• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Picturing Deutschböhmen: German Nationalist Tourist Material in Late Habsburg Bohemia by Lars Wibe Hagen (s1585894) December 2016 Leiden University History Research M.A. Thesis Political Culture Supervisor: Dr. Eric Storm and National Identities L. W. Hagen Picturing Deutschböhmen December 2016 Acknowledgments It was never my intention to focus on the history of Central Europe or Bohemia, but as I fuzz over the last few details of this thesis and look back at my work over the last few years, I suppose somehow that is what I have done. Much of the blame, I suspect, lies with Dr. Eagle Glassheim, whose lectures during my bachelors were simply too good. The consequences have been rewarding, and for that thanks are in order. Thanks are also due to my supervisor, Dr. Eric Storm, whose advice and feedback has been of great support in this process, and to the Austrian National Library (ÖNB), whose hospitality and help has been greatly appreciated. Without either, the thesis would have looked quite different and much, much worse. Remaining flaws, of which I am sure there are several, are mine entirely. Finally, a great thank you to friends and family, who has made this process and life beyond it far more pleasant. Without them I too would have been much different and much worse. Any remaining flaws in this regard are also mine to bear. 1 L. W. Hagen Picturing Deutschböhmen December 2016 Contents Table of figures……………………………………………………………………………..p. 3. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..p. 4. Chapter 1: On German Bohemia and German Bohemians……………… p. 14. Chapter 2: On Tourism……………………………………………………………………p. 32. Chapter 3: On Guidebooks………………………………………………………………p. 45. Chapter 4: On Photography…………………………………………………………….p. 62. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..p. 80. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….p. 84. 2 L. W. Hagen Picturing Deutschböhmen December 2016 Table of Figures All figures are gathered from: Landesverband für Fremdenverkehr in Deutschböhmen (1910), Durch Deutschböhmen, 3rd ed., Karlsbad: Verlag des Landesverbandes für Fremdenverkehr in Deutschböhmen. Fig. 1: Deutschböhmen according to the Tourist Association [Map]. Page 17 here, inserted in the back of Durch Deutschböhmen. Fig. 2: Women hiking in the hills by Bärringen/Perning. Photo: Josef Werner. Page 68 here, page 125 in Durch Deutschböhmen. Fig. 3: Crowd in Marienbad/Mariánské Lázně. Page 72 here, page 103 in Durch Deutshcböhmen. Fig. 4: Peasant women and chimney sweep in Wallern/Volary. Photo: Josef Seidl. Page 73 here, page 54 in Durch Deutschböhmen. Fig. 5: People and cart with firewood near Kalmswiese/Jalůvčí. Page 74 here, page 226 in Durch Deutschböhmen. Fig. 6: View from the Arberschutzhaus of Eisenstein/Železná Ruda. Photo: Josef Seidl. Page 77 here, page 26 in Durch Deutschböhmen. 3 L. W. Hagen Picturing Deutschböhmen December 2016 Introduction The nation has never been a universalist project; it has always been modeled on the notion that some are part of ‘the people’ whilst others are not. Moreover, the concept is, seemingly indelibly, in a relationship to space – geographies both material and imagined. The connection between national community and territory has never been without friction. The case has been famously made for France in Eugen Weber’s seminal Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), which outlines a process of assimilation, bringing a host of local identities to fit with the notion of a France of Frenchmen. Eric Hobsbawm has similarly made the case for how the rise of primary education and the invention of national traditions throughout Europe in the nineteenth century created a sense of a shared national background for people within a nation-state. Thus, national identities came to be constructed to fit existing political territorial boundaries.1 Processes of forming national identities occurred also in Austria-Hungary, but here these processes dovetailed with calls to alter the existing political geography. The restoration of the Hungarian Crown of St. Stephen in the Compromise of 1867 provided wide-ranging autonomy to Hungarians within the eastern half of the Habsburg realm, sometimes termed Transleithania, while in the Austrian half, correspondingly dubbed Cisleithania,2 German-speakers were facing increasing challenges to their hegemony from Italian and, even more so, several Slavic groups. Tellingly, Czech nationalists were calling for the restoration also of the Bohemian Crown and, with it, autonomy for themselves within the historical borders of the Kingdom of Bohemia (Ger.: Böhmen, Cz.: Čechy). Appealing to the past, if by-way of a contemporary re-reading of it, national activists sought to reform existing political space to overlap with their communities. Such overlaps were easy to draw on maps, but it was rarely as straightforward to find them on the ground. Along the southern, western, and northern edges of Bohemia, German-speakers made up the majority population but identities often failed to dissolve neatly into categories of Germans and Czechs. Claims to mixed nationalities, 1 Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989, pp. 142-164; Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (ed.