1. Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

2. The theoretical literature on nationalism has of course exploded in the last decade. Among the most important additions to the body of thinking have been Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

3. This view was expressed by the Pan-German movement of Georg von Schönerer and later picked up by the (proto-Nazi) Austrian National Socialist movement. See Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Austrian National Socialism before 1918 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); and Carl E. Schorske, “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Trio,” in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), pp. 116–180.Google Scholar

4. Some of the best work done specifically on this predicament of the Austro-German elites in the empire is Pieter M. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Also very useful is John Boyer's magisterial study of the Austrian Christian Social movement of Karl Lueger, which tried to maintain both a German cultural nationality and the distinctive (Catholic) Austrian imperial identity. John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement 1848–1897 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).Google Scholar

5. In Czech: the Češi , speaking česky, of Čechy. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg authorities and most German speakers in everyday language referred to the Czech language as böhmisch. Although many German nationalists began increasingly after 1848 to refer to Czechs and their language as tschechisch (Czech), to distinguish between them and Böhmen, it was really only in the last decades of the century that the term came into general and widespread use.Google Scholar

6. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries , pp. 167–174.Google Scholar

7. Judson points out that in the first big electoral struggle between the Jungen and Alten, in 1873, the former were roundly defeated in Bohemia, though he attributes this victory of traditional, supranationalist liberalism more to effective organization than to blanket agreement with them by the electorate. Ibid., pp. 169, 174.Google Scholar

8. There has been little work on this kind of cultural aspect of German Bohemian identity. See Karl F. Bahm, “Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Central Europe,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 29, 1998, pp. 19–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Hugh LeCaine Agnew, Origins of the Czech National Renascence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), p. 16. Agnew quotes here from Joseph Anton Ritter von Riegger, Skizze einer statistischen Landeskunde Böhmens (Leipzig and Prague: Kaspar Widtmann, 1795), pp. 98–99.Google Scholar

10. Hugh LeCaine Agnew, “Noble Natio and Modern Nation: The Czech Case,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 23, 1992, pp. 50–71, here pp. 58–59, quoted from Franz Joseph Graf Kinský, Erinnerungen über einen wichtigen Gegenstand, von einem Böhmen, in Des Grafen Kinsky, gesamelte Schriften (Vienna: Wappler, 1786), 3, p. 57.Google Scholar

11. Pfitzner, Josef, Das Erwachen der Sudetendeutschen im Spiegel ihres Schrifttums bis zum Jahre 1848 (Augsburg: Johannes Stauda Verlag, 1926), p. 103.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., pp. 152–53.Google Scholar

13. “Ihr Berge, stolze Berge, du schwarze Wäldernacht,/Ihr golderfüllten Ströme, Ihr Auen in grüner Pracht,/Ihr sanft gewölbten Hügel in blumigem Gewand,/Euch nenn ich, freudig rufend, mein schönes Vaterland.” From Karl Egon Ebert's Wlasta, quoted in ibid., pp. 153–155. The poem was written, it should be pointed out, in German, Ebert's native language, and the “Wlasta-Fever” to which Pfitzner refers affected primarily German speakers in Prague. In the 1820s Prague's upper and middle classes were linguistically and culturally overwhelmingly German. The few intellectuals who subscribed to a selfconsciously Czech nationalism were, according to Pfitzner, gravely disappointed by Ebert's “Wlasta.”Google Scholar

14. “völkisch unentschiedenes Gesicht.” Pfitzner, Das Erwachen der Sudetendeutschen , p. 155.Google Scholar

15. “Ja laßt uns treue Brüder sein von Allen,/Die dieses schönen Landes Raum vereint./Mag in verschied'nen Klang die Red' auch schallen,/Der Sinn nur macht den Vaterlandsfreund.” From Karl Egon Ebert's Břetislaw und Jutta , quoted in ibid., p. 157.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 159.Google Scholar

17. Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen der am 28. August 1848 in Teplitz im Namen deutscher Städte, Gemeinden und konstitutioneller Vereine Böhmens zusammengekommenen Vertrauensmänner (Teplitz: Carl Wilhelm Medan, 1848), pp. 23–24. Only one extant copy of the congress's proceedings still exists in the Czech Republic (in the Archiv Národního muzea, in Prague), and it is missing several crucial pages, including the results of the vote on this proposal. Josef Polišenský reports the unanimous vote in his Aristocrats and the Crowd in the Revolutionary Year 1848: A Contribution to the History of Revolution and Counter Revolution in Austria (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), p. 180. I am grateful to Dr Edvárd Mikušek, of the Státní Oblastní Archiv v Litoměřicích for his help in locating the copy.Google Scholar

18. See also Josef Pfitzner, “Zur nationalen Politik der Sudetendeutschen in den Jahren 1848—1849,” Jahrbuch des Vereines für die Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen, Vol. 3, 1930–1933, pp. 210–243.Google Scholar

19. See particularly Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival . Overlap and intermingling between the ethnic spheres could be found most especially among the working classes, and along the “language border,” though it assuredly existed in aspects of private middle-class life as well. See also Bahm, “Beyond the Bourgeoisie.”Google Scholar

20. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival, pp. 149–152; and Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, pp. 195–199. See also the memoirs of the Austro-German liberal leader, Ernst von Plener, Erinnerungen von Ernst von Plener, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1911–1921), particularly Vol. 2, “Parlamentarische Tätigkeit,” pp. 269–273.Google Scholar

21. All of these issues were in fact of great concern to many of the representatives at the Teplitz congress in 1848. Franz Klier, one of the representatives from Prague pointed out the anti-liberal aspect of the proposal, and expressed his fear that those Germans left in Czech districts would become victims of denationalization, and so lost to the German cause. And while debating a proposal on the erection of a customs union with the rest of Germany, several representatives of smaller enterprises, like Franz Kuhn of Joachimsthal, and radical-democrats, like Uffo Horn of Trautenau and Dr Glückselig of Ellbogen, spoke up about the inability of much of Bohemian industry to compete with German industry and the need for protective tariffs around Austria combined with the cultivation of the Bohemian economy. Stenographischer Bericht , pp. 48–49, 33–35. Polišenský adds (quoting some of the missing pages) that Dr J. F. L. Göschen, from Leipzig in nearby Saxony, declared that “when we consider the matter properly, the city [of Prague] is actually German. It is not merely a question of numbers; other things are more important. Who made Prague rich? The Germans! The German factory owners and German merchants insure our industrial interests. For us, Prague must remain a German city!” Polišenský, Aristocrats and the Crowd, p. 182.Google Scholar

22. Polišenský, Aristocrats and the Crowd , pp. 182–183. It is unclear, because of the missing pages, precisely why the vote on the proposal for Bohemia's division into Imperial Regions was unanimous in the face of so many misgivings. Polišenský, who is manifestly hostile to the entire Teplitz gathering, sheds no light on this.Google Scholar

23. Stenographischer Bericht , pp. 2–3.Google Scholar

24. Focke, Franz, Böhmen ist das angestammte Vaterland der Deutschböhmen (self-published, 1887), pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

25. Jan Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft, Tschechen und Deutsche 1780–1918 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996), e.g. pp. 320–321. See also Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, p. 238.Google Scholar

26. Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft , pp. 306–367.Google Scholar

27. The thesis that the Austrian empire was inherently backward, an anachronism incapable of survival has been under skillful attack by scholars for the past two decades. Particularly important has been David F. Good's, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Křen implicitly argues in the same vein as regards the nationality struggles, in Die Konfliktgemeinschaft.Google Scholar

28. Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft , pp. 307, 328. The progressive German cleric, Friedrich Naumann, had floated a program for a German-dominated Mitteleuropa already in 1915. Although it is now primarily associated with an aggressive German imperialism, Naumann's arguments were enjoying tremendous influence among a wide variety of Austrian politicians by the last year of the war, from the German nationalist National Union and Christian Socials to the moderate Social Democrat Karl Renner and even Magyar liberals like Oscar Jászi. Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1916).Google Scholar

29. Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 499–500.Google Scholar

30. Křen, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft , pp. 335–336, 345–346. The language reforms promulgated by Austrian Prime Minister Count Badeni in 1897 provided for the conduct of business in both German and Czech throughout Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia, and ordained that all public officials, whether in a German-speaking or a Czech-speaking community, would have to prove a working command of both languages within three years, or lose their posts. The decrees released a storm of outrage and protest from all sectors of the Austro-German public, leading to violent scenes in the streets of many Austro-German cities, and even in the parliament. Within a matter of a month, Badeni was forced to withdraw the decrees and resign.Google Scholar

31. Quoted by the Austrian Social Democratic leader, and first Chancellor of the Austrian Republic, Karl Renner, Die Gründung der Republik Deutschösterreich, der Anschluβ und die Sudetendeutschen (Vienna: Österreichischer Wirtschaftsverlag, 1938), pp. 22–23.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., pp. 25, 37. The term “Sudetenlands” had already started to be used during the late nineteenth century as shorthand for all of the German-inhabited regions of the lands of the Crown of St Wenceslaus (Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia).Google Scholar

33. Smaller strips and pockets of German-speaking areas in the south of Bohemia were declared to be parts of the already existing Austrian provinces of Niederösterreich and Oberösterreich. Simultaneously, the Germans of Moravia announced their secession and formation of the new Austrian/German provinces of Sudetenland and Deutschsüdmähren. See Ibid.; Klaus Zeßner, Josef Seliger und die nationale Frage in Böhmen: Eine Untersuchung über die nationale Politik der deutschböhmischen Sozialdemokratie 1899–1920 (Stuttgart: Seliger-Archiv, 1976), p. 117; also Rudolf Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit: Der sudetendeutsche Volkstumskampf in den Beziehungen zwischen der Weimarer Republik und der ČSR (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1977); Johann Wolfgang Brügel, Tschechen und Deutsche 1918–1938 (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1967), pp. 40–83.Google Scholar

34. Katherine Verdery's Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) is a good study of the general identity dynamics in Transylvania. See also Annemie Schenk, Deutsche in Siebenbürgen: ihre Geschichte und Kultur (Munich: Beck, 1992).Google Scholar

35. Pieter M. Judson, “Frontiers, Islands, Forests, Stones: Mapping the Geography of a German Identity in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1900,” in Patricia Yaeger, ed., The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 382–406. This shift in national imagination was part of a more general development away from a civic, voluntaristic understanding of national community toward one based more strictly on ethnicity and race. See particularly Pieter M. Judson, “‘Whether Race or Conviction Should Be the Standard’: National Identity and Liberal Politics in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 22, 1991, pp. 76–95; and idem, “‘Not Another Square Foot!’ German Liberalism and the Rhetoric of National Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 26, 1995, pp. 83–97.Google Scholar

36. Focke, Böhmen ist das angestammte Vaterland der Deutschböhmen , pp. 26–26.Google Scholar

37. Judson, “Frontiers, Islands, Forests, Stones,” especially pp. 395–397.Google Scholar

38. Parsche, Julius, Märchen und Sagen aus Deutschböhmen für Kinder und Jugend (Prague: Verlag A. Haase, 1908). Nearly all of the stories are placed explicitly in northern Bohemian locales. A very few refer to no specific place. One story, while taking place in northern Bohemia, does mention the landscape of southern Bohemia. And another one recounts the story of a mischievous water spirit (Wassermann), very common in Czech folklore (hastrman, or vodník), a legacy perhaps of a common Czech–German, Bohemian heritage.Google Scholar

