemian immigration while restricting the immigration of Czech speakers. Such regulations are inspired by German national feeling . . . , nevertheless . . . they will make [German-Bohemian conditions] worse . . . Our Association has worked for years to . . . create German migration to [Gablonz] . . . , but our success has been limited and there is a growing Czech element . . . [T]his is happening where-ever industries are demanding more labor than natural population growth can provide, hence in most of German Bohemia . . . This problem is only reinforced by German-Bohemian emigration. German-Bohemian nationalist activists in Jablonec/Gablonz demonstrated that, locally, pragmatism outweighed the need for consistent demonstrations of nationalist ideology. They suggested that nationalists should tailor their polices to local conditions and that Saxons could contribute more to the German national cause by encouraging Czech labor migration to Germany, rather than by adopting anti-Czech tactics like those used in Bohemia. They implied that Saxon territory was not in real

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danger of Czechization, despite the assertions of German-Bohemian nationalist propaganda. The Verein argued, The German Reich should leave German-Bohemian workers and take those Czechs who want to leave. They will be harmless [in Germany]. There they won’t be followed by Czech schools, bureaucrats, chaplains, and newspapermen who [›ock here] supported by the Czechization associations in order to create a bulwark against Germany.40 Not only did German-Bohemian activists intervene in Saxon nationalist projects in the Reich, but they also used cross-border ties to in›uence the ways Saxon organizations presented themselves in Bohemia. In 1909, the Deutscher Volksrat für Böhmen (German Volk Council for Bohemia) told the Dresden Pan-German League that a spa in Wachwitz, south of Dresden, was advertising in the Prague Union, a German-language paper that the Volksrat accused of being a front for Czech nationalists. The Saxon Pan-German League admonished the spa’s director, “We are informed by the Deutschen Volksrat that you have advertised in the Germanlanguage Czech paper Union in Prague. We can only assume that you are quite unaware that Union is the most anti-German paper in Austria. Germans do not read it . . . [W]e would be pleased to learn that you have decided to advertise in Austrian papers that are read by Germans.”41 Whether the spa changed its advertisements or not is unclear, but similar interventions did have an effect. In 1911, the Deutscher Volksrat für Böhmen complained to the Saxon Pan-Germans and the Dresden Chamber of Commerce about posters advertising the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden. Posters had been distributed in Prague, where German-language versions were posted in largely German-speaking neighborhoods while Czech versions appeared in largely Czech-speaking neighborhoods. The Volksrat declared this yet another Reich German failure to recognize national issues, insisting that a purely Czech-language poster for an exhibition in Germany where even Dresden was mentioned only by its Czech name was completely unacceptable. One of the exhibition’s organizers, Karl August Lingner, was a member of the Pan-German League. He protested that the posters posed no dif‹culty, because they appeared in two languages, not just in Czech. When the Volksrat refused to back down, Dr. Tille, another Dresden Pan-German leader, brokered an agreement to distribute bilin-

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gual posters in Prague. But in the end, exhibition organizers withdrew all advertising from Prague, and Lingner resigned from the Pan-German League.42 Clearly, for all the efforts of German-Bohemian and Saxon national activists to make Saxons regard Czech speakers and the use of nonGerman names for Saxon places with alarm, it had not occurred to exhibition organizers that referring to Dresden as “Drazd’any” or inviting Czech-speaking visitors to Saxony would be a problem.43 Indeed, the episode demonstrates that even nationalist activists disagreed over the signi‹cance of the language of exhibition posters. At the same time, German nationalists in Bohemia and Saxony ultimately cooperated to change practices within their own circles and in groups like the organizers of the International Hygiene Exhibition. The Saxon Pan-German League and Bohemian activists may not have forced Saxons to internalize their nationalist message, but together they managed to persuade them to adopt some of its outward forms. Both in the case of the Wachwitz spa and the hygiene exhibition, German-Bohemian nationalist activists used nationalist organizations in Germany as proxies to make Reich German businesses and institutions sensitive to German national interests when they advertised in Bohemia.

German Nationalist Activists in Saxony German-Bohemian activists sometimes despaired of awakening mass national commitment in Germany or among German speakers in their own communities.44 Yet by the 1890s, several Saxon nationalist organizations emerged as eager allies. German uni‹cation in 1871 and the new postal and rail networks that followed promoted social communication, reshaped people’s perceptions of space, and integrated Saxons into the German national community de‹ned by the Reich.45 But the same changes that eroded regional barriers within the Reich helped German nationalist activists build communication, community, and national commitment beyond its borders. Activists worked to create a sense of national integration that extended beyond the boundaries and control of the German state. The Saxon Pan-German League, along with Saxon branches of the German School Association (after 1908, the Association for Germans Abroad), the Protestant League, the Gustav Adolf Verein, and German gymnastics associations embraced the idea that their German nationalist efforts were tied to those of their Bohemian neighbors. In fact, the German School As-

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sociation began as an Austrian organization to promote German education in Austria. The ‹rst Reich branch opened in 1881, focusing on protection of Germanness abroad, especially in Austria-Hungary.46 Saxon activists joined in German nationalist projects on the Bohemian language frontiers and adopted many of the tactics used by German-Bohemian and Czech nationalists.47 Saxony proved rich ground for the German School Association in the 1880s, and it was home to some of the largest, most active chapters of the Pan-German League in Germany in the 1890s.48 The league never won the mass popular support or direct role in electoral politics that Social Democracy did, but it shaped public debate on issues of German national consciousness ranging from foreign policy to beer consumption. The Saxon branch focused particularly on publicizing German-Bohemian nationalist efforts against (alleged) Czech incursions in Bohemia and Saxony.49 The Dresden chapter was especially active in efforts to bring Bohemian nationality politics to Saxony and to the attention of Pan-Germans across the Reich.50 In 1896, the Dresden Pan-German leader Dr. Bassange declared that German Bohemians’ plight could be improved only through the “enlightenment” and engagement of Reich Germans.51 The Dresden Pan-German League kept close contact with German nationalist organizations in Bohemia, including the Union of Germans in Bohemia, the German National Council in Bohemia and Moravia (Deutsche Nationalrat in Böhmen und Mähren), and the German Böhmerwald Union. It sent its members to these groups’ meetings and celebrations in Bohemia and invited their members to Pan-German events in Saxony. The Pan-German League frequently hosted lectures that portrayed the situation in Bohemia in apocalyptic terms.52 An 1898 lecture titled “The Dangers of Slavization” and Dr. Paul Vogel’s 1899 lecture “Should the Reich Germans Stand Back Quietly and Watch the Extermination of Germandom in Austria?” were typical.53 Encouraged by the league and similar associations, the Saxon nationalist press reported on the dangers of Czechization efforts in Bohemia with new enthusiasm.54 The league sent representatives to Austria to learn more about German nationalist “defense associations” (Schutzvereine), and their Austrian colleagues urged them to start similar organizations in Germany.55 But Saxon activists not only used the Bohemian example to promote national politics in their own territory; the Pan-German League and the Association for Germans Abroad also sent speakers to Bohemia.56 Pan-German efforts to alert both the Saxon public and Saxon policy-

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makers to the Bohemian nationality con›ict and its potential encroachment into Saxony were not merely rhetorical. From its founding, the Dresden branch of the Pan-German League strove to place its members in in›uential positions in local government and administration and to woo those already in these positions to the league’s cause. From the 1890s on, the league used connections to local newspapers to win extensive coverage in the Saxon mainstream bourgeois press. By 1905, half the members of Dresden’s city council belonged to the league.57 The organization’s in›uence grew. In 1906, the Pan-German League and the German School Association won an annual contribution of ‹ve hundred marks from the city of Dresden for the Deutsche Volksrat für Böhmen, effecting the material intervention of Saxon of‹cials in Bohemian domestic politics.58 The league also persuaded local and regional governments to engage in crossborder German nationalist activism, despite the Saxon and Reich governments’ resistance to such measures.59 Often, however, German nationalist activists circumvented government channels altogether, as the Dresden Association for Germans Abroad did when it sent money to the Bohemian “language borders.”60 In 1913, Das Deutschtum im Ausland reported that representatives from the Saxon branch in Freiberg had visited the “language border” in Rakovník/Rakonitz, where, because of its proximity to the Saxon border, they held themselves responsible for the success of nationalist activism.61 Saxons also played an important role in the Los von Rom movement, which was brie›y popular in the Bohemian borderlands from 1898 to 1902. During this period, the Reich German Protestant League and the Gustav Adolf Verein championed the idea that German national unity could reach beyond the arti‹cial boundaries of the Reich only if religious divisions among German speakers were erased. Equating Protestantism with German nationhood, they urged German-speaking Austrians to abandon the Slav-infected Catholic church.62 The two primary architects of Los von Rom, Heinrich Bräunlich and Christian Friedrich Meyer, were both native Saxons, as were most of the Reich Protestant ministers who traveled to Austria to promote the movement.63 Bohemian authorities complained to Vienna, “Foreign protestant clergy . . . seem to feel the need to attend the ordination of every minister and the consecration of every Los von Rom church in the borderlands.”64 Saxon Los von Rom activists attended German-Bohemian nationalist events, donated money to Lutheran congregations in Bohemia, joined crowds singing Pan-German songs at consecrations of Lutheran churches, and sprinkled their sermons with homages to

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Bismarck.65 Once again, although a variety of Reich organizations promoted Los von Rom, Saxons engaged disproportionately in cross-border nationalism, stressing Saxon and Bohemian Protestants’ commonalities. A Saxon minister declared in Teplice/Teplitz in 1907, “As in Saxony, Protestants [in Bohemia] have to ‹ght on two fronts: against black and red.”66 German-Bohemian nationalists may have shared Saxon agitators’ aversion to the red front of socialism but were less united in opposition to Catholicism. Once again, Saxon activists’ efforts failed to increase German national unity or even unity among German nationalists. In the Bohemian borderlands, Los von Rom agitators, many of whom had joined the movement more for its anti-Czech and anti-Habsburg elements than from religious conviction, complained that Reich German pastors did not understand the Austrian nationality con›ict. Unlike the Reich German Los von Rom promoters, most German Bohemians saw no contradiction between Catholicism and German national identity.67 Mainstream German-Bohemian activists largely steered clear of the movement, and the Reich German pastors ultimately garnered no bene‹t from their choice of Austrian allies. Los von Rom became closely associated with Georg von Schönerer’s controversial Pan-German party in Austria, which questioned the legitimacy of the Habsburg state. The Austrian Pan-Germans used Los von Rom to drum up support in Germany and participated regularly in Reich German nationalist events, especially in Saxony and Silesia. Reich Germans’ activism in Bohemia led the Austrian government to expel a number of Reich German pastors for antistate agitation in 1900, and the Austrian Catholic church condemned Los von Rom organizers as deceitful foreigners or traitors to the Austrian state.68 Even the Reich German Pan-German League, after showing sympathy initially, backed away from supporting Los von Rom and especially the Austrian Pan-Germans, because of their hostility to the Austrian state.69 In the end, Los von Rom proved a failure. In Bohemia, it remained a borderland project that rose and fell with the changing quality of crossborder political networks, exchanges of ideas, and debates over the nature of German nationhood. Gymnastics associations, too, had promoted an extrapolitical vision of a large German Kulturnation since the early nineteenth century. They emphasized a German national identity that spanned political borders and superseded political, regional, and cultural diversity, well before the PanGerman League was founded.70 An Austrian delegate to the 1885 gymnastics festival in Dresden declared, “When we crossed the border, we did not

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feel that we were entering a foreign land . . . rather that despite political division we were joining the ranks of our beloved German brothers.”71 Similarly, the Saxon Turnverein in Seifhennersdorf lauded their Bohemian counterparts in a 1911 invitation: “Come you fellow nationals across the border, who bravely defend . . . our most precious national treasures, the German language and culture, against the attacks of your oppressors!”72 Austrian organizations demanded that Reich German gymnasts engage the Bohemian nationality con›ict in defense of “Germandom,” and Reich German groups embraced this mandate to enhance their own efforts.73 Nonetheless, Saxon nationalist activists echoed their German-Bohemian counterparts in bemoaning the Saxon public’s lack of nationalist engagement. In 1888, the German School Association’s Korrespondenzblatt complained that the Reich press showed little interest in Germans abroad.74 In 1909, the Dresden women’s branch of the Association for Germans Abroad complained, “The majority of ‘intellectuals’ in Germany are still naively indifferent . . . to the national plight of Germans [outside the Reich].”75 Such ideas echoed on the Reich level, too. The Pan-German League’s Alfred Geiser argued, “Reich German [nationalist] associations . . . are paying attention only to the spiritual and cultural unity of Germans on this earth . . . [while] the equivalent Slavic and Italian organizations work . . . towards speci‹c political goals.” Geiser asserted that the Czechs in Austria had proven most successful among Slavic nationalist groups.76 He pointed to Slavs—Czechs in particular—as models for German efforts. Reich Germans needed not only to embrace nationalist ideas but to channel them into political action. After 1900, Saxon nationalists began to launch economic and political campaigns like the ones their Bohemian counterparts had used for years to give national meaning to all aspects of human interaction. They emphasized buying “national” products and joining economic boycotts, and they drew attention to public use of language in the press, especially in advertising. The Pan-German League strove to de‹ne the borderlands as German national territory, where national allegiances as expressed through language, consumption, and other aspects of daily life superceded state power. It embraced the idea, central to Bohemian nationality politics, that language use shaped territorial nationality.77 It pressured Saxon newspapers not to print advertisements in Czech and campaigned against postcards of Saxon sites printed in languages other than German. It complained that mail from Bohemia to Saxony was often addressed with the Czech versions of German place-names, so that Dresden’s name appeared

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as “Drazd’any” and Zwickau’s as “Cvikava.”78 The Czech versions of city names seemed to blatantly appropriate the places themselves. After all, the Alldeutsche Blätter asserted, Czech speakers were bilingual and could address letters properly if they chose. Letters addressed in Czech should, the paper argued, be returned to their senders.79 Similarly, in 1910, the Dresden Pan-German League demanded that the Saxon railway remove a bilingual—Czech and German—sign from the train station in the Saxon border town of Moldau.80 Some Saxon newspapers also promoted the idea that simply using a language other than German threatened the German character of a place. In 1912, the Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten reported in scandalized tones that a waiter at the Dresden train station had been heard to call “Pivo!” rather than “Bier!” to passengers on a train from Bohemia. The newspaper concluded the story with the hope that “when the noble sons of Wenceslas travel through ‘Drazd’any’ again, they will have to resign themselves either to drink German ‘Bier’ or to go thirsty.”81 Although Czech, Polish, and other languages were unlikely to displace German in Saxony, Saxon nationalists borrowed the rhetoric Bohemian activists used to portray multilingual communities as centers of national con›ict. Nationalists not only argued that the public use of Czech irrevocably diminished the German nature of Saxon places. They insisted that Saxons regard all aspects of life, from the language of the railroad station to the provenance and labeling of beer, in national terms. In 1912, the Association for Germans Abroad suggested that vacation resorts were good places to spread nationalist propaganda, observing, “In Austria, where national defense is most highly developed, this is established practice.”82 Even before the Dresden “Pivo!” scandal, Saxon Pan-Germans had embraced economic strategies as critical to combating alleged Czech advances. In 1908, for instance, the Dresden branch suggested that Saxon employers should dismiss all Czech-speaking workers and return all Czech goods to Bohemia, “so that the Czechs are forced to feel our economic power.”83 In the following year, the organization began campaigning to put these ideas into practice, calling on Reich Germans to exercise their economic might for the national cause in the borderlands. The league organized boycotts of Czech goods in Germany, following the examples Czech and German nationalists in Bohemia set in 1897 and 1908–10. Ostensibly, this strategy sought to retaliate against Czech boycotts of German-Bohemian businesses. The boycotts focused on Pilsner beer sales, which the Pan-Germans claimed ‹nanced Czech nationalist projects, such as Sokol

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associations and Czech borderland schools.84 Pan-Germans even tried to engage Saxon local governments in boycotts, pressuring the Dresden city council, for example, to stop buying coal from a “Czech” mine.85 The boycotts sought to rally Reich Germans to the German national cause as much as to effect change in Bohemia. The Pan-German League borrowed tactics from Czech and German-Bohemian nationalists in part because the Bohemian nationality con›ict provided the sense of dynamic national crisis that Germany lacked, in part because they were frustrated with Reich German indifference to nationalist activism. The league declared, “The Germans, who are so spineless in national matters and have so little experience in the national economic struggle, could stand to learn a thing or two from the Czechs.”86 Economic boycotts were really about political ownership of the borderlands.87 Calls for boycotts in 1909, for instance, emphasized the importance of Saxony’s proximity to Bohemia and the migration of people, goods, and ideas between the two territories.88 Just as Czech and German nationalists in Bohemia had used boycotts to ‹ght over territory and to force the state to take their claims seriously, the Pan-German League’s boycotts stressed Saxony’s identity as German national and political territory. The league also used the boycotts to prove itself more “German” than the Reich government and to claim a political role in Bohemia. The league’s 1909 boycotts adapted Bohemian nationality politics to the German Reich, undermined the Austrian government’s ban on nationalist economic boycotts by moving the effort out of Austrian territory, and clearly connected nationalist politics in Germany with those in Bohemia.89 Of course, theory and practice rarely coincided. Although it is hard to measure how much support the Pan-German League’s boycotts gained in the Saxon public, we do know that its efforts produced howls of protest from German-Bohemian brewers whose sales to Germany fell right along with those of their Czech counterparts. As a result, the league was forced to specify which breweries were targeted in its beer boycott, a distinction likely lost on Saxon consumers.90 The Pan-German League declared the boycott a great success and a “gratifying sign of national sensitivity in the Reich.”91 But the boycotts exemplify the tension between myth and reality in the Bohemian nationality con›ict. Although groups like the Pan-German League and their Bohemian counterparts insisted on geographic, linguistic, cultural, and economic separation of German and Czech populations in Bohemia, the reality was different. It was dif‹cult to target Czech economic interests without

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affecting German-Bohemian prosperity, and vice versa. The illusion that German- and Czech-speaking Bohemia were truly distinct from each another was easier to maintain in Saxony than in Bohemia. The border between the two lands made Bohemian politics relevant to Saxony but granted Saxons some distance from the realities of those political events. The league succeeded in injecting a nationalist element into local politics and public debate in Saxon border communities. But its efforts to force the Saxon government to intervene in “national” issues met with little success. In 1909, the league’s Dresden chapter remonstrated with the Saxon government about reports that a Czech-language school had been founded in Dresden. Nationally segregated schools were a core battleground in the Bohemian nationality ‹ght,92 and the league insisted that Czech-language schooling in Saxony signaled Czechization at work on Reich soil. Although the government denied the reports, saying that a few private language classes did not constitute a school, the Pan-German leadership was unmolli‹ed.93 The league’s Dresden chapter admonished, If those who claim to want to preserve the German nature of our Volk in language and in spirit are truly grieved by the substantial increase in Saxony’s non-German population, then it is essential to prevent this.94 The Pan-Germans argued that the threat to Saxony came not only from Czech-speaking migrants but from Saxony’s proximity and ›uid relations with the Bohemian borderlands. The Dresden chapter insisted that it was not enough to deport offending Czechs to Bohemia, since they could move in and out of Saxon territory in the borderlands. We are familiar with Czech tactics from German Bohemia. The vanishing Czech minority settles quietly in German communities, creates tightly-knit associations . . . But as soon as the numbers grow, . . . the initial restraint is transformed into arrogance . . . [P]recisely the same pattern will unfold in Saxony, where the Czech colony has already grown large enough.95 The league suggested that the ways Saxons had integrated borderland ›uidity into modern life compounded such problems. Some branches of Saxon industry, as regrettable as this is from a German national standpoint, already appear unable to function without

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Czech labor. Precisely for this reason, and because the majority of Czech workers who come here settle in Saxony . . . , it is in the interest of the entire Saxon people to prevent the Czech language from being taught here . . . [T]he whole point [of Czech classes] is to prevent the Germanization of the younger generation.96 Clearly, the Pan-Germans viewed nationality as highly malleable. They argued that Czech-language classes and reports in the Czech nationalist press calling for the creation of Czech colonies in Germany proved that the Czechization of Saxony was already underway.97 Czech nationalists in Bohemia, however, perceived their émigrés as victims of Germanization, rather than a successful Czech national vanguard. The Pan-Germans cautioned that the mere presence of unrepentant Czech speakers posed a threat to the German nation and that the very absence of openly Czech politics in Saxony should be construed as ominous. Yet they also suggested that the same national malleability that endangered Saxons could save them. Pan-Germans urged Saxons not just to combat Czechization of their territory but to promote the Germanization of natives and newcomers alike. They treated the Germanness of the Saxon borderlands and of the German nation-state itself not as innate but as something to be cultivated and defended.

Sorbs: The Threat from Within Saxon nationalists emphasized the importance of German national consciousness for their borderlands by arguing that in Saxony, unlike in much of the German Reich, “Slavization” and Czechization were not just external threats. Saxony already had a Slavic Trojan horse within its gates. The problem was twofold. First, the Oberlausitz, on the eastern frontier, had once belonged to the Kingdom of Bohemia, so Czech nationalists might claim it on historical grounds. Second and more signi‹cant, Saxony had a native Slavic minority—the Sorbs—also in Oberlausitz, in whom both German and Czech nationalists saw possibilities for nationalization. Some German nationalists argued that Bautzen, in the Saxon Oberlausitz, had already become a German “linguistic island” surrounded by a sea of Slavic Sorbs, not unlike the situation on Bohemia’s language borders.98 They suggested that the Sorbs might easily develop a nationalist movement in Saxony modeled on the Czech movement in Bohemia and

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that a Sorb-Czech alliance could threaten the political stability and territorial integrity of the Saxon state. The German nationalist Berliner Neuste Nachrichten warned in 1895 that Czechs in Bohemia were trying to raise Slavic national consciousness among the Saxon Sorbs. Today [this movement] admittedly still appears a harmless historical and literary effort. But the relations of the Bautzen Sorb leadership to the Czech leadership in Prague will lead—indeed, have in part already led—to giving these efforts a national political character. All efforts are being made from Prague to animate the Sorbs of Lusatia anew. It is essential to make sure that a Sorb irredentist movement is not added to the French, Polish, and Danish ones already at work in the German Reich.99 Similarly, in 1909, Das Deutschtum im Ausland reported that the Czech nationalist publication Naše národnost had written, “Czech language territory stretches across the border. But we are working hard in Germany too . . . [T]he time is near when we will reach out to our sister folk, the Sorbs . . . Sorb territory must be recaptured from Germandom!’” Das Deutschtum im Ausland concluded, “Saxony’s government and people have every reason to be on their guard!”100 Such alarms were based less on developments among Sorb communities than on Bohemian examples and historical cross-border ties. Saxons knew well that German nationalists and the Reich government considered Prussia’s native Polish population a national threat, both because of its ties to foreign (Russian and Galician) Poles and because of its organized opposition to the Prussian government. The Polish threat seemed to be both external and internal. Prussia sought to solve this problem partly through Germanization campaigns in its eastern territories, intended to create a “living wall” between Germans and Slavs.101 Given this model of combined internal and external threats, Saxons could see another example of Slavic-German con›ict in Bohemia. Czech speakers may not have had long-standing communities in Saxony as they did in Bohemia or as Poles did in Prussia. But some German nationalists considered the Sorbs a possible internal source of Czech nationalism and expansionism in Saxony.102 Not only were the Sorbs Slavs, but they had historical and contemporary ties to the Czechs. The Oberlausitz had belonged to the Bohemian crown until the seventeenth century. In the 1830s and 1840s, a small group of Sorbs had initiated a cultural “awakening” in collaboration with Czech na-

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tionalists.103 Moreover, Sorbs were Catholics living in predominantly Protestant Saxony, and they sent their priests to Prague to train at a Sorb seminary established in 1696. The seminary took advantage of the traditional ties of the Oberlausitz to Bohemia to train Catholic priests for Protestant Saxony. In the 1890s, some German nationalists maintained that Sorb priests were receiving nationalist as well as theological training in Bohemia.104 Others simply worried that it was dangerous to educate young Sorbs in Prague, a hotbed of Czech nationalism. In 1908, the German consul to Vienna cautioned his Saxon counterpart against this practice. The consul suggested that if Saxony itself had no institutions for educating Catholic priests, students could study elsewhere within the Reich—in Breslau or Regensburg, for example. The Saxon Ministry of Culture and the bishop of Bautzen replied that moving the seminary was not so simple. The property in Prague could not easily be replaced. Further, they argued, seminarians studied at the German University of Prague and were discouraged from contacting Czech nationalists. The seminary was a Saxon institution, and the Sorbs were loyal. The concerns in Berlin, they suggested, were unfounded.105 There is little evidence that Czech activists were organizing widespread Sorb opposition to German rule in Saxony. Nevertheless, ties existed between Sorbs and Czech-speaking Bohemians, demonstrating how cultural, linguistic, and religious connections could bridge the political border. While Saxons often celebrated their connections to Germanspeaking Bohemians, they treated comparable cross-border ties among Slavs as threatening. In 1910, the Pan-German League reported that Saxon Sorbs had printed a conspiratorial appeal to Czechs to “not forget the Sorbs.” A Pan-German article in the newspaper Deutsche Reform— Deutsche Macht asserted, It is the same old story. The Slavs nest among us, behave unobtrusively for a while, and when enough have settled in one place, a lawyer, or doctor, or a Catholic priest emerges as a leader to agitate against Germans or to provoke Slavic politics.106 The Pan-Germans thus con›ated Saxon Sorbs with Czech nationalists, presenting the Slavic threat to Saxony’s German character as both internal and external. They argued that this threat was the result of industrialization, modern mobility, and short-sighted, anational government policies.

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The Kingdom of Saxony is heavily peopled with Slavs. It is mainly industry and agriculture that bring in this cheap labor. It is deeply regrettable that these hostile elements are used even in state and city building projects.107 Despite such rhetoric, before World War I, when reports of requests for Sorb-language schooling or the appearance of a Sorb leader at a PanSlavic congress caused unease among Saxon nationalists and criticism in the Saxon press, some Sorbs rushed to assert their loyalty to Saxony and the Reich.108 A few Sorb leaders and a few Czech nationalists may have hoped that the Oberlausitz would prove new ground for Slavic national awakening. But their hopes and those of German nationalists who tried to use them to rally support for their cause repeatedly met disappointment.109

Austrian Nationalist Politics in the German Reich During the 1890s and very early 1900s, Saxon and Reich of‹cials dismissed most demands by the Pan-German League and similar nationalist groups to intervene against Czech associations. They generally turned a blind eye to those groups’ lively participation in Austrian politics. As the nationality ‹ght intensi‹ed in Bohemia after 1900, however, German-Bohemian nationalist activists and politicians engaged more closely with their Saxon neighbors, using Saxony as a staging ground from which they could promote their political agenda, beyond the reach of Austrian authorities. When Saxon nationalist associations shed pretensions to being “apolitical” and invited Austrians to speak at public meetings, Saxon of‹cials found this increasingly dif‹cult to ignore. In 1906, the Pan-German League sponsored public meetings featuring Austrian speakers who called on Reich Germans to engage with the national con›ict in Bohemia. The Pan-German League had typically limited attendance at its meetings to members and used their own press reports to spread information to a broader public.110 But these new meetings upped the political ante, giving the Saxon public direct access to Austrian nationalist speakers, eliminating any pretense that the league’s activities were private or that the Saxon government was unaware of them. The Saxon government found itself in an embarrassing situation: appearing to harbor political actors working against the Austrian state. The Saxon police responded. They broke up Pan-German meetings in both Dresden and

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Leipzig in September 1906 after members of the Austrian parliament declared that “German” Bohemia might eventually be absorbed into the German Reich. Thanking Saxony for stepping in, the Austrian government asked it to continue to prevent Austrian citizens from using Saxon territory as a safe haven for promoting treason.111 In 1909, when the police forbade a German-Bohemian parliamentarian from criticizing the Austrian government at another meeting, Pan-Germans denounced the Reich government for joining “the ‹ght against Germandom.”112 In 1912, the issue reemerged when the Union of Germans in Bohemia announced plans for a meeting in Dresden: “The goal is to inform our fellow nationals in the German Reich, as well as German Austrians living in Germany, of the national and economic situation of Germans in Bohemia.”113 In fact, the Union wanted not only to present its case but to lay the ground for a Saxon branch of the organization. The Austrian government wrote to Saxony in no uncertain terms, “The transplantation of the German-Bohemian national con›ict across the border, and the discussion of domestic questions abroad is highly undesirable.”114 But the Saxon government and police replied that they faced legal limits on their ability to intervene: they could threaten to deport foreign citizens who gave public “political’ speeches, but they could not prevent the meeting itself. Austrian of‹cials objected to the Saxons’ tepid commitments and eventually seem to have prevailed on Saxon police to forbid anything other than “apolitical” speeches and to declare that the Union of Germans in Bohemia could neither operate in Saxony nor found a branch in Dresden. Fundamentally, however, Saxon of‹cials refused to make the border a barrier either to people or to political ideas.

Chapter 4

What’s in a State? Citizens, Sovereignty, and Territory in the Great War, 1914–19

In July 1914, central governments in Berlin, Vienna, London, and St. Petersburg launched World War I. Throughout the war, the Saxon-Bohemian frontier remained a military hinterland—the object neither of anyone’s war aims nor of military action. Yet the war devastated the region. It intensi‹ed existing economic and political problems; highlighted the weaknesses of old industrial areas struggling to compete with newer industrial regions, such as the Ruhr; and radicalized political divisions. In Germany and Austria-Hungary alike, the war heightened tensions among national groups, social classes, regions, state centers, and peripheries. In 1918 and 1919, these tensions ended in social, political, and national revolutions. The Habsburg and imperial German states collapsed, replaced by the democratic nation-states of Czechoslovakia and Weimar Germany. Many studies of World War I emphasize the failure of old imperial states and the apparent triumph of nations and nationalism. They tell of weak empires whose national populations failed to coincide with their political territories and that, estranged from their citizens, were doomed to collapse. But the story of World War I in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands shows that far from being irrelevant, imperial states assumed new prominence in local life during the war. In the process, the political border began to challenge the integrated borderlands. When the war ended, old empires crumbled. But the newfound prominence of state control in local life survived. Wartime governments focused unprecedented attention on their populations, economies, and territories, seeing them as both critical resources 81

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and potential threats. They claimed new jurisdiction over details of local administration and life. They regulated citizenship and passports more strictly, oversaw local distribution of food and consumer goods, curtailed travel, and limited information ›ow within their territories and across their borders. In short, governments increasingly inserted themselves into everyday life. Citizens responded to this new meddling by demanding that their states ful‹ll their self-proclaimed responsibilities. They called on governments to guarantee food supplies and combat local economic and social crises. But wartime states could not exert the wide-reaching control they claimed. When the imperial states failed to meet these demands, as they did on so many fronts by 1918, citizens challenged their sovereignty and replaced their imperial states with new democratic governments, the Czechoslovak and German republics. Nonetheless, wartime states’ claims of responsibility for local communities, their insistence on tracking populations and de‹ning political territory, and their citizens’ demands for government engagement with regional conditions reshaped interwar societies. Postwar successor states required passports, identi‹ed and regulated minority populations, and policed their borders with greater vigor than either imperial state had in the nineteenth century. In return, people demanded that the new republics support local communities directly and honor their local economic and political interests. Both built on the changes the old empires had made in wartime. During the war, membership in the German and Austrian states overshadowed other af‹liations for the ‹rst time. After 1914, nations, territories, and regions, which had competed for people’s prewar loyalties, were increasingly presented as linked directly to one imperial state or the other. States expected local people to identify themselves in territorial, national, and political terms, thereby de‹ning their relationships to the states where they lived and their rights to residence status, work permits, and social welfare. Locals, however, framed their political loyalties through their social interactions, cultural allegiances, and consumption patterns. States’ new wartime prominence in everyday life neither erased these other categories nor made them into mere subcategories of state af‹liation. Local people’s evolving perceptions of relationships among national, territorial, and regional rights and identities left their mark on the new German and Czechoslovak nation-states, even as the states endeavored to de‹ne their territories and shape their populations. When the war ended, these intersecting, often competing ideas of belonging preserved the same political division of territory between Saxony

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and Bohemia as had existed for centuries. The victorious Allies and Habsburg successor states embraced national self-determination as the yardstick for organizing postwar Central Europe. Yet in the borderlands, local and state interests reasserted historical political territories at odds with the claims that political territories should be de‹ned according to nationality. At the same time, those territories took on new, contested economic, cultural, and national meanings. States that attempted a more direct managerial role in local daily life than in the past had to adapt their administrative strategies, claims of sovereignty, and economic and population policies to local demands. This reality shifted the terms of action and debate for government of‹cials and local actors alike. Nowhere was negotiation, adaptation, and contradiction more evident than in the rhetoric of nationhood. The war and the sweeping changes it produced led government of‹cials and broad swaths of the populations on both sides of the border to embrace the rhetoric that nationalist activists had tried desperately and unsuccessfully to sell before 1914. But they did so situationally. Sometimes, they used nationalist rhetoric in asserting their views about how states and populations should relate to one another. At other times, they organized their public and private lives around nonnational criteria. In short, government of‹cials and local people used nationality as a language for political negotiation, not as a universal paradigm. Nevertheless, by using it, they set the stage for con›ict when their actions belied their public assertions that nationality played the leading role in their new societies.

Citizens World War I forced the German and Austrian states not only to mobilize troops and military equipment but to win material and moral support on the home front. To do this, states needed to know who and where their citizens were. As the borderlands were home to people from both Germany and Austria, the imperial states had to sort through these mixed populations to determine who should enlist in the army, who should be sent to allied militaries, and who should be prevented from ‹ghting against the Central Powers. They needed to know which war widows and orphans deserved support and which should apply to another country. In the borderlands, this proved complicated. Nineteenth-century labor migration and cross-border marriage had created a frontier population with multiple

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loyalties and often ambiguous citizenship. Over decades, the borderlands’ ›uidity and lack of passport requirements had created a population without papers. To resolve the problem, the states launched unprecedented efforts to organize their populations by citizenship, requiring of‹cial identi‹cation papers and especially passports. They needed to move as many people as possible to the political territories in which they “belonged.” States also wanted to identify which citizens were patriotic and which might be spies or revolutionaries. Fears about spying or revolution brought states face-toface with the variety of allegiances—local, regional, confessional, national, political, economic—that de‹ned the borderlands. When war began in 1914, the Austrian and German governments’ ‹rst task was to mobilize their armies as quickly as possible. Military mobilization made citizenship important for states and young men alike: German men were to return to the Reich for military service; Austrian citizens were to join the Austro-Hungarian army. The Austrian government, realizing that many of its citizens lived in Germany, obtained the Reich’s permission to set up army enlistment of‹ces in such Saxon cities as Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz.1 The Austrian state recognized that its population and, to some degree, its jurisdiction extended beyond its territory. At the same time, the war also forced Austria to address the dissonance between citizenry and territory created by late nineteenth-century mass migration. Yet, as Austrian and Saxon of‹cials quickly learned, the apparent territorial and political ties implied by legal citizenship and right of residence (Heimatrecht/Domaci právo) sometimes clashed with the experiences and inclinations of people in ›uid frontier communities. As Austria and Germany mobilized their armies, most men served the states where they were citizens, regardless of where they lived. Austrian citizens overwhelmingly obeyed the calls to mobilize, Bohemian men left Saxony in droves, and Bohemian associational life in Saxony went dormant.2 Nevertheless, as military conscription identi‹ed those who belonged to each state, it highlighted how much borderland dynamics had created populations with ambiguous or ambivalent state allegiances. Quite a few Austrian citizens argued that their personal attachments to Saxon territory were more important than their legal ties to Austria. Some young men born and raised in Saxony were sent to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army by virtue of their parents’—and thus their own—citizenship. Since lack of Saxon citizenship had been no handicap for non-Saxon German speakers before 1914, many Prussian, Bavarian, and Austrian citizens had

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never changed their citizenship. Now that they were being sent to their of‹cial homeland, they declared it foreign. For non-Saxon families with sons of military age, mobilization provided a reason to apply for Saxon citizenship, which would allow them to receive wartime aid from the state and guarantee that their sons served in the German, not the Austro-Hungarian, army. For Bohemians in Germany, German military service meant that men were more likely to train nearby and return home on leave. Applicants also argued that the AustroHungarian army was riddled with national tensions they wished to avoid. When Richard Steinhart, who had lived in Saxony from his birth, applied for citizenship in 1915, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior observed that Steinert had served in the Austrian army in the 1890s “under dif‹cult circumstances, since serving in the Austrian army is harder for someone born and raised in Germany than serving in the German army.” The ministry also noted that Steinert’s two sons would serve in the German military if the family received Saxon citizenship.3 In 1918, Robert Preiss pleaded with Saxon authorities to grant him citizenship, arguing that he had been born and raised in Saxony and that his father and sister had been granted Saxon citizenship. “I am entirely German,” he argued, “not an Austrian as well.”4 Saxon of‹cials found such arguments compelling. In both cases, they assumed that these men’s experience in Saxony implied a more natural attachment to the German state and military than to Austria Hungary. Similarly, men who wanted Saxon citizenship or whose citizenship status was in question could ensure their standing by volunteering for military duty.5 In 1918, Saxony granted citizenship to Stephan Vrba because, although his father’s application had been rejected before the war, Vrba had now ‹nished two years of active combat duty in the German army and proven his commitment to Saxony and Germany.6 Although the 1913 Reich citizenship laws granted foreigners no basic right to naturalization, the war persuaded Saxony to grant citizenship to applicants who would swell the German military ranks. The number of applications for Saxon citizenship did not rise dramatically during the war, but many who applied argued their cases by pointing to sons and brothers who could serve in the military and suggesting that the family’s allegiance lay in Saxony, not in Bohemia.7 Despite new regulation and documentation of citizenship, states still had no clear picture of who was eligible for military service. In 1916, Saxon of‹cials worried that able-bodied men had slipped through the cracks and avoided enlistment. Because men were called up to military service according to birth lists, noted the Saxon Ministry of the Interior, those born

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abroad did not appear on the military rolls; immigrants and gypsies escaped conscription because they lacked connections to speci‹c communities and places.8 German governments had not adapted their military systems to account for the remarkable population mobility of the late nineteenth century. Conscription compelled them to connect people to particular political territories, not by restricting movement, which was no longer really possible, but by documenting political and territorial af‹liation through passports and citizenship and by making documents central to modern mobility. Most Bohemians who left Saxony during the war did so to join the Austro-Hungarian army. Still, the Austrian government also tried to sort out civilian populations according to citizenship. In September 1914, the government offered free train tickets both to unemployed Austrian citizens living in Saxony who wished to return to Austria and to unemployed German citizens wishing to leave Austria.9 Nevertheless, both sides of the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands continued to be home to citizens from the other state. Early in the war, most people expected the con›ict to end quickly. But as the ‹ghting dragged on, states’ interest in identifying the citizenship of people in their territories was no longer just about enlisting soldiers. Food shortages and unemployment on the German and Austrian home fronts led civilians to demand that states make good on their promises to provide social welfare. Just as states had tried to identify those who owed them service in the ‹rst days of the war, governments now struggled to decide whom they had to help. When of‹cials’ assessment of state obligations fell short of what local people or neighbor states expected, tempers ›ared. Of‹cially, Saxony and Austria agreed to provide social welfare to each other’s citizens.10 But as food, consumer goods, and other resources became scarce, local administrations in the two states responded differently. Saxony extended the same social welfare and unemployment support to Austrian citizens as to its own, and private Saxon organizations aided Austrian citizens in Saxony during the war. By 1917, the Wartime Organization of Dresden Associations was supporting 1,178 needy Austrian families in Dresden.11 Yet many northern Bohemian communities, which had few Saxons compared to the numbers of Bohemians in similar Saxon communities, refused to acknowledge the agreement. In October 1914, the mayor of Johanngeorgenstadt reported, Bohemian of‹cials were telling needy Saxons who had lived in Bohemia for decades and had sent men to serve in the German army, to ask Saxony for support.12 In October 1915, seventy-

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year-old Andreas Wolfram, a Saxon weaver who had lived in the Bohemian town of Steingrün/Hazlov-Výhledy near Aš/Asch for forty-six years, wrote to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior in distress. Ever since the war began, he said, his work had dried up; he was no longer physically able to take on heavy labor, and when he asked his community for help, he was told to seek assistance from the Saxon town of Brambach, where he had of‹cial Heimatrecht. Wolfram was not alone. In November 1915, the mayor of Brambach complained that many Reich citizens who lived in Bohemia were applying to him for ‹nancial assistance after being denied help in Bohemia.13 Saxon communities, stretched thin by the war yet still supporting Austrian citizens, were infuriated that their Bohemian counterparts were shirking their responsibility for the cross-border population. Clearly, Saxon and Bohemian of‹cials had quite different understandings of the relationships among citizenship, state responsibility, and territory. Although the war made both states pay closer attention to peoples’ citizenship, loyalty, location, and territorial af‹liations, Saxon of‹cials maintained a greater commitment to the borderland dynamics of mixed populations. Saxon of‹cials, industrialists, and borderland populations considered Bohemians important to their local economies and societies. In Bohemia, Saxon migrants were not an important resource, and Bohemian of‹cials and industrialists regarded their Saxon neighbors as competitors as well as potential colleagues. Moreover, while both sides of the border faced serious economic hardships during the war, conditions were often worse in Bohemia than in Saxony. Early in the war, Saxony maintained that the Austrian state was responsible for supporting Saxons living in Bohemia, just as Saxony supported Austrian citizens in its territory.14 But Bohemian borderland communities’ refusal to honor the Saxon-Austrian agreement forced some Saxon district governments to cast aside principle in favor of pragmatism. Saxon of‹cials recognized that a desperate lack of resources drove many Bohemian communities to refuse to support any but their own citizens.15 As the war continued and shortages grew worse, Saxon of‹cials aided Saxons in Bohemia, thereby informally extending their state jurisdiction and in›uence outside Reich territory. But Saxony’s involvement with its citizens’ daily lives, even those outside its territory, did not mean that the state either fully controlled borderland conditions or received ongoing support from borderland residents. After 1915, chronic food shortages spurred popular unrest in the Saxon borderlands, as many borderland residents thought the state had done too little to solve economic and social problems

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on the home front.16 Nevertheless, government attempts to address problems reinforced the sense that states could and should be involved in their citizens’ lives, even outside their territories. It also contributed to a belief that Saxony had the right to act directly in Bohemia. State sovereignty no longer necessarily ended at the political border. Unlike their Saxon neighbors, Bohemian communities restricted their responsibilities to those who were both citizens and physically present. Even then, the Austrian state failed to deliver on its commitments. Food shortages, unemployment, and popular unrest were chronic.17 As early as 1914, northern Bohemian of‹cials and social welfare organizations compared their government’s failure to provide food with what they claimed was Germany’s greater success. By 1917, Austria had, in desperation, turned most social welfare work in the Bohemian borderlands over to German-Bohemian and Czech nationalist provincial commissions.18 Although the commissions ostensibly acted on behalf of the central government, they emphasized local and regional administration and national commitment over loyalty to the Austrian state.19 This was not simply persistence of an older localism. In the past, Bohemians had asserted local identities while simultaneously declaring loyalty to the Habsburg state, but as World War I dragged on, local loyalties and local social welfare began to challenge the state’s authority and legitimacy. Citizenship took on new importance for de‹ning individuals’ relationships to states and territories. It not only determined who owed military service or taxes or who had a right to education or social welfare. It also became an issue for cross-border mobility. Local of‹cials might establish someone’s citizenship, but if that person moved, how could he or she prove that citizenship? Passports thus became standard equipment for borderland life during World War I. And as Ceský vystehovalec told readers in 1915, the new rules made mobility more dif‹cult for Reich German citizens and foreigners alike.20 Passports replaced a wide range of identi‹cation papers that people had used in the past: birth, baptism, and marriage certi‹cates; work permits; and similar documents. Such identi‹cation documented birthplace or residence but did not unequivocally establish the carrier’s state af‹liation. During the war, however, state af‹liation mattered above all others. Passports provided a standard means of identi‹cation that supposedly did away with confusion about the relationship of residence to citizenship. Further, after 1915, Saxony required all residence papers and passports to

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contain the holder’s photograph and signature, to increase the accuracy of of‹cial identi‹cation.21 The new German and Austrian passport requirements proved easier in theory than in practice. In the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, few people, even those who crossed the border frequently, had passports. In 1915, the Eibenstock city council pleaded with district of‹cials to relax the requirement. Many Saxon women had married Bohemian men and lost their Saxon citizenship. Those men were now serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, and without Austrian passports, their wives could not visit them. Similarly, the council observed, tourists, whom Saxon border communities were eager to attract, also wanted to visit Bohemia, and they, too, needed passports. Getting a passport required traveling to a city with a consulate, paying a handsome fee, and waiting weeks. Impoverished local families or tourists who had not planned ahead met with considerable obstacles. The Eibenstock council proposed a special borderland identi‹cation card to allow local traf‹c to cross.22 It took three years for the suggestion to take hold. While Germany ‹rst required passports to identify people crossing its borders, by 1917, the Saxon government began using them to keep track of foreigners farther inland. When the Saxons announced that they would require all foreigners over twelve years old to carry a passport, the distressed Austro-Hungarian consul in Dresden promptly wrote to the Saxon government. He was, he said, quite unable to provide passports for all who needed them in the three weeks before the deadline. At least twenty thousand people in the Dresden-Bautzen district would need passports. Similar numbers would be needed in the Chemnitz and Leipzig districts. Not only was it dif‹cult to issue so many documents in so short a time, the consul observed, but most Austrian citizens in Saxony were working-class people. Many lacked the documents to prove citizenship and obtain a passport. What’s more, the war cut people off from their home districts, where they could obtain those documents. As the consul’s letter illustrates, although Saxony sought to standardize proof of citizenship for Austrians, the Austrian government itself could not always con‹rm its own citizens’ status.23 New passport requirements thus not only helped states identify their citizens but insisted that people with ambiguous status choose a clear state af‹liation. Although passports had become common in the borderlands by 1918, they were far from universal. As a result, while requiring their use for most

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travelers, the German and Austrian states ‹nally conceded that in the immediate borderlands, the close connections between populations, local industries’ dependence on cross-border labor, and public goodwill demanded an alternative. They relaxed passport requirements for the adjacent border regions and issued special borderland identi‹cation cards to local residents. These papers allowed people to cross the border but required them to stay within a four-kilometer zone on either side. Once these borderland passes were established, frontier residents petitioned for expansion of the zone, so that more towns could attract Bohemian workers and conduct cross-border business.24 This example speaks volumes. States had to negotiate with frontier communities. Even as the states made the border more of a barrier than before and made state power more visible, neither the barrier nor state power was absolute. Local people pushed, pulled, and adapted the system to real patterns of cross-border mobility. Along the way, they also began to assimilate this new attention to citizenship and its relationship to political territory. Between them, state of‹cials and local citizens began to imagine the borderlands as a place with clear territorial dimensions. By 1918, the German and Austrian states had established new norms for identifying their citizens, granting borderland residents access to territory, and de‹ning ordinary people’s interactions with their states. But even as the war created the drive for new regulations, it often made the regulations impossible to enforce. States did not know the legal status of everyone in their territory. They had to concede that in many contexts in the immediate borderlands, citizenship mattered less for daily interactions than did peoples’ participation in local communities. While their efforts made local people pay closer attention to their states than in the past, they also highlighted the states’ failure to fully establish local control.

States The heightened visibility of the German and Austrian states in local life cast the border into new relief during the war. People used to living in a region de‹ned by cross-border interaction and transnational relationships found themselves largely limited to territories and resources within their own states. These limits proved devastating. Industries on both sides went into free fall. Food shortages, seemingly senseless restrictions, censorship, and unequal distribution of resources among regions made frontier people

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distrust their states. States’ new prominence in all spheres of life also brought overlapping, previously complementary categories of af‹liation— regional, national, class, and state—into con›ict. When war was declared on July 28, 1914, the German and Austrian governments moved quickly to seize control of all movement along and across their borders. Border controls became far more aggressive than in the past. Border police were authorized to use force, and in the autumn of 1915, Saxony also stationed soldiers along the border. Under orders from the Saxon Ministry of War, all cross-border telephone, postal, road, rail, and foot traf‹c was closely monitored; traf‹c of goods and people was limited to of‹cial border crossings; and unmonitored roads across the border were closed to motor vehicles. Cross-border river traf‹c on the Elbe was forbidden after dark or in fog. Even hobbyists who raised carrier pigeons had to register their birds and were forbidden to ›y them across the frontier.25 At the beginning of the war, governments swept aside nationalists’ attempts to de‹ne the borderlands as “German” or “Czech,” concentrating instead on imposing state power on space. For governments, strict border regulation seemed a rational ‹rst step: they wanted a clear picture of who was in their territories and clear control over the ›ow of people, information, and goods. States asserted a new vision of territory that privileged state sovereignty over all other de‹nitions of space: regional, national, economic. They treated the borderlands as a place strictly demarcated between two states, not as a zone of interaction among local, regional, and national communities. Borderland residents had to negotiate, if not accept, their states’ new de‹nition of the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands. But these measures disrupted daily life and, in the long run, cost states dearly. Borderland residents on both sides found state efforts to limit crossborder traf‹c disruptive and puzzling. Not only were people cut off from an allied country, but they were suddenly isolated from the markets where they bought and sold, from family and friends, from favorite pubs and hiking trails, from access to landscapes and communities that had been integral to their prewar lives. Many were indignant. In mid-August 1914, the mayor of Johanngeorgenstadt complained, “One is not even allowed to stop in a Bohemian pub anymore!” He dismissed of‹cial justi‹cations for border controls, declaring, “There can be no real question of protecting military secrets. The Austrian newspapers print exactly the same information as the German ones.”26 Outrage at border restrictions, like the newspaper coverage, was the same on both sides. Innkeeper Herr Schumann in Bohemian Hinterdeubnitz bewailed the damage that border restrictions were doing to

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his livelihood. Herr Schumann walked four hundred meters of his way to work every day along the Saxon side of the border. But with the border closed, he was forbidden to take his usual path, cut off from supplies of food and drink for his inn, and separated from his Saxon customers.27 Similarly, the city council of Potucky/Breitenbach in Bohemia complained that Germany’s wartime border restrictions kept workers who normally crossed the border to work in Saxony from their jobs. By mid-August 1914, the mayor of Johanngeorgenstadt protested that he was merely echoing public opinion in demanding that frontier restrictions be lifted for local people. He admonished that Saxon of‹cials must surely have something better to do in wartime than control contact with their close allies and “denounce any German who drinks a glass of beer in the name of Austria.”28 Local peoples’ objections to border restrictions were partly a reaction to the German and Austrian states’ erosion of what frontier residents considered local rights and privileges. But border restrictions also had devastating economic consequences. Frontier industries suffered during the war. Conscription gutted local work forces when Germany and Austria initially failed to protect even war industries. In northern Bohemia, the number of skilled metalworkers fell by nearly two-thirds in the ‹rst month of the war. By late 1914, the Austrian government realized its mistake and began “repatriating” skilled workers, but not before industries had been hobbled by the loss of labor.29 Further, border restrictions magni‹ed labor shortages by making it harder for industrialists to recruit workers across the frontier as they had in the past.30 Border restrictions also cut local industries off from raw materials, triggering economic problems and a barrage of protest from industrialists. In March 1916, the Dresden Chamber of Commerce appealed to the Saxon government on behalf of the Saxon wood industry. Saxon border police were refusing entry to Bohemian barges carrying timber to Germany. The chamber argued, We don’t know why Bohemian bargemen are being refused entry into Saxony, or whether entry is denied only to those deemed nationally untrustworthy. But Saxon industries will suffer enormously if the lumber supply is curtailed . . . [C]omplaints about lumber shortages in Saxon industries are growing daily more urgent.31 In this and many similar cases, industrialists argued that governments were imposing shortsighted border restrictions at real cost to their communities.

