ism. Several chapters are devoted to Krakow. Hanna Kozinska-Witt compares the press in Warsaw, which was subject to Russian censorship after 1863, to Krakow, an Austrian crown possession after 1846: in the Second Polish Republic the press in Warsaw, the capital once again, was the more oriented to scandal and sensation, and that in Krakow was the more responsible and responsive to municipal needs and concerns. Both Krakow and Lwow (in its Polish version; Lviv in Ukrainian, Lemberg here) were Austrian cities; but Lwow was the administrative center of Austrian Galicia, and Harald Binder shows how initially Lwow was more involved in a democratic kind of politics than Krakow, un- til Polish nationalism as the dominant municipal atmosphere was threatened by the emer- gence of a secular Ukrainian mass movement, Zionism and a German-internationalist version of Social Democracy, whereupon the Polish leadership in Austrian Galicia re- verted to Krakow. Clearly, in fifteen different, short case studies it is difficult to find any real continuity, but there are a number of interesting observations. One must be grateful in the 1920s that when Brno (brunt) became the center of Czech modernism in rivalry with Prague, the modernizing architects who hoped to build sky-scrapers on Wenceslas Square in Prague were over-ruled. The saddest contribution is by Andreas Hofmann on Lodz as an "Anti- metropole" which nobody loved and which failed entirely in an effort to make Chicago's slogan, "A City That Works," work for itself. Anna Veronika Wendland shows how ru- mor and gossip kept alive the acrimonious national divisions in Lwow between Poles and Ukrainians for decades after 1919. Elena Mannova discusses how a local Pref3burg patri- otism dissolved after 1919 into a Czech-Slovak-Magyar-German contestation for the soul of Bratislava. Sabine Rutar examines Trieste before 1914, divided between Italian na- tional liberals, working class Slovenes and social-democrat Austrian patriots, and how in- tcrethnic class solidarity was dissolved by nationalist rivalries. Given that enormous ethnic rivalries come to figure in virtually all of these pieces, it would lake a different conference to consider the changes wrought by the Second World War as a result of the dreadful national homogenization created by the extermination of the Jews, the expulsion of the Germans, the population movement of the middle 1940s, the policies of the post-war Communist regimes and to pose the question of how relevant Offentlichlceit is to them, if at all.

Daniel Mulholland Tufts University

Národnostn� otázka v Polsku a �eskoslovensku v mezivále�ném obdob�. Praha: Ma- sarykův ustav Akademie ved CR, 2005.155 pp.

After the restoration of the Czech and Polish statehoods in 1918, neither ethnically- based nation assumed the minimum of political power necessary for peaceful coexistence with minorities. "In both republics, a tendency to form national states, Polish and Czechoslovak, prevailed, sanctioning the political dominance of the Polish nation in Po- land and of the newly-forming Czechoslovak nation in Czechoslovakia," writes editor P. Kaleta in the preface to the proceedings from the scholarly conference Ethnic Issues in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the Interwar Period (Prague, October 26-27, 2004). Kaleta, in his article on the Kashubs, indirectly continues the work of another Czech, Josef Muldner, who in 1934 brought to his readers' attention that insufficient scientific interest in this specific group had contributed to their Germanization. While tense relations between the Kashubs and the young Polish republic presented no essential political menace, the East Slavic minorities were a destabilizing factor which became most evident on the occasion of the Soviet invasion on September 17, 1939. M. Ivanov describes a strong Communist influence on the Belarusian national movement in interwar Poland. It is true that this increasing Communist influence was facilitated by the Polish policy of forced assimilation - in 1938-39 no Belarusian schools existed in the four northeastern Polish provinces. On the other hand, the tradition of the West Belaru- sian resistance to Polonization helped in gaining independence following the breakup of the USSR. M. Patelski devotes attention to an interesting participant in the Polish- Bolshevik war of 1919-20; unlike other "white" generals, Stanislaw Bulak-Balachowicz hated tsardom and approved the independence of the Baltic republics. M. Bialokur analy- ses depictions of the Ukrainians in the National-Democratic camp press. The Polish jour- nalists considered the most numerous national minority an ethnographic mass doomed to assimilation. Some Czech-speaking Moravians remained outside of the Czechoslovak border after World War I; P. Palys documents that the CSR's foreign policy did not prevent Germany from oppressing them linguistically. L. Kuberski examines a Polish newspaper's view of Czechs (in the CSR) primarily during 1938-39. The author notes several pieces of mis- leading information in this periodical, e.g., its hostile attitude towards Communists sug- gested extreme Soviet unreliability in days of the Munich betrayal. E. Broklova notes the strong constitutional protection of minorities in Czechoslovakia. The government, however, faced objections that the law did not correspond with practice in the case of the proportional participation of German inhabitants as civil servants. J. Harna quotes from Masaryk's speech on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the re- public in which the president declared that the mission of the majority, who devoted their character to the state, was to gain the favor of minorities for it. Germans in the Czech Lands, however, did not get over the trauma of losing their privileged status in 1918. J. Sebek concentrates on German political Catholicism, the main representative of which was Deutsche Christlichsoziale Volkspartei. This activist party, with its strongest clubs in the Silesian capital of Opava, grew weaker among other things as a consequence of its approval of the administrative reform of 1927 which degraded the position of Silesia in the Czechoslovak administrative system. It was to the Czechs' and Slovaks' advantage to organize a joint state in 1918; but the idea of one Czechoslovak nation, presented for tactical reasons to the Entente Powers, could not serve as a basis for the new "national" Czechoslovak state in reality. The Slo- vak nation formation process was already too far along. J. Rychlik's article discussing Czech-Slovak relations is complemented by Z. Zudova's reflection on the crucial period 1938-39. J. Friedl focuses on an international dispute from the Second World War, during which Polish and Czechoslovak foreign armies needed more soldiers and an important source of reserves could have been Slavic captives of German troops who came from the disputed Tešín region in Silesia. The proceedings are worthy of the reader's attention for two main reasons. The first is the deep perspective into Central European ethnic issues provided. The danger caused by insufficient familiarity with such issues can be observed, for example, in the frequently uninformed judgment of the Czech-German conflict on a global scale. In 1938, France and England aided Hitler in expanding into Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, ignoring the Nazi oppression of the Sorbs and Moravians in the Reich. And in 1945, the same powers approved the expulsion of the German minority which had been living in the Czech lands for centuries, yielding to the temptation of the internationally tolerated aggressor. The