Ottokar Czernin

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Ottokar Czernin (born September 26, 1872 at Dimokur Castle , Bohemia ; † April 4, 1932 in Vienna ; full name Ottokar Theobald Otto Maria Graf Czernin von und zu Chudenitz ) was an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and during the First World War (December 1916 to April 1918) Austro-Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs .

Count Ottokar Czernin

Life

Count Ottokar Czernin came from the old Bohemian and Austrian noble family of Counts Czernin von und zu Chudenitz . After completing his law studies at the Karl Ferdinand University in Prague , Czernin joined the foreign diplomatic service in 1895 and was first sent to the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Paris . Two years later he married Countess Marie Kinsky von Wchinitz and Tettau (1875–1945). The couple had six children. In 1899 he was transferred as envoy to the embassy in The Hague , but in November 1902 he had to break off his diplomatic career due to a lung disease.

Czernin initially withdrew to his Bohemian estates and was active in domestic politics from 1903. As a member of the Bohemian state parliament (1903-1913) he belonged to the party of large estates loyal to the constitution . In this capacity he exposed himself as a conservative advocate of the “monarchical principle” and advocated a strong monarchical state authority over democratic parliamentarism. He spoke out strongly against the introduction of universal suffrage in 1907 . During these years Czernin became a personal friend of the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand and from 1905 belonged to his advisory group. The heir to the throne saw Czernin as the future chancellor of a reformed, centralized Habsburg empire after he took over the government. In February 1912 Czernin was appointed a lifelong member of the Austrian manor house .

At the express request of Franz Ferdinand, Czernin returned to the diplomatic service in October 1913 and assumed the important post of ambassador in Bucharest with the task of creating an alliance with Romania against the background of the Balkan Wars .

His younger brother Otto Czernin also entered the Austro-Hungarian diplomatic service and served as chargé d'affaires in Saint Petersburg and Sofia .

Politics in the First World War

Count Czernin in Laxenburg Castle , October 1918

In 1916 Charles I , Franz Ferdinand's nephew, ascended the throne and on December 22, 1916 appointed Czernin as kuk Minister of Foreign Affairs.

In this role he also took part in a conference of Germany and Austria-Hungary in March 1917 on their war aims in the First World War. Czernin advocated, in consultation with Charles I, among other things, ceding territories by the Central Powers in order to achieve a quick peace with the Entente . In his view, the impending entry of the United States into active warfare made a victory for the Central Powers unlikely. He failed in negotiations with the war opponents, above all because of resistance from Italy , which refused to give up the territorial acquisitions promised in the secret treaty of London at Austria's expense. Czernin then gave in to the pressure of the German Supreme Army Command , which wanted to start an unrestricted submarine war . At the beginning of 1918, he was Austria's representative in the peace negotiations with Romania ( Peace of Bucharest ), Soviet Russia ( Peace of Brest-Litovsk ) and Ukraine ( Peace of Bread ).

He resigned from his post as foreign minister on April 14, 1918, because the French foreign minister Georges Clemenceau published documents in which the secret peace efforts of Austria-Hungary with the governments of the Entente were documented ( Sixtus affair ).

Republic of Austria

After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy , Czernin returned to politics from 1920 to 1923 as a member of the National Council of the Republic of Austria for the bourgeois workers' party. He lived in the Salzkammergut because he had lost his property in Bohemia due to the land reform in Czechoslovakia .

On April 4, 1932, Count Ottokar Czernin died in seclusion in Vienna. His grave is in the cemetery in Bad Aussee .

Assessment in research

Czernin's internal political views were shaped by active opposition to the democratic and national forces of his time. He rejected parliamentarism and wanted Caesarian absolutism . For him, democracy was freedom increased to the point of nonsense . Domestically, he often followed a tough course in practice; in February 1918, he even urged Karl to replace the ineffective Seidler and Wekerle governments with a military dictatorship, which the latter refused. When Czernin subsequently led the democratic forces against autocracy and militarism, it was admittedly not in line with his own fundamental convictions, but only had tactical causes. The seeds of alienation from Czernin also lay in these domestic political differences with Karl. These differences of opinion would certainly not have broken out during the war if the domestic political problems had not been closely intertwined with the Austro-Hungarian peace and alliance policy.

Even with the understanding politician Czernin, annexionist tendencies prevailed at times. Czernin pursued a two-pronged war policy with the demand for territorial integrity and non-annexed peace in the foreground; - on the other hand, not excluding a gain in territory, if possible. He never foregoed the chance, if the war ended victoriously, of gaining future benefits, which undermined the credibility of his emphasis on the desperate need for peace in Berlin . Czernin did not succeed in realizing his virtuoso drafts and in reconciling alliance, war objective and Poland policy . He had no illusions about the real power of the monarchy compared to Germany, so he tried to maintain a more balance through diplomatic manipulations of the various German power groups. Czernin overestimated his political possibilities to influence Germany; he even believed that the peace resolution of the Reichstag was due to him. Another method to strengthen its position in Berlin was to emphasize the weakness of the monarchy: if Germany did not understand the peace question, Austria would disintegrate or conclude a separate peace.

Czernin's policies were seen by many as the product of his highly nervous temperament , which undermined his credibility. A common reaction on the German side to his assessment of the situation was: Count Czernin has lost his nerve . However, his extremely nervous nature, his erratic nature, always caught up in new ideas, did not succeed in maintaining a fixed political line in the long term. He was generally regarded as insincere and also an unreliable ally . His contemporary, the officer and historian Edmund Glaise von Horstenau , expressed himself in a similar way : “The stormy haste with which he gave himself new impressions brought an element of great discontinuity into his policy, which is even more unfavorable towards the enemy, but even more unfavorably towards his ally and in the attitude to the respective success possibilities or waiver claims asserted ". Josef Redlich judged Czernin's politics even more negatively: “The man is pure 17th century; he does not understand the time in which he lives ”. Czernin stood up for the old Josephine imperial absolutism and the traditional feudal privileges of his class. He appears as an exponent of a tenacious centralized state structure in which the past of aristocratic cabinet politics already bordered on the future of dictatorial regimes.

