In her study of the Bohemian-Saxon borderlands, Caitlin Murdock provides a new perspective on international politics in central Europe. Organized chronologically and topically, the book offers a detailed examination of local, regional, and provincial forces in this transnational region. Arguing that nationalisms competed with other loyalties and interests, Murdock joins historians who have recently challenged the primacy of nationality and nationalism in modern central European history. Focusing primarily on Saxony, she demonstrates, on the one hand, how Saxon Germans became Reich Germans, and on the other, how Bohemian Germans became Sudeten Germans. Moreover, she traces the creation of the “Sudetenland”—a term used at least since 1897—in the popular imagination on both sides of the border. Her analysis is not limited to Czechs and Germans; she also weaves discussion of the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in Saxony, into the book.

This book begins in 1870 when the Bohemian-Saxon borderlands emerged as a modern cross-border region. Although the unification of Germany in 1871 created a political divide between Wilhelmine Germany and Austria-Hungary, rapid industrialization, mass migration, and the growth of mass politics helped to integrate the region as German citizens as well as Czech- and German-speaking Bohemians moved within and across it. Murdock argues that developing modern economic networks in the late nineteenth century had the most long-lasting effects on Bohemian-Saxon border relationships. They both reshaped physical space and social dynamics and provided the impetus for new political movements. There were, however, advantages and limitations to economic integration along the border, as the author demonstrates. For example, German nationalists in Saxony objected to Czech-speaking migrants not because they were Austrians, but rather because they were Czech. The Bohemian-Saxon border, however, remained permeable for Bohemian Germans.

Before World War I, the border served as a barrier to Czech nationalist politics, but not to Czech speakers. Most Bohemian migrants, Murdoch asserts, did not participate in the Czech associations in Saxony whose emphasis was becoming increasingly national. Although the overwhelmingly Catholic Bohemian migrants fueled the growth of Catholic communities in Protestant Saxony, many Bohemians who settled permanently in the Saxon borderlands converted to the majority religion. After 1880, with the advent of increasingly mass politics, German nationalist activists on both sides of the frontier sought to recast the borderlands as endangered national space. Murdock describes articles in Bohemian-German newspapers just after the turn of the century warning of the Czechization of Saxony, not unlike assertions about Czechs in Vienna and Lower Austria about the same time. There were some missed opportunities here to expand on Saxon-German participation in the nationalization of German-speaking Bohemia, including their participation in Volkstage and other protests connected with the Badeni Language Laws of 1897.

Following a discussion of the Czechoslovak and German states that resulted from the Paris Peace Conference, the author turns to the economic-political issues of the 1920s. Despite strained relations in the postwar period between Weimar Germany and the nascent multinational Czechoslovak state, which was governed as a nation-state, borderland residents maintained transnational communities. Free transit remained the critical issue under discussion, because between the wars, frontier people and their states began to perceive the borderlands as two interconnected territories divided by a political border. Weimar Germany soon joined Czechoslovakia in considering hardship and instability, as much as opportunity and privilege, to be markers of the Bohemian-Saxon borderlands.

In determining the economic and geographic limits of the borderlands, both interwar governments and individuals began to associate freedom of movement in the regions with local territorial belonging and national identity. They expanded upon the wartime policies of documentation and control that their imperial predecessors had begun to implement, thus forcing people to define publicly their relationships to nations, states, and territories. The Depression, which affected the border regions more adversely than elsewhere in Germany and Czechoslovakia, represented the culmination of a decades-long decline in their economic importance. It upended the precarious balance between the “Other” as both essential and threatening. The frontier, enjoying unprecedented prominence, again became the site of crisis and instability, as nationalists on all sides rushed to shape borderland policies and popular opinion.

Murdock traces the well-known history of the rise of Konrad Heinlein's Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia and its relationship with Nazi Germany. She cautions, however, that neither Henlein nor Adolf Hitler orchestrated the crisis that developed in the borderlands in summer and autumn 1938. Culminating with the Munich Agreement, it also destroyed the border.

In her epilogue, Murdock stresses the tensions that emerged, especially during wartime, between the Altreich and its new province. Indeed, owing to the Berlin government's policies in the Sudetengau, Sudeten German activists soon began to echo the long-time Bohemian German complaints that Reich Germans failed to understand the Bohemian nationality conflict or take frontier politics seriously. The expulsion of almost all Germans from the Czechoslovak border regions in the wake of the Nazi defeat did not transform the border into a Czech/Czechoslovak national space. In some forty years of rule, the Czechoslovak Communists proved unable to reintegrate the region into the national economy, indeed, it continued to set it apart. Moreover, by the time communist Czechoslovakia and East Germany were formed, the frontier had disappeared. Villages on the Bohemian side of the border disappeared, and roads that long facilitated traffic between Bohemia and Saxony were permanently closed. Like so much else seemingly dead, in the wake of 1989, the frontier revived and cross-border traffic was resurrected, sometimes with the same volatile dynamics.

Some of the author's assertions would benefit from more development, as when she describes Czechoslovakia as “the most prominent national state to emerge from the Habsburg Empire” (p. 109). Moreover, the Czech national activist organization, Národní jednota severočeska, which Murdock introduces only late in the interwar period, was founded in 1885 to defend the economic, national, and social interests of the Czechs in the northern and western Bohemian border regions, and had long reported on German “infractions” in the shared borderlands. While the book contains excellent maps, it would have been strengthened by the use of images to render visually the geography of the borderlands the maps present. These caveats aside, the Murdock book is a useful addition to the study of central Europe and should be read by historians of central Europe as well as those interested in transnationalism.