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The loss of international markets after 1914 meant that even industrialists who managed to continue production could no longer sell their wares. The British blockade and trade embargos hurt the Central Powers deeply.32 But the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands’ dependence on foreign markets made these losses especially devastating. Big industries, such as textiles and machine building, lost business, but the small industries that had long characterized the borderlands fared far worse. Many produced luxury goods, such as lace, arti‹cial ›owers, toys, and musical instruments—items that found few markets in wartime. With the sudden loss of markets, most industry in the borderlands ground to a halt, and unemployment soared.33 The mayor of Arnsdorf (near Ceská Lipa/Böhmisch Leipa) wrote to Vienna in November 1914, “No industry in the whole [Austrian] monarchy is suffering as much as the glass industry, which produces only luxury goods, and in which all production has been at a standstill since the beginning of the war. The workers already live hand to mouth, and are now suffering severely.”34 This experience extended well beyond the glass industry. The District Organization of German National Workers Associations in Teplice/Teplitz told the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, “Thousands of workers stand ready . . . to [give] life and blood . . . for our Fatherland . . . [yet] the majority of the working class can’t provide for even their most basic needs.” This situation produced growing resentment against people who seemed to pro‹t from the war.35 While such resentment was ‹rst directed at merchants and farmers, who were assumed to be pro‹teering, it soon extended to the state, which seemed unwilling or unable to provide for the same citizens who declared themselves ready to ‹ght for Austria. Food shortages compounded the misery of industrial crisis and mass unemployment. As a result, political unity and popular support for the war broke down earlier in the borderlands than elsewhere.36 As early as October 1914, the mayor of Jablonec/Gablonz urged the Austrian government, “There is already serious economic distress, especially in industrial areas, which needs to be combated quickly . . . to prevent the spread of despair.”37 Saxons staged violent hunger riots in Chemnitz in October 1915 and in Dresden in November 1916, prompting military intervention.38 Bohemia suffered similar shortages and unrest, with the most urgent pleas for state aid coming from the industrial borderlands.39 When the government failed to heed such pleas, popular opinion increasingly dismissed the Austrian state as incompetent and out of touch.40 Border restrictions intensi‹ed locals’ anger over food shortages. Local

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people had long supplemented their resources by shopping across the border when prices were lower or goods more plentiful there than at home. Further, many people gathered berries, mushrooms, and ‹rewood in the forests and ‹elds along the frontier. But during the war, they faced obstacles at every turn. Borderland residents protested when Germany and Austria tried to secure domestic food supplies by banning exports, even in the kleinen Grenzverkehr (small-scale cross-border traf‹c).41 The bans not only tightened communities’ sources of food but in›ated prices. Saxon bakers, for example, took advantage of the sudden evaporation of Bohemian competition to raise bread prices in August 1914.42 As the war went on, governments eased some restrictions on the kleine Grenzverkehr between Saxony and Bohemia. By late 1915, Saxony began issuing permits to local people to buy small amounts of food in Bohemia.43 As border policies became more local, they also became more nuanced. Typically, restrictions on frontier trade and travel originated with the central governments in Berlin and Vienna or with regional governments in Dresden and Prague. But those governments’ visions of economies neatly delineated by state territory crumbled when the loss of cross-border economic networks devastated local communities. Local and district of‹cials demanded a change in policy. As we have seen, their efforts produced a wartime border region—a strip of four kilometers on each side, later widened to six kilometers—permitting people within the region limited cross-border trade, work permits, and travel rights. But local and district of‹cials also took some matters into their own hands, negotiating trade with neighboring communities in an effort to counteract the worst consequences of the border restrictions. Johanngeorgenstadt, for example, brokered a trade arrangement with the Bohemian cities of Potucky/Breitenbach and Horní Platná/ Platten to buy food for local residents, and Zittau made similar arrangements with its Bohemian neighbors.44 Local of‹cials also adjusted enforcement of border regulations to accommodate their communities’ economic interests, including tourism. In July 1915, the Zwickauer Tageblatt und Anzeiger reported, “For unsuspicious-looking tourists, the passport requirement on the border appears not to be enforced at all, though it is still recommended that visitors carry identi‹cation.”45 When local of‹cials exploited—and sometimes created—loopholes in wartime restrictions, they did so in response to conditions in their communities rather than from loyalty to prewar norms. Since those conditions varied from community to community and moment to moment, local lead-

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ers occasionally reversed direction and embraced centrally mandated restrictions, as in 1917 when Zittau city of‹cials argued that selling milk to Bohemian Varnsdorf/Warnsdorf hurt Saxon areas already strained by shortages.46 But the volatility of local opinion about border restrictions illustrates that although central states were more visible in the borderlands than in the past, their power, even over local of‹cials who were nominally agents of the states, was often limited. Borderland residents and local of‹cials tweaked central policies, ‹nding ways around restrictions as often as they obeyed them. The border itself became a more prominent feature of local life as people made new use of it as a barrier that they could either exploit or circumvent. State attempts to impose regulations that locals found irrelevant or destructive undermined state power and popular loyalty. Many people ignored or actively out›anked border authorities. German and Austrian wartime policy, for example, not only prohibited civilians from crossing the border without consent but forbade them even to approach it. In August 1914, Saxon police stopped two women for picking blueberries too close to the border. The women knew the new rules but argued that food shortages and bans on cross-border trade made it imperative that they collect berries.47 Similarly, with cross-border trade banned, many border residents turned to smuggling, although shortages of goods, high prices, and military police on both sides made it dif‹cult.48 In June 1915, a border patrol in Eibenstock reported, “Increasing quantities of food are being taken on back ways to Austria, where prices are higher than in Saxony.”49 In 1917, Saxon military caught Bohemian miners crossing the border to steal ‹eld potatoes on their work break.50 In fact, smuggling was a barometer for local conditions. In August 1918, the Saxon city of Schneeberg reported that it was clear that local economic conditions had grown much worse, since the district had seen a huge rise in smuggling and in livestock and crop thefts.51 Clearly, many people, including berry pickers and smugglers, ›outed of‹cial wartime restrictions and continued to use the borderlands. They forced states to recognize that they lacked the resources to track the foot traf‹c that crossed the frontier far from of‹cial border crossings. The Schwarzenberg district reported in disgust in October 1915, “It isn’t hard to cross the border on foot when you have been turned back from a border crossing for not having a passport. The press is even telling tourists to do this!”52 Police and military forces enforced of‹cial restrictions as best they could and compelled civilians to make some show of compliance. But as

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the new rules criminalized normal subsistence activities, such as gathering berries, local people grew bitter about the restrictions and dismissive of authorities who could not enforce them. As food shortages and border restrictions spurred popular discontent, frontier people embraced regional identities to demonstrate opposition to their states and neighbors. In 1916, Saxons exhibited an upsurge of antiPrussian sentiment as the result of a popular conviction, supported in liberal and Social Democratic political circles, that the Berlin government and Prussian Junkers were hoarding food at Saxony’s expense. Prussian visitors to Saxon pubs met with hostility, and the Saxon Landtag demanded that Berlin release the food that Prussians were said to be stockpiling.53 Within Saxony, protesters in Dresden accused Saxons in the state’s agricultural north of withholding potatoes from hungry cities in the south. Austrians accused Hungarians of “Magyar betrayal” for selling grain to Germany rather than to the Austrian half of the monarchy.54 In Bohemia, German-Bohemian nationalists accused Czechs of keeping food from German-speaking areas, while the Czech nationalist press accused “German” authorities of letting Czech women and children starve.55 These regional rivalries undermined the sense that common loyalty bound Saxons and Prussians to the German state or bound Bohemians and Magyars to the Habsburg state. Food shortages strained cross-border relations, too. By the summer of 1917, Bohemians protested that the Austrian government was ignoring local needs and exporting food to Germany; and howls of outrage arose from Germany in 1918 when Austro-Hungarian troops requisitioned Romanian grain shipments headed to the Reich.56 Such rumors and protests revealed that frontier residents had come to regard their states as adversaries conspiring to defraud some regions and groups while favoring others. In the borderlands, food shortages led neighboring Bohemian and Saxon communities to see each other as economic competitors for scarce resources, rather than as collaborators. The wartime breakdown of borderland economies and the German and Austrian states’ failure to plan for their civilian hinterlands laid the ground for popular disgust, unrest, and revolution. Germany and Austria had required their citizens to serve in modern conscription-based armies, endure new state interventions in their lives, tolerate strict censorship, and put state loyalties before all others.57 Yet by the end of the war, many were certain that their states had failed to deliver on the promises they had made in return for civic loyalty.

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Disillusioned with war and disgusted with Germany’s and Austria’s bungling on the home front, people rejected the primacy of loyalty to imperial states that governments had asserted and that many people had accepted at the war’s inception. The collapse of the Wilhelmine German and Habsburg empires in October 1918 opened the way for a variety of people to attempt to reshape the borderlands. People cast around for new ideas to justify the territories, political systems, and sovereign claims of postwar states. In this setting, nationality reemerged as a central concept in the struggle to de‹ne the borderlands’ future.

Nations and Territories In the summer of 1914, state loyalties eclipsed nationality and other forms of allegiance as a framework for organizing borderland territories and populations. Even nationalists claimed that their efforts served their states and the war effort.58 But by the autumn of 1918, Reich German and Bohemian politicians, nationalists, and the victorious Allies declared nationality the primary criterion for reorganizing Central Europe. The Weimar German and Czechoslovak nation-states swept away their imperial German and Habsburg forebears by claiming to be nation-states. Yet there was no change to the political border between Saxony and Bohemia or to the borderlands’ ambiguous national character. Despite the overwhelming rhetoric of national self-determination in 1918–19, the modern bureaucratic state emerged as the primary organizing principle for Central European territories and societies. Postwar states wanted to create stable political systems, track their populations, de‹ne their territories, and secure their places in international political and economic systems. They claimed legitimacy by declaring that they represented sovereign nations. But they were more nationalizing than national. They sought to use nationalist ideas to create states, rather than truly national communities, and they worked to shape their populations to ‹t their national claims and territories. The rhetoric of national commitment, self-determination, and con›ict that nationalists had struggled to sell before the war came into its own in October and November 1918, but not quite as activists had envisioned. Emerging postwar German and Czechoslovak states followed their wartime predecessors’ leads by making nationality a criterion for evaluating political loyalties, asserting state control over society, and laying claim

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to territory. Borderland residents also borrowed from prewar nationalist rhetoric as they jockeyed for position in the swiftly shifting social, political, and economic landscape. They used nationalist rhetoric situationally— sometimes to preserve ›uid cross-border dynamics and at other times to demonstrate state allegiance, sometimes to challenge state power and at other times to win political support for regional projects and interests. National identity became a tool for negotiating changing conditions, not a goal in itself. Although often invoked, nationalist ideology did not triumph in 1918. While the German and Czechoslovak republican governments made nationhood their cornerstone for political legitimacy, political boundaries between Saxony and Bohemia remained unchanged until 1938. State sovereignty, historical territories, and nonnational communities proved more in›uential and less interchangeable with nations than political rhetoric suggested. Yet rhetoric mattered. By declaring state and national territories one and the same, the new German and Czechoslovak governments inadvertently illuminated the contradictions at the core of their states, lending substance to nationalist activists’ prewar claims that the incongruence of national populations, state boundaries, and even “national” territories was problematic. In 1918–19, these contradictions loomed large in debates about the borderlands’ future. Although they receded during the 1920s, that moment of prominence fed renewed debate in the 1930s, territorial revision in 1938, and the redistribution of populations after 1945. Before 1914, Habsburg Austria had refused to accept nationality as a political category for de‹ning its population. But during the war, the state grew anxious about securing its citizens’ loyalty and embraced nationality as a practical category of governance. Military leaders came to believe that some national groups, especially the Czechs, were undermining the AustroHungarian war effort.59 They imposed draconian restrictions, including strict censorship of people of “unreliable” nationalities.60 Austria’s distrust became a self-ful‹lling prophecy. By late 1918, many Austrian citizens, including nationalists who had been loyal to the monarchy in 1914, began to question the monarchy’s very existence. Government repression of particular national communities aroused new interest in national categories and sentiments. Wartime experiences made credible the idea that national communities were the inevitable alternative to the failed Habsburg system. In Bohemia, public support for the monarchy plummeted as a result of of‹cial distrust and restrictions. Government and German nationalist

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assertions that Czech soldiers were deserters and saboteurs, together with of‹cial suspicion of Czechs on the home front, disillusioned and embittered Czech speakers. A Czech-speaking army chaplain complained to Viennese social reformer Robert Scheu, “If I want to read a good word about a Czech regiment, I have to turn to the Reich German newspapers.”61 By 1918, Scheu reported, such sentiments were widespread: “The Czechs were vexed when every Czech word vanished from the army barracks after the war began.” Popular opinion soured further when the government forbade people to sing Czech songs, and Czech speakers began to encounter such daily irritations as being refused service for requesting a train ticket in Czech. Even people who identi‹ed as German were affected: a GermanBohemian judge was refused a job because his bilingualism made him nationally suspect.62 Although such incidents did not transform the Bohemian borderlands into the neat national territories that nationalist activists wanted and that the Austrian state imagined, they did make national af‹liation more central to how borderland people perceived their relationships to their states and each other. Ironically, in frontier communities, the Austrian state’s acceptance of nationality undermined its claims that state allegiances should take precedence over local, regional, and national loyalties. During the war, Austria delegated social welfare services in the borderlands to nationalist activists. Activists nominally served the state but asserted that economic and social stability could be achieved only through local national engagement. Rather than shoring up Habsburg patriotism, they reinforced popular convictions that unlike the state, nationalists were willing and able to defend local interests. They used their of‹cial role to promulgate the view that nations, not multinational states, would de‹ne postwar Central Europe.63 By October 1918, it was clear that the Central Powers had lost the war and that the German and Habsburg empires were unlikely to survive. Politicians, military leaders, nationalists, and citizens clamored to shape postwar Central Europe according to their own interests. These battles took place at many levels but proved especially heated and consequential in borderlands, where distinctions among political territories, populations, economies, and popular loyalties were most ambiguous and where states and nationalists sought to draw them most sharply. Many local actors sought to engineer faits accomplis to substantiate their claims to territory and political authority at the peace conference in Paris.64 But whereas Czech speakers and Czech political leaders demonstrated unprecedented unity in supporting the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, German speak-

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ers in Bohemia, Austria, and the Reich were deeply divided by competing economic, political, and cultural interests that limited national unity to mere lip service. As the Habsburg central government made last-ditch efforts to save the empire, provincial governments abandoned the sinking ship of state. In early October 1918, members of the Vienna parliament called for unity among German-speaking Austrians and for the reorganization of Austria on a federalist model.65 According to a Saxon observer, it was impressive to ‹nally see German Austrians politically united, but that unity had come too late. What German Austrians might have done weeks or days before to shape their postwar position became impossible once Woodrow Wilson handed the Czechoslovaks the right to decide Austria’s fate. Indeed, on October 28, the Czechoslovak National Committee in Prague declared the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state.66 Czech political leaders claimed the entire Bohemian crown lands, including majority German-speaking areas, for Czechoslovakia. In the nineteenth century, Czech nationalist activists had used Bohemia’s historical status as an independent kingdom to argue for Bohemian states rights (Staatsrecht/státní pravo) within the Habsburg Empire.67 Some politicians, including Czech Social Democrats and Tomáš Masaryk, later the ‹rst Czechoslovak president, had favored winning greater regional autonomy in the empire by dividing Bohemian political space along ethnolinguistic lines.68 But over the course of the war, Czech national leaders moved from advocating greater autonomy within the Habsburg Empire to calling for an independent state. By the summer of 1918, they were united in declaring a Czechoslovak state whose western borders followed the historic frontiers of the Bohemian kingdom and whose eastern boundaries in Slovakia were de‹ned in ethnolinguistic terms.69 Czechoslovakia’s western territorial claims had as much to do with pragmatic state building as with nationalist conviction. At the Paris Peace Conference, Czechoslovak leaders argued that if Czechoslovakia were to become a viable independent state, it must retain Bohemia’s historic boundaries. In the northwest, they insisted, these borders made the state defensible militarily, since they ran along a “natural” mountainous frontier. Further, Bohemia’s industrial borderlands were vital to a selfsuf‹cient Czechoslovak economy. Finally, they declared, the borders were politically essential in the aftermath of World War I, since neither Czech nor international public opinion would accept territorial changes that seemed to reward Germany.70

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German-speaking Bohemians were far from united in their vision of a postwar future, and in late 1918, they came to see their choices differently as the political landscape shifted.71 Nationalists objected to being absorbed into a Czechoslovak nation-state, and the polarization of Czech and German-Austrian political positions during the war left Germanspeaking Bohemians uneasy about becoming a national minority. But national identity did not automatically make German-speaking Bohemians support territorial fragmentation. As Karl Bahm argues, German-speaking Bohemians identi‹ed strongly with Bohemia but still considered themselves Germans. The Habsburg state had bridged these two kinds of identity. With its fall, two complementary identities were now in con›ict. German-speaking Bohemians disagreed over what they should do next. Should they accept the Czechoslovak state or create an independent German Bohemia? Should they embrace German nationalism and join the new German Austria, or should they join the German Reich?72 The disunity among German-speaking Bohemians highlights how much nationality competed with other af‹liations. Even nationalists disagreed about their ideology’s political and territorial implications. Initially, many German-speaking Bohemians assumed that they would remain within Austria. As late as November 1918, the German-Bohemian provincial government wrote to Berlin to assert its loyalty to Vienna and its status as the government of German Bohemia within a greater Austrian state.73 But by then, many German-Bohemian leaders had decided that the Austrian government was too weak to help them.74 Some campaigned for the creation of an independent German-Bohemian state. Various German nationalists on both sides of the border argued that national self-determination demanded a Reich Anschluss, or annexation, of German-speaking Bohemia.75 Others argued that the time was ripe for a Pan-German grossdeutsch state that encompassed Austria, Germany, and German-speaking Bohemia.76 Finally, some German-speaking Bohemians privately thought that incorporation into Czechoslovakia might be the best choice. On October 29, a day after the declaration of Czechoslovakia, German-Bohemian leaders in Liberec/Reichenberg declared the northern and western Bohemian borderlands the Province of German Bohemia. A few days later, the German National Committee for the Teplice/Teplitz district announced that it was taking over the local duties of the Austrian Ministry of War until further notice.77 Other majority German-speaking regions followed suit, announcing the formation of the autonomous provinces of

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the Sudetenland, German Southern Moravia, and the Bohemian Woods. In December, the Deutsche Laipaer Zeitung asserted that “it lightens the heart and strengthens the spirit of a German” to see local national councils taking charge.78 But the multiplicity of actors and organizations who claimed to represent German-speaking Bohemians lacked a vision of a single territorial “German Bohemia.” The diversity of political actors asserting authority over local and provincial administrations created confusion. In early November 1918, for example, northern Bohemian of‹cials received a letter from the district government in Litomerice/Leitmeritz instructing them to withhold funds from the Czechoslovak government on behalf of the Province of German Bohemia. The Czechoslovak government, however, assured them that they were now to work for Czechoslovakia.79 For local people, the situation was baf›ing. Many actors claimed state authority; none seemed able to wield it. German-Bohemian nationalist leaders tried to unite the separate German-Bohemian movements behind the idea of a common German-speaking “Sudetenland.”80 They understood that to win popular or international support for their vision of the borderlands’ future, they needed to prove that German-speaking Bohemia was culturally, territorially, and politically distinct. The Sudetenland could be imagined as an independent political and territorial entity, whereas the name German Bohemia implied a larger, non-German Bohemia. At ‹rst, this idea had limited appeal for most German-speaking Bohemians, especially after the peace treaties of 1919. But the concept of a German-speaking Sudetenland distinct from Czech-speaking Czechoslovakia circulated during the interwar period. When debates about German Bohemian self-determination and incorporation into Germany reemerged in the 1930s, the idea was available.81 German-Bohemian nationalists who believed that postwar political boundaries should be drawn along ethnolinguistic lines but that an independent German Bohemia or Sudetenland was not viable lobbied the Entente and their own governments to support a Reich Anschluss of Bohemia’s borderlands. Some radical German-Bohemians even demanded that Germany invade Bohemia and Moravia to prevent a Czech occupation of German-speaking areas. A sympathetic Saxon border of‹cial stationed in Bohemian Podmokly/Bodenbach wrote the Saxon government on October 25, 1918, Many German Bohemians think . . . the Czechs will soon control Bohemia . . . They see annexation by the German Reich as the only way

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out of this danger. German Bohemians expect that as soon as the Czechs take action, [Germany will mount] a strong military response . . . to protect the beleaguered German Bohemians. They take comfort in the conviction that the Reich will not abandon its fellow nationals in their time of need.82 Whether they advocated an independent German Bohemia or Anschluss, German-Bohemian nationalist leaders considered Saxony critical. In early October, German-Bohemian politicians secretly traveled to Dresden to drum up political support.83 Professor Geyer of the German National Council of Austria (Deutsche Nationalrat), proposed arming German Bohemians to ‹ght the Czechs, proclaiming, “Germans in Bohemia expect that Saxon and Prussian troops will invade immediately if a Czech state that includes German territories is declared.”84 Most proponents of the Anschluss assumed that German Bohemia would be incorporated into Saxony, because of the two territories’ geographic proximity, interconnections, and common industrial character.85 German-Bohemian nationalist leaders loudly demanded invasion and armed resistance. But Czech politicians were better able to assert their vision of postwar Bohemia. They were uni‹ed in their demands that Czechoslovakia keep the historic boundaries of the Bohemian crown lands. They had a larger population, police force, and military; the enthusiasm of independence; better food supplies than the German-speaking Bohemians; and the support of the Western powers. Czechoslovak of‹cials considered German-Bohemian attempts at separation not mere regional disturbances but a threat to the whole country.86 The Czech-language press condemned German-Bohemian separatism. In early November 1918, Národní politika suggested that German-Bohemian nationalists failed to grasp the world political situation. It pointed out that more “sober German voices” than those of the nationalists opposed an Anschluss.87 Czech politicians, unlike German-Bohemian leaders, took pains to show that German Bohemians could and would ‹nd a place in Czechoslovakia. They circulated German-language propaganda in the borderlands, making the case that Czechoslovakia offered peace and prosperity to the whole population of Bohemia, an effort that Czechoslovak of‹cials reported was generally well received.88 But Czechoslovak leaders also followed up their territorial and political claims with action. They assembled an army and occupied the Bohemian borderlands. Czechoslovak troops entered Ústí nad Labem/Aussig in early November 1918. By mid-December, the border-

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lands were ‹rmly under Czechoslovak control. A Czechoslovak state with the historic borders of the Bohemian crown was a fait accomplis. In fact, many German-speaking Bohemians were willing to join the Czechoslovak state. Popular support for nationalist resistance or for an Anschluss was thin.89 Most German speakers considered themselves Bohemians and Austrians and did not identify with the German Reich. Their Saxon neighbors, inundated with nationalist rhetoric about German-Bohemians’ suffering at the hands of Czechs, failed to grasp this fact. In December 1918, Saxony steeled itself for an in›ux of German-Bohemian refugees, assuming that masses of people would ›ee Czech occupation. In fact, very few crossed the border.90 As it became clear that separate German-Bohemian provinces would not hold out against Czechoslovak control, German-Bohemian nationalists decried the lack of national support from the Reich and their own population. The Neue Weiperter Zeitung accused German-speaking Bohemians of being nationally disengaged and unorganized, of allowing Czechoslovakia to take over the borderlands.91 Yet most German-speaking Bohemians preferred to preserve the Bohemian crown lands as a geographic, political, and cultural unit, rather than embrace nationalist calls for their dissolution. Practical considerations prompted many Bohemians—German and Czech speakers alike—to preserve Bohemia’s boundaries. In 1918, Director Bielohlawek of a bank in Ceské Budejovice/Budweis told Robert Scheu, “Bohemia is an economic region that is very dif‹cult to divide. We Czechs have the grain, the Germans the coal; we are dependent on one another.”92 Certainly, many German-speaking Bohemians thought their economic interests lay in Bohemia, partly because of its close proximity and ties to the Saxon borderlands. Saxon of‹cials reported that although the Union of Northern Bohemian Industrialists bowed to nationalist pressures and called for incorporation into either a German Austria or the German Reich in October 1918, industrialists considered inclusion in a new Czechled state not only the most likely outcome but also the most desirable.93 Separating German-speaking Bohemian industrial areas from the rest of the Bohemian crown lands would entail the loss of markets, labor, and help from the Entente.94 Bohemian industrialists worried that if they operated within a German state, they would be unable to compete with the more modern German industries, including those in Saxony. Many, including the president of the Union of Northern Bohemian Industrialists—a German citizen—saw far greater advantage in joining the Czech state than in joining Germany.95 Bourgeois German-speaking Bohemians looked across

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the German border in 1918–19 to see unemployed Saxons seizing goods from farmers and merchants, widespread violence, and socialist revolution. From their vantage point, the bourgeois and relatively orderly Czechoslovak leaders in Prague didn’t look half bad. As an industrialist named von Heintschel in Heinersdorf noted, at least half of German-Bohemian industry was willing to join a Czech state with “›ags ›ying.”96 German-Bohemian Social Democrats, however, found common cause with some nationalists espousing an Anschluss. They participated in the short-lived provincial governments of German Bohemia, arguing that joining Germany and the German revolution would help build socialism in Bohemia.97 Further, socialists suggested, industrialists were at best fairweather nationalists, as an article in the Volksstimme (Warnsdorf) argued in January 1919. Those whom [German nationalists and capitalists] denounced before the war as the worst enemies of the German people . . . [they now claim] are its best friends . . . For it is imagined that German industry in Austria will collapse . . . if it has to face competition from Reich German industry . . . [Industrialists act] as if they had never spoken of the interest of the German Volk . . . but only of German Austrians of this or that region and industrialists of this or that locality.98 In short, actors who had shunned nationalist activists before 1914 adopted their rhetoric in 1918, even as nationalists’ erstwhile allies abandoned nationalist principles. But they did so situationally and opportunistically. When nationalist ideas did not help, they abandoned them for other tools. Bohemians who opposed an Anschluss recognized that frontier dynamics required an international border. Close ties to Saxony were critical to northern Bohemian industries; so, too, was access to the price and currency differences and trade protections the border afforded. If the border were dissolved, the dynamics that had transformed northern Bohemia and southern Saxony into international industrial centers in the late nineteenth century would be lost. Few Bohemians doubted that northern Bohemia’s mines and industries were essential if Czechoslovakia wanted economic independence from Austria and Germany. Yet if the borderlands became part of Germany, the Bohemians worried, they would be only a secondary industrial region.99 Frontier territories also offered international status. Robert Scheu wrote of his visit to Marianské Lazne/Marienbad, “For Austria, the [Bohemian] spa towns . . . do more to connect us to international

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life than our capital cities . . . So it is understandable that the Czechs don’t want to consider separating German Bohemia from their new state.”100 Neither did the spa towns want to be diminished in a larger German state. Finally, after the armistice, German-speaking Bohemians realized that as Czechoslovak citizens, they would be on the winning side of the war, gaining both psychological and material bene‹ts. Some Czech speakers took advantage of the new order to acquire land and choice jobs in the borderlands, and many local German speakers complained that Czech occupation troops lorded it over them.101 But some Czech speakers who supported Czechoslovakia resisted adopting too national a tone. The shopkeeper Josef Král wrote to the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior in March 1919 saying that although he had been active in his local Czech national committee before independence and supported the Czechoslovak state, he was resigning from the nationalist committee because it was pressuring him to stop educating his children in German as well as Czech. “If the Czechs embrace such national chauvinism,” he wrote, “it will hurt the Czech cause.”102 Král recognized that participation in a multinational local and European community was essential for the future of the Czech nation and Czechoslovak state. Still, some Czech nationalist activists believed that the Czechoslovak government had not gone far enough in asserting the new national order. The Czechoslovak state had failed in its national mission, they argued, by being unwilling to promote aggressive Czech colonization of the borderlands.103 The Czechoslovak government did, in fact, put securing territory and political power ahead of nationalizing the borderlands. Land reform, new requirements that civil servants pass Czech language exams, and similar measures had a national tone, in that they undermined the disproportionate presence of German speakers among large landowners and civil servants. But although German-speaking Bohemians often described such measures as all-out attacks, the Czechoslovak government’s primary focus on getting the country up and running tempered the national content of these measures. Even with heady Czech declarations of national liberation and German-Bohemian proclamations of doom in 1918–19, many northern Bohemians sought to preserve the economic relationships and territorial divisions that characterized the borderlands, rather than replace them with homogeneous national communities. Czech- and German-speaking Bohemians were acutely aware that the national political tables had turned, and they were ready to use nationalist rhetoric in shaping postwar com-

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munities. But for most Bohemians, community and state stability, not the primacy of nationality, were of ‹rst importance. As Bohemians debated whether to divide their territory along ethnonational lines in October and November 1918, Saxony, like much of the German Reich, was embroiled in revolution. Soldiers’ and workers’ councils seized control of the major cities in early November. Socialists took over the state and local governments.104 Yet in the midst of turmoil, the Saxon press and of‹cials kept a close eye on events in Bohemia, which they treated almost like domestic affairs, liable to spill across the border at any time. The press and public opinion mounted lively public discussions about the fate of German Bohemians and the new Czechoslovak nation-state.105 German nationalists’ prewar claims about the importance of cross-border German national solidarity, preservation of national territory, and the threat of “Czechization” of the Saxon borderlands came brie›y to the fore, not only in traditional nationalist circles, but among socialists, liberals, and the military.106 In October and November 1918, before the German and Saxon governments had taken of‹cial positions on the fate of German-speaking Bohemians or the creation of Czechoslovakia, various actors tried their hands at policymaking. On October 12, for example, Dr. Benndorf, a Saxon representative in Vienna, joined a tentative agreement with the Reich German ambassador in Vienna, Bavarian representatives, and General von Cramon of Austria, for Austro-Hungarian troops to prevent a Czechoslovak occupation of German-speaking Bohemia. Saxon police were then to occupy the border areas. Benndorf also fell in with GermanBohemian requests to circulate news about the Bohemian situation to Saxon newspapers.107 The Saxon press responded, declaring Czechs a threat to German Bohemia and calling for an Anschluss or other Saxon intervention. These German representatives were sympathetic to Germanspeaking Bohemians’ desire to escape Czechoslovak rule. But they also shared the view of Wedel, the German consul in Vienna, who asserted, “If the Czechs found a state that includes all of Bohemia, we shall have a very disagreeable neighbor.”108 Their show of national solidarity was reinforced by their interest in guaranteeing the strength of the German state. As Czechoslovak troops began occupying northern Bohemia in November, prewar nationalists’ assertions that Czechs wanted to seize the Saxon Oberlausitz and undermine the German national character of the Saxon as well as the Bohemian borderlands suddenly appeared reasonable. The rhetoric intensi‹ed Saxon concerns about their German-Bohemian

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neighbors and raised fears for Saxony’s safety.109 Rumors reported that a Czech invasion of Saxony was imminent, in the name of historic territorial rights and Sorb national self-determination.110 The Czech nationalist press claimed that Sorb national determination required a Czechoslovak annexation of the Oberlausitz, and Saxon and German-Bohemian nationalists demanded a German Anschluss in Bohemia. In fact, Sorb national claims posed little threat to Saxon territorial integrity.111 But public discussion demonstrates that nationalist claims, which had limited appeal before 1914, played a critical role in shaping popular political opinion in 1918–19. In 1914, few people had accepted the Saxon-Bohemian political border as a national frontier. But by 1918, both national tensions honed during the war and the prospect of a new Czechoslovak nation-state made Saxons begin to perceive the border as a boundary between Germans and Slavs, despite mixed populations on both sides.112 German military action reinforced the border’s new national implications. Fighting was of‹cially over, but demobilized soldiers streaming back from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies joined the German and Czechoslovak revolutions. The central and provincial German governments responded with new border patrols, creating the impression that war was still raging in the borderlands. In November 1918, Saxony added border police to keep unrest in Bohemia from spreading into Saxony.113 In January 1919, the German government created “border protection” units, ‹rst for the eastern Prussian borders, then for the Saxon frontier with Czechoslovakia, bolstering the notion that these areas faced national and political threats.114 Nationalist rhetoric de‹ned the public face of the border patrols. The German government explained that patrols were intended to control smuggling and to discourage an Entente invasion if peace talks stalled. But within Saxony, the new border controls were framed in nationalist terms. The Saxon Military Ministry and press, among others, argued that military protection was imperative to guard against Czech invasion.115 Volunteers for the border patrols were recruited with propaganda calling on men to defend Germany’s borders against the Slavic threat. One recruitment ›ier from January 1919 proclaimed, We still have no peace. Our enemies stand armed on all sides of Germany. Poles and Czechs threaten our young Free State of Saxony. The . . . Czechs have troops amassed on the borders of our homeland . . . Saxons! Protect your families, your parents, your hearth and home!116

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Another asserted, The Czechs have already occupied Bohemia’s German areas. The Sorb movement is raising its head within our own homeland. The Sorb National Committee has declared a free Sorb state. The Sorbs have strong ties to Prague and the Czechs . . . The new free state of Saxony alone bears the responsibility for the protection of its borders . . . [W]e do not want to yield a single foot of our Fatherland.117 Prewar warnings of Czech and Sorb threats to Saxony found new expression in these calls. Opposition to Slav encroachment was a way to unite German speakers on both sides of the border. The Saxon military announced that it would accept German-Austrian volunteers to protect Saxony from the Czechs. In February 1919, one thousand German Austrians were said to have joined the troops protecting Germany’s eastern border, with the encouragement of Dresden’s workers’ and soldiers’ councils.118 Appeals to Saxon patriotism against the frightful Czech threat may have attracted Saxon volunteers, but the fairly high pay for border patrols also had its charms.119 The Czechoslovak government was infuriated by these appeals and threats, calling the Saxon border protection campaign “in›ammatory propaganda” and demanding that it stop.120 The Czechoslovaks found allies among German and Saxon of‹cials, who took a more cautious approach, putting their state’s interests ahead of nationalist demands. Despite widespread anti-Czech rhetoric in Saxony in late 1918 and early 1919, these leaders succeeded in shaping practical cross-border relations between Saxony and Czechoslovakia in the Weimar period. Many in the German central and provincial governments, including Saxony and Bavaria, realized that Czechoslovakia, both as a neighbor and as the most prominent national state to emerge from the Habsburg Empire, would be critical to Germany’s postwar economic and political relations. As a result, while some Reich German politicians, nationalists, and military leaders advocated a German invasion of Bohemia, other Reich German politicians rushed to build relationships with the new Czechoslovak state. Friedrich von Gebsattel, the German consul in Prague, was the ‹rst foreign representative to congratulate the Czechoslovak National Committee on the new Czechoslovak state.121 Acting on his own initiative, von Gebsattel told the committee that the Berlin government recognized the new country, although Berlin itself failed to con‹rm or deny this for some time. He urged Berlin to recognize the new state with the historic bound-

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aries of the Bohemian crown, in direct contradiction to German generals and the German consul in Vienna, who were pushing for ethnonational boundaries.122 Von Gebsattel was only one of many Reich German ambassadors clamoring to negotiate with Czechoslovak leaders. Provincial governments, including Saxony, also sought continued access to Bohemia. On the same day that Benndorf was negotiating an invasion, the Saxon consul in Vienna wrote to the Saxon foreign minister, “The military men are very quick to talk of invasion. It is most desirable that it not come to that, for that would pose the double danger of undermining the peace negotiations and poisoning future relations to the neighboring Czech state.”123 The Saxon government inclined to this view and, in November 1918, sent Walter Koch, its former minister of the interior, to Prague to represent its economic and political interests. Like Gebsattel, Koch believed it was critical for Saxony as well as Berlin to embrace Czechoslovakia. Further, he complained, anti-Czech rhetoric in the Reich German press undermined his efforts and gave the Czechoslovak leaders the impression that Germany and Saxony were opponents, rather than potential allies.124 Both sides saw danger lurking across the border. Saxon of‹cials worried that Bohemian politics, especially the nationality con›ict, might spread to Saxon soil. The Saxon public interpreted Czechoslovak police harassment of Saxon industrialists as proof of anti-German sentiment.125 Similarly, Germany’s revolutionary movements in 1919 made Czechoslovakia anxious about spreading Bolshevism.126 The Saxon government tried to ease tensions with Czechoslovakia but was often frustrated. It refused to allow the German-Bohemian provincial government, which had ›ed Liberec/Reichenberg ahead of Czechoslovak occupation, to establish headquarters in Dresden and spread unrest in Bohemia. In early 1919, Walter Koch wrote to the Dresden government that popular anti-Czech sentiment in Saxony, the Zittau district’s anti-Czech declarations, and antiCzech propaganda in the Saxon press made Czechs wary of Saxony and Germany.127 In November 1919, the Czechoslovak government wrote to Saxony about rumors that demobilized German Bohemians were using the Saxon borderlands as a base for plundering Bohemian frontier communities. Saxon border districts denied the reports,128 but true or not, they re›ected the two governments’ mutual distrust. Each doubted the other’s commitment to preserving the border and its political sovereignties. By late 1919, however, relations between Germany and Czechoslovakia began to improve. In November, the two governments agreed to ex-

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change information and coordinate anti-Bolshevik security measures on the border.129 The conclusion of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain in June and September 1919 established the two countries’ borders. Historical territorial claims and pragmatic state interests preserved the ancient Saxon-Bohemian boundary. Although the Allies had formally decided the postwar borders at the Paris Peace Conference, Czechoslovak leaders used their control over territory to get the Allies to accept historical territorial arguments, even though the Allies used ethnographic criteria to set borders in Poland.130 The Czechs succeeded partly because they were better armed and organized than their German-Bohemian opponents but also because persistent nonnational loyalties among borderland residents and of‹cials in Bohemia and Saxony reinforced the claims to historical boundaries. Hence, the division between the German and Czechoslovak nation-states became both a “national” border and a political boundary that belied the national claims of its states. The peace treaties eased the need to jockey for position, allowing the two states to develop more normal peacetime relations. The choices that the Berlin, Dresden, and Prague governments made in 1918–19 set the tone for later policy. Of‹cials in Berlin and Dresden, sympathetic to some German-Bohemian national claims, kept close watch on conditions in Bohemia. But they chose not to intervene directly, putting concerns of state, political change, and economic development ahead of nationality. Similarly, the Czechoslovak central government supported land reform and other policies in frontier areas that they insisted were not nationalist. Yet German-speaking Bohemians understood them, with reason, as attacks on their national territory.131 When the two countries dealt with one another, the national question, while rarely in the forefront of of‹cial relations, was never fully absent. Both states used nationalist rhetoric honed during the war, even when they adopted pragmatic policies that weighed nonnational interests and af‹liations over national ones. The self-presentation of nation-states kept nationalist ideas alive, including the goal of territorial revision.

Chapter 5

The Ties That Bind Economic Mobility, Economic Crisis, and Geographies of Instability, 1919–29

In November 1919, the Saxon district government in Schwarzenberg noted a new ban on cross-border traf‹c: “With the many exceptional measures that the war and the dif‹cult political and economic situation have made necessary, one comes to accept things that would once have set off a storm of indignation.”1 Cross-border mobility never ›owed freely during the war, but after the armistice, it slowed to a trickle, disrupting trade, work, and schooling.2 Within weeks, states and local people sought to expand border traf‹c again. In the midst of revolution, nationalist agitation, and of‹cial enmity, of‹cials on both sides of the frontier recognized that they could not afford to sever economic ties to each other, despite being at political loggerheads. Germany and Czechoslovakia fairly quickly reopened trade in vital goods, such as coal; and popular pressure soon expanded local cross-border traf‹c further. Nevertheless, states and locals were ambivalent about the relative advantages and dangers of ›uid borderlands. Mobility returned but was more selective and more frequently contested than before the war. People and goods crossed the frontier against new obstacles and greater surveillance than in the past. The Schwarzenberg district suggested that local people were more willing to accept state regulation as long it treated some cross-border economic mobility as indispensable. Selective permeability reinforced the sense that the frontier now had real dimensions and limits. During the early 1920s, central governments, local and regional of‹cials, industrialists, and frontier residents vied with one another to de‹ne the borderlands in terms of space, economic dynamics, state control, and legal rights. Fierce contests sprang from the conviction 112

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that the war had left the frontier society perilously unstable. In the second half of the decade, nationalist activists cultivated this narrative of borderlands in crisis. Although they failed to fully convince of‹cials or the public, they fanned people’s fears of a return to the instability of 1918–19 or 1922–23. Thus, when the Depression hit in 1929, those fears and nationalists’ borderland ideas moved front and center in public debates.

Reviving Trade Although the German and Czechoslovak republics did not formally acknowledge one another until April 1920, each knew the other was critical to its postwar success. Economic ties between the two countries would be hard to replace. So while nationalists and socialist revolutionaries on each side dominated the press and airwaves with calls for mass uprisings and territorial revision and warned of new military con›ict on the frontier, Reich German and Czechoslovak of‹cials quietly sat down to negotiate trade. Initially, state negotiators focused on macroeconomic concerns, such as industrial coal supplies. But soon they responded to local people who lobbied their governments to adjust borderland economic policies to ‹t local conditions, thereby reshaping those conditions in ways that states found impossible to ignore. Czechoslovakia and Germany reached their ‹rst provisional economic agreement in December 1918, reviving limited trade between the two countries to alleviate each state’s most pressing needs. Germany agreed to ship coal, coke, quartz sand, light bulbs, and fuses to Czechoslovakia. In return, it would receive lignite, jam, wood, kaolin, and graphite. Bohemian lignite was Saxony’s primary fuel, now critically important as German domestic coal production fell with the loss of the Lorraine and Saar coal‹elds to France and as labor unrest erupted in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia.3 Czechoslovakia also needed industrial raw materials and access to Atlantic trade via the Elbe.4 The states reached some agreements but continually issued new restrictions, including Germany’s 1920 bans on imports of Czechoslovak pearl buttons and on using Czechoslovak trains to transport goods through Germany, which prompted further talks.5 Cross-border mobility remained the critical negotiating issue. “The single most important issue [in economic talks] is that Czechoslovakia and Germany guarantee free transit,” wrote the Czech-language newspaper Tribuna in December 1919.6 Both sides tried to balance political senti-

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ments, the Allies’ expectations, economic interests, the need for social stability, and their states’ long-term international prospects. They sought new control over their populations, borders, and economies but acknowledged that mobility was essential to postwar economic success. The Saxon government recognized that its status within Germany, its international reputation, and its economic and political stability all hinged on its position as an industrial state. Even in the throes of a radical socialist revolution, the Saxon government heeded industrialists, who adjured it to protect Saxony’s economic interests, especially in the industrial south.7 This obliged Saxony to actively pursue economic relations with Czechoslovakia. Walter Koch, Saxony’s envoy to Czechoslovakia in 1919, its former interior minister, and a politician with strong ties to Saxon industrialists, was instrumental to shaping this policy, ‹rst for Saxony and later for the Reich. Saxony’s long-term trade relations with Bohemia and its interests as an industrial state, Koch argued, required it to play an active role in Reich economic negotiations with the Czechoslovaks. He advised the Saxon government to win Czechoslovak economic cooperation by downplaying nationalist tensions. His approach in›uenced much of Saxon and Reich German policy vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, especially after 1921, when he was appointed the Reich’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung commended his appointment: “The proximity of his Heimat to Czechoslovakia has given him repeated opportunities to travel in the land of his future duties and to learn about its conditions.”8 His selection ensured that Saxon borderland economic interests would play a central role in German-Czechoslovak relations from the beginning. Czechoslovakia, too, knew that it needed economic ties to Germany. With independence, it had lost the huge Austro-Hungarian domestic market. The new country now needed to export 30–40 percent of its industrial production to maintain its position as an industrial economy.9 As a close neighbor, Germany became Czechoslovakia’s most important export market, accounting for nearly one-third of its international trade in the early 1920s.10 German-Czechoslovak negotiations initially approved large-scale trade of only a few commodities, leaving frontier communities cut off from the small-scale cross-border economic networks that had been their bread and butter before and even during the war. In 1919, this isolation disconnected borderland industries from already scanty supplies of raw materials and fuel,11 exacerbating unemployment and food shortages. In April, the

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Auerbach district warned, “Conditions are creating a breeding ground for the agitation and subversion of the radical parties. The Marxist-revolutionary Spartakist party in particular has gained ground.”12 Economic stability via cross-border contact was essential to social stability at home. Frontier residents found a wealth of ways to revive cross-border traf‹c—with or without help from their central governments. They circumvented restrictions, lobbied to revise them, and reinterpreted them, creatively, to ‹t local conditions. When Germany and Czechoslovakia imposed severe restrictions on cross-border traf‹c from late 1918 to early 1919, people promptly turned to smuggling. For most, that meant selling a few pounds of butter across the border or buying a new coat or pair of shoes and wearing them home across the frontier.13 But some smugglers operated on a larger scale—carrying large supplies of Saxon yarn to Bohemian weavers or trading in counterfeit currency. Reports spread that arms were being smuggled illegally from Saxony to Czechoslovakia.14 Because of the political tensions between Germany and Czechoslovakia, smugglers risked being shot by nervous soldiers patrolling the border.15 But soldiers and police could not fully control the long mountainous frontier, and postwar economic dif‹culties made many more than willing to brave an illegal crossing. In December 1918, the wartime border zone fell victim to blanket bans on cross-border contact. But by mid-1919, the bans began to ease. Czechoslovakia and then Saxony blessed the unof‹cial loosening of restrictions; returning to the idea of border zones, they began allowing frontier people to travel within ten kilometers on either side. This eased traf‹c but failed to make everyone happy. Saxons who wanted to travel to Liberec/Reichenberg, which Czechoslovak of‹cials refused to include in the border zone, managed to get there even without of‹cial sanction. Many bought two separate train tickets—one to the boundary of the ten-kilometer border zone for which they had special passes and another for the rest of the way. Others crossed the border on foot and caught a train in Czechoslovakia where they would not be asked for borderland passes.16 Czechoslovak travelers used the same strategies in Saxony, although Saxon enforcement of the border zone seems to have been less strict. Circumventing restrictions was not enough. People across frontier society, from community governments and chambers of commerce to wholesalers’ associations and tourism promoters, petitioned their governments to of‹cially revive local cross-border trade, or kleine Grenzverkehr/maly pohranicní styk. Governments, they argued, should treat the borderlands as a distinct geographic and regulatory category.17 In July 1919, the

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Czechoslovak government of‹cially sanctioned the ten-kilometer border zone for kleine Grenzverkehr. This new rule embraced and even expanded the wartime system of a border zone for local trade and mobility that excluded populations farther inland. Still, Zittau’s city government protested, it was “not in the interest of the border population or cross-border business.”18 When new restrictions were imposed in November 1919, the Zittau Chamber of Commerce complained, “The ban on trade . . . across the border has . . . limited the trade of small tradesmen and craftsmen . . . and is seen as extremely annoying by consumers.”19 The ten-kilometer zone sparked public opposition because governments had failed to recognize the borderlands’ real dynamics. In September 1919, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior reported that frontier residents had proved unwilling to accept restrictions on kleine Grenzverkehr. Communities just outside the ten-kilometer zone but with ties to the frontier objected to being excluded and petitioned for borderland status. In January 1921, the Zittau Chamber of Commerce asserted, “The border districts on both sides extend ‹fteen kilometers, whereas the kleine Grenzverkehr is allowed only within a ten-kilometer zone.”20 Ultimately, local residents set the borderlands’ outer limits, insisting that community participation in cross-border networks, not arbitrary measurements, de‹ned the territory. The Saxon Ministry of the Interior decided that district governments should decide which communities merited of‹cial borderland status, and Czechoslovakia followed suit. Both sides compiled lists of communities to be included in the kleine Grenzverkehr based on their patterns of cross-border contact. In 1921, after a new round of talks, the Prager Presse reported, “The geographic borders [of frontier traf‹c] will be measured not in kilometers but according to conditions in each community.”21 States had succeeded in making the borderlands a distinct geographic and regulatory zone, but local people de‹ned who belonged there. Frontier restrictions targeted both human traf‹c and cross-border commerce. In January 1920, the Volkszeitung reported that restrictions on kleine Grenzverkehr posed a problem to Zittau residents who depended on trade with neighboring Bohemia. Nevertheless, it cautioned, Complaints over the dif‹culties of border traf‹c with Czechoslovakia are less about the exchange of goods . . . than about human traf‹c. During the war, the trade of peddlers and craftsmen was restricted in order to protect the food supply, which was better in Saxony than in Bohemia. Lifting the export limits is inadvisable, since large quantities

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of food would be carried off . . . to Bohemia. On the other hand, the removal of restrictions on people crossing the border is desirable.22 Although governments had moved ‹rst to ease cross-border trade, they soon had to recognize that human traf‹c was essential for local economic and social stability. In 1920, Germany and Czechoslovakia ruled that farmers with ‹elds on both sides of the border could cross with their work animals, machines, and crops outside of of‹cial border crossings. Similarly, Czechoslovaks lobbied to allow doctors, midwives, and veterinarians to cross the border at all times of day and by bicycle, velocipede, or car when their services were needed on the other side.23 By 1920, border residents began arguing that state policies should recognize individual needs. Many people had family on both sides and expected to maintain those ties. One Bohemian woman could not get a visa to arrange the funeral for her mother, who had died in the Saxon city of Zittau. A Bohemian industrialist named Ferster who lived in Liberec/ Reichenberg wanted to send his daughter to school in Dresden and was surprised and angry that new visa restrictions made this dif‹cult. Ida Schindler of Ceský Jiretin/Georgendorf complained to Saxon of‹cials in 1922 about new regulations limiting border crossing to main roads. She crossed the border daily to work in a Saxon factory. If she used the of‹cial border crossing as required under the new rule, she could not get home in time to cook her family’s lunch. She asked to be allowed to cross the border closer to home as she always had.24 While it is unsurprising that border restrictions affected individual lives, it is striking that frontier residents perceived restrictions as eminently changeable in light of established practice or individual need. Bohemian borderland residents expected and demanded access to the Saxon borderlands, despite regulatory changes. Advocates of cross-border mobility often spoke of a “return” to prewar practice, but this was not what they really sought. They recognized that in the postwar economy, border restrictions sometimes cut in their favor. A reorganization of the Czechoslovak lace and curtain industries in 1919, for example, threatened to undermine Saxon producers in the Vogtland. In 1921, Saxon industrialists and of‹cials worried that Bohemian imports could not only ruin the Vogtland industries but revive the Communist unrest that swept the area after the 1920 Kapp Putsch.25 Similarly, in 1921, butchers in Plauen urged the German government to allow livestock imports from Czechoslovakia but tried to ban Saxon consumers from buying the cheaper meat that Czechoslovak butchers offered just across the

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frontier.26 In short, local people and governments wanted to use the border to their own advantage. Generally, that meant having more open trade than during the war, but some also saw advantages in targeted restrictions. Between 1919 and 1922, border restrictions eased, both because local people demanded that governments back off their most extreme policies and because local of‹cials who enforced those policies were typically more sympathetic to their neighbors than to their central governments. In the fall of 1919, the Auerbach district reported that despite new regulations, the lifting of military border control had revived a lively local cross-border trade. In December, an of‹cial in Seifhennersdorf reported that both sides had stopped requiring people to justify their need for a border pass. In 1920, the Zittau district reported that Czechoslovak border police had stopped enforcing the border curfew between 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. Street traf‹c between Saxon Seifhennersdorf and Czechoslovak Varnsdorf/Warnsdorf now ›owed unchecked, wrote one of‹cial: “I have repeatedly seen border residents openly . . . carry pork that they bought in Warnsdorf across [the frontier].”27 By May 1920, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior again ceded day-to-day decisions about who could cross the border to district governments.28 This decision bowed to the inevitable, as local of‹cials were already inclined to enforce border regulations as they saw ‹t. Of‹cials on both sides grew creative in applying border restrictions, often easing them to encourage tourism, which they hoped would prove a new economic resource. Sometimes, this meant disregarding the photographs and signatures required for tourists seeking day passes to cross the border. At other times, of‹cials who were not authorized to issue border passes did so anyway. Some German newspapers even advertised the fact that tourists could cross the border without passports or other special documents. In early 1920, Saxony’s borderland districts petitioned Dresden to create a formal tourist border pass that would boost tourism and prevent such evasions of the law.29 Sometimes, of course, border police abused their ability to set and enforce borderland practice. The Society for the Interests of Dresden Tourist Associations complained in 1920 that Czechoslovak of‹cials allowed hikers to stray unknowingly into Czechoslovak territory and then ‹ned them for trespass.30 Most border of‹cials probably eased enforcement of restrictions on their own volition or in response to neighborly persuasion. But some locals took it upon themselves to convince more conscientious of‹cials to back off. In January 1920, a miller in the Saxon Hammermühle told Czechoslovak soldiers not to bother repairing a border fence built during the war

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to discourage smugglers. The soldiers persisted in their repairs but found the fence gone when they returned later. Popular resistance to border control sometimes turned ugly. In January 1920, a group of young men threw a Czechoslovak border guard into a stream when he tried to keep them from crossing the border near Unterwiesenthal. Dominik Pribyl, a Czechoslovak policeman in Loucná/Böhmisch Wiesenthal, fell victim to a similar attack in March 1920 when he tried to stop a rum smuggler.31 Central governments protested one another’s failures to uphold border restrictions. In 1921, the Czechoslovak consul in Berlin complained that Saxon of‹cials in Zittau were issuing borderland passes to people from outside the frontier zone. The same year, the Czechoslovak consulate observed that Saxon of‹cials were issuing border passes that were not legal in Czechoslovakia and that Czechoslovak of‹cials were accepting them.32 Periodically, the governments issued and even enforced new restrictions. Still, although local people accepted much greater state control of frontier traf‹c than before the war, they had the ‹nal say about where the borderlands began and ended and how much cross-border traf‹c took place.

