5.0 out of 5 stars
Winner of the 2011 Laura Shannon Prize for European Studies, February 15, 2011
This review is from: Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Hardcover)
This work by Tara Zahra received the 2010 Laura Shannon Prize for European Studies, an award which carries a $10,000 prize and is administered by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The jury statement reads, "A work of extraordinary scholarly creativity and excavation, Tara Zahra's Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands 1900-1948, explores Czech-German relations in the first half of the twentieth century to address from a fresh archival angle larger questions about national identification, indifference, and the use of constituencies for national agendas. Working deeply in multiple national archives, Zahra examines policies toward children and schooling in a border region of Bohemia in which partisans of Czech and German identity competed for allegiance. Without ever losing sight of big questions or Hauptpolitik, Zahra enlivens every page with vivid detail and takes us into ordinary lives to show not that national identity is merely a matter of cultural and political circumstance, but that particular circumstances cause claims on identity to work in different ways. A model monograph, with interesting lessons for the future of multilingualism in European educational systems." The final jury was composed of Nancy Bermeo, Nuffield Professor of Comparative Politics, Nuffield College, University of Oxford; Laura Engelstein, Henry S. McNeil Professor of History, Yale University; Felipe Fernández-Armesto, William P. Reynolds Professor of History, University of Notre Dame; James Sheehan, Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Stanford University; Catherine H. Zuckert, Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame. For more information about the book and the Shannon Prize, visit [...].
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?, February 11, 2011
This review is from: Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Hardcover)
The term "national indifference" here refers to the feelings/beliefs of early 20th century inhabitants of Bohemia vis-a-vis the developing German and Czech nation-state ideologies. Rather than land rights, craft/art, etc, these relationships are examined through the prism of conflicts over children. In this story, children presented a potential problem for nationalists due to their ideological blank slate status, a problem that was heightened in a region such as Bohemia where populations were claimed by two competing ideological bodies. According to Zahra, the resulting conflicts reveal an underlying state of indifference to the concerns of nationalists that might go undiscovered under the story of national identification revealed through sources created by the nationalists themselves. Moreover, later in the century, this national indifference laid the ground for conceptual and legal conflicts in Bohemia over questions that manifested themselves as geopolitical and logistical conflicts in other parts of Europe.
The book is well-written and the author is obviously well-read, not only in the literature but in archival material. Most of the original research seems to have been done in relation to the pre-WWII period, and so I take this to be the core of the argument. I am not totally convinced, however. It is not so much that there is a failure to make a case here but that I'm unconvinced of the dichotomous nature of identity. For academicians, the nation-state, nationalism, and modernity are specific forms of technical jargon, but the term identity, as in "national identity," is not, being the point at which abstract analysis meets lived experience. A prime piece of evidence here is the documentation of family complainants attempting to have their children sent to the schools of their choice rather than the schools dictated by nationalist bureaucrats. While this is "national indifference" in the sense that nationalist sentiment is not shown to be commensurate between parents and bureaucrats, official documents, in which opinion can be obfuscated behind a veil of bargaining within an institutional marketplace, is not a convincing documentation of identity. In addition to the question whether complainants understood the conflict presented by bureaucrats, it begs the question of the place of institutional careerist concerns as against conformity of identity amongst "nationalists". And did Bohemians who insisted on their Bohemianism as against Czech or German lack a nationalist concept or have a different historical memory from the one we recognize? If we accept a definition of nationalism that is so narrow it admits no internal conflict, it cannot have much analytic power. Nationalism is not ethnic epiphany, but they are not historically unrelated and there must be a gray area between indifference and identification with collective ends. But this is as much a criticism of academicians as this book.
The latter part of the book is an interesting look at child policies of the Third Reich in Bohemia and how these differed from Reich policies in other lands due to the ambiguities of language and ethnicity in this German-Czech border area. The prism of national indifference works well here to prime the analytic juices, and the story of conflict over children and child policies is well-illuminated by being told in the context of the immediate post-Hapsburg history of Bohemia.
A subtopic of the book is an analysis of an alternative view of childrearing from the common nuclear family. In this story, cooperative and corporate childrearing practices in the Bohemian lands lend a feminist critique of modern life, revealing alternative modes of conceptualizing the place of women and families in society. This story I find is fairly unsupported and turns into a topsy-turvy ideological world of areality in discussing WWII. In fact, much of the evidence presented on a range of topics in this book tacitly confirm that, whether coming from the Bohemian peoples themselves or from the corporate perspective of nationalisms, children are primarily the preserve of parents with mothers as the primary force behind education and habituation. For example, the concept of child-exchange in pre-nationalist Bohemia (in which children went on "study-abroad" programs with other Bohemian families) presupposes a conception of the family as the primary category of child-development. Likewise, the concerns of pre-war German nationalists over finding foster homes in which the women were sufficiently ideological demonstrates that, even where children were considered within the purview of corporate rights and responsibilities, it was families and primarily women that were considered not only the sufficient labor of ideological instruction but also the necessary capital. The argument presented in chapter 3 that the expanding welfare state was not a novel form of communal claim on children only reinforces the point that extra-organic appartus were not seen as necessary to national health.
Later in the book, in discussions of National Socialist child policies and the post-WWII period, the argument is advanced that, because Germanization policies emphasized maintaining a "German" home, post-war characterizations of collectivist competition with the home in childrearing as totalitarian are de-legitimized. This position could only be advanced under pre-factual assumptions. Importantly, these are not a fortiori arguments but Orwellian ones, twisting not only reality but the language we use to describe it as collectivist competition with the home is almost the definition of totalitarianism. Again, the story told in the book does not support the conclusions. There were clearly qualitative as well as quantitative changes in the collectivist treatment of children as totalitarianism ratcheted up throughout the war. Collectivist child-centered policies changed from attempts to identify, preserve, and support nationalities vis-a-vis neighbors to conflicts over the future of existence and the subjugation of women and children to state ends. Especially, note the Reich policy of telling women who had chosen to stay at home that they must return to factories, and note the Reich's creation of Czech youth groups for the purpose not of preserving Czech culture but of controlling those populations. In the end it is hard to see that the claim that criticizing totalitarian intervention in the home does not do justice to the experiences of women collapses into anything but an argument that any criticism of state intervention is nigh to denying women the right to work. The position supported here takes as assumptions some of the worst aspects of individualistic capitalism (the belief that people are fundamentally separate from any sort of organic community) to create an argument in favor of some of the worst aspects of socialism (the belief that state ends create the conditions for liberation). Minus one star!
The author is clearly intelligent and works this material easily. While retaining a professional voice, personality and even humor seep into the prose: "The winners of a democratic nation-state are the recipients of a great deal of mail." From the preface, it is clear that the author enjoys her life in academia and enjoyed producing this book, although at times I feel her ability to create facts out of arguments would have served her well in the legal profession instead.
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