Contradictions in Terms?

                   The Relationship Between Czech and Austrian German Liberalism

                                    in the Late Habsburg Empire

                                            Peter Bugge



Treating Czech and Austrian German liberalism as two manifestations of essentially the same
political phenomenon has not been commonplace in the existing literature on Austrian politics in
the late Habsburg Empire. General accounts of late Habsburg history, as well as specialist
literature on nineteenth-century liberalism, have almost invariably interpreted liberalism in
Austria as primarily, if not exclusively the concern of Austrian Germans.[1] In Robert A. Kann’s
classic study of the history of the Habsburg Empire, the very notion of a Czech liberalism appears
to be almost a contradiction in terms. Kann interprets Austrian politics – at least in the 1860s
and 1870s – as a conflict between German liberalism and Slav (including Czech) conservatism. This
“discrepancy of political ideologies” is said to have continued during the Taaffe regime of the
1880s, which Kann describes as “mainly based on German clerical conservative and Czech and Polish
conservative support.” With Taaffe, we are told, “not only German liberalism but liberalism
altogether, seen as a powerful ideology, had permanently disappeared from the Austrian political
scene.”[2]

            Political antagonisms are thus perceived as closely correlated to national ones, with
the Germans representing liberalism and the Czechs (or Slavs) conservatism, reaction, or just
‘nationalism’, a description seemingly making any further investigation into the ideological
profile of Czech politicians superfluous.[3] This paradigm can be traced all the way back to the
pre-First World War historiography on the Empire,[4] and ultimately to the Austrian German liberals
themselves, who from 1848 until the collapse of the Empire stuck firmly by the belief that there
could be no liberal opposition to the Austrian German cause. Even at a time when traditional
Austrian German liberalism had long been pushed in the defensive by more radical political mass
movements, the leading German liberal paper, the Viennese Neue Freie Presse (nicknamed the ‘Neue
Freche Presse’ by Czechs), interpreted everything, including the Czech‑German antagonism, “in a
spirit which was ‘German’ and ‘universalist liberal’, for to the Neue Freie Presse these qualities
were indistinguishable.”[5]

            The Austrian German liberal discourse construed its argument on the impossibility of a
non-German national liberalism as a refined ‘Catch 22’: if a Czech (or any other representative of
a minor nation, at least in the ‘Cisleithanian’ part of the Empire) made any claims to national
equality with the Germans, and in particular to the equality of their languages, it only testified
to the parochial horizon and non-reasonable nature of the claimant, and hence to his lack of
entitlement to full political rights, since manifestations of reason and enlightenment in the
Austrian public sphere required the use of the German tongue. From an Austrian German liberal point
of view, Czechs – like workers and peasants – could as individuals gain full political rights, but
only through the acquisition of a German Bildung. In 1871 the Deutsche Zeitung insisted that “for
us the nationalist position coincides with the free-thinking, enlightened one, since to be German
means to be free and behave ethically”[6], and in 1901 the Neue Freie Presse made it a liberal act
to protest against a Czech polytechnic in Brünn/Brno or any other such concessions to Czech
linguistic demands, arguing that the use of the Czech language in these spheres would deny the
students access to the free interchange of ideas possible only in a world language and inseparable
from any notion of higher education.[7]

            This Austrian German appropriation of the term liberal presented middle-class Czech
politicians with a semantic as well as a political challenge: if this was liberalism, what scope
was left for any Czech program, or politics, by that name or orientation? To start with semantics:
around 1848, leading Czech public figures did use the term liberal (in Czech: ‘liberální’) in
self-descriptions, and they defined the concept in positive terms. František Palacký did not
hesitate to declare in 1848, “I am decidedly a liberal”,[8] while Karel Havlíček two years later in
a newspaper article defined liberalism in the following way: “Liberal stems from the Latin word
liber (free) and is usually used as shorthand for labeling all who are for good progress and for
political freedom.”[9] But as Czech and Austrian German political representatives became entrenched
in conflict in the early 1860s over the constitutional structure of Austria, and the terms
‘liberal’ or ‘liberalism’ became firmly associated with the Austrian German centralist stance, the
words gradually disappeared from the Czech political dictionary, except in references to the German
opponent. In 1874, Palacký’s frustration with the political practice of the Austrian German
liberals (and with the many pejoratives addressed at the Czechs) led him to exclaim with bitter
irony:


Our Germans compensate more than sufficiently with their liberalism for what they have not been
given of sense for right and justice. They are now almost exceedingly liberal, so why should they
also be just? Justice would be a mere obligation, but liberality is magnanimous and offers more
than it has to. So who is then allowed to remind it of a debt? It would be indecent to demand that
the liberal lords should go so far as to regard the feudal, clerical, ultramontane Slavs as equal
to themselves and deal with them accordingly.[10]


From the 1860s onwards the very word ‘liberal’ was thus too negatively charged for any Czech
political party to use it. Instead the word svobodomyslný (‘freethinking’) came to substitute for
it as a marker of liberal convictions, as in the National Freethinking Party, the official name of
the Young Czech Party, and in many other contexts.[11] The close association of liberalism with the
Austrian German liberals and the strength of the wrath against these is palpable in the entry
concerning liberalism in the authoritative Czech encyclopedia from the turn of the century, Ottův
slovník naučný:


Liberalism means in parliamentary parlance a trend striving for the assertion of freethinking
principles in all public life. In Austria it identifies itself with centralizing and Germanizing
aspirations in a political and national perspective, and with capitalist exploitation in an
economic perspective. German l[iberlaism] has made itself sadly famous through its persecution of
non-German nations… In the Czech nation a liberal political party began to take shape soon after
the introduction of constitutional life, which of course did not have common political or economic
principles with the German-liberal party.[12]


To the extent that any Czech liberalism was identified at all, its radical difference from and
opposition to the Austrian German political movement by that name was thus underlined. Such
dissociation was to be expected from contemporaries such as Adolf Srb, the author of the
encyclopedia entry, but it has also – in less vehement words – colored later studies, which have
largely analyzed Czech political liberalism in isolation from its Austrian German liberal
environment as a distinctly national phenomenon.[13] But as I shall try to argue in the rest of
this essay, Czech and Austrian German liberalism in the Habsburg Empire had much more in common
than their mutual political and terminological alienation.

On the structural level a main point to make is that for all national disagreement between them,
Czech and Austrian German political leaders (many of whom in ‘the liberal era’ came from Bohemia)
all stemmed from one and the same ‘Bildungsraum’, or educational space. I mean by this that
although they appeared as separate political forces, these Bürger representatives of two allegedly
very different nations were socially and culturally, in terms of education and norms, of
mentalities and often also at a personal level of one and the same milieu. For a start, the circles
actively identifying with a national community were very small, because a marked national
self-identification was alien to the vast majority of the population in Vormärz or pre-1848
Bohemia. Although one finds in nineteenth-century Bohemia a high correlation between mother tongue
(or main everyday linguistic environment) and national affiliation, the mechanisms transforming
such ‘objective conditions’ into subjective identification were only rudimentarily developed before
1848, or even 1860. There was no separate Czech system of higher or secondary education in Vormärz
Bohemia capable of equipping children with any national Czech education, linguistically or
ideologically,[14] and so the educated middle-class elites that came to form the backbone of both
the Czech and the Bohemian German political representation of 1848-49 were products of one and the
same Austrian school system. As Gary Cohen has written: “All those who made their way into the more
prosperous commercial or manufacturing strata, the professions, or the bureaucracy had to adopt the
German language, Austro-German culture, and Catholicism if they lacked one or the other. This did
not involve, however, the adoption of a specific German ethnic identity before the 1850s.”[15] On
the contrary, we may add, some of those who had adopted – or adapted to – both the German language
and Austro-German culture ultimately opted for a Czech national identity, while others remained
non-nationalized Habsburg loyalists.[16]

One should therefore not exaggerate the separating power of certain differences in the formation
and composition of bourgeois strata from the German-speaking areas of Northern Bohemia, as compared
to the ones stemming from the Czech-speaking central parts of the Kingdom.[17] A Czech-speaking and
identifying bourgeoisie may have developed later and from somewhat different social backgrounds
than its Bohemian German counterpart, but the social boundaries or differences between them were
not sufficiently clear-cut to allow for simple identification of class with national allegiance.
The educational and professional background of the Bohemian Czech and German representatives in the
Austrian Reichstag or Parliament in 1848-49 was nearly identical, with a preponderance of lawyers,
civil servants and other members of the ‘intelligentsia’ in both groups.[18] Also, the Union for
the Encouragement of Industry in Bohemia, founded in 1833 under the auspices of the Bohemian
nobility and opened up for all Bürger capable of paying the fees in 1842, is commonly held to have
been a main school of politics before 1848 for the younger generation of Czech patriots (F. L.
Rieger, A. P. Trojan, F. A. Brauner and others). But the Union was an association for Bohemia’s
liberal bourgeoisie (and for the liberally inclined factions of the Bohemian aristocracy), not a
Czech national institution.[19] Finally, Prague was the towering center of all intellectual and
political life in Bohemia, and the city’s inhabitants, most of whom were probably to some degree
bilingual, were not (in spite of the formation of a Czech Burghers’ Club (‘Měšťanská beseda’) in
1846, and other early attempts at ‘nationalizing’ the public sphere) sharply divided in their daily
interactions into a ‘Czech’ and a ‘German’ national camp.[20]