Currency Crisis and Unneighborly Relations Although economic conditions seemed to improve by 1921, they took a sharp turn for the worse in mid-1922, making frontier residents deeply pessimistic about the border’s impact on local communities. The economic and social dif‹culties that frontier people had faced during and after the war paled beside the economic crisis of 1922–23. Czechoslovak currency de›ation and German in›ation grew out of Czechoslovak and German central monetary policies combined with international politics that treated countries according to their status as winners or losers in World War I. The consequences for both countries were far reaching. But in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, the conjunction of an arti‹cially strong crown, a sliding mark, and newly relaxed border controls was explosive. The simultaneous currency crises ruptured cross-border economies and social networks, recasting the ways in which frontier residents used the border, regarded one another, and interacted with their states. By late 1923, frontier people on both sides were convinced that the border threatened economic and social stability, national coherence, and territorial security. They began to describe their cross-border neighbors as “foreigners,” opportunists, and hypocrites and to discuss the border areas of each state as distinct territories in

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competition rather than in bene‹cial coexistence—a view that differed sharply from attitudes of 1914 or even of 1920. In 1921, Czechoslovakia embraced a de›ationary monetary policy as part of a broader strategy for building ties to its Western European allies. The Czechoslovak crown rose steadily in value in late 1921 and early 1922.33 But by late 1922, Czechoslovak ‹nance minister Alois Rašín had raised the value of the crown too high, sparking a wave of unemployment, bankruptcies, and strikes as Czechoslovak goods became too expensive to compete in world markets.34 Czechoslovak borderland industries, which were chie›y oriented toward export markets, were hard hit by the currency de›ation in 1922–23. By June 1922, much of the Czechoslovak textile industry was operating at 15 to 20 percent capacity.35 By October, half the textile ‹rms in Varnsdorf/Warnsdorf had stopped production altogether. Similarly dramatic declines in production, employment, and wages spread through the metal, shoe, and other frontier industries. Some Czechoslovak industries, including the glass and arti‹cial ›ower industries, avoided bankruptcy by moving factories into Saxony to reduce operating costs.36 Unemployment and underemployment in northern Czechoslovakia grew quickly, leaving many frontier residents in dire economic straits. Even during the period of relative stabilization in 1920–21, Saxony’s unemployment rates had hovered at 4.79 percent, high compared to 1.3 percent in Prussia and 1 percent in Bavaria. Its borderlands had suffered from chronic food shortages and social and political unrest. In June 1922, the assassination of Reich foreign minister Walter Rathenau sparked new demonstrations and Communist violence in the Vogtland.37 By October 1923, Saxony was home to 22 percent of Germany’s unemployed.38 Food supplies were short, prices rose daily, and social and political unrest spilled into the streets. When the in›ation began, the Saxon government was hanging by a thread; by the spring of 1922, it was close to economic collapse. Dresden warned the Reich Economic Ministry of the danger, but the government ignored the warning.39 As in›ation swept across Saxony, it further radicalized Saxony’s socialist government, bolstering the power of the independent socialists and Communists. Communist “Hundreds” clashed with right-wing paramilitaries. By the summer of 1923, bands of unemployed Saxons were seizing food from farmers, whom they accused of hoarding and charging exorbitant prices.40 The German in›ation revealed economic weaknesses that had been

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building in the Saxon borderlands since before World War I. In Saxon frontier economies, the German mark’s dramatic downward slide was compounded by the arti‹cially strong Czechoslovak crown. The divergence in prices across the border was rapid and devastating. It exacerbated existing problems, further isolating industries from foreign markets and raw materials and boosting poverty and unemployment. Saxon border residents blamed their declining economic fortunes on their proximity to Czechoslovakia, while Czechoslovaks came to see their Saxon neighbors as opportunistic, hypocritical, and nationally insensitive. As the two currency crises converged in the borderlands, Czechoslovak citizens found that their strong crowns went much farther in Saxony, so they streamed across the border to shop. Throughout much of 1922–23, weekend train traf‹c over›owed with thousands of Bohemians traveling to spend their week’s pay in Saxon frontier towns and in such cities as Dresden and Chemnitz.41 In August 1922, the border district of Sayda reported that it was “›ooded with foreigners.” Bands of Bohemians, twenty or thirty at a time, strolled the streets of Saxon border villages on weekends, emptying local shops of their goods. Reporting that masses of Saxon goods, especially food, were being taken to Czechoslovakia, police called for new regulations to stem the tide. The Czechoslovak press declared that the “epidemic” of shoppers traveling to Germany was bad for Czechoslovak businesses and demanded that authorities curb it.42 This large-scale cross-border consumption ebbed and ›owed with changing currency values on either side. When price differences were not great, cross-border traf‹c slowed; when they increased, so did the traf‹c. But for much of 1922–23, goods were cheaper in Saxony than in Czechoslovakia, and Czechoslovak consumers crossed the border in droves. By May 1923, Czechoslovaks armed with crowns could buy a glass of beer in Saxony for one-‹fth what it cost in Czechoslovakia, bread for one-tenth the Czechoslovak price, and beef for half the price at home. By July 1923, the discrepancy was even greater. By November 1923, at the in›ation’s height, the mark had fallen so far as to make comparisons almost meaningless. A loaf of bread in Saxony cost ten billion marks.43 Saxony’s economy, insofar as it functioned at all, did so without currency or by adopting more stable currencies. In the borderlands, Czechoslovak crowns became the currency of choice. In 1922, a German law made it legal for border residents to pay for goods and services in crowns instead of marks.44 Throughout the in›ation, Saxon beggars streamed into the Czechoslovak borderlands asking for hard currency.45

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The currency crisis produced the largest wave of smuggling the border had ever seen. Small-scale smugglers, generally women and children, typically hid food under their clothing or bought new clothes and wore them across the border.46 Such tactics did not always work. In November 1922, when Richard Ulbricht, a Czechoslovak factory worker, tried to cross from Saxony to Czechoslovakia at Velký Šenov/Grossschönau, the customs of‹cial, named Jagdhuhn, asked if he had any thing to declare. Ulbricht replied that he was carrying only a cucumber. Jagdhuhn noticed that Ulbricht’s shoes were dusty, something he found odd, since the day was wet and there was no dust on the roads. Concluding that Ulbricht was trying to smuggle new shoes and had tried to disguise them with dust, he asked Ulbricht to take off his shoes for inspection. Ulbricht ran, and Jagdhuhn shot him. Similarly, when Saxon police suspected Anna Fixl of Vejprty/Weipert of smuggling a coat over the border, they investigated her story that it had been made by a seamstress in Vejprty/Weipert, which the seamstress denied.47 More professional smugglers used pubs, barns, and cemeteries as places to organize their goods before carrying them over the border. Czechoslovak grocers bought milk and butter directly (and illegally) from Saxon borderland farmers, contributing to shortages in Saxony. Unemployed Saxon men smuggled goods to Bohemia to sell, and of‹cials in Chemnitz complained that shopkeepers would rather sell to Czechoslovaks than to their own countrymen.48 The thousands of Czechoslovak consumers crossing the border every weekend in 1922–23 pushed up prices and reduced supplies of food and consumer goods in Saxon frontier communities already suffering from in›ation and shortages.49 The in›ux of Bohemian consumers in 1922 meant that the Saxon borderlands suffered shortages, high prices, and unrest earlier in the in›ation than the rest of Germany. Czechoslovaks’ use of the favorable exchange rate with Germany changed the way Saxon borderland residents talked about their southern neighbors. Saxons who had recently hailed their Bohemian neighbors as German brothers and essential trading partners denounced them now as smugglers and currency consumers. Moreover, they now referred to those neighbors as “foreigners,” “Czechs,” and “Czechoslovaks.” The police in Sayda re›ected Saxon frontier public opinion when they reported, “The native population is growing embittered as [Bohemians] buy out [local stores].”50 The situation sparked unrest and violence. In striking contrast to the tenor of public opinion in 1920, Saxons now demanded that the Reich and Saxon governments close the border to Czechoslovak economic invaders. Consumers pressured Saxon shopkeep-

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ers to sell only to German citizens and made sales a measure of community, state, and national loyalty. One Saxon gendarme observed, “The relationship of the border population to us has improved markedly. They now understand that we are necessary.”51 Indeed, frontier people were now treating border regulation as essential to regional stability. Saxon consumers and of‹cials called for new antismuggling measures. In August 1922, the Sayda police argued, “The foreigners will buy out the border areas entirely if these Czechs are not blocked soon.” Later that month, Saxony brie›y closed the border to kleinen Grenzverkehr, which happened repeatedly during the in›ation. Now, the Czechoslovak press reported, it was indeed getting harder to cross into Germany.52 Saxon police tried new approaches to supervising the frontier. They divided the border into strips and created new police stations to control the ›ow of Czechoslovak consumers.53 They staked out warehouses and paths that they suspected smugglers were using. Customs of‹cials, foresters, and the gendarmerie patrolled the frontier. Border police watched for odd behavior, such as vehicles or cyclists driving on the left without lights at night. At frontier train stations, Saxon customs units even hired women to search suspected female smugglers.54 Saxons portrayed such measures as imperative, but the Czech-language press argued that Saxon police were harassing Czechoslovak citizens.55 Renewed border enforcement, the military legacy of the war, and continued unrest on both sides made border police more violent and made smuggling more dangerous than in the past. Police shot at numerous smugglers and suspected smugglers. When Johanna Bruckner ›ed from Saxon police after they caught her carrying six dozen handkerchiefs over the border, they shot at her. Saxon police beat Franz Pracht bloody for smuggling margarine. On both sides, frontier residents complained when bullets from across the border hit their houses. Some police tried to enforce the law in complete disregard of their neighbor state’s territorial sovereignty. In June 1923, a policeman from Zittau crossed into Czechoslovakia with a bloodhound to investigate a suspected vegetable theft by Wenzel Müller, a Czechoslovak miner in Hrádek/Grottau.56 Czechoslovak citizens ›ooded their government with complaints that Saxon of‹cials were seizing goods, ‹ning cross-border shoppers, even threatening imprisonment.57 The Czechoslovak government responded with retaliatory border restrictions.58 The Czech-language press declared both Reich Germans and German-speaking Czechoslovaks hypocrites when they claimed that they suffered disproportionately from the crisis.

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Národní listy contended that the German-language press on both sides falsely portrayed Czechoslovak consumers in Saxony as Czechs from central Bohemia, not as the German-speaking borderland Bohemians they were. But even as the Czech press accused Reich authorities of spiteful border restrictions, German-Bohemian papers accused their own government of the same.59 By themselves, stricter border controls had little effect. The economic incentives for smuggling were too great. In 1922, the Dresden district noted that border patrols alone could not solve the problem of Czechoslovak smugglers. Frontier residents themselves had to stop shopkeepers from selling to foreign consumers.60 Many borderland residents agreed. Police reports told of Saxons, especially workers, turning to “self-help” against Czechoslovak consumers. In Bad-Elster, local Communists hindered people trying to cross the border.61 Police reported that “little dramas are often enacted” in the Saxon frontier train station of Neuhausen: “Residents, and above all workers, meet the evening trains from Olbernhau and Chemnitz and support of‹cials in their efforts. Foreigners . . . who try to avoid being controlled . . . are surrounded by locals and held fast until the of‹cials have . . . searched everyone.”62 Throughout 1922–23, the Czechoslovak and Saxon governments continually adjusted to volatile economic and political conditions, sometimes limiting and sometimes easing cross-border traf‹c. Frontier residents shaped their uses of the border—legal and illegal—accordingly. One Czechoslovak of‹cial noted, “Our border population can smell . . . sudden restrictions a mile away.”63 The Czechoslovak press reported on changes in Saxon regulation and enforcement, and Bohemian consumers adapted quickly. In 1922, when police at frontier train stations began searching passengers for smuggled goods, travelers started boarding trains on the side away from the station. When Saxon of‹cials enforced geographical limits on border passes, Bohemians used day passes to cross the border and then caught trains to cities outside the border zone, such as Freiberg, Chemnitz, and Dresden. When police introduced surprise inspections of warehouses and barns for smuggled goods, one smuggler set up children with ›ashlights to expose of‹cers as they tried to sneak up on him.64 The currency crises and the smuggling they generated led Saxon border residents to resent Czechoslovaks in general. But German-speaking Bohemians did not accept their fall in popularity in the Reich without a ‹ght. The German-Bohemian press responded to Saxons’ newfound hostility with impatience, chiding them for lacking national feeling. The

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Prague German-language paper Bohemia reported growing tensions between the Saxon and Bohemian frontier populations in 1922 and responded as follows to Saxon complaints about cross-border consumption: The Saxon population and the provincial press have long since forgotten how tactful the German border population in Czechoslovakia was with Saxon [consumers in Bohemia], both during the war and recently, although they suffered from it and the behavior of the Saxons was often provoking. Bohemia further accused the Reich German press of ignoring the plight of German speakers in Czechoslovakia. That [Saxons] fail to grasp that “German-speaking foreigners” are also affected by the pressures and conditions in the Reich is perhaps not surprising given the materialism into which the Reich has fallen and the absence of common national feeling.65 Some German nationalists in Bohemia and Germany published articles in Reich German newspapers to try to dispel in›ation-driven resentments and revive Reich German nationalist support for German-Bohemian nationalism.66 In a letter sent to Dresden newspapers, the Decín/Tetschen branch of the Union of Germans in Bohemia wrote, “It is important to us that Saxons ‹nally grasp that there are still Germans in Bohemia. We must use every opportunity to do so. Eventually, when articles keep appearing in the newspapers, it will begin to dawn [on them].”67 Even the Czech nationalist Národní listy reported that Czechoslovak shoppers in Germany had caused “all evidence of brotherly affection for [Reich Germans’] foreign compatriots to fade.”68 Yet as German Bohemians stressed that their relationship to Saxony was national rather than economic, Saxons, it seems, were unconvinced. In October 1923, popular unrest and the Saxon government’s leftward slide prompted the Reichswehr to march in and topple the Dresden government.69 The Reich occupation of Saxony again shut down border traf‹c. By 1924, after the Czechoslovak crown had stabilized, the introduction of the Goldmark in Germany ended the in›ation, cross-border prices came into alignment, and Reich troops withdrew from Saxony. Relations among border residents eased, and people once again called for more openness on the border, for fewer limits on kleinen Grenzverkehr, and for

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measures to boost tourism.70 Resentments spawned by the in›ation subsided as Saxon and Bohemian frontier residents once again traded with one another. But the in›ation did have lasting in›uence. German-speaking Bohemians still complained that Saxons were unfriendly, and Saxons emerged from the in›ation with a new understanding of the border’s role as a barrier and line of defense. The currency crisis reinforced borderland residents’ and states’ belief that Saxon and Bohemian frontier communities’ destinies were linked, but their bonds seemed more tenuous than in the past. Communities and industries across the frontier now seemed to pose potential competition and predation as well as cooperation. Frontier people and their states conceived of the borderlands as distinct geographic, political, and economic entities, but in contrast to the prewar period, they now thought frontier economic networks should be limited to speci‹c territories and participants. They began to perceive the borderlands as two interconnected territories clearly divided by a political border. They saw the borderlands de‹ned as much by instability and hardship as by privilege and opportunity.

A Geography of Instability? Czechoslovaks embraced their side of the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands as a zone of con›ict and instability long before their Reich German counterparts. Late nineteenth-century Czech and German-speaking national activists in Bohemia had already developed a rhetoric of national danger and a portfolio of political tactics for use in Bohemia’s “language borders.” The transformation of Central European political boundaries after 1918 made nationalists reevaluate and expand their visions of the geographies and importance of borderlands. In Austria, German nationalists responded to their loss of empire with a dizzying rhetorical shift, borrowing the prewar debates about language borders in order to proclaim the former Habsburg Austrian Kernländer (central territories)—now the Austrian Republic—a borderland and to proclaim its German-speaking citizens Grenzler, or borderland people. Czech and German-Bohemian nationalist activists expanded their understanding of borderlands to connect disputes over “national territory” to the Czechoslovak political territory, declaring the entire territory between the language borders and Czechoslovakia’s state boundaries a borderland.71 Like their Austrian counterparts, they be-

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gan to consider the people in these territories Grenzler and hranicari— people de‹ned by their frontier status. During the 1920s, Czech nationalist activists expanded their efforts from cities and language frontiers into these pohranici (frontier regions)— much larger territories than had ever before been subject to local clashes of proselytizing nationalists.72 The largest of these groups—the Národní jednota severoceska—won increased visibility and popular support in the 1920s, especially late in the decade. By 1928, its membership was over one hundred thousand. Far from celebrating Czechoslovakia as the culmination of their efforts, Czech nationalists chafed at their government’s refusal to nationalize German-speaking areas, warning that these areas were the state’s Achilles’ heel, a breeding ground of irredentism that threatened the Czechoslovak state and the Czech nation alike. In 1922, the Svaz Národních Jednot a Matic (Union of National and Cultural Associations) wrote to the Czechoslovak government asserting, “The Czechoslovak element in the borderlands . . . is the best guarantee of security for [Czechoslovakia’s] state boundaries.”73 In such “borderlands,” Czech nationalist organizations argued, Czech speakers suffered discrimination as a national minority within their own nation-state. To combat national isolation, regional Czech nationalist organizations established Czech schools, libraries, and cultural centers in the borderlands, thereby de‹ning what it meant to be a borderland Czech, or hranicar.74 In the early 1920s, German-Bohemian nationalists portrayed Czechoslovakia’s disparate German-speaking regions as a united “Sudetenland.” At the end of World War I, they used this idea to argue variously for an independent Sudeten German state, for Germany’s annexation of the territory, or for German-Bohemian administrative autonomy within Czechoslovakia. When these options did not materialize, mainstream GermanBohemian political parties retreated from their claims for national autonomy and in 1926 several joined the Czechoslovak government. GermanBohemian nationalists then followed their Czech counterparts’ lead and began characterizing their entire territory as endangered borderlands. Unlike Czech nationalists, however, German-Bohemian activists argued that the Sudetenland’s frontier status had to do less with its position along Czechoslovakia’s state boundaries than with debates about German national self-determination and the region’s geographic and political marginality to the Pan-German national community. Thus, in 1927, the German-Bohemian nationalist émigré Ernst Leibl

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wrote, “The borderland has become the political school of the whole German nation.” He explained, “We Sudeten Germans increasingly believe that the fate of our nation will be decided on Sudeten territory. For no German territory other than the Rheinland compares to the Sudetenland in geopolitical importance.”75 In the mid-1920s, this argument found few buyers. Most German-speaking Czechoslovaks ignored the German-Bohemian national activists, while the mainstream German political parties in Czechoslovakia marginalized them, seeking cooperation and stability instead. Yet borderland rhetoric, while intended to reinvigorate German separatist nationalism in Czechoslovakia, also aimed to win support from the German Reich by describing a crisis of national, rather than merely regional, signi‹cance. Reich German of‹cials, nationalists, and academics also began to write about embattled borderlands in the mid-1920s. Before 1914, Reich nationalist activists, including the Pan-German League, had advocated engagement with foreign German-speaking populations in southeastern Europe, Bohemia, and elsewhere. Sometimes, they had referred to German-speaking regions outside the Reich as “borderlands,” but they had neither clearly de‹ned their territorial limits nor claimed that the residents were peculiarly “borderland” people.76 Prewar calls for engaging with foreign Germans had largely fallen on deaf ears. But after World War I, Germany’s territorial losses and the exclusion of many former German territories and populations from the Reich revived the idea that Reich Germans should take an interest in foreign Germans, especially those excluded from the Reich by the Versailles Peace Settlement.77 Territories with signi‹cant German-speaking populations adjacent to the Reich were the subject of a rhetorical shift in the mid-1920s. Reich German nationalists and academics expanded their category of “foreign Germans” (Auslandsdeutsche) to include any Germans outside Germany who were not Reich citizens and “borderland and foreign Germans” (Grenzund Auslandsdeutsche). This shift suggested that neighboring populations were distinct from other foreign German speakers. Although Germanspeaking Czechoslovaks had never been Reich citizens, as Germans in Poland or Alsace-Lorraine had been, nationalists included them among borderland Germans, reasoning that they would have joined Germany after the war had not the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain prevented them. Borderland rhetoric enabled activists to advocate territorial revision as a defensive, rather than offensive, act. It was a critique of the Versailles system, a call to roll the system back.

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The Weimar government neither claimed territories outside its boundaries nor rejected nationalists’ demands that Germany engage with borderland Germans.78 It trod a ‹ne line, demonstrating that, as the German nation-state, it had a natural concern for German minorities abroad but was committed to good relations with its neighbors and opposed to German irredentism. Nongovernmental organizations did not share this last priority. Nationalist organizations, including the Association for Germans Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland) and the Union of Foreign Germans (Bund der Auslandsdeutsche), expanded their membership dramatically in the Weimar period.79 Ostforschung—the academic study of Eastern Europe, which emphasized German-speaking minorities and the “German” nature of Eastern European territories excluded from the German Reich—enjoyed a similar expansion.80 Both movements sought political and cultural relationships between Germany and German-speaking populations in neighboring states and sought to stake claims to “German” national territories.81 Nationalist activists asserted that borderland Germans were not simply German minorities abroad but, as Max Hildebert Boehm argued in 1925, “settlements on the outer edges of ethnic German territories . . . [now] betrayed, forgotten, and lost.”82 By excluding members of the German nation from the nation-state, Boehm and his compatriots argued, Reich Germans neglected their national responsibilities and risked permanent erosion of the national community. “No nation [but Germany] that has succeeded in creating a nation-state . . . has as large and as important a population of fellow nationals living outside that state,” wrote Hermann Ullmann of the German Defense Union (Deutsche Schutzbund) in 1925. “And in no nation [but Germany],” he continued, “is the importance of these fellow nationals so little recognized.”83 Ullmann argued that the creation of a kleindeutsch Reich in 1871 had crippled German national feeling. He suggested that old German values were better preserved in German borderlands than in the Reich and that if Germans wished to repair their nation, further fractured by the Versailles system, they had to turn to these borderlands to ‹nd national unity.84 Otto Boelitz of the Association for Germans Abroad expanded this theme in 1926. Admitting that Reich Germans had long neglected their fellow nationals, he wrote, “The painful experiences of the war and the Diktat of Versailles with its devastating redrawing of borders awakened the understanding . . . of our people. Those who live in our mutilated state grow daily more aware that its borders do not encompass the borders of our nation.”85

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This narrative of Reich German national complacency, ignorance, and neglect was carried over from prewar nationalists. But it was bolstered by arguments that World War I had made the situation of Germans outside the Reich more urgent than ever. “Citizenship does not replace nationality,” admonished Gottfried Fittbogen of the Association for Germans Abroad in 1929.86 Reich Germans and their government, Fittbogen argued, could not afford to con‹ne their attention to the Reich. In the 1920s, narratives of crisis-ridden borderlands enjoyed greatest currency among nationalist activists. For most of the decade, governments either marginalized them, as Czechoslovakia did, or downplayed them, as Germany did. The economic crisis of 1922–23 was an important, if ›eeting, moment when state of‹cials and local people embraced nationalist assertions of cross-border con›ict and territorial differentiation. Such narratives paved the way for broader conceptions of “frontiers in crisis,” and these conceptions became popular in Germany and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.

Chapter 6

Connecting People to Places Foreigners and Citizens in Frontier Society, 1919–32

After World War I, frontier people and governments sought new ways to de‹ne who belonged to the borderlands. At the same time, they were also determining the borderlands’ geographic and economic limits. The relationship of populations to territories played out in debates over foreign labor, citizenship, cultural practices, and political action. Foreign workers, businesspeople, and political activists still routinely crossed the frontier, but people and governments on both sides began to associate freedom of movement within the borderlands with local territorial belonging and with nationality. Wartime conscription, social welfare policies, and industrial stagnation had reduced the foreign populations in the borderlands. But after the war, some Reich Germans still lived in Czechoslovakia, and some Bohemians still lived in Saxony. These people faced new scrutiny in the 1920s. The Saxon and Czechoslovak governments accepted their wartime predecessors’ belief that it was essential to know who inhabited their territories and where those individuals’ allegiances lay. Local of‹cials embraced the idea that for communities to survive in the postwar order, their members had to be loyal in spirit, cultural practice, and economic and political behavior. The seemingly split loyalties of people who lived in one place but remained citizens in another were harder to reconcile than in the past. Resident “foreigners” offered fodder for nationalist posturing by governments, economic interest groups, and political activists. At stake was what it meant to belong in postwar societies. For states, citizenship was the ultimate measure—the legal de‹nition of political and territorial belonging. But in 131

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practice, de‹ning who belonged in borderland communities was more complicated than legal de‹nitions suggested. As the legal and territorial delineation of the borderlands became clearer, local actors fought to reshape access to the region. They insisted that their commitments to frontier and national communities were as important to their daily lives as were citizenship and state loyalty. By mid-decade the need to distinguish strictly between Reich Germans and Czechoslovaks, Czechs and Germans, dissipated somewhat. German, Czechoslovak, and borderland societies stabilized. On both sides of the border, people still struggled to adapt to changing markets, but after years of economic crisis, they now found modest gains. Political life was also less strained than in the early 1920s. German-Bohemian “activist” political parties loyal to Czechoslovakia joined the Czechoslovak parliament in 1926 and the governing coalition in 1929, signaling the end of serious national divisions in government. In 1930, 75 percent of German-speaking Bohemians voted for loyal “activist” parties, demonstrating widespread acceptance of the Czechoslovak state.1 In Germany and Saxony, political power was distributed more evenly than in the ‹rst postwar years, when it had swung dramatically between right and left. The most extreme voices— Communists, German-Bohemian nationalists, and National Socialists— remained marginal, although they had a stronger presence in the borderlands than in either Germany or Czechoslovakia as a whole. Debates about the de‹nition, delineation, and implications of the borderlands quieted as well. Germany and Czechoslovakia regulated cross-border traf‹c more than before World War I and de‹ned territories, populations, and state af‹liations more strictly. Yet mobility continued, and borderland economies and populations remained highly interconnected. Nationalists lost leverage over of‹cial population policies but still lobbied their governments and the German and Czechoslovak publics to divide populations and territories along national lines.

Foreign Labor Immediately after the war, state and local communities had to decide what to do with the foreign workers still among them, with men returning from military service, and with newcomers who had suffered economic displacement at home. In Germany, regulation of foreigners was now under the jurisdiction of the German Foreign Ministry. But Saxony, like other states,

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had to interpret and implement new Reich measures,2 This meant that local concerns often shaped the application of new laws. Similarly, Czechoslovak frontier of‹cials applied state policy according to local conditions and their own political convictions. Moreover, Saxon and northern Bohemian of‹cials continued to negotiate practical borderland policy with each other.3 As was true before the war, struggles over foreign labor were more pronounced in Saxony than in Bohemia. Foreign workers became the targets of postwar political rhetoric, as the German and Czechoslovak governments tried to win recognition for their sovereignty and as governments and citizens tried to stem the economic crisis that destabilized frontier communities. Foreigners, frontier residents asserted, took jobs desperately needed by citizens. Under the Weimar Republic, Germany’s foreign labor force changed markedly. By 1924, returning soldiers had pushed women, youths, and foreign workers out of their jobs. Unemployment, in›ation, and increasingly restrictive regulation diminished the number of foreign workers in Germany to less than a third of their pre–World War I numbers, leading scholars to dismiss foreign labor as relatively unimportant in interwar Germany.4 Czechoslovak statistics from the in›ation period con‹rm that the number of emigrants to Germany dropped sharply between 1922 and 1923.5 Yet the Saxon case clearly shows that foreigners remained important, economically and rhetorically. As Ulrich Herbert has argued, the “foreigner” category found political resonance in Weimar Germany, despite smaller numbers of foreigners.6 Loopholes in the new foreign labor policy allowed some foreign workers to stay in Germany, and illegal labor migration continued.7 Even during the in›ation, when thousands of unemployed people demonstrated in the streets, Saxon industrialists insisted that they needed Bohemian labor to survive. As late as 1931, Czechoslovak citizens still composed 20 percent of the populations of the Saxon border towns of Jöhstadt and Oberwiesenthal. In Johanngeorgenstadt, 20 percent of schoolchildren came from Bohemian families, and a quarter of all marriages included a bride or groom who had been born in Bohemia.8 In 1920, the Reich German government moved to limit the number of foreign workers in its territory. Before World War I, Bohemian workers largely avoided regulation in Saxony. But after the war, Bohemians became the primary target of new foreign labor regulation. Not only were they Saxony’s largest group of foreign workers, but they were citizens of a potentially unfriendly neighbor state. They were people whom nationalists,

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Social Democrats, and Liberal reformers had identi‹ed as a threat after 1903. Where Bohemian workers had once seemed harmless, domestic economic and social turmoil in Saxony now made them troublesome. In 1920, Dr. Friedrich Syrup of the Reich Of‹ce for Work Distribution (Reichsamt für Arbeitsvermittlung) suggested a twofold solution to the foreign labor issue: Germany could invoke state sovereignty and limit the entry of foreigners into the country; in addition, it could pressure employers to voluntarily free up jobs for German citizens.9 Across the Saxon political spectrum, people demanded curbs on foreign labor. While nationalists had long been critical of Germany’s foreign labor policies, the Social Democrats now set the tone for interwar foreign labor policy. Arguing that foreign workers undercut Reich German wages, they abandoned any pretense of internationalism and demanded that foreign labor be permitted only when domestic labor was unavailable.10 In 1922, the Czech newspaper Cas lamented that Saxon attacks on foreign labor had “ruined the international (socialist) movement in (Saxon) Königstein.”11 But although the Reich government imposed ever greater limits on foreign labor throughout the Weimar years, real changes in numbers of Bohemians in Saxon border towns were mediated by such factors as local of‹cials’ interpretations of central policy, demands of local populations and businesses, and international diplomacy, which endowed every local con›ict with potential international rami‹cations. “Of‹cials are keeping a close watch on the employment of Czechoslovak citizens in Saxony,” the Chemnitz Social Democratic paper, Volksstimme, reported in 1920. Legally, the paper pointed out, workers who were employed in Saxony since August 1914 or who had established residence by March 1919 had the right to stay in Saxony. “Therefore in many cases,” argued Volksstimme, “it is not possible to dismiss Czechoslovak workers without their employers’ permission.” Still, the paper expressed the hope that more restrictive measures would follow.12 This hope was only partially realized. Even as Saxony tried to limit foreign labor, it bowed to pressures from Czechoslovakia, Saxon business leaders, and long-standing Bohemian residents of Saxon communities. People who could not document long-term residence or employment or who were deemed “bothersome” (lästig) by local authorities risked deportation.13 In the early 1920s, many people were deported or threatened with deportation because they were foreigners, had lost their jobs, or were seen as contributing to local unemployment and housing shortages. The Czech newspaper Ceské slovo reported in 1921, “Rising numbers of our

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countrymen who have lived in Germany for years [are] being deported for no reason.”14 In 1921, Germany took new steps to document which foreign workers could stay in the country and which should be deported. Saxon regional and local governments followed the central government’s lead in restricting foreigners’ access to residence and employment. By March 1921, all foreigners in Saxony were required to have legitimation cards in order to work. In theory, this meant that, for the ‹rst time in Germany, foreigners in all occupations and of all national origins faced the same restrictions. These new measures affected cross-border mobility as well as employment. In 1921, the Annaberg district warned border police to consider state security and availability of food and housing when they issued entry papers to foreigners. While this strategy seems to have done little to alleviate shortages in the early 1920s—the scale was too great—district governments continued to treat foreign labor restrictions as a solution to local problems.15 The new restrictions met with wails of distress, most notably from Czechoslovak workers and Saxon employers. In 1921, the Bohemian embroiderers Roman Lill and Joseph Meinelt appealed to the Czechoslovak consulate in Berlin after they had been ‹red from a factory in Saxon Eibenstock on the grounds that Germany had enough embroiderers. As Lill and Meinelt explained, they were the only two Czechoslovaks in their workplace, and their dismissal could have little impact on the German labor market. They argued further, “We border residents are dependent on Germany because there is no opportunity for employment in our [home] area [in Czechoslovakia]. It would be a catastrophe for us if we could not stay here.”16 Saxon employers, too, argued that state of‹cials should make exceptions to foreign labor rules for border areas. In 1921, the brickworks of Leistner and Georgi in Zschorlau applied for permission to hire foreigners, complaining that they could not ‹nd enough native labor.17 In 1923, printer Emil Lange in Bärenstein protested Saxon government efforts to make him dismiss his Bohemian apprentice, Johann Kreuzig. He said that Bärenstein’s position right on the border made it hard for him to ‹nd skilled labor. Repeated newspaper advertisements had failed to win him a single job applicant. Arguing that “there have always been” Bohemian workers in Saxony and Saxons in Bohemia, Lange asserted that Kreuzig was not depriving any German of work but, instead, made it possible for Lange to run his business.18 Lange was no exception. Many employers who were close to the border or had an established relationship with speci‹c skilled

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workers continued to use the same labor sources they had before the war. Saxony’s frontier districts reported in 1922 that many employers simply preferred Czechoslovak workers to native Germans. Furthermore, while increasing numbers of foreign workers registered with the Of‹ce of Work Distribution (Landesamt für Arbeitsvermittlung), the Saxon branch of the organization had to admit in 1922 that many foreign workers in Saxony, especially those in domestic service, were still unregistered.19 Czechoslovak of‹cials, too, worried about workers arriving in Saxony illegally. In 1921, the Czechoslovak consulate in Chemnitz appealed to its Berlin counterpart, writing, “It often happens that Czechoslovak workers cross the border without passports, supply only residence cards, and demand that this consulate issue them additional papers.”20 Was the consulate to bow to this impertinent, illegal behavior? With so many intersecting jurisdictions, establishing who was responsible for enforcing border and labor regulations was often dif‹cult. The German Reich’s position was that employers needed permission to hire foreigners, despite their claims of labor shortages,21 but Saxon of‹cials frequently bowed to employers’ demands. In 1922, for example, after refusing repeatedly, the Schwarzenberg district capitulated and granted permits to the Bohemian employees in the Leistner and Georgi brickworks.22 In 1923, the brickworks again faced problems. Czechoslovak master brick maker Josef Rasl found himself defending his right to employment in Saxony. As his employers pointed out to district of‹cials, Rasl had worked in Saxony since 1907, had served in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1916 to 1918, and had been back since 1919. They argued that he was an integral member of the local community and, despite his Czechoslovak citizenship, was not a “foreign worker” at all.23 Although it is unclear how Rasl’s case concluded, pressure to allow foreign labor on the basis of local need and community belonging often worked. Leistner and Georgi continued to employ Bohemian workers. Still, the brickworks, their employees, and others like them faced periodic state and public scrutiny throughout the Weimar period. These cases demonstrate that despite Germany’s introduction in 1920 and 1921 of apparent blanket restrictions on foreign labor, employers, workers, and bureaucrats assumed that Bohemians’ claims to work in Saxony would be treated differently, depending on their length of residence, skills, and local ties. Nationality was also critical. Exceptions seem to have been made primarily within recognized frontier territories, reinforcing states’ and local peoples’ understanding of the borderlands as a distinct so-

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cial and economic geography. These factors were important to the application, if not the letter, of the law. Foreign workers whose position in Saxony was rooted in prewar cross-border traditions expected and were often allowed to continue these older models, even when newer immigrants were not. Employers expected the state to make exceptions based on their particular needs and circumstances, and their expectations were often rewarded. The German in›ation of 1922–23, intensi‹ed on the frontier by Czechoslovakia’s currency crisis, lent new urgency to Saxon efforts to curb foreign labor. During the in›ation, Saxony began linking foreign labor policy directly to unemployment rates, determining how many foreigners to grant work permits (and encouraging deportations) based in part on the number of unemployed the state was supporting.24 Czechoslovakia responded to Germany’s limits on Czechoslovak workers and to its own economic crisis by documenting the numbers of Reich Germans working in northern Bohemia.25 In 1922, the Czechoslovak government asked the German government for detailed information on Czechoslovak citizens deported from Germany.26 Czechoslovak consulates in Germany contested deportations. In 1923, at the height of the German in›ation, the Saxon Foreign Ministry announced even stricter control of immigration and stepped up deportations, even of people who had lived in Saxony for years.27 Deportations and German layoffs of Czechoslovaks who lived in Bohemia and worked in Saxony created domestic strife in Czechoslovak border communities. The Šluknov/Schluckenau district reported unrest among Czechoslovak workers ‹red from Saxon industries, “especially in Georgswalde and Filippendorf, where most people have worked in the nearby Saxon textile mills in Ebersbach and Neugersdorf for the past ‹fty years.”28 Czechoslovakia responded to German attacks on its workers abroad by expelling Reich Germans from its industries and territory. The Czechoslovak press reported lively stories of “mass” deportations on each side.29 By April 1923, the deportations had created so much diplomatic tension that Saxony was forced to agree to deport only Czechoslovaks who threatened Saxon security and not to use deportations to solve housing shortages or unemployment. In 1922 and 1923, both governments agreed to reverse deportation decisions made on such grounds.30 In 1924, Saxony backed off charging high visa fees as well.31 The introduction of a new German currency in November 1923 eased the situation, but rumors that factories on one side were ‹ring foreign workers in retaliation for layoffs on the other

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side continued to circulate on both sides. By January 1924, the Šluknov/ Schluckenau district reported, “Now that the German currency has stabilized . . . , many Bohemians have again found work [in Saxon border industries].”32 Nevertheless, the in›ation period left its mark. Bohemian workers returned to Saxony, but Saxons were more willing to accept strict regulation of foreign labor than in the past. The currency crisis of 1922–23 undermined the concept of a crossborder German national community in debates about consumption and trade. But the ideas of German national unity and of the German state’s special relationship with German speakers outside the Reich proved critical to borderland population policies both before and after the crisis. Ideas championed by the nationalist fringe before World War I now became central elements in public debate and government policy. For the ‹rst time, Saxons accepted the idea that ethnic Germans of whatever citizenship were never as “foreign” as other migrants. Weimar foreign labor policy favored ethnic Germans and long-term residents over other foreigners. By 1933, 80 percent of foreigners in the Reich claimed German as their mother tongue.33 German authorities agreed that Czechoslovak foreign workers in the 1920s were primarily German-speaking Bohemians, rather than “actual Czechs.” They estimated that these workers were about 90 percent German speaking or bilingual.34 In Saxony, where geographic proximity to Czechoslovakia reinforced nationalists’ warnings of Czech expansion into German national territories, Czechoslovak citizens were far more likely to be German speaking than elsewhere in Germany.35 This was probably a result both of borderland migration patterns and of incentives for Czechoslovak citizens to acculturate to their German-speaking context. But by the late 1920s, the Reich labor administration also tried to place German-speaking foreign workers in “nationally endangered areas,” such as the borderlands, while sending nonGermans elsewhere.36 From the moment Germany began limiting foreign labor in the 1920s, voices in Saxony criticized the government for treating German-speaking Bohemians as foreigners, rather than as members of a greater German nation with claims on the German state. In 1921, for example, the Dresdner Volkszeitung declared that requiring Saxony’s German-speaking Bohemian residents to obtain work permits along with non-German foreigners was at odds with (nongovernmental) efforts to support Saxons’ “German-speaking brothers on the other side of the green and white border posts.” It noted that many foreign workers in Saxony had been born and

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raised there. Some had even served in the German army. These people, the paper asserted, were often “German thinking” and did not consider themselves foreigners at all. The only reason they were not yet citizens, it argued, was that the monarchy had privileged the propertied over working people.37 In 1921, the Dresden branch of the Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary lobbied the Dresden government to exempt its over sixteen thousand members from restrictions on work permits and citizenship applications.38 In 1920, the Chemnitz Social Democratic paper Volksstimme had written, “It isn’t hard to understand why resentment against Czech migrants is rampant even in proletarian circles . . . Czech oa‹shness and falseness only spur these resentments on. Furthermore, non-German labor migrants from our neighbor state have almost always depressed wages.”39 Similarly, in 1924, the paper accused Saxon agriculturists who still employed foreign Poles of not being “deutsch national.”40 Clearly, German speakers, whatever their citizenship, were less foreign than other immigrants. Nationalist demands that ethnic Germans be treated as a distinct category created dif‹culties for the Reich and Saxon governments. In April 1921, the Sächsische Staatszeitung defended the government’s extension of the legitimation requirement to all foreigners, saying that the Treaty of Versailles forbade the exceptions requested for German-speaking Bohemians.41 In fact, though, both Saxony and the Reich treated German speakers differently from other foreigners. From the beginning, new Reich legislation proposed exemptions for people who had lived and worked in Germany for years, who had served in the German army, who had family or a spouse in Germany, or who were highly skilled.42 People quali‹ed for these exemptions received Befreiungsscheine freeing them from legitimation requirements and allowing them to take jobs not designated for foreign labor. Of‹cially, these criteria were not “national.” But in fact, they privileged German-speaking foreigners over others. Of‹cials who issued Befreiungsscheine treated the criteria as measures of an applicant’s “Germanness.” In Saxony, workers who demonstrated suf‹cient Germanness were more likely to receive Befreiungsscheine than others.43 Frontier of‹cials considered Germanness a quality not just of descent but of education, language use, mentality (Gesinnung), and commitment to “German” communities and territories. Thus nonlegal criteria became central to decisions about who was exempted from foreign labor regulations. In 1922, Saxony also decreed that ethnic German foreigners who lived abroad and worked in the Saxon borderlands could continue to do so with

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a simple borderland pass, rather than of‹cial legitimation papers.44 The decree acknowledged the way foreign labor functioned in the kleine Grenzverkehr. It also re›ected new of‹cial acceptance of nationalist arguments that “German” foreigners were less dangerous than others. In making the practice of‹cial, the Saxon government hoped to limit this permissive approach to foreign labor to border districts.45 By 1925, exemptions were extended to women who had lost their German citizenship through marriage and to workers who could prove that they had lived and worked in Germany before the war.46 These exemptions reinforced the message that membership in local border communities could still overshadow the territorial and political af‹liations implied by citizenship. German speakers did not entirely escape restriction, of course. Enforcement of the new laws was left to local of‹cials, who interpreted and applied them unevenly. Like work permits, Befreiungsscheine had to be renewed annually and could be refused. Here, German-Bohemian nationalists stepped into the breach and became key mediators in Saxon foreign labor policy in the 1920s, ensuring that many German-speaking Bohemian workers continued to live and work in Saxon frontier communities as they had before the war. The Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary, a nationalist organization that championed the interests of Reich residents who were German-speaking citizens of the Habsburg successor states, asked the German and Saxon governments to apply different rules to ethnic Germans than to other foreign citizens. The Union and its allies borrowed prewar German nationalist rhetoric, insisting that nationality tied German-speaking Bohemians to the German Reich and the Saxon borderlands. Acknowledging the “dif‹culties” of clearly identifying the nationalities of citizens of the former multinational state, the Union took on the task of checking the German credentials of Bohemians in Saxony and advising the government which foreigners should be exempt from regulation. It issued people who passed this test a Volkstammkarte certifying their Germanness, and the Saxon government accepted this document as grounds to waive labor restrictions.47 Remarkably, this nongovernmental organization of “foreigners” and naturalized citizens became responsible for telling Saxon of‹cials who was “foreign” and who was “German.” Although German-Bohemian nationalist activists intervened most in Saxon foreign labor policy during the early 1920s, they argued that German-speaking Bohemians were not truly foreign throughout the Weimar era. In April 1930, the Dresdner Neuste Nachrichten reported a lecture the Sudetendeutsche Heimatbund hosted about Saxon policy toward German-

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speaking Czechoslovak citizens. The speaker asserted, “[That] Sudeten Germans fall under laws regulating foreigners is a serious problem. The law . . . does not distinguish between those who are of German lineage, and those who are not.” Reich German and German-Bohemian nationalists had argued for decades that this distinction was essential, but although their view gained wider acceptance in the 1920s, economic and political circumstances, such as the in›ation and now the Great Depression, often offset its in›uence. The speaker acknowledged, “Given the current unemployment, it is understandable that measures protecting the labor market are strictly enforced. [But] that also hits Sudeten Germans, some of whom have lived and worked in the Reich for years . . . They have fallen between two stools, people without a Heimat, without work, and suffering great misery.” Legally, the speaker argued, Sudeten Germans had been Reich citizens from December 1918 until the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain in September 1919. “People in the Reich forget this,” the speaker said, “and recklessly try to push them out of the labor market.”48 After the in›ation, Saxon of‹cials proved more resistant to exempting German-speaking Bohemians from restrictions. In 1925, Saxon of‹cials worried that giving them access to work in Germany would be disastrous for borderland economies.49 Of‹cials in Dresden took a page from the nationalists’ own book, using prewar nationalist arguments to justify excluding German-speaking Bohemians: they said that Germany had an obligation to preserve the “German” nature of territories abroad. Denying German-speaking Bohemians access to Saxony would prevent the erosion of German-speaking populations in Czechoslovakia and thereby serve the grossdeutsch nation. Thus, in 1931, when the Reich Ministry of the Interior suggested that in-migration of German-speaking Bohemians should not be hindered, Saxon of‹cials were appalled. As the Czechoslovak economy slid into depression, they observed, Bohemians were again looking to Saxony for work. Lifting migration restrictions would ›ood the borderlands with foreign labor, causing economic disaster on Saxony’s frontier.50 Bohemian labor in Saxony worried Czechoslovaks as well. The Czechoslovak government took a far more active role in its citizens’ lives abroad than its Habsburg predecessors had done. Throughout the 1920s, Czechoslovak consulates in Germany tracked unemployment rates and intervened to prevent mass layoffs and deportations of Czechoslovak workers.51 The Czech-language press also followed the German labor market and the fate of its Czechoslovak workers. In 1927, Ceskoslovenský denik reported that Czechoslovaks in Germany were suffering widespread unem-

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ployment and prejudice: “I have in mind Saxony, the land closest to us, in particular. Our people have settled there in large numbers, most as bricklayers or textile workers.”52 Saxony’s proximity to Czechoslovakia and poisonous German-Bohemian nationalist rhetoric, the paper argued, had caused violent anti-Czechoslovak sentiment. The press in the Saxon cities of Plauen, Zwickau, and Chemnitz bombard [readers] almost daily with articles railing against our state and against Czechs . . . In 1925 Chemnitz hosted a lecture series against our republic. One of their speakers was the director of the textile school in Chemnitz, the former director of the hosiery school in [Czechoslovak] Strakonic! By 1928, Czech-language newspapers from the Social Democratic Pravo lidu to the nationalist Národní listy were warning readers of Germany’s high unemployment rates and restrictions on foreign workers, urging them not to seek work there.53 Unemployment was not the only danger: an alarming number of Czechs in the Reich were succumbing to “Germanization” efforts and assimilating to German culture.54 Czechoslovak of‹cials and the Czech-language press recognized that their citizens’ experiences abroad shaped Czechoslovak domestic and international relationships. They also knew that signi‹cant numbers of Czechoslovaks, combined with German-Bohemian nationalist politics, made the Saxon borderlands a hot spot for Reich German-Czechoslovak con›ict over labor migration. In the 1920s, as before 1914, Czechoslovaks who lived and worked in Saxony were far more numerous than Saxons in Czechoslovakia, although some Reich German workers did live in Czechoslovak frontier communities. Many Czechoslovak frontier industries employed Reich German managers or were owned by German citizens. After 1924, these people, now considered foreigners, faced new restrictions. A new law required foreign workers in Czechoslovakia to have work permits, and rising numbers of German citizens were refused work permits or dismissed from their jobs. In 1926, Czechoslovakia refused to renew work permits for Reich German workers at the F. A. Lange copper works in Zelený Dul/Böhmisch Grünthal. German of‹cials suggested that the crackdown on foreign labor was part of a Czechoslovak campaign to pressure such ‹rms to close their Saxon factories and relocate to Czechoslovakia. Germany responded to restrictions on Reich citizens in Czechoslovakia by refusing visas to Czechoslovaks.55

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Although German of‹cials suspected that dismissals of Reich Germans from Czechoslovak borderland factories in the mid-1920s were simple retaliation for German dismissals of Czechoslovak workers,56 Czechoslovak policies differed signi‹cantly from German ones. Visa restrictions, deportations, and press attacks were aimed primarily at bureaucrats and factory managers, a group not affected by German foreign labor laws, rather than at working-class foreigners.57 These measures were an extension of the Czechoslovak government’s campaign to consolidate state control of frontier territories, economies, and populations and to reduce the Reich’s in›uence in Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia identi‹ed several companies owned by Reich Germans as major sources of Pan-German, antistate political in›uence.58 In 1923, for example, the Czechoslovak government deported Reich German engineers from the wool spinning plant in Nejdek/Neudek. But this tactic changed with time. In 1928, economic conditions in northern Bohemia grew sharply worse, and strikes erupted in the Most/Brüx coal mining district.59 Czechoslovakia, like Germany, passed a law to protect domestic labor by restricting foreign workers. The terms of the 1928 law were like those of German foreign labor laws. Employers needed permission to hire foreigners, and foreign workers had to have work permits. Foreigners who had been in Czechoslovakia before May 1923 were exempt from the new restrictions.60 Ultimately, German and Czechoslovak foreign labor laws had similar goals in frontier areas. Each state wanted to ensure social and economic stability and reinforce state power. Each state also wanted an indisputable claim to the territory on its frontier. In the 1920s, state power was often framed in nationalist terms. Prewar Reich German and German-Bohemian nationalists’ assertions that the borderlands on both sides were distinctly “German” territory, and Czech nationalists’ struggle to establish national claims to all the historic crown lands of Bohemia, assumed new meaning in an era of nationalized state boundaries and international insistence on minority rights.61 Demographics, rather than state administrative power, became, at least rhetorically, the de‹ning issue in delineating political sovereignty. Consequently, states made new efforts to document and control who was in each territory. Populations not only determined of‹cial linguistic and national geographies but also shaped the ›ow of capital, the spread of political ideas, and the functioning of the state. Germany and Czechoslovakia faced different challenges in their efforts to protect their frontier territories from unrest, irredentism, or foreign intervention. But both found it essential, as their predecessors had during

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World War I, to de‹ne who was in their territories, who belonged and who was foreign, who was loyal and who posed a threat. Foreign labor policy was critical to documenting and regulating some of the most volatile elements of borderland populations. But citizenship, too, became an essential tool.

Citizenship In the 1920s, establishing citizenship became a daily routine on the frontier. Passport requirements introduced during World War I continued to regulate cross-border traf‹c. Indeed, in 1928, Národní listy deplored the fact that Czechoslovak workers were still going to Germany with “only a passport” and no prearranged work.62 Their complaints showed how much had changed; before 1914, few workers would have had passports at all. Now, as during the war, exceptions were made in the immediate borderlands for local people with “borderland passes.” During the war, however, states had sought to move their own people into their home territories. In the 1920s, many borderland residents decided to change their citizenship to match where they lived. As citizens, they could avoid mounting legal restrictions on foreigners, gain unemployment support and social welfare, secure their property, and avoid demands for military service from their original states. Temporary labor migrants, a few of whom remained, did not ‹nd these reasons compelling, nor were they likely to be granted citizenship by either Saxony or Czechoslovakia. But for long-term expatriates, naturalization became very attractive. In the early 1920s, in fact, rumors circulated in Saxony that foreigners who did not apply for citizenship would be deported.63 The postwar peace treaties had muddied the waters about who had a right to citizenship in the Habsburg and German successor states. Like its Habsburg predecessors, Czechoslovakia based citizenship on residence rights (domovské právo or Heimatrecht). Czechoslovakia’s ‹rst citizenship law, introduced in 1920, theoretically granted citizenship to everyone who had held residence rights in January 1910 in territory now belonging to Czechoslovakia.64 But the peace treaties also emphasized national self-determination, introducing nationality as another potential basis for citizenship in postwar nation-states. The treaties allowed former citizens of Austria-Hungary who belonged to a national minority to become citizens of a neighbor state whose population comprised their fellow nationals (i.e., ethnic Germans could claim Reich German citizenship; ethnic Magyars, Hun-

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garian citizenship). Intended to allow people to choose the states they belonged to, these treaties instead created new tensions between territorial and national belonging in postwar nation-states. The majority of Bohemians on either side of the border became Czechoslovak citizens after World War I. Most had clear residence rights and considered Bohemia home, whether or not they were enthusiastic about Czechoslovakia. Sometimes, minority residents of Czechoslovakia learned that, far from granting their children automatic citizenship by birth, the law could require them to prove that their children did not possess German, Polish, Austrian, or Hungarian citizenship. Because these countries used the principle of citizenship by descent,65 a child of Czechoslovak residents could theoretically be a citizen of, say, Germany or Hungary. For frontier people with family connections to the Reich, citizenship could be complicated. Nationality, neighboring state policies, and Czechoslovak law all shaped citizenship for Czechoslovak frontier populations. Some Reich Germans also applied for Czechoslovak citizenship. The postwar peace treaties had exchanged a few small parcels of territory along the German-Czechoslovak border, though not with Saxony, and some German citizens found themselves living in Czechoslovakia. In the ‹rst draft of the 1920 Czechoslovak law, anyone who in 1910 had lived in territory now in Czechoslovakia was eligible for Czechoslovak citizenship. This draft would have included Reich German citizens throughout Czechoslovakia. But Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk objected, arguing that the peace treaties required the extension of citizenship only to Reich Germans in the newly incorporated territories. He asserted that Reich Germans, even if longtime residents of Czechoslovakia, had no “natural af‹nity” for the Czechoslovak state and should be excluded from citizenship whenever possible.66 Masaryk and, in practical application, much of the Czechoslovak citizenship law that followed assumed that ethnic Germans took an ambivalent—if not outright hostile—view of the new state. The ‹nal version of the law extended citizenship rights only to Reich Germans in the annexed border regions.67 Thus, in practice, nationalist politics shaped citizenship in Czechoslovakia. Czech speakers received automatic access; German-speaking Bohemians could have their right to automatic citizenship questioned; and long-term German-speaking residents who had not been Austrian citizens before the war were discouraged from naturalizing. Further, throughout the interwar period, Czechoslovak legal practice de‹ned “Czechoslovak people” as Czech or Slovak speakers. German speakers’ access to full citizenship was thus somewhat restricted.68

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Nevertheless, some Reich Germans applied for Czechoslovak citizenship in the 1920s. Certain businesspeople with interests in Czechoslovakia recognized an economic advantage to being naturalized there, given the state’s ties to the victorious allied powers, freedom from reparations, and absence of leftist revolution.69 Citizenship also protected people from having property seized by the state and guaranteed the right to redeem Austrian war bonds. Reich Germans with substantial investments in Bohemia therefore had powerful material interests in becoming Czechoslovak citizens, whereas the Czechoslovak state had equally strong interests in preventing their naturalization.70 As was true for foreign labor migration, many Reich Germans applying for Czechoslovak citizenship were of the propertied industrial middle class. Although these naturalizations were not numerous, they demonstrate that as borderland residents were asked to de‹ne their political and territorial allegiances, at least some found their af‹liation with territory and economic interest more compelling than national belonging. The creation of Czechoslovakia sparked a wave of applications for German citizenship from Bohemians living in the Saxon borderlands. The city of Bautzen reported to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior, Before the war, a relatively large number of Austrian citizens settled in Bautzen because of its close proximity to the Bohemian border. With the emergence of Czechoslovakia, most of these people became Czechoslovak citizens. They are trying to become Saxon citizens as quickly as possible, especially since many of them do not speak a word of Czech. But there are even pure ethnic Czechs among the applicants.71 Before World War I, Saxon of‹cials had been slow to grant citizenship on a large scale. Between 1907 and 1909, they approved only 43 percent of all naturalization applications.72 It is hard to know exactly how many Bohemians applied for and were granted Saxon citizenship in the early interwar period, but enough data exist to demonstrate that the numbers rose signi‹cantly in the early 1920s, especially in the borderlands. In 1920, over 80 percent of German speakers’ applications were approved.73 Czechoslovak citizens who applied for Saxon citizenship were overwhelmingly German-speaking Bohemians with strong ties to Saxony. Many had been born and raised there, had Saxon wives, or had lived there for years.74 In the Schwarzenberg district, most naturalization applicants in

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the 1920s had been born in the Saxon borderlands, often in the town where they lived at the time of application, and most of the rest had been born in the adjacent area of Bohemia. Johanngeorgenstadt reported that among foreigners naturalized between 1920 and 1932, 443 were born in the Saxon border region, 196 in the Bohemian borderlands, and only 5 came from elsewhere. As table 2 shows, 66 percent of those naturalizations took place between 1920 and 1923.75 The 1913 Reich citizenship law established the principle of German citizenship by descent and lifted residence requirements. The law de‹ned “Germanness” strictly in terms of af‹liation with the German state, rather than with racial or ethnic community. Thus it guaranteed citizenship to descendants of Reich citizens, whether they were Polish, Jewish, or “German.” Of‹cially, it excluded German speakers from Austria-Hungary and elsewhere.76 But in the 1920s, local of‹cials who evaluated naturalization applications interpreted and sometimes embellished the law. Not only did Saxon of‹cials determine whether an applicant was descended from Reich citizens; they also considered residence, marriage, birthplace, and economic independence—criteria at the heart of nineteenth-century citizenship laws, which also gauged people’s ties to territory and community. They increasingly considered Germanness as something demonstrated by social and cultural characteristics, language use, and community relationships, rather than by legal status. The 1913 law allowed some of these criteria; others, supposedly abolished by the new law, still in›uenced decisions.77

TABLE 2. Naturalizations in Johanngeorgenstadt 1920–32 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932

9 252 163 42 57 28 17 51 50 12 19 1 1

Source: Data from HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 272.