39. Dopsch, Alfons, “Die historische Stellung der Deutschen in Böhmen,” in Rudolph Lodgman, ed., Deutschböhmen (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1919), pp. 17–49.Google Scholar

40. Hauffen, Adolf, “Die Volkskunde der Deutschen in Böhmen,” ibid., pp. 51–107, here p. 52.Google Scholar

41. Wieser, Friedrich, “Deutschböhmens Selbstbestimmungsrecht,” ibid., pp. 225–290, here pp. 238–239.Google Scholar

42. Ibid., pp. 239, 261–262.Google Scholar

43. The Austrian socialists, despite their hostility to the imperial order and its classist society, had been committed to a large, more or less centralized state structure, in spatial dimensions essentially coextensive with the empire. And naturally they rejected any idea that states should be based on nationality. Their reluctance even to admit the principle of nationality into questions of social or economic organization within the party frequently brought them into conflict with the somewhat more nationally minded Czech Social Democrats. In probably still the best study of this issue, Hans Mommsen has pointed out how the Social Democratic Party was uniquely tied to the continued existence of the empire, benefitting not from the empire's weaknesses but from its centripetal strengths. Indeed, the party's committment to a preservation of the general shape of the supranational Monarchy led their nationalist rivals to dub them the “k. und k. privilegierte Sozialdemokratie” at the height of the Badeni crisis in 1897. Hans Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat (Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1963), pp. 6, 273–276.Google Scholar

44. Deutschböhmen 's governor was the conservative Rudolf Lodgman von Auen. See Zeßner, Josef Seliger und die nationale Frage in Böhmen, pp. 115–144; also Johann Wolfgang Bruegel, Czechoslovakia before Munich: The German Minority Problem and British Appeasement Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 19–33; Tschechen und Deutsche, pp. 40–83.Google Scholar

45. Volksrecht, 30 November 1918, p. 1. Although few of them examine in much detail the upheaval of that winter, general commentaries are offered by Brügel, Tschechen und Deutsche, Zeßner, Josef Seliger und die nationale Frage, and Ronald M. Smelser, “Castles on the Landscape: Czech–German Relations,” in H. Gordon Skilling, ed., Czechoslovakia 1918–88: Seventy Years from Independence (New York: St Martin's Press, 1991), pp. 82–104.Google Scholar

46. Volksrecht, 5 March 1919, pp. 1–2; 6 March 1919, p. 1; 7 March 1919, p. 1; 19 March 1919, p. 1. The number of casualties is a matter of some minor dispute. See also Smelser, “Castles on the Landscape: Czech–German Relations,” p. 9, and Brügel, Tschechen und Deutsche, p. 76.Google Scholar

47. Bruegel, Czechoslovakia before Munich , pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

48. Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit , pp. 47–49; Smelser, “Castles on the Landscape,” p. 90. The Volks-Presse reported on the receipt of numerous ministerial documents by the local courts which were written only in Czech: Volks-Presse, 16 November 1918, p. 3.Google Scholar

49. Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit, pp. 15–22. Jaworski describes two phases of industrialization in Bohemia. The first benefitted primarily the German-speaking regions, which then, however, fell economically and socially behind as the second, more highly developed phase took root in the Czech-speaking interior. Jaworski's conclusions are really not in conflict with David Good's, Richard Rudolph's, and others' more recent work on the economic viability of the Habsburg Monarchy as a whole. The kind of eventual lagging behind by those regions that enjoy the earliest headstart is a typical development in any normally modernizing economy. See Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire; Richard Rudolph, “Austrian Industrialization: A Case Study in Leisurely Economic Growth,” in Sozialismus, Geschichte und Wirtschaft. Festschrift für Eduard März (Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1973); “The Pattern of Austrian Industrial Growth from the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 11, 1975, pp. 3–25.Google Scholar