            To be concrete: in political matters, men like Rieger and Palacký ought to have, and
did in fact speak the same language as the German Austrian liberals, both literally – they were of
course fluent in German – as well as figuratively. Educated Czechs primarily encountered liberalism
through German sources (and through the same sources as their German Austrian counterparts),[21]
and one finds in the Czech community of the 1840s all the same basic liberal norms and values as
among the Austrian Germans: Bildung und Besitz [education and property], and in particular the
former, were seen as prerequisites for access to the political sphere, whereas the calls for basic
human and civic rights were derived from natural law. The voluntary association – be it a reading
association or an industrial association – represented a model form of social organization for
Czech Bürger elites also and played a significant role in the formation of these, while
self-government was to guarantee the security, progress and liberty of citizens, as Havlíček argued
at length in 1846.[22]

            Even in their understanding of nationality Czech and Austrian German elites had a lot
in common beyond the obvious differences stemming from the fact that any formulation of a Czech
‘national idea’ had to appear as marked in structuralist terms, i.e. as a deviation from an
unmarked, naturally German high culture. As long as ‘civilized’, ‘educated’, ‘progressive’, and
‘rational’ were perceived as synonymous with ‘German’, Austrian German liberals could define their
Germanness largely in terms of such cultural values as a potentially open, non-ethnic ideal against
which the Czech aspirations could be dismissed as parochial, and hence irrational, “a politics
based on mere ethnic identity”.[23] We should, however, be careful not to make this Austrian German
point of view our own.

First, Austrian German liberals also frequently lapsed into a rhetoric and discourse of essential
ethnic difference drawing on the same Herderian and romanticist sources as the Czech national
movement. It may therefore be most correct to acknowledge the fuzziness of perceptions of
nationhood in the mid-nineteenth century: the belief in the possibility of acculturation to a
higher German culture was not yet perceived as sharply at odds with organic or primordial
understandings of Germanness. Depending on context one or the other could be emphasized.[24]

Secondly, Czech politics was never merely ethnic. Havlíček’s pointed statement of 1849, that
“[e]verybody will be happy to call himself a citizen of the Austrian Empire when it becomes an
honor...[but] the nations are God’s and not the Emperor’s … We will always remain Czechs, like the
Hungarians and Italians, and we will never be Austrians, but only citizens of the Austrian
Empire,”[25] testifies not only to his belief in the God-given natural rights of nations, but also
to an ability to distinguish between ethnicity and citizenship. When in 1848, the Wiener
Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode exclaimed: “Teach your children that they are
not [simply] Hungarians, Germans, Slavs, [or] Italians, but rather citizens [Bürger] of a
constitutional Austrian state”[26], it based its request on assumptions much closer to the ones of
Havlíček than a juxtaposition of Czech ethnic and Austrian German political (liberal) nationalism
would suggest.

Finally, Czech liberals shared the German view that only Kulturnationen, i.e. nations living up to
European standards of civilization, could make claims to political and cultural recognition.
Bildung was, from a Czech perspective, an individual and a national obligation. In German Austrian
liberal perceptions, however, it remained a premise that only the German nationality was capable of
living up to these standards, whereas in the Czech national ideology it was upheld that the Czechs
from the outset of their ‘awakening’ already were a European Kulturnation. If this was initially a
fiction (as many Czech patriots admitted in private) the Czech national elites strove very hard,
and with much success to convert it into reality throughout the nineteenth century.[27]

Given these close social, educational, and ideological affinities we should expect concord rather
than conflict in the political sphere also, and in fact we can observe a recurring pattern from
1848 onwards during all major upheavals in Austrian politics: At first, Austrian German and Czech
national elites responded in the same way and at times even together, eyeing the liberal potential
in the situation, but then conflict broke out on the very visible level of national disagreement
over issues that cannot per se be placed on a liberal – anti-liberal scale. As argued, the German
liberal discursive hegemony, and perhaps also the German political hegemony, may have led friend
and foe alike to identify German unification, Frankfurt style, and then Austrian centralism with
liberalism. But none of these stands follow logically from liberal theory.


            When in early 1848 revolutionary moods reached Austria from France and Germany, Prague
citizens went into action even before Metternich’s resignation on 13 March. The Prague elites –
Czech and German, although the well-prepared nationally Czech Bürger elites soon took the political
lead – cooperated in March in the so-called “St. Wenceslas Committee” on the drafting of two
petitions, submitted to the Emperor in late March and early April respectively. These petitions
contained the standard liberal demands of the day: a constitution, freedom of the press, full
religious freedom, oral and public court proceedings, national guards, local self-government etc.
Disagreement on the drafting of these texts was political, not national, as the Prague liberals
successfully prevented radical democrats from introducing calls for the regulation of work and
wages or the abolition of serfdom into the petitions.[28]

A novelty in the petitions was the call for “complete equal rights for the Czech and the German
nationality in all Bohemian Lands, schools and offices,” an equality that was to be recognized and
guaranteed by law.[29] As a declaration of 21 March, signed by fifty-two “Writers of Prague, of
Czech and German tongue, raised by the feeling of liberty and … concord between the Czech and
German population of their fatherland” made clear, this call stemmed from the “zeal and strivings
of the Czech part of the population”, but it was “not to be regarded as a disturbance of this
concord.”[30] The Czech introduction of the principle of national equality on the political agenda
of 1848 thus happened with the full consent of the participating Prague German elites, who in March
subscribed to a rhetoric of brotherhood and equality between the German and Czech nations in the
Bohemian lands in their struggle for progress and liberty. This was very different from the later
Austrian German liberal discourse of German cultural and hence national superiority, and Czech
reactionary national fanaticism.[31] Secondly, as Gerald Stourzh has demonstrated, the idea that
equal national rights was a legitimate liberal principle spread very quickly from Prague not only
to other parts of Austria, but even to the German constitutional assembly in Frankfurt. This
doctrine must thus be considered common Austrian or Central European liberal property, not some
nationalist, collectivistic pollution of liberal principles.[32]

The two Prague petitions insisted finally that the political framework for the realization of the
demanded rights was to be a union of the Bohemian lands with its own freely and broadly elected
parliament, and even this claim had the initial support of the Prague German liberals. We thus see
again how liberals could produce many different answers to what form of statehood to establish for
their emerging community of free and responsible citizens.

Sadly, in the strife about Bohemia’s and Austria’s relationship to Frankfurt, which from April 1848
came to separate the Czech and Bohemian or Austrian German political elites for much of the
following year, both sides were equally quick to let perceived national interests take precedence
over liberal concerns – cf. Austrian German reactions to Windischgrätz’s attack on Prague in June
and Czech ones to his quenching of the Vienna uprising in October.[33] Only as the Großdeutsch or
Greater German program fell and the Austrian state became the realistic and hence commonly accepted
political framework, could Czech and German political representatives begin to join forces again in
a liberal alliance in the Reichstag, especially during its spell in Kremsier/Kroměříž. The most
significant Czech contribution here was perhaps Rieger’s work on the draft Bill of Rights,
culminating in his passionate defense of the idea of popular sovereignty in a speech of January 10,
1849, a speech that led Ludwig von Löhner to embrace him heartily.[34] Among the many standard
liberal claims, this Bill of Rights guaranteed in Art. 21 the equal rights (‘Gleichberechtigung’)
of all nationalities of the Empire and obliged the state to secure the equality of the languages
common in the individual crown lands (‘landesübliche Sprachen’) in schools, civil service and
public life.[35] Again, my point is not to show that even Czech Reichstag delegates were capable of
supporting a liberal agenda, but to argue that this finding of a common language – to a high degree
also on the political meaning and significance of nationality – should not surprise us, because all
these educated middle-class delegates were products of the same Austrian experience. It was
therefore not so much “the Austrian nations” who found each other in Kremsier/Kroměříž, as a narrow
segment of Austrian elites (without representation from Hungary and Lombardy-Venice), agreeing also
on the relevance of dividing themselves into national camps.[36] Sadly, their conciliation came too
late to stop the dynastic counter-revolution.

            History almost seemed to repeat itself in 1860-61 when Austria made a careful return to
constitutionalism. At first, Czech and Austrian German liberals rejoiced in the new freedom and
sought cooperation on a variety of liberal political issues. The Czech attempts in 1860 to gain
permission to publish a political newspaper, expressed in a petition by Rieger to the Emperor, was
supported by the Prague German liberal press,[37] and in December 1860 the Prague Czech and German
liberals presented a joint electoral committee and program for the upcoming local elections in the
city.[38] At the elections to the Bohemian Diet [sněm] in March 1861, Czechs and Germans had
separate lists, but Leopold von Hasner and Adolf Maria Pinkas, who later joined the German camp in
the Diet, were elected from Prague on the recommendation of the Czech electoral committee, whereas
conversely two pro-Czech representatives were elected from predominantly ‘ethnic German’
districts.[39] National segregation was thus still far from complete, and numerous cases show that
also the Czech community remained open to anyone who embraced the national vision, even if they
were not of Czech descent or did not speak Czech fluently.[40] The Prague newspaper market of the
1860s and 1870s may illustrate how misleading it would be to perceive of Bohemian society as neatly
divided into two national camps based on, and marked by language: Next to the national (i.e.
nationally agitating) newspapers, like the Czech Národní listy (National Papers) or the German
Bohemia or Tagesbote aus Böhmen, we find the Prager Zeitung or the Pražské noviny (Prague News)
expressing the official Habsburg view in both languages, and even the German language daily
Politik, a paper addressing those who “politically belonged to the Czech camp even though they were
more used to reading German than Czech.”[41]

Soon, however, Czech opposition to Prime Minister Schmerling’s centralism, which had the support of
the Austrian German liberals, made the Czech National Party join forces with the conservative
nobility in demanding the recognition of an autonomist program, the so-called Bohemian historical
state rights, an alliance determining Czech attitudes toward the central political institutions of
Austria for the next two decades and leading them to boycott the Reichsrat or Austrian Parliament
from 1863 to 1879.[42] This was the move that made Kann and others label the Czechs ‘conservative’.
But again, matters are more complex. For a start, the Czech political leaders themselves kept
insisting that they were committed to liberal values, which do figure prominently in all Czech
political programs of that era.[43] Secondly, at several occasions in the early 1860s Czech and
German liberals cooperated in the Bohemian Diet against the conservative nobles.[44] Thirdly, Czech
attempts in 1863 to get the Diet to revise the curial voting system [systém volebních sborů] to
secure a more proportionally just Czech representation in the Diet while respecting the liberal
doctrine of tax payment as a pre-condition for voting rights were rejected by a coalition of
conservative nobles and Bohemian German liberals.[45] And finally, the alliance with the nobles
helped the Czechs to great advances in education, in particular in 1864 with regard to the use of
Czech in secondary schools, as called for in all Czech political programs.[46] Even the strict
legalism of the Czech state rights argument, used also to justify the boycott of the Reichsrat
before and after the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867, may be interpreted not just as an imitation
of Hungarian liberal strategies and demands, but also as a product of an Austrian liberal adherence
to the principle of Rechtsstaatlichkeit, or the rule of law.


If until the early 1860s Austrian German liberalism mostly shaped its Czech counterpart in terms of
norms, values, and language, its main formative contribution thereafter was probably of a
legislative nature. With few interruptions the Austrian German liberals had the major say in
Austrian governments and Reichsrat politics in the ‘liberal era’ of 1861-1879, which established
the administrative and political framework that was to frame Austrian and hence Czech politics
until the end of the Monarchy. In 1862 a system of self-government was introduced at communal level
(and in 1864 at district level in Bohemia), which – though two-tracked with much control still in
the hands of imperial authorities – gave ample scope for local political development. A restricted
curial franchise was used at elections at all levels (it was reformed only for Reichsrat
elections), and that secured liberal middle-class control of the local polity. Pieter Judson has
pointed to the pivotal role of municipal politics and voluntary associations in the preservation of
an Austrian German liberal hegemony outside Vienna; Cathleen Giustino’s study of ghetto clearance
in Prague offers rich insights into how the same mechanisms were at play around 1900 in Czech
municipal politics.[47]

The December 1867 complex of post-Ausgleich constitutional laws for Cisleithania included also a
Bill of Citizens’ Rights with a rich catalogue of liberal principles: equality before the law,
personal freedom, the inviolability of private property, religious freedom and freedom of
conscience, freedom of speech, the right to assemble and form associations (although Art. 12 called
for special legislation to regulate the practicing of this right) and so forth. Art. 1 of the Bill
created an Austrian citizenship (‘Staatsbürgerrecht’), while simultaneously Art. 19 recognized the
equal rights of all nationalities (‘Volksstämme’), and the equality of all languages customary in
the crown lands in schools, government agencies, and public life.[48] This constitutional catalogue
of rights served Czech Bürger also, but on the other hand Czech hopes for the creation of a
satisfactory framework for their collective political self-realization were marred twice: with the
introduction of dualism in 1867 and again in the autumn of 1871, when the so-called Fundamental
Articles, which would have created a kind of sub-dualism within Cisleithania, were withdrawn after
Austrian German liberal and Hungarian pressure.[49] Prague was declared in a state of emergency,
and the Austrian German liberal predominance in the Auersperg Cabinet (1871-1879) meant that
Austrian liberalism was increasingly measured by its political practice, rather than by its
rhetoric and doctrines; a practice which in the Czech view implied a very high correlation between
German liberal cabinets in Vienna and infringements of the freedom of the press and other basic
civic and political rights in Bohemia.[50] Hence Palacký’s sarcastic remarks, cited above.

Finally, the Austrian German liberal hegemony produced an economic space in which also Czech
entrepreneurs could act. Economic liberalism and the centralization of Cisleithania created
lucrative conditions for the growth of a Czech national industry (based mostly on the
agro‑industrial sector), and for its eventual utilization of the opportunities in the whole ‘inner
market’ of Cisleithania. In accordance with liberal principles, Czech and German politicians and
Bürger tended well into the 1880s to regard the whole sphere of trade and production a ‘free zone’
exempted from national controversies, and to pursue their class interests accordingly.[51] So,
contrary to functionalist theory, the economic modernization of Austria neither led to the creation
of one Austrian state‑nation (as expected by Schwarzenberg’s neo-absolutist regime and in the
post-1848 Austrian German liberal vision), nor to calls from the national bourgeoisies for the
division of the huge Austrian ‘inner market’ into small nation‑states.


As suggested above, the Austrian German liberal fall from power in 1879 and the installment of
Taaffe’s ‘Iron Ring’ around them is generally perceived as a turning point in the history of
liberalism in Austria. In Czech politics things had already begun to change in 1874, as
dissatisfaction with the alliance with the conservative nobility and the policy of passive
resistance made the Young Czechs establish themselves as an independent political party, with a
consistently liberal program.[52] The Young Czechs advocated political activism and a return to the
Bohemian Diet and later also the Reichsrat, and soon after Palacký’s death in 1876 the Young Czech
leader Eduard Grégr even dared to criticize Bohemian state rights for being incomprehensible and
“not worth a pipe of tobacco without the proper power capable of securing their validity.”[53] When
in 1878 internal strife in the Austrian German liberal camp over the annexation of Bosnia created a
new window of opportunity for Czechs, even Rieger, Palacký’s successor as informal national leader,
sought a way out of passive resistance. As in 1848 or 1860, the Austrian German liberals seemed the
most natural potential ally, and with the help of another veteran from 1848, Adolph Fischhof,
Rieger met on 31 October 1878 with the influential editor-in-chief of the Neue Freie Presse,
Michael Etienne, and Alexander Scharf, publisher of the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung. Rieger
wrote about the meeting to his wife:


I will be today among three Jews; it will be a kind of viva voce, and if they find me sufficiently
kosher, perhaps even my nation will then get its General Certificate of Education and be allowed a
voice in Austria.[54]


The quote is telling of how important Austrian German recognition of the maturity of the Czech
achievements in Bildung was for Rieger, and how closely related he believed cultural and political
recognition to be, i.e. how deeply committed he was to one of the core doctrines of Austrian
nineteenth century liberalism.

