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Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central Europ

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

Karl F. Baham
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Extract

The history of Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century (as indeed at the end of the twentieth) is to a large extent the history of the furies of nationalism. The attempt to understand that fact has for a long time been dominated by understandings of nationalism and the mobilization of national identity that are rooted in conceptions of a particularly modern social and political crisis. In this paradigm the rise of nationalism is associated—as it was for many critical observers at the time—with the failure of liberal politics and the general breakdown of an elite-dominated, rational-liberal society in the face of mass politics and the clamor for cultural and political participation by the lower classes. Nationalism in this view is a rejection of the whole liberal paradigm—a turn to a militant, populist “politics in a new key,” to use Carl Schorske's evocative phrase; or, following another imagery, the revenge of the traditionalist, irrational “dark gods” against the rationalism, secular optimism, and elitism of Enlightenment society.

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Articles
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , January 1998 , pp. 19 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1998

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References

1 Carl, Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981), chap. 3, 116–80.Google Scholar Although he does not subscribe to the “dark gods” view, Ernest, Gellner describes it in his Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 130. See also his Thought and Change (Chicago, 1964).Google ScholarElie, Kedourie also discusses the importance of “the dark gods and their rites” in the postcolonial nationalisms of Asia and Africa, in the introduction to Nationalism in Asia and Africa, ed. Kedourie, (London, 1971), 106.Google Scholar

2 Schorske, , Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 116–80 (a discussion of the diverse nationalist politics of Georg von Schönerer, Karl Lueger, and Theodor Herzl);Google ScholarJudson, Pieter M., “‘Not Another Square Foot!” German Liberalism and the Rhetoric of National Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 26 (1995): 83–97;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of the Hapsburg Monarchy,” Social Analysis 33 (09 1993): 47–67.Google Scholar

3 See especially Judson, “ ‘Not Another Square Foot!’ ”Google Scholar

4 Smith, Anthony J., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986);Google Scholaridem, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge, 1981);Google ScholarHobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992).Google ScholarHobsbawm discusses his notion of “popular proto-nationalism” in chap. 2, 46–79.Google Scholar

5 Deutsch, Karl W., Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).Google Scholar

6 The literature on the national problems in nineteenth-century Bohemia is rather large.Google ScholarA list of the most important works in English would include Bradley, John F. N., Czech Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Boulder, Colo., 1984);Google ScholarGary, Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, N.J., 1981);Google ScholarGarver, Bruce M., The Young Czech Party, 1874–1901, and the Emergence of a Multi-party System (New Haven, Conn., 1978);Google ScholarJudson, , “Inventing Germans” and “ ‘Not Another Square Foot!’ ”;Google Scholar and Elizabeth, Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans: A Study of the Struggle in the Historic Provinces of Bohemia and Moravia (London, 1938).Google ScholarThere are also a good number of studies, from various angles, in Czech.Google Scholar For a useful general survey of the period, see Otto, Urban, Česká společnost 1848–1918 (Czech society, 1848–1918) (Prague, 1982).Google Scholar

7 I am not aware that any German minority schools were ever actually established—or really necessary. But the Bund der Deutschen in Böhmen, founded in 1895 and centered in Teplitz (Teplice), was active in this sort of cause (Okresní archiv [District Archive] Teplice [OAT], Spolky, čís. evid. 109).Google Scholar

8 Cohen describes, for example, the heated battle in Prague over the name of a street in the Old Town: Karpfengasse or Kaprová (Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival, 3).Google Scholar

9 Pavla, Horská-Vrbová, Kapitalistická industrializace a středoevropská společnost. Příspěvek ke studiu formování tzv. průmyslové společnosti (Capitalist industrialization and Central European society: A contribution to the study of the formation of the so-called industrial society) (Prague, 1970);Google ScholarLudmila, Kárníková, Vývoj obyvatelslva v českých zemích 1754–1914 (Population development in the Czech lands, 1754–1914) (Prague, 1965);Google ScholarJaroslav, Purš, “The Industrial Revolution in the Czech Lands,” Historica 2 (1960): 67–157;Google Scholaridem, “The Situation of the Working Class in the Phase of the Expansion and Completion of the Industrial Revolution (1849–1873),” Historica 6 (1963): 145–237.Google Scholar