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Nationality became a central concern for 1920s naturalizations, despite its absence from the 1913 citizenship law. Ethnic Germans were far more likely to be granted Saxon citizenship than other applicants. The Reich government speci‹cally identi‹ed birth and upbringing in Germany, German education, descent from a German mother, marriage to a German citizen, or long-term residence in Germany as important factors in favor of naturalization.78 At the same time, the grossdeutsch nationalist ideology that had gained public attention at the war’s end argued that Germanspeaking Bohemians had claims on the German nation-state. Moreover, German-Bohemian organizations in Saxony actively promoted such claims. As early as April 1919, the German-Austrian Soldiers’ and Workers’ Council in Dresden made the following appeal to the Saxon government: The vast majority of Austrians in Saxony have lived here for years; many were born in Germany . . . [T]hey have now become Czechoslovak citizens against their wills. We entreat that these people, for whom the right of self-determination has proven illusory, be given expedited naturalization.79 Also in 1919, the Association of German Austrians in Lauter wrote to Dresden that as it was now clear that German Bohemia would not become part of the Reich, “We ask whether it is possible to naturalize German Austrians living in Saxony who feel bound to their German brothers [here].”80 In the 1920s, German-Austrian and German-Bohemian organizations took a more systematic approach to campaigning for citizenship, asking the Saxon government for detailed information on naturalization and lobbying to facilitate their members’ naturalization.81 They took up the cases of German-speaking Bohemians who had trouble with their naturalization applications, and they discouraged the naturalization of Czechs, whom they considered potentially hostile to the Saxon and German states. In January 1920, Dr. Hneppe, a representative of the Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary, even suggested that Saxony simply grant all German-speaking Bohemians in its territory equal rights with Reich citizens until they could be naturalized.82 Saxony at ‹rst demurred, arguing, correctly, that it was bound by Reich citizenship law and had to treat people with the same citizenship equally regardless of nationality. But as with foreign labor regulation, local practice and of‹cial policy made naturalization easier for German-speak-

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ing Bohemians than for Czech speakers or other foreigners.83 Local of‹cials who reviewed citizenship applications embraced the Reich’s emphasis on cultural “Germanness” and combined that with the conviction that citizenship required an established belonging to local communities. Of‹cials rejected applicants who had insuf‹cient income and were thus a ‹nancial burden, were fremdstämmig (non-German), or were involved in left-wing politics.84 Not all such distinctions were legal. Political af‹liation was not supposed to affect naturalization decisions. But sometimes it did. When Czechoslovak citizen Camillo Kolitsch applied for Saxon citizenship in Chemnitz in 1924, the city government denied his application because they considered his Communist politics “hostile to the state.” When Kolitsch appealed the decision, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior told Chemnitz that the law stated explicitly that it could not refuse naturalization on those grounds, a ruling the city was forced to accept after much resistance. The Reich citizenship law of 1913 forbade barriers to naturalization on the basis of religion as well as politics, a provision that Saxony got around by extending its residency requirement from the usual ten years for foreigners to twenty years for “eastern foreigners,” which usually meant Eastern European Jews.85 On the whole, Saxon of‹cials welcomed German-speaking Bohemian applicants. Indeed, in 1920, the army complained that the city government of Zittau was passing out citizenship much too liberally. The Zittau city council, far from thinking that naturalizations should be limited, told the Saxon Ministry of the Interior that it believed the forced inclusion of German-speaking Bohemians in the Czechoslovak state required Saxon of‹cials to lift barriers to naturalization of German-speaking Bohemians.86 The city council, like many other Saxon frontier of‹cials, thought that Germany had an obligation to help its conationals. Of‹cials’ inclination to treat German-speaking Bohemians differently from other applicants meant that establishing whether someone was “German Bohemian” was often central to evaluating naturalization applications. Although nationality was now assessed by the state or by such organizations as the Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary, rather than left to individual choice, it remained an acquired, rather than innate, characteristic—the product of upbringing, education, and Gesinnung (mentality). Applicants and their supporters understood well the terms in which of‹cials evaluated nationality, and they framed their arguments accordingly. In 1921, the Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary intervened with the Saxon government on behalf of Karl

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Zaschka, arguing that since Zaschka had been born in “a German part of Bohemia,” had received a German education, was of self-declared German Gesinnung, and had lived in Saxony for twenty-seven years, he “should be considered German.”87 Master weaver Franz Berthold in Schirgiswalde declared that he was applying for Saxon citizenship because he did not want to “subjugate his pure German identity (Gesinnung) to the Czechoslovak government,” a sentiment echoed by his son.88 Maximilian Hoyer, a factory worker who had lived in the Saxon town of Lauter since 1899, asserted that he “felt” German.89 In asserting that they felt German, applicants were not simply making a national argument. They were also aligning themselves with both the Saxon and Reich German states and territories. Even in cases of people who were unambiguously German Bohemian, Saxon of‹cials looked for allegiance to Saxony, whether through prolonged residence, marriage to a woman who had been a Saxon citizen, education in the Saxon schools, or service in the Saxon military. District of‹cials argued that Ernestine Blechschmidt, a German-speaking Bohemian who had lived and gone to school in Germany, should be naturalized on the basis of “constant residence with German citizens, which creates a wide-reaching understanding of the German way of life and the duties [of citizens] to the Reich, states, and local communities.”90 Ties to local territories continued to be critical for inclusion in larger state and national communities. Bohemian applicants for Saxon citizenship argued that the Saxon borderlands were their home territory. Naturalization applicants were now clearly choosing one side of the frontier over the other. Even Czech speakers could be naturalized if they demonstrated suf‹cient “Germanness.” In 1920, the cobbler Franz Salda appealed to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior after local authorities rejected his citizenship application. Salda was bilingual but argued that it was essential that he not be forced to return to Czechoslovakia, since neither his wife nor his children spoke Czech. The ministry approved his petition, noting that Salda’s children were being raised “purely German.” Similarly, when Johann Sule applied for naturalization, of‹cials noted that he was of German nationality, although his parents had been Czechs. Saxon authorities granted him and his family citizenship without objection.91 Of‹cials in Bautzen, however, rejected an application from Franz Kundrat, arguing that despite his declaration of German Gesinnung, he had demonstrated Czech nationality through his membership in a Czech association through

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1919, his Czech-speaking wife, and his having lived in Saxony for only six years—too short a time to have become German.92 Naturalization was not automatic even for people who were unambiguously “German.” Applicants complained that Czechoslovak of‹cials were slow to provide the paperwork they needed to become German citizens.93 Some Saxons feared that an in›ux of new citizens would strain communities already racked with unemployment and shortages and would impose disproportionate burdens on frontier areas.94 Even some German nationalists saw reasons not to naturalize German-speaking Bohemians, as they still hoped that the Bohemian borderlands would eventually become part of Germany. Since national self-determination was the means to that end, these people wanted to preserve Bohemia’s German-speaking population, even at the price of denying them German citizenship in the short term.95 Moreover, Saxon of‹cials were sometimes suspicious of naturalization applicants’ motivations. The Kreishauptmannschaft Bautzen wrote to the government in Dresden in 1922, Naturalized people, including German Bohemians, have made no secret of the fact that they see naturalization as a formality and that they will continue to maintain Czech identities and connection to Czechoslovakia. It is possible that material considerations encourage them to naturalize: higher social welfare rates, avoidance of Czech military service.96 Many applicants born and raised in Saxony may well have felt Saxon.97 But others responded to the new state demands for allegiance to one side of the border or the other, while maintaining identities and social networks that were either more ›uid than their citizenship applications suggested or still strongly linked to the side of the border opposite where they now lived, worked, and voted. In essence, while they aligned themselves legally with a postwar world that demanded allegiance to a single state and emphasized the national characteristics of the German Reich and Czechoslovakia, many Bohemians maintained more complicated borderland identities. Some German-speaking Bohemians, for example, declared themselves opposed to the Czechoslovak state and committed to Saxony but maintained ties to family, friends, and business associates across the border and participated in Bohemian associations within Germany.

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Associational Life Despite new legal restrictions and economic fallout from in›ation, Czech and German-Bohemian associations remained active in the Saxon borderlands in the 1920s and, around 1924, actually experienced a revival.98 Groups that had suspended activity during World War I began meeting again, and new groups emerged. Throughout the Weimar period, the Saxon borderlands continued to be a focal point and conference site for Czech organizations in Germany. By 1930, the Reich government estimated that 120 Czech associations were active in Germany, along with a variety of German-Bohemian organizations. In the same year, the Czech periodical Naše zahranicí reported that representatives of 550 Czech organizations in Germany attended a meeting in Berlin.99 Such associations included Czech and German-Bohemian gymnastics clubs, social welfare associations, choral and theatrical clubs, nationalist groups, and Social Democratic organizations. But in contrast to the prewar period, many associations were now overtly political. Czech associations not only promoted Czech linguistic and cultural community but received Czechoslovak government funding and included loyalty to the Czechoslovak state in their of‹cial programs. In 1928, the group Vlastimil in Chemnitz reported, “The membership shows a great interest in our Republic, is glad to read the donated Czech newspapers, and searches local German papers to see whether they mention our homeland. Naturally, important events in the homeland are debated in our meetings.”100 But these émigré groups also demanded that their government defend their interests. In 1926, Czech associations from across Saxony called on the Czechoslovak government to intervene in German foreign labor policy. In early 1929, members of associations like Rozkvet in Mittweida grumbled that Czechoslovakia treated Czechs abroad in a “stepmother-like fashion,” doing little to help them despite high unemployment in Germany.101 Whether they celebrated the Czechoslovak state or derided its failure to act, Czech associations in the Saxon borderlands maintained a much closer relationship to that state than they ever had with Austria-Hungary. They applied the lessons they learned in World War I—demanding that the state defend its citizens’ interests at home and abroad. German-Bohemian groups in Saxony, which had held a low pro‹le before the war, emerged as public defenders of German-Bohemian interests against the Czechoslovak state in the early 1920s. By mid-decade, the

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Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary and similar groups that had emerged at the war’s end were displaced by such new organizations as the Sudeten German Heimat Union (Sudetendeutsche Heimatbund, or SHB), which claimed to represent a uni‹ed Sudeten German people whose homeland was the Bohemian borderlands.102 A spin-off of the Union of Germans in Bohemia (Bund der Deutschen in Böhmen), an organization illegal in Germany, the SHB condemned the Czechoslovak state and called for Germany to annex the Czechoslovak borderlands. Its declared purpose was to educate the German public about the plight of Sudeten Germans and to support Sudeten German self-determination.103 The group wanted to convince the German public that Sudeten Germans formed an important part of the German Volk. To that end, the SHB encouraged all Germans to join the organization, whatever their homeland or citizenship, and two-thirds of the Dresden chapter’s members were German citizens.104 The SHB signaled a shift in strategy among German-Bohemian nationalists and their supporters in Saxony. In the mid-1920s, the SHB did not command a huge following, as the Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary had right after the war. The Dresden branch, founded in 1923, was long the only group in Saxony, and the organization was more active in Bavaria.105 Nevertheless, they and other nationalist groups in Saxony worked hard to shape Saxon public opinion in favor of German-Bohemian nationalism and Anschluss. The Saxon Pan-German League continued to draw public and political attention to the question of German Bohemia, by distributing propaganda, organizing lectures, placing articles from the Sudetendeutsche Tageszeitung in the local press, and circulating the newspaper to cafés in Saxon cities. By 1932, the league proclaimed it vital that every league meeting include discussion of Germany’s relations with the Sudeten Germans. In the early 1930s, the Pan-German League claimed that Sudeten Germans were ‹ghting in the front lines on behalf of all Germans.106 The decline of the Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary and the SHB’s limited in›uence in the middle to late 1920s re›ected political and economic stability in both Germany and Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia, German-speaking Bohemians spread their votes once more across the political spectrum—to the Clerical, Agrarian, German National, National Socialist, and Social Democratic parties. Despite nationalist activists’ efforts, no single German-Bohemian or “Sudeten Ger-

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man” political bloc existed. After 1925, most German-speaking Bohemians and their political parties embraced “activist” positions in support of the Czechoslovak state. In 1926, German-Bohemian ministers joined the Czechoslovak cabinet. By 1929, nationalist activism and national con›ict were at a low ebb.107 Czechoslovak citizens in Weimar Saxony showed a similar diversity of political opinion to their compatriots in Czechoslovakia, despite the impressions left by German nationalist rhetoric. Many Czechoslovaks in Saxony occupied social and political ground between that of the Czech and German nationalist camps. Some groups supported Czechoslovak war veterans and their widows and orphans regardless of nationality. A few associations, such as Druizna in Zittau, included both Czech and GermanBohemian members. Such inclusive organizations drew attacks and suspicion from German nationalists and Saxon of‹cials, who assumed they were Czech efforts to undermine German-Bohemian organizations.108 Many Czechoslovak citizens likely joined mainstream Saxon associations as they had done before the war. In the mid-1920s, the Union of Germans from Czechoslovakia (Bund der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei) emerged in Saxon cities as a new organization of German-speaking Bohemians loyal to Czechoslovakia. Initially, this organization cooperated with Czech associations like Vystehovalec in Plauen or Neruda in Leipzig and had support from the Czechoslovak consulates.109 Groups like the SHB and the Organization of Sudeten Germans in Bavaria (Landesverband der Sudetendeutschen in Bayern) condemned the union out of hand as a pseudo-German, pro-Czech organization made up of “lazy riff-raff who hope to gain materially by parading their ‘loyalty’ to the Czechoslovak state.”110 The position of the Union of Germans from Czechoslovakia as a German national organization loyal to Czechoslovakia was much like that of most German-Bohemian political parties in Czechoslovakia after 1925. But that mainstream position was suspect in Saxony. Because of the union’s ties to the Czechoslovak government, the Pan-German League and the German nationalist press in Saxony and northern Bohemia discouraged Saxons and German-speaking Bohemians from contributing to the group’s charity projects.111 The Union of Germans, in turn, condemned German-Bohemian nationalists for trying to undermine Czechoslovakia. It criticized Germany’s reliance on such organizations as the Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary to certify which Czechoslovak citizens were ethnic Germans. The Union of Germans from Czechoslovakia believed that certi‹cation forced

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people to join a disloyal organization so that they could get housing or work in Germany.112 On balance, it seems as though many Czechoslovak citizens in Saxony were very like their Reich German neighbors and their countrymen in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s. Small groups took extreme political positions, but the majority adjusted to a troubled, though not catastrophic, economic situation, seeking accommodation both with the state they lived in and the one to which they of‹cially belonged. In contrast to the prewar era, however, they found that accommodation was not always possible. Of‹cial and popular pressures to present unambiguous state, national, and territorial allegiances meant that many people who tried to lead nonnational cross-border lives ran afoul of the police or of nationalist organizations. As a result, many people embraced more explicit public identities than in the past. In return, they demanded state protection. Bohemians who wanted to stay in Saxony applied for German citizenship. They argued that the Saxon government should reward their cultural and territorial loyalty. Similarly, Bohemian associations loyal to Czechoslovakia won new protection from the Czechoslovak government. On all sides, people found that ‹xed political and territorial identities had become essential to giving states and nationalists a sense of security that allowed cross-border mobility and transnational community on the frontier to survive.

Conclusion Frontier people began interwar life in the same physical geographies as before the war. But they found themselves in a very different place. New states, volatile political and economic climates, and a new international order that shifted cross-border hierarchies and made nationalist ideas central to state legitimacy changed frontier residents’ understandings of the borderlands, their states, and each other. People and governments no longer treated the borderlands as a set of regional relationships but as distinct territories in which communities and populations enjoyed special rights and were subject to particular restrictions. During the Weimar years, the German and Czechoslovak republics extended population policies that their wartime imperial predecessors had begun but often had only partially implemented: passport requirements and documentation and control of frontier populations. Access to frontier mobility became dependent on people establishing clear community and territorial belonging.

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Policy changes forced people to publicly de‹ne their relationships to nations, states, and territories. Bohemians in Saxony found that as foreign workers or as applicants for citizenship, demonstrating “Germanness” had become essential to proving their ties to Saxon communities. Germanspeaking Bohemians tried, depending on their political predilections, to demonstrate that a German national identity either entitled them to help from the German Reich or that such identity could coexist with loyalty to the Czechoslovak state. Czech nationalists used schools to give “Czech” content to the Bohemian borderlands, Czech associations abroad made state loyalty central to their platforms. German and Czechoslovak of‹cials sometimes questioned whether peoples’ self-proclaimed state and national loyalties were backed by real conviction. They were not wrong to do so. Interwar people adopted more ‹xed territorial, national, and political identities in order to keep access to borderland mobility and to protect what they understood as their regional rights. Their choices were governed by a blend of conviction and convenience. Frontier populations experienced a rhetorical nationalization between 1919 and 1932. Nationalist rhetoric enjoyed wider of‹cial and popular acceptance than before the war. But people and governments used it as a tool for negotiating shifting political, economic, and social realities rather than as programmatic ideology. Thus Saxons could proclaim their Bohemian neighbors to be “German brothers” in 1919 and condemn the same people as “Czechs” during the currency crisis of 1922–23. A bilingual Bohemian living in Saxony could apply for naturalization asserting his German Gesinnung, while maintaining business and social contacts to Czech-speaking circles in Bohemia. In the late 1920s, German-Bohemian nationalists could argue that a grossdeutsch national community required Germany to embrace German-speaking Bohemians in its territory, whereas German nationalists in Saxony protected local economic interests by insisting that true nationalists had to keep German-speaking Bohemians in Czechoslovakia. Taken together, states’ and local peoples’ interwar understandings of frontier communities re›ected a fundamentally new view of border relations. Late nineteenth-century mobility created an integrated cross-border region, economy, and society largely because workers, tourists, industrialists, and governments discovered bene‹ts in cross-border community and gave relatively little credence to the few voices that declared that such community posed dangers of national erosion and economic competition. But by 1919, the borderlands appeared to be a much more dangerous place. For

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most of the Weimar period, this sense of instability encouraged states and frontier communities to embrace new population regulations so that limited cross-border mobility could continue. Each side saw the other as both essential and threatening, and the trick was to strike a balance between the two. For much of the interwar period, they succeeded. But in 1929, the Great Depression swung the balance once more into instability and crisis.

Chapter 7

Borderlands in Crisis, 1929–33

The Great Depression destroyed the cautious cooperation that had emerged between Germany and Czechoslovakia, between state authorities and local populations, and among national groups. It propelled nationalists back to the forefront of popular and political debates. It also turned the borderlands into a fault line where the ‹rst tremors shook the foundations of the Versailles system in Central Europe. By 1931, Saxon and Czechoslovak frontier governments, nationalists, socialists, consumers, and wage earners had again transformed the meaning of the borderlands. Abandoning the 1920s vision of the borderlands as two small administrative territories, local actors in the 1930s endowed the frontier with greater political signi‹cance, economic instability, and territorial scope than ever before. Their arguments combined new political radicalism with political and territorial ideas that had circulated since the late nineteenth century. They no longer characterized the borderlands simply as a territory or a social and economic network but as a crisis zone where the fates of whole states and nations were at stake. To some, the Nazi rise to power in 1933 seemed the culmination of Germany’s social breakdown and political crisis; to others, it seemed the solution to the crisis. Saxon Nazis and anti-Czechoslovak German-Bohemian nationalists greeted the Third Reich with euphoria—convinced that the Versailles system, the German-Czechoslovak border, and the social and economic turmoil of the 1920s were at an end. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) used Pan-German rhetoric and embraced the borderland rhetoric of other ultranationalist groups in the early 1930s. But the party 158

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leadership and German central government showed little interest in challenging Czechoslovakia, allying themselves with German-Bohemian nationalists, or contesting the border. Nonetheless, both Germany and Czechoslovakia used National Socialism’s rise to reinforce the message that the frontier was a danger zone—to be tightly controlled rather than radically transformed.

Embracing Frontiers in Turmoil By 1930, the Depression had hit frontier areas with greater ferocity than in the rest of Germany and Czechoslovakia, compounding existing regional weaknesses, undermining cross-border cooperation, and magnifying economic, political, and national tensions.1 Local people and of‹cials embraced the idea that their region’s borderland status explained its mounting economic and political turmoil. On both sides, people broadcast messages of “borderlands in distress” to local, state, and international audiences. Frontier residents recast regional economic problems, appeals for government aid, tourism promotion, and cross-border interactions in frontier terms. In “borderland” meetings and festivals and in dramatizing border enforcement and con›ict, they expressed their new vision of the region, of its position in a turbulent Central Europe, and of the relationship of states to national communities. German nationalist borderland rhetoric from the 1920s, combined with the economic problems of the Depression, led the Saxon government to begin using the idea of borderlands within the Reich to justify its demands for social welfare funding and a voice in policymaking. In December 1930, the Saxon parliamentary caucus of the Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) asserted, “The Treaty (Diktat) of Versailles turned the Free State of Saxony into a border region of particular importance.” The DVP called “Grenzmark Sachsen” (borderland Saxony) a bulwark against Slavdom and considered Sudeten German communities in the Czechoslovak borderlands a German economic and cultural buffer zone. In the DVP’s view, Saxons had to help the Sudeten Germans, and the Reich had to help Saxony, so the German nation could resist the Slavic threat.2 The DVP’s statement marked the beginning of a dramatic change in the way Saxons portrayed themselves in relation to the German Reich, the German nation, and Central Europe. Pre-Depression Reich German nationalist rhetoric had located German borderlands outside the German

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state. In the early 1930s, publications about German borderlands maintained this focus.3 But some Reich German regions—Saxony among them—now claimed borderland status. Arguing that their fates were governed as much by forces outside Germany as within, they claimed that, like German borderlands outside the Reich, they deserved political and material aid. With these claims, Saxons expanded their de‹nition of frontier regions far beyond the administrative territories of the 1920s. They embraced the idea that national economies and geopolitical position de‹ned borderlands. They stressed that mobility—of populations, ideologies, economic resources, and territorial meanings—endangered frontier regions, and they declared themselves a part of the German nation that their government and conationals neglected at their peril. By declaring their entire state a borderland, Saxons made their proximity to Czechoslovakia central to their regional identity and role in the Reich. They made frontier communities’ interests and traditions those of the whole state. In essence, Saxons upended the Saxon-Bohemian border’s position on the rhetorical compass. This border had long been considered a division between North (Saxony, the German Reich, and Protestantism) and South (Bohemia, Habsburg Austria, and Catholicism). Now it became a division between East and West. For nationalists, that meant a backward, uncultured East (Czechoslovakia, Slavs, and Eastern Europe) and a civilized West (Germany, Germans, and Western Europe).4 For industrialists, Social Democrats, and some regional of‹cials, that meant a victorious West (the Allies and Czechoslovakia), and a defeated East, including Germany, relegated to “backwardness” and cut off from international markets and prestige. Saxons also pronounced their state a borderland because they perceived an increasingly receptive audience for stories of fragile frontiers. German-Bohemian nationalists were parlaying borderland rhetoric into political clout in both Czechoslovakia and Germany. In the early 1930s, Saxon nationalists jumped on the tactical bandwagon. Even more important was the Reich German government’s decision to recognize its frontier territories as vulnerable. In 1930, it passed legislation for the protection of “endangered border areas.”5 Of‹cials in Berlin wanted to secure Germany’s position along the Polish border. But Bavaria seized on the law’s broad wording and applied for borderland funds, arguing that its border with Czechoslovakia posed the same threats to German culture and stability as the Prussian-Polish frontier. Loath to be outdone by their Bavarian neighbors, Saxony followed suit. The Oelsnitz district argued, “Osthilfe is

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at least as necessary in Saxony as in Bavarian border districts.” The mayor of Jöhstadt added, “Czechoslovakia threatens the German border everywhere from Bavaria to Upper Silesia. Not only in Bavaria.”6 In 1931, the Dresden government requested reports on Saxon border districts’ economic and political conditions, so it could build a case for funding. It asked district of‹cials to clarify how the Depression, World War I, and the creation of Czechoslovakia had altered frontier communities and fostered economic decline and political unrest. The Saxon government framed borderland problems in national terms. “[Since] culture and economics are being supported for the bene‹t of the Czech nation [in Czechoslovakia], the German side of the border cannot keep up without state help,” the government argued, claiming, “These changes pose cultural and political dangers for Germandom on both sides.”7 Of‹cials sought domestic reform and investment, not German territorial expansion, but the arguments they used to justify administrative projects injected nationalist activists’ rhetoric and grossdeutsch ideas into state practice. Even the projects’ nature re›ected a mix of practical economic and nationalist cultural priorities. Of‹cials requested borderland funding not just for road repair and railways but for sports facilities and “borderland” theaters, to raise the region’s cultural, as well as economic, pro‹le. The Saxon government harnessed the persuasive power of nationalism to aid collapsing communities and win in›uence with the German central government. Of‹cials described how World War I and the creation of Czechoslovakia had marked a critical turning point for their communities. The Oelsnitz district asserted, “As part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Bohemia was a friendly land with the same population [as ours], and borders were hardly noticeable. But since the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic, everything has changed.”8 The mayor of Brunndöbra wrote, “Decades of friendship with the former territories of Austria-Hungary— now Czechoslovakia—developed relationships . . . that essentially erased the border. The economies were closely interconnected and trade ›owed almost unchecked. After the war, that friendship was broken, and the border renewed.”9 Saxon of‹cials suggested that borderland troubles had everything to do with the state control, economic rivalries, and political divisions that had reshaped the region after 1918. They used nationalist language that had ›ourished right after the war and was reemerging in the Depression. But as they had done during the war, they used this language to highlight the German state’s responsibilities in frontier areas. They argued that the heightened importance of the political border and the German

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state’s failure to invest in education, welfare support, and infrastructure, rather than national divisions, had plunged frontier people into crisis. The mayor of Jöhstadt wrote, “The border area has always been the stepchild of the government. It is too far away from the center of power. Authorities know little about border conditions.”10 Border communities’ abrupt change from lively prewar centers of cross-border commerce to a neglected interwar periphery, of‹cials suggested, was a result of state neglect. They urged the central government to take a more active role in regional affairs: the Reich had a national, as well as political, obligation to do so.11

The Depression in the Borderlands The Depression was the culmination of a decades-long decline in economic importance for Saxon-Bohemian frontier communities.12 Even before World War I, some export industries had struggled as fashions changed and as demand for handmade lace or arti‹cial ›owers declined. The war and the economic crises that followed compounded these tendencies, leaving farmers, industrialists, and the middle classes mired in debt, while towns that once suffered labor shortages now battled unemployment. City governments lost the tax base to pay for unemployment support, roads, housing, and schools. Foreign competitors and modern industries displaced small-scale crafts and manufacturing in international markets. Debt, backwardness, shortages of skilled workers, and lack of infrastructure compounded local producers’ inability to compete in world markets. Then, the Great Depression turned decline into crisis.13 In 1931, the mayor of Jöhstadt described the changes in his oncebustling Saxon town: “The streets are empty. The shops are quiet. No one crosses the border to shop or give our craftspeople orders. Instead . . . the population of Jöhstadt crosses the border to buy cheaper food and goods.”14 By August 1930, the Czechoslovak Heller and Schuller factory in Mníšek/Böhmisch Einsiedel, which once had employed ‹fty workers and shipped goods worldwide, had but twelve employees working three days a week.15 By 1932, Saxony had 12.6 percent unemployment—well above the Reich average of 8 percent; unemployment in parts of the Erzgebirge and Vogtland was as high as 60 percent.16 In January, unemployment in many northern Bohemian industrial towns hovered around 50 to 60 percent.17 Saxony’s economic crisis compounded Czechoslovak problems. Czecho-

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slovak workers, among the ‹rst laid off in Saxony, ›ooded a northern Bohemian labor market already suffering from unemployment.18 In 1930–31, the Czechoslovak government was deluged by letters from its consulates and from Czech-speaking workers in Saxony. Czech speakers, the writers reported, were harder hit by unemployment and economic hardship in Saxony than elsewhere in Germany and were in desperate need of help from Czechoslovakia. The Czech-language press also reported hardships facing Czechoslovak workers in Germany. “The situation of our citizens in Germany is critical,” Ceské slovo reported in 1931.19 As in the past, people tried to offset the economic slump by using resources across the border. In May 1930, rumors circulated in the Czech press that the Saxon clock industry in Glasshütte was considering moving to Czechoslovakia, where labor costs were lower and where international ‹nancing was more available.20 Saxon tourists cut costs by traveling to Czechoslovakia, where food and lodging were cheaper than at home.21 In 1931, the mayor of Oberwiesenthal complained that Czechoslovakia was luring tourists away from Saxon frontier towns, and he urged the government to invest in tourism to offset the region’s economic woes.22 In 1932, several Saxon toy producers did move to Bohemia. Police on both sides reported a resurgence of smuggling. As the Czechoslovak economy worsened and as the German mark declined, Bohemian border residents found cheap Saxon goods irresistible. Professional Bohemian smugglers were so lucrative for Saxon shopkeepers that merchants in Sayda were said to have thrown parties for them.23 Police con‹scated smugglers’ borderland papers,24 but the illicit traf‹c continued, often with a wink and a nod from of‹cials. In 1932, the mayor of Sayda found a creative way to avoid losing customers for his merchants while he acknowledged rules requiring border crossers to have papers. Saxon border police, he reasoned, could not catch all illegal Bohemian consumers, nor, since the Depression had drained the town’s coffers, could the city government afford to prosecute offenders. Instead of ‹ghting a hopeless battle to enforce German laws, he decided to ‹ne Bohemian smugglers twenty-‹ve pfennigs in local shops. The ‹ne was low enough not to reduce smugglers’ pro‹ts, shopkeepers could collect it for the police, and the town gained much-needed income.25 Thus Saxon frontier of‹cials quietly aligned regulation with local circumstances, regardless of legislation from Berlin or Dresden. Despite local adjustments, the economic crisis produced waves of po-

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litical strife. Radicalism on one side begat radicalism on the other. Political agitators right and left found inspiration, allies, and opponents among their neighbors on the other side, traded literature and activists across the frontier, and used the border to highlight their messages of political and social crisis. Bohemian frontier residents responded to the Depression with widespread socialist and radical nationalist unrest: strikes, demonstrations, and political violence. Communists organized mass protests against unemployment, high food prices, and government’s failure to provide social welfare aid. They smuggled political propaganda from Germany. Their Saxon counterparts often joined them. The Czechoslovak police banned mass meetings, broke up marches, and arrested Communist leaders, but the demonstrations continued.26 German-Bohemian nationalists and National Socialists also stepped up efforts on the Bohemian frontier in the early 1930s.27 In February 1931, German-Bohemian National Socialists marched in Podmokly/Bodenbach, and the government banned National Socialist Party publications from Germany.28 On January 7, 1932, six thousand unemployed people protested in Liberec/Reichenberg. On February 7, German-Bohemian National Socialists demonstrated in Liberec/Reichenberg, decrying the economic crisis and lack of political autonomy. Communists joined the demonstration, and when violence seemed likely, police shut it down. Despite repeated police intervention, demonstrations—some of them violent—continued throughout northern Bohemia in the spring of 1932, drawing participants from Saxony as well.29 In Czechoslovakia, the Depression had disproportionate effects on the frontier areas where most German speakers lived. This re›ected the region’s history of early, small-scale industries, which persisted into the 1930s. During the Depression, declining demand, competition from foreign and mass producers, and new international tariff barriers crippled those industries. In the mid-1920s, Czechoslovakia had invested substantially in infrastructure and other state projects, including in frontier areas,30 but economic modernization moved new industries to inland urban centers. German-Bohemian nationalists claimed that the sharp territorial divide in economic suffering was the result of systematic government neglect of German-speaking areas. Czech nationalists complained that the government was not helping Czech-speaking minorities in beleaguered frontier districts,31 and the Czech-language press decried Reich Germans’ interference in Czechoslovak nationalities politics.32 These nationalist messages,

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though well worn by the 1930s, found new urgency and new audiences as economic and social instability spread. Many Czechoslovaks began to regard a wide frontier territory, corresponding roughly to areas with the largest German-speaking populations, as a zone of economic, political, and national danger. Similar unrest was taking place in the Saxon borderlands. By 1931, communities in the Schwarzenberg district witnessed weekly marches, protests, and clashes between Communists and National Socialists.33 The conservative press warned that Social Democrats and Communists were leading the state back into the chaos of 1923.34 In 1932, the Schwarzenberg district wrote to Dresden, “Most people cannot understand why the government does not ‹nally put a halt to this great hardship.”35 The public’s perception that their government was unable or unwilling to help bolstered popular support for radical political parties. National Socialists used the crisis to turn Saxony’s industrial borderlands into one of their ‹rst electoral strongholds.36 They won 20.3 percent of the vote in the Schwarzenberg district in state elections in June 1930 and were second only to the Social Democrats in Saxony as a whole. New supporters ›ocked to the Saxon National Socialists and its paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) from both sides of the frontier. In 1931, school director Dörfel in Klingenthal reported, “Large numbers of enthusiastic Sudeten Germans are attending National Socialist rallies in the Klingenthal district.”37 In July 1932, the Nazis won 49.1 percent of the Schwarzenberg district vote in the Reichstag elections, compared to 37 percent Reich wide.38 But Communists and Social Democrats also began holding mass meetings in Saxon border cities, meetings that often included Czechoslovak participants and speakers.39 After the June 1930 Saxon state elections, the Czechoslovak press abounded with grim reports that “red” Saxony had plunged to the right, paralyzing parliamentary government and threatening a return to the political and social turmoil of 1923.40 Government of‹cials, the press, and popular opinion on both sides feared that destabilization of the borderlands would lead to open con›ict between Germany and Czechoslovakia. The Depression had made industries and communities on both sides regard each other as economic competitors.41 German-Bohemian nationalist activists deplored their Saxon neighbors’ ignorance of Czechoslovak nationalist politics and blamed their lack of national engagement for undermining cross-border national community.42 Saxon police seemed to con‹rm these accusations when they blamed foreign “Czech” Communists for the disruptive political marches in Saxon frontier towns.43 Again, when

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Saxons wanted to label Bohemians in their territory a threat, they made them all “Czech,” ignoring arguments that they should recognize a crossborder German community. Political radicals increasingly used the border itself as a site for protests and demonstrations—challenging not only their own political administrations but the sanctity of state territorial boundaries.

A Land of Protest The frontier had long been a zone of interaction between adjacent states, economies, and societies where tempers ›ared in periods of uncertainty. But beginning in the nineteenth century, it had also been characterized by its residents’ dedication to familiar, balanced, mutually bene‹cial relations. In the 1930s, economic and political changes on both sides ‹nally undermined this equilibrium. Frontier people were gripped by mistrust—of governments, the international community, and each other. That mistrust transformed the political border into a focus for protests and fears, a place where varied historical actors bid for power in a swiftly mutating Central European political landscape. The Depression threw the Versailles system into question. In Germany, it revitalized right-wing ideas of a Grossdeutschland and a Germanled Mitteleuropa, by suggesting that borderlands were where Germans could reclaim their rightful position in Europe, which the Versailles system had undermined.44 As economic and social chaos convinced many Reich Germans that the state was failing its duties, growing numbers of people threw their political support to the Nazis and Communists—the parties challenging the Weimar Republic. Czechoslovakia, too, faced new uncertainties. New tariff barriers and a currency crisis in Great Britain isolated Czechoslovakia from the Western Allies. Antidemocratic nationalists held political sway over its neighbor states—not only in Germany, but in Poland, Hungary, and Austria. In 1931, a short-lived plan for a German-Austrian customs union threatened to expand German in›uence in Central Europe and undermine Czechoslovakia’s independence with its two chief trade partners. While the customs union threat dissipated quickly, the political crisis it created, combined with new tensions raised by the Depression, cooled GermanCzechoslovak relations.45 Meanwhile, the uneven distribution of Czechoslovakia’s economic problems rekindled national rivalries that had been

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politically marginal after 1926. Nationalist activists again occupied the center of political debates. The Saxon-Bohemian border emerged as a symbol of the international economic and political relationships at the heart of the frontier region’s current misery and hope for a better future. Most people did not ponder the justice of the Versailles system as they went about their lives. Yet borderland rhetoric assured them that they lived in a dangerous place. This message appeared in the press, in public exhibitions, even in schoolbooks.46 The border became notorious as a locus of national resentments and looming disaster, where nationalists, Communists, and other opponents of the German and Czechoslovak states saw political opportunities. Governments now had to grapple with frontier conditions. Although Communists and nationalists challenged the German and Czechoslovak states throughout their territories in the 1930s, they were particularly active in frontier areas. In 1930, the Národní jednota severoceska demanded that the Czechoslovak government not only settle Czech speakers and establish more Czech schools in German-speaking frontier areas but also ensure that border police were Czech.47 Czech nationalists claimed that German-Bohemian nationalists’ demands for autonomy and assertions that frontier areas were purely “German” threatened both Czechoslovak sovereignty and Czech national interests.48 Czechoslovakia, they argued, should take charge of its own territory, which Czech nationalists thought would best be done by giving state institutions and territories a clear “Czech” character. Indeed, Saxon authorities reported that now, in contrast to the past, many Czechoslovak border police spoke only Czech.49 The nationalization of Czechoslovak border police made Reich Germans crossing the border recognize immediately that they were entering “Czech” territory, although the local population was overwhelmingly German-speaking. Czech nationalists also asserted their presence on the border through seemingly apolitical activities. During the 1931 Pentecost holiday, for instance, a Czech Sokol group visited the border town of Hrensko/Herrnskretschen. Club members wore red shirts and sang Czech Sokol songs, normal enough behavior for a club taking a day trip, but German-speaking locals unhappily perceived what the club members undoubtedly intended: that Czech nationalists could penetrate Germanspeaking territory even in the shadow of the Reich.50 Czech nationalists, however, argued that Reich German “cultural” initiatives in northern Bohemia were a front for German cultural and political expansionism. They asserted that Czech hranicari and Czech nationalist initiatives along the

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frontier were essential methods for warning Reich Germans to “keep their hands off ” Czechoslovakia.51 German speakers, too, used club outings, festivals, and political demonstrations along the frontier as ritual enactments of group claims to borderland territories. Moreover, in the 1930s, they recognized that such claims could shape both the future of the Czechoslovak state and Germany’s relationship to it. In August 1932, German-Bohemian nationalist parties, including the National Socialists, held a protest in Decín/Tetschen that drew two thousand participants. Speakers railed against Czechoslovak injustices done to Sudeten Germans, and participants sang Nazi songs. When police and the military moved in, they met with jeers and ›ying beer glasses. During the 1932 Easter holiday, an economic protest in Podmokly/Bodenbach took a nationalist turn when German-Bohemian hooligans smashed windows in the town’s Czech cultural center. On August 17, protesters in Liberec/Reichenberg marched against Czechoslovakia’s “anti-German system.” Later that month, the city hosted a “Sudeten German Goethe Week” that emphasized “the cultural unity of ALL Germans without regard for border markers.”52 In October, Dr. Wilhelm Medinger, a German Christian Social Party member of the Czechoslovak parliament, spoke in Liberec/Reichenberg, declaring that while Czechoslovakia complained that Germany was violating the Treaty of Versailles by rearming, it had itself violated the Treaty of St. Germain in its treatment of the Sudeten Germans, a claim that German-Bohemian nationalist activists made to Saxon audiences as well.53 By demonstrating in Decín/Tetschen, Podmokly/Bodenbach, and Liberec/Reichenberg, towns within easy reach of Germany, German-Bohemian nationalists addressed multiple audiences: the Czechoslovak government, Czech nationalists, German-speaking Bohemians, and Reich Germans. They used Germany as a backdrop to signal that, although they lived on the margins in Czechoslovakia, they enjoyed close contact with powerful players in the Reich. They sought to convince Reich Germans that national interest and geographic proximity demanded Reich German engagement in Bohemia. Proximity to the border also enabled GermanBohemian nationalists to include Saxons in their events. For domestic Czechoslovak audiences, Saxon participants’ very presence signaled Reich support for the Sudeten German movement. Moreover, Saxons learned about Sudeten German politics ‹rsthand and could carry their experience home to Germany. Thus, when Saxons from Zittau attended a National

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Socialist rally in Hrádek nad Nisou/Grottau, Czechoslovaks were reminded that their own German National Socialists had allies in the Reich, while Saxon National Socialists, forbidden to wear brown shirts or carry Nazi ›ags during the visit, returned home with tales about Czechoslovak “repression” of Germans.54 Communists, too, used frontier communities to demonstrate their cross-border political networks and challenge their states. In 1931, they held a “Roter Tag” (Red Day) in Prebuz/Frühbuss, where ‹fty uniformed members of the Saxon Communist Party (KPD) joined fourteen hundred Czechoslovak demonstrators.55 Czechoslovak frontier Communists used Saxony as a source of Communist literature,56 and they often attended Saxon rallies, provoking border police.57 On August 1, 1932, Saxon Communists and Czechoslovak police were locked in a standoff on the border between Zittau and Dolní Poustevna/Niedereinsiedel. Czechoslovak Communists had planned a demonstration, and the police were determined to prevent Reich Germans from taking part. Saxon KPD members camped out until nightfall, waiting for an opportunity to cross, but the police closed border crossings and patrolled the area.58 The police seem to have won that round, but Czechoslovak Communists reinforced the message that they had outside support poised to move into Czechoslovak territory. As nationalists had done before World War I, Communists now used crossborder political networks, resources, and tactics to win leverage in their own communities. In January 1932, for example, the Zwickau district reported, “The rise of the NSDAP in Germany is being watched with considerable unease in Czechoslovakia. Many people believe that as soon as . . . the NSDAP takes power, the Reich will no longer . . . abide by the terms of the Versailles Treaty.”59 Many Czechoslovaks were leery of rising political radicalism in Germany. The last thing Czechoslovak leaders wanted was to have a nationalist or socialist revolution spread across the border or a Nazi-led Germany wrest Bohemia’s majority German-speaking territories from Prague’s control.60 Throughout 1932, the frontier buzzed with rumors that Germany and Czechoslovakia were remilitarizing border areas and that war was possible. Both the Czechoslovak and Reich German press warned of rearmament on the other side of the border. The Obervogtländischer Anzeiger, for example, declared in February 1932 that Saxony was in constant danger from its neighbors.

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Czechoslovakia . . . owns no fewer than six hundred war planes, which could appear over the Saxon border just minutes after the outbreak of war . . . Borderlands are by their nature always in the greatest danger. Saxony is a borderland and therefore has a particular interest in ending the current situation as quickly as possible.61 Attempting to head off threats of radical politics or violence spilling across the frontier, Czechoslovak authorities cracked down on both the political right and left in the borderlands. Police arrested German-Bohemian National Socialist and Communist leaders; closed several German-Bohemian newspapers; dissolved German-Bohemian associations suspected of spying, smuggling weapons, and other antistate activities; and banned, ‹rst, public use of the swastika and, later, the Czechoslovak German National Socialist Party (DNSAP) itself. Czechoslovak police cracked down on people involved in illegal politics outside Czechoslovakia, arresting German-speaking Bohemians who attended NSDAP meetings in Saxony, which apparently they did frequently.62 Czechoslovak police also used the bureaucratic frontier to inhibit cross-border political activity. In 1931, they turned back many Czechoslovak citizens headed to a “Sudeten German Day” in Dresden for not having passports, and they beefed up border patrols when they heard about a Saxon Communist rally that might attract Czechoslovaks. Their Saxon counterparts used similar tactics, brie›y imposing an exit fee of one thousand reichsmarks for Reich citizens, so Saxons would not spend money in Czechoslovakia or join Czechoslovak Communist rallies.63 Local challenges to state authority, German-Czechoslovak relations, and the Versailles system were often couched in nominally apolitical cultural and social practices that states found hard to control. Saxons’ participation in Communist or German nationalist rallies in Czechoslovakia led Czechoslovak authorities to be suspicious of a wide range of behavior once considered normal, injecting distrust into cross-border mobility. In July 1930, for instance, a youth club from Pirna took a day trip to Ústí nad Labem/Aussig. The club band played during the trip down the Elbe, but at the border crossing in Hrensko/Herrnskretschen, the group’s carefree progress halted abruptly when Czechoslovak police arrested the group’s leader. The band had been playing a tune the police recognized as “Gott erhalte Franz, der Kaiser” (God preserve Emperor Franz), which they interpreted as pro-Habsburg political provocation. The group denied any political intent, saying that they had performed a popular youth song—“Wir

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sind Burschen noch, frei vom Ehejoch” (We are still bachelors, free from the bonds of marriage)—that had the same tune. Unable to prove that the group was anti-Czechoslovak, the police ‹nally released its leader. At other times, Czechoslovak police con‹scated cameras from Reich German tourists taking pictures near the border. The tourists were surprised and puzzled, but the police were under orders to regard photography as possible espionage.64 They had learned to see threats everywhere, whether real or not. Reich Germans heading into Czechoslovakia now treated the border as a place where they either stepped carefully around authorities or de‹ed them outright. By late 1932, de‹ance was common. In August 1932, teenagers from the Saxon town of Bad Elster marched to the border, ›ying black ›ags. They tore down a Czechoslovak border post, spat on it, hurled stones at it, and scrawled “Heil Hitler” and “Germany Awake” across it. They then marched a few meters into Czechoslovakia, raised a Nazi ›ag, and returned whence they had come. Czechoslovak of‹cials treated the incident as political provocation. German police dismissed it as teenage hooliganism.65 The speci‹c incident may indeed have been trivial. Nevertheless, the young men had launched a symbolic attack on the border as an institution, on Czechoslovakia as a sovereign state, and on Weimar Germany, which accepted that border and neighboring state. In so doing, they anticipated a new kind of border relations, which followed the Nazi rise to power in Germany a few months later, in January 1933.

Nazis at the Frontier The Nazi rise to power in 1933 prompted a rash of Saxon attacks on the legitimacy of the border and the Czechoslovak state. In March 1933, Josef Salmann, a Czechoslovak farmer, was taking a break in his ‹eld about ‹fteen meters from the German border when an armed SA member ordered him—quite illegally—to get back to work. Salmann pointed out that the SA man had no authority in Czechoslovakia, and the SA man, after yelling at him for a while, retreated to German soil.66 In itself, this exchange posed no real threat to Czechoslovakia. Yet to have someone claim authority on Czechoslovak soil by virtue of his connection to the German government was shocking and signaled a major shift in frontier relations. The Nazis proclaimed Pan-German national unity and declared Germany’s Versailles-era boundaries arti‹cial. They expanded on rhetoric that

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Reich German, Austrian, and German-Bohemian nationalist activists had been honing since the late nineteenth century. In 1933, Saxon Nazis went out of their way to show contempt for Czechoslovakia, Czechs, and the integrity of the international border. Czechoslovakia reacted with alarm, building an unprecedented police and military presence in frontier areas. On paper, border regulations remained unchanged, and German-Czechoslovak relations were cool but “correct.”67 In fact, cross-border cooperation declined rapidly. Nazi propaganda made much of the plight of borderland Germans at home and abroad. But in the mid-1930s, the central administration showed little real interest in them. Nazi economic initiatives were of no help to Saxon frontier areas, where conditions went from bad to worse. Nazi administrators ignored pleas for aid from German-speaking Bohemians and self-styled “Sudeten Germans,” whether through a more open border or through direct intervention in Czechoslovakia. Frontier people struggled to shape the political landscape to better their lives, communities, and countries. Ignoring the German central government’s policy of not confronting Czechoslovakia directly, Saxon Nazi party members violated the border repeatedly. Their actions made it hard for local people and of‹cials on either side of the border to distinguish between central Nazi policy, which proclaimed neutrality toward Czechoslovakia, and local Nazi practice, which constantly challenged the border and the Czechoslovak state. For local people, whether or not they supported the Nazi regime, endangered borderlands were not just propaganda but everyday life. Facing new circumstances, frontier residents fought to undermine or defend the border’s legitimacy; to reshape cross-border political, economic, and social networks; and to make governments, nationalists, and international observers see them as important participants in a rapidly changing Europe.

“If I am standing here, this is Saxony” The ‹rst months of 1933 were heady for Saxon Nazis. Finally, it seemed, they could terrorize opponents and act as political enforcers with impunity. The Saxon SA—the Nazis’ street ‹ghters—attacked the border with gusto, eager to wield their newfound power and convinced that Czechoslovakia was a key adversary in the German national revolution. Even as their enthusiasm for Nazism had grown out of local circum-

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stances, their ideas about Nazism’s meaning more often re›ected local concerns than central government policies. In 1933, the SA and Schutzstaffel (SS) carried out far more brazen attacks on the border and Czechoslovak border of‹cials than in previous years. They harassed Czechoslovak of‹cials, policed both sides of the border without regard for law or political sovereignty, and used threats and violence to discourage Reich Germans from crossing to Czechoslovakia. They succeeded in scaring people but could not always cow them. Germany and Czechoslovakia had long allowed each other’s customs of‹cials to inspect ships and trains before they crossed the frontier. But in 1933, the SA and SS began challenging Czechoslovak of‹cials’ authority in German territory. In May 1933, when Czechoslovak customs of‹cers tried to inspect a ship crossing the border, a group of SS of‹cers shoved them, to the delight of onlookers, and sang, “We will drive all enemies out of the land, including the Czechs.”68 That same month, a group of SA men serenaded Czechoslovak customs of‹cers with a song in which they replaced the word Bolshevik with Tschechovik. In June, German SA members on a ship headed to Czechoslovakia, swore at a Czechoslovak customs of‹cer, calling him “Bohemian dog” and “Czech pig.” They kicked him and shouted, “We’ll toss Czechs overboard like dogs!”69 Czechoslovak of‹cials decided that in the future, they would inspect ships carrying SA or SS members after they entered Czechoslovak territory. At ‹rst glance, this seems a minor concession. Indeed, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior dismissed the Czechoslovak consulate’s protest as overreaction: “The [‘Tschechovik’] incident is certainly regrettable, but we have to keep in mind that it happened during the excitement that followed the national revolution.”70 Yet Czechoslovak of‹cials recognized, as Saxons did not, that these incidents belied claims of “correct” German-Czechoslovak relations. SA exploits demonstrated the primacy of “national revolution” and Nazi power over both states—German and Czechoslovak—at the frontier. They proclaimed that Reich Germans did not recognize Czechoslovakia as an equal sovereign state. Nazi leaders in Berlin had no interest then in challenging Czechoslovakia’s boundaries, but their reluctance to defend them allowed regional dynamics of Nazism to have far-reaching consequences. The SA’s incursions into Czechoslovak territory forcefully demonstrated Nazism’s potential to disrupt borderland society. For decades, government of‹cials and police on both sides had observed the sovereignty of the political border, even when their citizens crossed it to escape the law at

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home. Such political groups as the Pan-German League, Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis themselves had used cross-border networks to escape their own legal systems. But under the new regime, SA members used their connection to Germany’s ruling party to repudiate Czechoslovak territorial sovereignty. They embraced the liberties of nongovernmental actors but claimed to act on behalf of the Reich government. The Czechoslovak consul in Berlin complained that SA members acted like police in the Czechoslovak borderlands, as the man who confronted Josef Salmann had done. The SA, he said, respected neither the border nor international agreements governing its use. The SA con‹rmed this assessment. One SA man who was told that he was in Czechoslovak territory and had no authority replied, “If I am standing here, this is Saxony.”71 Local people complained about the SA’s imposition of “iron order” and their habit of shooting at people near the border. In April 1933, as Hermann Wagner and Emma Piegert, Czechoslovak citizens from Varnsdorf/Warnsdorf, neared the border when returning home from a visit to Saxon Seifhennersdorf, they saw an SA patrol heading toward them. Fearing arrest or harassment, which often happened to those who encountered the SA, they ran across the Czechoslovak border; the SA followed, shooting, into Czechoslovak territory. SA members also stopped people with legitimate border papers from crossing.72 In December 1933, the Obervogtländer Anzeiger und Tageblatt published a letter from a Saxon “border crosser” who complained that on a recent trip to Czechoslovakia, “‹ve Hitlers” had photographed him crossing the border, a tactic used to intimidate Saxons into staying out of Czechoslovakia. As district of‹cials noted, such actions were turning Saxon frontier opinion against the NSDAP.73 The SA con‹rmed this, complaining that locals refused to adjust to the new order and that the SA “put up with a lot” from local Grenzläufer (border crossers).74 On January 26, 1933—just days before Hitler took power as Germany’s chancellor—“a hranicar” wrote in Národní politika, “a cold north wind is withering the blooms of our cultural labors [in the borderlands].”75 The chill spurred Czechoslovakia to expand its police and military presence along the frontier and to regulate cross-border traf‹c more strictly than ever.76 Its reasons were many. Germany and Czechoslovakia were each other’s most important trade partners; both wanted commercial relations to continue. But the movements of people and political ideas seemed more threatening than ever before. Not only were the SA harassing people inside Czechoslovakia, but the Czechoslovak government feared that the Nazi

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success in Germany would spur efforts to win German-speaking Bohemians for the Nazi movement. Czechoslovakia imposed stricter rules for entering the country, questioned visitors about why they were coming, and required even locals with borderland papers to cross the border at of‹cial checkpoints.77 It reiterated its ban on National Socialism in Czechoslovak territory. Police warned that it was illegal for Czechoslovak citizens to join or even contact the SA or SS, and they arrested suspected SA members for antistate activity.78 The government created special gendarme commandos to limit Czechoslovaks’ contact with the NSDAP in Germany, to monitor SA activity, and to track contact between German-Bohemian gymnastics associations and Reich citizens. Police now closed the border whenever they thought that a political event in Czechoslovakia might draw participants from Germany or that events in Germany might attract Czechoslovaks.79 German-Bohemian nationalists who opposed Czechoslovakia’s existence celebrated Hitler’s election as Germany’s chancellor as a new era for German irredentism. A Saxon woman who visited Czechoslovakia in 1933 reported later that people there had told her, “We envy you that you can experience such a time!”80 But despite Saxon Nazis’ gleeful attacks on Czechoslovakia, German-Bohemian nationalists were distressed to ‹nd that, like its predecessor, the Third Reich showed little interest in them. The Nazi rise to power brought sweeping changes to Germany, but the Nazis succeeded partly because they embraced established administrators and institutions. In Saxony, the preservation of local administrations helped National Socialist leaders enforce centralized state control over the more radical impulses of the Nazi rank and ‹le.81 Thus, despite SA attacks on Czechoslovak police, Reich German and Saxon policies kept aloof from radical German nationalism on either side of the border. In March 1933, Walter Koch, the German ambassador to Czechoslovakia, urged the Berlin government to tell Sudeten German leaders that Reich German interests were its ‹rst priority.82 When German-Bohemian industrialists complained that Reich policies were hurting their business, Koch advised them to put their own political house in order.83 In July 1933, when the Saxon city government of Ebersbach declared support for the Sudeten German cause, the Saxon government rebuked it for undermining German relations with Czechoslovakia.84 The Plauen Chamber of Commerce, however, asked the Saxon Economic Ministry to restrict Czechoslovak business in the state. The chamber observed that although most of these people were Sudeten Germans, Saxony had to protect its own economy.85 German Bohemians protested. The Sudetendeutsche Heimatbund told the Saxon

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government that while Germany had the right to block its own citizens’ mobility, it had a national obligation to let German Bohemians cross the border.86 Of‹cials in Berlin and Dresden disagreed, arguing that politically “undesirable elements” might be among the people who claimed to be Sudeten Germans or members of established German nationalist organizations. German-Bohemian pub owners appealed to the Reich consulate in Liberec/Reichenberg not to “disrupt the centuries-old friendly coexistence of the border populations.”87 Some German Bohemians asserted that the Reich was boycotting German-Bohemian borderland businesses.88 Yet faced with a choice between nation and state in 1933, Saxon Nazis, of‹cials, and businesspeople chose the state.

