1690 Reviews of Books
the latter mainly official records from U.S. and British
archives. This volume can be regarded as a very useful
contribution to our knowledge of both Allied policy in
World War II and Italy’s relationship with the United
States and Britain after the fall of the fascist regime and
in the complex period of the so-called co-belligerency.
ANTONIO VARSORI
University of Padua
MARK CORNWALL. The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist
Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press. 2012. Pp. 352. $39.95.
In this extraordinary book, the end is also the begin-
ning. Mark Cornwall has woven a series of interrelated
histories around Heinrich Rutha’s suicide during the
early hours of November 5, 1937, in his cell in the north-
ern Bohemian town of Böhmisch Leipa following his
arrest for homosexual behavior under paragraph 129b
of the Czechoslovak criminal code. This is a biography
of Rutha, Sudeten German Party (SdP) leader Konrad
Henlein’s “foreign minister,” a creative, intelligent man
who was deeply conflicted over his sexuality, as well as
the story of homosociability and cross-generational ho-
mosexuality in the northern Bohemian national youth
movement during the first half of the twentieth century.
The wider context is the Czech-German national an-
tagonism that finally ended with the expulsion of the
Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia in the wake of
World War II. Rutha was thus a man whose life had
local, national, and international implications. In the
hands of a less elegant writer or less careful historian
the threads of this “who done it?”—who really betrayed
Rutha to the Czechoslovak police in 1937?— might
have become tangled. Cornwall, however, employs a
wealth of heretofore unused archival material, includ-
ing local police and court records, to tell a complicated
story with such clarity and verve that the reader does
not want to put down the book.
Born to a prosperous small-town family in 1897,
Rutha grew up on the so-called “language border” of
northern Bohemia where he experienced the tense na-
tional discourse of the time. Initially self-identifying as
“German-Bohemian” and “German-Austrian,” he ad-
opted a “Sudeten German” identity in the wake of
World War I and the creation of the multinational
Czechoslovak nation-state. Active in the Wandervogel
youth movement before 1914 and in the radically dif-
ferent political environment of the interwar era,
Rutha’s ambition became the training of a vanguard of
Sudeten German young men, elite and charismatic, to
lead a national revolution across what he—and they—
considered Czech-dominated space. Cornwall asserts
that Rutha’s pedagogic crusade among male adoles-
cents, one powered by “Eros,” reflected both his ho-
mosexual and nationalist insecurities.
In his analysis of Rutha’s long acquaintance with
Henlein, Cornwall demonstrates very clearly what Ron-
ald Smelser and others have long argued: that Sudeten
German nationalism was largely a homegrown move-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ment rather than one directed by Nazi Berlin. It was
through his youth work that Rutha met Henlein in 1923.
The gymnast Henlein, like Rutha, had already begun to
fuse physical training with a contemporary völkisch el-
ement after World War I. Following Henlein’s election
as leader of the Sudeten German Turnerbund (Gym-
nasts’ League) in 1931, Rutha became his main advisor
on youth education. Henlein, a one-time bank clerk
from Reichenberg, later became leader first of the Su-
deten German Home Front and then of the SdP after
its formation in 1935. Although Rutha remained out-
side party politics to devote himself to his youth mis-
sion, he exercised a moderating influence on Henlein
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because of his beliefs and goals: he sought peaceful rev-
olution in the Bohemian lands in contrast to Czecho-
slovakia’s Nazis. A trusted Henlein advisor, in the wake
of the SdP’s decisive electoral victory in 1935 Rutha was
selected to act as a foreign minister and explore links
with the German diaspora to publicize the Sudeten
German plight. Here Cornwall focuses on the role of
Rutha, who remained blind to the danger that Germany
and cross-border Nazi links posed to his goal of a “mod-
erate,” non-irredentist route to secure victory peace-
fully for the Sudeten cause. Rutha worked assiduously
to win British sympathy for the Sudeten Germans. In-
deed, Rutha was preparing to accompany Henlein by
train to England when police in Prague arrested him on
paragraph 129b at the request of the Czechoslovak po-
litical police in Reichenberg in 1937.
The men charged in connection with the Rutha affair
were tried in December, after his suicide. While those
convicted received suspended sentences, their crimes
were publicized. Indeed, one result of the Rutha affair
was a homosexual panic in which the press uncovered
homosexual offenses throughout Czechoslovakia, with
the main focus on pederasts corrupting male youth. The
scandal also sharpened political tensions within the SdP
and between Czechs and Germans. This witch hunt,
started by the Czechs, continued after Germany’s an-
nexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, when the
Waffen-SS wielded the notorious paragraph 175, which
criminalized male homosexuality, to remove political
foes in the Sudetenland. Rutha’s nationalist youth mis-
sion, underpinned by homoeroticism, was again con-
demned, and at least some of his former comrades ar-
rested and tried, as much for national deviance as
sexual deviance.
Cornwall’s deeply researched study of youth-move-
ment politics offers historians of Habsburg Central Eu-
rope much food for thought. It should encourage a fun-
damental rethinking of some of the most closely held
assumptions of the history of the first Czechoslovak Re-
public.
NANCY M. WINGFIELD
Northern Illinois University
PINAR ŞENIŞIK. The Transformation of Ottoman Crete:
Revolts, Politics and Identity in the Late Nineteenth Cen-
tury. New York: I. B. Tauris. 2011. Pp. xiii, 333. £59.50.
