But the Italians controlled the municipality of Trieste, and while their demand for the constitution of the Trentino as a separate Crownland was regularly refused (partly owing to the objections of the Tirolean Germans, partly for fear of creating a precedent), they were fully represented, proportionately to their numbers, in the Innsbruck Landtag, and administration, justice and education, primary and secondary, in the Trentino were purely Italian.
But the heart of the problem of the Monarchy’s Italians lay in the geographical location of their homes, just across the frontiers of the new Italy, and in Italy’s open ambition to annexe them. These factors made the problem as much an international, as an internal one, and not only strengthened among the Italians of the Monarchy an irredentism to which all questions of their de facto conditions were fundamentally irrelevant, but led the Austrians themselves to accept this as a fact of life to which resistance was useless and even moral indignation over it out of place.
There have even been Austrians, of the most various schools of thought, who have written that the Monarchy was unwise in not ceding the Trentino to Italy in 1866, when it could have done so without much further loss of face, their argument being that this minor sacrifice would have made a reality of the Triplice, and saved for the Monarchy, certainly the German South Tirol up to the Brenner, and probably the Italian Littoral as far as Trieste.121 The present writer doubts strongly whether the sacrifice would have glutted Italy’s appetite indefinitely; but that the idea could have been held by serious thinkers indicates the special light in which the Italian national problem was viewed in the Monarchy itself.
Of the Italians within the Monarchy, by no means all were irredentist. Precisely in the Trentino, the Catholic Church long threw its weight into the Austrian scale, and its Party, the Partito Populare, contained many Austriacante. The local nobility was divided, most of the peasants still nationally indifferent and often instinctively loyal to the traditional authority. In Trieste the business interests, many of which were, indeed, German or Jewish, were pro-Austrian, and the Social Democrats there (although not in the Trentino) came down on the same side. But the ‘intellectuals’ nearly everywhere, and especially in Trieste, were Italian nationalist, often very turbulently so. Trieste was the scene of many and rowdy demonstrations, and it was there that a fanatic (whose name, characteristically, was the German one of Oberdank) achieved the distinction of being the only man during this period to attempt the life of the Monarch as a purely national gesture.122
*
The Roumanian educational system in the Bukovina made very large strides after the lifting of the Polish control over it. It is true that when (in 1875) the Duchy received an University of its own, this was a German one, as were many of the secondary schools, and a large number of the primary schools were mixed. But these, too, were of benefit to the Roumanians, who in time received also a number of elementary and even secondary establishments of their own. Thanks to these, a perceptible intelligentsia emerged, while numerous associations occupied themselves with raising the cultural and economic standards of the peasants.
The local Roumanian nationalism of the time was, however, extraordinarily pacific. The landowners, who, with the higher Orthodox clergy, dominated the Duchy, made loyalty to the Monarchy a fixed principle of their policy, and were even themselves largely denationalized to the point of forgetting their own language. There was practically no irredentism, nor even political disaffection,123 and the connections of the local Roumanians with their kinsfolk in the Regat, and even in Transylvania, were of the loosest. There was no trace here of such hostility to the Monarchy, or to the local Germans, as prevailed among the Transylvanian Roumanians towards the Hungarian State and the Magyar people.
*
If the Germans of Austria were slower than any of its other peoples to evolve a specifically ‘national’ policy, and if a far larger proportion of them denied to the last the necessity, or even the propriety, of any such thing, this was not due to any quality in the German soul which lifted it above national emotion. Where, in any Land or commune, its Germans felt their position threatened or their self-esteem injured, they were as quick as any others to resort to self-defence, and did so with fully as much intolerance and intransigence. But it was one thing for an individual German to react ‘nationally’ to a personal or local stimulus; quite another for the Germans to organize themselves politically on a national basis. One obstacle lay in their very geographical distribution, scattered over so many Crownlands, each of which had its own special traditions, its own problems, even in respect of nationality – those of the Tirolean Germans were quite different from those of the Bohemian, those of the Styrian and Carinthian other again – even its own type of German, often far more conscious of his local affiliations than of his kinship with a man from another province.
They were also more highly differentiated socially, economically and culturally, than most of the other peoples, and thus more naturally prone to think in terms of class or confessional interests, which in their case could not usually be translated into national terms, as could the grievance of a Czech worker against a German employer, or a Ruthene peasant against a Polish landlord (we shall see shortly how much the German national movement, when it did take root, owed to the case which was the exception to this rule), and had become habituated to thinking in these terms before nationalism emerged as a rival for their political allegiance. They were beati possidentes with no national grievances of their own, and consequently inclined to underestimate the strength of others’ feelings. Most important of all was the influence on their outlook of the fact that they had so long been accustomed, with reason, to regard themselves, if not as the Monarchy’s Staatsvolk, at least as its staatserhaltendes Element par excellence. Up to the 1860s this view of the relationship between the State and its Germans was not confined to the Liberals: it was held, consciously or subconsciously, by most educated Germans, and it implied in itself a sort of national philosophy which made a specifically national policy not merely undesirable, but superfluous. And it was not purely selfish: those who held it could maintain, with much reason, that any other was detrimental to the State, as weakening the ‘cement’ which held it together, and further, as encouraging and even justifying reactions against it among other peoples.
