For many decades the study of nationalism has dominated the study of central European history. It has become increasingly difficult to “say something new” about the topic. But Tara Zahra has written a book that reinvigorates this very crowded field of scholarship. Kidnapped Souls is a creative, even risky, history of inaction and action—of national fence-sitters and side-switchers in central Europe and those devoted to knocking them off fences into essentialist national communities. It is a history that requires the invention of English terms to approximate the dizzying nationalist vocabulary in the Bohemian lands in the first half of the twentieth century: Czechification, re-Czechification, Germanification, Czechified Germans, Germanizable Czechs, insufficiently Nazified Germans, insufficiently Germanized Nazis, and Reich-loyal Czech nationalists. In this story, “kidnapped” children and “reclaimed” children were punted back and forth in a high stakes game of “soul robbery.”

Kidnapped Souls examines the struggles over raising and schooling children in the Bohemian lands during the late Habsburg Monarchy, the Czechoslovak Republic, the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia/Sudetenland, and the postwar Czechoslovak state. Zahra's study takes its place in a growing body of scholarship that examines nationalism by decentering it. She joins Pieter Judson, Chad Bryant, Jeremy King, and others who have looked at indifference, ambiguity, in-betweenness, and multiple loyalties to explain what nationalism is. Zahra states at the outset that her book “treats indifference to nationalism as a central category of analysis,” while also acknowledging that indifference is elusive, a historical phenomenon once-removed. To get at it, she reads for inaction on the part of some historical actors, and argues that “[n]ational indifference appears most clearly at moments when nationalists mobilized to eliminate it” (pp. 4-5).

There were many such moments. Zahra combs Czech, Austrian, German, French, and American archives to craft a theoretically sophisticated and exhaustively researched account of education and child-welfare policies in central Europe. Why children? Of course, children go to school, and earlier historians have shown that schools were frequently at the center of nationalist politics in this region. But Zahra sees in children something that threatens a key assumption of nationalist politics: that there is an essential difference between national communities. If there is an essential difference, some reliable test or method could surely be developed to identify it. Over and over again activists struggled to define—or more precisely, ferret out—an essential Czechness and Germanness lurking within the individual. Over fifty years of intense nationalist politicking, children “seemed to slip easily between linguistic and national communities” in ways that undermined the very premise of that politics.

A book centered on children is risky. One could imagine it being received as soft history, an interesting but peripheral side story to real nationalist politics. Kidnapped Souls convinces us otherwise. Tracing the desperately unsuccessful language tests of the late Habsburg period to Reinhard Heydrich's contorted “Summer Relaxation Program for Czech Children” fifty years later, the study soundly convinces that children were at the center of central European nationalists' machinations.

For the Habsburg period, Zahra zeroes in on Moravia. A series of court cases in the wake of the 1905 Compromise centered on the question of who should have the final choice in the selection of a child's school: parents or representatives of the national collective. Czech and German nationalists zealously tracked body counts at their schools and periodically raided enemy schools to reclaim pupils whose parents had “falsely” given them an “incorrect” nationality. Zahra emphasizes that nationalists in Moravia used the collective rights granted by law to constitute “national communities” rather than vice versa. Indeed, even the term “reclamation” is suspect because it assumed children possessed a “true” nationality that needed to be called back, made right, or corrected, rather than created.

Czech and German nationalists in the Bohemian lands developed an expansive network of competing child-welfare institutions before 1914. During World War I, the strapped Austrian state strengthened these nationally based welfare projects, granting them greater authority to administer the children of “their” nations. In this transition, previously private officers took up posts in the newly created Ministry for Social Welfare. To their own surprise, Czech and German nationalists now found themselves operating as “the Habsburg state's own trusted agents” (p. 12). In interwar Czechoslovakia, the nationally segregated child-welfare efforts expanded, and individuals' abilities to choose their “correct” nationality disappeared. Census takers and state officials, acting in the interests of “the nation,” were empowered to change an individual's nationality declaration, and thousands of self-declared Germans were interrogated for claiming “false” nationality. In the postwar discourse of minority rights and national self-determination, it was the nation, not the individual, whose interests were protected. Zahra explains, “The nation itself became the privileged liberal subject” (p. 107).

This claim allows the author to critique long-standing Czech assertions of democratic exceptionalism, whereby Czechs served as beacons of light in the dark, democratically challenged east. Rather, the democracy of interwar Czechoslovakia was a nationalist democracy that valued national rights over those of the individual. In matters of schooling and child welfare, the “problem” of individual parents continued to vex nationalist activists. The latter saw children as the property of the national collective. As had been the case in the imperial period, the vast majority of contested and reassigned children came from the lower classes. Working-class and peasant parents were thought particularly ill suited to assess and properly determine the nationality of their children.

If the 1920s saw a flood of Germans being reassigned Czech nationality, the same process was undertaken in reverse after the Nazi dismantling of Czechoslovakia. To an existing list of factors (language, “descent,” democratic leanings) used earlier (unsuccessfully) to distinguish one nation from another, Nazis predictably added race. But the ambiguous children of the so-called Zwischensicht confounded racial thinkers as much as they had earlier Czech and German nationalists.

One of Zahra's most novel discoveries is that standard periodization of modern Czech history (Habsburg, interwar democracy, World War II), which emphasizes grand political ruptures, has overlooked more subtle continuities in policy. Kidnapped Souls demonstrates that turn-of-the-century Czech nationalists and Sudeten Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s in fact had similar assumptions and political strategies regarding family and child-rearing. Carefully reconstructing institutional histories of several key central child-welfare organizations, Zahra shows that nationalist activists more often than not parroted the positions of their fiercest foes.

Beyond the immediate central European context, Zahra's study raises a set of more universal questions that have been sitting quietly at the center of twentieth-century European politics: To whom do children “belong”? To their parents? To a collective “national community”? To the state? In raising these questions and answering them in such patient detail for the case of the Bohemian lands, Zahra has offered future researchers one way of reconceptualizing the twentieth-century political landscape.