In February 1919, Theresia Prokop submitted an application for German citizenship to the Bautzen administrative district in Saxony. The application showed that Prokop was originally from northern Bohemia, had lived in Saxony since 1901, and was a “Bohemian” citizen of “German-Austrian” nationality. Further, it noted: “It is her dearest wish to become German.”Footnote ¹

But what did it mean to be “German” in early-Weimar era Saxony? Prokop seems to have accepted German-ness as synonymous with legal citizenship in the German Reich. District officials ascribed her citizenship in a nonexistent state (Bohemia) and a nationality at odds with the choices that their own naturalization laws allowed (German, Czech, Polish, etc). They also appear to have assumed that she would be “German” only when she was granted Saxon, and thus Reich, citizenship. In contrast, most German-Bohemian nationalists in Bohemia would have argued that Prokop was already German but that her German-ness did not imply allegiance to the German Reich.Footnote ² Moreover, Prokop asked to become “German” even as Saxon and German-Bohemian nationalists in Saxony called on Germany to annex Bohemia's majority German-speaking borderlands and to naturalize thousands of German-speaking Bohemians living in Saxony on the grounds that they were “purely German” and thus belonged in a German, rather than a Czechoslovak, national state.

Between 1919 and 1924, Saxon district officials received and approved naturalization applications at a greater rate than ever before. The people they recommended for naturalization were overwhelmingly German-speaking Bohemians who had lived in Saxony for years. This was a dramatically different applicant pool than the historiography on German citizenship discusses. Bohemians were not former Reich citizens like many of the people Prussia naturalized after the war. Nor were they overwhelmingly Jews or Poles, the groups that German law and practice worked to exclude from Reich citizenship. Rather, they were a significant group of foreigners that historians have ignored both because Reich authorities did not single them out and because they do not fit our contemporary desire to examine inclusion and exclusion according to tidy, unambiguous categories. These people, and the officials who reviewed their applications, exhibited a multifaceted understanding of German-ness shaped by ideas from the Reich and Habsburg Austria, by the consequences of World War I, and by local assessments of the kinds of social capital and commitments that made people valuable to communities.

For historians of the Kaiserreich, German-speaking Austrian citizens do not appear terribly out of place in Reich German communities, nor did they appear so to many of their contemporaries. It seems natural enough to find German speakers in the German nation state. We ignore the fact that neither Reich Germans nor Habsburg Austrians understood German language or nationality as implying either a claim to or a desire for Reich citizenship, and we tend to focus our attention on groups of people who provoked contemporary comment or who more clearly challenge our own search for growing coherence among population, national community, and the modern state in German history. Reich level political debates in the 1920s, as well as the historiography of Weimar Germany, do not suggest that Austrians, or German-speaking Czechoslovaks, are of much interest for understanding postwar Germany. Historians have repeatedly noted that although “foreigners” figured in political debates during the Kaiserreich, their numbers and political importance declined dramatically in the Weimar period before reemerging as a topic of debate under National Socialism.Footnote ³ Reich statistics do show a decline in the number of resident foreigners in the Weimar period, but that decline coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of naturalizations. Quite a few foreigners decided to throw in their lot with Weimar Germany. The simple fact that many of them spoke German did not make this an inevitable choice for applicants or for the officials who vetted them.

In order to understand the dynamics of German naturalization in the early interwar period, and the various understandings of German-ness circulating in Central Europe at the time, we need to look not only at the legal codes, political debates, and groups targeted for exclusion, but also at those people whom Reich officials accepted for naturalization. Saxon naturalization records demonstrate that in the early 1920s there was still no real agreement on what it meant to be German, or indeed whether German-ness as demonstrated by culture, ethnicity, state loyalty, or community belonging was necessarily a question of nationality. In the context of naturalization, most people in Saxony seem to have understood German-ness as a reflection of an applicant's residence in and commitment not just to the German Reich, but also to specific Saxon communities. Applicants' and district administrators' comments on naturalization applications make it clear that they did not share a single coherent vision of a German national community either coterminous with or with a right of access to the German Reich.Footnote ⁴ Nor did they agree on nationality's importance to Reich citizenship.

Saxon naturalization applications make it clear that understandings of state, national, and community belonging were still very much in flux in Central Europe after World War I. Further, they emphasize the importance of examining not only central policies and political debates, but also the ways in which political practice, even in a rapidly centralizing nation state, was shaped by the priorities and choices of local officials and ordinary people.

