Zahra.T National - Indifference Slavic - Review 1 2010

Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis
Author(s): Tara Zahra

Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Spring, 2010), pp. 93-119
Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
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Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference
as a Category of Analysis
Tara Zahra
Last Christmas I convinced my father to dig up some old family letters.

My grandfather, a Jewish taxi driver from New York, served in the U.S.
Army in Germany during World War II. He wrote weekly letters home to
my grandmother, and I hoped they might serve as a source for my new
research project. In any event, I was curious about what my grandfather
had to say about Nazi Germany. I was quickly disappointed, however. It
turns out that my grandfather was more interested in declaring his un
dying love for his "fatty" at home and promising gifts of silk stockings than
in analyzing political conditions in wartime Europe. The letters might as
well have been written from Brooklyn as from Bavaria. The only proof
I have that my grandfather set foot on German soil at all is a photo of
him leaning against a wall in Bubenheim, in the Rhineland (population
446) in 1945. On the back of the photo he wrote, "Bubenheim, Germany.
Plenty close to hell."
Was my grandfather indifferent to the political dramas unfolding
around him? He died when I was eight years old, so I have no way of
knowing. But reading those letters pushed me to think about indiffer
ence to politics and the broader issues it poses for historians. Indifference
raises particular challenges for social and cultural historians?those of
us explicitly interested in uncovering the experiences of nonelites and
convinced that ordinary lives have something important to tell us about
society, politics, culture, and historical change. What if our subjects seem
to shrug their shoulders at the questions that interest us? Does it mean we
need to ask different questions? Or can apparent indifference itself be a
significant clue about the past?
This article explores the potential of national indifference as a cate
gory of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Since
the birth of modern mass political movements in the nineteenth century,
European nationalists across the political spectrum have lamented the
failure of their constituents to respond to the siren-call of national awak
ening. In 1908, Czech nationalists in northern Bohemia complained, "On
the language frontier we wrestle for every inch of soil, and we must not
only fight with the Germans, but also with renegades and with Czech apa
thy and national indifference."1
But while national indifference has long been an obsession of nation
alist activists in east central Europe, it has only recently become a subject
of historical research. Several historians of east central Europe have re
I thank Pieter Judson, Jeremy King, the participants at the 2008 Conference "Sites of In
difference to Nation in Habsburg Central Europe" at the University of Alberta, and the
anonymous referees for Slavic Review for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this
essay.
1. "Vyrocm zprava narodm jednoty severoceske" (1908), 4.
Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010)
94 Slavic Review
cently made national indifference or ambiguity in eastern Europe a cen

tral focus of their work.2 But what is national indifference exactly, and why
has it attracted historians' attention? How have forms and expressions of
national indifference changed over time? How does the concept of indif
ference intersect with other methodological approaches that attempt to
see beyond the nation-state, such as regional history, borderland studies,
and transnational history? And finally, what methodological challenges
face researchers who attempt to excavate the history of national indif
ference? Making indifference visible, I argue, enables historians to bet
ter understand the limits of nationalization and thereby challenges the
nationalist narratives, categories, and frameworks that have traditionally
dominated the historiography of eastern Europe.
Indifference and the Denationalization of History

Twenty-five years ago, anthropologists began to reflect on the colonialist
origins of their discipline. In a seminal 1973 article, Diane Lewis wrote,
"Since anthropology emerged along with the expansion of Europe and
the colonization of the non-Western world, anthropologists found them
selves participants in the colonial system which organized relationships
between Westerners and non-Westerners."3 This critique provoked de
cades of soul-searching, through which anthropologists sought to decolo
nize both their research strategies and their theoretical assumptions. His
torians are currently in the midst of a similar process, as we face up to our
discipline's record as a faithful accomplice in nation-building projects.
Recent interest in national indifference among historians of east central
Europe is inextricable from this broader movement to "rescue History
from the Nation."4
2. Gary Cohen drew historians' attention to national indifference almost thirty years
ago by highlighting the social dynamics of national affiliation in Prague. See Gary B. Co
hen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton, 1981). More
recently, see, for example, Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Lan
guage Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Jeremy King, Budweisers into
Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 (Princeton, 2002); Eagle
Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy (Cambridge,
Mass., 2005); Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge,
Mass., 2007); James Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a
Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor, 2008); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Na
tions: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (New Haven, 2003); Theodora Dra
gostinova, "Speaking National: Nationalizing the Greeks of Bulgaria," Slavic Review 67,
no. 1 (Spring 2008): 154-81; Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle
for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca, 2008).
3. Diane Lewis, "Anthropology and Colonialism," Current Anthropology 14, no. 5 (De
cember 1973): 581-602. For an early critique of anthropology's relationship to colonial
ism, see Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1973).
4. This phrase comes from Prasenjit Duara's Rescuing History from the Nation: Ques
tioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1995). On the dominance of the national
paradigm in the historical profession, see also Stefan Berger, "A Return to the National
Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France, and Britain from 1945 to
the Present " Journal of Modern History 77, no. 3 (September 2005): 629-78.
Imagined Noncommunities 95
Historians of Europe have mostly attempted to dethrone the nation

state by shifting the scale of historical analysis. Comparative history, trans
fer history, histoire croisee, global history, international history, regional his
tory, local history, and, finally, transnational history each have distinctive
methods and claims, but all have the potential to challenge the privileged
position of the nation-state as the subject and agent of historical change.5
In their efforts to explore the limits of nationalization, historians of cen
tral and eastern Europe have turned, in particular, to the study of border
lands, localism, and regionalism.6 Initially, studies of regionalism and bor
derlands in modern Europe focused largely on understanding how local
and regional identities were rendered compatible with larger national
izing projects. Alon Confino, for example, analyzed how the concept of
Heimat in Germany actually helped to consolidate German national unity
in the Wilhelmine empire. The notion of Heimat, Confino argues, em
bodied the nation in the locality, enabling citizens to reconcile diverse
local and regional loyalties with a larger ideal of German national unity.
Likewise, early studies of borderland regions in Europe, most notably
Peter Sahlins Boundaries, demonstrated how national communities were
consolidated on the periphery of nation-states. These studies illuminated
the dynamics of successful nation-building projects rather than exploring
the limitations of nationalization.7
5. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jiirgen Kocka, Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansdtze und
Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); Jiirgen
Kocka, "Comparison and Beyond," History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February 2003): 39-44;
Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jiirgen Kocka, "Comparative History: Methods, Aims, Prob
lems," in Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in
Cross-National Perspective (New York, 2004), 23-41. For insightful reflections on the prom
ises and pitfalls of comparative history, see also Nancy L. Green, "Forms of Comparison,"
Deborah Cohen, "Comparative History: Buyer Beware," and Peter Baldwin, "Comparing
and Generalizing: Why All History Is Comparative, Yet No History Is Sociology," all in Co
hen and O'Connor, eds., Comparison and History, 41-56, 57-70, 1-22.
6. On regionalism and localism, see, among others, Laurence Cole, ed., Different Paths
to the Nation: Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830-1870 (New
York, 2007); Philipp Ther and Holm Sundhaussen, Regionale Bewegungen und Regional
ismus in europaischen Zwischenrdumen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Marburg, 2003);
David Blackbourn and James Retallack, eds., Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of
Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1890-1930 (Toronto, 2007); Peter Haslinger and
Joachim von Puttkamer, eds., Staat, Loyalitat und Minderheiten in Ostmittel- und Sudosteuropa
1918-1941 (Munich, 2007). On borderlands, see Rolf Petri and Michael Muller, Die Na
tionalisierung von Grenzen: Zur Konstruktion nationaler Identitdt in sprachlich gemischten Grenz
regionen (Marburg, 2002); Peter Haslinger, ed., Grenze im Kopf: Beitrage zur Geschichte der
Grenze in Ostmitteleuropa (New York, 1999); Caitlin Murdock, Changing Places: Mobilizing
Society, Culture, and Territory in Central Europe s Borderlands, 1870-1946 (Ann Arbor, 2010).
7. See, for example, Celia Applegate, "A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the His
toriography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times," American Historical Review 104,
no. 4 (October 1999): 1157-82; Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemburg,
Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Stephane Gerson,
The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca,
2003); Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity
in Brittany (Princeton, 1993); Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of
Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the
Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989).
96 Slavic Review
More recently, historians of regionalism, localism, and borderlands in