10 It is notoriously difficult to arrive at reliable estimates of the percentages of workers actually organized. But at the 1897 party conference of the Deutsche Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs (DSAPÖ), the Aussig-Tetschen regional organization (Kreisorgcmisation) reported 10 district (Bezirfcs-) and 46 local organizations (Lokalorganisationen), and 4 political or electoral organizations (Wahlvereine) with a total of 1,560 members (1,300 in the Aussig electoral organization alone)Google Scholar (Protokoll des VI. Parteitages der Deutschen Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Österreichs, “Parteibericht und Kreisberichte” [Vienna, 1897], 39–41).Google ScholarIn the same year, the new Teplitz party newspaper, Die Freiheit, had a circulation of 4,800; Aussig's Volksrecht circulated a similar number. And the annual summer “Volksfest,” or “People's Festival,” organized by the party in Aussig regularly attracted thousands of visitors—in 1897, for example, a reported 10,000 (Volksrecht, Aug. 12,1897,4). Similar attendance estimates were reported in the bourgeois press and by the police as well. Finally, in the elections of 1897, with an unequal and indirect franchise, the Social Democrats made a tremendous showing in almost all parts of Austria where there was a large working-class population, winning fourteen seats in the Reichsrat, the most of any party in the fifth (general) curia. The Social Democrats took almost 40 percent of the fifthcuria vote in Bohemia (the Young Czechs took the other 60 percent). In the whole Teplitz district, the Social Democratic candidates for elector (Wahlmanner) received almost 60 percent of the vote in the fifth curia. Only the vote in the town of Teplitz (where fewer workers lived and where members of other curia were likely to have an additional vote in the fifth) kept the total so low; in the working-class “suburb” of Turn the Social Democrats won every single mandate with a commanding majority, and in most of the other communities of the district the percentages for the Social Democrats were closer to or over 90 percent. Their showings in Aussig and most of the surrounding districts were similar (Österreichische Statistik 49, no. 1 [1897]; Volksstimme, Mar. 18, 1897, 1–2; Die Neue Freiheit, Mar. 31, 1898, 1).Google Scholar

11 Wenzel, Holek, Lebensgang eines deutsch-tschechischen Handarbeiters (Jena, 1909);Google ScholarHeinrich, Holek, Unterwegs (Vienna, 1927).Google Scholar

12 See particularly Jan, Havránek, “Češi v severočeských a západočeských městech v letech 1880–1930” (Czechs in northern Bohemian and western Bohemian towns in the years 1880–1930), Ústecký sborník historický (Ústí historical proceedings), 1979, 227–53;Google Scholarsee also Kárníková, , Vývoj obyvatelstva.Google Scholar

13 Wenzel, Holek, Lebensgang, 1.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 9–10.

15 Werner, Conze and Dieter, Groh, Die Arbeiterbewegung in der nationalen Bewegung. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor, während, und nach der Reichsgründung (Stuttgart, 1966);Google ScholarHans-Ulrich, Wehler, Sozialdemokratie und Nationalstaat. Nationalitätenfrage in Deutschland 1840–1914 (Göttingen, 1962);Google ScholarHans, Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat (Vienna, 1963).Google Scholar

16 Wenzel, Holek, Lebensgang, 218–19, 240–41, 249, 254, 258, 316.Google Scholar

17 Paul, Göhre, in the preface toGoogle Scholaribid.,.

18 Wenzel, Holek, Lebensgang, 196, 202, 250–51.Google ScholarThere is a wealth of other evidence that corroborates this feature of Wenzel's life as being typical. The German-language party papers frequently carried ads, in Czech, for their Czech-language sister publications, particularly during the late 1870s and early 1880s. The libraries of the German-Bohemian party organizations generally contained fairly sizable collections of books and periodicals in Czech as well as in German.Google ScholarIn 1876, Aussig's Arbeiterbildungsverein, for example, possessed 262 books in German and 28 in Czech, as reported in both the Arbeiterfreund, Nov. 11, 1876, 4;Google Scholar and Budoucnost (The future), Nov. 17, 1876, 3. And the pubs where Social Democratic workers met almost always subscribed to worker publications in both languages.Google Scholar

