Kidnapped Souls

National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948

Tara Zahra

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801462092
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Throughout the nineteenth and into the early decades of the twentieth century, it was common for rural and working-class parents in the Czech-German borderlands to ensure that their children were bilingual by sending them to live with families who spoke the "other" language. As nationalism became a more potent force in Central Europe, however, such practices troubled pro-German and pro-Czech activists, who feared that the children born to their nation could literally be "lost" or "kidnapped" from the national community through such experiences and, more generally, by parents who were either flexible about national belonging or altogether indifferent to it.

Highlighting this indifference to nationalism—and concerns about such apathy among nationalists—Kidnapped Souls offers a surprising new perspective on Central European politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Austrian, Czech, and German archives, Tara Zahra shows how nationalists in the Bohemian Lands worked to forge political cultures in which children belonged more rightfully to the national collective than to their parents. Through their educational and social activism to fix the boundaries of nation and family, Zahra finds, Czech and German nationalists reveal the set of beliefs they shared about children, family, democracy, minority rights, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Zahra shows that by 1939 a vigorous tradition of Czech-German nationalist competition over children had created cultures that would shape the policies of the Nazi occupation and the Czech response to it.

The book's concluding chapter weighs the prehistory and consequences of the postwar expulsion of German families from the Bohemian Lands. Kidnapped Souls is a significant contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of modern nationalism in Central Europe and a groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which children have been the objects of political contestation when national communities have sought to shape, or to reshape, their futures.

1 “Czech Schools for Czech Children!”

September was a busy time of the year for nationalists in the Habsburg Monarchy. By the turn of the century, nationalist agitation ranked with new shoes and teachers as a back-to-school tradition in many multilingual towns of the Bohemian Lands. While traveling through the town of Prachatice/Prachatitz in the late summer of 1918, the German writer Robert Scheu observed, “There is always a great deal of agitation during the holidays because of the schools. Both nations attempt to win students over for their schools, and not always with the most honest methods. Some families send their children alternately to the Czech school one year and the German school the next.” 1 How did this nationalist battle for children’s souls begin? What kind of “dishonest methods” did Scheu observe? And what were the consequences of the struggle to “win” children for the nation?

This chapter traces the origins of the nationalist campaign to eradicate national indifference and bilingualism among parents and children in the Bohemian Lands. In the eyes of Czech nationalists at the turn of the century, the very survival of the Czech nation depended on keeping as many children as possible in Czech schools. To nationally contested children and their parents, national affiliation was, however, rarely the obvious basis on which to choose a school. Although Czech nationalists actively cultivated a democratic self-image, positioning themselves as representatives of a popular rebellion against German elitism, they confronted persistent apathy and indifference to their demands among parents. Czech nationalists deployed a wide range of strategies to eradicate this indifference, beginning with a pedagogical campaign to convince parents of the moral and psychological dangers of bilingualism. When pedagogy and persuasion failed, they resorted to more radical tactics, including bribery, denunciation, threats, and finally, the force of law. In the last decade of the Habsburg Monarchy, nationalist activists were increasingly successful in transforming their polemical claims that children comprised a form of precious “national property” into a legal reality.

The back-to-school nationalism discovered by Scheu was the product of a legal and political framework created by the Habsburg state itself, a system that increasingly recognized nationality in order to diffuse nationalism. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Austrian liberals had attempted to relegate nationalist expression to an imagined private sphere and to preserve the supranational character of public institutions like the bureaucracy, army, and dynasty. They thereby inadvertently created an expansive and promising space for nationalist mobilization around children, education, and the family. 2 The Austrian Constitution, crafted by liberals, further galvanized nationalist activism around children and schools. Article 19 of Austria’s 1867 constitution stipulated, “All national groups within the state are equal, and each one has the inviolable right to preserve and cultivate its nationality and language.” To this end, each nationality was guaranteed “the necessary means for education in its language.” 3 The Imperial School Law of 1869, meanwhile, obligated municipal governments to support an elementary school wherever an average of more than forty pupils (over five years) lived within four kilometers of it. These laws provided a critical constitutional and legal basis for nationalists to make aggressive claims on the Imperial state for new schools. Between 1884 and 1886, Gerald Stourzh has shown, a series of decisions by the Austrian Supreme Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgerichtshof) determined that Article 19 actually guaranteed linguistic minorities a right to state-funded elementary schools in their language. After 1886, if the parents of more than forty children demanded a school for their children in a recognized language, the municipality was required to provide one. 4

Finally, in the early twentieth century, a series of compromises designed to alleviate national tensions in the Monarchy had the perverse effect of further legitimizing nationalist claims on children. In 1905, representatives of German and Czech political parties in Moravia ratified the Moravian Compromise. The Lex Perek, paragraph 20 of the Compromise, stipulated that children in Moravia were legally permitted to attend a school only if they were “proficient” in the school’s language of instruction. In 1910 this law was modified so that children could attend a school even if they could not speak the language of instruction as long as they could prove that they belonged to the corresponding nation. But it was no longer enough for parents to simply declare themselves and their children Czechs or Germans, as had previously been the case. Now, in cases of conflict, local officials were empowered to conduct an investigation and assign both parents and children to a single national community based on “objective characteristics.” These characteristics could include language use, reading habits, social contacts, education, census records, and descent. National affiliation, once a matter of personal choice, gradually became a matter for state investigation and classification through the nationalist battle for children. These developments all bolstered the claim that schools and schoolchildren were the property of nationalist movements and that nationality was an inherited quality rather than a political or social choice.

