Rudolf Jaworski's book led me to recall how once during archival diggings I uncovered a late nineteenth-century picture postcard depicting a map of Bohemia in the shape of a brightly dressed woman with an image of a dark bullet hole ripped through the spot marking Prague and the woman's heart. It was sent to Jan Podlipný, who in 1896 became the Czech-run municipality's first Young Czech mayor. The postcard's violent content was striking (all the more so because a paper figure with a noose-like string around its neck was in the same box of materials). This was no simple tourist's travel memento; it was a gendered representation of someone's intense feeling of national political rivalry. As I learned from Jarworski, there were thousands of other politically coded picture postcards printed in late-nineteenth-century Bohemia. Not all were gendered, although many were, a reality not investigated in this book but one certainly meriting scholarly attention.

In his introduction, Jaworski tells us his goal is “to make visible in the truest meaning of the word the collective self-understanding of Czechs and Germans in the Bohemian lands during the last decades of the Danube Monarchy through selected picture-postcards” (9). The book contains just over 100 photos (32 are color) of postcards—half of them German and half Czech. They were carefully chosen from around two thousand postcards, many in Jaworski's personal collection dating from his student days in Vienna. The postcards were selected to reveal “collective identification patterns” (9) of Czechs and Germans and “to make visible parallels or even correspondences [between the two national groups]” (16). Jaworski's efforts led to the development of the themes of his book's eight chapters. The themes are myths, history (often indistinguishable from myth), leaders, associations, exhibitions, national events, the Emperor-Cult and the Habsburg military, and World War I.

Jaworski recognizes that identity in the Bohemian lands around 1900 was a lot more complicated than the totalistic Czech-German bipolar split presented throughout his chapters. In his conclusion, he writes, “the living world in the Bohemian Lands before 1918 was far more colorful and multilayered and with this much less unified than the collective self-images documented here would make believable” (153). Living among Germans and Czechs were Jews, cosmopolitan artists, Social Democrats, and ethnically indifferent or mixed persons. There were also people who worked to satisfy market demands rather than one exclusive group, including the Czech artist, Kamil Vladislav Muttich, who created postcards for Czech, Pan-Slavic, and German clients (14). In the book, Jaworski does next to nothing with his knowledge of Bohemian complexity and persists in seeking parallels and correspondences between the bifurcated German and Czech postcard worlds. Chapters treating that complexity could complement and enhance Jaworski's observations and could contribute to important new studies of Central European national and nonnational identities.

One point that Jaworski “makes visible” through his pursuit of parallels and correspondences was that far more often than their Czech equivalents, the German postcards drew from traditions, leaders, and events external to the Bohemian lands. Out of the book's fifty German images “there were sixteen cards that held themes which had imperial-German, Austrian, or Pan-German codes” (157). The Czech postcards “[ . . . ] in contrast concentrated almost exclusively on purely internal affairs in the past and present” (157). Jaworski concludes with the interesting point that this difference “reflected [ . . . ] the unresolved identity search of Germans in the Bohemian Lands” (157). It also gave them more options than Czechs had. Czechs only had three identity options: Kaisertreu, centeredness around the Bohemian Crownlands, and Pan-Slavic. Here, Jaworski overlooks a wider European identity that numerous Czechs pursued around 1900; nor does he consider that perhaps their limited alternatives contributed to their desire to belong in the progressive West.

Despite differences, Jarowski's parallel postcard worlds show Czechs and Germans sharing much in common. To underscore this point, he quotes Joseph Maria Baernrheither: “they both want the largest share of the treasures that nature gave to the land. They both want space and work-opportunity for the growing, multiplying generation” (159). In some contexts, such common desires can lead to conflict and violence and, significantly, images can help create those contexts. Jaworski tells us that as a result of censorship laws, postcards depicting attacks “remained an exceptional occurrence” (Badeni Crisis postcards were among the exceptions; p. 159). Still, an image does not have to depict extreme violence in order to contribute to violence. Images of a Germanized forest giant stepping on little Czechified, apelike figures and swords that are bloodied or plunged into dying dragons are hardly gentle or respectful of difference. Jaworski's book is important for helping us to think about the power of mass-produced images delivered to people's doorsteps and their possible consequences for modern Central Europe.