19 He notes how the towns near the Bohemian-Saxon border, unlike those deeper in Bohemia, were strung out rather than being grouped around a central square, and how the houses there were nearly all at least one story higher than those in the Czech-speaking interiorGoogle Scholar (Wenzel, Holek, Lebensgang, 7, 88–89).Google ScholarAnyone traveling in Bohemia today can still notice these differences in architecture and town planning. Holek also recalls that in the border regions, people tended to use German currency rather than Austrian (136–37).Google ScholarThe same points are made by Theophil, Pisling, Nationaldkönomische Briefe aus dent nordöstlichen Böhmen (Prague, 1856), 144–45.Google Scholar

20 Both Czech-language and German-language newspapers, even in the most hard-bitten nationalist papers at the height of nationalist radicalism, often carried advertisements for live carp around Christmastime throughout the period under study. A custom throughout the lands of the former Habsburg empire today, the eating of carp at Christmas has never, as far as I can determine, been practiced among Germans of the Reich. Moreover, within the Czech lands the custom has become so infused with a nationalist narrative that today it appears there as a distinctively Czech trait, an ethnic marker—so much so that Sudeten-Germans appear not to have been able to retain it as part of their Bohemian heritage.Google Scholar

21 Wenzel, Holek, Lebensgang, 56.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 268–74. Anna was herself the child of a “mixed” marriage—her father was Czech. Although the evidence is at this stage incomplete, preliminary examinations (based on the birthplaces of couples, compared with the census returns on language usage in those places) suggest that there was a surprisingly large number of such “mixed” marriages from the 1860s through the 1880s—perhaps as many as one-fifth to one-quarter of all marriages, although it is difficult to be precise with the available data.Google Scholar

23 Heinrich, Holek, Unterwegs, 116.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 68–69. Heinrich went on to become active in the local Social Democratic youth movement (201–1), and eventually, in 1914, became local events editor of Volksrecht (289–90).Google Scholar

25 On official numbers, see, Gemeindelexikon von Böhmen (Vienna, 1905), 6–14.Google ScholarAustrian authorities rarely correlated statistics on class and occupational standing with those on language. But in the household statistics published in the census results for 1910, it is possible to calculate roughly the number of non-German speaking workers, although only for the entire Reichenberg district chamber of commerce (Handelskammerbezirk), of which Aussig was a part. According to those calculations, 40.8 percent of all workers and day laborers spoke languages other than German. The vast majority of those—and in Aussig all of them—would have been Czech speakersGoogle Scholar (see Österreichische Statistik, Neue Folge 4, no. 3 [1910]: 9).Google ScholarThe use by Habsburg authorities of the Umgangssprache—the language of daily use, rather than the mother tongue—was subject to serious underrepresentation of linguistic minorities, and is an unreliable indicator of nationality. This was a sore point for Czech nationalists, and private attempts to publicize the “true” numbers of Czech minorities abounded. Many of these must also be taken with large doses of caution, since the relative numbers of speakers of the various languages were weapons used by the nationalists in the battles over state resources: it was very much in their interest to inflate the numbers, as it was in the state's to minimize them. The private figures reported in the German-language Social Democratic Volksrecht (Aug. 19, 1899, 1, and Beilage, 4) were taken most likely from Czech sources, and were used to score a point against the bourgeois city leadership. They are almost certainly inflated.Google ScholarJan, Havránek, using the data on Umgangssprache in combination with those on the language abilities of schoolchildren and legal home residence (Heimatsberechtigung—often a place other than the place of birth, based on parental or even grandparental origins), has estimated the number of native Czech speakers to have been somewhat higher in northern and western Bohemia than the census figures indicate, although not as much as nationalists claimedGoogle Scholar (Havránek, , “Češi v severočeských a západočeských městech”).Google Scholar

