The New Europe/Volume 6/Number 67/The Germans of Austria

by Friedrich Austerlitz

The Germans of Austria

To students of Austrian affairs we recommend a specially enlightening article in the Socialist monthly, Der Kampf, for December, on “German Policy in Austria,” by Herr Austerlitz, the well-known German-Jewish Socialist journalist, who for many years past has been one of the principal editors of the Arbeiter Zeitung. Space prevents us from giving more than a few extracts.

“All the nations of Austria have their distinct and positive national programme; the Germans (we are only speaking of the bourgeoisie) lack a programme to such a degree as to be unaware that it is missing. The Czechs want their independent state’ with every attribute of sovereignty’; the Poles want to get away from this state and to take Galicia with them, and regard the Personal Union merely as an inevitable transitional stage: the Ukrainians demand either independence within the Monarchy, or a return to the bosom of the Ukraine; the Southern Slavs, the union of all parts of their race, now cut up among four states, in a single state. But what do the Germans want and demand? Really nothing for its own sake; their demand is limited to the non-fulfilment of the ideals of the other nations. They oppose the foundation of the Czech state, the union of the Southern Slavs, and even where they appear to agree to the national claims of another people, in the ‘Austro-Polish’ solution of the Polish question, they only wish to set up a miniature copy of the Austria of to-day, and are not concerned for a national ideal of their own. ‘For all this is negative with them; the Germans really want everything in Austria to remain as it was, and resist every demand of the other nations, because they themselves have none. . . .

“The result of their insistence upon worn-out ideas is that the German bourgeoisie cannot attain to a uniform point of view. In 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-politicians with an exaggerated imperialism. They want to separate off whatever stands in the way of creating a German majority; and yet they are annexationists, although any annexation by Austria leads into Slav territory, and so increases Slav predominance.

“By renouncing all idea of making the Germans of Austria into a nation independent alike of the racial state and of the other nations, by refusing to rally the nation and assert its right of self-determination, the German bourgeoisie have based their national cause upon Privilege. And now they have the feeling that every renunciation of privilege weakens their national position, that every step towards democracy leads to national misery. . . . They are continually holding up to us German Social Democrats, the noble example of the Czech Social Democrats, who loyally join their bourgeois co-nationals. But have they never noticed that the national development of the Czechs is taking place in the name of Democracy, while the national preservation of the Germans, so long as they do not form a separate nation, depends on the maintenance of privileges? It is not that the Czech bourgeoisie adopts democratic views in order to win the Czech workman, but that the Czechs, if they wish to develop, can only do so according to the laws of democracy—because their power tends to follow their numbers. But what does the German bourgeoisie want of us when they bid us support their national policy? They want us to renounce Democracy, to renounce Universal Suffrage in the country and in the commune, to rest satisfied with the ‘Curia’ because the German cause is so badly managed as to be incompatible with democracy! That is what made Victor Adler, at the Socialist Congress, sigh: ‘We have a peasantry and a bourgeoisie with whom there is absolutely nothing to be done.’”

Herr Austerlitz concludes with the phrase: “Only in the ‘Federation of Nations’ (Völkerstaat) can democracy be at home and victorious; the ‘State of Nationalities’ (Nationalitätenstaat), as we see it to-day, is condemned to barrenness and stagnation.”

Unhappily he gives no indication as to how the one is to be replaced by the other; in other words, how Federalism is to take the place of Dualism. Even the ablest political theorist of his own party, Dr. Carl Renner, stands committed to the futile and unsatisfying plan of national autonomy in each of the seventeen Austrian provinces, and this is the plan favoured by the present Austrian Government.