Does this mean that people applying for Saxon citizenship and those reading their applications were indifferent to nationality in the years immediately following World War I? Given that Germany's 1913 citizenship law made nationality an official consideration for naturalization, it was difficult for either applicants or state officials to dismiss it out of hand. But as we shall see, agreeing that nationality mattered, at least in the context of naturalization, did not mean that historical actors agreed either about what nationality was or about its importance in comparison to other kinds of belonging.

German Citizenship and the Law of 1913

Historians of Germany have long worked to explain the relationship between a modern German national community and the modern German nation state. Scholars have highlighted the variety of forms that relationship took in the Kaiserreich by examining ways in which regional dynamics shaped local understandings of the modern state and nation.Footnote ⁵ Yet despite calls for a broader understanding of “German” history,Footnote ⁶ the historiography remains largely bounded by the territory and interests of the post-1871 German Reich and its successor states. When considering the period after World War I, straying beyond those boundaries makes it especially tempting to envision a nation unified in irredentist schemes and imperial fantasies. Instead, we need to develop an understanding of multifaceted German-ness—ideas about which spread across political boundaries and borrowed from one another without creating a unified national identity or politics. Reich German radical nationalists did keep elements of Grossdeutsch thinking alive but remained politically marginal during the Kaiserreich.Footnote ⁷ Only with the Nazis have scholars paid extensive attention to broader ideas of German-ness in connection with the Reich.

Citizenship seems like one topic where historians' focus on Reich territory makes sense. After all, in its most basic legal sense, citizenship is about state belonging. Yet scholars' concentration on Reich territory, even as they emphasize a new centrality of ethnicity and nationality to Reich citizenship, oversimplifies our understandings of “German-ness” in ways that are at odds with how Central Europeans negotiated discontinuous state, national, and communal allegiances in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Germany. They make “Germans” elsewhere in Europe peripheral—the objects of Reich debates, rather than participants in its policies and communities.

In a 1992 book, Rogers Brubaker argued that nineteenth-century German state and national development shaped a peculiarly ethnocultural understanding of citizenship that was codified in the 1913 Reich citizenship law.Footnote ⁸ He asserted that by embracing the principle of citizenship by descent rather than by territorial affiliation, Germans departed from other European models—particularly that of France—and eliminated the possibility of assimilation. A variety of scholars have challenged Brubaker, showing that the Reich German citizenship law bore significant similarities to that of other European states, had roots in Napoleonic law, and became truly ethnic in focus only after 1933.Footnote ⁹ Nevertheless, most agree that Germany moved away from early modern ideas of territorial or community-based citizenship by the twentieth century and used citizenship law based on descent as a tool of national inclusion and exclusion in an increasingly mobile Europe.

The 1913 law shifted the basis of Reich German citizenship from the early modern norm of granting citizenship by residence (jus soli) to the principle of descent from another citizen (jus sanguinis). The law was more inclusive than its predecessors in that it allowed German emigrants to retain their citizenship indefinitely, a provision that Reich German nationalists championed as a means of building a worldwide German national community loyal to the Reich in an age of mass emigration. At the same time, scholars have noted that German states used the new law to systematically exclude fremdstämmige Ausländer, or foreigners of non-German lineage, from naturalization. Fremdstämmigkeit (foreign lineage) was certainly used as grounds for the systematic exclusion of many Jewish and Polish applicants. Despite arguing that the 1913 law did not establish a principle of exclusively ethnonational citizenship, historians have seemed either to assume—whether explicitly or implicitly—that ethnic German applicants, even if they had no previous ties to the Reich, were naturalized almost automatically after 1913, or to ignore the question of naturalization of “foreign” Germans, even though they comprised the majority of foreigners and naturalization applicants in the Weimar Republic.Footnote ¹⁰ In fact, the new law maintained the principle of restrictive naturalization for all immigrants—including ethnic Germans. German citizenship reform had been spurred in part by pressure from nationalist activists, but the new laws reflected state, rather than ethnonational, interests and understandings of citizenship.Footnote ¹¹

Although scholars have focused on the Reich's decisions to retain existing citizens and their descendents, and to exclude people it deemed undesirable, they have paid little attention to those people who became Reich citizens without descent from another citizen—the majority of naturalizations in Saxony both before and after World War I. The conflation of German state and national communities, to some degree on the part of contemporaries, and to a much greater degree by subsequent scholars, masks the degree to which ethnicity and nationality remained murky categories that competed with other concerns in determining naturalization. Multiple understandings of nationality and German-ness coming from the Reich, from local tradition, and from Habsburg Austria shaped postwar Saxon officials' understandings of who had a right to join the Reich polity. Historians of the Habsburg Empire and its successor states have shown that nationality was not clear, omnipresent, or static even at moments of apparent nationalistic fervor.Footnote ¹² The same was true in Saxony, where government officials and local people agreed that “German-ness” was important to community belonging but differed significantly over its definition and implications.

