Josef Pfitzner was a professor of Eastern European history at the German University in Prague, a supporter of the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP), and at the time of the German occupation, formally No. 2 at the Prague town hall. He was sentenced to death for his role in the German occupation and executed on 6 September 1945 at only forty-four years of age. His relatively short life comprised several different worlds—from the academic world to the world of high politics. It is, therefore, no wonder that Pfitzner's personality, reflecting a number of decisive moments in the history of the Czech lands in the first half of the twentieth century, has provoked biographical interest.

The authors of this publication were able to take advantage of the relatively extensive research on the history of the German University in Prague, both German and Czech historiographies in the Czech lands in the twentieth century, and works devoted directly to Pfitzner. One of the authors edited one of the most important such works, the edition of Pfitzner's diaries from the time of the occupation (Alena Míšková and Vojtěch Šustek, eds., Josef Pfitzner: A protektorátní Praha v letech 1939–1945, 2 vols., Prague 2000–2001). The second author has been dealing in the long term with the period of the German occupation. The immediate impulse for writing the book, however, was the lucky and surprising discovery of Pfitzner's estate in Linz, which is currently accessible in the archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.

The authors divide their shares of the book chronologically, and a thematic division emerges between Pfitzner the historian and Pfitzner the politician, although activities in the two segments of his life overlapped. While Alena Míšková deals with Pfitzner's childhood, his student years and the beginning of his scientific career (chapters 1–6), Detlef Brandes follows up with Pfitzner's scientific texts from the late 1920s and early 1930s and, above all, Pfitzner's subsequent politicization and his activity at the Prague municipality during the German occupation (chapters 7–13).

The book is in principle structured chronologically, following the traditional model of the biographical genre—i.e., “from the cradle to the grave.” In a somewhat austere introduction, the authors set two goals for themselves: finding more information about the character of Josef Pfitzner (“Wie war Josef Pfitzner eigentlich?,” 13) and uncovering the reasons for his politicization in the 1930s (14). The two questions essentially correspond to the two major parts of the work and, to some extent, determine the approach of the authors. Whereas Míšková is interested mainly in the forces that formed Pfitzner's complex character (one of the decisive influences was his background in the miserable conditions of the Czech border region, which did not stop Pfitzner from achieving a dazzling academic career), Brandes provides a detailed depiction of Pfitzner's political career.

The authors managed to find several interesting documents supplementing our previous knowledge of Pfitzner's life. These include materials about his initial contacts with the SdP in 1934 and Pfitzner's audience with President Beneš in May 1936. The record of this meeting offers evidence about Beneš's views at the time and also the effort to find a positive solution to the Sudeten German “issue.” The authors also offer a detailed mapping of Pfitzner's conflicts with the chiefs of the German occupation power in Prague and German power in general (Heydrich, Frank, and Goebbels).

The book, however, does not move much beyond the level of description, or the effort to “empathize” with Pfitzner's character. Moreover, the authors are not always successful in coping with the main pitfall of biographies: on one hand, the tension between a particular personality and his inner motivation, which is often difficult to reconstruct, and the influences of the surroundings, on the other hand. This pitfall gains importance with a person like Pfitzner, who was not only influenced by his surroundings, but also interpreted them in his scientific and journalistic texts, and actually cocreated them as a politician. Modern biographies attempt to solve this problem by contextualizing and taking into account contemporary mentality as a culturally, socially, and generationally conditioned, collectively shared attitude toward the world. In Pfitzner's case, a more detailed reflection on the issue of the formation of Sudeten German identity in interwar Czechoslovakia and the Third Reich is necessary. Our understanding of the process of Pfitzner's “politicization” (and of other representatives of the humanities at the German University in Prague) would also benefit from a more profound consideration of the relationship between science and politics, especially in terms of how this relationship was perceived by the persons involved, above all German historians, Germanists, and ethnographers.

Although the authors do come close to this approach in some places—for example, when depicting Pfitzner's first encounter with the “nationally alien” city of Prague—they remain true to the traditional descriptive approach. However, this approach makes answering the central question of the book difficult. It seems, if it is possible to judge from the rather summarizing conclusion, that the authors see Pfitzner's egocentrism and his efforts to assert himself as chief reasons behind his politicization. Can that be considered the main possible answer? The chapters dealing with Pfitzner's scientific activity in the 1930s also testify to the gradual development of his concept of the nation (Volk) and the changing discursive and social environments in which this concept appeared: at the beginning of the 1930s, Pfitzner's concept of the nation that emphasized the ethnic component could still be understood as an appeal for an honest and fair “national conciliation” within the Czechoslovak state. From the mid 1930s, however, his concept of the nation came increasingly close to the exclusive, racial variety, in which the ethnically homogenous nation (Volk) became the only legitimate bearer of political will and therefore the foundation of statehood. Pfitzner's transition from an advocate of national conciliation in the Czech lands to a booster of German domination in the residue of the Czech lands—culminating even in remarks about the need to expel the Czechs and his historical interpretations being accompanied on the “scientific” level by racial paradigms (as seen in Pfitzner's biography of Charles IV)—does not have to be explained merely by categories such as egocentrism and careerism. The authors should also take into consideration the development and transformation of German science at that time, the growing attractiveness of biological discourse, and eventually the collapse of a number of mental barriers against National Socialism. Along with the new, ideologically firm, and sufficiently pragmatic elite of the German administration (cf. Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, Hamburg 2002), these factors made hitherto unimaginable ways of “solving” national tensions and conflicts suddenly not only imaginable, but possible.

The above-mentioned objections are not intended to lessen the value of the present work, which summarizes the existing knowledge of the personality and work of Josef Pfitzner and supplements it with new archival research. The aim is, rather, to raise issues related to the historiography of science, in this case Sudeten German science in the Czech lands and its relationship to politics and the genre of biography.