DECEMBER 2012
 Europe: Early Modern and Modern
The study of Ottoman Crete in English-speaking aca-
deme took off with Molly Greene’s A Shared World:
Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterra-
nean (2000). Greene’s book used a case study of Crete
just after the final Ottoman conquest of the island in
1669 to make a broader revisionist argument about
commerce and social relations in the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. Pınar
Şenışık’s book examines the local history of Crete at the
moment the Ottomans lost sovereignty. Şenışık, how-
ever, provides a startlingly traditional narrative account
of events surrounding the Cretan revolts of 1896 and
1897.
The book is divided into five chapters, with an in-
troduction and conclusion. The introduction provides a
literature review on theories of nationalism, running
through all the classics. The first chapter is a faithful
rendition of modern Greek history; the second offers
background about the local history of Crete, which is
mostly very general and then abruptly very specific, with
a section on Hamidian officials’ views on the Cretan
issue. Chapters three, four, and five then provide a nar-
rative history, based on consular and Ottoman-state
sources, of the revolts of 1896 and 1897, the establish-
ment of the autonomous polity in Crete, and with-
drawal of Ottoman troops from the island. Absent is
any substantive problematization of Hamidian-era Ot-
toman governance, as well as a comparative framework
that would allow for insights from, say, eastern Rume-
lia, Samos, the Danubian principalities, or the mutasar-
rifiyya of Mount Lebanon, all of which experienced var-
ious forms of confessional/ethnic violence and political
autonomy in the late nineteenth century.
There are several problems with Şenışık’s conceptu-
alization. In the introductory chapter, for instance,
Şenışık notes that, with the establishment of the Greek
Kingdom in 1830, the “infiltration of Greek national
ideology” (p. 3) meant that “Cretan Christians were
gradually indoctrinated by the idea of belonging to an
‘imagined community,’ ” which undermined any effort
to keep them under Ottoman administration and oc-
casioned the revolts that led to political autonomy.
Such a notion assumes that “Greek national ideology”
sprang ready made from Athens in 1830, not to mention
that Cretan Christians were otherwise naı̈ve to any pos-
sibility of identification with Orthodox Christians out-
side Crete until indoctrinated with new national mes-
sages. This reproduces, I might add, the way many a
twentieth-century Turkish nationalist would have
looked back on the movement in favor of Cretan uni-
fication with Greece (which is itself often conflated with
the Enosis unification movement in Cyprus in the mid-
twentieth century). This is not to argue that Cretans
were willing Greek national partisans from the early
nineteenth century. Instead, it should be remembered
that there were deep and complex local allegiances and
identities in Crete, for both the Muslim and Christian
communities, which deserve a far more nuanced treat-
ment than they receive here.
Among the most problematic aspects of this study is
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1691
the contradiction between the framework of the argu-
ment and the methodology employed to demonstrate
that argument. Şenışık is apparently interested in show-
ing how national identity was instilled in the minds of
Greek Orthodox Cretans by Greek consuls and other
agents of the fledgling Greek Kingdom (a point that is
not new in Greek- and English-language historiography
of the period), and yet she sets out to prove this argu-
ment using predominantly Ottoman-Turkish state
sources and European consular accounts. Given that
the population of the island, both Muslim and Chris-
tian, was overwhelmingly Greek-speaking, any study of
national or local identity would have to be based, at
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least in part, on Greek-language sources. This study
strangely lacks local voices, beyond the dispatches of
European consuls and Ottoman officials sent from Is-
tanbul. The result is a tedious rehashing of an old “East-
ern Question” discourse, where European powers and
Greece, as the aspiring imperial power in the neigh-
borhood, conspire to dismantle Ottoman sovereignty in
yet another locale. The overlay of Şenışık’s attempted
critique of Greek (but not Turkish) nationalist history,
which leads her to claim that local Christians in Crete
aimed to overthrow the Ottoman order, does not pen-
etrate deeply enough to expose the way the local story
is interpreted, and actually reinforces the Greek (and
Turkish) nationalist interpretations of these revolts. A
new school of diplomatic history has emerged in Ot-
toman studies in recent years, one that takes apart the
old “Eastern Question” paradigm and integrates the
high political narrative with social realities and conflicts
on the ground in these contested areas. While this book
does contain a narrative account of the diplomatic ne-
gotiations surrounding the Cretan revolts of 1896 and
1897, revolts that have not received any lengthy treat-
ment in English to date, it does not make productive use
of this new diplomatic history.
CHRISTINE PHILLIOU
Columbia University
AUGUSTA DIMOU. Entangled Paths towards Modernity:
Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Bal-
kans. Budapest and New York: Central European Uni-
versity Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 434. $50.00.
In this work of intellectual history Augusta Dimou an-
alyzes the socialist and agrarian intellectual debates on
modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. She examines discourse on modernity in
three Balkan states—Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece—
and analyzes the development and paths of socialist
thought and practice in these developing countries. For
Dimou, haphazard modernization in the region pro-
vided fertile ground for socialism. Her three cases high-
light the various directions early Balkan socialist
thought took in response to changing circumstances in
this volatile period and place.
In Serbia, the Radical Party, utilizing anti-Western
rhetoric, created a program heavily influenced by Rus-
sian populists. Their defensive message regarding cap-
DECEMBER 2012