The new citizenship law went into effect in January 1914, but it first began to reshape naturalization patterns significantly in Saxony after World War I. Even then, individual German states reacted to postwar conditions in variety of ways. Territorial losses made Weimar Germany much more homogeneous than the Kaiserreich had been.Footnote ¹³ Most of the prewar Polish population was now in Poland, and most French- and Danish-speaking communities were now outside the new Germany. At the same time, there were more German-speaking communities outside Germany's borders than in the past. Prussia responded to the flood of citizenship applications from former Prussian citizens in what was now Poland by declaring it self-evident that such people would be restored to German citizenship. Because these people had been Reich citizens before the war, they clearly fit the 1913 law's principle of allowing former citizens to regain their status. In Bavaria and Saxony, however, a similar deluge of naturalization applications came from former Habsburg Austrian citizens, to whom the 1913 law accorded no automatic right to naturalization. Bavaria was appalled by the explosion in citizenship applications in 1919 and 1920 and opposed the large-scale naturalization Prussia practiced. Saxony's policy in the early 1920s was more like Prussia's and allowed much higher rates of naturalization than before the war,Footnote ¹⁴ even though relatively few applicants were former Reich citizens.

Bavaria's and Prussia's policies mattered in Saxony because the 1913 law had transformed naturalization from the purely local decision it had been in the nineteenth century to one acknowledged to have implications for the Reich as a whole. New guidelines established in 1921 required that, although local officials in the Länder vetted applications and made the bulk of decisions, they had to submit lists of the people they intended to naturalize for approval by the other states and the Reichsrat.Footnote ¹⁵ It is hard to tell for sure how many of the naturalizations Saxony proposed were vetoed by Bavaria, Prussia, or other German states. Indeed, Saxony won a reputation for forwarding applications guaranteed to provoke Bavarian objections.Footnote ¹⁶ Still, the records suggest that while some people on the Saxon naturalization lists provoked objections, most cases were still decided at the local level. Nor did Reich level objections always carry the day, as the Saxon government appealed some such cases.Footnote ¹⁷

Bohemians into Saxons

The wave of naturalization petitions that Saxon district governments received after World War I was the culmination of decades of migration from Bohemia to Saxony, especially in the borderlands. Saxons and Bohemians had crossed the political border between their states for centuries, but in the 1880s and 1890s industrialization and the erosion of barriers to mobility in Austria and the North German Confederation spurred an influx of Bohemian labor migrants to Saxon industries.Footnote ¹⁸ By 1900, Austrian citizens constituted nearly 90 percent of Saxony's foreign population and came overwhelmingly from the northern Bohemian borderlands.Footnote ¹⁹ Although many migrants eventually returned home to Bohemia, by 1900 Saxony, especially its southern frontier, had a large resident Bohemian population. Saxon and Austrian authorities estimated that Bohemians in Saxony were about 90 percent German-speaking and 10 percent Czech-speaking, though it is likely that a good number were in fact bilingual. These migrants seem to have found it relatively easy to join Saxon communities. They became an important part of the labor force in a variety of economic sectors, bought property, started businesses, married Saxons, joined local associations, and participated in Saxon political movements—especially Social Democracy. Yet before World War I, relatively few changed their citizenship. Saxony, like the rest of the German Reich, was reluctant to naturalize foreigners of any sort. At the same time, neither foreign citizenship nor nationality appear to have been major concerns for Bohemian migrants or their Saxon neighbors.Footnote ²⁰

World War I disrupted this easy coexistence. Military conscription made the German and Austrian states and their populations pay new attention to citizenship as men were drafted to serve the states they belonged to regardless of where they lived. Both countries began requiring passports to cross the border and by the end of the war demanded that foreigners hold valid passports to stay in their territories.Footnote ²¹ Proof of citizenship also became essential for those applying for state social welfare aid. Citizenship and its formal documentation thus suddenly played a much larger role in daily life than they had since the mid nineteenth century.

