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The Battle of Zborov was the main commemorative site of Czechoslovakia's heroic military cult during the interwar era. The shifting fortunes of its commemoration reveal political attempts to reframe national questions for ideological ends. Zborov was an important symbol, because it was the nexus of the military and diplomatic-political efforts to found the state. The festivities on 2 July provided members of the military with the opportunity to demonstrate their prowess in the name of Zborov and to reassert their role in the creation of Czechoslovakia. The communist coup d'état in February 1948 spelled the end of the Czechoslovak national-military tradition that included Zborov. After 1989, the Battle of Zborov, like other historic events that had been downplayed or ignored under communism, enjoyed renewed interest. The “spirit of Zborov” has not been, however, an important part of a “usable past” in the post-communist Czech Republic or Slovakia, perhaps because it was so intimately associated with the formation of the First Czechoslovak Republic.

This book encompasses the world of prostitution in late imperial Austria. It addresses female agency and experience, contemporary fears about sexual coercion and the forced movement of girls and women, and police surveillance. Prostitution is analyzed at three different, but interlinked levels: subjectivity, society, and state. Rather than treating prostitutes solely as victims or problems to be solved, in contrast to much of the historical literature, it seeks to find the historical subjects behind fin-de-siècle constructions of prostitutes, to restore agency to the women who participated in various kinds of commercial sex, illuminate their everyday experiences, and place these women, some of whom made the reasoned economic decision to sell their bodies, in a larger social context. It investigates their interactions with the police and other supervisory agents, as well as with other inhabitants of their world, rather than focusing on the state-constructed apparatus of surveillance from the top down. Many Austrian prostitutes came from artisan and working-class, often impoverished backgrounds. They faced a complicated array of constraints that shaped the environment in which they made decisions, including lack of other economic opportunities, of education, of legal equality with men as well as legal dependence on their fathers and husbands. Despite entrenched beliefs about female sexuality and the “fallen” woman, prostitution, clandestine or regulated, was a viable choice for some women of limited economic circumstances when faced with the alternatives: low-paid, often dangerous employment in a factory, in a night café or inn, or as a servant.

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So read some of the subheadings in a 14 June 1920 article in the Wiener Montags-Presse, analyzing prostitution in post-imperial Vienna. Many journalists—sometimes, even the same journalists—continued to employ the very vocabulary, “contagion,” “contamination,” and “filth,” in their postwar exposés that they had used in their prewar and wartime reports on prostitution in the Habsburg monarchy. Viennese officials in the newly founded German-Austria (Deutschösterreich) continued to consider tolerated prostitutes a “necessary evil,” arrest women they found engaging in clandestine prostitution, subject them to pelvic examinations for venereal disease (VD), and treat these women as operating outside the bounds of society. In fact, women who practiced prostitution were a long-entrenched part of the female working class. In matters of commercial sex, Austria-Hungary's defeat in the First World War did not constitute a decisive break with the past, but rather a juncture in long-term historical processes, as this analysis of post-imperial Vienna through 1923, when postwar inflation had been tamed, reveals.