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

Abstract

It has been some forty years since Miroslav Hroch first published his three-stage paradigm of nation-forming processes in small nations. During that time, historians have variously analyzed the nationalizing activities of intellectual elites (stage A), bourgeois activists (stage B), and the popular masses (stage C). Until now, however, the role of children and the family in shaping and transmitting national messages has not been the focus of close scholarly attention. Tara Zahra fills this lacuna by masterfully marrying two separate spheres of historical inquiry: family history and nationalism studies. She constructs her narrative around the irony of “national indifference” in the Bohemian Lands during the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas in late imperial Habsburg Bohemia, parents commonly sent their children on year-long exchanges with Czech or German-speaking families so that they could gain the linguistic tools to operate in a multiethnic environment, a half century later, as Sudetenland was being reabsorbed into the Czechoslovak state, Czech speakers were responsible for one of the most violent episodes of forced expulsion. This sharpening ethnic tension is the central nexus of Zahra's study. She follows activists from both sides of the Czech-German language frontier as they seek to erase “wobbly” national commitment through the strategic use of schools, summer camps, orphanages, and other child welfare agencies. In so doing, she expands the purview of nationalism studies into new and revealing areas of inquiry.

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