east central Europe have rediscovered populations and individuals who
were not so easily swallowed up by the forces of nationalization. The Was
serpolen and Masures in Silesia, the schwenbendes Volkstum of Carin
thia, the Lemkos of the Carpathians, the Hultschiners of Moravian Silesia,
Transylvania's Szeklers, Bohemia's Budweisers, the tutejzsie in the kresy
of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Istrians in the Julian
March?all seemed on the surface to resist the momentum of modern
nation-building projects.8 All of these approaches have helped to situate
the nation-state in a broader relational and spatial context.
A related strategy has been to scrutinize the history of individual con
sciousness and subjectivity. Historians have asked to what extent individu
als actually felt national, and by extension, to what extent they did not feel
national. This approach has also rendered national indifference more
visible to historians.9 The canonical works of nationalism theory, includ
ing Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Ernest Gellner's Nations
and Nationalism, Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm's The Invention of
Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780, and Eu
gen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen all focused explicitly on the absence
of national loyalties before the modern era. By tracing the painstaking
labor of nation building, these scholars definitively dismantled the pri
mordialist claims of nationalists and established a firm consensus among
historians that nations are modern, historically and politically constructed
communities.10
Although these scholars posed fatal challenges to primordialist narra
tives of "national awakening," they did little to question the resonance of
nationalist claims and loyalties in the modern era. "Imagined communi
ties" may have become so ubiquitous in historical research that we have
inadvertently become blind to individuals who remained altogether aloof
to the nation's appeal. Research on the history of nationalism since 1980
has tended, above all, to analyze the contested cultural, political, and so
cial content of nationalist ideologies and discourses, rather than probing
the outer limits of nationalizing projects. Even as historians assert that
8. On indifference in the kresy, see Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic
Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Snyder, Reconstruction of Nations.
On the Windische, see Andreas Moritsch, "Das Windische?eine nationale Hilfsideolo
gie," in Andreas Moritsch, ed., Problemfelder der Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibungder Kdrnt
nerSlovenen (Klagenfurt, 1995), 15-29.
9. For a critique of the "ethnicist" presumptions dominating the history of east cen
tral Europe, see Jeremy King, "The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism,
Ethnicity, and Beyond," in Nancy M. Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Staging the Past:
The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette,
2001), 112-52.
10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983); Ter
ence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Eng., 1983);
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge,
Eng., 1990); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870
1914 (Stanford, 1976).
national groups are imagined communities, they have continued to write

the history of eastern Europe in particular with national groups in star
ring roles, analyzing relations between "the Czechs," "the Germans," "the
Poles," "the Slovenes," as though these collectives were self-evident enti
ties. It may be time, in short, to move beyond imagined communities and
to consider the history of individuals who stood outside or on the margins
of those communities.
In his essay "Ethnicity without Groups," Rogers Brubaker challenges
social scientists and historians to abandon the assumption that individu
als belong to groups and that national groups are coherent social agents.
Analyzing "groupness" as an "event" rather than analyzing "nations" as
historical actors, he suggests, alerts us to the possibility that groupness
"may not happen, that high levels of groupness may fail to crystallize, de
spite the group-making efforts of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, and even
in situations of intense elite-level ethnic conflict."11 But what does it mean
in practice for historians to make failed groupness their subject? Ernest
Gellner's "dogs that failed to bark" pose deep challenges to many of the
basic assumptions that have traditionally structured the history of east
central Europe.12 In particular, cultural and social historians of national
ism have largely devoted themselves to demonstrating that nationalists in
east central Europe successfully infused every realm of daily life with na
tionalist significance, breaking down distinctions between putative public
and private spheres. Brubaker, however, paints a very different picture
of life in postcommunist Cluj. In spite of the highly ethnicized rhetoric
that frames political discourse there, he suggests, "most Hungarians, like
most Romanians, are largely indifferent to politics, and preoccupied with
problems of everyday life?problems that are not interpreted in ethnic
terms."13
Here, Brubaker uses the term politics as shorthand for high, national
politics. He maintains that we cannot simply assume that the nationaliza
tion of elite political discourse reflects the intensity of national allegiances
or polarization in daily life. But his implicit contrast between the realms
of high "politics" and "everyday life" raises a troubling question for so
cial historians. If we discover that nonelites were not nationalized, or that
they were indifferent to nationalist appeals, is it because they were not
politicized at all? On the surface, this view seems to reinforce the binary
opposition between "high politics" and "everyday life" that social and cul
tural historians, historians of gender in particular, have worked hard to
undermine in the past thirty years.
The goal of this article is therefore to historicize national indiffer
ence and to explore its potential as a category of analysis, without rein
scribing imagined boundaries between the public (political) sphere and
the private (apolitical) world of "everyday life" and without evacuating
nonelites from politics. Instead, I argue that tensions between nationalist
11. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 12.
12. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 43.
13. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 22.
98 Slavic Review
aspirations and popular responses to their demands often propelled po

litical change and radicalization in modern east central Europe. In the re
mainder of this article, I explore three related questions: What is national
indifference and does it have a history? Wfiat historical and intellectual
forces have conspired to obscure national indifference? How does the
category of national indifference intersect with or complicate the theo
retical agenda of transnational history?
Defining Indifference
Indifference to nationalism is not a new discovery in east European his
tory. It is rather a new label for phenomena that have long attracted the
attention of historians and political activists. WTiat we might call indif
ference has gone by many other names (often derogatory) in the past:
regionalism, cosmopolitanism, Catholicism, socialism, localism, bilingual
ism, intermarriage, opportunism, immorality, backwardness, stubborn
ness, and false consciousness, to name a few. Nor is national indifference
a perfect term, since "indifference" itself carries a pejorative connotation.
Alternatives, such as national apathy, ambivalence, lability, or bination
alism, hardly seem preferable?indifference can encompass but is not
limited to any one of these phenomena. The absence of a suitable term
to describe nonnational and nationally ambivalent populations acutely
reflects the extent to which nationalist assumptions have shaped the vo
cabulary of social scientists.
The term national indifference can also apply to many different kinds of
behavior and people. This is because possibilities for and forms of national
indifference have changed radically over time, shifting with the boundar
ies of states and the political, social, and legal structures in which people
lived. National indifference in east central Europe was no more stable or
consistent in its form or meaning than nationalism itself in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Indifference can and should be historicized.
At first glance, it might seem that national indifference was simply a
premodern relic?a reflection of local, regional, dynastic, or religious loy
alties that were gradually wiped out by the forces of modernization, state
building, and modern mass politics. This assumption, of course, lies at the
heart of the modernist paradigm established by Anderson, Hobsbawm,
Ranger, Gellner, and Weber. In these narratives, nationalization, riding
on the tailwinds of modernization, industrialization, and state building,
appears to be a one-way ticket to a single destination?the homogenous
nation-state. More recent research has suggested, however, that indiffer
ence to nationalism actually flourished in the eye of the nationalist storm
in Europe between 1880 and 1948. Far from being a premodern relic,
national indifference was often a response to modern mass politics.
Weber's seminal Peasants into Frenchmen illustrates some of the pitfalls
of the modernist paradigm. Weber famously challenged the prevailing
assumption that nineteenth-century French peasants and workers were
actually French. "From Vosges to Brittany," French peasants in the nine
teenth century were altogether "indifferent to political debate and to is
sues that did not affect them directly," he maintains.14 French workers
and peasants were more connected to their local, regional, professional,
familial, and religious communities than to any overarching French na
tional community. Perhaps most tellingly, in Europe's quintessential
nation-state, French was a foreign tongue to half the population in 1870.15
Weber ultimately concludes that "the modern view of the nation as a body
of people united according to their own will and having certain attributes
in common (not least history) was at best dubiously applicable to the
France of 1870."16
Peasants into Frenchmen dealt a serious blow to the primordialist claims
of nationalist historiography. If France, the quintessential nation-state,
was not a unified national state in the nineteenth century, what state could
legitimately claim to be a bona fide nation-state? And yet Weber's narrative
is highly teleological, linking modernization and state building inextrica
bly to nationalization. Peasants into Frenchmen thus describes the French
Third Republic's relentless campaign to make peasants into Frenchmen
by launching an army of civilizing schoolteachers and civil servants into
the "backward" countryside, where they suppressed local dialects, tradi
tions, superstitions, and religious practices and imposed a modern, uni
fied "French" culture and bureaucracy. Historians of French regionalism
and the French empire have since challenged this top-down account of
the relationship between regionalism, colonialism, and nation building
in modern France.17 But Peasants into Frenchmen, like many early studies of
nations as imagined communities, simultaneously acknowledges national
indifference and relegates it to a premodern past.18 I argue, in contrast,
that national indifference persisted well into the twentieth century and
that it was produced and reinforced by modern mass politics.
Research on several distinct regions of eastern and southeastern Eu
rope confirms that national ambivalence was not wiped out by the tidal
force of modernization. The Upper Silesians studied by Bjork were per
haps the most famously indifferent population in twentieth-century
central Europe. In 1906, Father Jan Kapica posed the question, "What
is an Upper Silesian? Is he a German, a Pole, a Prussian, simply an Up
per Silesian, or simply a Catholic or, perhaps, even just an abstract hu
man being?"19 His question was never definitively resolved, but this was
not because Silesians were marooned in premodernity. Like Bohemia
and Alsace-Lorraine, Upper Silesia at the turn of the twentieth century
boasted near universal literacy, widespread industrialization, and a vibrant
associational culture. Bjork shows that a resilient Catholic subculture in
14. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 343.

15. Ibid., 67-94.
16. Ibid., 485.
17. See, for example, Ford, Creating the Nation; Gerson, Pride of Place; James Daughton,
An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914
(New York, 2006).
18. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 494. The conclusion can be read as an apology for
French colonialism.
19. Quoted in Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 1.
100 Slavic Review
Upper Silesia, promoted by a nationally indifferent clergy, nonetheless

complicated nationalization in the region.
The story of Upper Silesia challenges the teleological assumption that
nationalization was irreversible. The persistence of national indifference
in Silesia well into the twentieth century forces historians to confront "the
possibility that people may be subjected to multiple processes of nation
alization without becoming irretrievably immersed in any of them," Bjork
argues.20 After a brief period of nationalist polarization between 1897 and
1907, the utraquist Catholic Center Party and the Social Democrats re
emerged as the most powerful political parties in Upper Silesia in the
elections of 1912. The nationally ambiguous profiles of these two par
ties actually facilitated their electoral success, according to Bjork. Ironi
cally, the very stridency of the German and Polish nationalist movements
alienated Silesians and helped to augment "the ranks of the nationally
uncertain." While the German imperial government's repressive linguistic
policies sought to eradicate the Polish language from public life, Polish
nationalists construed any use of German as a form of national treason.
But neither national camp's "linguistic absolutism" resonated with Sile
sians who were accustomed to living in a nationally and linguistically het
erogeneous environment. The result was a "growing potential constitu
ency for a supranational politics in what had so recently seemed like a
no-man's-land between nationalist camps."21
In Dalmatia in the mid-nineteenth century, Dominique Reill has found
a similar relationship between the rise of modern nationalist movements
and a flourishing culture of national ambiguity. Many Dalmatian elites self
consciously asserted that they were both Italian and Slavic, insisting that
their special destiny was to mediate between the two cultures.22 In the Ju
lian March, meanwhile, a region of the former Balkans divided between
present-day Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia, Pamela Ballinger has shown that
Istrians also developed self-consciously "hybrid" identities in response to
intense political and social pressure from competing nationalist move
ments.23 And in the Bohemian Lands in the early twentieth century, nation
alist competition engendered a virtual bidding war for the souls of children.
Both Czech and German schools and welfare institutions offered parents
free lunches, textbooks, clothing, and even Christmas gifts to attract higher
enrollments and expand the ranks of the nation. It is hardly surprising that
when questioned about his national loyalties in 1948, one bilingual factory
worker frankly replied, "It is a matter of who is giving more."24
Across eastern Europe, competition between popular nationalist
movements on the ground actually encouraged national indifference. But
20. Ibid., 4.
21. Ibid., 172, 129, and 131. On Upper Silesia, see also Kai Struve and Philipp Ther,
eds., Grenzen der Nationen: Identitatenwandel in Oberschlesien in derNeuzeit (Marburg, 2002).
22. Dominique Reill, "A Mission of Mediation: Dalmatia's Multi-National Regional
ism from the 1830s-60s," in Cole, ed., Different Paths to the Nation, 16-36.
23. Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans
(Princeton, 2002), 262.
24. Josef Hursky, Zjistovdni ndrodnosti (Prague, 1947), 92-94.
the forms of national indifference did change dramatically over time and
across regimes. For some, particularly in Habsburg Austria, indifference
to nationalism could entail the complete absence of national loyalties?a
claim to be neither Czech nor German, neither Polish nor Ruthene, nei
ther German nor Slovene. In the late nineteenth century, however, as
Gerald Stourzh and King have shown, the Austrian state itself began to
"multinationalize," acknowledging the so-called rights of national collec
tives in order to defuse national tensions.25 This made national agnosti
cism less viable, particularly in regions affected by the so-called national
compromises of the early twentieth century (Moravia, Galicia, Bukovina).
Once citizens were forced to register their nationality in order to exercise
basic civil rights such as the right to vote or to a primary school education,
remaining on the national sidelines was no longer simple.
The collapse of the Habsburg empire into self-declared nation-states
in 1918 rendered the outright refusal of nationality nearly impossible.
The dissolution of the Austrian empire marked the demise of the nation
ally indifferent or neutral state in east central Europe. The Czechoslovak,
Polish, and Yugoslav governments all forcibly classified citizens, hoping
to boost the legitimacy of their states domestically and internationally by
reducing the number of people counted as members of minority groups.26
Although interwar Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were both officially
supranational, neither government was nationally indifferent. Czechoslo
vakia was always conceived of as a nation-state, Elizabeth Bakke has argued.
The "Czechoslovak" nation was defined in terms of shared cultural values,
the closeness of the Czech and Slovak languages, and racial kinship, and
not simply in terms of civic loyalties. Germans, Hungarians, Gypsies, and
Poles could not be "Czechoslovaks."27 There was also very little "Yugo
slavism" in interwar Yugoslavia, either at the level of political parties, the
educational system, or cultural and religious organizations.28 Yugoslavism
shared the exclusionary logic of the nation-state, Charles Jelavich has ar
gued, since "the non-Slavs, the Albanians, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians,
Romanians, Turks, and others, were not a part of the equation."29
The Soviet Union is of course the classic example of how an officially
supranational state actually contributed to the eradication of national in
25. King, Budweisers, 114-53; Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitdten
in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Osterreichs (Vienna, 1985).
26. On national classification, see Tara Zahra, "The 'Minority Problem' and National
Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands," Contemporary European History
17, no. 2 (May 2008): 137-65.
27. Elizabeth Bakke, "The Making of Czechoslovakism in the First Czechoslovak
Republic," in Martin Schulze-Wessel, ed., Loyalitdten in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik,
1918-1938 (Munich, 2004), 23-44.
28. Srecko M. Dzaja, Die politische Realitdt des Jugoslawismus (1918-1991) (Munich,
2002); See also Charles Jelavich, "South Slav Education: Was There Yugoslavism?" and Ar
nold Suppan, "Yugoslavism versus Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene Nationalism: Political,
Ideological, and Cultural Causes of the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia," both in Norman M.
Naimark and Holly Case, eds., Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars
(Stanford, 2003), 93-115 and 116-39.
29. Jelavich, "South Slav Education," 95.
102 Slavic Review
difference. Recent research by Terry Martin, Francine Hirsch, Yuri Slez

kine, and others has stressed the central role of the Soviet government
in nationalizing the Soviet population. Soviet policymakers strategically
consolidated national communities in the early twentieth century, often
cutting them from whole cloth through national classification and nation
alizing linguistic, cultural, and education policies. In the long-run, Soviet
officials hoped to placate political nationalism by encouraging cultural
nationalism.30
Building on these arguments, Brown's Biography of No Place traces the
fraught encounters between Soviet officials and rural populations in the
kresy, the borderland regions between historic Poland and Russia. In these
regions, Soviet officials quickly discovered that indifference to national
ism was more the norm than the exception. In 1925, for example, Jan
Saulevich, Secretary for the Ukrainian Commission for National Minority
Affairs, was charged with the task of taking a national inventory of the
kresy, in order to implement Soviet plans for the establishment of a Ukrai
nian autonomous region. He reported with dismay that "Ukrainians and
Poles hardly differ from one another in their material existence beyond
their conversational language?however, language too is problematic
because the local Polish sounds very much like the local Ukrainian." To
complicate matters, much of the population was bilingual.31 Confounded,
officials attempted to ask people about their national loyalties, but this was
hardly helpful. Local Polish- and Ukrainian-speakers alike often insisted
that they were simply peasants. Others replied that they belonged to the
"Catholic" nationality. Some identified themselves as tutejzsie, or "people
from here." One peasant claimed that he spoke "the Catholic language,"
while others simply insisted that they spoke "in the peasant way" or in "the
language of here."32
Of course, forcible classification went a long way toward eradicating
this kind of national ambiguity. Increasingly, after 1918 in eastern Europe,
nationality became an explicit basis for citizenship rights and for securing
voting privileges, education, and social services in the Habsburg successor
states and in the Soviet Union. Nationalist activists themselves gleefully
celebrated the demise of national indifference in the aftermath of the rev
olution of 1918. Hugo Heller, a German child welfare activist in Bohemia,
boasted that, after the revolution, nationalist enthusiasm "rushed in like a
fresh spring, awakening life throughout all of German Bohemia, melting
the snow and ice of national ambivalence, dispersing the clouds which
had paralyzed and depressed nationalist thought, feeling, and will. . . .
Those were the good times!"33
30. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Un
ion, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge
and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005); Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal
Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53,
no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52.
31. Brown, Biography of No Place, 33.
32. Ibid., 39.
33. Hugo Heller, Die Erziehung zum deutschen Wesen (Prague, 1936), 9.
Sadly for Heller and his nationalist friends, however, the good times
did not last. The collapse of eastern Europe's continental empires in 1918
did not spell the end of national indifference but rather encouraged its
expression in different forms. In the Bohemian Lands, for example, many
Czech-speakers continued to marry German-speakers and vice-versa, and
in such families, bilingualism and fluid national loyalties were the norm.
Other citizens also remained on the fence when it came to national affili
ation. These individuals switched sides depending on political and social
circumstances. The number of German-speakers in Czechoslovakia de
clined by 400,000 from 1910 to 1921, for example. In some towns such
as Budejovice/Budweis, the number of people registering as Germans
dropped by as much as 50 percent.34
Where did all the Germans go? Some died in the war, some emigrated
to Austria or Germany, some gave in to state pressure to become "Czecho
slovaks," and some registered as members of the newly created Jewish na
tionality. Many others, however, were simply side-switchers, who saw that
membership in the nation-state could have its privileges. Even more in
dividuals may have considered themselves nominally Czechs, Germans,
Poles, or Hungarians, although they rejected the strident demands of na
tionalist politicians. Nationalist organizers in the early twentieth-century
worked tirelessly to educate citizens about the many duties that accompa
nied national belonging. Being a good German did not simply entail cast
ing a ballot for nationalist politicians on election day. Loyal Germans were
to shop exclusively in German-owned stores, visit endangered German
"language frontiers" on vacation, join German choral groups, fire com
panies, and associations (and regularly make financial contributions),
speak only German at home, marry Germans, hire German nannies, and
send their children exclusively to German kindergartens, summer camps,
and schools.35 Not surprisingly, relatively few individuals managed to keep
up with the exhausting demands of the nationalist lifestyle. By 1930 in
Czechoslovakia, so-called activist parties, such as the Social Democrats,
the Agrarian Party, and the Christian Social Party, enjoyed the support of
a full 75 percent of the German population. These parties were primarily
organized around non-nationalist concerns and issues. Only in the mid
19308, when the Great Depression began to inflict the worst on German
speaking industrial regions, did German-speakers increasingly turn to
ward the nationalist Sudeten German Party.36
Nor was indifference easily banished from interwar Poland and Hun
gary. Thousands of German-speaking Protestants in central and eastern
Poland declared themselves Poles on interwar Poland's first census in
1921. In Lodz, Poland's second largest city, such individuals were known
as "Lodzermenschen." Josef Spickermann, a delegate to the Sejm from
34. King, Budweisers, 164-66.
35. See, for example, Judson, Guardians of the Nation; Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars
and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Elizabeth
Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, 2003);
Bryant, Prague in Black; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls.
36. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 144.
104 Slavic Review
Lodz, vehemently rejected pan-Germanism in a speech in March 1919,