The Exclusive State Nazi Germany consolidated state control over territory, mobility, and population in 1933.89 National Socialists wanted to identify those who could become part of National Socialist society and those likely to oppose it. Early Nazi policy did not, however, challenge Germany’s neighbors or its post-1918 borders. The Nazis needed to consolidate power inside the Reich before they could direct their attention outside it.90 Rather than using Nazism’s revolutionary dynamism to reinforce ties to foreign German populations—such as those in Czechoslovakia—both the German and Saxon governments tried to consolidate the new regime’s control within the Reich. Berlin made unprecedented efforts to control Reich populations and territory. It revised Germany’s border control, citizenship practices, and use of foreign labor, not out of concern about a Slav menace, but to reduce the cross-border human mobility that made the borderlands distinct. So in its ‹rst years of rule, the Nazi central government treated the SaxonBohemian border with respect. The National Socialist state used nationalist ideas to reinforce existing political and territorial divisions, emphasizing imagined differences between German and Czechoslovak territories and populations. Over time, the Reich German and Saxon governments treated Czechoslovakia as a Slavic nation state and seldom mentioned its large German-speaking minority. Saxon of‹cials increasingly referred to “Czech” industry, of‹cials, and borderlands.91 Once again, they treated all Bohemians as foreigners, restricting access to work and citizenship and eventually revoking citizen-

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ship from people who had been naturalized. All of this tightened Nazi political and economic control in Saxony. The Nazis imposed new restrictions on foreign workers to reduce native unemployment and win popular support.92 New laws in 1933 required foreign workers to be replaced with unemployed German citizens. They limited employment of foreign workers to those already in the country, introduced new work permits, and again required employers to obtain permission to hire foreigners.93 After 1935, foreigners had to list language and religion on applications for work permits—another measure to limit nonGermans in the Reich.94 In 1933, many Czechoslovak citizens working in Saxony, particularly Czech speakers, were suddenly dismissed from their jobs. Various reasons were given. A Mr. Novotný lost his job in Falkenau because the April 1933 law required the dismissal of “antistate workers,” although, as the Czechoslovak consulate pointed out, Saxon of‹cials could not prove that he was a Communist.95 In September 1933, Alfred Ševecek, who had lived in Chemnitz since 1905, lost his job for not being an NSDAP member. This, the Czechoslovak consulate pointed out, was ludicrous, since foreigners were not allowed to join the party.96 Franz Kuchar, who had lived in Saxony since 1904, was told he would lose his job unless he applied for Saxon citizenship. When he did, he was refused for being Czech and ‹red from his job. Dismissals because of citizenship violated a 1929 German-Czechoslovak agreement. Still, many who lost jobs in 1933 were convinced they were ‹red for being Czechoslovaks. Certainly, most cases seem to have been dismissals of Czech, rather than German, speakers.97 Nevertheless, German-speaking Bohemians were not welcome in the Third Reich. Some had hoped that Germany’s “national revolution” would help them as well as Saxons. In June 1933, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior responded to reports of German-speaking Czechoslovak citizens entering Saxony in search of work, often claiming they were ›eeing Czechoslovak police. Their bid to use German nationalism as leverage for ‹nding work proved misguided. The ministry told districts, “Despite (our) sympathy for the dif‹cult position of the German-speaking population in Czechoslovakia, especially those sympathetic to Nazism, a large-scale immigration to Saxony is not unproblematic.” Such immigration, the ministry argued, could allow political undesirables into Germany, undermine the Sudeten German cause in Czechoslovakia, and harm a Saxon economy already dogged by unemployment.98

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National Socialists not only banned immigration to Saxony but set about purging the state of people they considered threatening. On July 14, 1933, the German government revoked the naturalization of anyone unsuited for membership in the Third Reich, especially Jews, Slavs, and socialists. District governments were ordered to review naturalizations granted since 1918 to identify those to be expelled from the body politic.99 Citizenship was increasingly equated with membership in both the German Volk and the Third Reich. People whose citizenship was revoked lost a wide range of political rights, and after the Nuremberg laws in 1935, they lost all legal rights in Germany.100 In 1933–34, Saxon of‹cials reviewed the ‹les of every person naturalized after 1918. Those who appeared suf‹ciently “German” and politically innocuous were left alone. But Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, Czechs, and their families lost their citizenship.101 Adolf Sandig, a leather worker born in Potucky/Breitenbach, received Saxon citizenship in 1921. His wife, a Saxon citizen before their marriage, regained her citizenship with Sandig’s naturalization. Sandig’s son, who was born and grew up in Saxony, was naturalized along with his father. But in 1933, the German government revoked not only Sandig’s citizenship, because he was a Communist, but also his wife’s citizenship, because she had known about his politics and had not intervened. His son, although a member of the SA, also lost his citizenship, a decision he protested vigorously.102 The Sandigs and others like them suddenly found themselves outside the law in Germany, with no claim to help from Czechoslovakia either. Worse, people like Sandig’s son, with connections to National Socialism, risked arrest if they returned to Czechoslovakia. The new rules applied to applications for naturalization as well. When Jakob Weitzenmann applied for German citizenship in September 1933, his application was rejected because he was Jewish.103 Nazi efforts to control Saxon populations were part of the process of Gleichschaltung (synchronization) that brought Reich German political, social, and cultural life under Nazi control.104 On the frontier, this proved particularly dif‹cult. The Nazis attacked political opponents, imposed censorship, and took over social organizations. But in the Saxon borderlands, they faced frequent, public, and embarrassing challenges from opponents—mostly Reich Germans—who operated in the Czechoslovak borderlands, just out of reach. Saxon Social Democrats, Communists, and Jews crossed the Czechoslovak border to escape Nazi persecution. Many settled just across the frontier and used the borderlands as a staging ground for anti-Nazi activism.105 Exiled members of the Reich German

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Social Democratic Party (SPD) organized six border secretariats in Czechoslovakia, collected information on conditions in Germany, and distributed anti-Nazi literature on both sides of the frontier.106 Socialist publications were smuggled into Germany by workers who lived in the Czechoslovak border areas and worked in Saxony, by Czechoslovak citizens who crossed the border ostensibly to shop in Saxony, and by émigrés.107 German police found propaganda in watertight containers submerged in border streams and stashed in cemeteries.108 German Communists living in Czechoslovakia posted anti-Nazi posters in trains headed to Germany. Anti-Nazi pamphlets were attached to balloons and ›oated across the border.109 German border police were told to arrest suspected émigrés. They convinced some German-speaking mayors in Czechoslovakia to give them lists of émigrés, whom they tried to lure into Germany so they could arrest them. SA members crossed into Czechoslovakia to kidnap émigrés,110 and in June 1933, the Gestapo sent lists of SPD leaders to border posts to prevent those still in the country from escaping. German of‹cials worried that émigrés not only smuggled anti-Nazi propaganda into Germany but tarnished Nazism’s image abroad.111 Dresden police complained, for example, that Social Democrat Oskar Emil Edel had ›ed to Czechoslovakia and founded a newspaper in which he was publishing caricatures of Nazi leaders, intended to “insult the German Volk . . . and damage Germany’s [international] image.”112 The Czechoslovak press, using émigré accounts, reported details of the new German regime’s violence and anti-Semitism.113 In 1935, the Dresdner Neuste Nachrichten reported that émigrés were spreading stories to scare foreigners from traveling to Nazi Germany. The paper claimed that one woman had asked whether she should bring a pistol with her to Germany for selfprotection.114 Émigrés succeeded in discom‹ting the Nazis but found Czechoslovakia an imperfect haven. The Czechoslovak government and frontier residents did not welcome Reich Germans. Émigrés posed political, national, and economic problems. Most were Social Democrats or Communists who faced arrest or worse in Germany.115 Czech nationalists argued that émigrés would undermine the country’s national balance, a concern shared by the government, which feared the growth of German-Bohemian irredentism. Moreover, émigrés strained an already struggling economy, especially as most settled in German-speaking frontier areas where the economic crisis was worst.116 The Czechoslovak government deported some émigrés to

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Germany and required all foreigners to register with the police.117 Reich German émigrés who found refuge in Czechoslovakia faced suspicion from the state, unemployed German-speaking Bohemians, and GermanBohemian and Czech nationalists. For them, state boundaries turned out to be very real. In an era when passports and citizenship had become crucial to legal existence, one could no longer join a neighboring society, however close its cultural and political ties. Overall, the Great Depression threw borderland communities into chaos and put Reich German, German-Bohemian, and Czech nationalists back in the political limelight. The Nazi rise to power was a product of the Depression and a nail in the cof‹n for German-Czechoslovak cooperation on the frontier. Of‹cially, both governments maintained “correct” relations, even as they imposed ever-stricter divisions between their states and populations. But local actors undermined this position, mounting challenges to the German and Czechoslovak states, attacking the border and border of‹cials, and con‹rming nationalists’ assertions that the frontier was a zone of con›ict and danger. By the late 1930s, competing interests and unresolved con›icts had stretched taut the relations between Germany and Czechoslovakia, between local Nazis and the Reich government, between borderland residents and their states. Local people held their breath, waiting for them to snap.

Chapter 8

“No border is eternal” The Road to Dissolution, 1933–38

In May 1934, the Sudetendeutsche Heimatbund (SHB), a Sudeten German nationalist organization in Austria and the German Reich, held a conference in Dresden. The closing ceremonies took place in Meissen, in the Albrechtsburg, hung with red and black Nazi draperies. Participants entered the church to ‹nd the pulpit decorated with Sudeten German colors; behind the pulpit hung a massive Nazi ›ag, reaching from ›oor to ceiling, the symbol of National Socialism triumphant. The Dresden Sudeten German men’s choir sang. Speakers reminded the audience of Sudeten Germans’ struggle in Czechoslovakia and of its importance to the entire German nation.1 Dresden and the Albrechtsburg were logical locations for the conference. Dresden was home to the largest branch of the SHB, and in the 1930s, Saxony had become the center of pro-Sudeten German politics in the Reich.2 German nationalists argued that Sudeten Germans’ ‹ght against Czechoslovak oppression and Saxons’ defense of German territory against Slavic aggressors constituted the ‹nal chapter of a long history of German-Slavic con›ict that made the cross-border region a crucial national frontier. Saxon nationalists told how the German dukes of Meissen had repelled Polish and Czech attackers from the Albrechtsburg in the tenth and eleventh centuries. When Czechs took control of Charles University in Prague in 1409, Saxons founded Central Europe’s ‹rst German University in Leipzig.3 Saxons withstood the “German-Czech racial con›ict” of the ‹fteenth-century Hussite Wars,4 and Saxony had weathered con›icts that spilled over from Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War. In the 1930s, nationalist writers argued that Saxons and Sudeten Germans once again 181

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stood shoulder-to-shoulder to defend German soil against the Czechs.5 The ceremony portrayed a German nation uni‹ed across political boundaries. Yet it took place at a moment of shifting ideas about national, political, and territorial community in the Reich. Sudeten German nationalists in Nazi Germany were among those competing to shape Reich German understanding of national unity and how it could be achieved. By holding their festivities at the Albrechtsburg, the SHB sent a clear message: Sudeten Germans were central to the fate of Saxony, the National Socialist Reich, and the greater German nation. Between 1933 and 1938, Saxon nationalist activists joined their Sudeten German colleagues in the Reich in contending that Saxony’s and the Sudetenland’s adjacent territories and German-speaking populations created a bulwark against the enemy—a bridge uniting the German nation. These nationalist arguments were commonplace in the mid-1930s but then had little apparent impact on the Nazi leadership in Berlin or on German policy. By 1937, that had changed. Saxon geographer Ernst Neef asserted, “Sudeten German territory is connected to a greater German national territory by way of Saxony . . . [and] the open political border,”6 and Nazi leaders in Berlin and on the Saxon frontier began to act as if they believed this. Borderlands throughout Central Europe enjoyed unprecedented political prominence in the 1930s. Early in the decade, Saxons demanded that the Reich government pay heed to their crisis-ridden borderlands, and Sudeten German activists pleaded with Reich Germans for support during economic crisis. On both sides, traditional nationalists and National Socialists competed to shape borderland policies and popular opinion. Sudeten German activists in the Reich proved disproportionately in›uential in making the Saxon-Bohemian frontier politically important. By 1937, Nazi Germany transformed German borderlands within and adjacent to the Reich into a focus of its domestic propaganda and its foreign policy. In 1938, Hitler used the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands to stage Europe’s biggest international crisis since World War I. The Nazi central government had everything it needed. Over the course of decades, frontier people had written the script, de‹ned the characters, and outlined motivations to tell a story of national con›ict, irreconcilable differences, and historical wrongs. Not all actors played their parts quite right, but the story came together, and the audiences—domestic and diplomatic—ate it up. On October 1, 1938, Nazi Germany—claiming historical legitimacy, national selfdetermination, and international approval—dissolved a border that had

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survived essentially unchanged for over three hundred years. The drama on the Albrechtsburg was merely a prelude to the larger show.

Positioning the Borderland at the Center Borderlands became a leitmotif in Nazi Germany after 1933. The Völkischer Beobachter celebrated the fact that in Hitler, Germany had a “borderland German” as chancellor—proof of a new age.7 The Nazis embraced borderland rhetoric, but until 1937, efforts to promote borderland politics came from traditional nationalists or from new organizations nominally independent of the NSDAP. Such organizations as the Association for Germandom Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland, or VDA), the Pan-German League, the Ostmarkenverein, and the SHB seized on Nazism’s volkisch ideology to promote borderland politics at home and abroad. Indeed, in 1934, the VDA declared its mission to support “the pioneer work of our comrades abroad, [as part of our] ‹ght to build the new Germany.”8 In Czechoslovakia, that work included funneling increasingly Nazi-oriented schoolbooks, money, and propaganda to Sudeten German groups.9 But far from receiving carte blanche for their projects, these organizations found themselves in tension with the NSDAP and the Reich government. Nazi leaders, including Hitler, initially showed little interest in foreign and borderland Germans. Even leaders who saw Volkstumsarbeit (nationality work) as a way to win international support for Nazism were intent on disguising government involvement that would provoke Germany’s neighbors, including Czechoslovakia.10 Thus, between 1933 and 1938, nationalist activists engaged with borderland questions were pulled between unof‹cial Reich encouragement of their projects, pressure to centralize their efforts under Reich and Nazi Party control, and competing demands of government and Nazi Party leaders to either radicalize or soft-pedal their policies.11 By 1937, these organizations either succumbed to Gleichschaltung and became de facto agents of Nazi policy or were pushed aside.12 In the meantime, they had played a key role in promoting the importance of foreign and borderland Germans for the National Socialist state and in concentrating of‹cial and popular attention on Czechoslovakia.13 Academics lavished new attention on German borderlands within and outside the Reich. They founded borderland institutes and churned out publications on German frontiers.14 This new borderlands literature was more sweeping in its claims than the literature of the 1920s and early 1930s.

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It highlighted the disjuncture between the German nation-state and the nation itself. It de‹ned borderlands not just as areas of economic decline or minority populations but as ›uid zones where entire nations and civilizations clashed, where the future of the Third Reich and of Europe itself was in play. The Nazis needed to consolidate power at home before challenging the international system. But although they discouraged frontier residents’ material attacks on Czechoslovakia, they tolerated and co-opted nationalists’ aggressive rhetoric demanding Reich help for foreign Germans. The Nazis allowed such organizations as the VDA to hold “borderland rallies” on behalf of Sudeten Germans.15 They required schools to work with the VDA to incorporate study of foreign and borderland Germans into their curriculum.16 In 1934, Arthur Graefe, an NSDAP and VDA board member who ran the Saxon Staatskanzelei’s propaganda of‹ce, made borderland status an of‹cial part of Saxony’s self-presentation and National Socialist cultural policy.17 Dresden’s mayor Ernst Zörner became head of the Saxon VDA and a “borderland” promoter.18 Thus, long before the Third Reich openly embraced an expansionist foreign policy in 1937, the Nazis had encouraged and had been shaped by a new borderland activism that promoted pan-German ideas, undermined the Versailles system, and recast the “German revolution” in international terms. Writers ›ooded the Reich with publications about borderlands—with France, Denmark, and especially Poland and Czechoslovakia. They stressed Germany’s historical strength, its victimization under the Versailles system, and its potential for a shining national future—messages at the core of Nazism.19 The ›uidity of borderlands made these arguments compelling, painting a picture in which national triumph and national peril were closely intertwined. By 1938, the Nazis had transformed borderlands into the primary battleground in the ‹ght for Germandom and National Socialism. After 1933, writers from the Saxon and Reich German borderlands returned to prewar nationalist themes, a stark contrast to borderland discussions of the 1920s and early 1930s. Gone was the idea that Bohemia’s frontier communities were a source of crippling economic competition. Indeed, Ernst Neef declared it “a crime against the nation” to regard fellow Germans as competitors.20 Instead, nationalists in the Third Reich presented the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands much as their nineteenth-century counterparts had described Bohemian language borders, emphasizing Saxons’ and Sudeten Germans’ close ties, the “German” nature of frontier

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territories, and Saxons’ and German Bohemians’ history of defending those territories from Slav encroachment. In their view, the loss of a single German job, farm, or business in Czechoslovakia was a blow to the entire German nation.21 Nationalist writers underscored the borderlands’ importance to the German state and nation and to a broader European community. Ernst Neef called “borderland” Saxony a birthplace of the German Volk and argued, “The Saxon-Bohemian [region] has a particular signi‹cance among the frontier areas that protect German-Volk territory against the Slavic East.” In addition to their dense population, strong industrial tradition, and close ties between German-speaking populations on either side, he asserted, “the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands are a portal to . . . southeastern Europe.”22 Neef, like other writers, stressed Saxony’s and the Sudetenland’s cultural and historical contributions to the German Reich and nation, the Saxon-Bohemian frontier’s long history as “German” territory, the dangers of “Czechization,” and the region’s signi‹cance to larger European communities. Borderland writers argued that Saxons and Sudeten Germans shared a region whose division by the German-Czechoslovak border was arti‹cial and destructive.23 Despite Nazi Germany’s and Czechoslovakia’s Herculean efforts to control cross-border movement, nationalist activists again told stories of the regional mobility that bound the two sides together, conferred shared dangers, and made territorial revision not only possible but necessary. Saxon borderland writers also claimed eastern borderland status to win their region the public attention and government support that Ostforschung had accorded the Prussian East.24 In 1936, geographer Oswin Poetscke argued that like Prussia, Saxony was “German” territory, reclaimed from Slavs through medieval colonization and plagued by threats of a Slavic return.25 Yet, rather than simply clutching at Prussia’s coattails, Saxon writers asserted that the Saxon-Bohemian frontier was geographically, economically, demographically, and culturally nearer the core of the German Reich and nation than other borderlands. The Nazi paper Der Freiheitskampf wrote in 1933, “Saxony is . . . in the heart of Germany, nevertheless it is a genuine borderland.”26 The Slavic threat was thus even greater there than elsewhere. Arthur Graefe wrote, “Czechoslovakia—like the armored ‹st of Slavdom—thrusts deep into German territory, directed toward Saxony.”27 Saxony and the Sudetenland simultaneously constituted eastern borderlands and the heart of Germany. Ernst Neef pointed out that unlike eastern Prussia, the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had more

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unambiguously German territory than on the Polish border and had closer cross-border national ties than in any other frontier.28 Poetschke asserted that Saxons had proven the strongest and most industrious of the German Volk since the Middle Ages, precisely because they had been the only people willing to conquer a ›uid frontier region open to Slavic attack. “The Saxon Volk,” he wrote, “[must] be understood in terms of the Eastern German struggle for self-assertion in the rewon Heimat.”29 Thus, even as Hitler declared Germany a “thousand-year Reich,” Saxon writers declared that their state’s importance lay in its position as a “thousand-year German borderland.”30 Early on, German-Bohemian nationalists in Saxony led the way in de‹ning the border with Czechoslovakia as the core issue for the region’s “German revolution.” The SHB became the principal German-Bohemian nationalist organization in the Reich, and after 1933, its strongest support was in Saxony. One SHB leader told Saxon of‹cials, “Saxony’s . . . self-interest demands that it intervene on behalf of Sudeten Germans.”31 The SHB demanded border revision long before Reich Germans or GermanBohemian nationalists in Czechoslovakia embraced the idea. In 1933, they marched in Dresden’s May Day parade under banners reading “Into the Reich!” and called for Germany’s borders to be realigned with the Czechoslovak language border. The Czechoslovak consulate in Berlin protested the SHB’s openly anti-Czechoslovak rhetoric and demands for territorial revision, as well as German of‹cials’ refusal to intervene. In 1933 and 1934, both the Saxon and Reich governments tried to discourage the SHB’s more dramatic gestures, for fear of antagonizing Czechoslovakia, and they eventually brought the organization under unof‹cial government control. Reich of‹cials then believed that Germany was in no position to intervene directly in Czechoslovakia.32 German-Bohemian frontier nationalists claimed a central position in Germany and Europe in the 1920s, long before their Reich German counterparts made similar arguments for Reich frontier regions. After 1933, Sudeten German activists in the Reich stepped up such rhetoric. Rudolf Lochner argued, Sudeten German territory, especially in Bohemia, is a core area of German Mitteleuropa . . . The natural treasures of this area are extraordinarily important. Bohemia was once the heartland of Germania . . . Seen thus, the Sudeten German question is of great urgency to the Reich.33

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In short, while the Reich was important, its boundaries did not yet encompass all of “Germany.” Herr Beer, head of the SHB in Germany, reportedly declared in 1933, “German Bohemia belongs . . . to Grossdeutschland, whose true boundaries are one and the same with the language borders.”34 Sudeten Germans, activists in Germany claimed, had to defend their territory from being subsumed by Czechoslovakia and lost to the greater German national community. Writers stressed that the Sudetenland was a clearly de‹ned German-speaking territory almost as large as Belgium and much larger than Alsace-Lorraine and that Sudeten Germans were the third-largest German-speaking population in Europe after Germany and Austria. Lochner argued in 1937 that the Third Reich must recognize that Bohemia had been the center of the ‹rst German Reich.35 Sudeten-German activists in the Reich further suggested that German speakers in Bohemia and Moravia had long been cultural bridges between Western and Eastern Europe, exposing Czechs to the civilizing in›uence of Western culture. Problems arose only in the nineteenth century, these writers claimed, when the Czechs turned against everything German and denounced the natural eastward ›ow of culture and enlightenment as a German “Drang nach Osten” (Push to the East). 36 Nationalists in the Third Reich used borderland rhetoric to advocate revising the Versailles system.37 Shifting away from earlier discussions about mobility across the frontier, they now suggested that the border itself was movable. In 1935, for example, the SHB in Dresden held a rally entitled “The Injustice of the Peace Treaty of Saint Germain” and argued that German-speaking Bohemia should not be part of Czechoslovakia.38 The SHB had made similar claims for years, but by 1938, ideas that the Reich government had quashed as radical and politically dangerous in 1934 had now become commonplace. Historian Walter Schlesinger wrote, “Our Saxon task is to keep watch over the borderlands and to support the Sudeten Germans . . . History has taught us that borderlands are zones of con›ict . . . Thus no border is eternal.”39 Similarly, geographer Rudolf Käubler asserted, “[Few people realize] that the [Bohemian] border has been very changeable historically . . . For a millennium, [it] was a border within the German Reich, not a border against the Reich.”40 A chorus of authors called the Saxon-Bohemian frontier’s legitimacy into question, observing that it was neither a “natural border” nor a national and linguistic one.41 Käubler argued, “Czechoslovakia is not yet twenty years old, and yet it claims its state borders as a right . . . [But] it is generally recognized that almost no part of Czechoslovakia’s boundaries can be called a national . . .

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[or] cultural border. German culture is apparent even in its landscapes— the ‹elds, villages, and cities.”42 Paul Wagner, writing to Saxon postsecondary teachers, called Czechoslovakia “a textbook example of a state created in criminal fashion in disregard for nature.”43 In September 1938, the Saxon Vogtländischer Anzeiger warned readers that unless state boundaries changed, Saxons and Sudeten Germans alike were at risk. Volk comrades from the Sudetenland are suffering under a brutal regime . . . The border tears apart not only a national area but also a tightly interconnected economic region. From an economic point of view, the border is arti‹cial, like the entire Czechoslovak state. And arti‹cial borders create unrest.44 In short, 1930s borderland writers framed the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands as a test case for the failure of the Versailles system. Some writers echoed nineteenth-century Heimat writers’ descriptions of the Saxon-Bohemian frontier’s interconnected landscapes, to argue that the border was illusory. In 1937, Emil Lehman, a Sudeten German nationalist who had ›ed Czechoslovakia for the Reich in 1935, quoted the adage “The most beautiful part of the Saxon Erzgebirge is Bohemian.” In his view, the frontier’s uni‹ed landscape reinforced the message that the political border was neither natural nor legitimate.45 Germany never of‹cially repudiated claims to territorial revision in the east as it had in the west.46 Calls for border revision were not at odds with Nazi ideology, although before 1937, they typically came from nonNSDAP nationalists and sometimes clashed with of‹cial Reich foreign policy. The Nazis had supported claims to the “lost” German lands incorporated into Poland since the early 1920s. But Saxon nationalists’ demands were more radical than Prussia’s. They were not claiming territory lost after World War I but demanding the dissolution of a political boundary that had stood almost unchanged since 1635. They hearkened back to the few prewar Saxon and German-Bohemian radical nationalists who had called for Anschluss and Grossdeutschland, and they declared themselves and their German-Bohemian neighbors on a par with other eastern “borderland” Germans. Nationalists in Saxony expanded on another nineteenth-century nationalist mantra: that the frontier’s future would be decided largely by the willingness of Germans on either side to embrace national consciousness and the duties it entailed. Nationalists writing in the 1930s expressed hope

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that National Socialism was ‹nally awakening Reich Germans to the fact that Germandom and Germans’ national obligations extended beyond the Reich’s boundaries.47 Nevertheless, writers noted that the process was still incomplete. In 1934, Dresden SHB leader Herr Rössler argued that the organization existed in part to educate Reich Germans about the plight of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, “since a large number [of Reich Germans] have not yet embraced Grossdeutsch ideas.” He lamented, “It is not easy to ‹nd idealists in [Bohemia] or among Sudeten Germans in the Reich. [Many] German politicians in Bohemia and Volksgenossen in the Reich . . . exploit real Sudeten Germans for their own sel‹sh ends.”48 Saxon nationalists seem to have been more optimistic. Arthur Graefe wrote in 1934, It took a decade and a half for German Volk consciousness . . . to awaken in the Reich—a decade and a half during which our German brothers across the border struggled nearly alone . . . Only under National Socialism . . . has the [Reich] German ‹nally recognized that the position of his fellow nationals in the borderlands and [outside the Reich] is more dif‹cult than his own and that they bear an especially heavy responsibility for the preservation of Germandom. He has learned that this zone will decide part of the German future.49 Similarly, Ernst Neef argued that Saxons bore a greater responsibility than most Reich Germans to maintain contact with German speakers across the border. He warned, “Czechs and traitors to the German Volk are trying, by means of lies about conditions in National Socialist Germany, to open a chasm between Reich Germans and foreign Germans.”50 Neef suggested that Marxists in northern Bohemia were distorting Sudeten Germans’ understanding of the Reich so as to turn the border into a barrier between the Reich and German-speaking Bohemians. He argued that “a glance across the border, personal contact with neighbors in the Reich, destroys the lies . . . better than any explanation.”51

Changes in Bohemia During the ‹rst years of the Third Reich, a glance into Czechoslovakia would have shown that German-speaking Bohemians were far from united in support for the Reich, Nazism, Anschluss, or even opposition to Czecho-

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slovakia. Granted, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany raised some Sudeten German nationalists’ hopes that Nazi Germany would prove a valuable ally. The Czechoslovak government, afraid that the wave of German nationalist enthusiasm on the frontier signaled dangerous irredentism, cracked down on the Czechoslovak German National Socialist Party (DNSAP), which dissolved in September 1933. But most German-Bohemian nationalists still wanted to unify German speakers within Czechoslovakia and win regional autonomy, rather than be absorbed into the Reich.52 The DNSAP’s dissolution and in‹ghting among German-Bohemian nationalists opened the way for a new German-Bohemian political movement. In October 1933, Konrad Henlein founded the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront, a nationalist organization that attracted supporters across the German-Bohemian political spectrum.53 In 1935, the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront, renamed the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP), won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections, emerging as the largest political party in Czechoslovakia. Henlein’s party was neither a reincarnation of the DNSAP nor clearly irredentist in 1935.54 Its lack of ideological de‹nition, apparently contradictory policies, and diverse membership produced both its mass appeal and its ultimate slide toward Nazism. Henlein’s simultaneous völkisch nationalism, repudiation of Pan-German and Pan-Slavic ideas, and declaration of conditional support for Czechoslovakia made the organization a haven for both negativist (anti-Czechoslovak) and activist German-speaking Bohemians. Until 1937, Henlein and the SdP formally rejected identi‹cation with National Socialist Germany. Yet the SdP’s radical factions—often led by former DNSAP members—ignored party orthodoxy and used Nazi Germany as a foil for Czechoslovakia, celebrating Hitler’s “economic miracles” and deriding their own government for its indifference to German-speaking Bohemians’ economic woes.55 Henlein and the SdP won the 1935 election with the help of funding from the Reich VDA (some originating within the Reich government). But the image of Sudeten German unity and political prowess that emerged from the election was misleading. Henlein soon found his traditional nationalism under siege from radicals, often former DNSAP members, with allies in the Reich. He appealed to Reich nationalist organizations, such as the VDA, and eventually to Nazi leaders in the Reich government to help mediate the con›ict. He tried to stop the cooperation between Reich and Sudeten German radicals that provoked the Czechoslovak government and fractured German-speaking Bohemian political in›uence. Although Henlein failed to arouse Hitler’s interest in the Sudeten German cause be-

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fore 1937, his efforts left him inextricably entangled—‹nancially and politically—with the Reich. By 1937, control of German nationalist politics was in the hands of radicals on both sides of the border, not because of leaders like Hitler and Henlein, but because of local radicals who maintained cross-border contacts and pursued their own extreme policies. The radicals’ efforts were bolstered by SS power grabs and by people like Hans Krebs, a DNSAP émigré in Germany who undermined support for Henlein in Czechoslovakia and for traditional nationalists within the Reich. In 1937, the SS took control of Reich nationalist projects aimed at foreign and borderland Germans. In desperation, Henlein cast his lot with Hitler, who was ‹nally showing interest in Czechoslovakia.56 Henlein’s contacts in the Reich and his party’s commendation of Reich National Socialism’s achievements were consistent with decadeslong Bohemian political practice. Borderland politicians in Bohemia and Saxony had long used comparisons with and connections to the neighboring state as leverage with their own central governments. These actions did not necessarily imply loyalty to Hitler. But Nazi Germany was not a typical neighbor. In 1936, it followed up its aggressive rhetoric against the Versailles system by withdrawing from the League of Nations, intervening in the Spanish civil war, asserting political in›uence over Austria, and remilitarizing the Rhineland. Given this context, nationalist intervention by the VDA and similar Reich organizations assumed an increasingly sinister aspect. Although Henlein claimed allegiance to Czechoslovakia until 1937, negativist nationalists often ran the show on the local level, thwarting Henlein’s attempts to moderate nationalist demands and leading many Czechoslovaks to question Sudeten-German nationalists’ professions of loyalty to the state.57 The Czechoslovak government was well aware that Nazi Germany was a dangerous neighbor, one that could prove disastrous if Germanspeaking Bohemians decided to join the “German revolution.” Moreover, the Czechoslovak press reminded the public that Germany was tracking events in their country and preparing to interfere outside its territory.58 The state’s fear of irredentism prompted new policies in frontier areas. In 1934, a Czech Agrarian Party deputy suggested creating a ten-kilometer zone along the German border in which only Czech speakers would be allowed to settle, a suggestion that enraged German-speaking Bohemians.59 The Czechoslovak government did not take such drastic measures but did impose new restrictions on mobility and trade along the frontier.60 It replaced local of‹cials whose loyalties it mistrusted—sometimes just because

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they were German speakers—with Czech speakers or German-speaking socialists—thereby reinforcing German-Bohemian nationalists’ longstanding cries of “Czechization.” Meanwhile, escalating German nationalist rhetoric on both sides of the frontier seemed to con‹rm Czech nationalists’ warnings that German speakers intended to secede from Czechoslovakia.61 In 1936, Czechoslovakia granted the military broad powers within a border zone of twenty-‹ve kilometers.62 Czechs’ fears of Sudeten German radicalism found expression in nationalist activism as well as of‹cial policy. After 1933, membership in Czech nationalist organizations rose rapidly, and Czech nationalist activist tactics became more aggressive, especially in frontier areas. In northern Bohemia, the Národní jednota severoceská began reporting “antistate” activity in the borderlands to the Czechoslovak government. Members of such nationalist groups proved eager to denounce German Bohemians as unreliable, and denunciations often led to the loss of a passport or professional license.63 After 1935, Czech nationalists made unprecedented efforts to promote Czech Sokols, cultural institutions, and tourism in the borderlands. Hranicari held frequent pro-Czechoslovak demonstrations in frontier towns.64 Yet in 1938, hranicari in Liberec/Reichenberg reported that these efforts had not stemmed the tide: “Every gymnastics club, ‹re brigade, movie house, and theater is under the in›uence of Henlein and Third Reich propaganda.” Antifascist German speakers, the article continued, faced beggary and terror at the hands of the Henleinists.65

The Understudy Takes Center Stage Frontier residents had front-row seats from which to observe the contradictions, ›uctuations, failures, and downright inanity of their leaders. Governments’ lack of attention gave local actors—including Nazi, Sudeten German, and Czech nationalist radicals—relatively free rein. As states’ abrupt, seemingly arbitrary changes in political direction alienated borderland residents, local communities embraced increasingly radical tactics. In 1937, Saxon Nazis returned to the blatant violations of Czechoslovak territorial sovereignty that had been commonplace in 1933. Public expressions of contempt for Czechoslovakia seemed to spread from frontier radicals to the Nazi leadership in Berlin. On the Czechoslovak side, the borderlands stayed in focus both because they were the center of Sudeten German activism and because the

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Czech nationalist press kept them and the Czech hranicari in the public eye. In January 1933, an article in Národní politika described “the dif‹cult life of the Czech hranicar” and informed readers that Czechs in the borderlands were in an increasingly tenuous position.66 In 1935, the Klub ceskoslovenských turistu urged its readers to remember that “[the northern borderlands] are also ours, they are Czechoslovak, and Czechs should feel at home there.”67 By 1937, the Czech press was full of headlines asking such questions as “Are the state borders suf‹ciently guarded?”68 The Czechoslovak government asked itself the same question as it became clear that Nazi propaganda and Sudeten German radicalism could join forces in the borderlands.69 In Saxony, local people anticipated a crisis with foreboding. Social Democrats reported, “Those who remember the last war . . . despair at the prospect of another con›ict.”70 Nazis—‹rst locally, but later joined by the central government—went about creating a crisis. Saxon frontier residents’ unease owed much to the militarization of the borderlands, which began in 1934 and was unmistakable after 1937. In 1934, Saxon industries were enlisted to produce military uniforms, boots, and other gear. As German Social Democrats in exile reported, there was not “a single unemployed saddler in all of Saxony.”71 SA troops and military exercises near the border created “the popular conviction that the Third Reich is preparing materially, economically, and psychologically for war—and indeed trying to provoke it.”72 In fact, the Reich government was not planning an attack on Czechoslovakia in 1934, and Reich authorities tried to keep military preparations below the public’s radar. According to reports, many Saxons were convinced that a war between the two countries was not only coming but would devastate frontier communities.73 Unable to trust either government pronouncements or press reports, people judged by events. They interpreted local Nazis’ actions (often mistakenly) as re›ections of broader policy and were acutely aware—as leaders in Berlin were not—of the permeability of the frontier. The 1936 German occupation of the Rhineland sparked new anxiety, heightened when authorities held training sessions on how to deal with bombing raids and gas masks and when the press reported that the Soviets were sending troops to Czechoslovakia.74 By 1937, the Reich’s hostility to Czechoslovakia was on full display.75 Frontier policing expanded dramatically. One stretch of the Saxon frontier had employed eighteen customs of‹cials and two gendarmes in 1932; in 1937, it had a force of over one hundred of‹cials, including many SA, SS, or Wehrmacht soldiers. Saxon authorities began preparing frontier people

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for war in earnest. Military maneuvers on the frontier became commonplace—training soldiers, accustoming locals to a military presence, and putting on a show of saber rattling for Czechoslovaks. Saxon border communities were treated to screenings of military-themed ‹lms, and Sudeten German supporters were allowed to sneak across the border to watch them.76 In November, Saxon border communities were barraged with antiCzechoslovak propaganda declaring Beneš a swindler and claiming that the Czechs were intent on “bolshevizing” Europe. Nazi of‹cials held public meetings to announce that Czechoslovakia was building military bunkers and road barriers along the frontier—evidence, they claimed, of its hostile intentions. They even organized guided tours of those projects from the German side.77 In Czechoslovakia, Konrad Henlein and the SdP signaled the end of their pretensions to cooperation by adopting the Nazi salute and other trappings of National Socialism.78 The Czechoslovak government responded to these aggressive stances by deploying a 1936 state defense law to strictly police the German-speaking borderlands. They increased the number of border police, giving them wide discretion to act. Frontier residents soon complained that seemingly arbitrary decisions about who was politically reliable were disrupting life and undermining support for the state. The Czechoslovak government now subjected people they deemed suspicious to numerous inconveniences, such as seizing their passports when they tried—legally—to visit relatives in Saxony. Czechoslovakia also strengthened its border protections, stationing more police and troops along the perimeter. By May 1937, it had begun building defense forti‹cations: earthworks, trenches, and cement barriers at border crossings. By December, the government had forbidden people on the Czechoslovak side to enter border forests, and it planted trees to make forest paths impassable.79 Although such measures were taken to defend the Czechoslovak state, the fact that many soldiers carrying them out began calling themselves hranicari blurred the line between nationalist and government action. This contributed to claims on both sides that con›ict between the Reich and Czechoslovakia was synonymous with con›ict between the Czech and German nations, despite the fact that German-speaking Czechoslovaks still numbered among the state’s loyalists.80 Nazi Germany’s barrage of propaganda in the Saxon borderlands left no doubt in locals’ minds that the Reich was preparing for war with Czechoslovakia. Yet German assessments of the form that con›ict might take swung wildly between fear and overcon‹dence. At one extreme, they

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bragged that Czechoslovakia was so weak that the Reich could invade with the local ‹re brigade. At the other, they warned darkly that Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union were assembling a formidable force to attack Germany by way of Saxony. In November 1937, party leaders assured Saxon Nazis that Hitler was working to keep good relations with Czechoslovakia. Yet at the same time, authorities in frontier communities were distributing gas masks, setting off nightly warning sirens, and dragging people from their beds to dig trenches along the border—confusing and irritating even the party faithful.81 People, goods, and information continued crossing the border, legally and illegally, in the mid-1930s. But Saxon Nazis took steps to control such mobility. They promoted cross-border contacts they considered advantageous, and they hindered those that undermined their authority. By 1936, they began systematically discouraging ordinary citizens from going to Czechoslovakia, using travel bans, fees, propaganda, and rumors.82 In 1937, German of‹cials even succeeded in pressuring Czechoslovakia to move Reich German émigrés out of Bohemian border areas so that they would be less able to wield cross-border political in›uence. Saxon border police began ‹ling reports with the Gestapo on Czechoslovak citizens crossing the border, including their names, origin, where they were going, and how much money they carried.83 Reich German of‹cials knew that too much unmediated cross-border contact would expose the exaggerations and outright lies that riddled German propaganda about Czechoslovakia and its German-speaking minority. Border guards told Reich citizens that Czechoslovak police would spy on them, seize their cameras, and even arrest them just for being Reich Germans. A customs of‹cial in Johanngeorgenstadt accused would-be border crossers of supporting Germany’s enemies when they went to a Czechoslovak pub.84 In 1937–38, as the Nazis inundated frontier communities with anti-Czechoslovak propaganda, border police became ever more vigorous in hampering casual excursions into Czechoslovakia. When people applied for passports and borderland passes, the police often visited their homes to ask why they wanted the documents; those with papers were refused renewals. Applicants were warned that they could face arrest, food shortages, and worse in Czechoslovakia. Police forbade people they considered politically unreliable to go near the border, sometimes relocating them to other parts of Germany.85 Even when Saxons were allowed to visit Bohemian pubs, Gestapo spies kept track of whom they met, what they talked about, and the political reputations of the establishments they visited.86

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By 1938, after relentless propaganda and efforts to isolate ordinary Saxons from their Czechoslovak neighbors, those who could cross were sometimes surprised to ‹nd that Czechoslovak communities were quiet, food was available, and people could speak German in public.87 The contradictions between of‹cial truth and conditions on the ground forced local people to engage in convoluted behavior. When, for instance, Strength through Joy tourists visited the Saxon frontier, they were forbidden to visit Czechoslovakia, where, they were assured, dangers and food shortages awaited them. Yet when one group visited a Saxon restaurant, the restaurateur, on running out of supplies, sent his servant to smuggle some from Czechoslovakia. Such experiences meant that people in the immediate borderlands considered an attack on Czechoslovakia neither as necessary nor as desirable as their countrymen farther inland believed.88 After just a few years of Nazi rule, they had learned to view all political claims with great skepticism. Saxon Nazis and local SdP of‹cials used cross-border mobility to win over and control German-speaking Czechoslovaks as well. Social Democratic observers commented, “[National Socialists use] the close economic and ethnographic relations between Sudeten German territory and neighboring German areas [to spread propaganda] . . . especially along the Saxon-Bohemian border.”89 After strictly curtailing foreign labor after 1933, Saxony again began recruiting Bohemian workers in 1937–38. This re›ected an upswing in production for remilitarization but was also a way to extend political in›uence across the frontier. Only members of the SdP or other German-Bohemian nationalist organizations were eligible for jobs in the Reich.90 One observer claimed, “ An SdP party card is now more important in Germany than a passport,” and Reich authorities of‹cially accepted SdP cards in lieu of passports. Saxon Nazis, Henleinists, and the German-Bohemian nationalist press declared the labor recruitment proof that “the Third Reich looks after its own.”91 Because these jobs offered better pay than jobs in Czechoslovakia and, by summer 1938, signi‹cantly reduced unemployment in some Bohemian frontier communities, popular support for the SdP and the Third Reich rose among German-speaking Bohemians.92 Nazi of‹cials reinforced the message about the Third Reich’s generosity by ensuring that Saxon border communities that employed these workers were well supplied with butter and other foods in short supply elsewhere in Germany. Even so, some Czechoslovaks returned home disillusioned after getting a glimpse of real conditions in the Reich.93 Nazi recruiters welcomed politically approved German-Bohemian

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workers to the Reich, but many Saxons were disgusted. Some accused these workers of undercutting local wages. Others complained, “They irritate Reich workers with their enthusiasm for Hitler.”94 One report noted, “Czechoslovak workers are instantly recognizable. They dress in black riding pants and black boots, just like the SS.” They were widely resented for their political fanaticism and eagerness to denounce coworkers.95 Labor migration not only seduced German-speaking Bohemians with work and consumer goods. It also allowed the Third Reich, by way of Saxon Nazi functionaries, to contribute to the Gleichschaltung already underway in the Czechoslovak borderlands.96 People had to join the SdP to qualify for jobs in the Reich, which sometimes meant ‹rst resigning as Social Democrats. But they could lose those jobs if they or their families were caught cooperating with Czechoslovak authorities, participating in a Social Democratic political protest, or shopping at Jewish or Communist stores in Czechoslovakia.97 Even those who did not work abroad had to face the SdP’s paramilitary organization, Freiwilligen Schutzdienst, which discouraged dissent with terror tactics reminiscent of the SA in the early 1930s.98 By spring 1938, Národní listy observed that German-speaking Czechoslovaks were increasingly torn: they must either join the Henleinists or be excluded from the German-Bohemian national community.99 In early March 1938, Saxons watched as troops were trucked to the Czechoslovak frontier. Border communities braced themselves as it became clear that Hitler was poised to invade Austria. There were runs on banks and food shops, and an SA member in Chemnitz reportedly said, “The bigwigs are quaking in their boots, ’cuz this means war, and that’ll be the end of them!”100 On both sides of the frontier, people concluded that after the Austrian Anschluss, they were next, a view reinforced by international reports of Reich military planes over Czechoslovakia.101 The Austrian invasion changed the political dynamics on the SaxonBohemian frontier. Over the next months, Saxon Nazis transformed frontier communities into stages on which to perform the Third Reich’s power for Czechoslovak audiences. Saxon Nazis pointed loudspeakers into Czechoslovakia and broadcast Hitler’s speeches, Reich propaganda, and local National Socialist events. They conducted military exercises in sight of Czechoslovak towns and decorated houses facing Bohemia with political messages and swastika banners.102 When the Reich held a referendum on the annexation of Austria on April 10, 1938, German-speaking Bohemians were bused to Saxony, where they met with ›ags, marching bands, and signs reading “Welcome to the Homeland.” In one area, a military ve-

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hicle drove along the border with a loudspeaker blaring “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” into Bohemia. On the Saxon side, local NSDAP of‹cials spoke openly of the need to “free Sudeten Germans from their chains.”103 Sudeten German groups in Saxony organized protests against Czechoslovak “repression.” One factory gathered its Czechoslovak workers to lecture them on the signi‹cance of the Austrian Anschluss and the future of Czechoslovakia. In summer 1938, the SdP joined its Reich colleagues in frontier demonstrations. At Einsiedel in July, eight hundred Sudeten Germans marched near the border, singing and waving ›ags. Reich Germans gathered on the other side, and the two groups cried “Heil!” and sang at one another until Czechoslovak police dispersed them. In August, Germany began radio broadcasts in Czech that celebrated the Reich’s close ties to Henlein and the SdP. Some propaganda may have won the Reich supporters or frightened its opponents. It did unsettle people on both sides, who braced themselves for certain con›ict.104 On May 21, Czechoslovakia mobilized troops in response to the Reich, prompting renewed military posturing and popular dismay on both sides.105 Austrian SA members popped up along the Saxon border as “vacationers,” and the Reich press ‹lled with stories of “Sudeten German refugees” ›eeing Czechoslovak aggression. In Chemnitz, rumors that the military was headed to Czechoslovakia sparked a new run on banks and food supplies.106 Czechoslovakia’s military mobilization provoked a new wave of German-speaking Bohemian migrants to Saxony—young men ›eeing military service—who met with hostility from Saxon civilians and of‹cials alike. Some deserters were greeted by Nazi of‹cials as victims of Czechoslovak repression. But even then, the Gestapo investigated their claims for asylum and assigned them jobs outside the border areas.107 Many new arrivals were shocked to ‹nd that their “German brothers” did not welcome them. In fact, a Saxon policeman expressed widespread popular opinion when he told would be deserters, “You cowards! . . . we have enough unemployed already!”108 By summer 1938, Nazis and SdP activists had created a climate of fear on both sides of the border. Yet they still faced considerable skepticism, opposition, and indifference from locals.109 Czech hranicari and non-Henleinist groups held pro-Czechoslovak demonstrations. They revived a nineteenth-century political tactic by calling for boycotts of Sudeten German and Reich German goods, a strategy that Sudeten German textile companies complained was working.110 A radio station in Melnik that began

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broadcasts to Germany to counteract Nazi propaganda quickly gained a large audience. Some Czechoslovaks who worked in Saxony on the basis of their “German” national credentials continued to send their children to Czech-language schools in Bohemia.111 Some in the Czechoslovak government argued that their “borderland Germans” and multinational population offered an alternative to the exclusionary nationalism of Nazi Germany—a model in which state allegiances and the Versailles balance of political power and population allowed a truer German national identity to ›ourish.112 Such arguments did ‹gure in public debate. The Czech press reminded readers not to overrate German-Bohemian nationalist rhetoric and the SdP’s visibility. Numerous articles stressed that most people along the frontier were living their lives normally and that the borderlands remained territories characterized by the coexistence of their multinational populations and a shared economic interest in preserving Czechoslovakia.113 Certainly, the papers were right that frontier people were not uni‹ed in opposition to Czechoslovakia—or in much of anything else.

Chaos in the Last Days The borderlands plunged into crisis in the summer and autumn of 1938 because local people, political leaders, and international observers believed they would. Neither Hitler nor Henlein orchestrated the crisis. Henlein ›oundered, hampered by opposition within his own party and hoping for help from the Reich, while Hitler stalled, waiting for Henlein to test the waters before he committed himself. Local radicals did not band together to triumph over their more cautious neighbors and states. They remained divided, working separately and often at cross-purposes. Disunity, chaos, and insecurity ‹nally pushed events to a breaking point. Borderland residents remained uneasy and frontier communities volatile after the Austrian Anschluss and the Czechoslovak mobilization. People on both sides were terri‹ed of war. Many feared they would lose what little political leverage they had. Various players manufactured con›ict just to keep their hands in the pie. The more they did so, the more everyone felt compelled to in›ate their political rhetoric and tactics. Citizens had little con‹dence in their states, and political leaders—even those nominally in the same camp—distrusted one another. Hitler and Henlein had met in March, a meeting that left Henlein with instructions to mire the Czechoslovak government in protracted negotia-

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tions and impossible demands. In return, he received a vague assurance of backing from the Reich. But as Henlein negotiated and Hitler looked on, local radicals in Saxony and Bohemia spread rumors of immediate Anschluss, promised shipments of arms to Sudeten German militias, staged demonstrations, and distributed propaganda urging revolt against Czechoslovakia. The Reich German press churned out an ever-increasing wave of invective against Czechoslovakia, frequently referring to “Czech terror.” Reich of‹cials, Sudeten German leaders, and the Czechoslovak government reacted with distress but could not rein in the radicals.114 When the Czechoslovak government tried to ease public anxiety by allowing German-speaking Bohemians freer political expression and discouraged rumors of imminent invasion, Czech nationalist groups provoked new clashes with Sudeten Germans, while local SdP representatives organized demonstrations in de‹ance of the Czechoslovak government and their own party leaders.115 The incidents were often highly local—a protest, an SA raid across the border, a bloom of swastika ›ags, a rash of propaganda lea›ets. But in the climate of 1938, small events took on international proportions, especially when viewed from afar. In addition to seeking help from the Reich, Henlein had, since 1936, cultivated ties to British conservatives—part of a strategy to win the SdP leverage through international recognition and support.116 In the summer of 1938, international recognition came into play. Some British conservatives’ sympathies for Sudeten Germans, combined with Neville Chamberlain’s desire to avoid war, led the British government to demand a solution to the “Sudeten German problem.” Seen from London, unrest in the Czechoslovak borderlands, Reich German incursions across the border, and aggressive German nationalist rhetoric on both sides seemed to signal both a real danger of war and a German-Bohemian consensus in favor of fundamental political change. The British government and other international observers did not know that many protesters were uncoordinated and at odds with one another and that political rhetoric—including Henlein’s—often demanded more than its creators really wanted. From a distance, economic protests, SA yahoos’ antics, SdP leaders’ attempts at political self-preservation, and Czechoslovak efforts at state defense all seemed to con‹rm the narrative of national and territorial con›ict that nationalists had made since the nineteenth century. But this time, local actors, the German and Czechoslovak governments, and the international community also assumed—as they had never done before—that those di-

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visions had the potential to fundamentally change the demographic and territorial boundaries of Central Europe. All Hitler had to do was agree. On September 12, Hitler railed against Czechoslovakia at the NSDAP party congress in Nuremberg. Two days later, Henlein broke off negotiations with the Czechoslovak government and ›ed to Bavaria, whence he declared on behalf of all Sudeten Germans, “Wir wollen Heim ins Reich!” (We want to return home to the Reich!) On September 14, Chamberlain asked to meet with Hitler and signaled his willingness to entertain any German proposal on the “Sudeten question.” Czechoslovakia, its Germanspeaking minority, and their Saxon neighbors were barred from the of‹cial denouement of the crisis they had nurtured. Invited or not, frontier people were as present at the borderlands’ demise as they had been at their making. In the last days before the Munich conference, Czechoslovak soldiers made desperate attempts to further fortify the border against attack—quelling unrest, manning bunkers along the border, and setting up roadblocks and tank barriers.117 Many Czechoslovak citizens—Czech speakers and German speakers alike—braced for a ‹ght. In some places, the battle was over even before the international leaders gathered. Near Aš/Asch and Cheb /Eger, Sudetendeutsche Freikorps (SF) members disarmed local Czechoslovak police, who retreated, leaving the area in the hands of the SF and the Saxon SA on September 22. On September 25, Czechoslovak troops abandoned a stretch of the Silesian border.118 Along the rest of the frontier, soldiers, police, and local people waited with bated breath to see what would happen next. On September 29, 1938, Britain and France agreed to Hitler’s demands that the Czechoslovak borderlands, now of‹cially known as the “Sudetenland,” be ceded to Germany. Eduard Beneš, faced with a diplomatic fait accompli, was forced to withdraw Czechoslovak troops inside the new borders of a truncated Czechoslovak state. News of the agreement reached the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands on the morning of September 30. People gathered at border crossings where police still stood on both sides. At a crossing near Cinovec/Zinnwald, someone placed a radio in a window so that it could be heard in the street below. The gathered crowd listened to the announcement of the agreement from Munich, followed by an announcement from Prague. Police and border guards withdrew from crossings and raised barriers. Well ahead of the invading German army, local Saxons streamed across. The border had fallen.119

Epilogue

Occupation, Expulsion, and Resurrection

Some frontier residents celebrated this Anschluss by attacking the stones that had marked the political border for centuries. But far from endorsing such popular enthusiasm for the grossdeutsche Reich, the Saxon Ministry of the Interior admonished local of‹cials to stop the destruction. The ministry maintained, “Since the homecoming of the Sudeten German areas into the Reich, the former border has lost its meaning as a division between states. But it remains a district and property division.”1 In short, Germany’s occupation of the Czechoslovak frontier moved the international boundary but failed to erase the old borderlands from administrative practice or popular imagination. The sense that Saxon and Bohemian frontier territories and populations were both distinct and fundamentally interconnected persisted through World War II into the postwar era. This shaped the expulsions of German speakers from Czechoslovakia, the resettlement and administrative reorganization of both sides under Communist rule, and the reemergence of the cross-border region in the 1990s. The Saxon-Bohemian borderlands’ story is, as Henri Lefebvre claims of all boundaries, one of “ambiguous continuity.”2 Unprecedented mobility produced a vibrant cross-border community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the period in which local people and states began describing the region as a borderland. Still, some aspects of cross-border life were evident as far back as the Middle Ages, while others continued until after World War II. In the 1990s, this persistent belief in a common region prompted borderland residents to win recognition for three cross-border Euroregions between Saxony and the Czech Republic from the Associ202

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ation of European Border Regions. The story of the Saxon-Bohemian frontier is therefore a tale neither of a multicultural paradise lost nor of a multinational society doomed to con›ict and self-destruction. Transnational spaces persist or reemerge despite major political and demographic changes because they are both adaptable and compelling. But historical continuities can take startling forms. From the 1890s through World War II, Reich German, German-Bohemian, and Czech nationalists had fought to transform the borderlands into a homogeneous Czech and German space. Indeed, many German speakers hailed the Nazi takeover as the culmination of these efforts. Yet it was Czechoslovak and East German Communists who made the borderlands a (truly) national divide. Asserting the primacy of state power over local interests to an unprecedented degree, they severed social, economic, and political ties that had bound frontier communities together, and they ignored the territories’ shared past in their of‹cial histories. Communists completed a process that states had begun in earnest during World War I: documenting and controlling the ›ow of people, goods, and information within their territories and using state borders as primary sites of state surveillance and regulation. But despite their unprecedented success, they failed to completely eradicate the idea that the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands exist and that they matter.

