Zahra.T National - Indifference Slavic - Review 1 2010
Zahra.T National - Indifference Slavic - Review 1 2010
REFERENCES
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Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference
as a Category of Analysis
Tara Zahra
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94 Slavic Review
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.
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Imagined Noncommunities 95
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).
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96 Slavic Review
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).
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Imagined Noncommunities 97
11. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 12.
12. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 43.
13. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 22.
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98 Slavic Review
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
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Imagined Noncommunities 99
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
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100 Slavic Review
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.
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Imagined Noncommunities 101
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.
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102 Slavic Review
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.
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Imagined Noncommunities 103
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.
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104 Slavic Review
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.
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Imagined Noncommunities 105
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).
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106 Slavic Review
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.
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Imagined Noncommunities 107
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.
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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
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Imagined Noncommunities 109
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).
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110 Slavic Review
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Imagined Noncommunities 111
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112 Slavic Review
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
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Imagined Noncommunities 113
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.
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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.
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).
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Imagined Noncommunities 115
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).
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116 Slavic Review
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Imagined Noncommunities 117
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.
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118 Slavic Review
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.
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Imagined Noncommunities 119
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