When the war ended in 1918, Bohemians in Saxony found that their legal citizenship was both more important and less clear than ever before. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared, seemingly overnight. A new Czechoslovak government claimed the territories of the Bohemian Crownlands, and German-Bohemian nationalists demanded that Bohemia's majority German-speaking territories separate from Czechoslovakia as part of a German Austria, as an independent state, or as part of the German Reich.Footnote ²² Even when the peace treaties made clear that Czechoslovakia would include all of Bohemia, and when in 1920 Czechoslovakia granted citizenship to anyone with residence rights as of 1910, minority rights treaties raised the possibility that German-speaking Bohemians could opt for German or Austrian citizenship, rather than Czechoslovak, though relatively few did so.Footnote ²³

Bohemians in Saxony faced new pressures to clarify their citizenship after the war. Saxony and Czechoslovakia made the passport requirements they had introduced during the war permanent. Postwar economic turmoil also focused new attention on citizenship. High unemployment and food and housing shortages created a crushing demand for state economic assistance on both sides of the Saxon-Bohemian border, and government officials were reluctant to share scant resources with people who did not belong unambiguously to their communities. In Saxony, this meant that employers faced new pressures to fire foreign employees, and the government began deporting foreign citizens. For many local officials, foreigners meant non-Saxons, and they deported Bavarians, as well as Czechoslovaks, in 1919 and 1920.Footnote ²⁴ But in June 1920, the Dresdener Volkszeitung reported that Czechoslovak workers were coming under particular scrutiny from Saxon officials who urged employers to replace these people with Saxons.Footnote ²⁵ And in 1921, the Czechoslovak press complained that Czechoslovak citizens were being deported from Germany without reason.Footnote ²⁶

Czechoslovaks living in Saxony, of whom the Saxon government estimated there were more than 69,000 in 1920,Footnote ²⁷ suddenly had incentives to apply for Saxon, and thus Reich German, citizenship. Many had been born in the state or had lived there for decades, had married, raised children, and bought property there. Naturalization was the best guarantee that they could remain in the communities where they had established themselves. Fear of displacement was increased by rumors that foreigners who did not apply for citizenship would be deported.Footnote ²⁸ And in Weimar Germany, foreigners faced a reduction in legal rights compared to citizens, a difference that had been negligible in the Kaiserreich.Footnote ²⁹ Thousands of former Austrian citizens applied for Saxon citizenship between 1919 and 1924. People continued to apply after 1924 but in smaller numbers. Probably most long-term Saxon residents who wanted citizenship had already applied at that point. In addition, Germany and Czechoslovakia had backed off aggressive policies of deporting one another's citizens, so the pressure to naturalize was somewhat lessened. And Saxon administrators began to fall more in line with the stricter naturalization policies of other German states.

The 1913 Reich citizenship law standardized the information that local administrators were supposed to collect from would-be citizens, including current citizenship, nationality, occupation, marital status, and residence. But apparently this message was either lost on Saxon authorities or was ignored, because in October 1918 the Saxon Ministry of the Interior informed districts that other German states were complaining that Saxon officials provided insufficient and inconsistent information about the people they proposed to naturalize. In particular, the ministry chided, they needed to be clear whether the person was a former Reich citizen, where he or she had lived in Germany and particularly in Saxony, and for how long, and to stop confusing nationality with citizenship: “Nationality … should not be answered, for example, with ‘Austrian,’ … [you need to] specify whether the applicant is of German, Polish, Czech, Ruthene, or some other nationality.”Footnote ³⁰ Saxon officials did grow more consistent in the questions they asked of naturalization applicants in the early 1920s, but they continued to interpret the answers they received in ways that reflected local priorities and understandings rather than Reich central policy.

