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Commentary: Renaming the Promised Land

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2009

Pieter M. Judson
Pieter M. Judson
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
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Extract

What's in a name? For nationalist activists in Habsburg Central Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, names seem to have meant everything. As Peter Bugge and Maura Hametz convincingly demonstrate in their engaging essays on Bratislava and Trieste after World War I, the use of particular names gave nationalists the power to assert symbolic territorial claims against opponents. Well before 1914 in many regions of the monarchy, as apparently innocent a gesture as hanging a business sign in one language in a neighborhood inhabited by speakers of another language could inflame the passions of local nationalists enough to create political causes célèbres out of such displays. Similarly, the decision of a town council in a linguistically mixed region either to add or to prohibit street signs in a second language could easily provoke serious public protest. The activists who labored obsessively to nationalize both Central European peoples and the spaces they inhabited experienced decisions in favor of one or another set of names as incursions launched against the territory of a national enemy. Never mind that such “linguistic attacks” frequently originated as innocent business advertisement. Nationalists made sure that they would become understood as the legitimate (or illegitimate) reclamation (or seizure) of one nation's property from another.

Information

Type
Forum What's in a Name? Anointing the Nation-State
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 35 , January 2004, pp. 259 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2004

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References

1 There are countless examples in the literature on the monarchy about this kind of nationalist behavior. For the famous controversy over street signs in Prague, see Cohen, Gary B., The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981), 3, 148–49Google Scholar. When Czech nationalists declared the city of Pilsen/Plzeň reconquered for the Czech nation in 1912, German nationalists protested bitterly. Bohemia, 23 09 1912, 1–2Google Scholar, quoted in Spector, Scott, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle (Berkeley, 2000), 74Google Scholar. On nationalist attempts to territorialize their nations, see, for example, Judson, Pieter M., “‘Not Another Square Foot!’ German Liberalism and the Rhetoric of National Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 26 (1995): 83–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Frontiers, Forests, Islands, Stones: Mapping the Geography of a German Identity in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yeager (Ann Arbor 1996), 382–406Google Scholar.

2 Hergel, Carl Maria, “‘Plöckenstein’ oder ‘Blöckenstein’. Ein Kapitel aus unserer Muttersprache,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Böhmerwaldbundes 2 (1885): 26–27.Google Scholar

3 King, Jeremy, “The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Wingfield, Nancy and Bucur, Maria (West Lafayette, 2001), 112–52Google Scholar; idem, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, 2002).Google Scholar

4 Stourzh, Gerald, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Osterreichs 1848–1918 (Vienna, 1985)Google Scholar; Burger, Hannelore, Sprachenrecht und Sprachengerechtigkeit im österreichischen Unterrichtswesenn 1867–1918 (Vienna, 1995)Google Scholar; Baier, Dietmar, Sprache und Recht im alten Österreich. Artikel 19 des Staatsgrundgesetzes vom 21. Dezember 1867, seine Stellung im System der Grundrechte und seine Ausgestaltung durch die oberstgerichtliche Rechtsprechung (Munich, 1983).Google Scholar

5 For a contemporary analysis of the problem of so-called side switcher or amphibian (bilingual) Bohemians from a German nationalist perspective, see Zemmrich, J., Sprachgrenze in Böhmen (Braunschweig, 1902), 7–10.Google Scholar

6 On the census, see Brix, Emil's magisterial study, Die Umgangssprachen in Altösterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation (Vienna, 1982)Google Scholar; Melik, Vasilij, “Die Wählerfolge der Deutschen, Italiener und Slovenen in Laibach, Triest, Marburg an der Drau und anderen krainischen und untersteierischen Städten in den Jahren 1848–1927,” in Alpen Adria Städte im nationalen Differenzierungs-prozess, ed. Moritsch, Andreas (Klagenfurt, 1997), 134–54Google Scholar. On the Trieste census of 1910, see Brix, , Die Umgangssprachen, 183–202Google Scholar. Minority schools in multilingual regions also became the subject of nationalist battles, lawsuits, and legislation, because they too involved critical questions of language use. In Moravia, for example, under laws specific to the Moravian Compromise of 1905, activists could even “reclaim” children from schooling in one language for another if they could prove that the child was not competent in the language of instruction and therefore “belonged” to the other nation. See Burger, , Sprachenrecht und SprachengerechtigkeitGoogle Scholar, chapter 4.

7 Gogolák, Ludwig, “Ungarns Nationalitätengesetze und das Problem des Magyarischen National- und Zentralstaates,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vol. 3, Die Völker des Reiches, ed. Wandruszka, Adam and Urbanitsch, Peter (Vienna, 1980), 1207–1303.Google Scholar

8 Melik, , “Die Wählerfolge,” 97–105.Google Scholar

9 See King's important analysis of historians' use of the term ethnicity in his “The Nationalization of East Central Europe.”

10 Gebel, Ralf, Heim ins Reich! Konrad Henlein und der Reichsgau Sudetenland, 1938–1945 (Munich, 1999), 306–8.Google Scholar