of others, adding a particularist Jewish perspective to the mix. Stronger on rhetoric than on con... more of others, adding a particularist Jewish perspective to the mix. Stronger on rhetoric than on concrete solutions, he offered no distinctive reform plan of his own beyond an endorsement of the schemes of his great predecessor Adolf Fischhof. Reifowitz displays an assured touch when dealing with Bloch as a minor star in the firmament of Austrian politics. A liberal in the very broadest sense of the term, Bloch was an advocate of "particularistic universalism" (87), in other words, a form of Austrian liberalism divested of the Germanocentric "cultural chauvinism" that marked Austrian liberalism in the late nineteenth century. But Bloch's ideas on ethnic and civic nationalism, together with his insistence on an Austrian identity rooted in ethnicity (the Jews, he felt, were the only "true" Austrians) should also be seen against the background of the various Jewish proposals for political and cultural autonomy in Austria developed by those with a more pronounced nationalist bent, such as Hermann Kadisch—a Fischhof student and devotee—Siegmund Kaznelson, and Max Rosenfeld. Reifowitz ascribes to Bloch a greater degree of influence than is perhaps warranted in asserting that his "understanding of [Jewish] identity became predominant among Austrian Jews during the last twenty-five years of the Monarchy's existence" (161). A central assumption of the book is that schemes for reform derived in large part from ethnic commitments. Reifowitz provides user-friendly summaries of the array of reformist approaches that informed Bloch's thinking, delineating their myriad combinations of ethnic federalism and provincial autonomy. Bloch, however, stood alone in his belief that a multinational state was "morally superior" to a homogeneous nation-state (162). Austria was therefore an end in and of itself, its diversity the key to its potential success rather than its Achilles' heel, but also better for the Jews, a vulnerable minority unable to find a comfortable home in the nation-state. For Bloch too, then, ethnicity and reform dovetailed happily. "So-called Jewish interests," he wrote, "are in every way congruent with the vital interests of the Fatherland" (131). Like many Jews, Bloch remained a "true believer" in Austria, notwithstanding his increasing pessimism in the years leading up to World War I (163). Beset by anxieties about anti-Semitism and radical nationalism—Karl Lueger's Christian Socialism was a particular bugbear—he maintained a steadfast belief that Austria, or at least his ideal version thereof, was the best available alternative. Given the fate of Jews and other minorities in the successor states in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps we ought not to judge him too harshly on that score.
Rarely does a title capture the spirit of a book as eloquently as here: Alexander Maxwell has pro... more Rarely does a title capture the spirit of a book as eloquently as here: Alexander Maxwell has produced an intelligent, irreverent, idiosyncratic, and in his own words ironic narrative about the birth and ultimate success of Slovak nationalism, defined as the belief in a "Slovak nation" speaking a "Slovak language." His argument is interesting throughout, despite some inaccuracies and slips that could easily have been addressed within the author's own framework of interpretation. Maxwell places himself firmly within modernization theory's "peasants into patriots" framework. But rather than studying why this transformation happened, he takes the process of nationalization for granted and focuses on the many different conceptualizations of "the nation" circulating in the nineteenth and early twentieth century among the Slavic speaking elites of what is today Slovakia. Instead of linearity and teleology, Maxwell highlights contingency and failure in order to argue that "the historical forces that caused Slovak particularist nationalism were unintended consequences of other nationalist movements" (185). The author approaches his sources with considerable sophistication, taking the discourses and wording of his actors deeply seriously as testimonies to their world views and horizons of expectation-ideas and schemes that are often at odds with contemporary categories, or with how things turned out. When Ľudovít Štúr in 1843 in a pamphlet justifying the new orthography he had just designed called Slovak a "dialect" (nárečja) and Slovaks a "tribe" (kmen), Maxwell insists that these words were not chosen randomly and asks why Štúr used them, rather than simply presuming-as scholars have been prone to do-that what Štúr "really meant" was that the Slovaks formed a separate "nation" with its own "language." Such careful philological hermeneutics gives his reasoning considerable authority. Maxwell also seeks to sharpen our tools for analyzing arguments about language and nationality by developing a terminology capable of singling out the different brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Bohemia-Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder
Od svého založení v roce 1971 až do administrativního rozpuštění v roce 1984 a zatčení vedoucích ... more Od svého založení v roce 1971 až do administrativního rozpuštění v roce 1984 a zatčení vedoucích členů v roce 1986 byla Jazzová sekce Svazu hudebníků ČSR významným činitelem v kulturním životě „normalizovaného“ Československa. Jako ofi ciálně uznávané organizaci se Jazzové sekci podařilo vytvořit prostor pro řadu kulturních aktivit jinak nepodporovaných, nebo dokonce netolerovan ých státními úřady. Organizovala koncerty a festivaly a byla agilním vydavatelem časopisů a knih k rozmanité paletě kulturních témat. Sekce dokonce našla způsob, jak se vyhnout cenzuře a legálně vydat spoustu jinak zakázaných autorů a děl včetně románu Bohumila Hrabala Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále v roce 1982. Díky svému legálnímu postavení mohla Jazzová sekce pro nik nout k mnohem širšímu publiku, než bylo pro hudební underground nebo samizdatové nakladatele možné. Přes deset let učila Jazzová sekce desítky amatérů, jak pracovat profesionálně a nezávisle ve sféře kultury, a nabízela tisícům lidí přístup...
