"Each nation only cares for its own": Empire, Nation, and Child Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1918

Across Europe, citizens depicted the upheaval of World War I through stories of broken families, absent fathers, negligent mothers, and delinquent children, and they demanded action from the state. In the Bohemian lands (the Austrian crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), German and Czech nationalist child welfare activists took the initiative in responding to these demands. As a nationally segregated child welfare system developed and expanded in this region between 1900 and 1945, nationalist social welfare activists created and transformed imagined boundaries between public and private, as well as relationships between state and nation in the context of a multinational empire. [author]