Socialist Popular Literature and the Czech-German Split in Austrian Social Democracy, 1890–1914.

By 1911 it was clear that multiethnic Austrian Social Democracy could no longer resist the currents of ethnic nationalism that had already fragmented most of the late Habsburg political scene. The exit that year of most Czech Social Democrats to form their own party, along with Austrian Germans' insensitive reactions, signaled that workers were not immune to nationalism. The relevant historical literature has either viewed workers' nationalism as the product of elite manipulation and "bourgeois" influence, or, more recently, has questioned the extent to which nationalism actually resonated with ordinary people at society's grassroots. Jakub Beneš's article attempts to avoid the oversimplifications of both approaches and calls for more precise engagement with workers' own discourse. To this end, it highlights an important dimension of working-class political culture—socialist popular literature—in which proletarian authors articulated increasingly ethnic nationalist positions of a class-specific sort. Examining this influential but neglected genre illuminates how and under what circumstances workers found meaning in nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]