            The meeting did bring a rapprochement expressed in a joint declaration, known as the
‘Emmersdorf memorandum’, which in seven points listed the principles upon which Czech – German
liberal cooperation could be built. The list included the call for a nationalities law to protect
minorities in all the lands of Austria, a reform of the electoral system in the Bohemian lands
removing the political privileges of the great landowners, increased self-government for the
provinces (but no Bohemian state rights), and a Czech return to the Reichsrat, in which they would
be obliged to “work for the liberal [freiheitlichen] principles of our time, which the exclusion of
ultramontane and feudal tendencies, while defending the right to free self-determination and
autonomy.”[55] The memorandum was to be a first step only, but the initiative soon collapsed.
Eduard Herbst, the leader of the Bohemian German liberals rejected the compromise as nationally
unacceptable, and the Emperor himself also let it be known that if the Czech and German liberals
truly found each other he could see little benefit in a Czech return to the Reichsrat.[56] The
Emperor already had plans for the conservative alternative eventually materializing with Taaffe. So
again, the Czech support of the Taaffe cabinet was not their first choice, but their best chance of
getting concessions. They made progress with regard to the use of Czech in the civil service and in
higher education (the Stremayr ordinances and the division of the Prague University in 1882), but
they never felt the alliance to be ‘natural’, and the concessions granted by Taaffe to the clerical
parties in school policies were met with little enthusiasm among the Czech politicians forced to
support them.[57]

In response to the loss of power after 1879 Austrian German liberalism underwent a major
transformation into a nationalist mould, while remaining organized around the same values of
progress, science and education, and the same concerns for diminishing intra-community differences,
which had dominated earlier liberal Bürger elite politics.[58] It might be argued that German
Austrian liberalism had now become imitative of the Czech one, in the sense that the latter had a
certain lead in nationalizing the liberal discourse and in integrating the lower social strata into
a middle-class based social system, while still insisting on national unity under the natural
leadership of the educated bourgeoisie. It might be argued that German Austrian liberalism was
still ahead of the Czechs, as is suggested by Schmidt-Hartmann’s comparison of the German reform
efforts embodied in the so-called Linz Program of 1882 and the Czech efforts from the group of
Realists of the early 1890s.[59] And it might be argued that Austrian German and Czech political
thought and action remained as synchronized and interwoven as I have argued they were until the
1870s, or to the contrary that they simply parted ways as Czech society, with its educational
system complete, increasingly constituted a separate whole, a complete, autonomous ‘semiosphere’
based on the Czech language.[60]

As to the last possibility, it seems to me misleading to think of Czech society as a closed system,
largely sealed off from any larger Austrian system of communication. The formal national
segregation of Austrian education at all levels did not stop most Czechs and even some Germans from
learning the other language, and the individual choice of school did not always respect the
dictates of national classification.[61] Politics and associational life remained the spheres most
sharply divided along national demarcation lines, whereas in Prague and other ‘mixed areas’ Czechs
and Germans lived next to each other, socially and partly religiously stratified rather than
nationally, just as they met at work, when shopping or trading (in spite of the increased
campaigning for economic national autarky), and sometimes also at café, concerts etc.[62] Also,
everybody was confronted with the same Austrian administrative and judicial system traditionally
committed to an ideal of national neutrality, and all political elites had to meet in the Reichsrat
and other institutions. Robert Luft describes the Czech political elites of 1907-1914 as
biographically, economically, socially, and politically deeply entangled in the administrative
structures of Cisleithania, in stark contrast to the ideological and propagandistic ‘Staatsferne’
[distance from the state] typical of Czech politics.[63]

To return to the issue of liberalism, in some of the scholarly literature focusing on Czech
politics we meet an interpretation of the turn of events after 1879 exactly opposite to Robert A.
Kann’s quoted above. Jan Křen writes: “If so far the Germans had been the main bearers of social
progress, it was now the nations which possessed fewer rights, and especially the Czechs, who
became the main champions of democratization.”[64] Similarly, Bruce M. Garver contrasts the
“predominantly liberal and democratic orientation of Czech politics” with the position of the
privileged Germans, who “were the sole nation within the monarchy that had anything to gain from a
more centralized and more authoritarian state, whether Rechtsstaat or Polizeistaat.”[65] Clearly,
Garver uses the word ‘liberal’ here in the broad sense as synonymous with ‘reform‑oriented’,
‘democratic’ or ‘progressive’, and though Křen and Garver are correct in pointing out that Czech
political parties took the lead in Austria in pushing for universal manhood suffrage and other
democratic reforms, this contrasting of Czech and Austrian German political norms and attitudes in
the late Habsburg Empire should not be pushed too far.[66]

But even a specialist in Czech nineteenth-century liberalism such as Otto Urban argues that the
Young Czech Party, after its outburst of radicalism around 1890, consolidated itself as a “solid
liberal party,” and that “under the concrete historical conditions of the 1890s [it] represented
the most profiled liberal party of all in Cisleithania.”[67] This may be overstated, but in figures
such as Josef Kaizl or the Old Czech Albín Bráf, Czech society of the late nineteenth century did
produce highly competent political leaders with a pronounced liberal profile. We may interpret this
phenomenon as caused by the fact that Czech Bürger representatives now considered their national
community to be sufficiently consolidated (so self-evidently a Kulturnation in the
nineteenth-century sense of the word) for them to engage directly and responsibly in the running of
the Austrian state as Czechs and Austrian citizens. Kaizl designed a new Czech strategy of a
‘politics in stages’, a systematic effort to secure for Czechs their share of seats in the
government and the Austrian bureaucracy in order to make Austria politically and socially more of a
home for Czechs. This was a liberal approach, but marked by a somewhat ‘illiberal’ dependency on
the bureaucracy and the executive, typical also of the Austrian German liberals of the 1860s and
1870s.[68] With self-confidence and sincerity, Kaizl condemned in 1895 the “sterile and prejudiced
nationalism” that prevented Czechs and Germans from coming to an understanding that could
revitalize Austria around liberal principles. He declared:


Here to a high degree we still have to win political freedoms; I will just offer slogans: equal
right for nations, equal electoral rights, freedom of expression in word and print, freedom of
association and assembly… Here political liberalism still has a sphere of activism and makes lots
and lots of sense, and one must regret… that there is no really strong liberal party in
Austria…[69]


So, at a time when Austrian German liberals had reached the conclusion that there could be no
natural symbiosis between themselves and the Austrian state, resulting in a massive investment in
the national community as a ‘substitute umbrella’ for their followers, Kaizl tried to take the
Young Czech Party in the opposite direction. But even this attempt at finding common Czech-German
liberal ground in an Austrian framework failed, and with Kaizl’s early death in 1901 not only the
most “Austrian”,[70] but also the most committed liberal Czech political leader disappeared.


As a political philosophy, liberalism has its Leitmotif in the relationship between citizen and
state. The societal glue binding individuals and the whole is civic society, the complex network of
formal and informal associations of responsible Bürger and citizens. But liberalism had problems
finding a coherent doctrine about, or answer to what ‘the nation’ was or meant in this equation.
The equal right of individuals was an established cornerstone in liberal doctrine, but in 1848
Austrian liberals agreed to extend the principle to nations. This reinterpretation of the equal
rights doctrine as also a collective claim proved to be a formidable theoretical and practical
challenge to the liberals, who had to come up with answers first to the nature of this new
collective subject, and then to its legal and political representation.

At the individual level, liberals sharply distinguished between civic and political rights, or
between passive and active citizenship: civic rights were natural and universal, but to enjoy
political rights one had to qualify as a Bürger, i.e. to prove through Bildung und Besitz that one
could contribute responsibly and maturely to society’s self-government. But there was also, I have
tried to argue, a broad if often overlooked consensus among Czech and Austrian German liberals that
this liberal logic applied to nations too. Nations were God’s creations and hence at an elementary
level protected by natural law. But once the most basic civic rights (understood primarily as a
right to learn and use one’s mother tongue) were to be followed by political rights, all agreed
that only mature and educated nations living up to European standards of civilization were entitled
to these. Czechs wanted to be measured by these standards, but could not accept what was, in their
eyes, the a priori Austrian German verdict that Czechs fell short.