As we have suggested, this attitude was basically incompatible with a political philosophy which assumed that the destinies of Austria were in the hands of its peoples, represented in their Parliament – unless, indeed, its non-Germans accepted it, which they had most emphatically refused to do when Parliamentary life opened. That all the Germans in the Narrower Reichsrat had still been able to maintain it (for the Clericals had regarded themselves as above nationality exactly as had the Liberals) is explicable by the safe cushioning with which the Schmerling franchise had provided them. Nearly all of them had still held it through 1866, a fact more difficult to explain, except by the power of acquired habit to blind humanity to present reality.
A bigger change came in 1870, when Prussia’s victories over France evoked such an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm among Austria’s Germans. Even this, however, still hardly ruffled the political surface. The Graz and Vienna associations drew up political programmes, based on that of Aussee, for the 1870 elections, but neither put up a candidate. The ‘Constitutional Left’ included in its programme a phrase that Austria was a ‘German State’ – words to be read in their old connotation – but no more. Then came the Hohenwart experiment, which did, indeed, arouse deep national passions among the Germans, although Beust exaggerated when he told the Emperor that it had turned the Liberals into a German national Party.124 And when they returned to power, the Liberals put away their fears. With the Poles appeased, the Slovenes hardly yet awake and the Czechs, as they thought, decisively defeated (an illusion which the Czechs’ policy of absenteeism did much to foster) they regarded themselves as completely safe at home; while Austria’s official friendship with Germany strengthened the illusion, b
y giving them a comfortable assurance that Bismarck would see to it that no harm would come to them, and enabled them to feel that Austria was, after all, still a ‘German State’ so far as the world was concerned.
They thought it unnecessary to make any move to conciliate the Czechs, although they also did not think it necessary to repress them: it is fair to say that while the Czechs suffered much during this period from police and bureaucratic tyranny and social arrogance when they did raise their voices, they were not subjected to ‘Germanization’. Herbst himself said that to limit the freedom of other peoples would be contrary to the principles of Liberalism.125 Art. XIX was applied without distortion, nor did the Government try to fill what the German nationalists later regarded as a principal gap in Austria’s political structure by making German the official language of Cis-Leithania, or even of the Reichsrat.
This unconcernedness about the national issue was very general in the Liberal Party during its second term of office. When the great split came in 1873, one of the sins with which the young rebels reproached their elders was, indeed, slackness in defending the national interests of their countrymen in Bohemia. But the larger cause of the split was revulsion against the exploitation of the poor which was sanctioned by orthodox Liberalism, and above all, against the corruption in high places uncovered by the Krach – a revolt which was ‘national’ only in the special sense that it contained an element of anti-Semitism generated by the frequency with which Jewish interests had been revealed as lying behind the corruption scandals. The Progressives of the 1870s still sat with the Old Liberals in one Parliamentary Club, and still accepted the doctrine that the Party was concerned with the interests of the State, not those of one national group in it. The only Reichsrat Deputy in this decade to call for a German National Party was Georg von Schönerer, a doughty eccentric126 who had developed extreme racialist doctrines which were presently to lead him into hostility to the Monarchy and everything for which it stood. But Schönerer himself was at this stage primarily a social revolutionary. When he left the Progressives, as he did in 1876,127 because they were ‘insufficiently nationally-minded’, it was the Jewish question, not that of the relationship between the Monarchy and its Germans, that drove him out of the Liberal fold; and at the time, he failed to take a single colleague with him.
Even their defeat in 1879 did not move the Liberals to change their principles: the furthest they went was, in 1882, to adopt new statutes which declared the Party’s objects to include ‘the protection of the constitutional (staatlich) and national interests of its members’, who, it emphasized, were not all Germans.128 It rejected another motion by Schönerer that it should transform itself into a German national Party, and although Schönerer then definitively left the Party, all its other members continued to accept the doctrine that the Party was one of ‘the State’, not of its German element only.129
The German clericals, meanwhile, continued cheerfully to combine with Slavs against Viennese Liberalism, and the German feudalists against Viennese centralism, still regarding any other attitude as treason to the true unity of the State.
The rigidity of the Liberals over the national issue did not, however, mean that public opinion was equally immobile. It expressed the ideological beliefs of a group which was rapidly losing ground in the country, largely for that very reason. The 1870s had seen a considerable upsurge of national feeling in the Lands of mixed nationality, especially Bohemia-Moravia, which were then the national bull-rings in chief (the Slovene areas were still relatively quiet), and this had increased when the Germans fell from office. In the 1880s came a series of developments, the best publicized of which is that associated with the name of Schönerer. After finally leaving the Liberals, Schönerer joined a group of intellectuals which included the historian, Friedjung, and the later Socialists, Pernerstorfer and Viktor Adler, to produce a programme (known from its place of origin as the ‘Linz Programme’) for a ‘German People’s Party’. This contained a number of advanced social and political postulates, such as extension of the franchise, progressive taxation and protective legislation for the peasants and workers; its national programme was that the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Reichsrat were to be reduced to the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands, with German as the language of State and sole language of internal administration in them. There was to be the closest possible political, economic and cultural relationship with Germany; this was to be expressed in contractual form.
