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1. Birth of a Borderland
- University of Michigan Press
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been rendered all but invisible by historians.9 Scholars tend to look for discrete objects of study—a state, a community, a particular social or cultural movement. Even when they examine interactions among communities, they often focus on con›ict rather than coexistence and interdependence. In European history, that means that borderland studies typically focus on disputed territories, such as Alsace, Tirol, or Poland; zones of national con›ict, such as the Habsburg “language borders” or the Pale of Settlement ; or areas that have been characterized by mass violence and ethnic cleansing.10 Such studies are important. Yet they leave invisible the most common kind of modern borderlands—places where political boundaries have not moved, in which people are usually more inclined to cooperate than ‹ght, and in which populations resist clear categorization in terms of nationality, state af‹liation, political ideology, or economic status.11 This was especially true during the cold war, when Eastern and Western ideology rei‹ed nation-states and their post–World War II territories in historical discussion.12 Yet coexistence and con›ict are inseparable, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, persistent, porous boundaries proved the norm rather than the exception. Central Europeans and their states negotiated the interconnections of coexistence and con›ict in periods of dramatic historical change—industrialization , mass politics, economic crisis, world war, fascism, and ethnic cleansing—inscribing those relationships on physical and social landscapes even as they connected those landscapes to new transnational contexts . Their efforts demonstrate that the kind of cross-border relations that advocates of the European Union have hailed as proof of a new postnational Europe are in fact nothing new. Fluid borderlands were typical of late nineteenth-century Central Europe. They have become the most common kinds of border in Europe after the cold war. Yet there has been little examination of how they emerge and change. Using the study of space to connect crisis and continuity and to establish the relationship between the ›uidity of human interactions and the institutionalization of state and national identities requires both building on and moving beyond methodological, territorial, and chronological conventions . We all become frontier people when we allow political, economic, social, and cultural historical approaches to cross-fertilize, intermarry, switch sides, and operate situationally and opportunistically to tell a more nuanced story of the origins and dynamics of modern societies. This approach does not examine how discourse shaped behavior or how material conditions determined discourse. Rather, it examines how material, rhetor10 Changing Places ical, and cultural life are always interconnected and mutually in›uential. It demonstrates that to understand the crisis of the German in›ation, for example , one needs to understand not only the very real problems of food shortages but how multiple actors framed those problems in public debates and how ordinary people acted in response to the combination of material and rhetorical pressures. When Saxon villagers watched Bohemians buy out their bakeries, they turned to long-standing (and long-ignored) nationalist rhetoric, labeling their erstwhile “German brothers” as “foreign Czechs.” Those national monikers may have been invented and unstable, but the frustration—and the bread—were real enough. Beyond Nations, Regions, and States Between the 1870s and the 1940s, the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands were home to a highly mobile, multilinguistic population. Germany and Habsburg Austria and, later, Germany and Czechoslovakia were each others’ most important trade partners, with most of the goods they traded originating in or passing through these borderlands. Bohemia became a critical source of labor for Saxony—one of Germany’s most important industrial regions. Industries on both sides produced for international markets. The borderlands also became hotbeds of socialist and nationalist political agitation that often crossed the frontier. These territories and their populations were simultaneously part of two countries, two national communities, regions within their states, a cross-border community, and international trade and political networks. They were a microcosm of transnational territory and community. By the 1930s, they straddled what Reich German nationalists declared was a fundamental divide between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. These characteristics did not make them either marginal or exceptional , as contemporary nationalists and subsequent scholars have often suggested of frontier and multinational regions. Rather, their multiple af‹liations and regional particularities combined to create an eminently normal Central European landscape. This book takes a transnational approach not simply by examining multiple states, national communities, and historiographies. Rather, it traces where states and nations succeeded and where they failed to de‹ne modern European...