Readers of the Austrian History Yearbook will be acquainted with the work of Nancy Wingfield and will recognize some of the material in her newest book. Drawing on, revising, and adding to several articles that she has published in journals (including the AHY) and edited collections, she has included new research to explore aspects of the history of the lands of the Bohemian Crown from just after the 1867 Ausgleich to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia's seizure of power in 1948. Her argument is that Czech and German nationalists sought to nationalize the population by taking “symbolic possession of the expanding public sphere . . . through the unveiling of statues and other memorials, the celebration of holidays, and the commemoration of historic persons or events” (1). Wingfield's analysis of their success in doing so results in an interesting and valuable sociocultural history of nationalism, one that brings several recent theoretical approaches to bear to show how culture transformed the multiple (confessional, class, and so on) identities Bohemians, Moravians, and Silesians bore in the mid nineteenth century into unified Czech or German ones.

The breadth of Wingfield's scope can be seen in the episodes she examines. Beginning with a subject she addressed in the volume she co-edited with Maria Bucur, Staging the Past (West Lafayette, 2001), she looks at how statues of Joseph II were used by Bohemian Germans. She then moves on to discussions of the furor that surrounded the Badeni Language Ordinances of 1897, noting that the national communities in this case were expanded to include women and less nationally entrenched rural populations. Similarly, in her discussion of the battle over whether to open a Czech university in Brünn/Brno, the roles of women and the working class are highlighted. The struggle for control of public space is revealed in the discussion of the Francis Joseph Jubilees of 1898 and 1908, as promenade and parade routes were contested. The discussion of the consolidation, or Czechification, of the new Czechoslovak state touches upon the destruction of Habsburg monuments and emblems and the changing of place and street names, before focusing on the strikes of 4 March 1919 and attacks on the statues of Joseph II discussed in the opening chapter. As the initial turbulence surrounding the birth of Czechoslovakia subsided, the newly dominant Czechs moved to entrench themselves symbolically in the calendar, by organizing large-scale commemorations of 28 October (Independence Day) and 2 July, the anniversary of the Battle of Zborov, which celebrated the Czechs' military heroism.

Departing from these standard symbolic memes, her seventh chapter explores the role that the new technology of “talkies” played, as Czechs flooded the streets of Prague to protest (innocuous) German-language films in September 1930. One of the most important chapters addresses the ongoing attempts to construct a unified German community from disparate experiences, memories, and traditions. The tools for doing this ranged from cultural and other associations (eventually merged into Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German Party), through the celebration of holidays to compete with Czechoslovak state ones (including the commemoration of those who died in the strikes of 1919), to the wearing of traditional costumes. The final chapter looks at the fate of many of the preceding sites of commemoration from the vantage point of the first years after 1945, in a Czechoslovakia becoming almost devoid of Germans, but with a large and active Communist party.

This collection constitutes an important contribution to our knowledge of East Central European history in four ways, the first two of which spring from Wingfield's assiduous labor in many, many archives. First, it presents materials about events hitherto under- or unexplored. Further, although many of the objects of her research are familiar, her rich, textured accounts add much nuance to our understanding of the fraught Czech-German relationship. Third, the materials used, rather than focusing on elites, describe actions taken by ordinary people, thereby coming much closer to solving the reception problem that has vexed nationalism studies since its inception. This makes the book much more a social history than a cultural history, but really a social history of cultural artifacts. Finally, and most importantly, Wingfield demonstrates how national sensibilities spread throughout the society—from bourgeois, liberal men, increasingly to women, workers, small-town dwellers, and peasants/farmers—until national enmity permeated it.