Liberal doctrine insists that the status as Bürger is an open category, i.e. that every individual
has the chance to advance to the ranks of the politically entitled. The same logic ought by analogy
to apply for the collective. But Austrian German liberals were reluctant to recognize this. It was
an open issue in liberal doctrine whether society should actively encourage attempts at
socio-political advancement by individuals (or, by extension, nations), or whether a laissez faire
principle should apply. But to actively hamper chances of progress represented a violation of
liberal principles. When seeking to prevent, say, the full development of a Czech educational
system, Austrian German liberals would have had to argue that barriers to advancement in Bildung
had root in innate qualities of the minor nations, not in a politics of discrimination.
Metaphorically speaking, they moved from seeing the situation of the minor nations as analogous to
the one of the ‘non-independent’ classes, as individuals from minor nations were offered an escape
from the prison of their ‘ethnic nature’ through German acculturation, to seeing it as analogous to
the one of women, whom ‘nature itself’ excluded from political rights.[71]

With regard to national representation the profound and ultimately unbridgeable disagreements
between Czech and Austrian German liberals are well known. But behind the federalism-centralism
antagonism we can glimpse a shared understanding that decision-making must take place in a
political unit that allows the national community a suitable representation. Bohemia (or the lands
of the Bohemian Crown) represented such a unit in Czech liberal eyes, whereas Bohemian or Austrian
German resistance to any major decentralization of power to the crownlands was rooted not just in
fears that these might become bastions of conservatism or parochialism, but also in the view that
Austria/Cisleithania represented a proper forum for their national representation.[72] For long,
the goal was to obtain a sufficient share in the formulation and conduct of politics in a
territorially defined political unit, but from the 1880s onwards Czech and Austrian German liberals
increasingly demanded that the administration of national matters be placed in the hands of the
nations themselves.[73]

When in 1848 liberals introduced the idea of national equality, they took for granted the existence
of a supra-national territorial state, which (controlled by the representatives of the
people/peoples) could guarantee these rights and protect the individual and the collective against
arbitrariness and discrimination. Calls for national self-administration weakened the very idea of
a liberal territorial state. I see in this not just testimony to the growing illiberalism of
national elites, but also an inability of the Habsburg regime to reconcile Article 1 and Article 19
of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, Austrian citizenship and the equal rights of nationalities.
Beyond the difficulty of translating Article 19 into viable political arrangements, the state also
hesitated before giving Article 1 sufficient political content, for instance by making the
government responsible to the parliament. That seriously weakened the prospects of a true liberal
alliance (the possibility of which I have tried to demonstrate) that could have balanced Articles 1
and 19, individual as opposed to collective rights and responsibilities. From 1848, Austrian German
liberals (and from a different position also their Czech counterparts) oscillated between
understanding the nation as a primordial collective and as a community of educated and responsible
citizens. As Austrian German liberals increasingly invested loyalties and ‘meaning fulfillment’
that they had originally reserved for the vision of the constitutional state instead in the figure
of the ethnic or racial nation, and as Czech liberals never managed – to follow up on Havlíček’s
dictum of 1849 – to be happy citizens of Austria in the Emperor’s world and happy Czechs in God’s,
Austrian liberalism had to remain a building without a roof. Its contradictions stemmed not just
from the lack of a shared Czech-German liberal language, but also from perceptions, ideas, and
conditions that all liberals in Austria had in common.

________________________________

[1] See for instance the contributions on liberalism in Austria by Klaus Koch, Harm-Hinrich Brandt,
and Lothar Höbelt in Dieter Langewiesche (ed.), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im
europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen 1988). Only Brandt even mentions the non-German nationalities of
Cisleithania, but not as communities worth analyzing in the context of nineteenth century European
liberalism. By contrast, the anthology contains two contributions on Hungarian liberalism. Robin
Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy (New York 2001) represents an exception to the rule, as Okey devotes
due attention to liberalist trends among the Czechs and other Slavic nationalities. See for
instance p. 135, 183, 216-20.


[2] Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526-1918 (Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1977), 330,
361. Pieter Judson has convincingly challenged the conventional image of a total demise of
Austrian-German liberalism after 1879, as also the view that liberalism in Austria was an import
lacking domestic roots or a genuine social hinterland, but even in Judson’s subtle analysis liberal
politics in the Austrian Empire is treated as an exclusively German Austrian domain. Pieter M.
Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in
the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914 (Ann Arbor 1996).


[3] Harm-Hinrich Brandt briefly describes the Old Czechs as mere clients of the feudal conservative
Bohemian nobility, while the Young Czechs are said to be building on some undefined
“liberal-democratic tradition of Czechhood,” which however is put entirely in the service of
nationalism. Harm-Hinrich Brandt, “Liberalismus in Österreich zwischen Revolution und Großer
Depression” in Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 149, 155. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries also mostly
refers to Czech politicians simply as nationalists.


[4] Richard Charmatz, the preeminent pre-war historiographer of Austria’s most recent history,
recognizes that Palacký and Rieger represented a liberal, ‘bürgerlich’, party in the Czech nation,
but he interprets their alliance of the early 1860s with the federalist (in Charmatz’s terms
‘feudal’) faction of the Bohemian aristocracy as a betrayal of liberal principles. He also calls
the Old Czech German language newspaper, Politik “the paper of the Czech feudals”, and describes
the coalition supporting Taaffe in 1879 as consisting of “179 feudals, clericals and Slavic
nationalists.” The Young Czechs of the late 1880s are called “pro-freedom-democratic”
(“freiheitlich-demokratisch”), but not liberal. Richard Charmatz: Österreichs innere Geschichte von
1848 bis 1895, 3 edn. Leipzig 1918, Vol. 1, 54-55, 114, Vol. 2, 40, 54.


[5] Steven Beller, “German Liberalism, Nationalism and the Jews: The Neue Freie Presse and the
German‑Czech Conflict in the Habsburg Monarchy 1900‑1918,” Bohemia 34 (1993), 63-74, quotation at
64. On earlier perceptions of the Czechs and of Czech politics in the Austrian German press see
Francis L. Loewenheim, “German Liberalism and the Czech Renascence: Ignaz Kuranda, Die Grenzboten,
and Developments in Bohemia, 1845‑1849,” in The Czech Renascence of the Nineteenth Century, ed.
Peter Brock and H. Gordon Skilling (Toronto, 1970), 146‑175, Andreas Gottsmann, “’Stockböhmen’ oder
‘Russenknechte’? Das Bild der Tschechen in der deutschsprachigen Presse Österreichs im
Revolutionsjahr 1848/49, ” Österreichische Osthefte, 34 (1992), 284-311, Eugenie Trützschler von
Falkenstein, Der Kampf der Tschechen um die historischen Rechte der böhmischen Krone im Spiegel der
Presse 1861‑1879 (Wiesbaden 1982), and Christian Scharf, Ausgleichpolitik und Pressekampf in der
Ära Hohenwart: die Fundamentalartikel von 1871 und der deutsch-tschechische Konflikt in Böhmen
(Munich 1996).


[6] Cited from Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 169. My summary of the German Austrian liberal
argument with regard to the non-German nations is based on Judson’s reading of the liberal
discourse.


[7] Beller, “German Liberalism,” 69-70. This line of reasoning is strikingly similar to the
arguments used in neo-absolutist statements of the 1850s justifying the government’s withdrawal of
concessions given in 1848-69 to Czechs and other minor nationalities with regard to language use in
secondary and higher education. See Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in
der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs 1848-1918 (Vienna 1985), 40, 42-44.


[8] Cited from Pavla Vošahlíková, “Počátky českého liberalismu v díle Františka Palackého,” (The
Beginnings of Czech Liberalism in the Work of František Palacký) in František Palacký 1798/1998 –
dějiny a dnešek (František Palacký 1798/1998 – History and Today), ed. František Šmahel (Prague
1999), 289-299, at 291. See also Jan Havránek, “Tschechischer Liberalismus an der Wende vom 19. zum
20. Jahrhundert,” in Ungleiche Nachbarn: demokratische und nationale Emanzipation bei Deutschen,
Tschechen und Slowaken (1815-1914), ed. Hans Mommsen and Jiří Kořalka (Essen 1993), 65 on the Czech
usage of the word liberal around 1848.


[9] Karel Havlíček Borovský, “Strany politické” (Political parties), Slovan (The Slav) 2. and 19.
October 1850, printed in Karel Havlíček Borovský, Dílo II (Prague 1986), 376-388, quotation at 386.
Havlíček satirized the variety of people who suddenly declared themselves to be liberal in 1848-49,
but he did not consider the term itself discredited.


[10] Cited from Vošahlíková, “Počátky českého liberalismu”, 297.


[11] Havránek, “Tschechischer Liberalismus,” 65-71. The Young Czech leader Edvard Grégr made it
clear in a pamphlet of 1874 that he considered ‘free-thinking’ and ‘liberal’ to be synonymous, see
Cathleen Giustino, Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of
Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900 (New York 2003) 351, note 10.


[12] Ottův slovník naučný (Otto’s Encyclopedia), vol. 15 (Prague 1900), 1016-17.


