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Changing Places
Society, Culture, and Territory in the Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870-1946
By Caitlin E. Murdock The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2010 University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11722-2
Chapter One
Birth of a Borderland
"I still see the great open place in the forest, ringed with vast spruce trees, where we were told that we had crossed the border," wrote twenty-six-year-old Hans Christian Andersen after his 1831 trip to Saxony and Bohemia. Andersen was impressed that a state border, an institution that stood out impressively on maps, appeared invisible-almost irrelevant-on the ground. Had Andersen looked, he might have found one of the stone markers that identified the political frontier then as they do today. But by gazing at the forest around him, rather than hunting for stones among tree roots, Andersen discovered what local people already knew-that nineteenth-century Central European political borders were of limited relevance to the people who lived along them.
Until the middle to late nineteenth century, international boundaries played little role in most peoples' daily lives. Life centered on the village-expanded perhaps by occasional trips to a provincial market town. In the first half of the century, a variety of barriers impeded the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Austria still required people to carry internal passports for domestic travel. The northern German states, including Saxony, eased internal restrictions on their own citizens' movement in the early nineteenth century, but Bohemian travelers needed permits to travel within Saxony. Until the 1830s and 1840s, most German states still required citizens to have passports to leave their territories. For those who traveled regularly-merchants, peddlers, journeymen, bargemen-crossing international boundaries meant paying tariffs and showing papers. But as strangers had to register with the police in every town where they stayed, such controls were by no means peculiar to the frontier. For those who did not have to use the main roads, border controls were eminently avoidable. Peddlers and smugglers (often one and the same) crossed the "green border" on back roads and forest paths, bypassing the forces of law and order.
The forces policing the borders were not especially formidable. Gendarmes and customs agents lived where they worked-so they knew their neighbors. The Saxon folklorist Curt M|ller-Lvbau observed that the nineteenth-century border was rigid "only to the superficial eye." The state boundary was part of the local landscape and rarely an object of fear. In his stories about frontier life before World War I, Franz Rvsler recalled a Saxon border guard who prevailed on local boys to bring him beer from the neighboring Bohemian pub, pretending not to know where they got it. The same boys used the border gate as a slide, and when "the old bear ... was in a good mood, he let the youths sneak over the border in the evening." Similarly, the Bohemian migrant worker Wenzel Holek described crossing the border many times in the 1870s and 1880s without encountering frontier officials. The one time he mentioned being stopped, much to his surprise, the guards wanted to fumigate his clothing because of an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease. With that done, they sent him on his way.
Before the second half of the nineteenth-century, most Saxon and Austrian citizens never encountered the frontier. Those who did cross or lived along it knew the rules and how to avoid them. But the border was only one of many places where they ran into state restrictions. It played little part in debates about state identity, government roles, or citizens' rights. Unlike many Central European borders, the boundary between Saxony and Bohemia was remarkably stable. Saxony and Habsburg Austria, of which Bohemia was part after 1526, had first put up border markers in 1534. The last major revision of the border had been in 1635, when Saxony acquired the Oberlausitz from Bohemia. By the time the German Empire was founded in 1871, the border's physical location was well established. Saxon and Bohemian officials cared that the frontier was policed and that tariffs were collected. They met periodically to review policies and maintain border markers. Routine cooperation characterized their mutual dealings.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the character of the territories adjacent to the Saxon-Bohemian political frontier changed dramatically. Small-scale cross-border contact had long been integral to Saxon and Bohemian frontier life. Smugglers had eluded customs officials, manufacturers had shared markets and raw materials, and political and religious dissidents had crossed to escape arrest. But between the 1870s and 1914, cross-border contact grew at an unprecedented rate, creating a new sense of regional community. The border receded further from prominence as the German and Austrian economies leapt into the industrial age, as legal and economic changes unleashed swarms of migrants and travelers, and as international markets and modern transportation networks burgeoned. Frontier regions became zones of opportunity.
During this period, the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands emerged as a social, economic, and political dynamic with territorial dimensions. They were part of a rapid proliferation of overlapping spaces in which Saxons, Bohemians, and Europeans in general understood their lives in the late nineteenth century. Central governments became more prominent in regional administration; mass mobility made people view local communities through the lens of broader experience; nationalists promoted visions of nationally delineated social space and political territory; regional leaders rethought their regions' relationships to states, nations, and European communities; and expanded foreign economic markets made industrial producers and regional officials imagine their communities in an increasingly global context.
