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The Politics of Belonging: Citizenship, Community, and Territory on the Saxon-Bohemian Frontier, 1918–1924

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2012

Caitlin E. Murdock
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Extract

In February 1919, Theresia Prokop submitted an application for German citizenship to the Bautzen administrative district in Saxony. The application showed that Prokop was originally from northern Bohemia, had lived in Saxony since 1901, and was a “Bohemian” citizen of “German-Austrian” nationality. Further, it noted: “It is her dearest wish to become German.”

Type
Sites of Indifference to Nationhood
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 43 , April 2012 , pp. 59 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2012

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References

1 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9815: 31.

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16 Sammartino, “Defining the Nation in Crisis,” 329.

17 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9816: 23.

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20 In the Kaiserreich, Saxon authorities often seem to have measured “foreignness” by whether someone spoke German rather than of either citizenship or nationality. SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 15855: 47, 52, 61.

21 Torpey, John, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, 112–13Google Scholar; SächsHStA Dresden, Aussenministerium 2707: 11.10.1917.

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23 Alicia Cozine, “A Member of the State: Citizenship Law and Its Application in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938,” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996), 43–45.

24 SächsHStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 1932: 162, 198.

25 SächsHStA Dresden, Aussenministerium 1840: 215.

26 České slovo 26.8.1921; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 11709: 27, 42.

27 SächsHStA Dresden, Aussenministerium 1840: 172. This number did not include the Bautzen administrative district, which likely had 20,000 more.

28 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 11709: 21. Annemarie Sammartino argues that Germany could not control or deport all its resident foreigners, making naturalization of symbolic rather than material importance, but at least some Bohemians in Saxony appear to have faced real consequences for foreign citizenship in the early 1920s. Sammartino, “Culture, Belonging, and the Law: Naturalization in the Weimar Republic,” in Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski, 57–72 (Stanford, CA, 2008), at 62.

29 Gosewinkel, Einbürgerung, 348.

30 SächsHStA Dresden, AH Freiberg 200: 44.

31 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9815: 182, 186, 197, 199.

32 StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 690, 692, 693; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9816: 3, 49, 121.

33 StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 686, 703; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9816: 121.

34 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9815: 50.

35 StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 685; StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 686.

36 SächsHStA Dresden, AH Annaberg 606: 2; SächsHStA Dresden, AH Freiberg 1589: 5, 9; SächsHStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 178: 2.

37 SächsHStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 272.

38 StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 683; StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 684; StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 685; StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 686; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9815: 112.

39 SächsHStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 278: 2.

40 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9815: 115.

41 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9815: 121.

42 StaA Bautzen, AH Bautzen 690.

43 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 184, 186.

44 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 374.

45 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9815: 224.

46 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9711: 54, 59.

47 Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival; King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans; Judson, Guardians of the Nation; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls.

48 Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship, 1.

49 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 2820: 17.11.1928. Annemarie Sammartino has found similar examples of “non-Germans” accepted for naturalizations and ethnic Germans who were rejected. Sammartino, “Culture, Belonging, and the Law,” 66.

50 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9794: 127.

51 Trevisiol, Oliver, Die Einbürgerungspraxis im Deutschen Reich 1871–1945 (Osnabrück, 2006), 49Google Scholar; Gosewinkel, Einbürgern, 341; Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship, 201–2; Sammartino, “Culture, Belonging, and the Law,” 59–60.

52 Kolditz, Gerald, “Der Alldeutsche Verband in Dresden: Antitschechische Aktivitäten zwischen 1895 und 1914,” in Landesgeschichte in Sachsen: Tradition und Innovation, ed. Aurig, Rainer, Herzog, Steffen and Lässig, Simone, 235–48 (Bielefeld, 1997)Google Scholar.

53 Gosewinkel, Einbürgern, 334; Judson, “When Is a Diaspora Not a Diaspora?” 225–26.

54 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9794: 64; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 234; SächsHStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 271:146.

55 For example: SächsHStA Dresden, Aussenministerium 1663: 21–22; Český Vystěhovalec [The Czech Emigrant] 2, no. 3 (15 January 1906): 2Google Scholar; Český Vystěhovalec 1, no. 5 (15 March 1905): 1Google Scholar; Český Vystěhovalec 3, no. 5 (15 March 1907): 1Google Scholar.

56 Judson, “When Is a Diaspora Not a Diaspora?”; Bahm, Karl F., “The Inconveniences of Nationality: German Bohemians, the Disintegration of the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Attempt to Create a Sudeten German Identity,” Nationalities Papers 27, no. 3 (1999): 375–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 For Czechoslovak debates about territory and boundaries, see: Peter Haslinger, “Imagined Territories: Nation und Territorium im tschechischen politische Diskurs 1889–1938” (Habilitationsschrift, University of Freiburg, 2004).

58 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 107, 110.

59 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 110.

60 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 113.

61 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 154.

62 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 190.

63 SächsHStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 271: 134.

64 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9794: 63; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 203, 204, 206, 234.

65 SächsHStA Dresden, AH Schwarzenberg 271: 145–46.

66 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9710: 345; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9711: 59, 338.

67 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 11752: 31.

68 Ibid.

69 On homeland nationalisms, see: Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (New York, 1996), Chap. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Judson, Pieter, “Changing Meanings of ‘German’ in Habsburg Central Europe,” in Germans and the East, ed. Ingrao, Charles and Szabo, Franz, 109–28 (West Lafayette, IN, 2008)Google Scholar.

71 HStAD, MdI 9841; HStAD, MdI 9733: 38; HStAD, AH Schwarzenberg 275: 23; SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9842: 27.8.1933. The law also allowed the revocation of citizenship from emigrés and “undesirables,” native-born German citizens. See: Lehmann, Hans Georg and Hepp, Michael, “Die individuelle Ausbürgerung deutscher Emigranten 1933–1945,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterrricht 38, no. 3 (1987): 163–72Google Scholar.

72 SächsHStA Dresden, MdI 9733: 5.