My dissertation seeks to be first and foremost a story of a socio-political life of books. It intends to offer a history of German-Jewish book collections in Czechoslovakia - a country which emerged from the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in the course of the following three decades experienced the rise of the First and Second Republic, the Nazi occupation and the post-war recreation as an ethnically homogenous nation-state. It seeks to examine the specific conditions in which the German-Jewish book collections were established and subsequently developed in the three aforementioned periods, and to illuminate main factors that stimulated their movement within the Czechoslovak state, the Central and Eastern Europe, and eventually also outside the European borders. Furthermore, while providing a history of book collections, it aims also to shed some light on the history of Czechoslovakia, and specifically on various nation-building processes that created the socio-political framework in which the German-Jewish heritage unfolded in the period of 1918-1948. As it demonstrates, that framework influenced directly not only the examined book collections, but also the political making of national belonging out of great variety of identifications - local, linguistic, religious, ethnic - that one may see in the discussed areas. I believe that the proposed double-perspective will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the complex and intertwined relations between the German-Jewish heritage and the Czech nation-building in the first half of the XX century.