The author of this posthumously published book, Stephen M. Thomas, was a distinguished political consultant at the Council for a Livable World in Washington, DC. After he retired, his passion for history and languages led him to investigate the founding of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic as seen through the lens of the political conflict between Czech and German nationalists. His book offers non-specialists a highly readable political history of the very early years of the First Republic around the conflict between Czech and German nationalist politicians. The chapters then trace political developments through the mid-1930s, where the book ends abruptly because the author died in 2015 before its completion. Most of the text, however, focuses on events and negotiations that took place immediately following World War I. It includes an introduction by the Serb author and politician Predrag Markovic and a short epilogue by the freelance editor Karen Alexander. It was also co-edited posthumously by the Serb novelist and historian Vladimir Pistalo.

The book is clearly a labor of love thanks to the author's obvious fascination for the subject and the vigorous efforts of his survivors to have it published. It offers a good narrative political history for those interested in the often-stormy relationship among German nationalists or between them and Czech nationalists and the emerging institutions of a new Czechoslovak state. Despite its focus on the interwar politics of ethnicity, the book largely leaves out issues of Magyar, Polish, Slovak, or Ukrainian nationalism. Still, it does tell its story with careful attention to events and incidents that are often left out of narratives about the founding of Czechoslovakia, especially its detailed investigation of the four German provinces in Bohemia and Moravia that survived for a few short weeks after the fall of the Monarchy. The author cites archival and published sources such as newspapers and pamphlets and frequently quotes the actors he follows. The book also includes one rudimentary map (6) that unfortunately does not illustrate what the text on page 43 claims that it does.

I cannot, however, recommend this book to readers of this journal. In the first place, it suffers from serious problems of scholarship; many of which, I hope, have to do with the early death of its author. At a basic level, the book lacks adequate citations throughout, and its bibliography does not include the most important works on this subject published over the past 40 years in Czech, English, or German. I have to assume that the bibliography was put together after the author's death by the non-specialist editors, but it seems shocking to me that De Gruyter Oldenbourg and the anonymous reviewers who must have evaluated the manuscript for publication did not address this problem. A comparison of the inadequate footnotes with the minimal bibliography suggests that the editors added works by authors whom Thomas himself had not in fact read. How else can the presence of Andrea Orzoff's 2009 Battle for the Castle in the bibliography be explained, even though it is not cited in the book in the discussion of the Castle on page 118 and elsewhere? How else might we also explain the appearance of one article by Jan Křen in the bibliography, for example, while his masterful Konfliktní společenství: Češi a Němci 1780-1918 (1986) is omitted entirely? Moreover, indispensable books and arguments by the scholars Gary Cohen, Mark Cornwall, Peter Haslinger, Peter Heumos, Jeremy King, Nancy Wingfield, Martin Zückert, and above all, Tara Zahra, are completely missing from the notes and the bibliography. These obvious gaps in the bibliography betray serious lacunae in the author's own knowledge and the book's arguments about the history of both the Habsburg Monarchy and the first Czechoslovak Republic. It is irresponsible enough for a press to publish a highly flawed bibliography (why publish a bibliography at all in that case?), but it is another matter entirely for an author to ignore the major arguments and approaches that have transformed this field since the 1980s. The critical arguments of the missing scholars make no appearance. The author was certainly under no obligation to agree with them or even to cite them, but the absence of their ideas compromises the utility of this book.

This is especially the case for the completely unreflective way that Thomas approaches questions of ethnicity or nationhood. He makes no effort to define or describe what he means by the term "ethnic prism" and how this relates to the ongoing processes of nation-building in all camps, especially those of the Czech, German, and Slovak nationalists. There is certainly nothing wrong with writing a political history of nationalists and their parties. But the author's claims go well beyond nationalists, as he too easily elides Czech and German nationalists with "Czechs" and "Germans," to say nothing of "Bohemians" and "Moravians," who are left out of the story altogether. This is regrettable because on occasion Thomas demonstrates intelligent insights into his subjects and their actions. He is also highly critical of the nation-state as an institution, writing that privilege "is inherent in the concept of nation state, the privilege of the dominant nation and the subordinate status of all the others". (63) Ultimately, however, the book remains a political narrative of the kind we might have appreciated in the 1970s before Cohen's groundbreaking work questioned the easy national(ist) identifications historians and political scientists assigned to their subjects. It is certainly not Thomas's fault that the De Gruyter website describes the book in the following highly misleading way: "This book's radical contribution to studies of nationalism and ethnicity is that it juxtaposes German and Czech perspectives of power and oppression as part of the same story." [1] Seriously, De Gruyter? Has this juxtaposition not already been accomplished by many talented historians writing in Czech, English, and German, and whose important work your easy claim renders completely invisible? For shame. Someone should complain.

Note:

[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110749885/html?lang=en (2023-01-14).

Pieter M. Judson