[13] See for instance the anthology Český liberalismus: texty a osobnosti (Czech Liberalism: texts
and personalities), eds. Milan Znoj, Jan Havránek and Martin Sekera, Prague 1995; Otto Urban,
Kapitalismus a česká společnost (Capitalism and Czech society), 2^nd edition, Prague 2003; Bruce
Garver, The Young Czech Party 1874-1901 and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System, New Haven 1978,
or Jiří Malíř, Vývoj liberálního proudu české politiky na Moravě (The Development of the Liberal
Stream in Czech Politics in Moravia), Brno 1985. The present essay will primarily focus on
developments in Bohemia. Tomáš Vojtěch, Mladočeši a boj o politickou moc v Čechách (The Young
Czechs and the Struggle for Political Power in Bohemia), Prague 1980, offers a brief comparison of
Young Czech liberalism with other “bourgeois trends” in Austria-Hungary.


[14] Czech was the language of instruction only in primary schools in districts where it was the
mother tongue of the pupils; it was taught as an optional subject at a few Gymnasien and at the
universities in Prague, Vienna and Pressburg. See Jitka Lněničková, České země v době předbřeznové
1792-1848 (The Bohemian Lands in the Vormärz Era 1792-1848), (Prague 1999), 151-53, 401-406. The
near exclusive use of German in secondary schools and higher education does not mean that these
Austrian institutions (supervised by the Catholic church) had any German national curriculum or
aims.


[15] Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton 1981),
24.


[16] I have borrowed this phrase, and the argument, from Jeremy King, “The Nationalization of East
Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond,” in Staging the Past: The Politics of
Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present, eds. Maria Bucur and Nancy M.
Wingfield (West Lafayette 2001), 121-23.


[17] On the formation of bourgeois strata in Bohemia and the social background of Czech political
elites see the contributions by Pavla Horská, Otto Urban and Jiří Kořalka in Bürgertum in der
Habsburger-Monarchie, eds. Ernst Bruckmüller, Ulrike Döcker, Hannes Stekl, and Peter Urbanitsch
(Vienna 1990).


[18] See Jiří Štaif, “Revoluce 1848-1849 a počátky občanské společnosti v českých zemích” (The
Revolution 1848-1849 and the beginnings of civic society in the Bohemian Lands), in Narodní
obrození a rok 1848 v evropském kontextu (The National Awakening and the Year 1848 in a European
Context), ed. Milan Skřivánek (Litomyšl 1998), 72-75. Also Urban notes that the Bildungsbürgertum
was strongly over-represented among the Reichstag from the Bohemian Lands, and that this trend was
even more pronounced among the Czech delegates (62% of all delegates from Moravia and Silesia and
81% of those from Bohemia belonged to this group, and over 90% of all Czech delegates). Otto Urban,
“Zur Frage der Voraussetzungen der politischen Tätigkeit des tschechischen Bürgertums in den Jahren
1848/1849,” in Bruckmüller, Bürgertum, 208.


[19] Lněničková, České země, 153, 220-23. Urban, Kapitalismus, 158-59. The struggle of these young
Czech representatives for an industrial school teaching in Czech, and for the publishing of the
Union’s journal in a Czech version next to the German one testifies to the growing strength of a
Czech liberal bourgeoisie even before 1848, but all mobilization still took place within one common
institution.


[20] To quote Cohen again: “In fact, many in Prague in the mid nineteenth century had a choice of
ethnic affiliation… During the early stages of ethnic differentiation, family descent and
geographical origin provided no simple determinants for identification.” Gary Cohen, “The German
Minority of Prague, 1850-1918,” in Ethnic Identity in Urban Europe, ed. Max Engman et al., New York
1992, 267-293, at 270. See also Jan Havránek, “Předpoklady působení české kultury v Čechách v 19.
století” (Preconditions for the Impact of Czech culture in Bohemia in the 19^th century), in Město
v české kultuře 19. století (The City in Czech Culture of the 19^th century), ed. Milena Freimanová
(Prague 1983), 110-113; Urban, Kapitalismus, 148-49, and Cohen, Politics, Chapter One.


[21] Otto Urban, “Český liberalismus v 19. století” (Czech Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century),
in Český liberalismus: texty a osobnosti, 18. See also Hugh LeCaine Agnew, “Dilemmas of Liberal
Nationalism: Czechs and Germans in Bohemia and the Revolution of 1848”, in Nations and Nationalisms
in East-Central Europe, 1806-1948: a Festschrift for Peter F. Sugar, eds. Sabrina P. Ramet, James
R. Felak and Herbert J. Ellison (Bloomington 2002), 59-60, and Lněničková, České země, 79-86.


[22] See his article “Co jest obec?” (What is a community?), originally in Pražské noviny (Prague
News), 5. November until 31. December 1846, printed in Havlíček, Dílo II, 88-106. My summary of the
constitutive features of Austrian German liberalism is based on Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries,
Chapters One and Two.


[23] Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 58-59. See also Pieter Judson, “Rethinking the liberal
legacy,” in Rethinking Vienna 1900, ed. Steven Beller (New York 2001), 57-79, in particular 66-67,
and Berthold Sutter, “Die politische und rechtliche Stellung der Deutschen in Österreich
1848-1918”, in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Band III, 1. Teil: Die Völker des Reiches (Vienna
1980), 174-75.


[24] Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung, 22-24. Nor did the pronounced Herderian elements in the Czech
definition of the nation prevent the national movement from bidding everybody welcome, irrespective
of their family background, who identified with the Czech national project. For one example from
1848 see Miroslav Hroch, “Ludvík Rittersberg – účastník a komentátor revoluce” (Ludvík Rittersberg
– Participant in and Commentator of the Revolution) in Skřivánek, Narodní obrození a rok 1848,
85-95. As to the complexity of defining Germanness, and on the impossibility of using a Kohnian
dichotomy of ‘western’ liberal and ‘eastern’ ethnic or cultural nationalism to the analysis of
Central European developments, see the fine discussion in Brian E. Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848
Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge 2002).


[25] “Porotní soud nad redaktorem Národních novin pro článek Výklad oktrojované ústavy od 4. března
v čísle 62 Národních novin” (Trial by jury against the editor of the National News for the article
An interpretation of the ‘octroied’ Constitution of March 4 in No. 62 of the National News),
originally in Národní noviny (National News), 14 and 15 April 1849, printed in Havlíček, Dílo II,
189-199, quotations at 193.


[26] Quoted from Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 60. Agnew quotes the Bohemian German liberal
Franz Schuselka for writing in 1843: “The language is the most holy possession of a nation, the
strongest means for the preservation of its national independence, the purest expression of its
national spirit… To sacrifice even an imperfect, raw language freely to a better foreign one is
high treason to one’s own worth…” Agnew, “Dilemmas,” 53. Any Czech liberal could subscribe to this.


[27] See Vladimír Macura, “Problems and paradoxes of the national revival”, in Bohemia in History
ed. Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge 1998), 182-197, and Christopher P. Storck, Kulturnation und
Nationalkunst: Strategien und Mechanismen tschechischer Nationsbildung von 1860 bis 1914 (Cologne
2001). The dismissal of the Czech chances of becoming a Kulturnation could be reconciled with a
liberal German self-perception through arguments that certain nations (‘Völker’) had a greater
innate potential for progress in civilization than others. When Leopold von Ranke defined European
or Occidental civilization as the joint historical product of the strivings of the Romance and
Germanic nations he explicitly excluded the Slavs from a share in this history “because of their
strange and peculiar nature.” Slavic nature thus bars the way to European (Romance and Germanic)
culture, and so – the liberals could argue – only by overcoming this nature, only by
‘de-Slavicizing’ oneself, could one become a truly civilized Bürger. Such perceptions of and
arguments about ‘the Slavs’ became quite frequent in German discourse from around 1848, see Peter
Bugge, “‘Land und Volk’ – oder: Wo liegt Böhmen?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft (Vol. 28, 2002),
404-434 for references and discussion.


[28] The St. Wenceslas Committee consisted in Josef Polišenský’s words, of “only two radicals…
several Germans, a Jewish banker, and the rest were middle-class Czech liberals.” Josef Polišenský,
Aristocrats and the Crowd in the Revolutionary Year 1848 (Albany 1980), 112. More Czech and German
liberals and conservatives were added when the committee was transformed into a broader National
Committee on 10 April. See also Otto Urban, Česká společnost 1848-1918 (Czech Society 1848-1918)
(Prague 1982), 23-25, and Stanley Z. Pech, The Czech Revolution of 1848 (Chapel Hill 1969), 47-79.
Full Czech texts of the first petition in its draft and final version, and of the second petition
can be found in Josef J. Toužimský, Na úsvitě nové doby (At the Dawn of a New Era) (Prague 1898),
63-66, 184-188, 247-48.


