Kidnapped souls
Subtitle: national indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948
By: Tara Zahra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
ISBN-13: 9780801446283
Subjects: Children and politics -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- History -- 20th century; Children -- Government policy -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- History -- 20th century; Nationalism -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- History -- 20th century; Germans -- Czech Republic -- Bohemia -- Politics and government -- 20th century; Bohemia (Czech Republic) -- Ethnic relations; Bohemia (Czech Republic) -- Politics and government -- 20th century
Description: "Kidnapped Souls offers a surprising new perspective on Central European politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Austrian, Czech, and German archives, Tara Zahra shows how nationalists in the Bohemian Lands worked to forge political cultures in which children belonged more rightfully to the national collective than to their parents. Through their educational and social activism to fix the boundaries of nation and family, Zahra finds, Czech and German nationalists reveal the set of beliefs they shared about children, family, democracy, minority rights, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Zahra shows that by 1939 a vigorous tradition of Czech-German nationalist competition over children had created cultures that would shape the policies of the Nazi occupation and the Czech response to it. The book's concluding chapter weighs the prehistory and consequences of the postwar expulsion of German families from the Bohemian Lands." "Kidnapped Souls is a significant contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of modern nationalism in Central Europe and an exploration of the ways in which children have been the objects of political contestation when national communities have sought to shape, or to reshape, their futures." --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index
Table of contents: title: "Czech schools for Czech children!"; title: Teachers, orphans, and social workers; title: Warfare, welfare, and the end of empire; title: Reclaiming children for the nation; title: Freudian nationalists and Heimat activists; title: Borderland children and Volkstumsarbeit under Nazi rule; title: Stay-at-home nationalism; title: Reich-loyal Czech nationalism