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Reviewed by:
  • Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946
  • David Gerlach
Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946. By Caitlin E. Murdock. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. 275. Cloth $70.00. ISBN 978-0472117222.

Caitlin Murdock’s monograph offers a compelling account of the integral nature of borderlands in central European history. It explores how the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands served as a space where people, commerce, and politics interacted and [End Page 664] changed in ways not coterminous with the state borders and governments that, in theory, defined and controlled them. It is a history that moves as well: Murdock takes the reader from the 1870s to the 1930s, from small towns to central governments, and from Germany to the Hapsburg/Czechoslovak lands. In this way, she develops an innovative approach to examining the frontier from both sides of the border.

Murdock presents the story of these borderlands in the second half of the nineteenth century as a space of mutual exchange between Saxons and Bohemians, who had more contact with each other than with the interior parts of their own respective realms—a space that grew through war, economic depression, and nationalist activism into mutually exclusive territories under greater control from the outside. In the 1870s, the people living in the borderlands were used to treating the state border as porous and negotiable. This worked because they did not see themselves as belonging to a particular national group, and because central governments were still unconcerned about achieving absolute control over their borders. By tracing the lively cross-border migration of this period, Murdock demonstrates that neither Bohemian nor Saxon employers, shopkeepers, or officials saw such migration as a national or security threat.

Like goods and people, Murdock demonstrates that politics also crossed the border. She shows that even though Czech-speaking workers either assimilated or posed little danger of effecting the “Czechization” of Saxony, and that few things distinguished Czech from German Bohemians except language, national activists were still able to manufacture nationalist threats on both sides of the border. That is to say, as nationalist disputes played out on the Bohemian side of the border, German-Bohemian nationalists began projecting them across the border. Murdock argues that this movement did little in the short term to convince central authorities or the majority of locals in Saxony or Bohemia that a national threat really loomed. In the long term, however, she notes that the various debates, organizations, newspapers, and tactics developed during the late nineteenth century laid the foundation for future nationalist politics in the 1930s.

In one chapter, Murdock examines a textile strike in the Saxon town of Crimmitschau to explore how cross-border labor relations and nationalist politics intertwined. Although few Czech-speaking workers served as strikebreakers, German nationalists, Saxon organized labor, and others blamed Czech outsiders for breaking the strike (in fact, it seems that many Bohemian workers supported the strike, in a noteworthy case of cross-border working-class cohesion). The case demonstrates well Murdock’s point that local realities differed from nationalist rhetoric—though, in the end, it was the nationalists’ version of events that mattered more for the lasting memory and future course of borderland politics. More detailed accounts of such local events, which take us further into the borderland context and the ties that connected both sides, would have been welcome. Along similar lines, a greater exploration of [End Page 665] borderland dialects and customs, rates of intermarriage, hiking routes, and even beer-drinking habits would have enhanced Murdock’s portrayal of this region as one of shared development.

One of the major strengths of the book is Murdock’s capacity to capture concisely what the broad changes brought by war, Czechoslovak statehood, and the rise of the Nazis meant for the borderlands. She describes how state efforts to claim people and territory during the war and afterward did not result in greater control. During World War I, people on both sides of the border did what worked best for them, rather than what the central government demanded. For instance, borderland residents successfully resisted state efforts...

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