THE GERMANS OF AUSTRIA
the North they are for separatism and national autonomy; only he is a good German who denies the historical and political individuality of the province (i.e., Bohemia). In the South, on the other hand, they are enthusiastic about the inviolability of provincial boundaries, and he who attacks the unity of the province is threatening its most sacred possession. In the one case, local autonomy (Kreisordnung) is the highest aim; in the other it is treason. . . . They only think in provinces (Kronländer); what will happen to the Germans in Styria if the Slovenes are taken from them, or to the Germans in Tirol if the Italians are separated from them? But they do not think nationally; that the Germans of all Austria ought to be a free, solid nation with rights of its own. They see the province and the state, but not the nation—the nation which decides its own fate and so overcomes the restraint of the racial state. To the illusion that they are progressing through the favour of the state they sacrifice the possibility of making the German nation independent of the state. . . .
“The German bourgeoisie only sees the Czech “State,” fears and hates it, but does not see the German state, which achievement, as the expression of national independence in the racial state, ought to be the aim of any far-sighted national policy. The idea that every nation can deal with and dispose of its affairs freely and independently (selbständig) is really, after all, a natural idea; and if the racial state prevents the fulfilment, opposes to the living nation the abstract “state organism,” and seeks to restrict national forces within the narrow limits of provincial frontiers, then it merely proves that it is not the ‘supernational state’ which its admirers proclaim, but the anti-national state whose existence rests on the denial of the Right of Self-determination for the peoples. The Germans who reject the national state for themselves fancy, no doubt, that they are thus proving themselves to be better than the others. In reality they are thus merely choosing for themselves the position of a pariah; they, who belong to the most developed of civilized peoples (Kulturvolk), thereby place themselves among the small nations still struggling for their culture.
“The reconciliation of the nations by whom the desire for attaining full independence is innate with the racial state who denies it to them, can only be achieved by separation (Sonderung)—by that nation becoming independent of each other and by the racial state becoming a League of free peoples. People complain of the racial struggle as hindering creative work, paralysing action, distorting all questions. But even this is far from summing up the whole of its evil effects. The worst is that it poisons men, and breeds in all those who conduct public affairs or lead in politics, a spirit of meanness and shabbiness, and, at the same time, leads to their intellectual deterioration (Verpöbelung). . . .
“The Pangermanism of Herr Wolf is to-day a collection of contradictory crimes. Its exponents take from their Prussian models their enthusiasm for authority, and yet are specialists in Austrian muddling (Schlamperei). Economically, they represent the petty bourgeois clique at its narrowest, and yet pose as world-
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