declaring, "We, the citizens of German ethnicity, consider Poland our
Fatherland. . . . Our entire psyche is completely different from that of
the Germans on the other side of the border. . . . We are ready to give
our property and our lives in order to do everything we can to create a
strong and powerful Poland."37 In Hungary in 1941, meanwhile, 174,995
individuals declared German as their native tongue on the Hungarian
census but simultaneously registered as members of the Hungarian na
tionality. A report by a local census official indicated that most German
speaking Hungarians cared more about protecting their land and prop
erty than about preserving a German national identity, explaining, "The
Swabian population feels at home here, wants to stay here, is attached
to the land. They are willing to disavow not only their nationality but
also their mother tongue if that small price would allow them to remain
here."38 In the Burgenland region of Austria, meanwhile, the Nazi party
successfully recruited Hungarian- and Croatian-speakers in the late
1930s, and even organized local party rallies and events in Hungarian and
Croatian.39
Nationalist politicians across east central Europe decried such indi
viduals as opportunists, collaborators, and traitors. In interwar Czechoslo
vakia, for example, teachers alleged that German-speaking parents who
sent their children to Czech schools "seriously damage their nation and
thereby work for its extinction. This is the result of. . . national indiffer
ence that should be a punishable offense."40 But such individuals were
not necessarily victims of false consciousness, political and economic pres
sure, or moral lassitude?they simply did not organize their lives or politi
cal allegiances according to nationalist priorities.
Given the diversity of behaviors and attitudes that can be grouped
under the rubric of "national indifference," it is worth asking if the term
is too broad to be useful. The coherence of the category, I believe, ul
timately lies in nationalists' own use of it to mobilize potential recruits.
Regardless of diverse motivations and interests, nationally indifferent in
dividuals were denounced, boycotted, and rallied for the national cause as
though they belonged to a common species. To nationalists in Habsburg
Austria and its successor states, these frustrating individuals were known as
"hermaphrodites," "amphibians," "renegades," "utraquists," and "border
land souls." The Nazi regime anointed them the "in-between Strata" and
"me-too Germans." And after World War II they were finally denounced
37. Quoted in Ingo Eser, "'Loyalitat' als Mittel der Integration oder Restriktion? Po
len und seine deutsche Minderheit, 1918-1939," in Haslinger and von Puttkamer, eds.,
Staat, Loyalitat und Minderheiten, 23-24.
38. Gerhard Seewann, "'Ungarndeutschtum' als Identitatskonzept und politische
Ressource," in Haslinger and von Puttkamer, eds., Staat, Loyalitat und Minderheit, 20,
99-126.
39. Gerhard Baumgartner and Ursula Hemetek, 6 x Osterreich: Geschichte und aktuelle
Situation der Volksgruppen (Klagenfurt, 1995), 60.
40. Anonymous, Unsere deutsche Schulen und das Vernichtungsgesetz (Eger, 1920), 7.
and sometimes expelled as "nationally labile opportunists" or simply as

traitors.
National indifference is therefore fundamentally a negative and na
tionalist category. Indifference only existed as such in the eyes of the na
tionalist beholder. Ironically, however, this imagined noncommunity was
brought to life and institutionalized through nationalists' own persistent
efforts to eradicate it. As historians, this means we need to proceed with
caution lest we fall into the trap of using nationalist categories of practice
as categories of analysis.41 This does not mean shunning the category of
national indifference altogether, however, any more than we avoid the
terms nation or nationalism. Once imagined, indifference to nationalism
became as real and meaningful a category as the nation itself and had
significant social, cultural, and political consequences.
National indifference came to be perceived as a social and political
phenomenon through nationalist activism, but national, imperial, and
even international authorities increasingly acknowledged its existence and
institutionalized it. After 1918, for example, guarantees of minority rights
in international treaties and in eastern European constitutions raised bit
ter disputes about who belonged to these "minorities" and who would thus
be entitled to claim minority rights. National indifference became the
focus of international diplomatic disputes as well as blistering domestic
conflicts. A 1922 agreement between Poland and Germany regarding Up
per Silesia, for example, specified that German children in that province
were to enjoy the "minority right" to attend German-language elemen
tary schools. But which children were German and which were Polish?
Disputes over the language abilities and national affiliations of individual
children ultimately reached the new League of Nations World Court.42
The World Court officially recognized national indifference, conceding
that neither nationality nor language abilities were transparent in Silesia:
"There is reason to believe that in the conditions which exist in Upper
Silesia . . . the question of whether a person belongs to a minority . . .
does not clearly appear from the facts. Such an uncertainty might for
example exist, as regards language, where either a person does not speak
literary German or literary Polish, or where he knows and makes use of
several languages, and as regards race, in the case of mixed marriages."43
This is just one example of how national indifference gradually became
41. On the danger of conflating categories of analysis with categories of practice, see
Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups; Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Li
ana Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton,
2006).
42. For the details of the case, see Manley O. Hudson, ed., World Court Reports: A
Collection of the Judgments, Orders and Opinions of the Permanent Court of International Justice,
vol. 2, 1927-1932 (Washington, D.C., 1935), 268-320, 690-91.
43. Hudson, ed., World Court Reports, 292. For more on the issue of Silesian schools,
see Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Mi
nority Protection, 1878-1938 (New York, 2004); Christian Raitz von Frentz, A Lesson Forgot
ten: Minority Protection under the League of Nations: The Case of the German Minority in Poland,
1920-1934 (New York, 1999).
106 Slavic Review
far more than a thorn in the side of nationalist agitators. In an age of na