This proliferation neither pitted different territorial conceptions and allegiances against each other nor produced tidy, predictable hierarchies. Rather, they offered historical actors multiple, overlapping ways in which to understand the spatial dimensions of their lives. Someone could be Austrian, Bohemian, Czech, a borderland resident, and an international industrial producer simultaneously, with each identity implying connection to a social and physical geography. Sometimes, one territorial context outweighed the others or even appeared at odds with another-forcing people to choose. Historical actors often disagreed about the relative importance of different affiliations. But for the most part, frontier people consciously lived their lives at the intersection of these overlapping places. The borderlands became a place in their own right-intersecting with but never fully corresponding to the states and administrative regions the border defined. But they also became representative of the many interconnected territories and communities that defined modern Central European societies at the turn of the century. They were a microcosm in which the relationships among state, local, national, and transnational communities were most apparent and most volatile. They were a product and an impetus of the sweeping changes remaking European societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, few people in frontier towns, or central governments talked about "borderlands" before World War I. They recognized a dynamic. Only later did they decide it should be labeled, mapped, and defended.
The Physical Landscape
In 1870, the Saxon-Bohemian border extended, as it had since 1635 and still does today, from roughly Zittau and Hradek nad Nisou/Grottau in the east to near Bad Elster and Aš/Asch in the west. For much of its length, the border runs along mountains, broken only by the Elbe River valley. Three distinct landscapes characterize the Saxon-Bohemian border (today that between Germany and the Czech Republic).
Along the western two-thirds of the border lie two mountain ranges: the Elstergebirge/Halštrovski hory and the much longer Erzgebirge or Krušni hory. These mountains divide the Bohemian plain to the south from the increasingly flat lands of northern Germany that stretch from central Saxony to the North Sea. The German and Czech names Erzgebirge and Krušni hory mean "ore mountains," reflecting the area's rich mineral deposits, which first drew silver miners in the Middle Ages and later yielded tin, iron, cobalt, lignite, and, in the twentieth century, uranium.
Rocky, with long winters, the mountains are bad for agriculture. Since the early modern period, the mountain people have been miners and craftspeople rather than farmers. The region's mineral wealth and, later, its industries encouraged people to find ways in and out of the mountains. As a result, people in the mountains and foothills stayed in contact with the adjoining lowlands, even shaping their development, enabling highlanders to export their goods and to import food and raw materials.
At the eastern edge of the Erzgebirge, the Elbe River cuts across the frontier. One of Europe's great rivers, the Elbe has connected the Central European interior to the Atlantic Ocean for centuries. It has long been a major thoroughfare for people and goods in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands as well. In the late nineteenth century, the sandstone cliffs that flank the river near the border came to be known as the Saxon and Bohemian Switzerlands and attracted tourists from around Central Europe. Even in the twentieth century, the Elbe remained both a thoroughfare, alongside expanding road and railway networks, and a tourist destination.
Finally, the easternmost part of the border runs through the Lusatian Mountains (Lausitzer Gebirge/Luzicki hory), separating the Saxon Oberlausitz from northern Bohemia and running up against the "three-state corner" where German, Czech, and Polish territory meet today. Lower than the Erzgebirge, these mountains form a rolling landscape that nurtured one of Central Europe's earliest textile-producing regions.
In the nineteenth century, the densely populated mountain villages began sprouting factories and smokestacks. Between 1880 and 1900, the rail lines criss-crossing the highlands grew by more than 50 percent. Cities in the foothills had long connected the highlands' mineral wealth and manufacturing to more fertile and hospitable landscapes. But in the nineteenth century, these cities grew dramatically as large-scale industries expanded on highland manufacturing traditions. On the Saxon side, Dresden, Chemnitz, Zwickau, and Plauen were part of a string of foothill cities that housed textile, glass, machine, and chemical production centers. These cities also became portals through which highland goods-bobbin lace, wooden toys, musical instruments-passed on their way to international markets. On the Bohemian side, Liberec/Reichenberg, Zstm nad Labem/ Aussig, Teplice/ Teplitz, Most/Br|x, Chomutov/Komotau, Karlovy Vary/Karlsbad, and Cheb/Eger formed a similar chain. Industrial cities on both sides of the frontier grew enormously in the last two decades of the century. Zstm nad Labem/Aussig, for example, saw a population of around sixteen thousand in 1880 swell to over thirty-nine thousand by 1910, while Most/Br|x grew from ten thousand to over twenty-five thousand in the same period. Such growth created new industrial landscapes. This study treats these cities, which built on the productive traditions of the mountains and connected frontier areas to the interior, as the outer limits of the borderlands.
