Nationalism in Germany, 1848

The significance and power of the Habsburg monarchy during the 1850s and 1860s purportedly led to the maintenance of strong historical links between Austria and South Germany. Certainly, the monarchy’s continuing presence in German affairs was required by the governments of the Mittelstaaten, as a bulwark of the Bund and a counterweight to Prussia. Although it was true that Vienna was ‘using the middling states for its own ends’, it was necessary to consider ‘what to do in order to protect Austria, the weakening or decline of which would inevitably bring the collapse of the individual German governments in its wake’, warned Reinhard von Dalwigk zu Lichtenfels, the first minister of Hessen-Darmstadt, in 1861.³ The power and reputation of the Habsburg monarchy in Germany rested entirely on ‘the trust and dependency of the governments’ of the middling and smaller states, wrote the Saxon minister Richard von Friesen retrospectively of the mid-1860s, yet even the ministries of the Mittelstaaten had become ‘mistrustful’.⁴ The decisive element as far as the Habsburg monarchy was concerned was ‘public opinion’ and party support, which had greater weight in the third Germany as a consequence of the perceived precariousness of the individual states after 1848. In Friesen’s view, the inconsistency of Austria’s policy after 1849 had alienated ‘the public opinion (öffentliche Meinung) of Germany’, making it receptive, in prospect, to Prussian advances.⁵ This chapter investigates the extent to which such alienation actually existed.

Germany in the Presses of the Mittelstaaten

In Hanover, where the founders of the National Association faced a powerful group of opponents, the historian Onno Klopp, reporting from the ‘grossdeutscher Verein’, proclaimed that Austria was a defensive, protective, conservative power, traditionally repelling Ottoman and Slav invaders from the East, whereas Prussia was a foreign-backed conqueror-state.⁹ Vienna had defended Germany against France during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and again in 1859.¹⁰ Austria alone was strong enough to stand up to France; Prussia was ‘scarcely half as strong’.¹¹ Moreover, the Habsburg monarchy could co-exist with the other German states, continuing the precedent of the Holy Roman Emperors of never intervening ‘in the internal affairs of the German territories’, since it was not ‘centralising, and could not be such because of its natural conditions’.¹² By contrast, the Hohenzollern state, to which the leaders of the Nationalverein wanted ‘to transfer the military and diplomatic command of German affairs’, was a ‘military monarchy, with centralisation and uniformity ruthlessly enforced’, making it a threat to the third Germany.¹³ ‘We want a Germany which keeps to already-acquired extra-German positions, particularly in the East, which has the greatest land mass and the greatest military power, with which we have the fate of the world in our hands,’ wrote Klopp’s fellow Hanoverian and historical writer Heinrich Langwerth von Simmern: ‘We want the extension of the Bund with the retention of the independence of its parts … We do not want a displacement of Germany’s centre of gravity to the North or even to the Germanised North-East.’¹⁴ The ‘small German party’, wrote Klopp in 1863, ‘wants to satisfy the German nation’s need for unity through the loosening and tearing up of existing law and existing legal powers and, after the exclusion of Austria, wants to put the other states together under Prussian rule in the form of a so-called Bundesstaat’, which would lead to civil war.¹⁵ The grossdeutsch party, for its part, would avoid internal strife ‘by tightening the ties which already exist’ and by including the Habsburg monarchy.

Such opinions were shared by South German commentators like Albert Schäffle, the prominent economist and government-backed publicist from Tübingen. Attitudes towards Austria rested on ‘the contradiction between Protestantism and Catholicism, of the old Kaisertum of the Reich and the new Kaiseridee of Gotha, of historical law and modern state-building, of constitutionalism and the absolutist or estates’ system’, wrote the later founder of the Reformverein – the main counter-organisation of the Nationalverein – in 1859.¹⁶ The role of the middling German states was to mediate between the two powers and integrate them into a reformed Confederation. ