Title Kidnapped souls : national indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 / Tara Zahra

Published Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2008 ©2008

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Description 1 online resource (xvii, 279 pages) : illustrations, maps Contents "Czech schools for Czech children!" -- Teachers, orphans, and social workers -- Warfare, welfare, and the end of empire -- Reclaiming children for the nation -- Freudian nationalists and Heimat activists -- Borderland children and Volkstumsarbeit under Nazi rule -- Stay-at-home nationalism -- Reich-loyal Czech nationalism Summary Throughout the nineteenth and into the early decades of the twentieth century, it was common for rural and working-class parents in the Czech-German borderlands to ensure that their children were bilingual by sending them to live with families who spoke the "other" language. As nationalism became a more potent force in Central Europe, however, such practices troubled pro-German and pro-Czech activists, who feared that the children born to their nation could literally be "lost" or "kidnapped" from the national community through such experiences and, more generally, by parents who were either flexible about national belonging or altogether indifferent to it. Highlighting this indifference to nationalism-and concerns about such apathy among nationalists, this book offers a surprising new perspective on Central European politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Austrian, Czech, and German archives, the author shows how nationalists in the Bohemian Lands worked to forge political cultures in which children belonged more rightfully to the national collective than to their parents. Through their educational and social activism to fix the boundaries of nation and family, the author finds, Czech and German nationalists reveal the set of beliefs they shared about children, family, democracy, minority rights, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. The author shows that by 1939 a vigorous tradition of Czech-German nationalist competition over children had created cultures that would shape the policies of the Nazi occupation and the Czech response to it. The book's concluding chapter weighs the prehistory and consequences of the postwar expulsion of German families from the Bohemian Lands. This book offers a contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of modern nationalism in Central Europe and a groundbreaking exploration of the ways in which children have been the objects of political contestation when national communities have sought to shape, or to reshape, their futures Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes In English Print version record Subject Children and politics -- History -- 20th century Children -- Government policy -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- History -- 20th century Nationalism -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- History -- 20th century Germans -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- Politics and government -- 20th century HISTORY -- Europe -- Eastern. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Discrimination & Race Relations. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Minority Studies. Children and politics Children -- Government policy Ethnic relations Germans -- Politics and government Nationalism Politics and government SUBJECT Bohemia (Czech Republic) -- Ethnic relations Bohemia (Czech Republic) -- Politics and government -- 20th century Subject Czech Republic -- Bohemia Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780801461910 080146191X 0801446287 9780801446283 9780801462092 0801462096

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