Saxon officials assessed applicants' nationalities according to categories that reflected regional understandings more than either Reich legal imperatives or German völkisch nationalism. In the early 1920s, applicants for Saxon citizenship were overwhelmingly German-speaking Bohemians. The Saxon Ministry of the Interior reported that of the 1,328 people who applied between September and December 1920, 1,268 were “German Austrians,” most of whom had residence rights in Bohemia.Footnote ³¹ Yet local Saxon officials identified the nationalities of the Bohemians whom they recommended for naturalization variously as “German,” “Bohemian,” “German-Bohemian,” “German-Austrian,” “apparently German,” “German-Czech,” “Czech,” and “Germanized Czech.”Footnote ³² Other former Habsburg citizens, including people who might have been identified as Jews or ethnic Germans, were described as being of “Silesian,” “Austrian Silesian,” or “Galician” nationality.Footnote ³³ Occasionally, officials still neglected to answer the question entirely.Footnote ³⁴ At other times, records reported siblings as having different nationalities, as in the case of the brothers Friedrich and Karl Bannert whom Bautzen district officials listed as being of German-Austrian and German-Silesian nationality, respectively.Footnote ³⁵

This wide range of national descriptors suggests that the local Saxon officials who compiled naturalization applications, and likely the applicants themselves, considered nationality at once more complex and less important than did the Reich government, German nationalists on either side of the German-Czechoslovak border, or many historians. Although Reich law recognized only a single German nationality, Saxon officials who had dealt and lived with Bohemians for decades adopted categories such as “German-Bohemian” and “German-Austrian” common to Habsburg Austria's successor states. Such categories were familiar and unlikely to trigger concern about Fremdstämmigkeit. That district governments were inconsistent in the categories they used suggests that they did not perceive uniform assessments of nationality as critically important. At the same time, they suggested that Saxon officials still distinguished between their own citizens and German speakers from outside the Reich and among foreign “Germans.” Territorial affiliation still mattered.

Naturalization applications make it clear that local officials considered an applicant's territorial affiliations and openness to assimilation essential. More than anything else, Saxon officials looked for applicants' strong ties to specific Saxon communities. These ties were often described as proof of “German-ness,” a quality correlated to but not synonymous with nationality. Applicants, too, highlighted ties to Saxony when they argued for naturalization. The importance of such ties is evident in who did and did not apply for naturalization. Although Saxony received thousands of applications from Bohemians, many more Czechoslovak citizens in Saxony did not apply. Nor did hoards of German-speaking Bohemians cross the border in search of “German” territory as Saxon officials expected when Czechoslovak troops occupied northern Bohemia in December 1918.Footnote ³⁶ For the most part, the people who sought legal status in Saxony were those who were already well established there. Indeed, naturalization records from the Saxon border town of Johanngeorgenstadt show that nearly 69 percent of the Bohemians naturalized during the Weimar years had been born in Saxony.Footnote ³⁷

Quite a few applicants argued that they wanted Saxon citizenship because, after having lived there most of their lives, they considered Saxony home.Footnote ³⁸ When Maximilian Hoyer applied for Saxon citizenship in 1920 he argued: “I have lived in Lauter (a Saxon town) since 1899, went to school here, and only left Germany to do my military service in Austria… I feel German and lead an orderly family life… my wife was born a German citizen [and] we have a great desire to belong politically to the German Volk.”Footnote ³⁹ For Hoyer, the “German-ness” important for naturalization was local belonging, a particular mode of life, and loyalty to the state.

Long-term residence and roots in local communities seem to have been compelling for Saxon officials and suggest that, for all that the 1913 Reich citizenship law rejected the principle of jus solis, territorial belonging and state loyalty still played an important role in German citizenship. Indeed, local authorities approved people with long-standing ties to Saxon communities even when the applicants were acknowledged to be of Czech nationality, an official example of Fremdstämmigkeit. They considered candidates' social capital and contributions to local communities central reasons for naturalization. For example, when Franz Witek applied for naturalization in 1919, his application form noted that he was Czech, but the authorities who reviewed his case found no reason to comment on that. Rather, they supported his application with the observation: “The applicant has lived in Saxony for more than forty-five years, and owns property in Grosspostwitz. He enjoys a good reputation and well-ordered pecuniary circumstances.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Similarly, Rudolf Prochazka won support for his application on the basis of having lived in Saxony for thirty years and having married a Saxon woman. His Czech nationality was noted but evoked no comment.Footnote ⁴¹ Things proved more complicated for Adolf Birnbaum in 1921. Birnbaum's naturalization record lists his nationality as German-Austrian, but notes say that the original application questionnaire suggested he might be Czech. The county official who reviewed the file commented that it would be necessary to check that Birnbaum did indeed identify with Germandom but that his relationships all suggested that was the case.Footnote ⁴² The possibility that Birnbaum might harbor Czech loyalties caused concern, but his ties to a Saxon community, his Saxon wife, and his statement that he sought naturalization because he wanted “to be Saxon” were all read as strong signs of his commitment to German-ness. County officials evaluated this not as some inherent trait, but a question of community ties and personal identification.

