Caitlin E. Murdock

In the early 1900s, German-speaking Central Europeans hailed nuclear radiation as key to promoting modern health and “wellness.” Yet by the late twentieth century, they treated radiation as a major public health threat and state responsibility. This project explores how and why popular understandings of the relationship of radiation to public health changed so dramatically. It argues that these shifts were neither a linear process of scientific and regulatory change, nor just a Cold War reaction to nuclear technology. Spas, consumer goods, occupational health risks, and environmental concerns shaped public opinion and state policy. Positive and negative views of nuclear radiation’s implications for modern health competed, driven by ordinary people, commercial interests, and political expediency as much as by scientific experts. German-speaking Central Europe serves as a case study of how public health debates shaped citizens’ relationships to modern states through the upheavals of the twentieth century: empire, world war, Nazism, Communism, and capitalist democracy.

This book project explores how the idea of borderlands as concrete places sprang paradoxically from the new mobility typical of modern nationalizing states. From 1870 to 1938, the German-Bohemian borderlands’ conflicting dynamics of fluidity and division were forged by the interaction of modern technology, local practice, bureaucratic states, and national ideas. Governments and smugglers, migrant workers and police, bakers and tourists all played decisive roles in defining the borderlands as distinct territorial, political, and cultural places. Territorial, political, and cultural divisions lent weight to larger nationalist movements, defined local and transnational communities, and were used to justify ethnic cleansing by establishing the idea that territories have national meaning.