[29] Quotation from the first draft petition of 11 March. The call for legal guarantees was made
explicit in the final version of the first petition and repeated in the second petition of 29
March. See Toužimský, Na úsvitě, 64, 189, and 248, and Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung, 17-18.


[30] Quoted from Toužimský, Na úsvitě, 149. Among the signatories were Ignaz Kuranda, Karl Egon
Ebert and Moritz Hartmann. The term for “Czech” in the German version is “böhmisch”.


[31] According to Křen several German towns in Bohemia supported the Wenceslas petition; Jan Křen,
Die Konfliktgemeinschaft: Tschechen und Deutsche 1780-1918 (Munich 1996), 91. See also Toužimský,
Na úsvitě 189-92. A report in the Reichenberger Anzeigeblatt, criticizing the anarchy in Prague
created by the “czechischen Ultras” led to a joint Prague Czech and German protest declaration
stating: “We attend persistently here in Prague to the concord between both nations, Germans and
Czechs, since we know well that we could easily both of us be deprived of our freedom if a national
strife between us broke out.” Signed by 33 Prague Bürger and printed in Národní noviny (National
News), 5 April 1848, 3. Ludwig von Löhner’s League of Germans of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia for
the Preservation of their Nationality, founded in Vienna in early April in protest not only against
the call in the second Wenceslas Petition of 29 March for Bohemian crown land unity, and in support
of their incorporation in a new Germany, but also against any concessions to the Czech language in
secondary education and the civil service (see Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 92) thus did not
represent the view of all Bohemian German liberals.


[32] Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung 17-21. Stourzh insists that the idea of equal rights among
nationalities was interpreted in 1848 as an implementation of the ideas of liberty, equality and
fraternity of the French revolution, ibid. 3. In this perspective Křen’s argument gains weight that
the Czechs contributed significantly to the enrichment of the supply of ideas of liberalism and
democracy, Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 83.



[33] The ‘Whitsuntide Uprising’ in Prague was politically motivated, not nationally. Both Czech and
German radicals took part in the fighting, which the Czech liberals perceived as a disaster. But
outside Prague the event was largely interpreted as an anti-German Czech rebellion and even people
like Löhner and Kuranda praised Windischgrätz as a national hero. See Pech, Czech Revolution,
139-166, and Josef Kolejka, Národy habsburské monarchie v revoluci 1848-1849 (The Nations of the
Habsburg Monarchy in the Revolution, 1848-1849) (Prague 1989), 192-203. Gottsmann, “‘Stockböhmen’
oder ‘Russenknechte’?” 294-97, shows how a stereotypical hostility to the Czechs was more
predominant then in the Viennese press than in the Prague German one. On Czech condemnations of the
Vienna uprising see Pech, Czech Revolution, 193-208.


[34] Robert Sak, Rieger: Příběh Čecha devatenáctého věku (Rieger: The Story of a Czech of the
Nineteenth Century) (Semily 1993), 102. When drafting the individual articles Rieger mostly looked
to Rotteck and Welcker’s Staatslexikon for inspiration, ibid. 104. On 17 January 1849 Löhner called
Rieger the “Ajax of the Parliament”, see Otto Urban, Kroměřížský sněm 1848-1849 (The Kremsier
Parliament 1848-1849) (Prague 1998), 71.


[35] Rieger sat in the sub-committee on the Bill of Rights with Ernst Violand from Lower Austria
and Franz Hein from Moravia, two German liberal delegates. Also Josef von Lasser influenced the
final wording of Art. 21. See Urban, Kroměřížský sněm, 56 ff. In another example of how ideas
circulated in Central Europe in 1848, Stourzh shows how Rieger when drafting the Bill found
inspiration both in Pillersdorf’s Austrian Constitution of 25 April 1848 and the draft German
Constitution of Frankfurt, see Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung, 24-27.


[36] Sutter, “Stellung der Deutschen”, 177-78. Even with regard to the territorial-administrative
organization of Austria a high degree of consensus had been reached, in spite of Palacký’s
resignation from the Parliament in protest against the lack of comprehension for his vision of a
federalization of Austria along ethnic lines. See Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 99-108.


[37] Trützschler von Falkenstein, Der Kampf der Tschechen, 27. Rieger’s memorandum of 14 June 1860,
signed by further eleven leading Czech national representatives, is printed in full in Politické
programy českých národních stran 1860-1890, ed. Pavel Cibulka (Prague 2000), 39-44. The text,
written in the name of the ‘Czechoslav’ people, echoes the liberal rhetoric of 1848, and next to
arguing for the virtues of having a political daily it stresses the need for secondary education in
the Czech language, all to improve the nation’s level of education.


[38] Under the slogan “Progress toward Betterment” the program called not only for reform, progress
and equal rights for all under the protection of the law, but also for the implementation (and not
just recognition) of equal rights for all nationalities and confessions. The full text of the
program is printed in Politické programy, 47-48. See also Cohen, Politics, 46-47. As in 1848,
Prague Czech and German liberals thus together supported the doctrine of national equality, which
had been abandoned by the neo-absolutist regime, and towards which even the Schmerling cabinet had
lukewarm feelings, see Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung, 39-49.


[39] Jiří Kořalka, “Tschechische bürgerliche Landtagabgeordnete in Böhmen 1861-1913,” in
Bruckmüller, Bürgertum, 212; Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 89-90. Pinkas and Hasner tried in
1862 together with Anton Gindely and Karl Habietinek and with the initial support of approximately
twenty Czech and German deputies, but ultimately in vain, to establish a nationally neutral,
liberal Klub der Mitte in the Diet. See Otto Urban, “Der böhmische Landtag,” in Die
Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Band VII: Verfassung und Parlamentarismus, 2. Teilband: Die
regionalen Repräsentativkörperschaften (Vienna 2000), 1997, 2005.


[40] The most prominent case is probably that of Heinrich/Jindřich Fügner, the co-founder of the
Czech Sokol (another bourgeois-liberal association modeled after German paragons), see Claire E.
Nolte, “Choosing Czech Identity in Nineteenth-Century Prague: The Case of Jindřich Fügner,”
Nationalities Papers, Vol.24 (1996), 51-62. Nolte tells how Fügner around 1860 was “brought… into
the upper echelons of Czech society in Prague, a small world of mostly German-speaking Czech
patriots, where Fügner’s poor command of Czech was no barrier to acceptance.” (ibid. 54). See also
Cohen, Politics, 44-45.


[41] Havránek, “Předpoklady působení,” 113-14. In 1862 in Prague 6400 copies of Czech language
papers were published, and 11,000 copies of German language papers, of which Politik made up 2100,
ibid. Politik was for decades the main organ of the Old Czech faction of the Czech national
movement, as its Czech language newspaper Národ (The Nation; published 1863-65) was unable to
compete with the Young Czech Národní listy. See also Scharf, Ausgleichpolitik und Pressekampf,
105-111, and Karel Hoch, “Dějiny novinářství od r. 1860 do doby současné” (The History of
Journalism from 1860 to Contemporary Times) in Albert Pražák (ed.), Československá vlastivěda VII:
Písemnictví (Czechoslovak National History and Geography VII: Literature), 449-458.


[42] See Urban, Česká společnost, 163-73, and Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 120-25 on the reasons
that made the Czech leaders opt for this alliance, which was perceived as ‘unnatural’ by the
majority of Czech liberals.


[43] Notice for instance Rieger’s speech in the Reichsrat of 19 June 1861, quoted in part in Urban,
Česká společnost, 170, or see the various declarations of the 1860s printed in Politické programy.


[44] Several such instances are listed in Urban, “Der böhmische Landtag,” 2008. Beyond the realm of
national controversy there was thus still plenty of room for pursuing common Bürger economic and
political interests.


[45] Palacký, who presented the Czech case, showed convincingly and in great detail how the design
of constituencies discriminated against the Czechs, whose share in tax payments far exceeded their
share of seats in the Diet, see Urban, Česká společnost, 174-75. The Czech calls for reform could
therefore not be dismissed from the standpoint of liberal doctrine, which gives weight to Křen’s
argument that national intransigence dictated the “profoundly illiberal attitude of the liberal
Germans”; Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 125.


[46] Urban, “Der böhmische Landtag,” 2007.


[47] Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, Chapters 7 and 8; Giustino, Ghetto Clearance. On local
self-government and administration in Bohemia and Austria see Jiří Klabouch, “Die Lokalverwaltung
in Cisleithanien,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Band II: Verwaltung und Rechtswesen
(Vienna 1975), 270-305, and Georg Schmitz, “Organe und Arbeitsweise, Strukturen und Leistungen der
Landesvertretungen,” in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Band VII: Verfassung und
Parlamentarismus, 2. Teilband: Die regionalen Repräsentativkörperschaften (Vienna 2000), 1353-1393.