Saxon authorities treated “German-ness” as something that could be learned rather than as a “fixed” characteristic. For example, in 1920, the cobbler Franz Salda appealed to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior after local authorities rejected his application for citizenship. Salda was bilingual, and his ability to speak Czech had raised warning flags. He urged the Ministry to overturn the decision, insisting that it was essential that he not be forced to return to Czechoslovakia because neither his wife nor his children spoke Czech. The ministry approved his petition, noting that Salda's children were being raised “purely German.”Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, when Johann Sule applied for Saxon citizenship, officials noted that he was of German nationality, although his parents had been Czechs. Saxon authorities granted him and his family citizenship without objections.Footnote ⁴⁴ The extent to which community ties played a role is evident in Johann Janetzschka's 1921 appeal of his 1920 rejection for naturalization. It is not clear why Janetzschka was initially rejected, although his Czech last name is suggestive. In a letter of support for his appeal, the Dresden district government pointed out that the town councils in the area where he lived, the local agricultural association, county officials, and the board of the estate where he worked all supported his application. In addition, his children had become Saxon citizens, and he and his wife had become “fully rooted in German conditions and fluent in German.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Officials treated “German-ness” as something that did not necessarily preclude non-German nationality or previous national commitments. On the other hand, they believed that acquired German-ness took time and dedication. Consequently, when Franz Kundrat applied for naturalization, authorities in Bautzen refused him, arguing that his membership in a Czech association until 1919, his Czech-speaking wife and household, and his short six-year residence in Saxony suggested that he had not yet “adjusted to German ways” and that there was insufficient evidence that he had cultivated “a feeling of belonging to the (German) state or to German political interests.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the comments suggested that in time, “German-ness” might be within Kundrat's reach.

The idea that nationality and identification with particular political, cultural, and linguistic milieus were qualities that could be learned and cultivated, or neglected and lost, was at the heart of early-twentieth-century Bohemian nationalisms.Footnote ⁴⁷ And Reich German radical nationalists cultivated ties to German-Bohemian nationalists, borrowing rhetoric and tactics and using them as an illustration of threats to the German national community. Yet scholars have assumed that in the German Reich, national, political, and community belonging were more obviously interconnected than in either Habsburg Austria or Czechoslovakia. Rogers Brubaker has suggested that Reich German understandings of citizenship did not leave room for assimilation of people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Eli Nathans argues that between 1880 and 1980, German naturalization policies became obsessively ethnically exclusive.Footnote ⁴⁸ These arguments suggest that contemporaries knew who was German and who was not and that we, too, can clearly tell the difference. Yet in some cases, Saxon officials were willing to accept that someone whom they described as being of Czech nationality had “become German,” even as they questioned the “German-ness” of people whose German nationality was not in doubt. For example, the Bautzen district government refused Karl Anton Jäger's request for naturalization in 1921 and again in 1926. Jäger moved to Saxony from Czechoslovakia in 1920, and despite his German ethnicity the district argued: “Jäger has been here too short a time to have become fully accustomed to German ways.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This was not an ethnonational judgment, but an assessment of Jäger's ties to Saxon society.

Political territory and local commitments motivated Bohemians to become Saxon citizens, and applicants knew that they needed to persuade state officials of their commitment to “German-ness” and the Reich in order to be approved. Those commitments, however sincere, did not prevent new citizens from continuing to think and act as Bohemians, something Saxon officials found disturbing. In 1922, the Bautzen district government told the Saxon Ministry of the Interior: “Naturalized people, including German Bohemians have repeatedly made no secret of the fact that they see naturalization as a formality, and that they will continue to maintain Czech identities and connection to Czechoslovakia. It is possible that material considerations encourage them to naturalize: higher social welfare rates, avoidance of Czech military service….Footnote ⁵⁰

The Bautzen authorities recognized that, although Bohemians used official Reich political and national rhetoric in their naturalization applications, most did not live or think according to the tidy categories that rhetoric suggested. The fact that most people who applied for naturalization were those with vested material and social interests in Saxony suggests that officials in Bautzen were undoubtedly right that for many people the choice was a pragmatic rather than an ideological one. These people did have real ties to Saxon territory, but unlike government authorities, they did not necessarily treat those as exclusive. The Bautzen letter also makes clear that despite the Reich's emphasis on Fremdstämmigkeit, Saxon authorities did not use categories like “German” and “Czech” in purely ethnonational ways. In this case, they ascribed “Czech” identities to “German Bohemians,” describing political and territorial loyalties rather than nationalist conviction.