The geography of the Saxon-Bohemian border suggests a "natural boundary." Yet, although distinct from the flatlands to the north and south, the mountainous borderlands proved no obstacle to humans. The valleys are riddled with villages. Old industrial buildings are reminders of the region's past importance in international markets, and the Elbe still carries cross-border traffic, as it has for centuries. The mountains characterize but do not dictate the political border. As Hans Christian Andersen found, borders, though important in human imagination, are not indelibly inscribed in the natural world.
The Political Landscape
The Saxon-Bohemian border had proved one of Central Europe's most geographically stable boundaries by the nineteenth century. Yet in the century's second half, Central Europeans on the frontier tested new ideas about the meaning and organization of political space, ideas that changed their relationships to their states, their localities, and their cross-border neighbors. By 1900, the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands played a very different political role than they had a century earlier. They became a periphery of the German nation-state, a frontier between adjacent empires, a hotbed of socialist revolution and conservative reaction, and a target for German nationalist agitation. Above all, the borderlands became a zone with its own peculiar political dynamics.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Saxony was a midsized country sandwiched between Central Europe's most powerful states: Prussia and the Habsburg Empire. Bohemia was part of the Habsburg Empire. Both territories were considered part of Germany, a conglomeration of states defined by former membership in the Holy Roman Empire and a shared high culture but home to a variety of political, economic, and religious traditions and a diversity of peoples and languages. Moreover, the balance of power among Central European states, ideas about state sovereignty, and conceptions of what defined Germany were in flux. By midcentury, liberal ideals of constitutional government from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, an expanding economic and professional middle class, and new economic and labor networks sparked calls for political reform. In 1848, those calls spurred a wave of revolutions across Europe. Central European revolutionaries believed that states should be defined in terms of national communities, rather than territorial sovereignty. The German camp convened a parliament in Frankfurt to merge Central Europe's politically fragmented German territories into a modern constitutional nation-state. Concurrently, revolutionaries in Hungary, Croatia, northern Italy, and Prague proposed Hungarian, Italian, and Slavic political autonomy.
Efforts to create national political territories reflected a fundamental rethinking of political and cultural landscapes. They created a new need to define the German, Czech, and Hungarian nations whose representatives claimed a place in Central Europe's political and cultural geography. Two models for a German state emerged in 1848: a Grossdeutschland (Greater Germany) that included both Prussia and Austria and a Kleindeutschland (Small Germany) under Prussian leadership that excluded Austria. Many revolutionaries understood the German nation in terms of the former Holy Roman Empire, a shared German high culture, and the ability of many peoples to assimilate to "Germanness," a view that made the Austrian half of the Habsburg lands seem necessary to any true German state. But 1848 also marked the emergence of the Czech national movement as a political force in Bohemia. Unlike their German counterparts, Czech nationalists argued that ethnolinguistic identity, rather than legal and political precedent, proved that Bohemia was not German at all and did not belong in a German state. Practical political considerations played a role as well. Neither Prussia nor Austria, the two German superpowers, wanted to cede power to the other in a grossdeutsch state. Furthermore, many German reformers eyed the Habsburg east with unease, certain it could neither be separated from Austria nor be considered German territory in political, cultural, or ethnolinguistic terms.
Revolutionaries failed to create a German nation-state or win Czech political autonomy in Bohemia in 1848. Yet they set in motion a vigorous debate about the nature of states, territories, and populations in Central Europe, which continued unbroken until 1946 and has reemerged in European political debates since 1989. In June 1866 and 1867, the debate pitting a grossdeutsch state against a kleindeutsch state came to a head, establishing a formal realignment of Central European political territories that lasted until 1918. Tensions among the German states and Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck's proposals for a new German national order led to war, with Austria-Hungary, Saxony, and the other significant German states on one side and Prussia on the other. When Prussia prevailed, Saxony was incorporated, first, into the Prussian-led North German Confederation and, in 1871, into the newly created German Reich. Austria, however, was barred from the new German nation-state.
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Excerpted from Changing Places by Caitlin E. Murdock Copyright © 2010 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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