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 263-307; Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976, pp. 485-486.. 2 After the river Leitha, which formed part of the border between the two parts. 4 L. W. Hagen Picturing Deutschböhmen December 2016 indifference to national questions, and any number of other alternative self-conceptions abounded among people living in this area, described by nationalists before the First World War as a ‘language frontier’ (Ger.: Sprachgrenze, Cz.: jazyková hranice). Even as the advent of the twentieth century with new social, political, and official administrative demands such as reforms of school policy, electoral systems, and administrative divisions, made it increasingly difficult for individuals to avoid national categorization. Conflation of these people with nationalists, or even to infer that national identity ranked particularly high in the hierarchy of these peoples’ concerns does not necessarily follow. Thus, the national communities to which territorial ‘restorations’ were supposed to adhere, were themselves very much works in progress.3 While Czech nationalists sought to restore an old political entity in the name of their nation, however, a specifically German space within Bohemia grew to take on increased importance for how German nationalists conceived of where they lived. This Deutschböhmen (German Bohemia), bounded by Upper Austria and Lower Austria in the south, Bavaria in the West, Saxony in the north, and the nebulous language frontier in the East, was a new concept. It lacked historical precedent, and arose in response to a situation that, to German nationalists, seemed to have suddenly swung out of their favour.4 If the language frontier, vital to this conception, was not, as Pieter Judson has argued, an “adequate description of this world,”5 nationalists saw little reason to reject it for something more accurate. Instead they pursued a reality more in line with their description. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how German nationalists sought to reshape conceptions of the geography of Bohemia to one in line with their vision. By what means they hoped to render the language frontier and the space it bounded ‘real.’ If existing literature goes a considerable way to provide answers to these question as regards the relationship between nationalists and other locals in Deutschböhmen, I seek 3 Pieter M. Judson, “Nationalizing Rural Landscapes in Cisleithania, 1880-1914,” in Nancy M. Wingfield (ed.) Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict & Nationalism in the Habsburg Central Europe, New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2003, p. 145; for an extensive analysis of the territorialisation of the Czech nation, see Peter Haslinger, Nation und Territorium im tschechischen politischen Diskurs 1880-1938, Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2010. 4 Given later developments, the area is probably best known in current historical memory as the Sudetenland, but this term only came to prominence after the First World War. Deutschböhmen was hardly universal prior to this, but it best reflects naming practices in the primary sources used here. 5 Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 3. 5 L. W. Hagen Picturing Deutschböhmen December 2016 here to examine strategies that could reach beyond Bohemia, to also convince outsiders, especially fellow Germans, about their vision. The timespan to which this investigation pertains begins in the 1880s. This decision is influenced by the publication dates of the primary sources, as well as the formation in 1884 of the Deutscher Böhmerwaldbund, one of the main organisations considered in this thesis. With the advent of the First World War and subsequent collapse of the Habsburg Empire considerably changing the dynamics, 1914 makes for a reasonable end point. This periodization also fits quite well with the time at which the idea of Deutschböhmen first came to materialize, and with the rise of relevant new technologies and modes of consumption which will be discussed below. If starting in the 1880s, however, the weight of attention rests on the years from circa 1900 onwards,

Load more

  89

Copy Link