tionalizing states and international minority-rights protections, indiffer
ence to nation was at the heart of both domestic and diplomatic conflicts,
new forms of international law, and new ideals of minority rights.
Finding Indifference
Paradoxically, nationalists both invented national indifference and, until
recently, deliberately obscured it. In the east European context, national
indifference has long been effaced from the historical record by the na
tionalist frameworks, narratives, and categories that dominate historical
analysis and the sources historians rely on: censuses that denied the ex
istence of bilingualism, color-coded ethnographic maps, sensationalist
newspaper accounts that transformed drunken bar brawls and children's
games into fierce battles for national survival.44 There are also practical
challenges to studying an imagined noncommunity. Indifferent people
are rarely well organized. Unlike nationalism, national indifference has
not left much of a paper trail, since most state archives are devoted pre
cisely to documenting the history of nation-states. National indifference
was not memorialized with public monuments or celebrated with festi
vals, costumes, and songs. There was no Association for the Protection
of National Hermaphrodites nor was there a Nonnational Peoples' Party.
Attempts to create such parties, such as the Moravian Mittelpartei of great
landowners at the turn of the century, ultimately failed.45 Austrian impe
rial institutions that explicitly claimed to transcend divisions of nation
ality or language, such as the Social Democratic Party, the nobility, the
Catholic Church, the army, and the civil service, represented diverse con
stituencies that were unlikely to unite in defense of national indifference.
In the twentieth century, many of these supranational institutions were
themselves increasingly nationalized. It is no coincidence, therefore, that
national indifference appears most clearly in the archives at the moment
that nationalists mobilized to extinguish it.
It is therefore challenging to quantify indifference, much as we might
like to know whether the indifferent constituted a significant mass or an
exotic fringe group. The very systems devised for counting and classifying
populations in the nineteenth century were shaped by nationalist goals,
with an eye to eliminating or obscuring indifference. Occasionally, there
have been official efforts to track and quantify national indifference in
east central Europe, but these typically met determined resistance. In an
unusual concession to the nationally indifferent population in 1930, for
example, the Czechoslovak State Statistical Office proposed that citizens
be permitted to declare themselves "without nationality" (bez narodnosti)
or "of unknown nationality" (ndrodnost nezndma) on the decennial census,
44. Seejudson, Guardians of the Nation, esp. 1-18.
45. On the Mittelpartei in Moravia, see Robert R. Luft, "Die Mittelpartei des mahri
schen Grossgrundbesitzes 1879-1918," in Ferdinand Seibt, ed.,Die Chance der Verstdndigung:
Absichten undAnsdtzezu ubernationaler Zusammenarbeit in den bohmischen Ldndern 1848-1918
(Munich, 1987), 218-36.
just as it was possible to register one's lack of religious affiliation. "Not all
people have national feelings or consciousness, or the desire to belong to
a specific national community," officials in the Statistical Office conceded.
But Czech nationalists harshly rejected this view. Activists in the Czech
National Council, an umbrella organization for Czech voluntary associa
tions and political parties, warned that allowing citizens to opt out of the
nation on the census would "make it impossible to obtain a clear overview
of the national composition of the state, wearing away at its borders."46
Their viewpoint prevailed, and the indifferent were denied the chance to
be counted.
It is possible, however, to use certain statistical measures to (imper
fectly) estimate the number of nationally ambivalent people in a given
time or place. In the Bohemian Lands, for example, one demographer
found that in Prague in 1900, 16.6 percent of schoolchildren were bilin
gual. In Budejovice/Budweis, the percentage of bilingual children reached
16.2 percent, in Liberec/Reichenberg, 16.1 percent, and in Most/Brux,
22.4 percent.47 These statistics must be treated with caution, as the politi
cal pressure to underreport bilingualism was considerable. Bilingualism,
moreover, has no intrinsic relationship to national indifference. Many
of the early Czech nationalist "awakeners" were famously bilingual, for
example.48 But by the late nineteenth century in Habsburg central Eu
rope, many nationalist education experts began to see bilingualism as evi
dence of national indifference. Shortly after the 1880 Austrian census, Jan
Kapras, a Czech gymnasium teacher in Brno/Brunn, excoriated Moravian
parents who raised their children in bilingual households, proclaiming,
"This is the class of linguistically neutral hermaphrodites, who sail to any
wind, calling themselves Czech here, German there, and are educated to
constantly go back on their word."49
Fluctuations in census numbers offer another potential measure of
national lability: the loss of 400,000 German-speakers in the Bohemian
Lands between 1910 and 1921 suggests that side-switchers were not iso
lated eccentrics. In 1946, Ministry of Interior officials in Czechoslovakia
estimated that at least 300,000 Czechs had "become German" during the
Nazi occupation of the Bohemian Lands.50 This so-called Zwischenschicht
of nationally ambivalent people obsessed Nazi officials in occupied eastern
Europe. In 1940, many German-speakers in the Protectorate were reluc
tant to register as Germans, whether out of ideological opposition to the
Nazis or (more often) fear of being drafted into the Wehrmacht. "Through
46. Scitam lidu 1930, Memo from the Czech National Council to the State Statistical
Office and the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, 16 May 1930, Carton 183, Narodni
rada ceska, Narodni archiv (NA), Prague.
47. Heinrich Rauchberg, Der nationale Besitzstand in Bohmen (Leipzig, 1905), 435.
48. On early Czech nationalists, see Peter Bugge, "Czech Nation-Building, National
Self-Perception and Politics, 1780-1914" (PhD diss., University of Aarhus, 1994).
49. Jan Kapras, Rec mateskd orgdnem skoly obecne a znakem ndrodnosti (Prague, 1883),
9-10.
50. Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in
Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 18.
108 Slavic Review
the proven work of National Socialist education there is no doubt that the
offspring of today's indecisive, madly behaving Volksdeutsche will become
the most valuable members of the German citizenry," Protectorate offi
cials reassured themselves.51
Thus even if the nationally indifferent were actually a small minority
by the early twentieth century, national indifference was historically sig
nificant. In nationalist rhetoric, national indifference loomed larger than
life and therefore played an extraordinary role in shaping nationalist ac
tivism and political and social institutions in modern east central Europe.
From the mid-nineteenth century until after World War II, nationalists
obsessed over the problem of national indifference and devised new strat
egies to eradicate it. They tried bribery and persuasion, seeking to awaken
the loyalties of nationally indifferent citizens with generous offers of wel
fare benefits and calls to conscience. But when gentler methods failed,
nationalist activists and state officials resorted to more disciplinary tactics,
including forcible national classification in interwar eastern Europe and
in Nazi-occupied east central Europe.
Indifference was important to the development of modern national
ism, not only because nationalists reacted so strongly to it, but because it
compelled nationalist movements to define the boundaries of the national
community more precisely. Was the nation a voluntary community of all
those who believed themselves to be Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, French, or
Germans, or of those who learned to speak a language or adopted cer
tain cultural practices? Or was the nation defined by descent or "blood"
alone? Was national belonging an expression of political commitments
(for example, to Nazism or to democracy?) Or of cultural and economic
status? The answers to these questions were never stable, but they often
developed precisely through confrontations between nationalists and in
different populations. For example, Czech nationalists, officials, and legal
experts increasingly demanded policies of forced inclusion or national
ascription in order to prevent indifferent or opportunist "Czechs" from
joining the German camp. In the early twentieth century, they shifted
away from language and toward descent as the defining mark of Czech
nationality in order to reign in potential national "renegades."52
National indifference, and attempts to eradicate it, were not confined
to eastern Europe. In Alsace-Lorraine after World War I, French officials
also adopted practices of forcible national classification as they sought to
distinguish between German subjects and French citizens and to punish
the vanquished Germans. Beginning in February of 1919, French officials
began to classify the entire population of Alsace into four categories, issu
ing identity cards that entitled the holders to different forms of treatment.
The Carte A was reserved for Alsatians who were born in Alsace and whose
parents or grandparents carried French citizenship before 1870. Individ
uals of so-called mixed heritage, those with one parent who had carried
51. Generalreferat fur politische Angelegenheiten, Prague, 12 August 1939. Carton

520, Ufad fisskeho protektora, NA.
52. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls, 193.
French citizenship, were assigned the Carte B. The Carte C was issued to
foreigners from allied states. Finally, the Carte D was conferred on indi
viduals who were born in Germany or Austria or whose parents or grand
parents were born in Germany or Austria.53 French officials introduced
these identity cards explicitly to stamp out what they saw as the menace
of national ambiguity. The Francophile Alsatian exile and former senator
Emile Wetterle explained in 1915, "Too often the Austro-Germans, who
don't shy away from any disloyal maneuver in order to assure their own
impunity, have attempted to pass for locals ... those of us who have a great
deal of practical experience with the two populations of our provinces, we
can recognize the true German and the true Alsatian or Lorrainer of old
stock at first glance. . . . We sniff out the Teuton like a hunting dog sniffs
its prey, and I assure you that with a little practice it is not difficult, because
the odor is so particular and so strong."54
Under Nazi occupation, German officials insisted that the German
nation was defined by race or blood, at least rhetorically. In practice, how
ever, Nazi officials also took liberal advantage of national indifference in
eastern Europe, keeping the doors of the Volksgemeinschaft open to many
non-Jews who professed to Nazi ideals. George Kennan, the American
diplomat, observed that shortly after the Nazi occupation of the Bohe
mian Lands, "It became difficult to tell where the Czech left off and the
German began."55 Doris Bergen has found that national indifference in
Nazi-occupied Poland contributed to the escalation of antisemitic vio
lence. As nationally ambiguous individuals attempted to improve their
ranking on the four-tiered German Volksliste, some resorted to antisemitic
language and violence in order to "prove" their questionable loyalties to
Germandom.56 In each of these cases, the "indifferent" may have been a
numerical minority of the population. But in each case, the existence of
this minority exposed the limits and contradictions of nationalist ideolo
gies and drove state officials to devise more radical strategies for policing
the boundaries of the nation.
Broader historiographical and theoretical trends well outside the field
of east central European history have also conspired to efface national
indifference. For the last twenty years, many social and cultural historians
have focused precisely on the historical construction of identities, espe
cially race, gender, sexuality, and nation. The concept of national indif
53. On Alsace, see Christopher J. Fischer, "Alsace to the Alsatians? Visions and Di
visions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1890-1930" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, 2003); Laird Boswell, "From Liberation to Purge Trials in the 'Mythic Prov
inces': Recasting French Identities in Alsace and Lorraine, 1918-1920," French Historical
Studies2S, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 129-62; Zahra, "The 'Minority Problem.'"
54. L'abbe Emile Wetterle, Ce qu'etait VAlsace-Lorraine et ce qu'elle sera (Paris, 1915),
305.
55. Cited in King, Budweisers, 176. From George Kennan, From Prague after Munich,
Diplomatic Papers 1938-1940 (Princeton, 1968), 134.
56. See Doris Bergen, "The Nazi Concept of 'Volksdeutsche' and the Exacerbation of
Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939-45 " Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (Oc
tober 1994): 569-82; on Germanization in Nazi-occupied Europe, see also Mark Mazower,
Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York, 2008).
110 Slavic Review
ference rests solidly on this constructivist scholarship, which first insisted