Occupation and War Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Bohemian frontier extended regional economic interdependence, labor migration, and borderland rhetoric even as it dissolved a centuries-old political divide. The occupation zone became a new German province—the Reichsgau Sudetenland or Sudetengau— whose borderland status proved a source of growing tension between the Reich government and Sudeten German leaders. Frontiers shaped northern Bohemians’ assessments of the German occupation. Consumers and producers alike continued to use resources on both sides of the old frontier. Nationalists still saw the “borderland struggle” as central to the German national cause. All soon learned that the region’s new status changed the rules of the game. In October 1938, Germany banned all but military traf‹c between Saxony and the new Sudetengau. When travel resumed in December, Bohemians faced a new consumer “invasion” from the Altreich (Old Empire). An observer reported from Nejdek/Neudek, “On the ‹rst day . . . an al-

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most unbroken column of cars and buses streamed into Neudek and onward to Karlsbad . . . By evening even Karlsbad’s well-stocked shops were sold out of goods.”3 Reich German consumers exploited economic differences between Saxony and Bohemia as frontier people had for decades. But under the occupation, there were no longer two political systems to temper consumer frenzies. Rather, Altreich consumers set the tone for economic relationships under the occupation: German-Bohemian frontier residents were promised economic gains, only to see Reich Germans buy up goods, compete with local producers, and seize control of the Sudetengau’s industries and natural resources.4 Nazi Germany won early support from Sudeten Germans by treating the new Sudetengau as an “endangered borderland.” Using the same borderland funding that Saxony and Bavaria had received since 1931, they ›ooded northern Bohemia with funds to boost social welfare aid and to reduce unemployment.5 But by 1939, Sudeten Germans were complaining that the Nazi occupation had also brought in›ation, a declining standard of living, and a new form of outside rule, as Altreich bureaucrats ‹lled business and government positions in the Sudetengau. Disappointment was especially palpable along the old frontier. A Sopade report from January 1939 explained, “Frontier cities . . . whose tourist industries have long depended on cross-border traf‹c [kleine Grenzverkehr] have lost their importance as borderland places . . . [C]ross-border traf‹c and smuggling have moved to the new frontier.”6 Similarly, the area’s export industries found that although the Anschluss won them greater access to Reich German markets, it cut them off from those in central Bohemia, Great Britain, and the United States and burdened them with new competition from the Altreich.7 For all that the Reichsgau Sudetenland was of‹cially Reich territory, and Nazi propaganda stressed Saxon and Bohemian frontier residents’ commonalities,8 a palpable separation remained between the Altreich and its new province. People on both sides still distinguished between “Sudeten Germans” and “Reich Germans.” The German government’s use of Czechoslovak administrative and election districts in the Sudetengau and continued economic discrepancies between the Bohemian province and its Altreich neighbors reinforced this sense of separation.9 Indeed, in February 1939, black-market traf‹c in meat, butter, and textiles between the Sudeten territories and the Altreich prompted the German government to reinstate border police along the old frontier.10 Borderland thinking continued to shape political relationships as

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well. Many Sudeten-German Nazis thought that the “borderland mission” (Grenzlandaufgabe) to transform the region into undeniably “German” territory was the essence of National Socialism in the Sudetengau. But they soon echoed the complaints of their late nineteenth-century and interwar predecessors that Reich Germans neither understood the Bohemian nationality con›ict nor took borderland politics seriously. The Reich government scaled back “borderland” funding for the Gau after the September 1939 invasion of Poland. It required German Bohemians but not Czechs to serve in the army. It outraged Sudeten German nationalists by moving Czech-speaking workers into Sudetengau industries—an affront to those trying to reverse the “Czechization” of the interwar period. It also faced accusations that it treated Czech speakers in the Bohemian Protectorate— the state Nazi Germany created out of the rest of Bohemia in 1939—better than Germans in the Sudetengau.11 Despite such complaints, Reich nationality policy in the Sudetengau was strongly in›uenced by Bohemian traditions. By 1940, Reich German Nazis embraced the idea that many Czech speakers could be assimilated into the German nation, a pragmatic policy that echoed many Bohemians’ ideas about nationality.12 The policy also re›ected the Nazis’ belief that Czechs and Germans had to be distinguished from one another: Czechs might become German, but remaining nationally ambiguous was unacceptable. Nevertheless, local of‹cials still assessed nationality in a variety of ways, and northern Bohemians continued to switch between nationalities when they found it useful to do so.13 Such inconsistencies made some Sudeten German nationalists among the most vigorous opponents of Nazi assimilation policy. A school of‹cial in Opava/Troppau warned in 1941, “We don’t believe that the Czechs . . . can be won for Germandom . . . [W]e have learned from history.”14 German speakers in the Sudetengau did little to resist the Nazi occupation.15 Nevertheless, by 1941, tensions emerged between the Sudeten German population and the Reich. Many Sudeten Germans thought that Germany had failed to ful‹ll its social and economic promises. Worse, Reich Nazis had proven unreliable nationalists in Bohemian terms, losing interest in the borderland nationalist struggle when the war began, moving Czech-speaking workers into the Sudetengau, and promoting a new Reichloyal Czech nationalism. Reich leaders came to regard Sudeten Germans as situational nationalists—willing to invoke their frontier status in order to ask for ‹nancial assistance, but lacking the nationalist fervor the Nazis had hoped to ‹nd among “borderland” Germans.16

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Czech speakers in the Sudetengau were divided between those who embraced German citizenship and an of‹cially “German” identity and those who declared themselves Czech. Self-identi‹ed Czechs demonstrated opposition to Nazi rule by shopping in Czech-owned stores, listening to foreign radio, and distributing anti-Nazi propaganda, often with the help of the more-organized Czech opposition in the Protectorate. But Czech associations, a Czech-language press, and Czech schools largely vanished from the borderlands.17 For all that of‹cials in the Sudetengau were dismayed to conclude by 1944 that their assimilation policies had had limited success, until the end of the war, Czech resistance to Nazi rule was largely limited to a small number of Communists and Social Democrats.18

Defeat, Expulsion, and Territory Transformed The end of World War II sparked the single largest migration in the history of the Saxon-Bohemian frontier, reestablished the old international boundary, transformed the border into a national divide for the ‹rst time, and paved the way for Communist rule on both sides. As the Red Army advanced in early 1945, thousands of Silesian refugees poured into Saxony and the Sudetengau, and northern Bohemians watched as the retreating SS marched Prisoners of War and concentration camp victims through their communities.19 In May, Germany’s surrender loosed the ›oodgates completely, as a rapidly reconstituted Czechoslovakia began simultaneously expelling German-speaking Bohemians from the former Sudetengau and resettling the region with Czechs and Slovaks. By 1948, more than ‹ve million people had passed through northern Bohemia.20 Hundreds of thousands of German-speaking expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia began arriving in Saxony in June 1945. A state with a native population of ‹ve million was soon accommodating more than two million refugees, with more arriving every day. Czechoslovakia Postwar upheaval and Allied support gave the Czechoslovak government and Czech political activists—from radical nationalists to Communists— the opportunity to fundamentally rede‹ne the borderlands. Czech parties across the political spectrum declared that expelling German speakers was part of “national cleansing” intended to purge Czechoslovakia of irreden-

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tists, opportunists, and collaborators and to resettle minority areas with politically reliable Czechs and Slovaks.21 Not surprisingly, Czech nationalists and the Czechoslovak government considered the pohranici (borderlands)22 the front lines of national cleansing, because of the territory’s large German-speaking populations, its historical centrality in the Bohemian nationality ‹ght, its association with Nazism, and its national vulnerability. The Social Democratic newspaper Ceskoslovenské demokracie argued in 1947, “The borderlands need proper hardened Czechs, not weaklings capable of selling their Czechness for a pretty German smile.”23 But despite widespread consensus that the borderlands had to be remade as unambiguously Slavic space, it was Czechoslovak Communists who led the national, political, and economic transformation, taking control of many aspects of local administration, organizing the population transfer, and leading the distribution of “German” property to Czech and Slovak settlers. Mass migration, the destruction of local society, and a widespread commitment to the transformation of the region gave Communists an invaluable opportunity to test new propaganda, win popular support, shape local government, and use the borderlands as a laboratory for building socialism.24 Yet nationalist rhetoric and the removal of German speakers did not automatically transform frontier areas into Czech national space. For that, a substantial new population was needed. Government and nationalist propaganda urged Czech speakers from the Bohemian interior to move to the borderlands. The Czech press again lauded the efforts of hranicari to secure the frontier.25 In 1946, Czechoslovakia began promoting the “remigration” of Czechs from abroad, many of whom came from Germany with the help of Czech associations there. One thousand Saxon Sorbs moved to Czechoslovakia, and Sorb nationalists demanded that the Oberlausitz be integrated into Czechoslovakia as Slavic territory.26 But reemigrants from Germany and Czech speakers who had lived in frontiers for years found that settlers from the Bohemian interior often treated them with suspicion, arguing that their long coexistence with German speakers had made them too “Germanized” to be allowed in the borderlands.27 The Czechoslovak state also needed to reintegrate a struggling borderland into the national economy. Many northern Bohemian industries lost as much as 50 percent of their labor to the expulsions. By 1950, nearly half of the factories and workshops in operation before World War II had closed, with the luxury and export industries that had long characterized the region among the hardest hit. In some cases, industrialists and government of‹cials slowed the expulsion of skilled German-speaking workers

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from critical industries but were unable to stop it.28 By 1950, the region had smaller communities, a more-limited industrial base, a less-skilled workforce, and far fewer transregional and transnational connections than it had had for nearly a century. After 1989, the legacies of postwar and Communist-era population and economic policies continued to set the borderlands apart, earning them an international reputation for poverty and industrial decay, rather than recognition as distinctly Czech national space. Saxony In 1945, the Saxon borderlands were the closest escape hatch for people ›eeing Silesia and northern Bohemia, and they bore the brunt of the ‹rst wave of expulsions, as people arrived on foot and in carts, by ship and by train.29 Between May and August, more than 450,000 German-Bohemian expellees arrived in the Saxon Erzgebirge alone.30 Saxon frontier communities were initially left to fend for themselves, as mass migration turned already severe food, housing, and transportation shortages into crises. In the summer of 1945, Saxon of‹cials reported that refugee trains from the former Sudetengau were so overloaded that people were sitting on the engines and in the coal cars, while those inside faced such horri‹c sanitary conditions that many died.31 Infant mortality in Görlitz reached 75 percent, and in mid-August, of‹cials in the Bautzen administrative district implored, When refugees wander the streets . . . desperate, . . . diseased, and hungry . . . , when growing numbers of infants and children suffer severe malnutrition and communities have to dig mass graves . . . the situation cries out for an immediate, uni‹ed, and effective solution.32 In September, the Saxon administration reported, “Two million people have arrived from Czechoslovakia and another hundred thousand from Poland . . . In Zittau alone, there are thirty thousand Ostarbeiter [forced labor from Eastern Europe] [waiting to be repatriated], seventy thousand refugees from Czechoslovakia, and forty thousand from Poland . . . Saxony has ‹ve million residents and two million refugees . . . The refugee problem in Saxony is by far the worst.”33 Soviet occupation authorities did little to stem the refugee crisis. Nevertheless, seizing on the Soviets’ initial decision not to settle expellees in Saxony, beleaguered Saxon of‹cials transferred refugees to other parts of the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ). The Saxon administration explained in

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early August 1945, “[Saxony] can neither house nor feed the estimated two million refugees [in its territory]. If these refugees are not moved out of Saxony, the state will be unable to feed its own population.”34 A few weeks later, after several months in which Saxon of‹cials sent trainloads of refugees to Thüringen, Brandenburg, and the Province of Saxony, those states rebelled, closing their borders with Saxony. In October, Soviet authorities granted permanent residence to the estimated 690,000 refugees in Saxony. By 1947, the state was required to absorb another 600,000.35 Nevertheless, in 1947, Saxon authorities announced the creation of a ten-kilometer border zone to be kept free of expellees—presumably an attempt to hinder the revival of cross-border relationships and clashes with Czechoslovak authorities. They also resisted accepting new settlers, sometimes using old borderland arguments to do so. In 1947, for example, Bautzen of‹cials objected to settling German-speaking refugees in Sorb villages, and the Sorb-language press declared the settlement proposal “a new wave of Germanization.”36 Saxon Communists, like their Czechoslovak counterparts, played a central role in dealing with expellees. Although all of the “antifascist” political parties in the SBZ took positions on expellee policy, the German Communist Party (KPD) was the most effective in tracking refugees, in labor distribution, in coordinating social welfare, and in demanding the rapid assimilation of expellees into local communities. Many antifascists from Czechoslovakia joined the KPD and ‹gured among the new political elite in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).37

Death and Resurrection By the time the Czechoslovak and GDR Communist states were established in 1948 and 1949, respectively, the old Saxon-Bohemian frontier region had vanished, after having withstood decades of economic crisis, nationalist agitation, revolution, fascism, and war. Bohemian border villages were abandoned and dismantled. Permanent barriers blocked roads that once carried cross-border traf‹c. In the 1950s, each of the two Communist states began inviting athletes and cultural groups from the other country to visit. In the 1960s, tourists began to trickle across the border again. But these people crossed the national and international boundary as foreigners, not as natives of a shared frontier economy, territory, and society. The postwar isolation of border regions remained largely unchal-

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lenged for forty years. But when the fall of Communism and European integration eroded barriers to mobility in the 1990s, borderland dynamics reappeared. In 1990, Sudeten German activists in Bavaria revived demands for an independent Sudetenland. Sudeten Germans and conservatives in Germany later tried to use the history of the expulsions to block the Czech Republic’s entry into the European Union. Despite President Vaclav Havel’s of‹cial apology for the expulsions, most Czech citizens refused to repudiate them.38 Disagreements re›ected the belief of parties on each side that the Bohemian borderlands might be open to rede‹nition once again. But Sudeten German activists’ efforts have had little real effect on the national or political character of the frontier: expellees have not regained lost property, and northern Bohemia remains Czech-speaking territory within the Czech Republic. Indeed, nonnational and local interests have proven much more important. On the frontier itself, local people used new cross-border mobility to begin building new regional relationships while their governments were still debating historical ones. In the early 1990s, eastern Germany, though economically depressed, was better off than Czechoslovakia, and people on both sides of the border were quick to take advantage of price differences. Markets sprang up in Czech border towns, hawking cheap alcohol, cigarettes, gasoline, sex, and garden gnomes to their German neighbors. Saxon frontier residents complained of a rise in cross-border crime and smuggling, though the culprits were typically understood to be Roma, Vietnamese, and Romanians rather than Germans and Czechs.39 Debates about cross-border labor migration reemerged. Yet not all new contacts hinged on economics. In 1997, the mayor of Deutschneudorf sent his ‹re brigade to help Nová Ves, a Czech town across the river. In 2002, he replaced a bridge connecting the two communities and allowed their citizens to cross without passports. These measures were illegal. But as in the late nineteenth century, local of‹cials were more interested in cooperating with their neighbors across the state and national divide than adhering to nonsensical state policies, and their central governments found they had to give way.40 Local actors have led the way in re-creating borderland relations in other ways, too. Between 1990 and 1992, frontier people spearheaded efforts to create three new Euroregions spanning the Saxon-Bohemian border. They have founded music and theater festivals, initiated joint research projects at local universities, cooperated to build a new regional tourism, and established joint environmental initiatives. Post-Communist borderland dynamics have proven as volatile as their

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early twentieth-century predecessors. In 2004, membership in the European Union raised prices in the Czech Republic, and the ›oods of Saxon consumers crossing the border dried up, though a few things—such as medicine—continued to draw customers.41 Indeed, by 2008, the economic balance had changed so much that thousands of Czechs traveled to Dresden to do their Christmas shopping.42 These shifts show that the borderlands are back. Cross-border mobility, economic interconnection, and cultural interaction have once again made this frontier region—and transnational spaces more broadly—important to the human geography of Central Europe. The end of the cold war and the rise of the European Union did not bring about the sudden death of the nation-state or the advent of a new “borderless” Europe. To say so is to misunderstand the nature and the history of European borderlands—perceiving them as imposed, static barriers. Rather, they are dynamic, permeable, and negotiated spaces.43 As was true in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the two decades following the collapse of Communism in Central Europe, states and national communities have had to coexist and interact with regional and transnational networks. Since 1989, transnational communities have harkened back to ‹n de siècle borderland ideas, championing Heimat tourism and warning against labor migration, even as they developed connections—from international prostitution rings to Internet communities— that their predecessors would have found astonishing. But in the early twenty-‹rst century as in the early twentieth, these multiple, changing, overlapping, competing, and complementary communities thrive because whether local people warn of the dangers or seize upon the opportunities these communities offer, they embrace and give meaning to them all. As a result, although these communities are most visible on frontiers, they form the heart of Europe.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 83. 2. Curt Müller-Löbau, “Zum Geleite,” in Grenzgeschichten: Erzählungen aus dem sächsisch-böhmischen Grenzgebiete, Franz Rösler (Reichenau, 1920). 3. Frederick Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 9. 4. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 87. 5. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 208. 6. On connecting discourse and practice in space, see Lefebvre, Production of Space, 6–8. On “producing” space, see: Lefebvre, Production of Space, 15. 7. On borders as products of modernization, see also Jouni Häkli, “Territoriality and the Rise of the Modern State,” Fennia 172, no. 1 (1994): 1–82; John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47 (1993): 139–74. 8. John Breuilly, “Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Nationality: Re›ections on the Case of Germany,” in The Frontiers of Europe, ed. Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort (London: Pinter, 1998), 39; Hans Lemberg, “Grenzen und Minderheiten in östlichen Mitteleuropa—Genese und Wechselwirkungen,” in Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert—Aktuelle Forschungsprobleme, ed. Hans Lemberg (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2000), 159–60. On the establishment of the Saxon-Bohemian border, see Christine Klecker, “Die Oberlausitzer Grenzurkunde: Landesausbau im Spannungsfeld von Landschaft und Herrschaftsbildung,” in Landesgeschichte in Sachsen: Tradition und Innovation, ed. Rainer Aurig, Steffen Herzog, and Simone Lässig (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1997), 29–40. 9. Important recent exceptions include Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); James Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). Even these are different from my case, as they examine frontiers within states. 213

214

Notes to Pages 10–12

10. Important studies of Central European borderlands include Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-Uni‹cation and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Judson, Guardians; Bjork, Neither German nor Pole. 11. On difference and visibility, see Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 201–2. An important exception is Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 12. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004), 12; Stefan Berger, “A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France, and Britain from 1945 to the Present,” Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 629–78. 13. Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Peter Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building, National Self-Perception, and Politics, 1780–1914 (PhD diss., University of Aarhus, 1994); Judson, Guardians; Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Peter Haslinger, “Imagined Territories: Nation and Territorium im tschechischen politischen Diskurs, 1889–1938” (Habilitatsionsschrift, University of Freiberg, 2004). 14. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 88. 15. James J. Sheehan, “What Is German History? Re›ections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 1–23. 16. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Alon Con‹no, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Bismarkreich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2006). 17. Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 18. For example, F. Gregory Campbell, Confrontation in Central Europe: Weimar Germany and Czechoslovakia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 19. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, ed., Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin, ed., The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 20. Ute Frevert, “Europeanizing Germany’s Twentieth Century,” History and Memory 17 (2005): 87–116; Phillip Ther, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe,” Central European History 36, no. 1 (2003): 45–73.

Notes to Pages 14–21

215

21. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 5. 22. By “territorial origins,” I mean the places where people held residence rights, as distinct from where they actually lived.

CHAPTER 1 1. Hans Christian Andersen, Reise nach Dresden und in die Sächsische Schweiz (Hamburg: Christians, 1990), 46. 2. Andrea Komlosy, Grenze und ungleiche regionale Entwicklung: Binnenmarkt und Migration in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Promedia, 2003). 3. StAB, KH Bautzen 958. 4. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 64–66, 73. 5. Curt Müller-Löbau, “Zum Geleite,” in Rösler, Grenzgeschichten, Introduction. 6. Rösler, Grenzgeschichten, 2, 1. 7. Wenzel Holek, Lebensgang eines deutsch-tschechischen Handarbeiters (Jena: Eugen Dietrichs, 1909), 88–89, 136–37. 8. Erich Berlet, Die sächsisch-böhmische Grenze im Erzgebirge (Oschatz, 1900), 51. 9. HStAD, MdI 9675/1; HStAD, MdI 9672; HStAD, AM 1291; HStAD, AM 4448. 10. In 1906, Artur Booden, a Saxon border of‹cial, published a popular novel about early nineteenth-century smuggling. See Booden, Pascherfriedel (Bautzen: Lusatia, 1992); Wulf Wäntig, “Zwischen Böhmen und Sachsen, zwischen Religion und Alltagswahrnehmung—die Mikrogeschichte frühneuzeitlicher Konfessionsmigration als Geschichte von Grenzerfahrung und Grenzüberschreitung,” Comparativ 14, no. 4 (2004): 17–27. 11. I borrowed the idea of proliferating spaces from Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Re›exivity,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 30. 12. Hansjörg Küster, Geschichte der Landschaft in Mitteleuropa (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 36; Heinrich Gebauer, Die Volkswirtschaft im Königreich Sachsen, 3 vols. (Dresden, 1893), 1:459–546. 13. Many combined manufacturing with subsistence farming. See Jean Quataert, “Combining Agrarian and Industrial Livelihood: Rural Households in the Saxon Oberlausitz in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Family History 10, no. 2 (1985): 145–62. 14. Uwe Schirmer, “Ernäherung im Erzgebirge im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert: Produktion, Handel und Verbrauch,” in Aurig, Herzog, and Lässig, Landesgeschichte in Sachsen, 129–44. 15. On Saxon geography, see Gebauer, Die Volkswirtschaft, 1:3–62. For the Bohemian borderlands, see Franz Jeffer, Die Beziehungen zwischen Heimarbeit und Boden (Prague, 1907), 8–30.

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Notes to Pages 21–25

16. Paul Degering, “Verkehrs-Geographie von Sachsen” (PhD diss., Universität Jena, 1907), 59. 17. Jan Havránek, “Ceši v severoceských a zapadoceských mestech v letech 1880–1930,” Ustecký sborník historický (1979), 230. 18. The precise limits of the borderlands are necessarily imprecise. See Josef Bartoš, “K pojmu a pojetí pohranicí v CSR 1918–1938: Územní a národnostní principy a problémy,” in Ceské národní aktivity v pohranicních oblastech první Ceskoslovenské republiky, ed. Ol’ga Šrajerová (Ostrava: Tilia, 2003). 19. Ingolf Grässler, “Pässe über das Erzgebirge: Paßwege und Paßstraßen zwischen Freiberger und Zwickauer Mulde im Mittelalter,” in Aurig, Herzog, and Lässig, Landesgeschichte in Sachsen, 97–108. 20. Sheehan, “What Is German History?” 21. Brian E. Vick, De‹ning Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 22. Jirí Koralka and R. J. Crampton, “Die Tschechen,” in Die Völker des Reiches, vol. 3 of Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, ed. Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1980), 500–501. 23. Franz Palacký, Gedenkblätter (Prague, 1874), 150–51. 24. James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 905–7. 25. Judson, Guardians, 12–13. The 1905 Moravian Compromise moved Austria toward treating nations as legal categories (King, Budweisers, 114–15). 26. Judson, Guardians; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls; Mark Cornwall, “The Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border, 1880–1940.” English Historical Review 109, no. 433 (1994): 914–51. 27. Pieter Judson, “ ‘Not Another Square Foot!’: German Liberalism and the Rhetoric of National Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 26 (1995): 83–97; Cohen, Politics of Ethnic Survival; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls; King, Budweisers; Catherine Albrecht, “The Rhetoric of Economic Nationalism in the Bohemian Boycott Campaigns of the Late Habsburg Monarchy,” Austrian History Yearbook 32 (2001): 47–67; Nancy Wing‹eld, “Statues of Emperor Joseph II as Sites of German Identity,” in Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, ed. Maria Bucur and Nancy Wing‹eld (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001), 178–205. 28. Spolecná cesko-nemecká komise historiku, Kon›ikní spolecenství, katastrofa, uvolení (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 16. 29. Weichlein, Nation und Region, 292. 30. James Retallack, “‘Why Can’t a Saxon be More like a Prussian?’: Regional Identities and the Birth of a Modern Political Culture in Germany, 1866–67,” Canadian Journal of History 32 (1997): 26–55; Siegfried Weichlein, “Saxons into Germans: The Progress of the National Idea in Saxony after 1866,” in Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 172–77; Weichlein, Nation und Region, 194.

Notes to Pages 25–29

217

31. Jirí Koralka, “Josef Krosch a casposiy saských socialních demokratu v letech 1868–1870,” Sbornik Severoceského musea—Historia 3 (1962): 19–42. 32. Nancy M. Wing‹eld, Minority Politics in a Multinational State: The German Social Democrats in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1989), 6; Jaroslav Bakala, “Prumyslové oblaski Ceských zemi a clenská základna Ceskoslovenské a nemecké sociální demokracie v letech 1897–1913,” Slezský sborník 78, no. 4 (1980): 241–58. 33. E. A. Wrigley, International Growth and Population Change: A Regional Study of the Coal‹eld Areas of North-West Europe in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). 34. Rudolf Forberger, Die Industrielle Revolution in Sachsen 1800–1861 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1982); Frank B. Tipton, Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany during the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), 30–38. 35. Forberger, Die Industrielle Revolution, 21; Hubert Kiesewetter, “Bevölkerung, Erwerbstätige und Landwirtschaft im Königreich Sachsen 1815–1871,” in Region and Industrialisation, ed. Sidney Pollard (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980), 91–94, 96. 36. HStAD, AM 1700: 23. 37. Forberger, Die Industrielle Revolution, 21. 38. Tipton, Regional Variations, 48–52. 39. Gebauer, Die Volkswirtschaft, 2:349, 366. 40. Degering, “Verkehrs-Geographie,” 59. 41. Tipton, Regional Variations, 125, 148; Degering, “Verkehrs-Geographie,” 61, 12–13. 42. “Sächsischen Industriestätten—Aue im Erzgebirge,” Sächsische Industrieund Handels-Zeitung 1, no. 6 (20 June 1904): 118. 43. Degering, “Verkehrs-Geographie,” 43. 44. Arnošt Klíma, Manufakturní období v Cechách (Prague: Nak. Ceskoslovenská akademie ved, 1955); Arnošt Klíma, “Zur Frage des Übergangs vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus in der Industrieproduktion in Mitteleuropa,” in Klíma, Economy, Industry, and Society in Bohemia in the 17th–18th Centuries (Prague: Charles University, 1991), 16–18. 45. Arnošt Klíma, “Industrial Growth and Entrepreneurship in the Early Stages of Industrialization in the Czech Lands,” in Economic Development in the Habsburg Monarchy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Komlos (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 82, 85. 46. David F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 132, 47. 47. “Gewerbevereine,” Sächsische Gewerbe-Vereins-Zeitung 10, no. 26 (4 July 1878): 129; “Hausindustrie in der sächsische Schweiz,” Sächsische Gewerbe-VereinsZeitung 10, no. 15 (11 April 1878): 72. 48. Karl Kostka, “Die Heimarbeit in der Hohlglasindustrie Nordböhmens,” in Hausindustrie und Heimarbeit in Deutschland und Österreich, ed. Verein für Socialpolitik (Leipzig, 1899), 506–11.

218

Notes to Pages 29–34

49. Gebauer, Die Volkswirtschaft, 3:605–6, 2:340–78. 50. Jeffer, Die Beziehungen zwischen Heimarbeit und Boden, 106–11; Philipp Weigel, “Das Sächsische Sibirien: Sein Wirtschaftsleben” (PhD diss., Universität Leipzig, 1907): 84–85. 51. HStAD, MdI 7306: 61; Manfred Schober, Die Sebnitzer Kunstblume: Die Geschichte eines Handwerks im Zeichen der Mode (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1994), 22. 52. Andreas Martin, “Zur Entwicklung der erzgebirgischen Handels im 19. Jahrhundert, Dargestellt in seinen Wechselwirkungen mit der Spankorbmacherei von Lauter,” in Wanderhandel in Europa, ed. Wilfried Reininghaus (Dortmund: Ardey-Verlag, 1993), 124. 53. Siegfried Sieber, Die Spitzenklöppelei im Erzgebirge (Leipzig, 1955), 38. 54. Erhard Hartstock et al., Juden in der Oberlausitz (Bautzen: Lusatia, 1998), 49. 55. HStAD, MdI 11759: 33–42, 80, 81; HStAD, AH Annaberg 3434: 3, 6. 56. HStAD, AH Auerbach 980: 6; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2824: 1, 2, 41; On these reforms’ potential, see Sächsische Gewerbe-Vereins-Zeitung 10, no. 14 (4 April 1878): 59–60. 57. HStAD, Finanzministerium 6746; HStAD, Gesandtschaft Wien 276: 5.1.1909. 58. HStAD, KH Zwickau 1763; Booden, Pascherfriedel. 59. HStAD, AH Auerbach 980: 6. 60. Sächsische Gewerbe-Vereins-Zeitung 10, no. 44 (31 October 1878): 222. 61. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2824: 6, 12; HStAD, AH Auerbach 980: 6. 62. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2824: 12. 63. HStAD, AH Auerbach 980: 6, 61; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2824: 6, 9, 12, 41. 64. Caitlin E. Murdock, “Böhmisches Bier und Sächsische Textilien: Das sächsisch-böhmische Grenzgebiet als Konsumregion (1900–1933),” Comparativ 11, no. 1 (2001): 70. 65. Lusatia 1, no. 1 (January 1885): 7; Lusatia 1, no. 4 (April 1885): 29; Lusatia 1, no. 7 (July 1885): 54; Nordböhmische Touristen-Zeitung 1, nos. 6–7 (July 1886): 143; SOA Decín, Turnverein VDF 23, June 1910, February 1910, February 1911, June 1911. 66. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2584: 1, 45–47, 159.

CHAPTER 2 1. StAC, Erinnerungen von August Friedel (unpublished memoir, 1954), 1–2. 2. Nineteenth-century German migration was primarily labor migration. Klaus Bade, “German Emigration to the United States and Continental Immigration to Germany in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 119. 3. Klaus Bade, Vom Auswanderungsland zum Einwanderungsland? Deutschland

Notes to Pages 34–37

219

1880–1980 (Berlin: Colloquium, 1983): 23–24; Dieter Langewiesche, “Wanderungsbewegungen in der Hochindustrialiserungsperiode: Regionale, interstädische und innerstädische Mobilität in Deutschland 1880–1914,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozialund Wirtschaftsgeschichte 64, no. 1 (1977): 1–40. 4. Weichlein, Nation und Region. 5. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 76, 80–91. 6. Komlosy, Grenze und ungleiche regionale Entwicklung, 95–100. 7. Vladimír Lipský, Migracní pro‹l mesta Ústí nad Labem koncem 19. a pocátka 20. století (Thesis, Ústi nad Labem, 1996), 67; Heinrich Rauchberg, Der nationale Besitzstand in Böhmen (Leipzig: Duncker und Humbolt, 1905), 231, 229; Heinrich Rauchberg, Die Bevölkerung Österrereichs (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1895), 107–8. 8. Volkmar Weiss, “Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Mobilität in Sachsen von 1550 bis 1880,” Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte 64 (1993): 56; Wolfgang Köllmann, Bevölkerung in der industriellen Revolution: Studien zur Bevölkerungsgeschichte Deutschlands (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1974), 110, 118, 121; Eugen Würzburger, “Bevölkerungsverhältnisse,” in Dresdens Entwicklung in den Jahren 1903–1909, ed. Otto Richter (Dresden, 1910), 34. Short-distance migration to cities was common across Europe. See Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 127. 9. Jirí Koralka, “Erste Sozialisten in Nordböhmen im Verhältnis zur Eisenacher Sozialdemokratie und zur tschechischen Nationalbewegung, 1868–1870,” special issue, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (1968): 306; Havránek, “Ceši v severoceských,” 227–53. 10. Karl Bahm, “Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe,” Austrian History Yearbook 29 (1998): 29. Statistics on language use in Bohemia are unreliable in this period. Austrian censuses reported Umgangssprache (everyday language). Czech speakers could be counted as German-speaking if they were bilingual or lived in largely German-speaking areas, and bilingualism went unreported. Since school funding and nationalist politics relied on such statistics, the censuses were often manipulated. Jan Havránek offers more balanced numbers based on birthplace and language among schoolchildren (Havránek, “Ceši v severoceských,” 232–33). 11. King, Budweisers; Cohen, Politics of Ethnic Survival. 12. HStAD, MdI 15855: 38. 13. Moch, Moving Europeans, 126–27; Steve Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 133–34. 14. HStAD, MdI 15855: 11, 16, 62; StAB, KH Bautzen 896. 15. HStAD, MdI 15855: 47, 52, 61. 16. HStAD, Finanzministerium 6746: 42–43; HStAD, AM 1701: 24.2.1909; StAB, KH Bautzen 958; Wulf Wäntig, “Zwischen Böhmen und Sachsen, zwischen Religion und Alltagswahrnehmung—die Mikrogeschichte fruhneuzeitlicher Konfessionsmigration als Geschichte von Grenzerfahrungen und Grenzuberschreitungen,” Comparativ 14, no. 4 (2004): 17–27. There were exceptions. Where Bohemian

220

Notes to Pages 37–40

industry was near the border and no Saxon equivalent was nearby, Saxons worked in Bohemia. See V. Wowková, “Einwanderung sächsischer Handwerker nach Böhmen—insbesondere in das Gebiet von Gablonz—im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Quellen in den böhmischen Archiven,” in Die Besiedlung der Neisseregion: Urgeschichte— Mittelalter—Neuzeit, ed. Gunter Oettel (Zittau: Zittauer Geschichtes und Museums Verein, 1995), 99–101. 17. Komlosy, Grenze und ungleiche regionale Entwicklung, 28. 18. W. Holek, Lebensgang, 7. 19. W. Holek, Lebensgang, 39. 20. W. Holek, Lebensgang, 7, 85, 88–89, 101, 138, 164. 21. HStAD, AM 1700: 28; Dresdner Anzeiger, 9 April 1888, 3. 22. HStAD, MdI 15855: 73. 23. NA, MZV/R sign. 221, Kart. 16: 272. 24. W. Holek, Lebensgang, 93, 179; Wenzel Holek, Vom Handarbeiter zum Jugenderzieher (Jena: Eugen Dietrichs, 1921), 1. Holek’s son Heinrich used the same strategy: see Heinrich Holek, Unterwegs: Eine Selbstbiographie (Vienna, 1927), 212. This was common throughout Europe: see Moch, Moving Europeans, 129. 25. StAB, AH Bautzen 653: 12. 26. Koralka, “Erste Sozialisten in Nordböhmen,” 310. Some northern Bohemian industrial areas attracted Saxon workers. Wowková, “Einwanderung,” 99; Northern Bohemia attracted more German migrants than the comparatively poor Böhmerwald. See Rauchberg, Die Bevölkerung Österreichs, 100, 107–8; Reichenberger Handels und Gewerbekammer, Nordböhmische Arbeiterstatistik (Reichenberg, 1891), 444–47. 27. HStAD, Finanzministerium 6746: 18. 28. HStAD, MdI 15855: 52. 29. HStAD, MdI 15855: 52–56. 30. HStAD, MdI 15855: 61–65. 31. HStAD, MdI 15855: 68, 74. 32. HStAD, MdI 15855: 68, 74. 33. Wolfgang Schröder, “Saxony’s ‘Liberal Era’ and the Rise of the Red Specter in the 1870s,” in Retallack, Saxony in German History, 235–54; Donald Warren Jr., The Red Kingdom of Saxony: Lobbying Grounds for Gustav Stresemann, 1901–1909 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff: 1964), 20–24; Gerhard A. Ritter, “Wahlen und Wahlpolitik im Königreich Sachsen 1867–1914,” in Sachsen im Kaiserreich: Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Umbruch, ed. Simone Lässig and Karl Heinrich Pohl (Dresden: Sächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1997), 33. 34. HStAD, MdI 10974: 145a. 35. HStAD, MdI 15855: 106; Erich Berger, “Die nationale und konfessionelle Gefüge der Bevölkerung im Königreich Sachsen” (PhD diss., Universität Leipzig, 1912), 26; Georg Lommatzsch, “Die Bevölkerung des Königreichs Sachsen nach der Staatsangehörigkeit und der Gebürtigkeit am 1. Dezember 1900,” Zeitschrift des Königlichen Sächsischen Statistischen Bureaus 48 (1902): 99. 36. Saxony ‹rst included citizenship in the 1867 census. In 1885, there was still substantial error in data on foreigners. See Ralf Richter, “Reichsausländer in Dresden zwischen 1871 und 1914” (Thesis, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 1996), 49.

Notes to Pages 40–43

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37. Rauchberg, Die Bevölkerung Österreichs, 511. 38. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Dresden, 1899, 40; Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Dresden, 1915, 328; Lommatzsch, “Die Bevölkerung des Königreichs Sachsen,” 98. 39. Anecdotal evidence for this is overwhelming. See HStAD, KH Zwickau 2029: 26; Erich Berger, “Die nationale und konfessionelle Gefüge,” 26–27; Würzburger, “Bevölkerungsverhältnisse,” 34. 40. Lommatzsch, “Die Bevölkerung des Königreichs Sachsen,” 97. Austrian statistics were also imprecise. See Leopold Caro, Auswanderung und Auswanderungspolitik in Österreich (Leipzig: Verein für Sozialpolitik, 1909), 38–39. 41. Siegfried Sieber, Studien zur Industriegeschichte des Erzgebirges (Cologne: Böhlau, 1967), 10. 42. HStAD, AH Annaberg 1844: 7; HStAD, Finanzministerium 6746. 43. Solvejg Höppner, “Migration nach und in Sachsen (1830–1930),” in Sachsen und Mitteldeutschland: Politische, wirtschaftliche und soziale Wandlung im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Werner Bramke and Ulrich Hess (Weimar: Bölau, 1995), 281, 283. 44. HStAD, Finanzministerium 6746: 44b. 45. HStAD, Finanzministerium 6746: 27, 36, 39–40, 42. 46. Max Weber, Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik 55 (Leipzig, 1892); Heinrich Sohnrey, Die Zug vom Lande und die soziale Revolution (Leipzig: Werther, 1894); Anton Knoke, Ausländische Wanderarbeiter in Deutschland (Leipzig, 1911); Paul Grund, Die ausländischen Wanderarbeiter und ihrer Bedeutung für Oberschlesien (Leipzig, 1913). Historians have also focused on Polish agricultural migrants. See Bade, Vom Auswanderungsland zum Einwanderungsland? 30–51; Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 9–45. 47. Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 48. Arnold Lassotta, Hans Röver, Andrea Schultes, and Vera Steinbord, eds., Streik: Crimmitschau 1903–Bocholt 1913 (Essen, Klartext 1993), 60–63; Der Textilarbeiter (Reichenberg) 4, no. 51 (17 December 1903): 3; HStAD, KH Zwickau 1549: 86. 49. Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (New York: Harper and Row, 1955), 29–31; Über den Crimmitschauer Streik (Crimmitschau, 1904), in StAL, AH Döbeln 2501. 50. HStAD, AH Zwickau 1549: 162; HStAD, AH Zwickau 1550: 52; Lassotta et al., Streik, 58–59; Der Textilarbeiter (Reichenberg) 4, no. 51 (17 December 1903): 1. Organized labor in Bohemia also urged workers not to go to Crimmitschau. See Der Textilarbeiter (Reichenberg) 4, no. 50 (10 December 1903): 1–2. 51. Crimmitschauer Anzeiger no. 3 (5 January 1904): 2; Karl-Heinz Wild, Um eine Stunde furs Leben (Berlin: Verlag Neues Deutschland, 1957), 207. 52. HStAD, AH Zwickau 1550: 19, 31. 53. “Gelerten Gutachten über Crimmitschau,” Der Textilarbeiter (Reichenberg) 5, no. 1 (7 January 1904): 2. For the evolution of Brentano’s views of labor con›ict, see James J. Sheehan, The Career of Lujo Brentano: A Study of Liberalism

222

Notes to Pages 43–48

and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 155–65. 54. Herbert, History of Foreign Labor, 24–28. 55. HStAD, AH Zwickau 1550: 123; Crimmitschauer Anzeiger no. 13 (17 January 1904): 2. 56. HStAD, AH Zwickau 1550: 19. For more attacks on strikebreakers, see HStAD, AH Zwickau 1550: 77; Crimmitschauer Anzeiger no. 1 (1 January 1904): 2. 57. Aussig-Karbitzer Volkszeitung, 8 April 1907, 3; Neue Nordwestböhmische Volks-Zeitung (Saaz) 1, no. 3 (16 March 1899): 6; Der Freigeist (Reichenberg) 1, no. 4 (28 November 1889): 5; Ceský vystehovalec 1, no. 2 (15 December 1904): 2; Der Textilarbeiter (Reichenberg) 1, no. 2 (12 January 1900): 2; HStAD, MdI 15855: 129a. 58. HStAD, MdI 15855: 129j; HStAD, AH Zwickau 1547: 13. 59. HStAD, AH Zwickau 1550: 23. 60. Lassotta, Streik, 35–36. 61. I ‹rst looked into the Crimmitschau strike after numerous Saxons told me that Czechs were the critical strikebreakers. As I argue here, the evidence supports the image but not the reality of Czech strikebreaking. For later association of nonGerman workers with strikebreaking, see HStAD, MdI 15855: 189. 62. HStAD, MdI 15862: 6, 55, 64, 70, 74; HStAD, MdI 15856: 58–62. 63. StAB, KH Bautzen 4693: 108. 64. HStAD, MdI 11745: 1. 65. HStAD, MdI 15862: 11. 66. HStAD, MdI 15862: 24. 67. HStAD, GW 275: 17. 68. StAB, KH Bautzen 4693: 156. 69. HStAD, MdI 15862: 75, 60. 70. HStAD, MdI 11745: 2; HStAD, MdI 15862: 50. 71. StAB, KH Bautzen 4693: 17, 56, 91, 123. 72. StAB, KH Bautzen 4693: 159. 73. W. Holek, Vom Handarbeiter, 1. 74. W. Holek, Vom Handarbeiter, 3, 14. 75. StAC, Erinnerungen von August Friedel, 2. 76. StAC, Erinnerungen von August Friedel, 2; W. Holek, Vom Handarbeiter. 77. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 278; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 285; HStAD, MdI 9700; HStAD, MdI 9702: 270; HStAD, MdI 9682: 10; HStAD, MdI 9709: 4, 50; StAB, AH Bautzen 653: Lage 6. 78. NA, MZV/R sign. 265, Kart. 15: 704; NA, MZV/R sign. 251, Kart. 16: 57. Tailors remained numerous in the 1890s. See Jirí Koralka, “Tschechen und Deutsche im Alten Reich und in der Habsburgermonarchie,” in Tschechen, Slowaken und Deutsche: Nachbarn in Europa, ed. Detlev Brandes et al. (Hannover: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1995), 26; Jirí Koralka, “Ceské krajanské spolky v Nemecku za první svetové války,” Ceší v cizine 8 (1995): 75–80. 79. Monika Glettler, “The Organization of the Czech Clubs in Vienna circa 1900: A National Minority in an Imperial Capital,” East-Central Europe 9, nos. 1–2 (1982): 124–36; Monika Glettler, Sokol und Arbeiterturnvereine der Wiener

Notes to Pages 48–53

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Tschechen bis 1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970); Karl Brousek, Wien und Seine Tschechen: Integration und Assimilation einer Minderheit im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1980), 56–66; Claire Nolte, “Our Brothers across the Ocean: The Czech Sokol in America to 1914,” Czechoslovak and Central European Journal 11, no. 2 (1993): 15–37. 80. NA, MZV/R sign. 265, Kart. 15: 684; NA, MZV/R sign. 251, box 16: 79; NA, MZV/R sign. 265, Kart. 15: 651. 81. Czech associations behaved like their German counterparts. See Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 82. HStAD, KH Dresden 1138, 254–55. Czech associations in Vienna pursued similar activities. See Brousek, Wien und Seine Tschechen, 62–66. 83. Jana Englová, “Ceský spolek v Drazd’anech v druhé polovine 19. století,” in Cechy a Sasko v promenách dejin, ed. Kristina Kaiserová (Ústí nad Labem: Univerista J. E. Purkyne, 1993), 169–70. 84. HStAD, MdI 10983: 6–7; HStAD, MdI 10984: 221, 224; HStAD, MdI 10985: 5, 31, 81; HStAD, MdI 10986: 22, 25; HStAD¸ KH Dresden 1138: 254; HStAD, AM 1700: 29. 85. T. Mills Kelly, Without Remorse: Czech National Socialism in the Late Habsburg Empire (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2006). 86. NA, MZV/R sign. 520, Kart. 26: 188. 87. HStAD, KH Dresden 1138: 253b–254a. 88. HStAD, KH Dresden 1138: 253b, 255b; Strucný prehled cinnosti ceských spolku zahranicních v roce 1902 (Berlin, 1902). Czechs in Vienna acculturated to their surroundings despite lively associational life and nationalist rhetoric. See Monica Glettler, “The Acculturation of the Czechs in Vienna,” in Hoerder, Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies, 297–320. 89. HStAD, AM 1667: 1, 4, 5. 90. HStAD, AM 1700: 28–29. 91. Ceský vystehovalec 6, no. 25 (15 October 1910): 7–8; Ceský vystehovalec 3, no. 5 (15 March 1907): 1. 92. Ceský vystehovalec 1, no. 5 (15 March 1905): 1. See also Ceský vystehovalec 2, no. 3 (15 January 1906): 2. 93. Ceský vystehovalec 3, no. 5 (15 March 1907): 1. Such concerns were common among the Czech diaspora (Glettler, “Organization,” 132). 94. W. Holek, Vom Handarbeiter, 3. 95. Ceský vystehovalec 1, no. 9 (18 July 1905): 4. 96. NA, MV/R sign. 8/4, Kart. 296, folder 1, 11–13.6.1912. 97. W. Holek, Lebensgang, 213. 98. Koralka, “Tschechen und Deutsche im Alten Reich,” 26. 99. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Königreich Sachsen (Dresden, 1913), 17; HStAD, MfV 11097/3:13. 100. Saxon statistics show 53,643 Catholics in 1871 and 218,033 in 1905, a change from 2 to 5 percent of the population. See Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Königreich Sachsen (Dresden, 1908), 5; HStAD, MfV 11059: 61; HStAD, MfV 11097/3:13; HStAD, MfV 11097/9: 2.

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Notes to Pages 53–60

101. Mittheilungen des statistischen Amtes der Stadt Dresden 7 (July 1897): 33. 102. HStAD, MfV 11097/3: 13. 103. HStAD, MfV 11097/3: 1; HStAD, MfV 11096/5: 12; HStAD, MfV 11059: 167. 104. HStAD, MfV 11059: 191. 105. HStAD, MfV 11097/3: 1. 106. HStAD, MfV 11096/5: 18–19. 107. HStAD, MfV 11059: 191; HStAD, MfV 11097/9: 7, 10, 13b; HStAD, MfV 11039/1: 5–6. 108. HStAD, MfV 11039/1:1, 3, 5, 6, 7; HStAD, MfV 11059: 20. 109. HStAD, MfV 11039/1: 14, 45. 110. Weichlein, Nation und Region. 14. 111. HStAD, MfV 11097/9: 22b. 112. HStAD, MdI 9700: 1–4, 6–11, 27–31, 41, 46–50, 57, 63–75, 77, 100, 109. 113. HStAD, MdI 9702: 29, 41a, 197.

CHAPTER 3 1. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 428. 2. This contrasts with Rogers Brubaker’s idea of “homeland nationalisms” (Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, chap. 5). Hans-Ulrich Wehler takes a similar view to Brubaker’s. See Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 1072. 3. Cohen, Politics of Ethnic Survival. 4. Benedict Anderson argues that nationalists often “pirate” ideas from one another. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re›ections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 67. 5. Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 44–45. 6. Cohen, Politics of Ethnic Survival, 153; Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 144–45; Das Deutschtum im Ausland 1 (1909): IV; Das Deutschtum im Ausland 13 (1912): 681; Judson, Guardians. 7. Jirí Koralka, Tschechen im Habsburgerreich und in Europa 1815–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), 86–88. 8. Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 127; Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building,” 120–22. 9. Jan Kren, Die Kon›iktgemeinschaft: Tschechen und Deutsche 1780–1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 77–90. 10. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries; Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building,” 164; King, Budweisers, 134; Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), chap. 3. 11. Judson, “Not Another Square Foot!”; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls.

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12. Cohen, Politics of Ethnic Survival, 158. 13. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 207; King, Budweisers, 66. 14. King, Budweisers, 80–81; Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building,” 165–72; Tara Zahra, “Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945,” Central European History 37, no. 4 (2004): 499–540; Judson, Guardians; Albrecht, “Rhetoric,” 48. 15. Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party, 1874–1901, and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 90; King, Budweisers, 96. 16. Bugge, “Czech Nation-Building,” 26. 17. Thanks to Pieter Judson for helping me articulate this distinction. 18. Ernst Hasse, Deutsche Grenzpolitik (Munich: Lehmann, 1906), 12; David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 264; Eley, Reshaping the German Right, viii, 10, 13–15; Rainer Hering, Konstruierte Nation: Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 2003), 124. 19. James Retallack, Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 215; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1074; James Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 97. 20. Applegate, Nation of Provincials, 23–24; David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Knopf, 1994). 21. Judson, Guardians, 19; Cornwall, “Struggle on the Czech-German Language Border.” 22. Jeremy King ‹nds new contact between Reich and German-Bohemian nationalists in the 1890s but suggests that the impetus came from the Reich (King, Budweisers, 136–37). In Saxony, it seems to have come from Bohemia. 23. HStAD, MdI 10974: 80a: Trautenauer Wochenblatt 28, no. 34 (26 August 1895): 1. 24. StAD, ADV 17: 268; HStAD, AM 1663: 18; Pieter Judson, “The Bohemian Oberammergau: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire,” in Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, ed. Pieter Judson and Marsha Rozenblitt (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). 25. King, Budweisers, 136–37. 26. German Bohemians were quick to see Czechs in Saxony as an extension of “Czechization.” See “Die Tschechen in Sachsen,” Aussig-Karbitzer Volkszeitung, 8 April 1907, 2 Beilage, 3. Jirí Koralka observes that national clashes in Bohemia provoked anti-Czech feeling in Germany. See Jirí Koralka, “Tschechen und Deutsche im Alten Reich und in der Habsburgermonarchie,” in Brandes et al., Tschechen, Slowaken und Deutsche, 26. 27. HStAD, MdI 15855: 139. 28. HStAD, MdI 15855: 139, 144–45; HStAD, AM 1700: 1; StAB, KH Bautzen 4693: 53.

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Notes to Pages 64–69

29. Bohemian organized labor warned of poor conditions in Ostritz before the case made Saxon headlines. See Der Textilarbeiter (Reichenberg) 5, no. 18 (5 May 1904): 3. 30. HStAD, AM 1700: 2. 31. StAB, KH Bautzen 4693: 53–54; HStAD, MdI 15855: 145. 32. HStAD, MdI 15855: 141; StAB, KH Bautzen 4693: 55–57. 33. “Die Tschechen in Sachsen,” Aussig-Karbitzer Volkszeitung 8 April 1907, 2 Beilage, 3. 34. Gerald Kolditz, “Die Rolle und Wirksamkeit des Alldeutschen Verbandes in Dresden zwischen 1895 und 1918” (PhD diss, Technische Universität Dresden, 1994), 251. 35. HStAD, AM 1701: 8. 36. “Germinisace místích jmen v Cechách,” Menšinová revue 1, no. 5 (1912): 297. 37. Judson, Guardians, 19. 38. “Das Nationalgefühl im Deutschreiche,” Aussig-Karbitzer Volkszeitung, 12 April 1907, 2. 39. StAD, ADV 36: 271. Dresden’s Pan-German League organized many such trips. See Chickering, We Men, 163. 40. StAD, ADV 17: 272. 41. StAD, ADV 36: 81–83. 42. StAD, ADV 38: 143–49; Kolditz, “Rolle,” 267–69. 43. Place-names were an established target for Bohemian nationalists. See Cohen, Politics of Ethnic Survival, 1. 44. Judson, Guardians, 19. 45. Weichlein, Nation und Region, 39–40. 46. Mildred S. Wertheimer, The Pan-German League 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University, 1924), 60. 47. StAD, ADV 36: 166, 171; Gerald Kolditz, “‘Gedenke, dass du ein Deutscher bist!’—die Ortsgruppe Dresden des Alldeutschen Verbandes zwischen den Weltkriegen,” in Landesgeschichte und Archivwesen: Festschrift für Reiner Gross zum 65 Geburtstag, ed. Renate Wissuwa, Gabriele Viertel, and Nina Krüger (Dresden: Sächsisches Druck- und Verlagshaus, 2002), 418. 48. Gerhard Weidenfeller, VDA, Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland, Allgemeine Deutscher Schulverein (1881–1918): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus und Imperialismus im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1976), 213; Chickering, We Men, 134, 144–45. 49. Gerald Kolditz, “Der Alldeutsche Verband in Dresden: Antitschechische Aktivitäten zwischen 1895 und 1914,” in Aurig, Herzog, and Lässig, Landesgeschichte in Sachsen, 235–48. The Pan-German League assumed leadership among Saxon nationalist organizations before 1914. See Kolditz, “Gedenke,” 417. 50. Roger Chickering, “Patriotic Societies and German Foreign Policy, 1890–1914,” International History Review 1, no. 4 (October 1979): 479; Kolditz, “Rolle,” 132. 51. Kolditz, “Rolle,” 116. 52. StAD, ADV 38: 19, 183; StAD, ADV 17: 78, 101, 301; HStAD, AM 1663: 9.