of others, adding a particularist Jewish perspective to the mix. Stronger on rhetoric than on con... more of others, adding a particularist Jewish perspective to the mix. Stronger on rhetoric than on concrete solutions, he offered no distinctive reform plan of his own beyond an endorsement of the schemes of his great predecessor Adolf Fischhof. Reifowitz displays an assured touch when dealing with Bloch as a minor star in the firmament of Austrian politics. A liberal in the very broadest sense of the term, Bloch was an advocate of "particularistic universalism" (87), in other words, a form of Austrian liberalism divested of the Germanocentric "cultural chauvinism" that marked Austrian liberalism in the late nineteenth century. But Bloch's ideas on ethnic and civic nationalism, together with his insistence on an Austrian identity rooted in ethnicity (the Jews, he felt, were the only "true" Austrians) should also be seen against the background of the various Jewish proposals for political and cultural autonomy in Austria developed by those with a more pronounced nationalist bent, such as Hermann Kadisch—a Fischhof student and devotee—Siegmund Kaznelson, and Max Rosenfeld. Reifowitz ascribes to Bloch a greater degree of influence than is perhaps warranted in asserting that his "understanding of [Jewish] identity became predominant among Austrian Jews during the last twenty-five years of the Monarchy's existence" (161). A central assumption of the book is that schemes for reform derived in large part from ethnic commitments. Reifowitz provides user-friendly summaries of the array of reformist approaches that informed Bloch's thinking, delineating their myriad combinations of ethnic federalism and provincial autonomy. Bloch, however, stood alone in his belief that a multinational state was "morally superior" to a homogeneous nation-state (162). Austria was therefore an end in and of itself, its diversity the key to its potential success rather than its Achilles' heel, but also better for the Jews, a vulnerable minority unable to find a comfortable home in the nation-state. For Bloch too, then, ethnicity and reform dovetailed happily. "So-called Jewish interests," he wrote, "are in every way congruent with the vital interests of the Fatherland" (131). Like many Jews, Bloch remained a "true believer" in Austria, notwithstanding his increasing pessimism in the years leading up to World War I (163). Beset by anxieties about anti-Semitism and radical nationalism—Karl Lueger's Christian Socialism was a particular bugbear—he maintained a steadfast belief that Austria, or at least his ideal version thereof, was the best available alternative. Given the fate of Jews and other minorities in the successor states in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps we ought not to judge him too harshly on that score.
Rarely does a title capture the spirit of a book as eloquently as here: Alexander Maxwell has pro... more Rarely does a title capture the spirit of a book as eloquently as here: Alexander Maxwell has produced an intelligent, irreverent, idiosyncratic, and in his own words ironic narrative about the birth and ultimate success of Slovak nationalism, defined as the belief in a "Slovak nation" speaking a "Slovak language." His argument is interesting throughout, despite some inaccuracies and slips that could easily have been addressed within the author's own framework of interpretation. Maxwell places himself firmly within modernization theory's "peasants into patriots" framework. But rather than studying why this transformation happened, he takes the process of nationalization for granted and focuses on the many different conceptualizations of "the nation" circulating in the nineteenth and early twentieth century among the Slavic speaking elites of what is today Slovakia. Instead of linearity and teleology, Maxwell highlights contingency and failure in order to argue that "the historical forces that caused Slovak particularist nationalism were unintended consequences of other nationalist movements" (185). The author approaches his sources with considerable sophistication, taking the discourses and wording of his actors deeply seriously as testimonies to their world views and horizons of expectation-ideas and schemes that are often at odds with contemporary categories, or with how things turned out. When Ľudovít Štúr in 1843 in a pamphlet justifying the new orthography he had just designed called Slovak a "dialect" (nárečja) and Slovaks a "tribe" (kmen), Maxwell insists that these words were not chosen randomly and asks why Štúr used them, rather than simply presuming-as scholars have been prone to do-that what Štúr "really meant" was that the Slovaks formed a separate "nation" with its own "language." Such careful philological hermeneutics gives his reasoning considerable authority. Maxwell also seeks to sharpen our tools for analyzing arguments about language and nationality by developing a terminology capable of singling out the different brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Bohemia-Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder
Od svého založení v roce 1971 až do administrativního rozpuštění v roce 1984 a zatčení vedoucích ... more Od svého založení v roce 1971 až do administrativního rozpuštění v roce 1984 a zatčení vedoucích členů v roce 1986 byla Jazzová sekce Svazu hudebníků ČSR významným činitelem v kulturním životě „normalizovaného“ Československa. Jako ofi ciálně uznávané organizaci se Jazzové sekci podařilo vytvořit prostor pro řadu kulturních aktivit jinak nepodporovaných, nebo dokonce netolerovan ých státními úřady. Organizovala koncerty a festivaly a byla agilním vydavatelem časopisů a knih k rozmanité paletě kulturních témat. Sekce dokonce našla způsob, jak se vyhnout cenzuře a legálně vydat spoustu jinak zakázaných autorů a děl včetně románu Bohumila Hrabala Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále v roce 1982. Díky svému legálnímu postavení mohla Jazzová sekce pro nik nout k mnohem širšímu publiku, než bylo pro hudební underground nebo samizdatové nakladatele možné. Přes deset let učila Jazzová sekce desítky amatérů, jak pracovat profesionálně a nezávisle ve sféře kultury, a nabízela tisícům lidí přístup...
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