[48] The liberals took most formulations almost verbatim from the octroied Constitution of 4 March
1849, which, however, had not acknowledged the equal rights of nationalities. Its introduction in
the December Constitution may thus be interpreted as the full recognition of this claim as a
liberal principle. The March Constitution had recognized a Reichsbürgerrecht (while mentioning
Austrian Staatsbürger in Art 7 in a separate Bill on fundamental political rights). See Stourzh,
Gleichberechtigung, 53-57, Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 118-126, and Wilhelm Brauneder, “Die
Verfassungsentwicklung in Österreich 1848 bis 1918”, in Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1918, Band
VII: Verfassung und Parlamentarismus, 2. Teilband: Verfassungsrecht, Verfassungswirklichkeit,
Zentrale Repräsentativkörperschaften (Vienna 2000), 120-25, 181-190. Full texts of all Austrian
Constitutions can be found at http://www.verfassungen.de/at


[49] See Scharf, Ausgleichpolitik und Pressekampf, for a detailed account of the events. The
Hohenwart Cabinet tried to justify its policy of conciliation towards the Czechs by evoking the
liberal discourse of education: “The non-German elements of the Empire must today be allowed a
greater and more independent share of the running of the state [der staatlichen Arbeit], not
because they are Poles or Czechs, Rumanians or Slovenes, but because they under the civilizing
influence of the state and the German element have acquired a higher measure of ability.” Quoted
from Scharf, Ausgleichpolitik und Pressekampf, 55.


[50] See Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 155-162. Urban, “Der böhmische Landtag,” 2023-2025 describes
how elections to the Bohemian Diet were manipulated in 1872 to secure support for the centralist
liberal regime.


[51] This point is argued in detail in Peter Heumos, Agrarische Interessen und Nationale Politik in
Böhmen 1848-1889 (Wiesbaden 1979), 53-54, 154-56, 169. Compare with Albrecht, who in her study of
the Chambers of Commerce in Bohemia writes: “When the control of institutions was involved, Germans
and Czechs disagreed sharply along national lines. When economic policy issues could be divorced
from their institutional context, however, the situation was more complex… Czechs and Germans
occasionally cooperated on issues that could strengthen the competitive advantage of all business
in Cisleithania, such as trade, taxes, or Austria’s relationship with Hungary.” Catherine
Albrecht,  “Chambers of Commerce and Czech-German Relations in the late Nineteenth Century,”
Bohemia Vol. 38 (1997), 298-310, at 299.


[52] The full text of the Party program of 27 December 1874 is printed in Politické programy,
213-215. The program was liberal both in its political demands and its rhetoric of Bildung
(‘vzdělanost’) and progress.

[53] Quoted from Urban, Česká společnost, 309.


[54] Quoted from Zdeněk V. Tobolka, Politické dějiny československého národa od r. 1848 až do
dnešní doby Vol. II. 1860-1879 (A Political History of the Czechoslovak Nation from 1848 until
Today) (Prague 1933), 327. I see in the mentioning of Etienne, Scharf, and Fischhof’s Jewishness
not so much anti-Semitism as an expression of how Viennese Jews together with Bohemian Germans made
up a significant segment of the Austrian German liberal leadership.


[55] Quoted from point five of the memorandum. Full German and Czech text in Politické programy,
247-48.


[56] Tobolka, Politické dějiny, 329, stresses Herbst’s negative influence, Urban, Česká společnost,
324-25, the Emperor’s hostility, and Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 168 a combination of both. All
agree that Etienne’s death in 1879 was a major blow to the initiative.


[57] William A. Jenks, Austria under the Iron Ring 1879-1893, (Charlottesville 1965) offers a
detailed account of the Taaffe era. Somewhat at odds with Urban’s interpretation Jenks argues that
Taaffe in 1879 hoped for a coalition ministry with both German liberals and Czechs, but that Herbst
refused the proposal, op. cit. 34-35.


[58] Judson, “Rethinking the liberal legacy,” 68-74.


[59] Eva Schmidt-Hartmann, “People's Democracy: The Emergence of a Czech Political Concept in the
Late Nineteenth Century”, in East European History ‑ Selected Papers of the Third World Congress
for Soviet and East European Studies, ed. Stanislav J. Kirschbaum (Columbus 1988), 125-140.


[60] The term is Macura’s, borrowed from Lotman; see Macura, “Problems and paradoxes,” 184.


[61] In 1890, 40% of the pupils in the German municipal Volksschulen and Bürgerschulen in Prague
reported Czech as their mother tongue, in 1910 the number was 17%. A much greater number of pupils
followed courses in the other language, although it was taught as a non-required subject, See
Cohen, Politics, 132-33. Nekula reports that at Franz Kafka’s German Gymnasium in Prag in the
1890s, the Czech courses were mostly followed by sons of storekeepers and doctors, less by sons of
higher civil servants or industrialists. Among the Czechs of Prague, he adds, a Czech-German
bilingualism remained widespread in first of all intellectual circles, due to their longer
education and the increased career opportunities offered by a knowledge of German. See Marek
Nekula, “Der deutsch-tschechisce Bilinguismus,” in Deutsche und Tschechen: Geschichte – Kultur –
Politik, eds. Walter Koschmal, Marek Nekula, and Joachim Rogall (Munich 2001), 212. See also the
contributions by Jeremy King and Tara Zahra in this volume on school attendance as a legal and
political battle field.


[62] Cohen, Politics, 134-37; Gary Cohen, “Deutsche, Juden und Tschechen in Prag: das Sozialleben
des Alltags, 1890-1914,” 64-67, and Robert Luft, “Nationale Utraquisten in Böhmen: Zur Problematik
‘nationaler Zwischenstellungen’ am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts,” 43, both in Allemands, Juifs et
Tchèches a Prague, eds. Maurice Godé, Jacques Le Rider, and Françoise Mayer (Montpellier 1996).


[63] Robert Luft, Parlamentarische Führungsgruppen und politische Strukturen in der tschechischen
Gesellschaft 1907-1914 (Munich 2001), 505. As to the civil service, the Czech National Council
noticed in 1905 that among the approximately 700 Bohemian ‘Landesbeamten’ there were 29 “profoundly
neutral persons”, who neither sided with the Czechs, nor with the Germans. See Luft, “Nationale
Utraquisten,” 40. Even among those civil servants, we may add, who proclaimed to be of one or the
other nationality, this national self-identification did not by necessity imply a commitment to
national politics.


[64] Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 196.


[65] Garver, The Young Czech Party, 302, 262.


[66] “In their attitudes to civic rights there was no difference between Czech and German liberal
politicians. The differences between them were in the economic field, but even there the difference
was no longer very big in the last pre-war years. The Czech nationalists were liberal, and the
German liberals nationalistic.” Havránek, “Tschechischer Liberalismus”, 80.


[67] Urban, “Český liberalismus”, 26.

[68] On Kaizl’s strategy see Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft, 202-205.


[69] Josef Kaizl, České myšlenky (Czech Thoughts) (Prague 1895), 142. The quote on “sterile and
prejudiced nationalism” stems from a Reichsrat speech of 28 October 1895, cited from Urban, Česká
společnost, 448.


[70] As Friedrich Austerlitz wrote about Kaizl in 1914. Citation from Křen, Konfliktgemeinschaft,
238.


[71] The liberals had a point when arguing that the application of the equal national rights
doctrine could get in conflict with the equal rights of individuals if used to bar members of
culturally weaker nations from access to high quality education in another language. This was the
logic applied in Bohemia in 1850 to justify that the “Prüfung zum Nachweise der allgemeinen
Bildung” was to be made in the German language only. It would be a deceitful abuse of the equal
rights doctrine, the Government decree argued, if candidates with a different level of Bildung
could make the same claims to government funded teaching posts (“Versorgung im Lehramte”) – instead
true concern for the equal rights consisted in securing for the youth of all nationalities an
education of the highest possible standards. For argument and quote, see Stourzh,
Gleichberechtigung, 40. My point is that such a line of reasoning was much less tenable from a
liberal perspective around 1880 or 1900 than in 1850, since in the meantime Czech education had
proven capable of making significant progress.


[72] Eduard Herbst declared in 1870 in the debate about a possible Bohemian mini-Ausgleich: “We do
not want to be oppressed by a majority in every single land, we want and wish that the Germans in
Austria can be and remain Germans precisely in Austria [“Deutsche eben in Österreich”; emphasis in
original], not merely Germans in Bohemia and Germans in Moravia or wherever else.” Cited from
Scharf, Ausgleichpolitik, 28.


[73] Stourzh, Gleichberechtigung, 14.