In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

109 Changing฀Meanings฀of฀“German”฀฀ in฀Habsburg฀Central฀Europe ◆฀฀฀Pieter฀M.฀Judson฀฀฀◆ How might we usefully examine the relations between German and non-Germancommunities in Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century without imposing a modern nation-centered perspective on those relations? How did German communities or individuals differentiate themselves from their non-German neighbors, if at all? More importantly, how did popular understandings of what it meant to be a German (or German-speaking) change during the nineteenth century? And how did such ideas about national identity become the basis for a cultural and social politics of separation within and among communities in many parts of Eastern Europe? This essay tries to suggest some useful ways of thinking about German-speakers, their changing conceptions of themselves and of their non-German-speaking neighbors in the broad geographic region known as East Central Europe during the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), using examples drawn primarily from the Habsburg Monarchy. In particular the essay contrasts conceptual changes about identity among nationalists to the ongoing realities of daily life in multilingual regions, demonstrating unevenness in the development of a consistent, coherent, and popular German national identity. By the end of the nineteenth century German nationalist media, politicians and organizations all framed daily life in the region in terms of ongoing battles among nations. They attributed local incidents of violence to nationalist animosities and portrayed the local world in terms of nationalist conflict. Yet despite their best efforts the nation remained an object of indifference, ambivalence, and only occasional interest among most inhabitants of East Central Europe. During the nineteenth century, ideas about national identity first became politicized and popularized among large, socially diverse populations.1 This process was anything but predictable or linear in nature, nor did it take place in a consistent or similar manner across the region. Despite the claims of nationalists to the contrary, the process did not reflect deeper transhistorical features somehow embedded in the 110 ◆ PIETER M. JUDSON region or in the peoples who have inhabited it. The particular character of local society produced particular local beliefs about national identity, and these often varied widely within broadly defined national communities. Considering oneself to be a German in one part of Eastern Europe, for example, might involve a completely different set of shared or imagined qualities than it did in another part of Eastern Europe. For social scientists, journalists, and politicians, the challenge of defining who was considered a German national and what political meanings that label conveyed appeared to be solved only by the end of the First World War. Post-1918 European governments increasingly categorized their populations according to particular ethnic attributes, often as a means to determine which groups should enjoy the full rights of citizenship. State policies that linked the full exercise of citizenship rights to membership in a national community helped to popularize national identities among their own populations even more. By the mid-twentieth century, radical policies of ethnic cleansing, discrimination against linguistic or religious minorities, and wholesale expulsions, not to mention genocide, had indelibly imprinted formerly abstract categories on the experiences, relationships, and self-understandings of many Europeans, including the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe. Since our period largely predates the twentieth-century introduction of identity cards, official systems of national ascription or ethnic attribution, it is far more dif- ficult to determine which people considered themselves to be German or German national in the nineteenth century and what exactly they meant by that label.2 On the other hand, those practices of ethnic or national attribution that underlay twentiethcentury government policies certainly developed from ways of thinking about large populations that had originated in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such ways of thinking about populations—in terms of ethnically or linguistically defined nations—in turn originated both at the level of state policy and at the level of popular social movements. They resulted both from state centralization initiatives—often not immediately concerned with determining national belonging—and in many regions from a rise of popular participation in local, regional, and state politics. In this essay I try to suggest how these varied factors taken together produced new understandings of identity, often making those identities into the basis of new forms of politics. After an introductory discussion I propose to analyze debates about the meaning of nation from the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, drawn from two particular...

Share