26 “Mašinfíra” is Maschinenführer; “Fajrum!” was the exclamation used in the glass factory where he worked to proclaim the end of the working day: Feierabend in a strong German-Bohemian accent (Heinrich, Holek, Unterwegs, 23, 176).Google ScholarThis Mašata had the habit of referring to himself always in the third person, with exclamations like “Do prdeli, povidal pan Mašata…” (roughly: “Dammit, Mr. Mašata said…”).Google ScholarHolek claims that years later, after Mašata was long gone, he heard these kinds of expressions still used by a new generation of workers, including German speakers,Google Scholar in Aussig (ibid., 180).

27 Ibid., 24–25. Heinrich describes communal evenings when the lodgers and boarders would often read aloud from books (usually cheap, sensationalist “penny dreadfuls” or adventure stories) to each other and to himGoogle Scholar (ibid., 83).

28 Ibid., 149.

29 Ibid., 132: “A call rings out like the crash of thunder, / Badeni sits in the pigsty. / The German Wolf yells in to him: / Badeni, you're a big pig!”Google Scholar

30 He writes that, while he disagreed with their chauvinistic intent, reading the classical Czech nationalist literature had a great and salutary effect on him, in that they taught him about the history of the Czech peopleGoogle Scholar (ibid., 88–89).

31 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Gesamt-Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei in Österreich, abgehalten zu Wien vom 6.-12. Juni 1897 (Vienna, 1897), 118.Google Scholar

32 Jiří, Kořalka, Tschechen im Habsburgerreich und in Europa 1815–1914. Sozialgeschichtliche Zusammenhänge der neuzeitlichen Nationsbildung und der Nationalitätenfrage in den böhmischen Ländern (Vienna, 1991), 227–28.Google Scholar

33 Pieter, Judson has done the most to elucidate the particular content of the dominant, middleclass German-Bohemian national identity. Particularly interesting in regard to the differentiation being made here between middle-class and working-class expressions of national identity is his analysis of the place of notions of the “national property” (Nationalbesitzstand) in bourgeois, German-Bohemian self-perceptions (Judson, “‘Not Another Square Foot!’” and “Inventing Germans”). One interesting example of the way in which traditional icons of German national Bildung und Kultur could be appropriated and used in different ways by both the bourgeoisie and the working class is that of Friedrich Schiller. While for the middle-class elite Schiller was primarily a representative of the richness and beauty of the German literary tradition per se, for the Social Democrats he was more precisely a symbol of the German hatred of authoritarian oppression and the tradition of fighting for freedom and equality.Google ScholarSee, for example, Martin, Rector, “Wozu der Arbeiter die bürgerliche Kultur braucht. Anmerkungen zur Schiller-Feier der SPD von 1905,” in Arbeiterbewegung und kulturelle Identität, ed. Peter Eric, Stiidemann and Martin, Rector (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 74–101;Google ScholarGerhard, Kurz, “Von Schiller zum deutschen Schiller. Die Schillerfeiern in Prag 1859 und 1905,” in Die Chance der Verständigung, ed. Ferdinand, Seibt (Munich, 1987), 39–48;Google Scholar and Lidtke, Vernon L., The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York, 1985), chap. 6.Google Scholar

34 As true children of Romanticism, nationalists everywhere, but especially in Central and Eastern Europe, saw in the lower classes and especially the peasantry the representatives of the “true, authentic” people (Volk, národ), uncontaminated by the hypercivilized and “foreign” elements that so often characterized the upper classes in these parts of Europe.Google Scholar

35 The phrase is Benedict, Anderson's, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).Google Scholar

36 Schorske, , Fin-de-Siède Vienna, 3–4.Google Scholar