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themselves as being possessed by the devil, eaten by
worms, or surrounded by wild animals. Such visions
were accompanied by a sense of "non-being" or feeling
"empty inside," of losing themselves. Similar to figures
in a fairy tale or Bible story, they needed to escape
magical curses and fight temptations in order to regain
their former sense of self and control over their lives.
In a provocative analysis that merits further elaboration, Fiorino suggests that the psychiatric treatments
employed in Santa Maria della Pieta-e-including
bloodletting, purges, and hydrotherapy-reproduced
the same tropes of ridding the body of evil and
submitting the self to the control of the doctor as a
precondition for rejoining the world of the sane. Thus
patient and doctor shared a ritual narrative of temptation, degradation, and redemption that was embedded in cultural assumptions shared by both the educated and popular classes and that shaped the new
science of psychiatry.
Italian historians have produced a rather short
bibliography on the history of insanity and mental
institutions compared to that for northern Europe and
the United States. The best Italian studies have focused on class: that is, the link between poverty and
diseases like alcoholism, pellagra, and syphilis that can
lead to insanity. Fiorino's book, while still discussing
class, marks a new stage in Italian historiography with
its careful analysis of the variable of gender. That this
approach is inspiring a new wave of studies is clear
from the fact that Genesis, the Italian journal of
women's history, chose mental illness as the theme for
its most recent issue. This new Italian research will
enrich comparative studies on the history of psychiatry.
MARY GIBSON
John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
City University of New York
ALON RACHAMIMOV. POWs and the Great War: Captivity
on the Eastern Front. (Legacy of the Great War.) New
York: Berg. 2002. Pp. xii, 259. Cloth $68.00, paper
$22.50.
Captivity was the most common experience of the
Great War shared by approximately 8.5 million combatants. Despite this fact, however, internment has
received only a marginal place in the collective memory of the war. This is especially the case for the
Eastern Front, which for a long time was under the lee
of scholarly interest compared with the countless
studies focusing on the Western Front. The imbalance
has changed at least gradually since 1989. The dissolution of the Soviet Union refreshed allegedly lost
memories and made hitherto closed archives accessible to historical research. It is the double merit of Alon
Rachamimov to have turned the view on the history of
captivity in Eastern Europe.
Rachamimov's focus is on the Austro-Hungarian
Army, and he hardly touches on the situation of POWs
from other belligerent states. The number of Austro-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Hungarian POWs amounted to 2.8 million. This figure
is significantly higher than those for Britain, France, or
Germany. Rachamimov aims, first, at filling a considerable empirical gap. Second, he is trying to illuminate
broader issues such as the formation and transformation of collective identities and loyalties, the writing of
history "from below," and the legacy of World War I
for the development of international law.
Rachamimov successfuly refutes many of the myths
that have been disseminated for almost ninety years.
First, soldiers of Slav nationalities were not overrepresented among the POWs. Second, written and unwritten rules of international law as codified in the
1899 and 1907 Hague Convention were generally
observed by all belligerent states. The striking disparities regarding the quality of life in the various Russian
camps were not intentional but resulted mostly from
the location of the camp or the infrastructure at the
disposal of camp authorities. And although it was a
prescribed policy to prefer Slav POWs, this did not
materialize in superior internment facilities. Consequently, Rachamimov refutes Peter Pastor's thesis that
the Russian POW camps of World War I served as a
prototype of Stalin's Gulag and the Nazi extermination
camps-despite the fact that the mortality rates in
Russian POW camps were three or four times higher
than those of the Central and Western European
states. Third, life in captivity was a true copy of the
class society at home, with a highly privileged officer
class. But even for officers, the material relief provided
by the Habsburg Empire was rather modest, compared
with the relatively generous help Germany could offer
its POWs in Russia. In this respect, the AustroHungarian state failed to give its POWs the impression
that they were being cared for and that their sacrifice
was appreciated. Fourth, only a small number of
POWs discussed the shortcomings in the AustroHungarian relief effort in terms of social or military
hierarchies. There is also little evidence to support the
idea that, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917,
socialist ideas affected a considerable number of
POWs. The concept of "nation" was by no means
predominant among the prisoners. Even those who
uttered their critique using the language of nationalism, mainly the Polish and Czech-speaking POWs, in
most cases did so as Austro-Hungariancitizens. From
their point of view, it was the Habsburg imperial state
that had abandoned them, not vice versa.
To sum up: this book gives a fresh and lively account
of the war experience on the Eastern Front based on
the intensive use of archival material. Rachamimov
contributes decisively toward a better understanding of
the history of captivity in World War I. Unfortunately,
his bibliography is not entirely up to date. A more
important critique is that Rachamimov leaves it too
much to the reader to make comparisons and draw
conclusions that point beyond the limits of this book.
