Jeremy King (shown here with daughter
Josephine in Berlin), MHC assistant professor of history, is writing
a book while on sabbatical this year in Germany. In it, he argues
that national loyalities in Central and Eastern Europe do not stem
from ancient "ethnic" ties, but are rather in large part a modern
invention to serve political means.
Jeremy King, assistant professor of
history, is seeking to overthrow a set of long-reigning assumptions
that pervade the written history of Central and Eastern Europe. In a
book he plans to finish while on sabbatical this year in Germany,
King argues that national loyalties in this conflict-ridden region do
not stem from ancient "ethnic" ties, but are rather in large part a
modern invention to serve political means.
King will support his thesis with a
detailed narrative about day-to-day life between the 1840s and 1940s
in Budejovice (also known as Budweis), a small town located today in
the Czech Republic about 100 miles south of Prague. Until 1918, the
town was a part of the Habsburg Monarchy; it became a part of
Czechoslovakia of the Third Reich during World War II, and of a
communist-controlled Czechoslovakia until that country disintegrated
in 1993. "By focusing on a single town," King says, "I can address
better the central issues of how national sentiment emerges and grows
in individuals. It allows me to avoid the all too common pitfall of
explaining the rise of nationhood by writing only of nations."
In an early chapter, for example, King
shows how the men's choir in Budejovice split during the early 1860s
into two choirs, one German and the other Czech. Yet most members
were bilingual and resisted classification into separate and mutually
exclusive Czech and German sides. Only gradually, over the course of
several succeeding generations, did those members and their
descendants divide into hostile camps, which by World War II had
descended into shocking violence against each other. Between 1945 and
1947 Germans throughout Czechoslovakia found themselves expelled en
masse from the country, forever. The ethnic loyalties that ultimately
divided Budejovice and its choir are a product of nationalism, King
says, not the producer of it.
Almost all previous studies of
nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe, King claims, have assumed
the existence of national sentiment in the populations. At best,
previous studies have tried to explain the rise of nationhood through
a simplistic argument: before the Czech and German nations, there
were Czech and German ethnic groups, out of which the nations then
supposedly emerged in a straightforward process. In the archives,
however, King finds a much more complex story. People speaking only
Czech sometimes became German, and those who spoke both languages
could choose their national identity. A fact that is important to
King's thesis is that they often changed their minds. The people of
Budejovice, says King, did not want to deny an entire side to their
linguistic, social, and psychological composition in order to fit in.
King is writing his book at the
American Academy in Berlin, where he is one of the first Berlin Prize
Fellows. The academy was established recently to revitalize the
transatlantic relationship between the United States and Germany
after the last U.S. military forces withdrew in 1994. The academy is
housed in a large villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee, which King
calls "a beautiful outlying district of Berlin."
During the year King plans to visit
archives in the Czech, Hungarian, and Slovene Republics, as well as
to do some library research in Austria. King is joined in Berlin by
his wife, Katya, their one-year-old daughter, Josephine, and their
dog, Scout.
![[Index]](../index3.gif){kind=small}