The New Europe/Volume 6/Number 69/The Austrian Germans and Bohemia

The Austrian Germans and Bohemia.

In No. 67 we quoted at some length from Herr Austerlitz’s striking article on the Austrian Germans and their hopelessly local and bourgeois outlook. The Socialist editor’s views find confirmation in the following extract from the Prager Tagblatt (23 December), the organ of the German Jewish Radicals of Bohemia, which incidentally bears hostile witness (to those who are reluctant to face patent facts) as to the unanimity of Czech national feeling.

“The sad fact must be admitted that the German progressive parties have lost contact with the German people (in Austria). Each group coquettes with another company of irresponsible and discontented persons, but none thinks of the broad masses of the people on which alone a strong German policy can be built up. Among the Slavs, whether it be a question of the Czechs, Poles, Southern Slavs, or Ukrainians, the whole nation is rallied round and pledged to a definite idea, a programme, however bizarre it may be. For Czech policy there is in Vienna no difference between workmen and agrarians, between protectionists and freetraders; no, they have become a unified national mass, which has set its whole thought and effort upon the attainment of a definite aim. Every parliamentary action is considered, adopted or abandoned, solely with a view to a nearer approach to this aim. On the German side national policy, though so strongly emphasised, has never been able to overcome the “Regionalism” of the Sudetian [Bohemia, Moravia] and the Alpine Germans.”