Battle of Kuchelbad
The Battle of Kuchelbad was an attack by Czechs on German students on June 28, 1881 in Kuchelbad (Czech: Chuchle , today the Prague district of Velká Chuchle ) near Prague . Egon Erwin Kisch recorded the events in a report of the same name and thus coined the term battle for the dispute. In modern terminology, the term street battle is more appropriate.
prehistory
The majority of the population of medieval Prague was German-speaking . As a result, the lectures at Karl Ferdinand University were initially held in Latin, later in Latin and German, and from 1748 only in German. After 1848, lectures were occasionally offered in the Czech language, but examinations were only held in German. When the majority of Prague's residents were Czech-speaking around 1860 , Czech politicians called for the introduction of consistent bilingualism . Since no agreement could be reached on this, the Reichsrat (Austria) decided on May 31, 1881 to divide the university into a Czech and a German university. This was rejected in Prague by both German and Czech students. The Germans feared that their sub-university would now face the same fate that had befallen the German institute after the division of the Technical University there in 1869 : it had almost sunk to insignificance, while the Czech Polytechnic rose to become the most prestigious engineering school in the Danube Monarchy. The Czechs did not want the university to be divided because they had made up the majority of students at it since 1870. Tensions between Germans and Czechs intensified in mid-June 1881 when it became apparent that the elections for the Prague Chamber of Commerce meant that Czech candidates had little chance of success due to the electoral rules. The mood escalated on June 27, 1881, the day before the Battle of Kuchelbad: On the one hand, it became known that the German candidates had won the election for the Chamber of Commerce and, on the other hand, the foundation festival of the German student association Corps Austria began on that day with a student trip in full color through the city, which was understood by the Czechs as a provocation. The reason for this was that " the Greater Austrian Corps students who were celebrating their foundation festival and who clung to the old supranational state idea were confused with the Greater German-national fraternities ".
confrontation
On June 28, 1881, the members of the Corps Austria and their guests took a steamer from Prague to Kuchelbad, where they arrived at around 10 a.m. to celebrate in the garden of the upper restaurant. At the same time, an advertisement appeared in the Prague Czech daily newspaper Národní listy with the text: This afternoon rendezvous in Kuchelbad, if you can, come by 4 a.m., the screw steamers run all afternoon. After a large crowd had gathered in response to this call all afternoon, the call Němečtí psi, domů rang out towards evening ! and a wild argument began. The corps students recorded eight seriously and numerous slightly injured. The German students finally fled a hail of stones from the restaurant to their steamer and returned to their quarters under police protection when they arrived in Prague.
The Bohemia reported in detail about the events.
consequences
In the Prague nationality tensions of the 19th century, the Kuchelbad battle was the first foresightedly planned physical confrontation. As a direct consequence, the political discussions about the resolution of May 31, 1881 ended and in 1882 the University of Prague was divided.
literature
- Josef Neuwirth : Bloody riots . Bohemia (Prager Tageszeitung), June 29, 1881 (reprinted by Wolfgang Wolfram von Wolmar : Prag und das Reich . Dresden 1943, p. 314 ff.)
- Egon Erwin Kisch: The Kuchelbad Battle . In: Prager Tagblatt , June 8, 1930.
- Egon Erwin Kisch : The Kuchelbad Battle . In: Prague Pitaval. Late reports . Berlin / Weimar 1969, 5th edition 1992, pp. 267-271
- Julius Kraus: Prague . 1908 (novel, among other things, about the battle of Kuchelbad)
- Jürgen Herrlein : The "Kuchelbad Battle" of the year 1881 from the point of view of the academic investigative authority of the University of Prague, in: Kai-Oliver Knops / Heinz Georg Bamberger / Gerrit Hölzle (ed.): Civil Law in Transition, Festschrift for Peter Derleder on the 75th Birthday, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015, pp. 189–210.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ "This afternoon rendezvous in Kuchelbad, if you can, you can come by 4 o'clock, the screw steamers operate the whole afternoon."
- ↑ On the German-Czech relationship during this period see: Gary B. Cohen: The Politics of Ethnic Survival. Germans in Prague 1861-1914 . Princeton 1981. Jan Kren, Václav Kural, Detlev Brandes: Integration and Exclusion. Germans and Czechs 1890–1945 . Bremen 1986. Jan Kren: The conflict community. Czechs and Germans 1780–1918 . Munich 1996, 2nd edition 1999 (= publications of the Collegium Carolinum, vol. 71).
- ↑ Harald Lönnecker : From "Ghibellinia goes, Germania comes!" To "People want to people!" - Mentalities, structures and organizations in the German student body in Prague 1866–1914 . In: Sudetendeutsches Archiv München (ed.): Yearbook for Sudeten German museums and archives 1995–2001, Munich 2001, pp. 34–77
- ^ Edition of June 28, 1881, p. 3.
- ↑ German "German dogs, home!"
- ^ Adolf Siegl: The Prague German universities and their students in the years from 1870 to 1914 . Once and Now, Yearbook of the Association for Corpsstudentische Geschichtsforschung , Vol. 21 (1976), pp. 95-133, here p. 108.
- ↑ No. 177 of June 29, 1881