A Brief History of Czech and German Nationalism

A visitor to a bilingual town in the Bohemian Lands in the early nineteenth century would not have encountered many Czechs or Germans. Little separated Czech speakers from their German-speaking neighbors throughout much of the nineteenth century, and few people thought of themselves in national terms. In multilingual communities on the language frontiers of the Bohemian Lands, language use was itself highly situational. As Jeremy King has argued, the language a person spoke in 1848 did not necessarily correspond to any distinct cultural, religious, ethnic, or class affiliations, nor did it determine the national affiliation of a person’s descendants two generations later. 5 Only in the mid-nineteenth century did some middle-class, urban Bohemians and Moravians begin to add a national layer to their existing mélange of local, regional, religious, professional, familial, and dynastic loyalties. These citizens began to mobilize into nationally segregated and mutually exclusive choral societies, fire brigades, gymnastics movements, and other civic associations, promoting nationalization in the name of modernity and progress. Fledging nationalist clubs and associations were particularly active wherever German speakers were found: in the regions of Northern and Southern Bohemia bordering Germany, in Prague, and sprinkled in “language islands”—that is, urban centers in Moravia such as Brno/Brünn and Jihlava/Iglau, which boasted a substantial concentration of German speakers. In the largely Czech-speaking interior and other rural areas of the Bohemian Lands, nationalists enjoyed far less success. 6

Yet even in regions supposedly most torn by nationalist conflict, nationalism was slow to catch on among the popular classes. Only in the late nineteenth century, as nationalist movements competed for state resources, schools, political power, and cultural prestige, did they begin to energetically recruit workers and peasants for their cause. This development accompanied the more widespread rise of mass politics in the Austrian Empire. In 1879, German liberals had suffered a defeat in the Austrian parliament. New mass political parties quickly blossomed, including the Young Czech Party (founded in 1874), Austrian Social Democratic Party (founded in 1889), Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party (founded in 1893), and the Czech National Socialist Party (founded in 1898—no relation to the Nazi Party). Male suffrage also gradually expanded, culminating in the introduction of universal male suffrage for Austrian parliamentary (Reichsrat) elections in 1907. Nationalists, meanwhile, appealed to a widening constituency in expanding voluntary associations. The largest and most successful of these associations were devoted to issues of education. In 1880 German liberal nationalists formed a German School Association (Deutscher Schulverein) to support German minority schools in the Austrian Empire. Czech nationalists followed almost immediately with the Central School Foundation (Ústřední matice školská), which promoted the parallel mission of building Czech minority schools. These organizations soon ranked among the largest voluntary associations in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1902, the German School Association managed twenty-six of its own private German minority schools and provided financial support to forty-one others across the Habsburg Empire, with a budget of 4.3 million crowns. The Czech School Association, for its part, distributed 8 million crowns in 1900, thanks to contributions from thirty thousand members, and enrolled ten thousand children in its private minority schools in the Bohemian Lands. 7 Thanks largely to the activism of these associations, multilingual regions of the Bohemian Lands far outpaced more homogenous areas of the Habsburg Monarchy in terms of the density of schools. In 1913, for example, Moravia boasted one school per 871 inhabitants, almost twice as many schools as in neighboring Lower Austria, which had only one school per 1,701 inhabitants that year. 8

Throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, Czech nationalists defined the boundaries of the nation predominantly through language use. Peter Bugge has suggested that the preoccupation with the Czech language among early Czech nationalists can be attributed precisely to a lack of any significant cultural, religious, or social differences between German speakers and Czech speakers in the early nineteenth century. 9 Not surprisingly, the Czech nationalist movement expended extraordinary energy to keep Czech-speaking and bilingual children firmly bound to a Czech linguistic community in Czech schools. Czech nationalists adamantly insisted that all children who spoke Czech (even if they spoke German as well) or who were descended from Czech-speaking parents were ethnic Czechs. German nationalists, in contrast, typically promoted a more assimilationist understanding of national belonging. They considered individual self-identification as well as the possession of bourgeois cultural attributes to be the most significant criteria for membership in the German nation, even as racial ideas took hold within the movement at the turn of the twentieth century. 10 These distinctions were more of emphasis than of type. Depending on the context, both German and Czech nationalists instrumentally used a mixture of arguments based on language, descent, history, race, and culture to claim as many children as possible as Germans or Czechs. But as each national movement competed to expand its ranks, Czech nationalists typically attempted to raise the barriers to exit. By deploying a conception of the Czech nation centered on language and descent, they aimed to prevent children labeled Czech by nationalists from enrolling in German schools and becoming Germanized. German nationalists, in contrast, focused more on lowering barriers to entry, recruiting working-class and peasant families into the national community, at least until 1918. Given these competing understandings of national belonging, it was not at all uncommon for both national movements, relying on their own internal logic, to claim the same children.

The Czech nationalist campaign against Germanization began in an era when the path to social mobility in the Habsburg Monarchy often ran through the German schools. Since German liberals in the nineteenth century had defined their national collective in terms of middle-class attributes such as culture and property, middle-class Czech speakers often assimilated into a German-speaking social world in Austrian universities and in the Austrian civil service and military. Nineteenth-century Czech nationalists rejected this assimilationist model and began to demand opportunities for social mobility as Czech speakers, through Czech schools. They claimed to lead a popular, democra...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Maps
• Introduction
• 1. “Czech Schools for Czech Children!”
• 2. Teachers, Orphans, and Social Workers
• 3. Warfare, Welfare, and the End of Empire
• 4. Reclaiming Children for the Nation
• 5. Freudian Nationalists and Heimat Activists
• 6. Borderland Children and Volkstumsarbeit under Nazi Rule
• 7. Stay-at-Home Nationalism
• 8. Reich-Loyal Czech Nationalism
• Epilogue