they distrusted the Czech and German radicals who dominated the first meetings at the St. Wenceslaus Baths and who, as members of the secret Repeal Club, had sought to link the end of absolutism to an early resolution of social issues.26 On March 12, one day before the fall of Metternich, the radicals formed the Svatováclavský výbor (St. Wenceslaus Committee) to coordinate their challenge to the Crown. And shortly thereafter they dispatched a petition to the emperor, calling among others for equality of the Czech and German nationalities, freedom of the press and religion, guarantees against arbitrary arrest, and a restoration of the legislative and administrative autonomy of the Bohemian kingdom.27 Liberals meanwhile publicized the need for a constitution and agitated for a broadening of the committee’s membership.
It remained for Palacký’s letter to signal, and partly cause, a major shift in the Bohemian revolution. At the middle of March, Czech and German liberals were united in their opposition to absolutism, but momentarily outmaneuvered by the radicals. By the end of the month they had gained control of the Svatováclavský výbor and reduced the radicals to a minority faction, only to divide along nationality lines. Palacký did not alone precipitate the split by writing to Frankfurt.28 But in focusing attention on hitherto unexamined aspects of the Anschluss question, he underscored its complexity and thereby forced Bohemian German liberals to clarify their own positions.
Poet Alfred Meissner was the first to attack Palacký’s stand. He denied that Austria could survive the revolution if transformed into a federation of equal nationalities. The “law of nature” was driving Germans to unite, in a Bund reconstituted along liberal, national lines. And that precluded the continuation of an Austria with traditional territorial and multi-national components,29 Palacký’s opposition to the political reorganization of central Europe was philosophically unsound. Further, it was an attempt to frustrate the inevitable.
Journalist Anton Springer spoke more to the issue of Russia. He agreed that Tsarist imperialism threatened central Europe, but saw it as a danger to Germans and Czechs alike. Would not a new Germany, more than a moribund Austria, deter Russian expansion? Certainly a united Germany would be economically more viable and politically and militarily stronger than a divided one. And it would guarantee Czechs nationality rights equal to those of the Germans, despite the former’s inferior numbers.30
The fundamental historical rebuttal came from economics professor Franz Makowiczka. He rejected entirely Palacký’s argument that
