„In deine Erde erzverkrallt, wir wollen wurzelnd bleiben“. Vorstellungen der böhmischen Deutschen über Raum und Landschaft 1880–1914

Abstract

“In deine Erde erzverkrallt, wir wollen wurzelnd bleiben” [In the Veins of Your Earth, Our Roots Should Always Flourish]: Bohemian Germans’ Ideas about Space and Landscape 1880–1914: The following study aims to explain how the Bohemian landscape was created and devel-oped in the imagination of primarily German writers who formulated their own ideas of the presence of the German ethnic group in Bohemia up to World War I. The contemporary historiography and the historiography of these times is also discussed. In this respect, the works by Erich Lehman and Ernst Gierach are crucial. The aforementioned authors construct ideas about the typical German landscape in Bohemia as a symbolic counterpoint to the image of the ideal landscape of the competing ethnic group, i.e., the Czechs. The loss of the cultural center(s) of Prague and others in the Bohemian lands was an impulse for the German nationalists to seek a center in the peripheral regions with the specific landscape of these times. The landscape has been perceived from symbolic, political and scientific points of view. It is therefore clear that the text conceives of landscape in purely constructivist, not environmentalist, terms. “Area,” “landscape” and “site of the memory” are key terms that are used in the analysis of the topic. The authors of this study ask how the area, or more precisely, the landscape, were constructed and (mis)used by nationalists, especially at the end of the “long” nineteenth century.