Notes to Pages 69–73

227

Speakers included German- Bohemian politicians. See Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 5 (29 January 1909): 42; Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 7 (12 February 1909): 58; Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 9 (26 February 1909): 79. 53. StAD, ADV 17: 251; Kolditz, “Der Alldeutsche Verband,” 241. 54. HStAD, AM 1701: 9. 55. HStAD, AM 1663: 18. 56. StAD, ADV 17: 78; StAD, ADV 38: 19. 57. Kolditz, “Rolle,” 132; Kolditz, “Der Alldeutsche Verband,” 237. 58. Kolditz, “Der Alldeutsche Verband,” 244. Individual Pan-German groups also raised money for German- Bohemian nationalist projects. See Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 7 (12 February 1909): 58. 59. Chickering, “Patriotic Societies,” 479; Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1075. 60. “Vereinsnachrichten,” Das Deutschtum im Ausland 3 (1910): 147. 61. “Die deutsche Sprachgrenze bei Rakonitz in Böhmen,” Das Deutschtum im Ausland 15 (1913): 755. Branches of the Pan-German League and the Association for Germans Abroad often mentored Bohemian communities. See Kolditz, “Rolle,” 101; Weidenfeller, VDA, 212. 62. Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Con›ict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 206–8. 63. Andrew Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan Germanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 244, 249. 64. NA, MZV/R sign. 102, Kart. 29: 124. 65. Whiteside, Socialism, 246–47; NA, MZV/R sign. 102, Kart. 29: 124, 65. 66. NA, MZV/R sign. 102, Kart. 29: 127. 67. Walser Smith, German Nationalism, 212, 211. 68. Whiteside, Socialism, 249, 244–45; Walser Smith, German Nationalism, 228. 69. Whiteside, Socialism, 258–59; Kolditz, “Rolle,” 153–55, 173. 70. Dieter Langewiesche, “Kulturelle Nationsbildung in Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Nation und Gesellschaft in Deutschland, ed. Manfred Hettling and Paul Nolte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996), 60. 71. Neue Preussische Zeitung, 26 July 1885, 2 Beilage, 1, quoted in Svenja Goltermann, Körper der Nation: Habitusformierung und die Politik des Turnens 1860–1890 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998), 246. 72. SOA Decín, NTSV 23: June 1911. 73. Goltermann, Körper der Nation, 252. 74. Weidenfeller, VDA, 237. 75. “Aus der Ortsgruppen,” Das Deutschtum im Ausland 2 (1909): 93. 76. Alfred Geiser, “Nationale Kampforganisationen,” Das Deutschtum im Ausland 1 (1909): 11, 14. 77. Hasse, Deutsche Grenzpolitik, 3. 78. StAD, ADV 38: 147, 195; Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 20 (14 May 1909): 174; Kolditz, “Rolle,” 197–98. 79. Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 20 (14 May 1909): 174. 80. Kolditz, “Rolle,” 252.

228

Notes to Pages 73–80

81. HStAD, AM 1701: 20. 82. “Nationale Aufklärung und Werbung in Bädern und Kurorten,” Das Deutschtum im Ausland 12 (1912): 612. 83. StAD, ADV 50: 75. 84. Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 1 (2 January 1909): 1, 2. 85. Kolditz, “Rolle,” 251. 86. “Der tschechische Boycott,” Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 1 (2 January 1909): 2. 87. Albrecht, “Rhetoric,” 54. 88. Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 8 (19 February 1909): 70; Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 22 (28 May 1909): 190; Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 12 (19 March 1909): 104. 89. Albrecht, “Rhetoric,” 48. 90. Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 8 (19 February 1909): 70; Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 22 (28 May 1909): 190. 91. Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 12 (19 March 1909): 104. 92. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls. 93. StAD, ADV 36: 201, 209–10. 94. StAD, ADV 36: 213. 95. StAD, ADV 36: 213, 212. 96. StAD, ADV 36: 213. 97. StAD, ADV 36: 214–15. On Czech “minority” schools ‹ghting Germanization, see Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, chap. 1. 98. Max Rau, “Deutsche Sprachinseln in Europa,” Das Deutschtum im Ausland 5 (1910): 218. 99. HStAD, AM 1693.2: 1. 100. “Tschechische Eroberungspläne,” Das Deutschtum im Ausland 2 (1909): 74. 101. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 962–63. 102. HStAD, MdI 10974: 74a. “Die katholischen Wenden der sächsischen Lausitz,” Der National Zeitung, 1895. 103. Peter Kunze, “The Sorbian National Renaisssance and Slavic Reciprocity in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 41, no. 2 (1999): 189–206. 104. HStAD, AM 1693.2: 104, 1; HStAD, MdI 10974: 80b. 105. HStAD, AM 1693.2: 24, 46–52. Prussia was historically more suspicious of the Sorbs than Saxony. See Walter Rauch, Presse und Volkstum der Lausitzer Sorben (Würzburg: Holzner, 1959), 68, 73. 106. StAD, ADV 36: 4. 107. StAD, ADV 36: 4. 108. HStAD, AM 1693.2: 87, 90–92; Rauch, Presse und Volkstum, 67, 71, 74. 109. Rauch, Presse und Volkstum, 69. 110. Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 305. 111. HStAD, AM 1663: 9, 6–7; Das Deutschtum im Ausland 3 (1910): 146. 112. “Der Kampf der deutschen Reichsregierung gegen das Deutschtum in Osterreich,” Alldeutsche Blätter 19, no. 5 (29 January 1909): 42. 113. HStAD, AM 1663: 21–22. 114. HStAD, AM 1663: 21–22.

Notes to Pages 84–89

229

CHAPTER 4 1. HStAD, AM 2311: 6–11. 2. HStAD, AM 1700: 85–88; Ceský vystehovalec 12, no. 2 (15 January 1916): 1. Austro-Hungarian citizens mobilized readily, see István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Of‹cer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 190. 3. HStAD, MdI 9709: 115. 4. HStAD, MdI 9703: 65, 71. 5. HStAD, MdI 9703: 1, 9; HStAD, MdI 9710: 4; Oliver Trevisiol, Die Einbürgerungspraxis im Deutschen Reich 1871–1945 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2006), 47. 6. HStAD, MdI 9814: 137. 7. HStAD, MdI 9709: 34, 4, 12, 15, 115; Trevisiol, Die Einbürgerungspraxis, 105. 8. HStAD, AH Freiberg 200: 46–47. 9. HStAD, AH Annaberg 595: 72–73. 10. HStAD, AM 2353: 25. 11. StAD, Kriegsorganisation Dresdner Vereine 36. 12. HStAD, AM 2353: 1, 3, 31, 34, 36, 41. 13. HStAD, AM 2353: 31, 34, 36. 14. HStAD, AM 2353: 1. Saxony and Bavaria had no such agreement, and Saxony did not support Bavarians. See HStAD, AM 2355: 10. 15. HStAD, AM 2353: 3, 34. 16. Christoph Nonn, “Saxon Politics during the First World War: Modernization, National Liberal Style,” in Retallack, Saxony in German History, 310–11; Stephan Pfalzer, “‘Der Butterkrawall’ im Oktober 1915: Die erste grössere Antikriegsbewegung in Chemnitz,” in Demokratie und Emanzipation zwischen Saale und Elbe, ed. Helga Grebing, Hans Mommsen, and Karsten Rudolph (Essen: Klartext, 1993), 197–99. 17. Peter Heumos, “‘Kartoffeln her oder es gibt eine Revolution’: Hungerkrawale, Streiks und Massenproteste in den Böhmischen Ländern 1914–1918,” Slezský sborník 97, no. 2 (1999): 81–104; Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 1. 18. NA, MV/R Inv. C. 81 Kart. 527: 44728, 47235; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, chap. 3. 19. Tara Zahra “Your Child Belongs to the Nation: Nationalization, Germanization, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2005), 291–92; Healy, Vienna, chap. 1. 20. In July 1914, Germany introduced “temporary” passport requirements that lasted through the war. See Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 112–13; Ceský vystehovalec 12, no. 1 (2 January 1915): 1–2. 21. HStAD, AH Freiberg 200: 50. 22. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 67. 23. HStAD, AM 2707: 11.10.1917.

230

Notes to Pages 90–96

24. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 210: 103, 91. 25. HStAD, Oberforstmeisterei Schandau 759; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1566: 22. 26. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 18. 27. HStAD, Oberforstmeisterei Schandau 759: 4.8.1914. 28. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 1, 18, 24. 29. Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (New York: Arnold, 1997), 293, 280. 30. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 210: 91, 103. 31. HStAD, MdI 7742: 4. 32. C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985); NA, MV/R Inv. C. 81 Kart. 527: 1338. 33. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 188, 41; Roland Zeise and Bernd Rüdiger, “Bundesstaat im Deutschen Reich (1871–1917/18),” in Geschichte Sachsens, ed. Karl Czok (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1989), 425; Erich Glier, Die sächsische Spitzenund Stickereiindustrie seit 1914 (Plauen: Franz Neupert, 1932). 34. NA, MV/R Inv. C. 81 Kart. 527: 44311. 35. NA, MV/R Inv. C. 81 Kart. 527: 44690. 36. Nonn, “Saxon Politics.” 37. NA, MV/R Inv. C. 81 Kart. 527: 42153. 38. Nonn, “Saxon Politics,” 310–11; Pfalzer, “Der Butterkrawall,” 197–99. 39. NA, MV/R Inv. C. 81 Kart. 527: 6139. 40. Heumos, “Kartoffeln her,” 81–82; Judson, Guardians, 220. 41. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 4. 42. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 187: 5.8.1914. 43. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 5.12.1915. 44. HStAD, GW 384: 3, 7, 23. 45. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 83. 46. HStAD, GW 384: 2.2.1917. 47. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 14. 48. HStAD, GW 384: 10, 11, 14. 49. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 99b. 50. NA, MV/R Inv. C. 81 Kart. 306: 73417. 51. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1957: 17.8.1918. 52. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 209: 107. 53. Zeise and Rüdiger, “Bundesstaat im Deutschen Reich,” 426; Nonn, “Saxon Politics,” 312–13. 54. HStAD, MdI 11070: 47; Herwig, First World War, 275. 55. Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans: A Study of the Struggle in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 80; Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 355. 56. H. Louis Rees, The Czechs during World War I: The Path to Independence (New York, Columbia University Press, 1992), 65; Horst Haselsteiner, “The Habsburg Empire in World War I: Mobilization of Food Supplies,” in War and Society

Notes to Pages 96–102

231

in East Central Europe, ed. Béla K. Király and Nándor F. Dreisziger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 92. 57. Alon Rachamimov, “Arbiters of Allegiance: Austro-Hungarian Censors during World War I,” in Judson and Rozenblitt, Constructing Nationalities, 157–77; Cornwall, Undermining of Austria-Hungary, 19. 58. Judson, Guardians, 222; David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 482. 59. Rachamimov, “Arbiters,” 161–68; Mark Cornwall, “Morale and Patriotism in the Austro-Hungarian Army, 1914–1918,” in State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed. John Horne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 176. 60. Rachamimov, “Arbiters,” 168–72; Cornwall, “Morale,” 178–79. 61. Robert Scheu, Wanderungen durch Böhmen am Vorabend der Revolution (Vienna: Ed. Strache, 1919), 16. 62. Scheu, Wanderungen, 15–16, 180. 63. Judson, Guardians, 228; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 95–103. 64. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 80. 65. SOA Decín, NTSV 18: Korrespondence, Kart. 29, 1918–19, Abwehr 5.10.1918; NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/126/5. 66. HStAD, Gesandtschaft Berlin 274: 141; Herwig, First World War, 436–37. 67. Hugh LeCaine Agnew, “New States, Old Identities? The Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Historical Understandings of Statehood,” Nationalities Papers 28, no. 4 (2000): 620–21. 68. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 79. 69. Kren, Die Kon›iktgemeinschaft, 370–74. 70. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 94. 71. HStAD, GW 384: 92. 72. Karl Bahm, “The Inconveniences of Nationality: German Bohemians, the Disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Attempt to Create a Sudeten German Identity,” Nationalities Papers 27, no. 3 (1999): 375–405; SOA Decín, NTSV 18: Korrespondence, Kart. 29, 1918–19, Abwehr 6.10.1918; “Eine Tagung des Volksrates in Böhmen,” Reichenberger Zeitung 29.10.1918. 73. HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 334: 55. 74. HStAD, MdI 5524: 3. 75. SOA Decín, NTSV 18: Korrespondence, Kart. 29, 1918–19, “Deutsches Reich” Abwehr 7.2.1919; Susanne Maurer-Horn, “Die Landesregierung für Deutschböhmen und das Selbstbestimmungsrecht 1918/19,” Bohemia 38, no. 1 (1997): 39. 76. SOA Decín, NTSV 18: Korrespondence, Kart. 29, 1918–19, “Der Anlass Deutsch-Österreichs an das Deutsche Reich gesichert,” Abwehr 4.2.1919. 77. NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/130/10. 78. Campbell, Confrontation, 49; NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/126/5. 79. NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/118/2. 80. The term Sudetenland was coined in 1902 to describe the German-speaking populations of Bohemia, Moravia, and Moravian Silesia but came into wider use

232

Notes to Pages 102–7

after 1918. See Helmut Schaller, Der Nationalsozialismus und die slawische Welt (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2002), 19. 81. Bahm, “Inconveniences,” 396. 82. HStAD, MdI 5524: 3. 83. HStAD, GW 384: 70. 84. HStAD, GW 384: 66–67, 74. 85. Most thought incorporation into Bavaria less logical. See HStAD, GW 384: 66. 86. Campbell, Confrontation, 51; NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/127/2. 87. Národní politika, 4 November 1918, 3; Národní politika, 5 November 1918, 1. 88. NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/118/4. 89. Maurer-Horn, “Die Landesregierung,” 38; Bahm, “Inconveniences,” 392; Campbell, Confrontation, 52. 90. HStAD, AH Annaberg 606: 2; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1589: 5, 9; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 178: 2. 91. NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/128/7. 92. Scheu, Wanderungen, 22. 93. HStAD, Gesandtschaft Berlin 274: 142–43. 94. Peter Burian, “Deutsch-Tschechoslowakische Beziehungen 1918/19,” in Politische Ideologien und Nationalstaatliche Ordnung ed. Kurt Kluxen and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1968), 371. 95. SOA Decín, NTSV 18: Korrespondence, Kart. 29, 1918–19, “Die Hetze gegen den Anschluss an das Deutsche Reich,” Rumburger Zeitung 16.1.1919; SOA Decín, NTSV 18: Korrespondence, Kart. 29, 1918–19, “Die deutsch-böhmische Industrie und der Anschluss an Deutschland,” Abwehr 4.2.1919; HStAD, Gesandtschaft Berlin 274: 144. 96. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 85–86; HStAD, Gesandtschaft Berlin 274: 143. 97. Die Volksstimme (Warnsdorf), 1 January 1919, 1; Wing‹eld, Minority Politics, 11. 98. Die Volksstimme (Warnsdorf), 12 January 1919, 1. 99. Jan Galandauer, “Das Verhältnis der Tschechen zur Frage Deutschböhmens,” in Die Au›ösung des Habsburgerreiches, ed. Richard Georg Plaschka and Karlheinz Mack (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970), 434. 100. Scheu, Wanderungen, 161. 101. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 95; Nancy M. Wing‹eld, “Statues of Emperor Joseph II as Sites of German Identity,” in Bucur and Wing‹eld, Staging the Past, 194. 102. NA, MV Kart. 145, sign. 3/125/8. 103. Haslinger, “Imagined Territories,” 303. 104. Benjamin Lapp, Revolution from the Right: Politics, Class, and the Rise of Nazism in Saxony, 1919–1933 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 21–23; Karsten Rudolph, Die sächsische Sozialdemokratie: Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik 1871–1923 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995), 169–80. 105. HStAD, GW 384: 77a. 106. Erzgebirgische Volksstimme, 4 January 1919, 1.

Notes to Pages 107–11

233

107. Burian, “Deutsch-Tschechoslowakische,” 368; Campbell, Confrontation, 56; HStAD, GW 384: 64. 108. HStAD, SkZ 2223. See Jirí Koralka, “Die Haltung des Deutschen Reiches zu den Nationalstaatlichen Bestrebungen in Zisleithanien (April bis October 1918),” in Plaschka and Mack, Die Au›ösung des Habsburgerreiches, 217. 109. HStAD, SkZ 2223; Franz Hadler, “Die Tschechoslowakische Republik in den Akten der Deutschen Waffenstillstandskomission von 1919,” Bohemia 36, no. 2 (1995): 390–91. 110. HStAD, General-Kommando XIX, AK 21436: 78; Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten, 24 December 1918. 111. HStAD, Staatskanzelei 155: 1, 7, 19, 25, 85; Národní politika, 23 January 1919; Národní politika, 1 November 1918, 5; Eduard Kubu, “Lusatian Sorbs in Germany before the Second World War,” in Economic Change and the National Question in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Alice Teichova, Herbert Matis, and Jaroslav Pátek (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79–81; Galandauer, “Das Verhältnis der Tschechen,” 434. 112. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1939: 94; HStAD, Staatskanzelei 1939: 11. 113. SOA Decín, NTSV 18: Korrespondence, Kart. 29, 1918–19, February 1919; HStAD, MdI 11074: 1a, 68. 114. Erzgebirgische Volksstimme, 29 January 1919: 1; Erzgebirgische Volksstimme, 31 January 1919, Beilage. 115. HStAD, General-Kommando XIX. AK 21436: 1, 96, 143, 93; Burian, “Deutsch-Tschechoslowakische,” 363. 116. HStAD, General-Kommando XIX. AK 21436: 346. 117. HStAD, Staatskanzelei 155: 96b. 118. HStAD, Abwicklungsamt XII. AK 18842, 57; Erzgebirgische Volksstimme, 11 February 1919, Beilage; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 96. 119. HStAD, MdI 15936: 1, 9, 10; Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 204. 120. HStAD, AM 2313: 33. 121. Manfred Alexander, ed., Deutsche Gesandtschaftsberichte aus Prag, vol. 1 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), 35, 41. 122. Koralka, “Die Haltung,” 209–18. 123. HStAD, GW 384: 70, 74. 124. HStAD, GW 384: 88–89, 93; HStAD, AM 2829: 3, 27.1.1919. 125. HStAD, AH Annaberg 606: 1; BA, R901/36755: 14. 126. HStAD, General-Kommando XIX. AK 21436: 74, 78; HStAD, Justizministerium 761, vol. 1:3 and vol. 3:1; Hadler, “Die Tschechoslowakische Republik,” 392. 127. Maurer-Horn, “Die Landesregierung,” 45; Campbell, Confrontation, 52; HStAD, GW 384: 89. 128. HStAD, MdI 11753: 75, 83–88. 129. Burian, “Deutsch-Tschechoslowakische,” 375; HStAD, MdI 11753: 160. 130. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 147. 131. Mark Cornwall, “‘National Reparation?’ The Czech Land Reform and the

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Notes to Pages 112–18

Sudeten Germans 1918–38,” Slavonic and East European Review 75, no. 2 (1997): 259–61.

CHAPTER 5 1. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1939: 40. 2. HStAD, MdI 5524: 69. 3. HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 334: 10.12.1918, 87, 83; Bessel, Germany after the First World War, 111–12; HStAD, MdI 5524: 5; Campbell, Confrontation, 56. 4. HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 330: 23–24; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 788, sign. 325, 29.2.1920. 5. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 788, sign. 325, 18.2.1920, 26.3.1920. 6. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 788, sign. 325, Tribuna 2.12.1919. 7. HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 334: 82; HStAD, AM 5008: 270, 273, 274. 8. HStAD, AM 736: 47; HStAD, GW 384: 100; HStAD, AM 5012: 98. 9. Alice Teichova, The Czechoslovak Economy, 1918–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 17. 10. Teichova, Czechoslovak Economy, 59; Vlastislav Lacina, “Zahranicní obchod v letech první Ceskoslovenské republiky,” Ceský casopis historický 95, no. 1 (1997): 110–39. 11. HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 334: 100; AH Schwarzenberg 1939: 40; NA, MSP Kart. 3958, sign. E1/a-91. 12. HStAD, MdI 11094: 2. 13. HStAD, AM 1847. 14. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 788, sign. 325, 4.2.1920, Chemnitzer Tageblatt 14.7.1920, Národní listy 21.11.20. 15. HStAD, General-Kommando XIX. AK 21436: 249; HStAD, MdI 11753: 83. 16. HStAD, MdI 11753: 93, 97, 106; HStAD, AM 7003: 147, 148, 150. 17. HStAD, SkZ 578, Frankfurter Zeitung 5.8.1920; HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 338: 24, 5–15, 133; HStAD, AM 7003: 306, 80; HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 334: 203. 18. HStAD, MdI 11753: 13–14. 19. HStAD, AM 7003: 80. 20. HStAD, MdI 11753: 172, 253; HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 338: 6. 21. NA, PZU Kart. 109, sign. 8/1/66/25/4: 23; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 788, sign. 325, Prager Presse 20.10.1921. 22. HStAD, MdI 11753: 96. 23. HStAD, AM 7003: 348–49, 366–67; HStAD, AM 1847: 150, 222. 24. HStAD, MdI 11753: 106; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 81. 25. HStAD, AM 7003: 107; HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 338: 13, 219. 26. HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 339: 49–50. 27. HStAD, AM 7003: 82, 145–46; HStAD, MdI 11753: 33, 36, 97. 28. HStAD, MdI 11753: 210. 29. HStAD, MdI 11753: 180, 186, 199–207; HStAD, AM 1847: 8, 9, 29.

Notes to Pages 118–23

235

30. HStAD, AM 1845, 18.6.1920. 31. HStAD, MdI 11753: 130; HStAD, AM 1845: 2.2.1920, 26.3.1920. 32. HStAD, AM 1847: 11, 49. 33. Teichova, Czechoslovak Economy, 68; Jirí Kosta, “Die Tschechoslowakische Wirtschaft im ersten Jahrzehnt nach der Staatsgründung,” in Das Jahr 1919 in der Tschechoslowakei und in Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Hans Lemberg und Peter Heumos (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993), 75. 34. Zora Pryor and Frederic Pryor, “Foreign Trade and Interwar Czechoslovak Economic Development, 1918–1938,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 62, no. 4 (1975): 504; Kosta, “Die Tschechoslowakische Wirtschaft,” 75. 35. BA, R3901/1638: 10; HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 330: 363. 36. HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 126, 129, 134, 137, 145. 37. Gerald Feldman, “Labor Unrest and Strikes in Saxony. 1916–1923,” in Strikes, Social Con›ict, and the First World War, ed. Leopold Haimson and Giulio Sapelli (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1992), 313: Donald B. Pryce, “The Reich Government versus Saxony, 1923,” Central European History 10, no. 2 (1971): 117. 38. Lapp, Revolution, 79. 39. Gerald Feldman, “Bayern und Sachsen in der Hyperin›ation 1922/23,” Historische Zeitschrift 238, no. 3 (1984): 578, 582, 584; Gerald Feldman, “Saxony, the Reich, and the Problem of Unemployment in the German In›ation,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 27 (1987): 134. 40. Pryce, “Reich Government,” 119; Feldman, “Bayern und Sachsen”; HStAD, MdI 11108; Feldman, “Saxony, the Reich, and the Problem of Unemployment,” 141. 41. HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 198, 265; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 63, 122. 42. HStAD, AH Freiburg 1633:67. See also HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 59; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 44; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, Národní dem. 16.9.1922; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Nákupy v Nemecku,” Tribuna 8.9.1922. 43. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, Národní dem. 16.9.1922; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 144, 148, 181; HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 172, 212, 265; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 73. 44. HStAD, Sächsische Staatskanzelei 129: 97; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2825: 3. 45. HStAD, AM 1843, Münchener Neuste Nachrichten 25.10.1923; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 148; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 87. 46. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 50; HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 198. 47. HStAD, AM 1845, 20.11.1922; HStAD, AM 1847: 139–40, 152. 48. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 15; HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 172; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 51, 64. 49. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 44. 50. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 6, 64, 73, 67; HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 172, 170, 198. 51. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 51. See also HStAD, AM 1847: 121; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 57, 59; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 70, 64. 52. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, Národní politika 16.8.1922. 53. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 4, 6, 64, 67, 70.

236

Notes to Pages 123–29

54. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 44, 51, 93. 55. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, Národní listy 14.4.1922. 56. HStAD, AM 1847: 188, 139–40, 152, 216; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, Lidové noviny 6.10.1922, Národní listy 13.9.1922; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Nevítaní Nemci z Ceskoslovenska v Nemecku,” CSR 27.8.1922. 57. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Nákupy v Nemecku,” Tribuna 8.9.1922. 58. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Jest potrebí odvety na saskou pohranicní zlovuli?” Venkov 3.10.1922; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “A ja vice pres hranice,” Cas 5.10.1922. 59. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Na saskem pohranici,” Vecerní národní listy 25.8.1922; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Übergriffe tschechischer Grenzorgane,” Prager Tageblatt 20.7.1922. 60. HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 137; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 34. 61. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 57; HStAD, AH Glauchau 24: 151, 170. 62. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 67. 63. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 85 64. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1633: 67, 65, 122; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1590: 7; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Uzavrení cesko-saské hranice,” Vecerní národní listy 26.8.1922; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, Národní listy 8.9.1922. 65. HStAD, AM 1843, Bohemia 21.9.1922; see also HStAD, AM 1843, Bohemia 2.6.1923. 66. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1909: 84. 67. StAD, AV 82: 113. 68. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, Národní listy 13.9.1922. 69. Lapp, Revolution, 96–102. 70. HStAD, AM 1847: 240, 246, 263, 268, 303, 324. 71. Judson, Guardians, 253; Haslinger, “Imagined Territories,” 300–301. 72. Haslinger, “Imagined Territories,” 301. 73. Haslinger, “Imagined Territories,” 300, 304. 74. Haslinger, “Imagined Territories,” 304, 311. 75. Ernst Leibl, “Sudetendeutschland, Volk und Raum,” in Der Grenzkampf des Deutschtums im sudetendeutschen Raume, ed. Curt Haller (Frankfurt an der Oder: Heilige Ostmark, 1927), 7, 12. 76. Hasse, Deutsche Grenzpolitik. 77. The Pan-German League and the Association for Germans Abroad were among those who argued before World War I that Germany’s failure to embrace foreign Germans undermined its status as a nation-state. See Chickering, We Men, 76; Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschliessen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 2001), 336, 341. This view won wider acceptance after the war. See Trevisiol, Die Einbürgerungspraxis, 49; Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (New York: Berg, 2004), 201–2. 78. On Reich “homeland nationalism,” see Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, 113–31. Brubaker underestimates the Reich’s ambivalence about foreign Germans and non-Reich nationalists’ in›uence.

Notes to Pages 129–35

237

79. John Hiden, “The Weimar Republic and the Problem of the Auslandsdeutsche,” Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 2 (1977): 273. 80. Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich ( London: Pan Books, 2002), 19. 81. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards; StAD, ADV 83: 12, 14. 82. Max Hildebert Boehm, Die deutschen Grenzlande (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1925), 14. See also Alexander Eggers, ed., Das Europäische Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum in Einzeldarstellungen (Leipzig: Velhagen und Klasing, 1929), iv, vi. 83. Hermann Ullmann, “Grenz- und Binnendeutsche,” in Volk unter Völkern (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1925). 76–77. 84. Ullmann, “Grenz- und Binnendeutsche,” 78–81. 85. Otto Boelitz, Das Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum: Seine Geschichte und seine Bedeutung (Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1926), iii. 86. Gottfried Fittbogen, Was jeder Deutsche vom Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum wissen muss (Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1929), 1.

CHAPTER 6 1. Jaroslav Krejcí and Pavel Machonin, Czechoslovakia, 1918–92: A Laboratory for Social Change (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). 14. 2. Birgit Gütersloh, “Der Sächsische Landtag und die Ausländerpolitik in der ersten Hälfte der 20iger Jahre,” Historische Blätter 1, no. 1 (1992): 5. 3. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “A ja vice pres hranice,” Cas 5.10.1922. 4. Knuth Dohse, Ausländische Arbeiter und bürgerlicher Staat (Königstein: Anton Hain, 1981). 112; Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 118, 123; BA, R3901/770: 16; Heinrich Senfft, “Arbeitspolitik, Migration und rechtliche Stigmatisierung von Fremden,” Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 14, no. 1 (1999): 97. 5. BA, R3901/770: 140. The drop was shaped by changes in Czechoslovak and German law. See Ernst Berger, Arbeitsmarktpolitik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1926), 124. 6. Ulrich Herbert, “Immigration, Integration, Foreignness: Foreign Workers in Germany since the Turn of the Century,” International Working-Class History 48 (Fall 1995): 92. 7. MBLSRH 11, no. 24 (15 December 1930): 5. 8. HStAD, AM 7005: 52–53; HStAD, AH Annaberg 592: 12, 35; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 183: 12, 32. 9. HStAD, AM 1711: 4. 10. Ernst Berger, Arbeitsmarktpolitik, 27. 11. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “A ja vice pres hranice,” Cas 5.10.1922. 12. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 788 sign. 325, “Beschäftigung von Ausländern in Sachsen,” Volksstimme (Chemnitz) 17.6.1920. 13. Foreigners considered “bothersome” were Jews, Slavs, Communists, criminals, and the unemployed. 14. Ceské slovo 26.8.1921; HStAD, MdI 11709: 27, 42.

238

Notes to Pages 135–41

15. HStAD, AH Annaberg 3266: II; HStAD, Arbeitsämter 30: 5, 11, 13. 16. BA, R3901/769: 32. 17. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 3377: 1. 18. HStAD, AM 1711: 22–23. 19. HStAD, Arbeitsämter 30: 5. 20. NA, MSP Kart. 1097, sign. E1/a-95, 21.9.1921. 21. BA, R3901/769: 60. 22. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 3377: 4. 23. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 3377: 28. 24. BA, R3901/772: 41. 25. NA, PZU Kart. 113, sign. 8/1/67/1: 19, 43, 45–67, 88. 26. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1932: 198; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “A ja vice pres hranice,” Cas 5.10.1922. 27. HStAD, MdI 11709: 57, 58, 60, 63. 28. HStAD, AM 1711: 47. 29. NA, PZU-AMV Kart. 113, sign. 8/1/67/3: 15, 19, 26, 30; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “Jest potrebí odvety na saskou pohranicní zlovuli?” Venkov 3.10.1922; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “A ja vice pres hranice,” Cas 5.10.1922. 30. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1932: 200; HStAD, Arbeitsämter 30: 27. 31. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 912, sign. 354, doc. 29583. 32. HStAD, AM 1711: 47. 33. Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik, 123; Naše zahranicí 2 (1930): 73. 34. BA, R3901/770: 312; BA, R3901/770: 296; HStAD, AM 1714/1: 89; BA, R3901/820: 261; Jirí Koralka, “Ceši v Nemecku,” Ceši v cizine 9 (1995): 126. The Czech-language press concurred. See NA, MZV-VA Kart. 790, “A ja vice pres hranice,” Cas 5.10.1922. 35. HStAD, AM 1714/1: 135. 36. HStAD, AM 1717: 151. 37. HStAD, SkZ 578, Dresdner Volkszeitung 16.4.1921. 38. HStAD, MdI 11752: 30–31 39. HStAD, MdI 9710: 204. 40. BA, R3901/772: 119, 124. 41. HStAD, SkZ 578, Sächsische Staatszeitung 28.4.1921. 42. HStAD, AM 1711: 13. 43. HStAD, MdI 15860: 107; AM 1711: 200. 44. HStAD, AM 1711: 2; HStAD, MdI 15859: 114. 45. HStAD, AH Annaberg 3266: IV. 46. HStAD, Arbeitsämter 30: 72. 47. HStAD, SkZ 578, Dresdner Volkszeitung 16.4.1921; HStAD, MdI 11752: 31. 48. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 912, sign. 355, “Ausländerbeschäftigung in Sachsen,” Dresdener Neuste Nachrichten 12.4.1930. 49. HStAD, AM 1717: 2, 4, 6, 10, 15–24, 25, 31, 39, 42, 60, 65–66; HStAD, AM 1711: 173. 50. HStAD, AM 8459: 363. 51. NA, MSP Kart. 3958, sign. 2540, 11251, 817, 14338.

Notes to Pages 142–48

239

52. NA, MSP Kart. 3958, sign. 8031, “Ceští vystehovalci v Nemecku!” Ceskoslovensky denik 12.3.1927. 53. NA, MSP Kart. 3958, sign. 10917, 12086. 54. Naše zahranicí 1 (1930): 33. 55. HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 13; HStAD, AM 1711: 70. 56. HStAD, AM 1711: 70, 47. 57. HStAD, AM 1717: 166; BA, R3901/770: 163, 268. 58. NA, PZU, Kart. 113, sign. 8/1/67/1: 11. 59. BA, R3901/788: 285, 298; BA, R3901/770: 266–267; HStAD, Gesandtschaft Berlin 334, 25.11.1925; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1574: 10, 46–50, 59–61. 60. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1574: 62; HStAD, AM 1717: 175; NA, MSP Kart. 3958, sign. 10752, Prager Presse 22.4.1927. 61. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others. 62. NA, MSP Kart. 3958, sign. 12086. 63. HStAD, MdI 11709: 21. 64. Alicia Cozine, “A Member of the State: Citizenship Law and Its Application in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996). 33. 65. Cozine, “Member of the State,” 43–45. 66. Cozine, “Member of the State,” 45–46. 67. HStAD, MdI 9794: 10. 68. Jaroslav Kucera, “Politicky ci prirozeny národ? K pojetní národa ceskoslovenském právním rádu meziválecného období,” Ceský casopis historický 99, no. 3 (2001): 548–68. 69. Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 81–82. 70. Cozine, “Member of the State,” 60, 77; HStAD, MdI 9794: 52. 71. HStAD, MdI 9794: 53. 72. Calculated from HStAD, MdI 9701. 73. HStAD, MdI 9710: 209–14; Gosewinkel, Einbürgern, 360. 74. Men’s naturalization extended to their wives and children. Women took their husbands’ citizenship. Thus many Bohemian men who married Saxon women applied for Saxon citizenship, whereas Bohemian women who married Saxon men ceased to be “foreigners.” 75. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 272. 76. Andreas Fahrmeir, “Nineteenth-Century German Citizenships: A Reconsideration,” Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (1997): 751; Gosewinkel, Einbürgern, 325. 77. On the “ambivalence” of citizenship criteria, see Dieter Gosewinkel, “Citizenship in Germany and France at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Some New Observations on an Old Comparison,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 33. 78. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 271: 169. 79. HStAD, MdI 9710: 107. 80. HStAD, MdI 9710: 113.

240

Notes to Pages 148–52

81. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 271: 145, 146; HStAD, MdI 11752: 30–31; HStAD, MdI 11709: 21; HStAD, MdI 9711: 338. 82. HStAD, MdI 9710: 201, 206; HStAD, MdI 11709: 23; HStAD, MdI 9711: 59. 83. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 271: 134; HStAD, MdI 7910: 112. Fewer Czechs than German Bohemians applied for naturalization. Most appear to have been refused for insuf‹cient “Germanness.” See StAB, AH Bautzen 693; StAB, AH Bautzen 694; HStAD, MdI 9711: 54, 67; Gosewinkel, Einbürgern, 353, 360. 84. HStAD, MdI 9711: 59, 67, 76–77, 104, 124, 268–69. 85. HStAD, MdI 9711: 268–74, 124, 215. In 1910, Saxony had the second largest population of Eastern European Jews in Germany, but 75 percent did not have Saxon citizenship because of exclusionary citizenship policy. See Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 58, 79. The 1913 law was intended to liberalize naturalization, but anti-Semitic practice continued. 86. HStAD, MdI 9794: 63, 64. 87. HStAD, MdI 9710: 345. 88. StAB, AH Bautzen 688: 2; StAB, AH Bautzen 689: 2. This reason was common. See StAB, AH Bautzen 704; StAB, AH Bautzen 692. 89. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 278. 90. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 274. 91. HStAD, MdI 9710: 184, 186, 374. Annemarie Sammartino also ‹nds “nonGermans” accepted for naturalization and Germans rejected. See Annemarie Sammartino, “Culture, Belonging, and the Law: Naturalization in the Weimar Republic,” in Eley and Palmowski, Citizenship and National Identity, 66. This contrasts with Eli Nathans’ argument that German naturalization policies became obsessively ethnically exclusive after 1880 (Nathans, Politics of Citizenship, 1). 92. HStAD, MdI 9711: 54, 59. 93. HStAD, MdI 9710: 201; HStAD, MdI 9794: 52, 53, 110. 94. This reluctance contrasts with Eli Nathan’s suggestion that Weimar Germany naturalized foreign Germans “almost automatically” (Nathans, Politics of Citizenship, 202). See also HStAD, MdI 9794: 64; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 271: 169. 95. HStAD, MdI 9710: 203, 204, 206, 234. 96. HStAD, MdI 9794: 127. 97. StAB, AH Bautzen 685; StAB, AH Bautzen 686; StAB, AH Bautzen 692; StAB, AH Bautzen 699; StAB, AH Bautzen 700. 98. HStAD, AM 1714/2: 133, 134, 158, 161. The Saxon Catholic population fell to three-fourths of its prewar level in the 1920s. See Georg Lommatzsch, “Die Bevölkerung nach dem Glaubenskenntnisse am 16. Juni 1925,” Zeitschrift des Sächsischen Statistischen Landesamtes, 1926–27, 67–72. Jirí Koralka argues that Czech associational life in Germany never regained its pre–World War I intensity, but he agrees that associations began new educational projects after 1924 (Koralka, “Ceši v Nemecku,” 127–28). 99. BA, R1501/13404: 112; HStAD, Staatskanzelei 132: 173, 358; BA, R1507/103: 42, 52; MBLSRH 11, no. 1 (1 January 1930): 4; Naše zahranicí 2 (1930): 77.

Notes to Pages 152–62

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100. Vystehovalec 19 February 1923; Vystehovalec 15 March 1928. 101. Vystehovalec 15 August 1926, 9; Vystehovalec 15 February 1929. 102. BA, R1507/103: 132, 151. 103. HStAD, Staatskanzelei 132: 358; BA, R1507/103: 15. 104. Some were doubtless naturalized Bohemians. See BA, R1507/103: 52. 105. BA, R1507/103: 52. 106. StAD, AV 83: 36. 107. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 131–34. 108. BA, R1507/103: 60, 55; HStAD, AM 1841: 103. 109. HStAD, Staatskanzelei 132: 358; BA, R1507/103: 42. 110. BA, R1507/103: 9. See also BA, R1507/103: 144, 8; HStAD, Staatskanzelei 132: 358. 111. StAD, AV 83: 39. 112. BA, R1507/103: 146, 150, 151.

CHAPTER 7 1. Lapp, Revolution, 185; MBLSRH 13, no. 24 (15 December 1932): 2; HStAD, AM 1866: 10, 28, 46–47; Jirí Sláma, “Die Außenbeziehungen der Tschechoslowakei mit Deutschland,” in Gleichgewicht—Revision—Restauration: Die Außenpolitik der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik im Europasystem der Pariser Vororteverträge, ed. Karl Bosl (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1976), 222; Teichová, Czechoslovak Economy, 23; Nordböhmische Tageblatt, 20 February 1932; HStAD, AM 1866: 33. 2. HStAD, Gesandtschaft Berlin 276, 13 December 1930. 3. Boehm, Die deutschen Grenzlande (Berlin, 1930). 4. StAD, AV 67: 34. 5. Reichsgesetzblatt 14 (8 April 1931): 117; Reichsgesetzblatt 42 (28 July 1931): 397, 407. 6. MBLSRH 13, no. 19 (1 October 1932): 2; HStAD, AH Auerbach 78: 1, 12; The government proposed borderland aid to eastern Prussia in 1926. HStAD, AH Oelsnitz 935; HStAD, AH Annaberg 592: 113. 7. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 183: 1. HStAD, AH Auerbach 78: 1; HStAD, AH Annaberg 592: 110. 8. HStAD, AH Oelsnitz 935: 51. 9. HStAD, AH Auerbach 79: 34. 10. HStAD, AH Annaberg 592: 27. 11. HStAD, AH Annaberg 592: 22–23, 28, 31, 48; HStAD, AH Marienberg 338: 5; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 183: 13–14. 12. HStAD, AM 1864:109. 13. HStAD, AH Oelsnitz 1101: 1–6, 19; HStAD, AH Annaberg 592; HStAD, AM 1864: 4–5, 50–52, 78, 109, 117; Vlastislav Lacina, “Dopad hospodárské krise tricátých let na ceskoslovenskou ekonomiku,” Ceskoslovenský casopis historický 37,

242

Notes to Pages 162–65

no. 1 (1989): 59–70; Manuel Schramm, “The Invention and Uses of Folk Art in Germany,” Folklore 115 (2004): 65. 14. HStAD, AH Annaberg 592: 18. 15. HStAD, AM 1864: 298–99. 16. MBLSRH 13, no. 24 (15 December 1932): 2; Lapp, Revolution, 204. 17. Nordböhmische Tageblatt, 20 February 1932; HStAD, AM 1866: 33. 18. HStAD, AM 1864: 166, 221, 225; NA, MSP Kart. 3980, doc. 3900, 5306, 5435, 2242. 19. NA, MSP Kart. 398D, doc. 2242. See also NA, MSP Kart. 3980, docs. 3900, 5306, 5435, 7254, 8465, 23207, 2876; “Zoufalé postavení našich vystehovalcu v Nemecku,” Pravo Lidu 11 December 1929. 20. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 912, sign. 355, Vecerní Ceské slovo 2.5.1930. 21. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1942: 142. 22. HStAD, AH Annaberg 592: 57. 23. HStAD, AM 1866: 529, 383–84. 24. HStAD, AM 1844: 217. 25. HStAD, AM 1848: 383–85. 26. HStAD, AM 1864: 85, 117, 126, 152, 273, 287; HStAD, AM 1865: 70. 27. HStAD, AM 1864: 152, 418. 28. HStAD, AM 1865: 91. 29. HStAD, AM 1866: 76–77, 82, 115, 128, 100,130, 153–55, 167, 202. 30. Vlastislav Lacina, “Hospodárská politika jako faktor ekonomického rustu a stabilisace ceskoslovenské spolecnosti ve dvacátých letech,” Moderní dejiny 6 (1998): 115. 31. Haslinger, Imagined Territories, 323–24, 314–15; Christoph Boyer, “Die Vergabe von Staatsauftragen in der CSR in den dreissiger Jahren—ein Vehikel zur Ruinierung der sudetendeutschen Wirtschaft?” in Das Scheitern der Verständigung: Tschechen, Deutsche und Slowaken in der Ersten Republik (1918–1938), ed. Jörg K. Hoensch and Dušan Ková (Essen: Klartext, 1994), 81–115. 32. “Zahranicní Nemci a Ceskoslovensko,” Cechoslovak, 15 February 1930, 81; “Nemecká demonstrace s oslavou nemecké revolty ze dne 4 brezna 1919,” Cechoslovak, 15 March 1930, 109. 33. Claus-Christian Szejnmann, Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in “Red” Saxony (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 53–54. 34. Lapp, Revolution, 186. 35. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1945: 10. 36. Lapp, Revolution, 159–76. 37. HStAD, AH Auerbach 79: 44 38. Szejnmann, Nazism, 52, 55, 58, 116; MBLSRH 11, no. 14 (15 July 1930): 14. 39. HStAD, AH Auerbach 761: 1, 5; Claus-Christian Szejnmann, “The Rise of the Nazi Party in the Working-Class Milieu of Saxony,” in The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany, ed. Conan Fischer (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 192. 40. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 912, sign. 355, multiple articles from 24.6.1930 and 28.6.1930.

Notes to Pages 165–75

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41. HStAD, AM 1866: 79; HStAD, AH Oelsnitz 935: 36, 118, 121; HStAD, AM 7008: 96, 19. 42. HStAD, AH Auerbach 79: 46–47. 43. HStAD, AH Auerbach 761: 1–5. 44. Jörg Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics: 1848 to the Present (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 48–50. 45. Dagmar Moravcová, “Pocátky krize v ceskoslovensko-nemeckých vztazích 1929–1932.” Moderní dejiny 6 (1998): 99–105; Campbell, Confrontation, 235. 46. MBLSRH no. 13 (1 July 1932): 8; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 223, 232–33. 47. HStAD, AM 1864: 57. 48. “Nemecka ofensiva v Cechoslovensku,” Cechoslovak, 15 May 1930, 157. 49. HStAD, AM 1864: 246. 50. HStAD, AM 1865: 226. 51. “Nemci v Cechoslovensku,” Cechoslovak, 15 January 1930, 20–21. 52. HStAD, AM 1866: 348, 166, 404. 53. HStAD, AM 1866: 444–45; HStAD, Gesandtschaft Berlin 276, 9.2.1931. 54. HStAD, AM 1865: 206. 55. HStAD, AM 1865: 334. 56. HStAD, AM 1864: 126; HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 50. 57. HStAD, AM 1865: 12. 58. HStAD, AM 1866: 386. 59. HStAD, AM 1866: 21. 60. HStAD, AM 1866: 115, 21, 147, 269. 61. HStAD, AM 1866: 128, 130, 339. 62. HStAD, AM 1866: 16, 147–48, 156, 157, 166, 178, 265, 269; Campbell, Confrontation, 260–62. 63. HStAD, AM 1865: 226, 298; HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 19. 64. HStAD, AM 1866: 106, 264–65, 542; HStAD, AM 1864: 295, 305. 65. HStAD, AM 1846: 95–97. 66. HStAD, AM 1846: 125. 67. Haslinger, Imagined Territories, 326. 68. HStAD, AM 1848: 436 69. HStAD, AM 1848: 454, 453. 70. HStAD, AM 1848: 436, 454. 71. HStAD, AM 1846: 125–26, 147, 149. 72. HStAD, AM 1844: 217, 221; HStAD, AM 1846: 119, 148–50. 73. HStAD, AM 1849: 12, 10. 74. HStAD, AM 1846: 119. 75. HStAD, AM 1842: 369. 76. HStAD, AM 1868: 224; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1987: 4.12.1936; HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 109; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 200. 77. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1575: 432, 430, 436–37. 78. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1575: 449; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1985, 8.3.1934; HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 141; HStAD, AM 1842: 397.

244

Notes to Pages 175–78

79. HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 109; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1953, 30.12.1936; HStAD, AM 1848: 450. 80. HStAD, AM 1842: 400–401. 81. Andreas Wagner, “Partei und Staat. Das Verhältnis von NSDAP und innere Verwaltung im Freistaat Sachsen 1933–1945,” in Sachsen in der NS-Zeit, ed. Clemens Vollnhals (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 2002), 41–53; Andreas Wagner, Mutschmann gegen von Killinger: Kon›iktlinien zwischen Gauleiter und SA-Führer während des Aufstiegs der NSDAP und der “Machtergreifung” im Freistaat Sachsen (Beucha: Saxon, 2001). 82. Heidrun Dolezel and Stephan Dolezel, ed., Deutsche Gesandtschaftsberichte aus Prag, 1933–1935, vol. 4 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), 36. 83. Dolezel and Dolezel, Deutsche Gesandtschaftsberichte, 33. 84. HStAD, AM 1848: 421. 85. HStAD, Wirtschaftsministerium 328: 153. 86. HStAD, AM 1848: 395. 87. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2169: 275. HStAD, AM 1848: 404. 88. HStAD, AM 1848: 407. 89. HStAD, AM 1848: 395, 398, 399, 404, 407. 90. Ronald Smelser, The Sudeten Problem, 1933–1938: Volkstumspolitik and the Formulation of Nazi Foreign Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 10. 91. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1575. 92. Eduard Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 7. 93. Lothar Elsner and Joachim Lehmann, Ausländische Arbeiter unter dem deutschen Imperialismus (Berlin: Dietz, 1988), 156–57, 159; Homze, Foreign Labor, 8. 94. HStAD, AH Annaberg 3266: 179. 95. HStAD, AM 1717: 253; Hoover Institution Archive, Theodore Abel Collection, Kart. 7, no. 520. 96. HStAD, AM 1717: 263. 97. HStAD, AM 1717: 273, 250–53, 260–64, 273, 298, 309, 316–19, 325. 98. HStAD, AH Annaberg 3266: 103; HStAD, AM 1874: 101. 99. HStAD, MdI 9704: 159; StAB, AH Bautzen 683; StAB, AH Bautzen 685; StAB, AH Bautzen 687. This law applied to German “émigrés” and naturalized citizens. See HStAD, MdI 9754. 100. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 166, 167; Hans Georg Lehmann and Michael Hepp, “Die individuelle Ausbürgerung deutscher Emigranten 1933–1945,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 38, no. 3 (1987): 163–72; Martin Dean, “The Development and Implementation of Nazi Denaturalization and Con‹scation Policy up to the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 217–42. 101. HStAD, MdI 9841; HStAD, MdI 9733: 38; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 275: 23. 102. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 285. Similarly, see HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 275; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 278.

Notes to Pages 178–81

245

103. HStAD, MdI 9704: 157, 159. 104. Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (New York: Longman, 1981), 96–182; Thomas Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur und Diktatur: Sächsische Heimatbewegung und Heimat-Propaganda im Dritten Reich und in der SBZ/DDR (Weimar: Böhlau, 2004), 27–98. 105. Saxons were overrepresented among German émigrés in Czechoslovakia. See Lisa Fittko, Solidarity and Treason, Resistance and Exile, 1933–1940 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 61; Werner Röder, “Drehscheibe— Kampfposten—Fluchtstation Deutsche Emigranten in der Tschechoslowakei,” in Drehscheibe Prag: Zur deutschen Emigration in der Tschechoslowakei 1933–1939, ed. Peter Becher and Peter Heumos (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992), 15–30. 106. StAL, Polizeipräsidium Leipzig 89: 28, 39, 40; StAL, Polizeipräsidium Leipzig 1983: 13, 127; StAL, Polizeipräsidium Leipzig 4672: 57–58; HStAD, AM 1868: 475; Sopade, 1934, 461; Marlis Buchholz and Bernd Rother, Der Parteivorstand der SPD im Exil: Protokolle der Sopade 1933–1940 (Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1995), XXXIV–XXXVI. 107. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1981: 10.4.1936; HStAD, AH Zwickau 1602: 48; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2008: 75; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2169: 36; HStAD, MdI 9754: 24.8.1933; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2009: 22.11.1936; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2050: 10.2.1932; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1980; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 9890: 1–2; Fittko, Solidarity, 77–78, 86–88. 108. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2488: 15.10.1936; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2487; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2062: 12.9.1936; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 9890: 8. 109. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2169: 267, 269. 110. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 9657: 3, 13.10.1937; HStAD, AH Zwickau 1603: 12; HStAD, AM 1846: 148; HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 129; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 244. 111. HStAD, SkZ 1159, Dresdner Neuste Nachrichten 26.3.1935. 112. HStAD, MdI 9842: 30.12.1933, 20.2.1934. 113. Fittko, Solidarity, 22; Dolezel and Dolezel, Deutsche Gesandtschaftsberichte, 31. 114. HStAD, SkZ 1159, Dresdner Neuste Nachrichten 26.3.1935. 115. Silke Schumann, “Die Soziale Lage der Bevölkerung und die NSSozialpolitik in Sachsen,” in Vollnhals, Sachsen in der NS-Zeit, 58. 116. HStAD, AM 1874: 127; Martin Bachstein, “Die Hilfe der Sudetendeutschen Fluchtlinge,” Bohemia 28, no. 2 (1987): 369–76. 117. HStAD, AH Marienberg 337: 95; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1575: 508–9.

CHAPTER 8 1. HStAD, AH Auerbach 79: 176. 2. HStAD, AM 1875: 83. 3. Moritz Durach, “Grenzland Sachsen im Unterricht,” in Sachsen als Gren-

246

Notes to Pages 181–84

zland: Ein Beispiel nationaler Lebensraumkunde, ed. Friedrich Grosch (Leipzig: List und von Bressensdorf, 1936). 28; Ernst Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische Grenzraum,” Zeitschrift für Erdkunde 5, nos. 9–10 (1937): 408. 4. The Hussite Wars, a religious con›ict, were turned into a story of national and “racial” con›ict. See Arthur Graefe, Grenzmark Sachsen: Ein Vorposten im deutschen Schicksalskampf (Dresden: Wilhelm Limpert, 1934), 10; Gotthold Weicker, “Der osterzgebirgische Raum,” in Grosch, Sachsen als Grenzland, 56, 58; Oswin Poetschke, “Sachsen als Teil der deutschen Ostfront,” in Grosch, Sachsen als Grenzland, 21. Saxon nationalists blamed the nationality con›ict on Czech “hatred” of Germans. See Walter Schlesinger, “Entstehung und Bedeutung der sächsisch-böhmischen Grenze,” Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte 59, no. 1 (1938): 17; Rudolf Kötzschke, “Sachsen als Grenzland in der Geschichte,” Politische Erziehung no. 12 (1933/34), 370; Johann von Leers, “Slawen und Deutsche,” Deutsches Grenzland, 1936, 26–27. 5. Rolf Naumann, Sachsens Geschichte als Deutsches Grenzlandschicksal (Dresden: Heinrich, 1938), 6–12; HStAD, AH Auerbach 79: 176; Graefe, Grenzmark Sachsen, 8–12. 6. Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,”408. 7. Tammo Luther, Volkstumspolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1933–1938: Die Auslandsdeutschen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Traditionalisten und Nationalsozialisten (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 63. 8. HStAD, AH Annaberg 3401: 18. 9. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 223, 232–33; HStAD, AM 1874: 13. 10. Smelser, Sudeten Problem, 33; Luther, Volkstumspolitik, 63–68. 11. Smelser, Sudeten Problem; Luther, Volkstumspolitik, chap. 4. 12. Allen Thompson Cronenberg Jr., “The Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland: Völkisch Ideology and German Foreign Policy, 1881–1939” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1970), 94, 118; Malte Jaguttis and Stefan Oeter, “Volkstumspolitik und Volkstumsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Staat,” in Zur Entstehung des modernen Minderheitenschutzes in Europa, ed. Christoph Pan and Beate Sibylle Pfeil (Vienna: Springer, 2006), 230–33. 13. Smelser, Sudeten Problem, 4. 14. HStAD, MfV 15652. 15. HStAD, AM 1875: 128. 16. HStAD, AH Annaberg 3401: 18. 17. Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur, 113. 18. Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur, 110. 19. Ernst Schröder, Schleswig, ein Grenzland (Flensburg: Heimat und Erbe, 1938); W. Grotelüschen, Grenzland Nordschleswig (Langensalza: J. Beltz, 1938); Ewald Kimenkowski, Soldat im Grenzland Ostpreussen (Berlin, 1938); Walther Franz, Deutsches Grenzland Ostpreussen (Pillkallen: G. Boettcher 1936); Doris Kraft, Das untersteirische Drauland (Munich: M. Schick 1935); Deutsches Grenzland, 1935; Kurt Freytag, Raum deutscher Zukunft—Grenzland im Osten (Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1933). 20. Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,” 407–8.

