Václav Houžvicka sheds light on topics associated with central European transitional historical periods and developments too often shrouded in convoluted controversy. His focus on “Mitteleuropa” as a geographical region encompassing contradictory political agendas and territories offers readers a coherent perspective about the Sudeten people cast as perpetual others in a landscape dominated by empires, nations, and singular or enfranchised factions. The book makes an immense contribution to the fields of continental History, Slavic Studies, and Political Science, whose readership should certainly consult it.
Notably the book stands as the most recent and thorough source of information on the Czech-German people, known as “the Sudeten” (Timothy Burcher 1996, Radomir Luža 1964). Houžvicka produced this work through fifteen years of research, involving multiple research endeavors, communications with colleagues, and direct observation (10). The author maintains the historical scope and tone of past work focusing on the Sudeten and includes unique insights into the Sudeten experience during the Cold War. Other contributions made include analytical delineation distinguishing the Pan-German political orientation, as represented by the modern German nation-state, from the multi-ethnic orientation represented by the Habsburg dynasty. Houžvicka makes a contribution with the conceptual framework, bearing theoretical significance and explanatory potential in conjunction with his disciplinary contribution to history.
The book contributes to the discourse on the Sudeten ethnic experience, including reflections on the transition from dictatorships to democratic processes and the moral weight of the quadruple cataclysms of Nazism, World Wars, communism, and the Holocaust. The author challenges any smug attempt to gloss over real historical facts, asking, “… are efforts to ‘get over’ history really having the expected positive and purgative effect for current cooperation between Germans and Czechs and Poles?” (11) The author reminds us in this way that forgetting the past will endanger the public to reemerging conflict and disaster.
Endemic to the perspective presented in the work lays the idea that emancipation from political domination by elites necessitates ethnic consciousness among the Sudeten and an ironic flirtation with Germanization among them (22). This described irony likewise emerges from Houžvicka's account of Austrian authoritarianism, increasingly association with centralization, contained in the nonetheless multi-ethnic history of decentralized Habsburg Austria (24). Rooted in an authentic and detailed understanding of historical developments, Houžvicka explains: “The growing ethnic tension between Czechs and Germans involved revolt against the liberal Austrian state and turned against the Jews, the most conspicuous and vulnerable of the groups that had been benefiting from liberal Constitutionalism” (19). The author further explicates the seemingly perplexing intricacies about Sudeten exceptionalism: “In this context we can see the position of the Sudeten German as one in which their own frame of history became the place where the Austrian and Pan-German frames of history overlapped and interlocked, and where action and attitudes in each of these frames was automatically influenced and affected by action and attitudes in the others” (84).
Despite evident strengths, Czech and Germans 1848–2004 remains verbose and so detail-laden that only the most seriously sworn scholars and students of history will choose to read it without any reservation. For this reason, the book's notes, appendices, maps, graphs, and illustrations help any reader navigate its overwhelming quantity of information. Despite the way it might seem off-putting to the majority of readers, however, it ultimately contributes to an understanding of Sudeten identity, the history of central Europe, and world history in a profound way.
Because the author aligns Czech revivalist thought with Enlightenment thought originating from the French Revolution, the book is a dialectically sound, optimistic, and theoretically engaged text. Despite this philosophical rigor, Czech and Germans 1848–2004 does not capitulate into redundancy or rhetoric. Rather, this work delivers substantive historical material about the Sudeten in their ethnic, geographic, and political contexts. The responsibility the work has in the advancement of ethnic exceptionalism as an explanatory framework remains a question for scholars and students of all said disciplines, as well as for those in any related area of cultural studies or anthropology.
