Kidnapped Souls. National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (review)

“Protest against child labor in a labor parade.” From a photograph of two girls at a protest wearing banners, in English and Yiddish, with the slogan “Abolish Ch[ild] Slavery!!”

Probably taken May 1, 1909 in New York City. The George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsc-00150.

Tara Zahra’s book may serve quite well to open up two large subjects of historical research. One is a long-cultivated and disputed topic—the history of nationalisms and nationalist conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe. The other topic is the history of childhood, a relatively marginalized field. The book is built around the Czech and German nationalist mobilization around children, from the Habsburg Monarchy to the Nazi occupation. Several key concepts support this theoretical approach, among them being bilingualism, national ambiguity, and indifference to nationalism. Tara Zahra builds her argument around such key concepts by talking about “kidnapped souls,” by which she refers to the ambiguity of national identity for children; “national indifference”—a concept which, considering the sources, has little historical value other than to point out the radicalization of nationalist policies in Central and Eastern Europe; and, finally, the battle for children, a notion fortunately chosen to express the whole layout of forces used to gain children for the nation (either Czech or German) in the former Austrian provinces during 1900–1945.

The book is structured in eight chapters approaching, from different perspectives, the role of children as instruments and objects of the nationalist conflict in the Bohemian Lands. The author starts from the premise that “the deepness of the nationalist polemics on children reflects the amplitude of the nationalist feeling and the intensity of the national conflicts” (ix). In the first three chapters, she places the battle for children in its historical and sociological context and tries to find the origins of the Nazi “Germanization” in the longer local history of Czech–German conflicts. Zahra demonstrates that the language only became a legitimizing instrument during the second half of the twentieth century and that only the laws from the beginning of the century legitimized the nationalist claims on children (see, for instance, Lex Perek, 1905, pp. 32–39—about which more shortly). Also here, the author brings in the center of the discussion the main promoters of the nationalist movement from the turn of the century: the teachers—the promoters of the pedagogic reform movement—and the social workers—the promoters of the child welfare movement. Between them were the orphans—“the ideal raw material for nationalist movement in the Austrian Empire” (68). In a state that evaluated its size and power through the number of people speaking a certain language, a moment like the 1880 census could only fire the whole chain of nationalist manifestations during the 20^th century. These chapters focus on the problem of children caught between the departure of their fathers to the front and the forced labor of their mothers in factories to sustain the war effort. In the background of increasing anxieties (her reproduction of Franziszka Pollabrek’s letter at the beginning of the third chapter being an excellent choice), Zahra shows how child welfare activists, German and Czech alike, went into action. They prepared a whole network of private institutions, organized and segregated on nationalist criteria. Obviously, children could not avoid mobilization and contribution towards the war effort. Instead, as the author points out, this effort had to be held in the name of mother nation, and patriotic labor was adapted to war pedagogies.

Beginning with chapter four Zahra unveils the true complexity of her subject. The whole question of national conflicts, of the Nazi policy in Eastern Europe, as well as the question of the horrors this way of understanding the world generated, spreads...