The Linz Programme does not deserve the place of honour accorded it even by many German historians in the family tree of the German national movement. Its national demands were simply a rehash, slightly coarsened, of the Aussee Programme; nor, for that matter, was there anything new in the social demands. Moreover, its only immediate political progeny was an illegitimate one, for opposition in high quarters prevented the proposed People’s Party from ever coming into being. Schönerer, however, took over its social items, added an anti-Semitic spice of his own, and founded his own party, known as the Deutschnationaler Verein. This was frankly extremist. ‘We gravitate,’ Schönerer announced as early as 1882, ‘not towards Vienna, but towards wherever there are Germans.’ He wanted the Monarchy to disappear, and the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands to be incorporated in the German Reich, and he declared war on everything in the Monarchy which separated or even distinguished it from the Reich: on the Catholic Church and on the Dynasty itself, which he believed to be systematically undermining the position of the Germans in Austria.
Henceforward there existed in Austria an avowedly German irredentist movement on the Reichsrat level, but precisely the irredentist plank in Schönerer’s platform was that which carried the fewest followers. The High School students used to go through irredentism as regularly as they had gone through mumps and chickenpox a few years before, but nearly all of them got over it within a couple of years of leaving the Aula.130 Hardly any Austrian of maturer years really wanted to see his country swallowed up in a Germany dominated by upstart, Protestant Prussia, and if his personal inclinations pointed that way strongly, he emigrated (as did Hitler, who admired Schönerer immensely). For the rest, ‘Ritter Georg’s’ picturesque eccentricities and his patent sincerity and sympathy for the victims of oppression always earned him a fairly wide personal popularity, but the very comprehensiveness of his programme made it impossible for more than a handful of fellow-fanatics to accept. Its most popular item was its anti-Semitism, but here it had many rivals, while it also earned him the undying hatred of the Jewish financial and intellectual supporters of the Liberal Party, and the hostility of the Social Democrats, whose leadership was also largely Jewish. His anti-Catholicism drew down on him the wrath of the Catholic Church and cut him off from the pious peasantry among whom he had at first had many followers, while his hostility to the Dynasty offended others, including, not unnaturally, Francis Joseph himself. Finally, he was intolerably autocratic as a leader. In the 1880s he never had more than three followers in the Reichsrat, and in 1888 his enemies (including the Emperor himself) took advantage of one of his numerous indiscretions to have him publicly disgraced.131
The comparative failure of the extremist movement did not, however, mean that German nationalism was on the decline. The contrary was the case. Popular feeling had really changed, and most German bourgeois Parties in the mixed Lands were giving the same priority to the national issue as were the Czechs, Slovenes, Croats and Italians. An enormous number of self-help organizations had come into being, most of them local, but some, like the Deutscher Schulverein, on a wider basis, and some, incidentally, receiving effective help from Germany, where official circles, indeed, held aloof, but the Alldeutscher Verein, while refusing to work for the break-up of the Monarchy, took the view that the cause of the Germans in Austria was the cause of all Germans. Among the bourgeois political groups in Austria, the German Clericals sat apart from their Slav colleagues after 1882. The German Constitutional Landowners were already a specifically German Party, and the Liberals
more than halfway towards becoming one, or being shouldered aside by others who had done so.
When the Party split before the 1885 elections, even the stalwarts, now led by Ignaz von Plener’s son, Ernst,132 although still maintaining that the interests of the Germans were identical with those of the State, consented to call themselves ‘German Austrian’. The dissidents who then formed the ‘German Club’ laid down as the first point of their programme that ‘our supreme principle, which must determine our attitude on all questions, is the welfare of the German people in Austria. The Germans must no longer be put in a minority by a Slav coalition, and the overwhelming Polish influence must be eliminated’. The German language must be made the language of State and the bonds with the German Reich drawn closer. The identity of interests between the Germans and the State was not absolute. When the two groups combined after the elections in the ‘United German Left’, the joint programme included a demand for ‘the protection of Deutschtum and the position due to them for the Germans in Austria’.
The more nationalist wing, which was led by Otto Steinwender, was still the smaller one in the Party in 1885, and dwindled further in 1888, when twenty-four of Steinwender’s followers returned to Plener’s fold in combined defence against the Liechtenstein educational proposals. Those who remained true to Steinwender’s leadership formed themselves into a Deutsch-nationale Vereinigung, which now produced a programme which, while still containing many social postulates, was also definitely national. It condemned as fruitless all efforts ‘to cling to the February Patent and to achieve the power without sacrifice of the most important national interests’ until Galicia-Bukovina and Dalmatia had been discarded, and adjured the Germans to obey no other consideration than their national interest. A novelty was a declaration of disbelief in Parliamentary government and a call for ‘a neutral Government standing above the nationalities’.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 103