Gary B. Cohen's 1981 book on the establishment, consolidation, and eventual decline of a self-conscious and self-consciously German community in Prague is a seminal work that has inspired numerous scholars in their own studies in the social history of nationalization processes in the late Habsburg Empire. The publication in 2000 of a Czech translation only confirms the book's status.

Because of its status and longevity, Cohen's book has been reviewed extensively for more than two decades, so I will focus here on what is new in the revised edition. First of all, Cohen has written a new introduction, but he has also refined his conceptual vocabulary, made several minor adjustments in the core text, and updated the references and bibliography. These changes enable us to see where Cohen found the most inspiration for his revisit to late Habsburg Prague. Perhaps not surprisingly works by Pieter Judson, Jeremy King, and, in the introduction, Rogers Brubaker figure prominently in the discussion as well as in the endnotes. So the new introduction, even more than that of the previous edition, stresses the contingency and construction of national communities, while it insists on the importance of microstudies of how social boundaries were created, upheld, or transformed and how they contributed to national or ethnic affiliation, or the lack thereof. Consequently, the main change in terminology in the new edition is the frequent replacement of “Germans” and “Czechs” with “German-speakers” and “Czech-speakers.” Comparing the two editions, however, one sees how easy it has been to make this adjustment, because a constructivist perspective already pervaded Cohen's 1981 argument.

Cohen's meticulous documentation of how, for the liberal German community of Prague, upholding liberal values—including a “deferential politics” respecting the hegemony of the upper-middle-class liberal elites—was intrinsically tied to their understanding of what it meant to be German remains utterly convincing. The same is true of his demonstration of how this self-identification left lower-class German-speakers in large part nationally unintegrated and forced the liberals to spend much energy on an “internal” struggle against Völkisch visions of Germanness. The pivotal role of sociopolitical and cultural norms in their collective self-perception and boundary drawing eventually makes the term “ethnic” (or “ethnic defense”) problematic as a label for a Prague German community. This community included Jews, who—though politically and culturally one with the rest of the community—largely remained segregated in terms of marriage and other aspects of private life, while for political and social reasons it excluded German-speakers who in the understanding of all involved actors were ethnic kin. “Ethnicity” appears here as either analytically misleading or too all-encompassing—as in Fredrik Barth's argument on “ethnic identity” (10–11)—especially because Cohen subtly insists that national and other group boundaries clashed in different spheres—such as in politics, economic transactions, religious practice, and places of residence. These differences allowed multiple allegiances and modes of interaction to form.

Though centered on the Prague German community, Cohen pays due attention to the interrelation of Prague Czech and German nationalization processes and political maneuverings. What one finds only embryonically in the 1981 edition is the analytical inclusion of the third part in what Jeremy King has called the “triangular dynamics” of Czech, Habsburg, and German in the Bohemian Lands. In recent works, such as “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867–1914” (Central European History, vol. 40, 241–78), Cohen himself has stressed the importance of the Habsburg state in shaping the political space and institutional venues for civil society and nationalist politics. However, a full-scale application of these insights would have called for more substantial revisions to the text than what was probably possible. Cohen has made steps in this direction, and they account for what seems to be the most profound interventions in the core chapters of the book (compare for example pages 177–78 of the second edition with pages 243–44 of the 1981 edition). Here, as elsewhere in the book, the revision offers massive justification for its publication and for the author's strategy of approaching his own time-honored text as a work in constant progress.