The sixtieth jubilee of Emperor Francis Joseph's reign in 1908 was to be a celebration and relegitimation of Habsburg rule over the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire. But Czech and German nationalists spoiled the parade (literally, since parades were central elements in Habsburg jubilees). German nationalist politicians and organizations loudly protested the pending Czech National Theater jubilee performance in Vienna, claiming that there was no place in German Vienna for a public airing of Czech “national chauvinism” (p. 115). Bowing to this pressure, the Theater an der Wien canceled the Czech performance. Czechs responded by withdrawing from the jubilee parade. With tensions running high, Bohemian Czechs and Germans staged counter-celebrations, of sorts, with riots in Prague, Brünn/Brno, and other cities throughout 1908.

As Nancy Wingfield documents in this finely written book, 1908 was one of many escalations in the nationalization of public space in the Bohemian Lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia). While the spread of Czech and German nationalism in the Bohemian Lands is well researched, Wingfield turns our attention to the “strategies, stories, narratives, monuments, holidays, and other cultural artifacts” that build national identification (p. 15). Flag Wars and Stone Saints fruitfully applies the insights of the cultural turn in history to Habsburg Bohemia and Moravia—in this case closely examining the performative elements of Czech and German nationalist manifestations. Lynn Hunt, Robert Darnton, and others popularized the cultural turn in the 1980s, looking to parades, commemorations, holidays, and ritualized violence for new understandings of eighteenth-century France and the French Revolution. Historians of east central Europe began doing this kind of work in earnest in the 1990s, with books and articles appearing over the past decade and accelerating since 2004. Wingfield has contributed several influential articles to this growing corpus, and her book can be seen as the culmination of the cultural turn in the historiography of the Bohemian Lands.

The book is organized chronologically around a series of key episodes in the nationalization of public space in Bohemia and Moravia. During the 1880s, nationalist Czech and German speakers used statues, commemorations, and public performances of music and theater to lay claim to contested public spaces. In the first chapter, Wingfield focuses on statues of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. Formerly revered by both Czechs and Germans as an enlightened emperor of the people and emancipator of the peasantry, German nationalists reconfigured him in the 1880s as a modernizer who sought to bring (German) culture to the backward Slavs of the Monarchy. By erecting Joseph statues in prominent public squares, “Germans took symbolic possession of the local public sphere in the name of the German Nation” (p. 30). Czechs responded with their own assertions of ownership of public space by constructing their own monuments in Prague and other cities, as well as staging parades and popular gatherings as a national(ist) show of force. In the 1890s, these events (on both sides) frequently degenerated into riots, culminating in 1897 with street battles over linguistic reforms in the Bohemian bureaucracy. Wingfield documents the rioting meticulously, and she takes care to look beyond Prague to the many other flashpoints in Bohemia and Moravia.

Central to Wingfield's argument is that symbolic (and sometimes physical) battles over public space prefigured the increasingly exclusionary political reorganizations of space in the Bohemian Lands. After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, the Czech leaders of independent Czechoslovakia drew on pre-war rhetorics of Czech national ownership and Germans as colonizers in creating a semi-exclusionary nation-state. Though endowed with basic democratic rights, Czechoslovakia's three million German-speakers rightly understood themselves as outsiders in the new state, whose holidays, public historical memory, and commemorations emphasized Czech and Slovak achievements and ownership of the state. Though Germans reasserted their control over public space during the Nazi occupation of 1938/39 to 1945, Czechs decisively nationalized the Bohemian Lands by expelling the entire German population after the conclusion of the Second World War. Czechs largely cleansed the Bohemian and Moravian borderlands of German statues, names, and memorials, leaving only overgrown cemeteries as markers of the 600 years of German presence in the Bohemian Lands.

Adding to a recent tendency associated with Jeremy King and Pieter Judson, Wingfield tries to avoid depicting this ultimate nationalization of the Bohemian Lands as inevitable. All of Wingfield's episodes include counter-voices, often from the left, that opposed the exclusionary nationalist rhetoric and symbolism she describes. But these voices are largely drowned out by Wingfield's own narrative's accumulated detail of nationalist exclusions, animosities, and violence. During a wave of Czech protests against German-language films in the 1930s, for example, a group of Czech fascists disrupted a screening of The Blue Angel (with Marlene Dietrich) in Olomouc/Olmütz. Wingfield laconically notes that “the predominately Czech audience supported the removal of the demonstrators by police” (p. 214), but we learn nothing of the apparently non-nationalist theater-going habits of local Czechs. While Wingfield's story is about the nationalization of public space and the increasing divisions this created between Czech-and German-speakers, she could have given more space to nonnational, antinational, and multinational voices.

This is a small quibble with an excellent book. Read in conjunction with Jeremy King's Budweisers into Czechs and Germans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Pieter Judson's Guardians of the Nation (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006), and Tara Zahra's Kidnapped Souls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), Nancy Wingfield's Flag Wars offers a fundamental deconstruction of Czech and German nationalism and nationalist narratives in the Bohemian Lands. As Wingfield points out, “nationness” is something that is cultivated through activism, rhetoric, and performance. There is nothing natural or inevitable about nation-hood.