His loyalty to Germany, which is often emphasized, also had the reason that he believed Germany was about to win the war. This was one of the reasons why he came to the conviction that the German-Austro-Hungarian alliance could not be dissolved because it was the prerequisite for maintaining the Habsburg Empire in its traditional social and political structures . The Holy Alliance with Germany was for him the guarantor against all revolutionary currents. The refusal of any internal reform of the monarchy, the abandonment of the German course in the monarchy, finally compelled him to regard the alliance as imperative. His attempt to lead Austria-Hungary out of the war, to regain independence in foreign policy, failed because of the unwillingness to free himself from the political interests of his class.

The formation of old Austria behind the energetic and ambitious figure of Czernin prevented a loss-making separate peace and a timely federalization of the Danube monarchy. Czernin also lacked the necessary flexibility both internally and externally, which the Habsburg Empire could probably have saved, albeit at a loss. As an Austro-Hungarian statesman, he should not have spared no effort and certain territorial sacrifices, should not have feared possible unpopularity and the use of all means at his disposal, if he wanted to protect the monarchy from its external enemies and keep it from internal disintegration. Only willingness to make sacrifices would have counted in the eyes of the world. The problem, however, was that, in Czernin's opinion, the monarchy was unable to make a peace-making offer. But the changing attitude of the monarchy with regard to the war aims, the greed for land reclamation, with simultaneous emphasis on the impending collapse, did not allow Germany to gain confidence in the monarchy's true readiness for peace.

Fonts (selection)

literature

Web links

Commons : Ottokar Czernin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. See Nobility Repeal Act 1919
  2. ^ A b Ernst Rutkowski: Letters and documents on the history of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy . Volume 2: The Constitutionally Loyal Large Estate 1900-1904 . Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-486-52611-1 , p. 33.
    Czernin Ottokar Graf. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1957, p. 162.
  3. ^ Erwin Matsch: The Foreign Service of Austria (-Hungary) 1720-1920. Böhlau, Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-205-07269-3 , p. 90.
  4. ^ Alfred Missong : Count Ottokar Czernin, January 1946. In: Christianity and Politics in Austria. Selected Writings, 1924–1950. Böhlau, Wien 2006, pp. 323–328, on p. 328.
  5. ^ Czernin Ottokar Graf. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 1, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1957, p. 162.
  6. ^ Ingeborg Meckling: The foreign policy of Count Czernin. Vienna 1969, pp. 68ff., 86 and 131.
  7. ^ Fritz T. Epstein: New literature on the history of Ostpolitik in the First World War . In: Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe . NF 19 (1971), pp. 265-286, here: p. 276.
  8. Gary W. Shanafelt: The Secret Enemy. Austria-Hungary and the German Alliance 1914-1918. Columbia University Press, New York 1985, ISBN 0-88033-080-5 , p. 126.
  9. Gary W. Shanafelt: Activism and Inertia: Ottokar Czernin's mission to Romania, 1913-1916. In: Austrian History Yearbook 19/20, Part 1 (1983/1984), pp. 189–214, here: p. 190.
    Rudolf Neck : The “Vienna Document” of March 27, 1917. In: Mitteilungen des Österreichisches Staatsarchiv 7 (1954), pp. 294-309, here: p. 300.
  10. Edmund Glaise von Horstenau: The catastrophe. The destruction of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of the successor states. Amalthea, Zurich / Vienna 1929, p. 211.
  11. ^ Fritz Fellner (Ed.): Fateful Years of Austria 1908-1919. Josef Redlich's political diary. Graz / Cologne 1953/1954, Volume 2: p. 212.
  12. ^ Ingeborg Meckling: The foreign policy of Count Czernin. Vienna 1969, pp. 68 and 358.
  13. ^ Leo Valiani: The End of Austria-Hungary . London 1973, p. 202.
    Wolfdieter Bihl : The way to collapse. Austria-Hungary under Charles I (IV.) . In: Erika Weinzierl , Kurt Skalnik (Ed.): Austria 1918-1938. History of the First Republic. Graz / Vienna / Cologne 1983, Volume 1: pp. 27–54, here: p. 29.
  14. ^ Ingeborg Meckling: The foreign policy of Count Czernin. Vienna 1969, p. 67.
    Helmut Rumpler: The Sixtus Action and the People's Manifesto of Emperor Karl. On the structural crisis of the Habsburg Empire in 1917/18. In: Karl Bosl (ed.): Versailles - St.Germain - Trianon. Upheaval in Europe fifty years ago. Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich / Vienna 1971, ISBN 3486473212 , pp. 111–125, here: p. 119.
  15. ^ Ingeborg Meckling: The foreign policy of Count Czernin. Vienna 1969, p. 358.
  16. Hartmut Lehmann: Czernin's peace policy 1916-18. In: Die Welt als Geschichte 23 (1963), p. 47–59, here: p. 58.
    Helmut Rumpler: Die Sixtusaktion and the Völkermanifest Kaiser Karls. On the structural crisis of the Habsburg Empire in 1917/18 . In: Karl Bosl (ed.): Versailles - St.Germain - Trianon. Upheaval in Europe fifty years ago. Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich / Vienna 1971, ISBN 3486473212 , pp. 111–125, here: p. 115.
predecessor Office successor
Stephan Burián Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister
Dec. 22, 1916 - Apr. 14, 1918
Stephan Burián