Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

without any premonition of belonging to one group or another. 29 Another recent study has
shown that “frontiers” of mixed German-Czech or German-Slovenian language use proved
too ethnically ambiguous for activists in the late nineteenth century to divide their
populations neatly along ethno-linguistic lines. 30 Well into the twentieth century and even
under Nazi occupation, local populations in Bohemia positioned themselves between the
German and Czech nations, resisting educational or racial policies meant to disentangle
their loyalties into clear national groupings. 31 These findings have combined to show that
the fixing of national identities involved a complex, bloody, and often unpredictable
transformation of ethnic traits into disparate national loyalties.
While the Czech-German case has proven particularly valuable in challenging an
ethnicist model of nationalization, evidence suggests similar complexity in other Central
European regions. Nobles and elites proved particularly adept at adopting national identities
disparate from their cultural roots, such as the Habsburg Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg,
who became a Ukrainian nationalist. 32 Many peasant communities speaking a mixture of
Polish-Ukrainian dialects in 1920s Soviet Ukraine often appeared to activists a hopeless
national admixture, identifying their language as “Catholic” or simply “tutai’shi” [of here]. 33
29 Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
30 Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
31 Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech <strong>Nationalism</strong> (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), Eagle Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian
Aristocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
32 Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York: Basic Books, 2008), ———,
The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003). The latter offers a broader examination of national crossings and historical ironies in the lands of the former
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
33 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2005), 39. Also see the work on Polish peasant activism in Austrian Galicia by Keely Stauter-Halsted,
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