6/24/2023 0 Comments The space in between reviewsEnvironmentally, Glassheim intertwines the visions of grandeur that Czechoslovakian officials had for the newly repurposed and reconsolidated Sudetenland with the industrialization of the region during what Glassheim labels as “high modernism.” It was the borderland that served as the natural starting place for this new boom in modernization and industrialization, as evidenced in Glassheim’s chapter on the Czechoslovakian town of Most which he labels as the ground zero of postwar borderlands transformation in Czechoslovakia. The most valuable contribution of Glassheim’s work is his incorporation of environmental and medical history into his analysis of the Sudetenland. He demonstrates that this process was a political, environmental, and medical one. Glassheim’s discussion of the redevelopment of the borderlands after the expulsion of the Germans is particularly important. ![]() In so doing, the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland was emptied of its “foreign” inhabitants, and this allowed for Czech reclamation of the region. Between 19, Czechoslovakian authorities sought to de-Germanize and homogenize their nation. After the war, the Czechoslovaks returned the favor. German expansion into the region settled the question during World War II. In the opening chapters of the book, Glassheim recounts the long history of German and Czechoslovakian competition to define the Sudetenland each in its own in nationalistic terms. The Sudetenland had long been a hotspot of contact between the two groups. As a result, according to Glassheim, Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland is a "modern borderland," that is, a now "cleansed" former contact zone.Ī photograph from the tumultuous German-Czech border in 1938 during World War II. An important prerequisite had to be met, however, in order for this land to serve the Czechoslovakian peoples in such a way – the deportation of nearly two million Germans out of Czechoslovakia and into the now divided German state. Still, thinking of the Sudetenland as a borderland gives us a new way of looking at this fraught piece of geography.įor Czechs and Slovaks after the war, the Sudetenland became something of a tabula rasa whereupon their aspirations for the future and their conception of the past could be written. ![]() Glassheim notes that with the end of combat in Europe in 1945, the borderlands of Czechoslovakia were “certainly not the lively ‘contact zones,’ ‘crossroads,’ and ‘fluid transitional spaces’ associated with scholarship on North American border regions.” He also acknowledges that with the onset of the Cold War the borderland was more powerfully divided and less easily traversed. Glassheim recognizes the challenge of bringing this idea developed to understand the colonization of the American West in the 18 th and 19 th centuries to the study of Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. Historian Eagle Glassheim brings the analytic frame of “borderlands” to craft a new conception of the Sudetenland, that space in between Germany and Czechoslovakia. Borders divide borderlands mix things up. ![]() This is an analytic concept historians have used, especially when examining the American West, certain parts of Africa and other places where borders don’t function as a hard separation but as places of cultural interaction. ![]() Europeans might be less familiar with the concept of “borderlands,” however. Across the 20 th century borders have been fought over, drawn and redrawn, and today the “integrity” of those borders in the face of migration and refugees is perhaps the biggest issue tearing at the fabric of European union. Europeans are certainly familiar with national borders.
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