that national belonging is a state of mind rather than a biological fact. But
a basic assumption behind much constructivist scholarship has been that
identities matter, that everyone has (and had) them, that they profoundly
shape individual experience, political culture, and historical change.57
While historians have amply documented the ways in which gender, ra
cial, class, and national categories have overlapped, transformed, been
contested, or destabilized over time, they have paid less attention to in
dividuals who remained aloof to the demands of modern identity poli
tics. "Identity" itself matters so much in our current political and cultural
landscape that it is challenging to imagine a time when it might not have
mattered so much, or in the same ways.
In a provocative essay entitled "Beyond Identity," Rogers Brubaker
and Frederick Cooper argue that we should eschew the term identity alto
gether. Identity, they maintain, is too torn between its "hard" and "soft"
meanings to be useful. In its "hard" form, identity essentializes people by
assuming that they belong to rigidly defined groups. In its "soft" form,
diluted by a string of qualifications (that identity is "multiple," "fluid,"
"contested," and "constructed") identity is so ambiguous that it is mean
ingless. "If identity is everywhere, it is nowhere," they suggest.58 Many
scholars have recently begun to substitute less reductionist terms, such as
"loyalty," "affiliation," "identification," "self-understanding," and "subject
position." Peter Haslinger, Joachim von Puttkamer, and Martin Schulze
Wessel contend, for example, that the concept of "loyalty" enables schol
ars to explore the history of collective forms of consciousness without the
essentializing baggage of identity politics.59 While "identity" conveys an
"illusion of stability," and appears to be "constitutional," the concept of
loyalty, they argue, better underscores the agency of the individual.60
Loyalty is certainly a productive category for historical research. It does
not, however, necessarily banish the basic assumption that everyone in east
central Europe had a national affiliation in the twentieth century?even
if we are more aware, as Robert Musil famously observed, that individuals
might boast "a professional, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a con
scious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot."61
Research on "loyalty" in eastern Europe tends to analyze the reasons why
individual civic, imperial, local, religious, or regional loyalties diverged
from, reinforced, overlapped with, or competed with national loyalties.
But this research rarely questions the existence of national loyalties or of
57. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 3.
58. Rogers Brubaker and Fred Cooper, "Beyond 'Identity,'" Theory and Society 29,
no. 1 (February 2000): 1.
59. Martin Schulze-Wessel, "Loyalitat als Geschichtlicher Grundbegriff und
Forschungskonzept: Zur Einleitung," in Schulze-Wessel, ed., Loyalitaten in der Tschechoslo
wakischen Republik, 10.
60. Peter Haslinger and Joachim von Puttkamer, "Staatsmacht, Minderheit, Loyalitat
konzeptionelle Grundlagen am Beispiel Ostmittel und Siidosteuropas in der Zwischen
kriegzeit," in Haslinger and von Puttkamer, eds., Staat, Loyalitat und Minderheiten, 2-3, 9.
61. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York,
1995), 30.
"national minorities" as self-evident communities.62 As with identity, it is

ultimately too easy to substitute one reductionist view of loyalty for an
other. In exploring national indifference, we should not seek to replace
the nation with something else, assuming that other modes of collective
identification were more authentic, real, compelling, or genuine than
nationality. So-called national hermaphrodites were not really Catholics,
regionalists, localists, Jews, Austrian patriots, cosmopolitans, or socialists.
Nor should we be searching for an underlying hierarchy of loyalties, rank
ing religion, class, race, gender, or region against or above nation.
In addition to a post-1968 focus on identity and identity politics in
the United States, indifference to nationalism has been effaced in part
by the cultural and linguistic turns that have so energized the study of
nation, gender, and race as categories of analysis. In the 1960s and 1970s,
the working class often played the starring role in social histories that
sought to understand the relationship between class experience and po
litical agency. Thatcherism and the fall of communism largely displaced
the working class from its heroic role as the agent of history in the late
1980s, and many historians borrowed new methodologies from literary
studies. They shifted their focus from class and social experience to the
broader realms of culture and politics. In some of the theory wars most
divisive moments, practitioners of the new cultural history were accused
of evacuating politics from history altogether. In fact, the appeal of cul
tural studies to many social historians was precisely that it located politics
and power everywhere, and not just in the words and actions of elites. The
blossoming fields of gender and sexuality history, postcolonial history, and
nationalism studies since the early 1990s are perhaps the most important
products of this insight. It is not always easy to find women in the history
of elite politics, for example; but, as Joan Scott famously noted, gender
structures the political and social order itself. Gender is everywhere, even
where women are scarce.63
The nation, like gender and race, became ubiquitous thanks in part
to historians' greater focus on textual and cultural sources. It was never
a challenge to find nationalism in the halls of parliament or provincial
diets of the late Austrian empire and its successor states, but in the past
twenty years historians have located nationalism in every nook and cranny
of daily life. Scholars have sniffed it out in literature, maps, exhibitions,
architecture, advertisements, films, postcards, schoolbooks, home decor,
and travel guides. The problem is that historians who analyze nations as
62. With few exceptions, the essays in Haslinger and von Puttkamer's volume on state,
loyalty, and minorities in east central and southeastern Europe do not question the extent
to which "national minorities" existed as self-evident communities. Two exceptions are
Albert F. Reiterer, "Abkehr, Widerstand, Loyalitat: Die Minderheiten und die Erste Oster
reichische Republik," and Elena Mannova, "Identitatsdiskurse und lokale Lebenswelten
in der Siidslowakei," both in Haslinger and von Puttkamer, eds., Staat, Loyalitat und Min
derheiten, 141 and 45-67.
63. Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American His
torical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-75. On the trajectory from social to cul
tural history, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann
Arbor, 2005).
112 Slavic Review
"imagined communities" risk remaining imprisoned within nationalists'

own discursive universe, analyzing the contested content of nationalist
ideologies and cultures without questioning the extent to which those
ideologies resonated among their audiences.
Nationalism's apparent ubiquity in the realms of modern culture and
discourse has the dangerous potential to reinforce a totalitarian framework
for understanding east central European politics and society. Historians
have often linked the rise of nationalist and mass political movements in
the late nineteenth century to the so-called destruction or invasion of
the private sphere, a beginning step on the slippery slope toward totali
tarianism. But narratives linking mass politics to the destruction of the
private sphere tend to overestimate the institutional power and resonance
of nationalist rhetoric. Until 1918 in Habsburg central Europe, national
ists typically did not have state power at their disposal, except at the local
or provincial levels. Their ability to impose their worldview on others was
severely restricted. Even very powerful states are limited in their ability to
mold populations at will, as revisionist scholarship on both Nazism and
communism has suggested over the past several decades. This literature
has persuasively highlighted the extent to which so-called totalitarian
states sought to negotiate the consent of the governed, the role of denun
ciation and popular participation in policing, and the agency of citizens
within their supposedly totalitarian societies. Surprisingly, however, schol
ars have been slower to apply insights about the limits of state power to the
history of nationalism and nationalizing states.64
From a contemporary perspective it is difficult to give up a view of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an exceptionally politi
cized and nationalized moment in the European past. Standard accounts
hold that the early twentieth century was the age of ideology: of mass poli
tics, Utopian state planning, and the rise of interventionist welfare states,
all justified in the name of improving the nation's collective health and
welfare. Many historians have argued that after 1945, by contrast, politics
itself was displaced by the market in the west, and the individualist eth
ics of capitalism, consumerism, domesticity, and human rights triumphed
over collectivist ideals. Self-realization took place in the shopping mall
and kitchen rather than in the union hall, nationalist association, or on
the streets.65 But perhaps it is worth considering whether this narrative
64. For a recent reflection on revisionism in Soviet historiography, see Sheila Fitz
patrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000); Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Revisionism in
Soviet History," History and Theory 46, no. 4 (December 2007): 77-91; Sheila Fitzpatrick
and Michael Geyer, "Introduction: After Totalitarianism. Stalinism and Nazism Com
pared," in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and
Nazism Compared (Cambridge, Eng., 2009), 1-40. Some examples of this approach in the
historiography of Nazi Germany include Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Co
ercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001); Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity,
Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, 1987).
65. On the presumed triumph of individualism in postwar west European politics
and human rights activism, see Tonyjudt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York,
2005), 564-65; Paul Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia,
1998); Mark Mazower, "The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950," The Histori
overestimates the political consciousness and commitments of ordinary

