Beyond the "Infamous Concentration Camps of the Old Monarchy": Jewish Refugee Policy from Wartime Austria-Hungary to Interwar Czechoslovakia

The scholarship on twentieth-century refugee movement highlights the persecution of national, ethnic, and religious minorities arising from state and nation-building. The very structure and function of modern nation-states made specific populations within them vulnerable outsiders. The nation-state limited and defined in new ways those groups for whom the state would take responsibility. In practically every way we can imagine, writes Michael Marrus, the First World War imposed on contemporaries the awesome power of the nation-state. Refugee movement has also been tied to policies of wartime persecution and the chaos of imperial collapse. Populations in flux mark a regime no longer in control, a state in dissolution and decay. © 2014 Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota.