Bohemian language conflict
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The Bohemian language conflict was the 19th and 20th century political dispute over the validity of the Czech language and the German language in the Bohemian lands of Cisleithania , the western part of the Habsburg monarchy . It was one of the areas of conflict in the long disputes between Germans and Czechs of the Habsburg Monarchy over the implementation of actual equality. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in autumn 1918 and the ambivalent history of the First Czechoslovak Republic , the linguistic and cultural alienation after the Second World War resulted in the violent separation of the two nationalities .
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The defeat in the German War brought the multiethnic state of Austria into distress; the central power was now so weakened that the demands of the nationalities could no longer be ignored. The Austro-Hungarian compromise gave the Kingdom of Hungary internal political independence. The Czech national movement, on the other hand, was disappointed because the Slavs were not treated as equals with the Germans and Hungarians of the now Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy .
Two views collided:
“The gentlemen in Vienna may be aware that the Czech people modestly demand fair equality in their own countries with a German minority. If it is grimly rejected this time with its most just request, it will begin to claim its full rights, which it has been entitled to in its glorious Czech empire for millennia. "
The Czech politicians demanded a domestically autonomous Bohemian state with a government in Prague based on the Hungarian model .
"We Germans in Bohemia are never able to see that the existing conditions, which more than meet the national claims of the Czechs, are being shaken and that new, sensitive damage is occurring to the Germans under the guise of equal rights."
The Germans of Bohemia and Moravia rejected the Czech demands because they (as members of the tribe who, in their opinion, had to remain the leader of the monarchy) did not want to play the role of a minority in a Prague government.
Badeni crisis
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The Czechs took a decisive step towards linguistic equality temporarily in 1897. The Prime Minister of Cisleithanien , the Polish aristocrat Kasimir Felix Badeni , as the Imperial and Royal Interior Minister and four other ministers issued the later so-called Baden Language Ordinance , which governs bilingual administration in Bohemia and Moravia (also in the predominantly German-speaking areas).
From now on, official submissions should not only be able to be made in the sender's mother tongue, as it has been since 1880, and should also be answered in his mother tongue. Rather, they should also be processed in the internal service of the administration and judiciary in the sender's native language, i.e. also in Czech. From June 1, 1901 (i.e. within four years) all civil servants were to be able to speak both languages and pass a language test. A storm of protest rose in Germany's 77 out of a total of 216 judicial districts ; because the German officials could only rarely speak Czech and had to fear that they would be replaced by bilingual Czechs in the purely German-speaking areas. The Germans of the monarchy from all political camps reacted with indignation. Demonstrations, riots and obstruction of parliamentary sessions were the order of the day (see Badeni riots ).
This regulation also led to riots in parliament. Demonstrations in Vienna , Graz and Prague plunged Austria into a state crisis.
On November 28, 1897, the Badeni Ministry had to give way to public pressure and offer Emperor Franz Joseph I his resignation; on November 30, 1897, the monarch relieved the ministers, not without warming Badeni for his work. The Imperial and Royal Prime Ministers now changed in quick succession (the four heads of government to Badeni, including Ernest von Koerber , each held office for a maximum of one and a half years) and ruled with emergency ordinances if the Kaiser had postponed the Imperial Council on their proposal. A state of emergency was imposed on Prague . The language regulations prompted Austria's German National Movement around Georg Ritter von Schönerer to proclaim the Los-von-Rom movement .
Badeni's successor, Paul Gautsch von Frankenthurn, defused the language ordinance in favor of the German Bohemians and Moravians in the spring of 1898. On October 14, 1899, Manfred von Clary-Aldringen repealed them completely. An Austrian-Bohemian balance was still sought by some, but was never achieved. In Moravia, where the exponents of both nationalities were apparently more willing to compromise, the Moravian Compromise was reached in 1905 .
This and the other nationality conflicts in Austria-Hungary could not be resolved with the instruments available under constitutional law and the acting politicians (an octroy was out of the question for the old monarch, who had ruled absolutistically in his youth). Rather, they came to a head and let Austria-Hungary break up as the Danube Monarchy at the end of the First World War .
Clairvoyance
In 1932 a Prague fraternity wrote :
"The connection between the countries of the Bohemian Crown and the German-speaking area in Central Europe is a natural one [...] Sooner or later this will no longer be a point of discussion in the relationship between Germans and Czechs until the idea has emerged, that what is worth striving for is not living against each other, but the creative cooperation of the peoples of Central Europe. "
literature
- Peter Becher , Jozo Džambo, Alena Gomoll (translator): Same pictures, same words. Austrians and Czechs in the caricature (1848–1948) . Adalbert-Stifter-Verein, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-9805378-2-X (exhibition catalog: Stejné obrazy, stejná slova ).
- Hans Mommsen : 1897: The Badeni crisis as a turning point in German-Czech relations. In: Detlef Brandes (ed.): Turning points in the relations between Germans, Czechs and Slovaks 1848–1989. Klartext, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-572-3 , pp. 111-118.
- Peter Becher, Jozo Džambo, Anna Knechtel: Prague - Province. Interactions and contrasts in the German-language regional literature of Bohemia, Moravia and Sudeten Silesia. Arco, Wuppertal 2014, ISBN 978-3-938375-53-2 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Radio Prague (September 23, 2006)
- ↑ quoted from Harald Lönnecker : From “Deutsch your time” to “O golden Prague, - we have forgiven you”. Mentalities, structures and organizations in the German student body in Prague 1933–1945 . Once and Now, Yearbook of the Association for Corpsstudentische Geschichtsforschung , Vol. 52 (2007), pp. 223-312, here p. 262.