people in an earlier era, as well as the absence of ideology after World
War II.66
Historians tend to focus on politics and political commitments, even
to assume them, because the one thing uniting us methodologically is an
interest in change. We operate on the assumption that change is a prod
uct of political commitment and agency, particularly since it is no longer
typically seen as a product of dialectic class conflict or anonymous forces
of "modernization." The study of indifference hardly seems to get us
anywhere?where is the agency in apathy? But the solution is not to res
urrect imagined divides between public and private. Nor should we draw
the conclusion that nonelites were indifferent to nationalism because they
were altogether indifferent to politics. Rather, it seems more productive
to analyze inaction, evasion, and indifference as potential forms of politi
cal agency.67
Research on daily life under Nazism and communism offers useful
comparative insights on the potential political valence of national indif
ference. What should we make, for example, of the oft-cited appearance
of "normality" in daily life during World War II in Germany? Few histo
rians would argue that Germans living "normal" lives in 1942 were not
implicated in a political system or relevant to its functioning.68 Under
what circumstances was seeming indifference to politics a form of accom
modation to (and even support for) a political regime, and under what
circumstances was indifference an act of active or passive resistance?69 A
conscious retreat into private life or an outward rejection of politics might
be interpreted as a political statement under any regime that demands
unwavering commitment. Indifference, like silence, is nonetheless chal
lenging to interpret and can only be understood situationally. It does not
belong to the Left or the Right, to women or men, to cowardly collabora
tors or a heroic resistance. It was not monopolized by religiously devout
and "backward" peasants, materialistic workers, or Jewish "cosmopoli
tans," though such stereotypes and prejudices flourished in the national
caljournal ^1, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 386-88; A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the
End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford, 2001), 157-220;
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge,
Mass., 2005), 59.
66. For an argument contesting the apolitical nature of postwar Europe, see Mary
Nolan, "Utopian Visions in a Post Utopian Era: Human Rights, Americanism, Market Fun
damentalism" (keynote address for conference on "Utopia, Gender, and Human Rights,"
Vienna, 12 December 2007).
67. For reflections on the agency exercised by peasants through evasion or inaction,
see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven,
1985).
68. On "normality" and Nazism, see Ian Kershaw, "'Normality' and Genocide: The
Problem of Historicization," The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation
(London, 1993); Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany; Harvey, Women in the Nazi East; Alf Liidtke,
The History of Everyday Life (Princeton, 1995).
69. See Klaus Michel Mailman and Gerhard Paul, "Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omni
present? Gestapo, Society, and Resistance," in David F. Crew, ed., Nazism and German Society,
1933-1945 (New York, 1994); Gellately, Backing Hitler.
114 Slavic Review
ist press. It was not a mark of innocence. During and after World War II
in Germany, indifference may have signaled a desire for "normality" and
privacy in the aftermath of Total War, ambivalence about Nazi policies,
or a conscious or unconscious decision to turn a blind eye to the perse
cution of others while benefiting from racial plunder.70 The example of
Nazi Germany is extreme, but in twentieth-century Europe, indifference
to politics has rarely been entirely apolitical and has instead carried mul
tiple possible political meanings.
This means resisting the temptation to either romanticize or pathol
ogize nationally indifferent populations. It would be easy to transform
so-called hermaphrodites or amphibians from the enemies of nationalist
pedagogues to the heroes of multicultural fantasies. But in a world of na
tional hierarchies, identity cards, and national ascription, many were sim
ply talking back to nationalists in nationalist terms. The more states and
nationalist movements obsessed over fixing and ranking national commu
nities, making such affiliation the basis for citizenship and social rights,
the more individuals stood to gain by being able to move easily between
those communities.
Transnationalism and Indifference
The emerging field of transnational history intersects with the project of

historicizing national indifference, in that both reflect a movement to un
cover the blind spots of national history.71 The field of transnational his
tory builds upon many intellectual neighbors and predecessors that have
contributed to the gradual decentering of the nation-state in historical
analysis, including comparative history, histoire croisee, transfer history,
postcolonial studies, international history, Atlantic history, and global his
tory.72 For historians of east central Europe, the appeal of transnational
history is almost self-evident, since transnationality has defined the mod
70. On a desire for "normality" after World War II, see Richard Bessel and Dirk Schu
mann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the
1940s and 1950s (New York, 2003).
71. On the theoretical concerns of transnationalism, see in particular Jiirgen Oster
hammel and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational: Deutschland in der Welt,
1871-1914 (Gottingen, 2004); Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking America in a Global Age
(Berkeley, 2002); Philipp Ther, "Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Compara
tive History of Germany and Europe," Central European History 36, no. 1 (2003): 45-73;
Ute Frevert, "Europeanizing Germany's Twentieth Century," History and Memory: Studies in
Representation of the Past 17, no. 1/2 (Fall 2005): 87-116; Patricia Clavin, "Defining Trans
nationalism," Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (November 2005): 421-39; David
Blackbourn, "Europeanizing German History: A Comment," Bulletin of the German Histori
cal Institute 36 (Spring 2005): 25-32.
72. On histoire croisee and transfer history, see Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels
franco-allemands (Paris, 1999); Benedicte Zimmermann and Michael Werner, eds., De la
comparaison a Thistoire croisee (Paris, 2004). For a discussion of the differences between his
toire croisee and cultural transfer, see Haupt and Kocka, "Comparative History," 31-33.
For an introduction to global history in theory and practice, see Bruce Mazlish and Akira
Iriye, eds., The Global History Reader (New York, 2005).
ern history of eastern Europe. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

eastern Europe has been an ample source of migrants and refugees, a
source of raw materials and a market for European goods, occupied by
several different regimes, and part of several different empires and states.
Countless individuals who lived between Germany and Russia spoke more
than one language, were citizens of more than one state, and identified
with more than one national community over the course of their own
lifetimes. Many historians of east central Europe have therefore long been
thinking transnationally about topics such as empire, borderlands, occu
pations, migration, and ethnic cleansing.
Transnational history also seems to offer the seductive possibility of
writing about something otherXhan nationalism?the ideas, people, goods,
and international organizations that circulated in eastern Europe with
little attention to the borders of nation-states. In this sense, transnational
history appears to offer a refreshing alternative to the concept of national
indifference.73 After all, while claiming to subvert or challenge national
categories, national indifference ultimately puts the nation right back at
the center of the agenda, albeit in a negative form. Transnational history,
by contrast, has the potential to offer a new set of thematic concerns and
a new window on old concerns.
But transnational history also carries the danger of assuming the nation
as its starting point.74 The concept of national indifference can actually
help historians to avoid this pitfall. Challenging the nationalist assump
tions that shape the history and memory of Europe will require more than
simply changing scales or seeking out institutions, identities, or processes
that appear to float above, below, or across the borders of nation-states
(migration, trade, empire, tourism, religion, localism, and regionalism, to
name a few). In fact, it will be challenging to write transnational histories
that do not presume the existence of national collectives unless we first
take national indifference seriously.
Historians of modern Germany, for example, have expressed growing
interest in the history of Germany's fraught relations with eastern Europe
and in the history of Germans in the east. This Drang nach Osten in Ger
man historiography has several sources. In addition to a broader interest
in transnational history, it reflects efforts to situate the Holocaust more
deeply in its east European context.75 Thanks to the influence of colo
nial and postcolonial studies, Germanists have also begun to confront
Germany's longer-term imperialist agenda in east central Europe. Eastern
73. For an example of a history that challenges national frameworks by writing the
history of "something else," see Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Aus
trian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
74. On the dangers of transnational history, see C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew
Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, "AHR Conversation: On Trans
national History," American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1442.
75. See, for example, Omer Bartov, "Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide, "Journal
of Modern History 80, no. 3 (September 2008): 557-93; Timothy Snyder, "Holocaust: The
Ignored Reality," New York Review of Books 56, no. 12 (16 July 2009).
116 Slavic Review
Europe, David Blackbourn has argued, is "Germany's India or Algeria"

and is ripe for transnational study.76 Looking eastward has produced fresh
perspectives on the transnational dimensions of German history, on the
shifting contours of German nationalism and citizenship, and on the ori
gins and dynamics of Nazi racial politics.
But the turn eastward also has its pitfalls. Namely, it is a mistake to
assume that German-speakers in modern east central Europe were a
bounded, clearly identified group, that they had common "German" in
terests, that they necessarily oppressed or dominated their Slavic neigh
bors or that they even saw themselves as different from those neighbors.
We cannot write history from multiple "sides" without questioning how
those "sides" were first constituted.77 By raising the fundamental question
of who was a German and who was a Slav, the concept of national indiffer
ence can help historians to write transnational histories that successfully
challenge nationalist assumptions.
The concept of national indifference might also serve as a useful tool
in migration studies. Debates about the experiences of migrants could be
reconceptualized using the concept of national indifference rather than
such terms as assimilation, acculturation, or hybridity that assume preexisting
national loyalties and coherent group identities. In addition, historians
could examine how experiences of migration and displacement served to
accentuate or eradicate national indifference. Recent scholarship on dis
placement in Europe after World War II reflects this approach, combin
ing a transnational methodology with attention to national indifference.
Much of this research demonstrates that experiences of displacement ac
tually furthered the nationalization of east European populations, some
times through official categorization by international relief organizations,
which organized refugees along national lines in order to facilitate re
patriation.78 In 1951, Hannah Arendt observed that "not a single group
of refugees or Displaced Persons has failed to develop a fierce, violent,
76. See Blackbourn/'Europeanizing German History," 25-32. On Germany in the

