This history of a single town in Bohemia casts new light on
nationalism in Central Europe between the Springtime of Nations in
1848 and the Cold War. Jeremy King tells the story of both German
and Czech-speaking Budweis/Budaejovice, which belonged to the
Habsburg Monarchy until 1918, and then to Czechoslovakia, Hitler's
Third Reich, and Czechoslovakia again. Residents, at first simply
"Budweisers," or Habsburg subjects with mostly local loyalties,
gradually became Czechs or Germans. Who became Czech, though, and
who German? What did it mean to be one or the other?
In answering these questions, King shows how an epochal,
region-wide contest for power found expression in
Budweis/Budaejovice not only through elections but through clubs,
schools, boycotts, breweries, a remarkable constitutional
experiment, a couple of riots, and much more. In tracing the
nationalization of politics from small and sometimes comic
beginnings to the genocide and mass expulsions of the 1940s, he
also rejects traditional interpretive frameworks. Writing not a
national history but a history of nationhood, both Czech and
German, King recovers a nonnational dimension to the past. Embodied
locally by Budweisers and more generally by the Habsburg state,
that dimension has long been blocked from view by a national
rhetoric of race and ethnicity. King's Czech-Habsburg-German
narrative, in addition to capturing the dynamism and complexity of
Bohemian politics, participates in broader scholarly discussions
concerning the nature of nationalism."
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