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6 Marking National Space on the Habsburg Austrian Borderlands 1880–1918 Pieter M. Judson Early in Fritz Mauthner’s 1913 novel, Der letzte Deutsche von Blatna, the hero, Anton Gegenbauer , remarks on a minor renovation to an arcade in the main square of his fictional small town, Blatna. For Mauthner and his protagonist, these external cosmetic changes reflect some much deeper transformations that have gradually overtaken the fictional Bohemian community. The words “Stephan Silber’s Gasthaus”—“zum römischen Kaiser”—had decorated the middle arcade for 20 years. [As a child] Anton had first practiced his knowledge of spelling by reading those freshly gilded letters. Now the text had been whitewashed and the bright red letters that decorated the white background spelled out: “Stjepan Zilbr hostinec.” The given name Stephan had been Czechified, the name “Silber” had simply been written using Czech orthography; “hostinec” basically meant the same thing as “pub,” but sounded more patriotic than “Gasthaus .” This painting over, along with the changes inside that they reflected, symbolized the process by which the German town had slowly but surely been transformed into a Czech one.1 Mauthner, a German (nationalist) Jewish Bohemian sets this tragic tale of national decline on the language frontier, a kind of unofficial borderland within imperial Austria that was understood to separate the Czech and German nations. In this region, Mauthner tells us, the specific geographic feature that separated the two nations was the Bjelounka river. “From time immemorial, the Bjelounka had served as the sharp frontier between the Czech and the German people, between the Slavic lowlands and the [German] highlands.” The tollhouse at the southern extreme of Blatna sat “on the last piece of German earth,” and “even the [statue Marking National Space on the Habsburg Austrian Borderlands 123 of] St. John Nepomuk on the bridge would have spoken Czech, if silence had not been his lot.”2 In the course of the nineteenth century, however, some alarming new developments had called the traditional certainties of this boundary into question. Czech families had crossed the Bjelounka in search of employment with the prosperous German artisans and manufacturers of Blatna. Gradually, Czechs too had bought property in the town, and soon “some houses on the [main street], some offices in the Town Hall and even the Church Sacristy” came into Czech hands. The language frontier had been breached, although much of this had happened without evidently affecting the surface character of the town. “In Blatna there were many people who spoke German with difficulty, but together they felt themselves to be part of a German town.”3 The national character of the town changed more visibly, however, as Czech nationalists began to assert their presence more publicly. The fearful German community , meanwhile, acquiesced to the new conditions, and bilingual opportunists like pub owner Stephan Silber (himself a Slovakian Jew, we learn) followed the new direction the wind was blowing. Only Anton, the last German in Blatna, manfully battled Czech trickery, Czech threats of boycotts, of violence, and even Czech attempts to use an innocent girl to seduce him, in order to maintain both his nation’s honor and the German character of his hometown. In the context of late Imperial Austria this term “borderland” rarely referred to a border between sovereign states. Instead, borderlands usually referred to internal national or cultural frontiers that allegedly separated—or conjoined—imagined nations, cultures, or even civilizations, along shared peripheries. In the 1890s the use of the term “borderland” to characterize a town like Blatna would have called to mind several powerful ideological images for a nationalist readership, some of which I will elaborate below. These images were produced thanks largely (and unintentionally) to decisions made by Austria-Hungary’s demographers in the 1870s. They determined that starting with the decennial census of 1880, respondents in Austria would be asked to list their “language of daily use.” Nationalists had increasingly used the census results to plot the territorial extent of their nations geographically . They produced maps and statistical studies that measured and depicted the geographic dispersal of the population that spoke the national language, along with its gains or losses from decade to decade. Because nations had no legally sanctioned existence in Imperial Austria and occupied no officially recognized administrative units of territory, activists viewed the mapping, marking, and defense of these national frontiers as all the more critical. And because nationalists in Austria tended to define their national cultures primarily in terms of language, the use of...

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