The Sudeten German advocate and nationalist youth leader, Heinz Rutha, celebrated his fortieth birthday in 1937, at the height of his influence in Czechoslovak and European affairs. A few months later, Czech police arrested him on suspicion of homosexual activity. Rutha's subsequent prison suicide helped to efface his remarkable efforts to build an idealistic Sudeten German youth movement and an autonomous German space in Czechoslovakia. Through meticulous research and careful reconstruction of Rutha's largely forgotten career, Mark Cornwall uses historical biography not only to reassert Rutha's historical importance, but also to offer a fine-grained (and occasionally revisionist) account of German-Bohemian nationalism between the wars.

On the occasion of Rutha's fortieth birthday, one of his disciples wrote, “Lucky are the youths you have inspired and assembled in the magic of our native landscape, giving meaning to their confused existence” (p. 234). This quote captures well Rutha's own search for meaning in his teenage years, when he hiked with other young men through the forests of northern Bohemia, warmed by the fire, song, and homosocial camaraderie of Wandervogel outings. On the one hand, “the magic of our native landscape” highlights the important spatial component of nationalist belonging, one of Cornwall's central themes in this book. Rutha and his comrades and disciples understood and experienced Bohemian/Sudeten German identity through particular places, landscapes, and social activities. At the same time, the nationalist youth movement helped to make these lived experiences of identity into a powerful antidote to youths' “confused existence,” not just of adolescence, but also as a beleaguered minority in a Czech-dominated province and state.

Rutha's own youthful confusion was compounded by homosexual longing. His work in the 1920s building a Männerbund guided by “pedagogic Eros” turned sublimated male desire into a creative force, allowing him to interpret his own sexuality “through the male bonding of the youth mission” (p. 252). As Cornwall writes, Rutha “blurred the emotional and didactic purposes (of his youth mentoring) and justified them via a Platonic model” (p. 151), hosting intense gatherings with youthful acolytes that sometimes culminated in poetry reading and mutual masturbation (p. 150). But “pedagogic Eros” was not simply a shallow self-justification for Rutha's sexual contact with these young men. Cornwall presents evidence from the Rutha trial in 1937 that neither Rutha nor the youth involved understood “their acts of mutual masturbation as homosexual” (p. 249). The powerful affinities inspired by pedagogic Eros shaded into a homoeroticism that did not necessarily imply homosexuality to the participants. Cornwall urges us to rethink the Rutha “homosexuality scandal” not just as a trigger of Rutha's political demise, but as an entree into the complex homosocial culture of the Sudeten German youth movement.

Cornwall also sees his biographical approach as a way to challenge “some deep-seated assumptions about the Czech-German relationship” (p. 7). An encounter with Rutha's intense, embodied experience of national belonging helps us take Sudeten German nationalism more seriously, to understand it on its own terms. It is easy enough to dismiss Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German Party (SdP) of the 1930s as a willing tool in Hitler's destruction of Czechoslovakia. But Cornwall, building on Ronald Smelser's book, The Sudeten Problem, portrays SdP politics as deeply rooted in Bohemian German soil, so to speak. Not only did Henlein and Rutha's nationalism emerge out of the specific Czech-German constellation of Habsburg Bohemia, but the goals of the SdP were essentially autonomist and not separatist, at least until the ascendance of a Nazi wing after 1936. While Cornwall's account is filled with fascinating detail on the SdP and Rutha's important role as the party's informal foreign minister, the book provides revision on the edges rather than a fundamental recasting of the history of the SdP.

There is much that is innovative in this book. Above all, Cornwall offers a fine-grained rejoinder to recent historiography that emphasizes the persistence of national indifference in the Bohemian lands. While Cornwall does not deny this phenomenon, his examination of the deeply felt, embodied national identification of men such as Rutha suggests the need for a course correction in scholarship on nationalism. Cornwall's analysis of the spatial and sexual threads of nationalist identity offers us tools for taking seriously the embodied experience of national belonging.