Notwithstanding its shortcomings, Rachamimov's
study is a valuable contribution to ensuring that the
war experience of the Eastern Front stands on equal
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2004
278
Reviews of Books and Films
footing with that of the Western Front in historical
memory.
CHRISTOPH JAHR
Humboldt University,
Berlin
CLAIRE E. NOLTE. The Sokol in the Czech Lands to
1914: Training for the Nation. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan. 2002. Pp. x, 258. $65.00.
Beginning in 1955, the communist authorities in
Czechoslovakia every five years held a gymnastics
festival they called Spartakiada, designed to replace in
the public mind the precommunist Sokol festivals,
called Slets, the first of which had taken place in 1882.
Sokol (Falcon), patterned on the German Turnverein
that emerged as a response to Napoleonic triumphs,
was, says Claire E. Nolte in this survey of its pre-World
War I history, an organization crucial to the development of Czech mass nationalism.
Although we have had histories of some of the
political parties and ethnic groups in the Czech lands,
as well as a monograph on the Czech national theater,
another iconic institution in the evolution of Czech
national identity, this is the first English-language
scholarly study of the Sokol. A fine introduction and
first chapter make the book accessible to specialists in
European history by placing the Sokol in the context of
the development of European national identities generally and by comparing it to the model of the Turnverein.
Miroslav Tyrs, the founder of the Sokol in 1862 and
its driving force until his death, perhaps by suicide, in
1884, plays a central role in this story. Orphaned at a
young age, Tyrs was introduced to gymnastics at the
age of twelve to try to build up his health. A driven
man who probably suffered from clinical depression,
he was by turns a gymnastics organizer and leader, an
art critic, a politician, and an erstwhile academic.
Bankrolled by Jindfich Fugner, whose young daughter
Tyrs married, Tyrs defined the purpose of the organization as "the pursuit of physical training through
group exercising, group outings, singing and fencing"
(as quoted on p. 42). Sokol also came to play political,
nation-building, and military-substitute (members
served as guards during public celebrations and as
guardians of public safety after Austria's defeat by
Prussia in 1866) roles.
Tyrs, in contrast to his more conservative and nationalist successors, steered Sokol along a moderate
course that responded to the twists and turns of
Habsburg policy. He tried to build an inclusive organization that would unite Czechs across classes (addressing each other as "thou" and "brother"). Nonetheless, the organization's structure reflected the
hierarchical social structure of the time. The police
kept a close watch on the organization, and occasionally the authorities prohibited proposed actions. The
Iron Ring of Slavic, clerical, and conservative parties,
1879-1893, offered much improved conditions for
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Sokol activity. Sokol was a predominantly Bohemian
Czech organization. It made fewer inroads in the more
clerical, agrarian and politically conservative Moravia.
The role of the Sokol as a potential national defender is in retrospect one of the most interesting in
light of the Czechs' failure to take up arms to defend
themselves in the twentieth century. Founding Czechoslovak President T. G. Masaryk emphasized how
important it was for a nation to be able to fight to
defend itself, yet in the interwar period he downplayed
the idea that the Sokol might once have been a
potential defense organization-perhaps because by
the 1920s, Sokol had become a more nationalist organization. After Tyrs's death, Sokol's all-national role
was diminished as economic growth in the Czech lands
led to the establishment of a wide range of political
parties, as well as clerical and working-class movements. Internally the leaders of the organization were
not agreed on the relative weights of gymnastic and
nation-forming activity.
Because Nolte chooses to focus on Tyrs and the
individuals who succeeded him as leaders of the organization, on Sokol's institutional growth, and on the
challenges that were presented by the fragmenting of
the national movement into interest groups and parties, she gives only limited consideration to how the
population of the Czech lands, especially in Bohemia,
imagined the Czech nation and its mythological history
after participating in or viewing the ritual and spectacle of the Slet or the marches and parades Sokol
members conducted. She also does not consider how
the experience was conveyed in oral communication or
through the press to create an image of Czechness that
stood above party and interest, according to the model
offered by David Waldstreicher.
This book reminds readers how malleable national
identity was in the ethnic mix of nineteenth-century
Central Europe. Its two founders both came from
German-language families, for instance, who may have
been drawn to the Czech movement in part by the
attraction of building a new culture. While Nolte
describes the evolution of Sokol clubs in Poland,
Russia, and the South Slav region, Sokol developed
virtually no ties with Slovakia because of the opposition of Hungarian authorities and the growth of the
Catholic-oriented gymnastic organization Orel. More
Sokol units developed in Slovenia than Slovakia, reminding readers that it might have been just as easy to
imagine a Czechoslovenia as a Czechoslovakia.
OWEN V. JOHNSON
Indiana University,
Bloomington
SCOTT SPECTOR. Prague Territories: National Conflict
and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siecle.
(Weimar and Now, number 21.) Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xiv,
331.
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