50. Ibid., p. 43.Google Scholar

51. Zeßner, Josef Seliger und die nationale Frage in Böhmen , pp. 137–138.Google Scholar

52. Volks-Presse , 16 November 1918, pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

53. While not giving up their condemnation of the undemocratic means of the establishment of the ČSR, and the claim that linguistic Germans would naturally feel more comfortable in a German-speaking society, they began to ridicule the more explicitly nationalist parties' suggestions that there could be such a thing as a “German” state, or a “Czech” state, or an “Italian,” “Hungarian,” or “Polish” state—there could only be a state of the bourgeoisie or working class. The platform adopted at the constituent party congress rejected the nation-state status of the ČSR and the Sudeten Germans' resulting minority status, calling instead for a state that would be constituted “not as a state of the Czechs, not as a state of the Germans, but of all the peoples who live on its territory; as a state of the true democracy of self-determination.” Volksrecht, 4 September 1919, pp. 2–3; 16 March 1919, p. 4.Google Scholar

54. Hans Jokl was Vice-Governor of one of the secessionist provinces in Moravia. Jokl, Renner, and Bauer were all Social Democrats. Bruegel, Czechoslovakia before Munich , pp. 25–26, 33.Google Scholar

55. Zeßner, Josef Seliger und die nationale Frage in Böhmen , pp. 133–134.Google Scholar

56. Volksrecht, 25 September 1919, p. 1. The front-page article disputed the demands made by some bourgeois circles for Czech to be taught mandatorily even in the German grade schools (Volksschulen). The author, a middle-school teacher, argued that this would only confuse the children when they were still trying to learn their own language properly, but that in the middle schools it was an absolute necessity for the sake of the Germans' own interests. The claim was justified with reference to the advantages Czechs had gained for themselves in the old empire by learning German.Google Scholar

57. My thanks to Nancy Wingfield for bringing this to my attention.Google Scholar

58. Volksrecht, 5 November 1919, pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

59. Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit , p. 39.Google Scholar

60. Ibid., pp. 23–26; see also Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, pp. 254–259; and Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival, pp. 184–232.Google Scholar

61. Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit , pp. 15–36, here p. 18.Google Scholar

62. Volksrecht, 13 September 1919, p. 1. Seliger had already made the same demand very explicitly in July. Zeßner, Josef Seliger und die nationale Frage in Böhmen, p. 137. See also pp. 139–140.Google Scholar

63. For the election results, see Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), pp. 102–126. In general on this history and the Sudetendeutsche Partei specifically see Brügel, Tschechen und Deutsche; Jaworski, Vorposten oder Minderheit; Anthony T. Komjathy and Rebecca Stockwell, German Minorities and the Third Reich: Ethnic Germans in East Central Europe between the Wars (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); Gregory F. Campbell, Confrontation in Central Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); and Ronald Smelser, “Die Henlein Partei. Eine Deutung”, in Karl Bosl, ed., Die Erste Tschechoslowakische Republik als multinationaler Parteienstaat (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1979), pp. 187–202; and Smelser, “Nazis Without Hitler: The DNSAP and the First Czechoslovak Republic,” East Central Europe, Vol. 4, 1977, pp. 1–19.Google Scholar

64. See Radomír Luža, The Transfer of the Sudeten-Germans (New York: New York University Press, 1964); and Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1994).Google Scholar

65. The majority of the expelled were resettled in what became the Federal Republic of Germany, although large numbers also went to the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, and elsewhere. There has been virtually no work done on the Sudeten German populations in East Germany, but they would have had scant opportunity for the public maintenance of a Sudeten Germany identity, as the revanchism implicit (and often explicit) in that kind of identity would have conflicted with the East German state's need to maintain bloc solidarity and “fraternal socialist relations” with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.Google Scholar

66. Though he does not subscribe to such a view, Ernest Gellner, for example, describes it in his Nations and Nationalism , p. 130. Elie Kedourie also discusses the importance of “the dark gods and their rites” in the postcolonial nationalisms of Asia and Africa: “Introduction,” in Elie Kedourie, ed., Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 106.Google Scholar