“What should the ideal German look like?” began a joke in the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. “For the protection of the race and in the interests of the nation's population, he must have as many children as Hitler. He must be racially pure like Leni Riefenstahl. A slim, resilient frame like Goering. He must speak truthfully like Goebbels. And be true to the cause like Hess” (p. 157). The joke points to the fundamental hypocrisy and instrumentalism lurking behind the Third Reich's racial pseudoscience. But defining Germanness was no joking matter in the Protectorate. The Nazi racial state was built around hierarchical distinctions between Germans and Jews, Slavs, and other racially “inferior” groups, and around the conviction that Germans, members of a separate and superior race, could be easily identified. Chad Bryant's Prague in Black demonstrates that the Nazis' efforts to distinguish between Czechs and Germans in the occupied east were plagued from the start—by tensions between different local administrators, who often upheld conflicting ideals of Germanness; between Reich German and Sudeten German Nazis; and between different Nazi agencies and organizations. This book is thus an important investigation of the making of a racial state in a world in which, as diplomat George Kennan observed, “It became difficult to tell where the Czech left off and the German began.”

As the first English-language study of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in thirty years, Prague in Black represents an important contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of Nazi rule in eastern Europe and to the history of nationalism more generally. Bryant's study enriches a growing literature on the history of national ambivalence and indifference in east central Europe, demonstrating that this indifference was not simply a relic of a premodern age. The Nazis confronted what Bryant calls “a hopelessly mixed people,” nationally ambiguous and bilingual individuals labeled by contemporaries as members of a “Zwischenschicht,” “amphibians,” or “hermaphrodites.” The definition of Germanness was continuously contested, redefined, and renegotiated on the peripheries of the Nazi empire. While the terms of the debate were often determined by officials in Berlin, ordinary citizens of the Bohemian Lands also participated. Sometimes, German-speakers infuriated Nazi officials by opting out of the Volksgemeinschaft in order to evade the draft or labor service. Equally frustrating to Nazi administrators, many so-called “new Germans” appeared to be criminals and opportunists who hardly spoke a word of German.

Bryant deftly explores the shifts in occupation policy and in everyday life that accompanied the changing fortunes of the German army and changing leadership in the Protectorate, beginning with plans to expel all of the Czechs eastward, to later dreams of Germanizing “racially valuable” Czechs, to Heydrich's efforts to “impose racial order” while keeping the Protectorate's war factories running. He thereby situates Nazi Germanization policies in the broader context of the regime's escalating campaign to remake Europe's racial demography through eugenics, expulsions, resettlement, the Germanization of whole populations, the expropriation of property, and the extermination of the Jews. He tackles the question of how and why the Protectorate, “surrounded by war,” was the “only Central European land living in peace,” according to one Reich German observer (p. 179), subject to considerably less violence and repression than other occupied lands in the east. Prague in Black also analyzes the distinct interests of Nazi policy makers from the Altreich (themselves notoriously divided), local Sudeten German nationalists, ordinary Czechs, and the Czech exiled government in London. Finally, he follows other recent analysts of Nazi rule in eschewing the binary categories of collaboration and resistance. Instead, Bryant argues that the dominant response to Nazi rule among Czechs was to “act Czech” in everyday life—speaking Czech, telling Czech jokes, singing Czech songs, and increasingly, hating everything and everyone German. After World War II, this hatred of Germans became the defining and unifying principle of Czech nationalism, propelling the violent expulsions and retributions of the immediate postwar years.

Prague in Black occasionally gestures to the ways in which Czechs and Sudeten Germans viewed the Nazi occupation as a continuation of a longer tradition of nationalist politics in the Bohemian Lands. On balance, however, Bryant seeks to emphasize the radical ruptures that characterized the Nazi occupation, the ways in which the Nazi regime “changed forever what it meant to be a Czech or German (p. 2).” In this effort to underscore the brutality and novelty of Nazi rule, he sometimes underplays the extent to which Nazi Germanization policies often ended up relying on precedents and traditions established in Imperial Austria and in the first Czechoslovak Republic. Hence, a central thesis of Prague in Black is that before 1939 “nationality remained an individual choice made relatively free of state influence (p. 4).” Only with the Nazi seizure of power, Bryant claims, did nationality become “something that state officials assigned (p. 5).” In reality, however, citizens of the Bohemian Lands lost the individual right to choose a national affiliation long before the Nazis marched into Prague, thanks largely to the efforts of Czech nationalists, who began pressuring the state forcibly to classify nationally ambiguous citizens as Czechs in the late Austrian Empire.

As early as 1910, the Austrian Supreme Administrative Court ruled that in cases in which the nationality of parents or children in Moravia was disputed, national identity could not be ascertained “through the simple declaration of the parents about their nationality … In conflicts over believability and truthfulness, this declaration would have to be supported with objective, concrete characteristics.” In other words, state officials would be increasingly responsible for confirming or challenging individuals' claims about their own national identity. In interwar Czechoslovakia, practices of forcible national classification became more widespread, when new laws regulating the census stipulated that all citizens were obligated to report their nationality based on so-called “objective characteristics.” Tens of thousands of self-declared Germans were changed into Czechoslovaks against their will by state officials in 1921 and 1930, informed by state officials that their “subjective feelings” about their nationality were “completely irrelevant.” Bryant claims that “in 1930 any male could have declared himself to be a German (p. 267),” but in fact, individuals who declared themselves German on the 1930 Czechoslovak census risked imprisonment. Individuals found guilty of declaring a “false” nationality on the census were subject to prison sentences of up to three months and fines of up to 10,000 crowns.

Of course, national classification under Nazi rule became more all-encompassing and far more consequential. The pretense of due process was abandoned, as was the promise of minority rights in the Bohemian Lands. Being labeled a German, Czech, or Jew now often meant the difference between life and death. The Nazi regime thus radicalized and racialized longstanding practices of national classification, using them to impose its own hierarchical racial order. But despite concerted efforts to discipline so-called national hermaphrodites through forcible classification, Bryant's own evidence of rampant side-switching and “amphibianism” suggests that national indifference and opportunism persisted under Nazi rule, as did a degree of choice (for non-Jews) about whether to become a Czech or a German. Nazi Germanization policies were meant to eliminate national ambiguity in the Bohemian Lands once and for all. Ironically, as Prague in Black demonstrates, it was Czech nationalists who ultimately fulfilled this fantasy, when they finally created a Czechoslovak nation-state after World War II through ethnic cleansing. Prague in Black will be of interest to scholars of Germany and eastern Europe alike for its illuminating and readable account of this radical chapter in the history of central European nation-making and occupation.