Vol. XXXV · 2004

Pieter M. Judson

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WHAT'S IN A NAME? For nationalist activists in Habsburg Central Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, names seem to have meant everything. As Peter Bugge and Maura Hametz convincingly demonstrate in their engaging essays on Bratislava and Trieste after World War I, the use of particular names gave nationalists the power to assert symbolic territorial claims against opponents. Well before 1914 in many regions of the monarchy, as apparently innocent a gesture as hanging a business sign in one language in a neighborhood inhabited by speakers of another language could inflame the passions of local nationalists enough to create political causes célèbres out of such displays.