east, see Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and
German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, Eng., 2000); Liulevicius, The German Myth
of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford, 2009); Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Cul
ture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005); Annemarie Sammartino,
The Impossible Border: Germany, Migration, and the East, 1914-1922 (Ithaca, 2010); Harvey,
Women and the Nazi East; Mazower, Hitlers Empire, Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Em
pire, 1884-1945 (Durham, 2001).
77. For more on the turn eastward in German history, see Tara Zahra, "Looking East:
East Central European 'Borderlands' in German History and Historiography," History
Compass 3, no. 1 (January 2005): 1-23.
78. On the nationalization of displaced persons and refugees, see Avinoam J. Patt,
Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Detroit,
2009); Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
(Princeton, 2007); Pamela Ballinger, "Borders of the Nation, Borders of Citizenship: Ital
ian Repatriation and the Definition of National Identity after World War II," Comparative
Studies in Society and History 49, no. 3 (July 2007): 713-41; Wolfgang Jacobsmeyer, Vom
Zwangsarbeiter zum heimatlosen Auslander: Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945-51
(Gottingen, 1985); Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology
among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995); Tara Zahra, "Lost Children: Displace
group consciousness and to clamor for rights as?and only as?Poles or

Jews or Germans, etc."79 Postwar refugees were responding to their own
experiences of persecution and displacement during World War II as well
as to the legal structures created by the Allies after the war. Individual
rights to asylum, to repatriation or resettlement abroad, and to food and
housing were all distributed hierarchically based on nationality, in spite of
the universalizing discourse of "human rights."
But national indeterminacy and imposture did not disappear in Eu
rope's Displaced Persons' camps. Many refugees deliberately obscured or
falsified their nationality in order to escape forcible repatriation to the
Soviet Union, evade imprisonment for collaboration with the Nazis, or
simply to gain a favored status for emigration schemes, housing, or food
rations. In the early 1950s, for example, Jewish agencies complained that
many Jewish refugees from Poland or Romania in postwar Austria were
forced to pose as Sudeten Germans in order to expedite their requests
for citizenship, housing, and social rights, due to ongoing antisemitism in
Austrian society. Legions of Soviet citizens who wished to escape forcible
repatriation meanwhile posed as Poles in Europe's postwar displaced per
son camps, sometimes with a wink and a nod from sympathetic translators
and Allied authorities.80 Government officials in Austria were also suspi
cious of the national loyalties of expellees. A 1947 memo from the Aus
trian Ministry of Interior cautioned, "It is not always easy for the Austrian
authorities to decide in individual cases if they are dealing with an ethnic
German or an ethnic Slovene from Yugoslavia, because both the Volks
deutsche and the Slovenes speak both languages equally well, or equally
poorly, and they can therefore claim to be Germans or Slovenes according
to their own needs."81
National ambiguity also confounded the international humanitarian
workers faced with unaccompanied displaced children after World War II.
In order to classify children according to their "correct" nationality, they
resorted to extensive interviews with so-called lost children who had for
gotten their own names and origins. One United Nations' social worker
elaborated in a 1946 report:
The question of nationality is most perplexing in the cases of children
coming from Silesia because of the mixed German and Polish popula
tion in that area before the war. In the absence of identity papers less de
pendable factors must be relied upon in determining nationality.... Our
most skillful interviewers report that the children's psychological reac
merit, Family and Nation in Postwar Europe," Journal of Modern History 81, no. 1 (March
2009): 45-86.
79. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), 292.
80. Memorandum of Agudas Israel, 25 June 1953, Carton 11, 12U-34, Bundesminis
terium des Innern, Archiv der Republik, Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna. On Soviet
displaced persons and national imposture, see Andrew Janco, "The Soviet Refugees in
Postwar Europe and the Cold War, 1945-51" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010).
81. "Das Problem der D.P.s in Osterreich," 29 April 1947, 5, Carton 35, II-pol 1947,
Bundesministerium fur auswartige Angelegenheiten, Archive der Republik, Osterrei
chisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna.
118 Slavic Review
tions to questions about nationality are significant. The unquestionably

German child usually replies freely and promptly. The response of the
non-German child, though he says he is German, is often characterized
by embarrassment, hesitation, confusion, or frantic appeal to a member
of the staff for help in making reply.82
No one considered the possibility that a Silesian child might have been
genuinely confused about his or her national affiliation. Only in excep
tional cases was the ambiguity of national belonging officially recognized,
as in Italy, where International Refugee Organization officials created the
category of "Undetermined Venezia Giulians" to designate refugees in
Italy from Venezia Giulia with indeterminate national loyalties. Ballinger
argues that the work of classification in postwar refugee camps suggests
that the history of national indeterminacy and indifference in east central
Europe did not simply end with ethnic cleansing in 1945.83 This research
on postwar displacement also illustrates the ways in which the history of
national indifference intersects with the history of migration, as the move
ment of people across borders exposed the limits of nationalization and
prompted state authorities to confront and classify nationally indifferent
populations. Ethnic cleansing in eastern Europe was ultimately an effort
to eradicate national indifference as much as an attempt to eliminate na
tional minorities.
National indifference has a long and colorful history in modern Eu
rope. It appeared on the scene as an imagined noncommunity in the mid
nineteenth century, called into being by nationalists themselves through
their own paranoia. Like the imagined community of the nation, the
imagined noncommunity of the nationally indifferent is best understood
in its local contexts, since both its form and meaning transformed across
time and space. Indifference has its own histories. But the concept of na
tional indifference may ultimately be most productive as a starting point
for scholarly research rather than as a peculiarity or exception requiring
explanation. Rather than assuming that people in Europe belonged to
nations, perhaps we should assume indifference and investigate how and
why people allied themselves politically, culturally, and socially from the
ground up.
More broadly, the study of indifference offers a promising strategy for
problematizing preconceived relationships between individual subjectiv
ity and collective affiliation. Although I have focused on national indiffer
ence in east central Europe, political indifference, gender indifference,
class indifference, and religious indifference may also prove fruitful cat
egories for scholars interested in the history of subjectivity, loyalty, and
classification. Indifference may also help social and cultural historians to
better integrate the history of individuals who seem to be on the margins
of elite politics into their analysis. Indifference, far from being the binary
82. Removal of Children (Polish) from the St. Joseph's Kinderheim, 14 October 1946,
File 16, S-0437- 0013, United Nations Archive, New York; see also W. C. Huyssoon, "Who Is
This Child," Sample of an Interview with an Unaccompanied Child, File 11, S-0437- 0013,
United Nations Archive.
83. Ballinger, "Borders of the Nation," 713-41.
opposite of political engagement, a reflection of popular ignorance, or a

premodern relic, was often a response to modern mass politics. As histo
rians, we cannot be indifferent to the nation-state and its impact on mod
ern history. But we can attempt to capture those moments when its grip
on both the individual and society was less than absolute. In the process,
perhaps we can finally rescue the citizens of Habsburg central Europe
from the "prison of nations" once and for all.

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Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis

Author(s): Tara Zahra

Last Christmas I convinced my father to dig up some old family letters.

Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010)

cently made national indifference or ambiguity in eastern Europe a cen

Indifference and the Denationalization of History

Historians of Europe have mostly attempted to dethrone the nation

More recently, historians of regionalism, localism, and borderlands in

national groups are imagined communities, they have continued to write

aspirations and popular responses to their demands often propelled po

14. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 343.

Upper Silesia, promoted by a nationally indifferent clergy, nonetheless

difference. Recent research by Terry Martin, Francine Hirsch, Yuri Slez

Lodz, vehemently rejected pan-Germanism in a speech in March 1919,

and sometimes expelled as "nationally labile opportunists" or simply as

far more than a thorn in the side of nationalist agitators. In an age of na

51. Generalreferat fur politische Angelegenheiten, Prague, 12 August 1939. Carton

ference rests solidly on this constructivist scholarship, which first insisted

"national minorities" as self-evident communities.62 As with identity, it is

"imagined communities" risk remaining imprisoned within nationalists'

overestimates the political consciousness and commitments of ordinary

Transnationalism and Indifference

The emerging field of transnational history intersects with the project of

ern history of eastern Europe. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

Europe, David Blackbourn has argued, is "Germany's India or Algeria"

76. See Blackbourn/'Europeanizing German History," 25-32. On Germany in the

group consciousness and to clamor for rights as?and only as?Poles or

tions to questions about nationality are significant. The unquestionably

opposite of political engagement, a reflection of popular ignorance, or a

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