Chad Bryant

The Language of Resistance? Czech Jokes and Joke-telling under Nazi Occupation, 1943-45

This article analyses jokes that Czech informants transmitted to their London government in exile from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a nazi rump state carved from the former Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The first half of the article explores the informants’ claims that jokes constituted a particular form of resistance [odboj] and Czech nationalism in the face of an oppressive and ‘Germanizing’ nazi regime. The second half of the article complicates the informants’ interpretations, suggesting other ways in which we might understand Czech jokes and joke-telling under nazi rule. At times the Czechs’ ‘resistance’ was individual, personal and local, not necessarily part of any collective, national project. Further, jokes show that ambiguity and uncertainty constituted the essence of everyday life for most Czechs in the Protectorate. While challenging the resistance/collaboration and Czech/German dichotomies that have informed history writing on the Protectorate, the article proposes a different approach to the study of everyday life and experience under occupation, and not just in the nazi-controlled Czechlands.

Introduction: Borderlands in a Global Perspective

In the winter of 1716–17 Lady Mary Montague crossed the border dividing the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. As she noted in a letter to Alexander Pope, dated February 12, 1717, decades of conflict between the two empires had caused the belligerents to police the border with particular care. The Habsburg governor and the Ottoman Bas sa negotiated, via courier, a place along the border frontier where Montague and her husband, Richard Wortley, could cross. A convoy of Habsburg soldiers then escorted the couple and their entourage to a small village on the border, where they were met by Ottoman Janissaries and regular soldiers. From there the couple traveled to Belgrade, then heavily fortified and filled with the tension of war. The previous year Prince Eugene of Savoy had defeated the Grand Vizier Damat Ali Pasha’ two hundred thousand-strong army near the spot where Montague had crossed into the Ottoman Empire. Eugene of Savoy had now set his sights on Belgrade, hich he successfully captured a year after Montague’ journey from England to Constantinople had ended.

Strolling the Romantic City: Gardens, Panoramas, and Middle-Class Elites in Early Nineteenth-Century Prague

This chapter examines promenading and strolling among Prague’s middling classes in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Using topographies, guidebooks and lithographs, Bryant argues that walking challenged long-established ideas that nobles, the clergy and burghers should enjoy privileges denied to the general population. Promenading signalled the end of the old order and the emergence of a city increasingly dominated by a new class of civil servants, traders, intelligentsia and industrialists who embraced liberal ideas. Second, walking atop or beyond the walls challenged notions of Prague as a closed city whose residents lived within a self-contained, clearly-demarcated world. Standing atop the city’s surrounding hills, emerging elites imagined Prague as an urban space in harmony with its natural surroundings.

Introduction: Modern Walks

In the introduction to this volume of essays, Bryant, Burns and Readman provide an extensive overview of nineteenth-century walking practices, and the meanings attached to these practices. They also offer an agenda-setting critique of the scholarly literature on walking. As the editors show, much previous work has focused on the idea of the ‘Romantic Walk’ in particular, with scholars—particularly historians—having given relatively little attention to many other walking practices. As the introduction sets out, Walking Histories is intended to correct this oversight. It suggests boldly that once historians place walking—of various kinds—at the heart of their analyses, important new perspectives on themes central to the ‘long nineteenth century’ emerge.

After Nationalism? Urban History and East European History

Urban history in our field has taken many different forms in the past few decades. Many such works, no doubt, have drawn great inspiration from scholars outside our area specialization. Many, however, have looked within our area specialization for inspiration, thus giving urban histories of our region several peculiar characteristics. The first part of this article discusses how urban historians have provided new perspectives on a topic long dear to Eastern Europeanist hearts—nationalism. Here the article looks at the ways in which Gary Cohen’s Politics of Ethnic Survival has influenced how historians have studied nationalism and the city. The second part will briefly survey other forms of urban history that have predominated within the field, many of which recall the questions and approaches first found in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-siècle Vienna. The final part concludes with some thoughts about what the rise of urban history among Eastern Europeanists might mean for the future our field.

Into an Uncertain Future: Railroads and Vormärz Liberalism in Brno, Vienna, and Prague

On the morning of 7 July 1839 , three trains operated by the Habsburg monarchys first steam railroad company, the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn, arrived at Brno/Brunn, the largest city in Moravia. As one local newspaper correspondent wrote, throngs of onlookers first “caught sight of the smoking locomotive with its line of carriages in quick flight.” In little time the first of three trains from Vienna pulled into the station. “With speed like the wind,” it had covered the roughly 130 kilometers from the imperial capital to Brno in just four and a half hours. The other two trains arrived shortly thereafter. Some of the trains passengers wandered through the city. Prominent state and local officials hosted several notable visitors, including the railroad companys main financial backer, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, and his leading engineers.