Eagle Glassheim's most recent book is also one of his oldest. Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands, his third book, was written, he writes in its afterword, “in fits and starts over the last fifteen years” (179). The chapters, several of which have appeared over the years as journal articles, cover a wide variety of topics, from the environmental degradation in the borderlands before and after World War II, to the stigmatization and health problems of Sudeten-German expellees in postwar Germany and the utopian attempts by the Communist government to remake both the physical and sociocultural environment of the border territories. The chapters certainly all hang together in the simple sense that they are all clearly related to the 1945/46 expulsions of ethnic Germans from the Czechoslovak borderlands. Yet there are deeper concerns and arguments—sometimes very clear and explicit, other times requiring a bit more thought to discern—that inform and tie together the essays.

In his introduction, Glassheim identifies three main themes that he weaves together throughout all the chapters: the borderlands, the environment, and health. The Czechoslovak border regions, he argues, should be understood less as periphery than as “a crossroads, a liminal space filled with ends, beginnings, and crossings, a space defined as much by bureaucrats in Prague and exiles in Munich as by the people who lived there” (7). The region became, he goes on to suggest, a sort of “projection screen” onto which the whole country, including exiles, projected their competing visions of past and future, visions that invariably involved images of the natural environment. Sudeten-German exiles in Germany, for example, projected romanticized visions of environmental harmony about the period when they lived in the region, and to which they contrasted dystopian visions of environmental decline and degradation after their expulsions. The Communist authorities for their part projected onto the region utopian visions of a new mastery of man over nature, seeing in the depopulated and de-Nazified region a laboratory for building Socialism. Glassheim resists interpreting the environmental destruction that was visited upon the borderlands simply as a consequence of the forced depopulation. “Rather than claiming a direct causal link between expulsions and the devastation of the borderlands, I see ethnic cleansing, Communist social engineering, and late industrial modernity as related and intertwined phenomena in postwar Czechoslovakia” (8). Understanding all as part of what he terms “high modernism,” Glassheim suggests that Socialist utopian modernism is in both its motivations and results essentially the same as ethnic cleansing: two different but related aspects of the same impulse to modernist productivism.

It follows, then, that Glassheim's interest in health is only partially rooted in the physical effects of the environmental manipulations of the borderlands on its new inhabitants and of the forced migrations on the expellees. He is more interested in ideas and fears about health as a form of discourse about social, cultural, and material health—a particular lens with which to focus the dystopian and utopian visions projected onto the borderlands. It is through this kind of framing that the book's chapter on the experiences of the expellees in West Germany, which might otherwise seem to be an oddly tangential inclusion, begins to make perfect sense. His interest in the discourses of health leads Glassheim, finally, into extended discussions of the idea of “rootedness” and its opposite. Whether it is the expellees’ nostalgic insistence on the inextricable link between their identity and the physical landscape of their “Sudetenland,” or the fears of disease that they were suspected of carrying by West Germans, or the similar suspicions of social and cultural pathologies with which postexpulsion Czech settlers in the region were viewed by the expellees, as well as other Czechoslovaks, a dual narrative of rootedness and unrootedness characterized all groups’ responses to the borderlands’ cleansing. At the end of his book, Glassheim offers us a meditation on the concepts of Heimat, Heimatweh, and what he terms a “Heimat deficit.” “We might consider Heimat, with its accompanying images of rootedness and community, as a metaphorical measuring stick for the social and ecological health of a society” (176).

This, which by the end of the book has clearly become a fourth overarching theme for him, is among the most innovative parts of the book. In arguing for a positive assessment of the idea of Heimat, of place-rootedness, Glassheim turns upside down decades of popular assumptions about the inherently reactionary and destructive nature of such sentiments, particularly in this region. In a deeply personal afterword, Glassheim ties that concern for a positive valuation of community to a rumination on the restorative possibilities of nostalgia, and especially of what he calls “utopian nostalgia,” as a vehicle for popular resistance and community reconstruction. “Rather than something to be recreated, the past instead offered a set of coordinates, understood spatially and reinforced emotionally, that helped organize community in the present” (184). This is Glassheim's response to the charge he presents us in his introduction: that “historians have a particular role to play in recovering and advancing hopeful and productive metaphors, while exposing and deconstructing noxious and dangerous ones” (14).

This is a refreshingly new (or old) take on the view of the social utility of history: history as community builder, as source not only of understanding problems but also of inspiration for their resolution. As subtly revisionist as it is in its motivations and aspirations, this is also very old-fashioned history, in all the best ways. Even while methodologically rigorous and impressively researched and documented, the book is elegantly written with novelistic detail and gentle commentary. Glassheim knows how to tell a good story, and how to use that story to make a point. It is, finally, an intensely thoughtful book. The references—from the literary (Bohumil Hrabal, Günther Grass, Milan Kundera) to the political (Václav Havel, Rachel Carson), even to the architectural (Le Corbusier)—not only evidence Glassheim's erudition and multicultural capabilities but they also enrich the argument and can delight the attentive reader.