The Nationalist Response

Historians have argued that World War I destabilized the relationship between German citizenship and German nationality. Reich Germans came to the realization that “German” and “Reich citizen” were not synonymous. They “discovered” the German-speaking populations scattered across Eastern Europe after World War I and transferred the interest they had shown for overseas emigrants during the Kaiserreich to these people.Footnote ⁵¹ Of course, the presence of a sizeable German-speaking population in neighboring Bohemia was not news to Saxons, and Saxon radical nationalists had made these people and the “threat” they faced from Czech nationalists a focus of their polemics for decades.Footnote ⁵² The question was not of knowing that there were German speakers, and even German nationalist movements, outside the Reich. Rather, it was whether Reich Germans did or should care. Prewar nationalist activists had promoted ethnolinguistic Grossdeutsch nationalism with limited success. “German-ness” in the Kaiserreich, as in Habsburg Austria and Imperial Russia, was defined in close connection with the state.Footnote ⁵³ Before World War I, most Europeans did not perceive noncongruity between state boundaries and ethnonational populations as a problem, even in officially national states. Indeed noncongruity was the European norm. But the idea of national self-determination and the emergence of new national states in postwar Central Europe transformed the political landscape.

The Allies endorsed the kind of ethnonational understanding of political belonging that German radical nationalists, such as the Pan-German League, had championed since the 1890s. But seen in this new light, German-speaking populations in Bohemia seemed contradictory, whereas under Austrian rule, they had appeared normal. The “national” characters of Germany and Czechoslovakia seemed to make those states and their citizens at least potentially antagonistic, whereas Germany and Habsburg Austria had been accepted as natural allies. Saxon officials were trying to assess naturalization applicants' German-ness through the generally statist lens of the 1913 citizenship law. They were doing so in a historical moment when ideas of national self-determination and the emergence of Czechoslovakia won Saxon radical nationalists a broader, more receptive audience than they had ever enjoyed before the war. And officials were under fire from German-Bohemian nationalist groups who argued Reich naturalization policies demonstrated Reich Germans' inability either to understand the nature, needs, and extent of German national community or to adjust to new historical realities. In some sense, people began to consider for the first time the possibility that Reich citizenship and German-ness should be synonymous.

Postwar Saxon officials naturalized people on a scale never seen before, and although they never endorsed wholesale naturalization of ethnic German foreigners, many suggested that the emergence of Czechoslovakia was reason to be “more generous” with German-Bohemian applicants than in the past.Footnote ⁵⁴ But German-Austrian and German-Bohemian nationalist groups in the state complained that the progress was too slow, too incomplete, and too a-national. German-Austrian organizations emerged as vocal advocates for their members' national claims in postwar Saxony. Although both German-Bohemian and Czech national activists had tried to rally support for their ideas among migrants in Saxony before the war, they had frequently been frustrated by their audiences' lack of interest.Footnote ⁵⁵ But in early 1919, uncertainty about Czechoslovakia's permanent borders and the position of foreigners in Germany made German-speaking Bohemians in Saxony and some people in the Saxon government more receptive to völkisch nationalist arguments than in the past. In December 1918, the Czechoslovak government used military occupation to establish de facto control over the Bohemian borderlands, including majority German-speaking areas, but until the Paris peace conference concluded, some German-Bohemian nationalists continued to hope those areas might not be awarded to Czechoslovakia. In Bohemia, most people thought the majority German-speaking borderlands would either form an independent German-Bohemian state or become part of the Austrian Republic. Relatively few considered joining the German Reich either logical or desirable.Footnote ⁵⁶ But German-Bohemian nationalist organizations in Saxony seem to have been much more enthusiastic about the idea of an Anschluss than their countrymen to the south, not least because an Anschluss would have normalized their members' status in the Reich.