Notes to Pages 185–87

247

21. For Slavic attacks on Saxony, see Poetschke, “Sachsen als Teil,” 18–19; Weicker, “Der osterzgebirgische Raum,” 57; Durach, “Grenzland Sachsen,” 37. 22. Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,” 391, 408. 23. Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,” 392; Arthur Graefe, Sachsen, Land der Vielfalt: Werkstadt Deutschland, Mittelpunkt deutscher Kultur, Grenzland (Dresden: Buchdruckerei der Wilhelm und Bertha von Baensch Stiftung, 1936), 5, 44–65; Graefe, Grenzmark Sachsen, 37–38, 43–46, 51–52; Sachsen am Werk (Dresden: Wilhelm Limpert, 1934); Schlesinger, “Entstehung,” 9, 11. Saxon nationalists echoed Ostforschung’s call to recover eastern “German” territories. See Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 3–39; Karl Thalheim and A. Hillen Zieg‹eld, Der deutsche Osten (Berlin: Propyläen, 1936); Freytag, Raum deutscher Zukunft; Paul Wagner, “Die Tschechoslowakei: Eine politisch-geographische Skizze,” Die höhere Schule 15, no. 8 (1937): 178. 24. The Reich introduced new borderland funding for the Prussian East in 1934. See Andreas Kossert, “‘Grenzlandpolitik’ und Ostforschung an der Peripherie des Reiches: Das ostpreussische Massuren 1919–1945,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 51, no. 2 (2003): 137. 25. This narrative was borrowed from eighteenth-century Prussian ideas of German “colonization” of Poland. See Poetschke, “Sachsen als Teil,”17; Schlesinger, “Entstehung,” 25. 26. Der Freiheitskampf, 10 August 1933, 7. 27. Graefe, Grenzmark Sachsen, 3; See also Graefe, Sachsen, Land der Vielfalt, 3. 28. Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,” 392. See also Poetschke, “Sachsen als Teil,” 18–19. 29. Poetschke, “Sachsen als Teil,” 20–21. 30. Graefe, Grenzmark Sachsen, 8; Rolf Naumann, “Grenzland Sachsen,” Die höhere Schule 15, no. 5 (1937): 90; The Oberlausitz also proclaimed itself a thousand-year borderland. Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten, 8 June 1933. 31. HStAD, AM 1875: 149. 32. HStAD, AM 1875: 107–8, 127–28, 130, 153–55, 218, 220; Smelser, Sudeten Problem, 33–37. 33. Rudolf Lochner, Sudetenland: Ein Beitrag zur Grenzlanderziehung im ostmitteldeutschen Raum (Leipzig: Julius Belz, 1937), 10. 34. HStAD, AM 1875: 128. 35. Lochner, Sudetenland, 4, 10, 16; HStAD, AM 1874: 108. 36. Hermann Ullmann, “Die Sudetendeutschen: Schicksal und Weg eines Volksstammes,” Berliner Monatshefte: Zeitschrift für Neuste Geschichte, November 1938, 972–73. 37. Hans Christoph Kaergel, “Die Kultur baut ewige Brücken: Die kulturelle Gemeinschaft des sächsisch-böhmischen Grenzraumes,” Das Schöne Sachsen 4, no. 9 (1934): 367. 38. HStAD, AM 1875: 208. 39. Schlesinger, “Entstehung,” 38. 40. Rudolf Käubler, “Die Unbeständigkeit der ‘historischen’ Grenzen Böhmens,” Geographische Zeitschrift 44, no. 10 (1938): 27.

248

Notes to Pages 187–92

41. Wagner, “Die Tschechoslowakei,” 180; Willy Künzel, Das Südlausitzer Bergland als Grenzlandschaft (Langensalza, 1935), 5, 24. 42. Käubler, “Die Unbeständigkeit der ‘historischen’ Grenzen Böhmens,” 27. 43. Wagner, “Die Tschechoslowakei,” 178. 44. HStAD, SkZ 2249, Vogtländischer Anzeiger 17.9.1938. 45. Emil Lehmann, Sudetendeutsches Grenzlandvolk: Das Sudetendeutschtum in seiner stammlich-landschaftlichen Entfaltung. (Dresden: Bastei, 1937), 24, 32. 46. The Locarno agreement guaranteed Germany’s western borders but left eastern revisionism unbroached. See Gerhard Fuchs, “Vyznam ‘Locarna’ v nemecko-ceskoslovenských vztazich,” Ceskoslovenský casopis historický 29, no. 6 (1981): 847–78. 47. Bruno Schier, “Böhmisch-sächsische Studien,” Mitteldeutsche Blätter für Volkskunde 10, no. 6 (1935): 161; Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,” 392; Ernst Neef, “Die Aufgaben eines Grenzlandinstitutes in Dresden,” in Grosch, Sachsen als Grenzland, 78; Durach, “Grenzland Sachsen,” 28, 30; K. E. Fritsch, “Volkstumsarbeit im erzgebirgischen Grenzland,” Mitteldeutsche Blätter für Volkskunde 11, no. 4 (1936): 113. 48. HStAD, AM 1875: 147. 49. Graefe, Grenzmark Sachsen, 3. On Graefe’s propaganda role, see Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur, 100–114; Poetschke, “Sachsen als Teil,” 25. 50. Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,” 407. 51. Neef, “Die Aufgaben,” 76; Neef, “Der sächsisch-böhmische,” 407. 52. Luther, Volkstumspolitik, 79; Smelser, Sudeten Problem, 57, 62. 53. Christoph Boyer and Jaroslav Kucera, “Die Deutschen in Böhmen, die Sudetendeutsche Partei und der Nationalsozialismus,” in Nationalsozialismus in der Region, ed. Horst Möller, Andreas Wirsching, and Walter Ziegler (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), 276. 54. Volker Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen im NS-Staat: Politik und Stimmung der Bevölkerung im Reichsgau Sudetenland 1938–1945 (Essen: Klartext, 1999). 40. Historians, especially in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, have often treated the SdP as unambiguous Nazi surrogates. See, for example, Jaroslav César and Bohumil Cerný, Politika nemeckých burzoazních stran v Ceskoslovensku v letech 1918–1938 (Prague, 1960). On this debate, see Eva Hahnová, Sudetonemecký problém: Obtízné loucení s minolostí (Prague: Prago Media, 1996). 55. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 203–5. 56. Smelzer, Sudeten Problem, chaps. 6–7, 9. 57. Smelzer, Sudeten Problem, 156. 58. Polední list, 16 February 1934. 59. Dolezel and Dolezel, Deutsche Gesandtschaftsberichte, 177–78; Cornwall, “National Reparation?” 279; Ota Holub, “Opatreni k obrane a ochrane cs. Státní hranice ve 20. a 30. letech,” Historie a vojenství 2 (1986): 98–100. 60. Haslinger, Imagined Territories, 327. 61. Even Beneš talked of “Creeping Germanization.” See Cornwall, “National Reparation?” 267. 62. King, Budweisers, 171. 63. Jaromír Pavlicek, “Národní jednota severoceská a její podíl na prosazování ceských národních zájmu v narodnostne smišených oblastech (1885–1948),” in Šra-

Notes to Pages 192–96

249

jerová, Ceské národní aktivity, 184; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 133; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 244. 64. Jana Burešová, “Význam Sokola pro ceský národní zivot v pohranici v letech prvni Ceskoslovenské republiky,” in Šrajerová, Ceské národní aktivity, 254; “Spolecný vybor pro ochranu hranicarských zajmu na Trutnovsku,” Národní listy, 17 May 1938: 2; King, Budweisers, 171; Klub ceskoslovenských turistu, Turistický obzor (Louny, 1935), 1. 65. Hranicári mluví a zalují: Slova pravdy o smišeném území napsali delníci z Ruzodolu u Liberce (Prague: Nedved, 1938), 21–22. 66. Národní politika, 26 January 1933. 67. Klub ceskoslovenských turistu, Turistický obzor, 1. 68. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1575: 500. 69. HStAD, AM 1875: 127. See, for example, Z. H. Wachsman, Gute Nachbarschaft: Ein Ernst-Heiteres Reisebuch aus der CSR (Vienna: Dr. Heinrich Glanz, 1937), 121–22. 70. Sopade, 1934, 501. 71. Sopade, 1934, 335. 72. Sopade, 1934, 783, 814, 500. 73. Sopade, 1936, 461. 74. Sopade, 1936, 461–62, 1101. 75. J. W. Breugel, “German Diplomacy and the Sudeten Question before 1938,” International Affairs 37, no. 3 (1961): 330; Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 241, 246. 250. Even Hitler described the atmosphere in November 1937 as “imminent catastrophe”; see Alfred D. Low, “Eduard Beneš, the Anschluss Movement, 1918–38, and the Policy of Czechoslovakia,” East Central Europe 1–2 (1983): 88. 76. Sopade, 1937, 680, 1554, 922. 77. Sopade, 1937, 1525–27. Nazis frequently portrayed Czechoslovakia as a Bolshevik puppet. See Jindrich Dejmek, “Nacisticka treti riše a Ceskoslovenská diplomacie 1933–38,” Moderní dejiny 5 (1997): 119–47. 78. J. W. Breugel, Czechoslovakia before Munich: The German Minority Problem and British Appeasement Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 152. 79. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, 244; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 181: 89; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1982: 1; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 1988: 5.11.1937; Emil Trojan, Betonová Hranice II (Ústí nad Orlící: Oftis, 1997). 80. Eduard Stehlík and Martin Vanourek, Zapomenutí Hranicári (Mohelnice: Hella Autotechnik, 2002). 81. Sopade, 1937, 1085–88, 1527, 1658–63. 82. NA, MV Kart. 4831, sign. 5/215/10, 7.11.1936; NA, MV Kart. 4831, sign. 5/215/13, 7.5.1937. 83. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 2169: 147; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 9657: 13.10.1937; HStAD, AH Annaberg 3273. 84. Sopade, 1936, 1052. 85. Sopade, 1937, 952–55, 1553, 1485; Sopade, 1938, 826. 86. Sopade, 1938, 781; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1577: August 1938: 4. 87. Sopade, 1938, 380, 561–62, 563–65. 88. Sopade, 1938, 636, 562, 564.

250

Notes to Pages 196–201

89. Sopade, 1938, 367. 90. Sopade, 1937, 1474–75; Sopade, 1938, 367–71, 566–67. 91. StAL, AH Borna 2913: 11; Sopade, 1938, 566, 368. 92. Sopade, 1938, 369, 566, 840. 93. Sopade, 1938, 371, 563, 829, 568, 833–34. 94. Sopade, 1938, 370. 95. Sopade, 1938, 369, 831. 96. On SdP Gleichschaltung, see “Vcera v pohranicí!” Národní listy, 1 May 1938: 3; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 165. 97. Sopade, 1938, 370, 570, 830. 98. Hahnová, Sudetonemecký problém, 51; Ralf Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!”: Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland 1938–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999). 57; Rudolf Sander, “Dva dokumenty o protistatní cinnosti sudetonemecké strany v cs. Pohranici v roce 1938,” Historie a vojenství 37, no. 6 (1988): 140–54. 99. “Mimo Henleinovu stranu jen-emigranté,” Národní listy, 17 May 1938, 2. 100. Sopade, 1938, 263. 101. NA, MZV-VA Kart. 821, 14.3.1938; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1577: 4. 102. Sopade, 1938, 272. 103. Sopade, 1938, 373, 376, 273. Similarly, see Smelzer, Sudeten Problem, 221. 104. Sopade, 1938, 374, 827, 376; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1577, 26.7.1938. 105. Sopade, 1938, 378–79; NA, MZV-VA Kart. 821, 24–26.5.1938. 106. Sopade, 1938, 382–83; HStAD, SkZ 2249, Flöhatal-Zeitung 16.9.1938, “Bereits über 5000 Flüchtlinge aus Sudetenland,” Allg. Thür. Landesztg. Weimar 251 (16.9.1938), Nachrichten für Johanngeorgenstadt 218 (17.9.1938): 3, “Die Flucht der Sudetendeutschen nach dem Mutterlande hält an,” Erzgebirgischer Grenzbote 17.9.1938. 107. StAL, AH Borna 2913: 1–2, 4. 108. Sopade, 1938, 570–71, 832. 109. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1577: April 1938: 2; May 1938: 1; July 1938: 1. 110. Národní listy 17.5.1938: 2; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1577: July 1938: 2, August 1938: 8, 13. 111. Sopade, 1938, 566; HStAD, AH Freiberg 1577: June 1938, 3; HtSAD AM 1868: 532. 112. Haslinger, Imagined Territories, 263–64. 113. “V pohranici je normalni zivot,” Národní listy, 29 May 1938, 3; “Narodnosti promiseni v pohranici,” Národní listy, 31 May 1938, 2; “Politika a hospodarstvi v našem pohranici,” Národní listy, 1 May 1938, 6. 114. Smelzer, Sudeten Problem, 220; Broszat, “Das Sudetendeutsche Freikorps,” 31; Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 9(1) 1961; HStAD, SkZ 2249. The SdP often referred to “Hussite-Bolshevik brutality”; see Rudolf Sander, “Vojensky organizovaná protistátní cinnost sudetských Nemcu v predmnichovském Ceskoslovensku,” Historie a vojenství 2 (1993): 81. 115. HStAD, AH Freiberg 1577, May 1938, June 1938; SOA Decín, Turnverein VDF 41, Abwehr 3.5.1938. 116. Smelzer, Sudeten Problem, 145–46. 117. Ota Holub, “Vojenská a bezpecnostní opatrení proti nebezpecí vzpoury SdP v pohranicí v léte 1938,” Historie a vojenství 37, no. 4 (1988): 117–32; Trojan, Betonová Hranice; Marie Salabová and Rudolf Sander, “Zari 1938; Dokumenty k

Notes to Pages 201–7

251

udalostem v zapadoceskem a jihoceskem pohranici,” Historie a vojenství 2 (1967): 303–50. 118. Broszat, “Das Sudetendeutsche Freikorps,” 45–46. 119. HStAD, SkZ 2251, Erzgebirgischer Generalanzeiger 1.10.1938, Der Freiheitskampf 1.10.1938.

EPILOGUE 1. HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 181: 140. 2. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 87. 3. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 189. 4. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 189–203; Václav Kural and Zdenek Radvanovský, Sudety pod hákovým krízem (Ústí nad Labem: Albis International, 2002). 119. 5. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 193, 76–77; Sopade, 1939, 22–23. 6. Sopade, 1939, 21, 132. 7. Sopade, 1939, 22; Kural and Radvanovský, Sudety pod hákovým krízem, 112–14. 8. Schaarschmidt, Regionalkultur, 208. 9. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 125. 10. Sopade, 1939, 129. 11. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 287–90, 321–24, 331; Kural and Radvanovský, Sudety pod hákovým krízem, 145. 12. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 186, 182; King, Budweisers, 183, 179; Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!” 288–305. 13. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 186–87, 177, 194; Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 279–80. 14. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 307; Vojtech Mastny, The Czechs under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance 1939–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 133. 15. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 380. 16. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 206–7, 210, 239, 179–80. 17. Gebel, “Heim ins Reich!” 312–15; Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 18. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 427–29, 432. 19. Zimmermann, Die Sudetendeutschen, 368–69. 20. Andreas Wiedemann, “Komm mit uns das Grenzland aufbauen!”: Ansiedlung und neue Strukturen in den ehemaligen Sudetengebieten 1945–1952 (Essen: Klartext, 2007), 11; Zdenek Radvanovský, Konec cesko-nemeckého souzití v ústecké oblasti 1945–1948 (Ústí nad Labem UJEP, 1997), 15. 21. Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” 45; Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 115. 22. Czechoslovakia outlawed the term Sudetenland in May 1945. See Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” 29.

252

Notes to Pages 207–11

23. Quoted in Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” 296. 24. Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” chaps. 1–2. 25. Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” 337–41. 26. Jaroslav Vaculík, “Die Remigration in die Tschechoslowakei 1945–1948,” in Heimat und Exil: Emigration und Rückwanderung, Vertreibung und Integration in der Geschichte der Tschechoslowakei, ed. Peter Heumos (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 99–109; Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” 288; Birgit Mitzscherlich, Diktatur und Diaspora: Das Bistum Meissen 1932–1951 (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005). 570. 27. Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” 257–73, 291–92, 320. 28. Wiedemann, “Komm mit,” 150–58, 207, 217; Anna Beinhauerová and Karel Sommer, “Nekteré problemy prumyslove zamestnanosti v ceských zemich v obdobi dvouleteho planu (1947–1949),” Slezský sborník 88, no. 1 (1990): 7–22; David Gerlach, “Working with the Enemy: Labor Politics in the Czech Borderlands, 1945–48,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 184–85. 29. In 1945, most Bohemian expellees were sent to Saxony. See Gerlach, “Working,” 184. 30. Irina Schwab, Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in Sachsen 1945–1952 (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2001), 37. 31. Manfred Wille, ed., Die Sudetendeutschen in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands (Magdeburg, 1993), 14, 17; Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 148. 32. Manfred Wille, ed., Die Vertriebenen in der SBZ/DDR: Dokumente. Vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), 134–35. 33. Wille, Die Sudetendeutschen, 19. 34. Wille, Die Vertriebenen, 84–85. 35. Stefan Donth, Vertriebene und Flüchtlinge in Sachsen 1945 bis 1952 (Weimar: Böhlau, 2000). 57; Schwab, Flüchtlinge, 90, 92, 151. 36. Schwab, Flüchtlinge, 151, 153. 37. Donth, Vertriebene, 62–80; Schwab, Flüchtlinge, 120, 201–8. 38. Jürgen Tampke, Czech-German Relations and the Politics of Central Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 143–48. 39. “Eastern Germans Angered by Cross-Border Crime,” New York Times, July 18, 1993, 14; John Tagliabue, “Smugglers Overrun Germany’s Border with East,” New York Times, February 18, 1991, 3. 40. Mark Landler, “Germans and Czechs and the Little Bridge That Binds,” New York Times, April 29, 2004, A4. 41. “Nemci si jezdí kupovat levnejší léky do Ceska,” Lidové noviny, May 21, 2008. 42. “Ceši si oblíbili nakupování v Sasku,” Lidové noviny, December 15, 2008. 43. For such arguments, see Eric Hobsbaum, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain, ed., Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

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Index

acculturation, 50, 52, 55, 138, 223n88 activists and activism, 154; anti-Nazi, 178–79; German-Bohemian nationalist, 57–59, 68, 128, 132; nationalist, 129–30, 167, 194; Reich German nationalist, 57–58, 128; Sudeten German, 192–93, 210 the Albrechtsburg, 181, 182, 183 Andersen, Hans Christian, 17, 21 Anschluss, 153, 188; Austrian, 197, 199–200; celebrations of (1938), 202; Czechoslovak (Sudetenland) anticipation of, 200; German-Bohemians and, 103–4, 105, 107–8; 1918/1919 calls for, 101–4, 105, 107–8 anti-Czechoslovak propaganda, 194, 195–96, 200, 249n77 anti-Nazi activism, 178–79, 206 Anti-Socialist Laws in Germany, 49 arti‹cial ›ower industry, 29 assimilation policies, 52, 206 associational life, 53, 56; German-Austrian and German-Bohemian in Saxony, 50, 84, 148, 151–55, 170; nationalist, 57, 59, 60–61, 66–67, 68, 69, 71–72, 74, 79, 175; Saxon, 48, 49, 50; Social Democratic, 49. See also Czech associations in Saxony/Germany; gymnastics associations Association for Germans Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland, VDA), 61, 73, 129, 183, 184, 236n77. See also German School Association (Allgemeine Deutscher Schulverein) Association of German Austrians, 148 August the Strong, 53

Aussig-Karbitzer Volkszeitung (newspaper), 65 Austria, 14, 17, 22, 23, 42, 71; Anschluss and, 197, 199–200; citizenship and, 37, 40, 48, 84–87, 98; nationalist politics in Germany, 79–80; 1938 invasion of, 197 Austrian Ministry of the Interior, 93 Austrian Ministry of War, 101 Bahm, Karl, 101 bakers, 30–31, 94, 121 Barth, Fredrik, 7 Bassange, Dr. (Dresden Pan-German leader), 69 Bautzen, Germany, 63, 76, 146, 208, 209 Bavaria, 89n14, 160–61, 201, 204, 210 Beer, Herr (Germany SHB head), 187 Befreiungsscheine (work permit exemption), 139–40 Beneš, Eduard, 194, 201 Benndorf, Dr. (Saxon representative), 107, 110 Berliner Neuste Nachrichten (German nationalist paper), 77 bilingualism, 7–8, 24, 36–37, 47, 61, 156, 158; censuses and, 219n10; citizenship and, 150; foreign labor and, 138; place-names and, 73; suspicion of, 99. See also language birth certi‹cates, 88 von Bismarck, Otto, 23, 25 Boehm, Max Hildebert, 129 Boelitz, Otto, 129 Bohemia, 16, 18, 22, 23, 88, 98–99; crown lands of, 100, 103–4, 110; 265

266

Index

Bohemia (continued) industries in, 27–29; language frontier of, 62–63, 69, 126; nationality con›ict of, 60–62, 70, 205; Nazi party and, 189–92, 203–6 Bohemia (Prague-based German-language paper), 64, 65 Bohemian nationality con›ict, 50, 69, 205, 207; censuses and, 24; onset of, 60–62; Pan-German League and, 74–75, 79; Reich German nationalist politics and, 13, 70–72; Saxony and, 53, 62, 63, 64, 66, 110 Bohemians, 12–13, 14, 96, 166, 176; in Austro-Hungarian army, 86; citizenship and, 87, 145; as Czech speakers, 35, 42–44, 48 Bohemians in Saxony, 36–47, 64, 84, 152, 176–77, 196–97; citizenship and, 146–50; demographics of, 38–40; expellees, 208; language and, 36–37; military mobilization and, 84; objections to, 37–38; post–WWI, 131; public perceptions of, 41–47; regulations and, 40–41; religion and, 53–55; travel and, 17. See also foreign labor Bohemian Woods, 63, 102 Böhmerwaldbund, 60, 63 Bolshevism, 110, 111, 194 border controls, 17–20, 91–97, 194; curfews and, 118; currency crisis and, 123; economic mobility and, 112; exceptions to, 135–37, 138–41, 143; extensions of, 155; fences and, 118–19; locals’ circumventing of, 115. See also passport requirements; passports borderland funds, 160–62, 185, 204, 205 borderland identi‹cation cards, 89–90 borderland limits post–WWI, 131 borderland passes, 115, 118, 140, 144; anti-Czechoslovak propaganda and, 195; SA and, 174, 175 borderland rhetoric, 159, 160; geography of instability and, 128; Nazis and, 183, 203; Versailles system reversal and, 187–88 borderlands literature, 183–85 border police, 17, 109, 124, 169; Czechoslovak, 118, 173, 194, 201; in Saxony,

18, 30, 92, 108, 123, 135, 163, 179, 195, 204; during WWI, 91–92. See also police border zones, 13, 115–16, 159–62, 191–92 boycotts, 24, 60, 72, 73–74, 176, 198 Bräunlich, Heinrich, 70 Brentano, Lujo, 43 British conservatives, 200 Brubaker, Rogers, 13 butchers, 117–18 Canning, Kathleen, 42 Catholics, 53–55, 70–71, 78, 223n100, 240n98 censorship, 26, 98 censuses, 23–24, 40, 60, 219n10, 220n36 Central Europe, 97, 99; map of (1871), 2; map of (1921–38), 3 central governments, 8, 19, 26, 56, 192; borderland funds and, 160–62. See also local levels; local people Ceský Vystehovalec (newspaper), 51, 52, 88 Chamberlain, Neville, 200, 201 Charles University, 181 Chemnitz, Germany, 50, 89, 121–22, 136, 142, 197, 198; associational life and, 152; as border, 21; citizenship and, 149; currency crisis and, 122, 124; enlistment of‹ces in, 84; industry in, 27–28; labor migration and, 35; passports and, 93; Volksstimme, 134, 139 church, 53–55, 56, 70–71 citizenship, 5, 40, 98, 144–51; belonging and, 131–32; Bohemians and, 87, 145; on censuses, 220n36; Czechoslovak, 144–146; family and, 41, 83–85, 89, 145, 150, 239n74; German, 146–51; German-speaking Bohemians and, 139; language and, 37, 145, 150; loyalties and, 140; marriage and, 41, 83–84, 89, 239n74; postwar peace treaties and, 144–45; pre–WWI, 47–48; regulation of during WWI, 82, 83–90; revoking and rejection of, 178; Saxon Nazi access to, 176–177 clergy, 53–54, 70, 78 coal: Bohemian natural supply of,

Index

27–29; boycotts and, 74; industry and, 31, 37, 104, 112, 113, 143 cold war, 10 Communists and Communism, 120, 124, 149, 167, 174, 178; arrests of, 164, 170, 179; demonstrations by, 120, 164–65, 169, 170, 197; end of WWII and, 202–3, 206–7, 209; fall of, 210; fear of, 117, 165; German Communist Party (KPD), 169, 209; Great Depression and, 164, 165; as marginal, 132; propaganda of, 179, 207; support for, 166 confession, 36, 53–55, 56 conscription, 85–86, 131 consumers, 116, 117, 158, 163, 203–4, 211; boycotts and, 24, 60, 72, 73–74, 176, 198; currency crisis and, 121–25; pre–WWI, 30–31, 74 crafts, 27–29, 40, 162 Crimmitschau textile workers’ strike, 41–44, 64, 222n61 crisis, 162, 199–201. See also Great Depression cross-border contact, 18, 19, 30–32, 56, 77, 78 currency crisis of 1922–23, 119–26, 156; foreign labor and, 133, 137–38 customs of‹cials, 123, 173, 193 Czech Agrarian Party, 191 Czech associations in Saxony/Germany, 48–52, 152–56, 207, 240n98; citizenship and, 150–51; military and, 84; nationalists and, 59, 75, 79; press coverage of, 65 Czech economic interests, 74–75 Czechization, 52, 63–64, 67, 192; attempts to reverse, 205; Czechs in Saxony and, 225n26; dangers of, 185; as internal threat, 76; Pan-German League and, 75; of Saxon borderlands, 107 Czech-language classes, 76 Czech-language press, 141–42, 179, 191 Czech National Council in Prague, 52 Czech nationalism, 5, 58, 192; Czech speakers and, 51–52; emergence of, 23–24; geography of instability and, 127; German-Bohemian nationalists

267

and, 66; place-names and, 65; publications of, 193; rise of, 59–61; Sorbs and, 77–79 Czechoslovak citizenship, 144–46. See also citizenship Czechoslovak Communism, 207 Czechoslovak currency de›ation, 119–26. See also currency crisis of 1922–23 Czechoslovak German National Socialist Party (DNSAP), 170, 190. See also Nazi party (NSDAP) Czechoslovakia, 14, 102–3; creation of, 81, 82, 99–100, 101, 107, 109–10, 146; German culture at borders of, 187–88; Great Depression in, 162–65; historic boundaries of, 103–4; military mobilization in, 199; Nazis and, 173–76, 189–92, 193; parliament of, 132; post–WWII, 206–8; SHB and, 186; territorial sovereignty of, 192 Czechoslovak National Committee, 100 Czech Republic, 210 Czechs, 14; Austro-Hungarian war effort and, 98–99; German-Bohemians and, 106; remigration of, 207; selfidenti‹ed, 12, 206; threats to Saxony of, 106–11 “Czech Saxony” (article), 65 Czech speakers, 8, 106, 127, 167–68; acculturation in Germany, 52; assimilation of, 205; Bohemians as, 35, 42–44, 48; border zones and, 191–92; censuses and, 219n10; citizenship and, 145, 150; in Crimmitschau, 42; Czech nationalism and, 51–52; Great Depression and, 164; labor migration and, 35–39, 48–49, 51, 163; in Ostritz, 64; place-names and, 73; Sorbs and, 77; in Sudetengau, 205–6; suspicion of, 99; territories of, 25 danger in borderlands, 156–57, 159, 160–61, 165, 180 day laborers, 30, 40, 117 Degering, Paul, 28 demographics, 38–40, 143, 201 demonstrations, 133, 164, 168, 169, 198–99. See also protests; strikes

268

Index

deportation, 80, 134–35, 137, 143, 144, 179 deserters, 198 Deutsche Arbeiterzentrale, 46 Deutsche Reform-Deutsche Macht (newspaper), 78 Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP), 159 Deutsche Volksrat für Böhmen (German Volk Council for Bohemia), 67, 70 Deutschmarks, 121 Deutschnationaler Verein (newspaper), 66–67 Das Deutschtum im Ausland (newspaper), 70, 77 dissolution of political boundaries, 188 District Organization of German National Workers Associations, 93 doctors, 117 domestic servants, 46 Dresden, Germany, 48–49, 53, 93, 161, 181; as border, 21; Chamber of Commerce of, 92; enlistment of‹ces in, 84; industry in, 27; Pan-German League of, 66–68, 69–70 Dualism, 23–24 eastern Europe, 11, 128–29, 160, 185, 187 eastern foreigners, 149 economic landscape of Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, 26–29, 32 economic mobility, 112–30; currency crisis and, 119–26; geography of instability and, 126–30; interwar trade revival and, 112, 113–19 economy, 163; border restrictions during WWI and, 92–96; during Nazi occupation, 172, 203–4. See also Great Depression Edel, Oskar Emil, 179 education, 60, 69, 75, 79 Elbe River, 20, 21 Elstergebirge/Halštroveské hory, 20 émigrés, 152, 245n105; arrest of, 179–80 employment. See unemployment enlistment of‹ces, 84 entente invasion, 108 entertainment, 31–32 Erzgebirge/Krušné hory, 20 ethnic Germans, 139, 148, 154

ethnolinguistically de‹ned German nation, 60, 102 ethnonational lines, 107, 110 European Union, 4, 7, 15, 210, 211 exchange rate, 122 expansionism, 167–68, 184 exports, 120, 162 expulsions, 16, 202, 206–9, 210, 252n29 family: citizenship and, 41, 83–85, 89, 145, 150, 239n74; cross-border trade and, 117. See also marriage festivals, 49, 65, 168 Fittbogen, Gottfried, 129 ›uidity of borderlands, 10, 75–76, 84 food prices, 30–31, 164 food shortages, 11, 90–91, 151; currency crisis and, 120, 122; interwar trade revival and, 114; post–WWII, 208; during WWI, 82, 86, 87–88, 93–96 foot traf‹c, 95 foreign labor, 13, 36–37, 41–47, 47–50, 132–44; currency crisis and, 133, 137–38; Czechoslovak sentiment on, 141–43; deportation and, 134–35, 137, 143; exceptions to restrictions on, 135–37, 138–41, 143; German-speaking Bohemians and, 48, 138–41; Nazi restrictions on, 176–77; Reich German limits on, 133–34; Saxony and, 132–33, 196–97. See also work permits Freiwilligen Schutzdienst (SdP paramilitary organization), 197 Friedel, August, 33, 48 frontier communities, 30–32, 105, 114–15, 123 Gebirgsvereine für die sächsisch-böhmische Schweiz (tourism organization), 31 von Gebsattel, Friedrich, 109 Geiser, Alfred, 72 gendarme commandos (Czechoslovakia), 175 geography of instability, 126–30 German-Austrian Soldiers’ and Workers’ Council in Dresden, 148 German-Bohemian activist politics, 132, 154, 190

Index

German-Bohemian nationalism, 5, 14, 71, 153, 167–68; activists for, 57–59, 68, 128, 132; Great Depression and, 164; “national property” of, 24; Nazis and, 158, 175; press of, 65; Saxony and, 62–68; SHB and, 186; Social Democracy and, 105; Sudeten Germans and, 141–42 German-Bohemian negativist politics (Czechoslovakia), 190–91 German-Bohemians, 14, 75, 102, 152; Anschluss and, 103–4, 105, 107–8; Czechs and, 59–60, 106; as expellees, 208; Nazi recruiters and, 196–97; press of, 170; Saxony and, 62–68, 103, 104 German citizenship, 146–51, 206. See also citizenship German Communist Party (KPD), 169, 209 German Defense Union (Deutsche Schutzbund), 129 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 209 German Empire: collapse of, 97, 99; founding of, 18 German Foreign Ministry, 132 German gymnastics associations, 68 German identity, 12–13, 14, 22–23, 156 Germanization, 142, 209 German labor movement, 25 German language, 138 German-language press, 47, 124, 125 German National Council of Austria, 103 German nationalism, 25, 57–80, 125; citizenship and, 151; foreign workers and, 48; rise of, 59–62; Saxony and, 62–68, 68–76; Sorbs and, 76–79 German Reich, 5, 24–25, 104, 107, 200; consumers in, 204; government in, 133–34, 167–68. See also Reich German nationalism German School Association (Allgemeine Deutscher Schulverein), 60, 61, 72; Saxon branches of, 68–69, 70. See also Association for Germans Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland, VDA) German Southern Moravia, 102

269

German speakers, 8, 36–37, 99–100, 168; censuses and, 219n10; citizenship and, 145; expulsions of from Czechoslovakia, 202; Great Depression and, 164–65; mistrust of, 192 German-speaking Bohemians, 101, 106, 189–90, 196, 200; expulsion of, 16; foreign labor and, 48, 138–41; geography of instability and, 128; identity and, 156; migrants to Saxony of, 198–99; Nazis and, 172, 175, 176, 177, 191; Saxon citizenship and, 146, 149–50 German uni‹cation in 1871, 24–25, 68 German University of Prague, 78 Gestapo, 195 Geyer, Professor (German National Council of Austria), 103 Gleichschaltung (synchronization), 178 Goldmarks, 125 government. See central governments Graefe, Arthur, 184, 185, 189 Great Depression, 157, 158–80, 162–66, 180 Great War. See World War I Grossdeutschland (Greater Germany), 22–23, 166, 187, 188–89, 202 grossdeutsch nationalist ideology, 148 Gustav Adolf Verein (Saxon activist organization), 61, 68, 70 gymnastics associations, 152; German, 68, 71–72; Sokol, 49, 52, 73–74, 167, 192 gypsies, 86 Habsburg Austrian Kernländer (central territories), 126–27 Habsburg Empire, 18, 22, 23, 34; collapse of, 97, 99–100 Havel, Vaclav, 210 Henlein, Konrad, 190–92, 194, 199–201 Henleinists, 197 Herbert, Ulrich, 133 Hitler, Adolf, 182, 183, 186, 190, 197, 199–201; election of, 175 Hneppe, Dr. (Union of Germans from the former Austria-Hungary), 148 Holek, Wenzel, 18, 37, 47, 48, 52 housing shortages, 137, 208 hranicari (borderland people), 194, 198

270

Index

human traf‹c, 116 identi‹cation, 30, 82, 94; borderland identi‹cation cards and, 89–90; replacement of, 88–89; requirements for, 84. See also passport requirements; passports identity, 1, 19, 35, 50–53; German, 12–13, 14, 22–23, 156 immigrants, 86, 177–78 imperial states, 81–83, 97 industry, 11, 120; economy and, 19, 26–29; foreign population size and, 131; Great Depression and, 163, 164; growth of, 21; industrialists and, 46, 56, 105, 160; labor migration and, 34–36; post–WWII, 207–8; Saxons in Bohemia and, 220n16, 220n26; in Saxony, 27–29, 114, 193 in›ation, 133, 204; German, 119–26, 137. See also currency crisis of 1922–23 International Conference of Czech Associations Abroad, 48 International Hygiene Exhibition, 67–68 irredentism, 127, 129, 190, 191; postwar purging of, 206–7 Jews, 30, 178, 240n85 Johanngeorgenstadt, Germany, 94, 133, 147 Kapp Putsch, 117 Karlovy Vary/Karlsbad, 21, 204 Käubler, Rudolf, 187 Kleindeutschland (Small Germany), 22–23, 25 Koch, Walter, 110, 114, 175 Korrespondenzblatt (German School Association’s paper), 72 Krebs, Hans, 191 Kreishauptmannschaft Bautzen, 151 labor, 11, 144; day laborers and, 30, 40, 117; recruiters for, 43–44; Saxon Nazi access to, 176–77; shortages of, 136, 162; work permits and, 45–47, 138–39, 142, 177. See also foreign labor

labor migration, 33–56; Bohemians in Saxony and, 36–47, 64; citizenship and, 83–84; foreign workers and, 47–50; German-Bohemian nationalism and, 64–65; inequality and, 37–38; nationality and, 36, 50–53; regionalism of, 34–36; religion and, 53–55 lace industry, 27, 29 language, 8, 99, 138, 187, 219n10; Bohemia’s language frontier and, 62–63, 69, 126; citizenship and, 37, 145, 150; Dualism and, 23–24; frontiers of, 58, 70; labor migration and, 36–37; national identity and, 52; work permits and, 46–47. See also bilingualism; Czech speakers; German speakers; German-speaking Bohemians language frontiers, 65; in Bohemia, 10, 24, 58, 62–63, 69, 70, 76; of Habsburg Austria, 10; nationalists and, 24, 70, 184, 186, 187; in Saxony, 126, 127, 184, 186, 187; Sorbs and, 76 layoffs, 137, 163, 177 League of Nations, 191 Lefebvre, Henri, 1, 7, 12, 202 legitimation papers, 135, 140 Lehman, Emil, 188 Leibl, Ernst, 127–28 Leipzig, Germany, 80, 84, 181 Leipziger Neuste Nachrichten (newspaper), 73 Leitmeritzer Wochenblatt (newspaper), 65 Liberec/Reichenberg, 21, 35, 101, 115, 164, 168, 192 Lingner, Karl August, 67–68 livestock, 117–18 localism, 88 local levels, 8, 12, 66, 133; border zones and, 116; boycotts and, 74; citizenship and, 90, 148–49; economic stability and, 113; Great Depression and, 159, 163; Nazi actions at, 193; preservation of administration on, 175; radical politics and, 191; wartime government and, 82. See also central governments local people, 56, 82, 92, 119

Index

Lochner, Rudolf, 186–87 loopholes, 47; in border controls, 94; in foreign labor policy, 133 Los von Rom movement, 70–71 loyalties, 83–84, 97–98, 101, 131, 140; associational life and, 155; convenience and, 156; currency crisis and, 123; to imperial states, 97; mistrust of of‹cials’, 191–92; nationalism vs. other, 11–12, 58; during WWI, 82, 87 lumber, 92 Lusatian Mountains (Lausitzer Gebirge/Luické hory), 20 Lutherans, 53, 70 marriage, 7, 88, 133; citizenship and, 41, 83–84, 89, 239n74 Marxism, 189 Masaryk, Tomáš, 100, 145 mass mobility, 15–16 meat, 117–18 Medinger, Wilhelm, 168 Meyer, Christian Friedrich, 70 military, 91, 108, 203; citizenship and, 83; conscription and, 86, 131; of Czechoslovakia, 103, 199; mobilization of for WWI, 84–86; mobilization of for WWII, 198, 199; presence of in frontier areas, 172, 175, 193–94 miners, 20, 27, 37 mistrust, 166, 191–92 Mitteleuropa, 166 mobility, 4, 5, 7–8, 13, 57, 211; community and, 202; as danger, 160; in late nineteenth century, 19; nationalist activists and, 59. See also economic mobility; labor migration modern states, 13 monarchy, 98 morality, 32 Most/Brüx, 21 mountains, 20–21 Müller-Löbau, Curt, 1, 4, 18 Munich conference (1938), 201 musical instrument industry, 27, 28 Národní jednota severoceska (Czech nationalist group), 127 Národní listy (Czech paper), 124, 125, 142, 144, 197

271

Naše národnost (Czech nationalist paper), 77 national cleansing, 206–7 national determination rhetoric, 97–98, 108, 144 national indifference, 4, 58, 74 nationalism and nationalists, 4, 13, 41, 129, 224n4; activists of, 59, 129–30, 167, 194; borderland aid and, 161; contact between, 225n22; Dualism and, 23; East/West division and, 160; ethnic Germans and, 139; geography of instability and, 126; German-Bohemian Social Democrats and, 105; Great Depression and, 164–65; Koch and, 114; labor migration and, 56; in late nineteenth century, 19; leverage of, 132; Nazism and, 175, 188–89, 205; vs. other loyalties, 11–12, 58; prewar assertions of, 107; radical, 48; Reich Nazis as unreliable, 205; state power and, 143; Sudeten Germans and, 141; tourism and, 63, 73, 192; during WWI, 91, 98. See also Czech nationalism; German nationalism nationalist rhetoric, 11, 107–9, 111, 156, 159; Crimmitschau and, 43, 44; Czech and German-speaking Bohemians and, 106; Nazis and, 184; post–WWII, 207; Sudetenland and, 15 nationality, 37; citizenship and, 144–45; identity and, 1, 35, 50–53; labor migration and, 36, 50–53; naturalization and, 148 national liberation, 106 National Socialists, 132, 194; Great Depression and, 164, 165; protests/demonstrations and, 168–69. See also Nazi party (NSDAP) national territory, 5, 57, 72, 107, 111, 126, 182 naturalization, 144, 145–47, 150–51, 240n85. See also citizenship Nazi party (NSDAP), 5–7, 176–80, 196–97; anti-Czechoslovak propaganda and, 249n77; Bohemia and, 189–92, 203–6; borderlands’ political prominence and, 183–84; Czechoslovakia and, 173–76, 189–92, 193; ›ag

272

Index

Nazi party (continued ) of, 171; German-Bohemian nationalists and, 158, 175; German-speaking Bohemians and, 172, 175, 176, 177, 191; leadership in, 182; occupation of borderlands by, 203–206; propaganda of, 172, 193–95, 196, 199; recruiters for, 196–97; rise to power of, 158–59, 171–72; Sudeten Germans and, 15, 172, 181–89, 190, 198, 205; Treaty of Versailles and, 169 Neef, Ernst, 182, 184–85, 189 nongovernmental organizations, 129 Nordböhmische Volkszeitung (newspaper), 66 North German Confederation, 24–25 Nuremberg, 178, 201 Oberlausitz, 18, 28, 53, 76–79, 107–8, 207 Obervogtländischer Anzeiger (newspaper), 169–70 Oelsnitz district, 160–61 Of‹ce of Work Distribution (Landesamt für Arbeitsvermittlung), 136 of‹cial border crossings, 95, 175 opportunity, political, 25–26 Organization of Sudeten Germans in Bavaria, 154 Ostmarkenverein, 183 Ostritz, 64 Pan-German League (Alldeutsche Verband), 61, 65, 72–76, 79, 236n77; associational life and, 154; in Dresden, 66–68, 69–70; geography of instability and, 128; national community of, 127; Nazis and, 183; in Saxony, 68–70, 153 Pan-German rhetoric, 158 Paris Peace Conference, 100, 111 passport requirements, 4, 5, 13, 144; extensions of, 155; foreign labor and, 136; labor migration and, 41; loosening of, 34; in nineteenth century, 17, 84; during WWI, 88–90, 94–95 passports, 170, 196; anti-Czechoslovak propaganda and, 195; Czechoslovak seizure of, 194; revoking of, 192, 194

peace treaties, 144–45. See also Treaty of St. Germain; Treaty of Versailles; Versailles system physical landscape of Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, 20–21 Pilsner beer, 73–74 place-names, 65, 67, 72–73, 226n43; language of, 14 Plauen, Germany, 21, 28, 53–54, 142, 175 Poetscke, Oswin, 185–86 Poland, 36, 111, 160, 186, 205; Polish population in Prussia, 77; Polish workers and, 45–46 police, 49, 51, 65, 79–80, 201; demonstrations and, 164, 198; presence of in frontier areas, 172, 175, 193–94; smuggling and, 123, 124. See also border police policymaking, 107, 159 political aid for borderlands, 159–62 political landscape of Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, 21–26, 32 political prominence of borderlands, 182, 183–89 politics, 49–50; associational life and, 152–55; citizenship and, 149; Great Depression and, 163–66; radical, 58–59, 164, 169–70, 190–91, 199. See also German nationalism; nationalism population growth, 40–41 population mobility, 86 Prague, 49, 51, 67–68, 78, 201 prices, 94; divergence of, 121, 210, 211; of food, 30–31, 164 propaganda, 179, 198, 207; antiCzechoslovak, 194, 195–196, 200, 249n77; anti-Nazi, 206; of Nazi party, 172, 193–95, 196, 199 Protestantism, 54–55, 70, 78 Protestant League, 68 protests, 96, 164, 165. See also demonstrations Prussia, 23, 41, 77, 185; food shortages and, 96; labor migration and, 45; nineteenth century political landscape of, 22 radical politics, 58–59, 164, 169–70,

Index

190–91, 199; Sudeten Germans and, 192, 193 radio, 198–99 railways, 4, 21, 28, 29, 30; construction of, 37, 38–39, 73 Rašín, Alois, 120 Rathenau, Walter, 120 raw materials, 92, 113, 114 rearming, 168, 169–70, 191, 196 refugees, expulsions and, 202, 206–9, 210, 252n29 regional community, 19 regionalism of migration, 34–36 regulations, 163; currency crisis and, 121; foreign labor and, 133; of identi‹cation during WWI, 82; labor migration and, 40–41, 45 Reich citizenship law of 1913, 147, 149 Reich German nationalism, 5, 13, 57–58, 128; German-Bohemian nationalists and, 63; as opposition movement, 61–62; Sudeten Germans and, 141 Reich German Protestant League, 70 Reich German Social Democratic Party (SPD), 178–79 Reich Ministry of the Interior, 141 Reich Of‹ce for Work Distribution (Reichsamt für Arbeitsvermittlung), 134 Reichstag elections, 39 religion, 149; Catholicism, 53–55, 70–71, 78, 223n100, 240n98; clergy and, 53–54, 70, 78; confession and, 36, 53–55, 56; Jews and, 30, 178, 240n85; Lutherans and, 53, 70; Protestantism and, 54–55, 70, 78 residence requirements, 88–89, 147, 149 residence rights, 144, 209, 215n22 revolutions, 81, 96, 107, 108, 173 Rosaldo, Renato, 7 Rösler, Franz, 18 “Roter Tag” (Red Day), 169 SA. See Sturmabteilung (SA) Sachsengängerei (labor migration to Saxony), 35 Saxon-Bohemian borderlands, 4–5, 5–11, 15–16; fall of border and, 201,

273

202–3; map of, 6, 9; postwar isolation of, 209–11; preservation of after WWI, 111; Sudetenland and, 14–15 Saxon Foreign Ministry, 137 Saxon Ministry of Culture, 54, 78 Saxon Ministry of the Interior, 38–39, 45, 87, 150, 173; border zones and, 116; citizenship and, 146; destruction of physical Saxon-Bohemian border and, 202; militarization and, 85–86 Saxon Ministry of War, 91 Saxon Nazis, 172–77, 192, 195, 197 Saxons in Bohemia, 87 Saxony, 14, 18, 22, 151, 160; von Bismarck and, 23; border police in, 108; citizenship and, 87, 146, 149–50; foreign labor and, 132–33, 196–97; German-Bohemians and, 62–68, 103, 104; German nationalism in, 62–68, 68–76; German uni‹cation and, 24–25; Great Depression and, 162, 165–66; industries in, 27–29, 114, 193; nationalist activists in, 72; Pan-German League in, 68–70, 153; post–WWII, 208–9; revolution in, 107; rumored Czech invasion of, 108; security of, 137; SHB and, 181–83; unemployment in, 120, 177. See also Bohemians in Saxony Scheu, Robert, 99, 104, 105 Schlesinger, Walter, 187 school, 53–54, 79, 199, 206; nationalists’ use of, 60, 67, 75, 127, 156, 167, 184 Schutzstaffel (SS), 173, 175, 191 SdP. See Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) seasonal workers, 40, 53 secession, 192 selective permeability, 112 SHB. See Sudetendeutsche Heimatbund (SHB) Sheehan, James J., 12 shooting, 115, 122–23, 174 Silesia, 63, 71, 113, 161, 201, 208; industry in, 27–28; labor migration and, 33, 35, 36 Silesians, 36, 206 Slavic threat, 76, 159–62 Slavs, 63, 72, 77–78, 108, 178, 185

274

Index

smuggling and smugglers, 18, 95, 115, 204, 210, 215n10; border fences and, 119; during currency crisis, 122–24; Great Depression and, 163; of political propaganda, 164, 179, 196 Social Democracy, 25, 39, 49, 57, 160, 165 socialism, 49, 105, 107, 207; citizenship revoking and, 178; German-Bohemian nationalists and, 71; Great Depression and, 164 social welfare, 86, 88, 131, 159, 164 Society for the Interests of Dresden Tourist Associations, 118 Sokol (Czech gymnastics association), 49, 52, 73–74, 167, 192 Sorbs, 53, 76–79, 108, 109, 207 Soviet occupation zone (SBZ), 208–9 spa towns, 105–6 spies, 84, 170 SS. See Schutzstaffel (SS) state defense law of 1936 (Czechoslovakia), 194 states, 90–97; Nazis and, 176–80 strikes, 120, 222n61; Crimmitschau textile workers’, 41–44, 64, 222n61. See also demonstrations Sturmabteilung (SA), 165, 173–75, 197, 198 Sudetendeutsche Heimatbund (SHB), 140, 175–76, 181–83, 186–87, 189; as Sudeten German Heimat Union, 153, 154 Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront, 190 Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP), 190, 196, 197, 198–99, 248n54 Sudetengau, 203–206 “Sudeten German Day,” 170 “Sudeten German Goethe Week,” 168 Sudeten Germans, 141–42, 165, 168, 200; activism of, 192–93, 210; Henlein and, 201; Nazis and, 15, 172, 181–89, 190, 198, 205; radicalism and, 192, 193; Sudetengau and, 204–6 Sudetenland, 14–15, 102, 127–28, 187 Svaz Národních Jednot a Matic (Union of National and Cultural Associations), 127 swastikas, 170 Syrup, Friedrich, 134

tariffs, 30–31, 40, 41, 166 Taschek, Josef, 63 Teplice/Teplitz, 21, 35, 37 territorial revision, 185, 186, 188 territories, 8, 25, 97–111, 201, 215n22; belonging and, 4, 87; sovereignty and, 22, 192 terror tactics, 197 textile industries, 27–28, 93, 120 Third Reich. See Nazi party (NSDAP) “three-state corner,” 20–21 tourism, 7, 31–32, 89, 159; anti-Czechoslovak propaganda and, 196; border controls and, 94, 95; border passes and, 118; con‹scation of cameras and, 171; currency crisis and, 126; Great Depression and, 163; nationalism and, 63, 73, 192; post–WWII, 209, 211 trade, 7, 11, 26–29, 166, 175; embargos on, 93; food shortages and, 94–95; interwar revival of, 112, 113–19. See also economic mobility; economy transnational communities, 5, 90, 155, 211 transportation, 28, 113–14, 208. See also railways travel documents. See borderland passes; identi‹cation; passport requirements; passports; work permits Treaty of St. Germain, 111, 128, 141, 168, 187 Treaty of Versailles, 111, 128, 139, 159–62, 168, 169. See also Versailles system Ullmann, Hermann, 129 unemployment, 137; associational life and, 152; border restrictions during WWI and, 93; citizenship and, 151; currency crisis and, 120; foreign labor and, 133, 142; Great Depression and, 162–64; interwar trade revival and, 114; labor migration and, 34; in Saxony, 120, 177; Sudeten Germans and, 141; during WWI, 86 Union of Bohemian Woods (Böhmerwaldbund), 60, 63 Union of Foreign Germans (Bund der Auslandsdeutsche), 129

Index

Union of German Austrians in the German Reich (Deutsch-Oesterreichischer Bund im Deutschen Reich), 50 Union of Germans from Czechoslovakia (Bund der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei), 154–55 Union of Germans from the Former Austria-Hungary, 139, 140, 148, 149, 153 Union of Germans in Bohemia (Bund der Deutschen in Böhmen), 60, 125 Union of Northern Bohemian Industries, 104 Union of the German-Austrian Associations in Saxony, 50 United States, 28 Ústí nad Labem/Aussig, 21, 34–35, 103 VDA. See Association for Germans Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland, VDA) Verein für Sozialpolitik (Social Policy Association), 43 Versailles system, 158, 166–67, 169, 170, 184; borderland rhetoric and, 187–88; Nazi rhetoric against, 191. See also Treaty of Versailles violence, 123, 164 visas, 137, 142–43 Vlastimil, 48, 49, 50–51, 152 Vogel, Paul, 69 Vogtland, 117, 120, 162 Vogtländischer Anzeiger (newspaper), 188

275

Volksstimme (newspaper), 105, 134 Volkszeitung (newspaper), 116–17 voting franchise, 23, 60 Vystehovalec (newspaper), 51, 52, 88, 154 wages, 36, 37, 64; Crimmitschau and, 42; foreign labor and, 134; GermanBohemian workers and, 197; labor migration and, 39 Wagner, Paul, 188 war, 94, 169–70, 197, 200; cold war, 10; governments in, 81–82; Saxon preparation for, 193–94; wartime aid and, 83, 85; World War II, 7, 203–7. See also World War I Wartime Organization of Dresden Associations, 86 Weimar Germany, 81, 82, 133 Western Europe, 11, 160 Wilson, Woodrow, 100 work permits, 45–47, 138–39, 142, 177. See also foreign labor; labor World War I, 5, 81–111; citizenship regulations during, 82, 83–90; nations and, 97–111; states and, 90–97; territories and, 97–111; trade and, 29 World War II, 7, 198, 199, 203–7 Young Czech Party, 49 youth group arrest, 170–71 Zittau, 94–95, 110, 118–19, 149, 168–69, 208; Chamber of Commerce of, 116; industry and, 28, 64 Zörner, Ernst, 184 Zwickau, 21, 27, 37, 53, 142, 169