National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements

František Palacký: Letter to Frankfurt, 11 April 1848

FRANTIŠEK PALACKÝ: LETTER TO FRANKFURT, 11 APRIL 1848 Title: Letter to Frankfurt, 11 April 1848 (Psaní do Frankfurta dne 11. dubna 1848) Originally published: Národní noviny (National Newspaper), Prague, Nos. 10 and 12, 1848 Language: Originally written in German, it was published in Czech in Národní noviny The authorized Czech version was published in František Palacký, Spisy drobné, vol. I, edited by B. Rieger, (Prague: Bursík a Kohout, 1898), pp. 16–22. About the author See František Palacký, A History of the Czech nation in Bohemia and Moravia, pp. 50–51. Context In 1848 the Czech national movement finally went beyond being a prevalently cultural endeavor and entered the political arena. The main aims of the political agenda of the Czech liberals (František Palacký, František Ladislav Rieger, Karel Havlíček, František Augustin Brauner) were to achieve the establishment of a constitutional system and to gain political autonomy for the Czechs in the Habsburg Empire. Palacký, a well-known scholar in the German-speaking world, was invited to take part in the ‘Board of Fifty’ in Frankfurt that was charged with the preparation of the German constituent assembly. The main reason for this invitation was to win over the Czechs—as a tolerated minority inside the Austrian territory—for the building of a modern ‘Greater German’ nation-state. Especially Austrian liberals supporting the Greater German idea, such as Viktor von Andrian-Werburg and Franz FRANTIŠEK PALACKÝ: LETTER TO FRANKFURT, 11 APRIL 1848 323 Sommaruga, did their best to help the Czechs get representation in the Frankfurt Parliament. They proposed a couple of resolutions about the linguistic and cultural needs of non-German minorities. They nevertheless had no doubts that the Czechs should be part of Germany and should help in the realization of the German national idea. The incorporation of the Bohemian Lands in the ‘Greater German’ polity had its historical logic, as the lands of the Bohemian Crown had been part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation since the Middle Ages. There were, however, many practical arguments as well. In the years of its major political influence, from 1840 to 1870, and again around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the supporters of the Greater German idea not only stressed the economic and cultural significance and superiority of the Germans in Bohemia, but employed a geopolitical argument as well. For them the territory of Bohemia and Moravia was a natural link between the northern and southern German lands. For the Czech liberal nationalist movement formed in the Vormärz era, however, the Greater German program was unacceptable. Palacký refused the invitation to the Frankfurt assembly and instead formulated his own idea of the raison d’être of Austria and the aims of Czech national politics in the Central European context. His letter was a clear refutation of the idea of a Greater Germany from the Czech point of view, based on the proof of the sovereignty of the Bohemian Lands and above all on the liberal tenet of the equal ‘natural rights’ of all nations in Austria. He presented an alternative geopolitical perspective that contested the Greater German one, arguing that for the small nations, west of expansionist Imperial Russia, the only possibility of survival was in their political unity. The “vital artery of this necessary union of nations,” a central axis, and hence the focus of the central governmental power, should have been the Danube. Vienna, therefore, was to maintain its leading role in an empire that, however, had to reformulate its national policy. Palacký’s ‘Letter to Frankfurt’ became the most important political statement of the Czech national movement in 1848, and a point of reference for the subsequent development of Czech national politics. His letter has been perceived as the first draft of the Czech concept of the federalization of the Austrian Empire, which became the basic tenet of Czech liberal politics. Palacký himself elaborated this idea during his work in the Imperial Diet in Vienna and Kremsier (Cz. Kroměříž) from June 1848 to March 1849. Especially in his last constitutional draft, presented in January 1849, he came very close to other liberal supporters of ethnic federalism in the Diet, such as the 324 THE NATION AND ITS NEIGHBORS IN EUROPE Bohemian German Ludwig von Löhner and the Slovene Matija Kavčič. The concept of federalization delineated the ideal...