German-Austrian nationalist organizations in Saxony embraced Reich citizenship as a way to secure their constituents' uncertain political status. Despite some nationalists' calls for Germany to absorb the Bohemian borderlands, by 1919 most people recognized that Czechoslovakia would make good on its territorial claims.Footnote ⁵⁷ Many people were afraid that this might leave Bohemians in Germany stateless, open to deportation, redefined as “enemies,” or subject to a hostile Czechoslovak government. In April and May 1919, the German-Austrian Soldiers and Workers Council in Dresden, the Association of German Austrians in Saxony (Verband der Deutschösterreicher in Sachsen), and the German-Austrian National Union (Deutschösterreichischer Volksbund) all appealed to the Saxon Ministry of the Interior to naturalize German-speaking Bohemians. They pointed out that most of the people in question were long-term residents, had fought side by side with their Reich “German brothers” in the war, and had now become “Czechoslovak citizens against their wills.” They urged that naturalizations be expedited without regard for class, religion, or economic standing lest these people “fall into the clutches of the Czechoslovak imperialists.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Further, they warned that unless Saxony embraced these people, they might one day be in the disgraceful position of having to “fight their German brothers, their relatives, and their neighbors in Saxony” as members of the Czechoslovak army.Footnote ⁵⁹

In August 1919, the Association of German Austrians in Lauter (Verein der Deutsch Österreicher) made its own appeal that people, many of whom “belong to Austria only in name,” and who “feel that they are one with their German brothers,” be allowed to naturalize.Footnote ⁶⁰ Similarly, the Working Committees of Germans from Austria-Hungary (Arbeitsausschüsse der Deutschen aus Österreich-Ungarn) in Plauen in Chemnitz wrote on behalf of their 4,000 members in December 1919 to complain: “We are treated as foreigners, something that should never happen among people of the same Volk and language …. we should be accorded the same rights as every other German in Saxony. Instead the … passport requirements, travel restrictions, and so forth remind us that there are two classes of Germans.”Footnote ⁶¹ In 1920, Jakob Wünderlich, a typical applicant who had lived in Saxony for thirty years and married a Saxon, protested that although the German government had promised to accept Austria if the Allies allowed a political union, “When a German Austrian wants to take German citizenship he is given the run-around and then rejected!” He declared this behavior reactionary and out of keeping with the national commitments of the new Weimar state.Footnote ⁶²

The Saxon government initially responded to German-Austrian organizations' requests for expedited naturalization by explaining that it was bound by the terms of the 1913 law and could not, of its own volition, naturalize all the German-speaking Bohemians in its territory.Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, quite a few officials argued that to do so would plunge the already economically strapped state into chaos and antagonize Czechoslovakia. Some even countered nationalist arguments for naturalizing German-Bohemians with nationalist reasons to exclude them—especially preserving the German-speaking population in Czechoslovakia and, consequently, its claims to territory and political influence.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such arguments may have been made out of real dedication to the preservation of German national property (Nationalbesitzstand) outside the Reich but were equally likely pragmatic efforts by Saxon officials to avoid burdening their already strained communities with new responsibilities.

Nevertheless, the German-Bohemian groups had an effect. They helped their members with their applications for naturalization.Footnote ⁶⁵ They set themselves up as arbiters of “German-ness” and on more than one occasion swayed Saxon officials for or against a naturalization petition based on their assessments of nationality.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, in 1921, the Union of Germans from former Austria-Hungary (Volksbund der Deutschen aus dem ehemaligen Österreich-Ungarn) observed that because of “the peculiar national composition of old Austria…it is not easy to clearly distinguish between German Austrians and people of other lineages.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The organization announced that because it had extensive experience distinguishing German-Austrians from Fremdstämmige, something they implied Reich Germans were not very good at, they would begin issuing their members official identification cards verifying their membership in the German nation, as well as providing Saxon officials ethnic maps and other reference materials to help them identify German nationals correctly. They noted: “When naturalization applicants were born in Germany, or at least attended school here, they should almost certainly be considered of German nationality regardless of their official Heimatzuständichkeit.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In other words, nationality was an assimilable quality best judged by examining people's actual relationships, behavior, and territorial status rather than rigid bureaucratic categories. Ironically, it seems that in some cases, rather than Germany using homeland nationalism to exert authority over German-speaking minorities in Czechoslovakia,Footnote ⁶⁹ Reich officials turned to “foreign” German-Bohemian actors to help them define what it meant to be German at home.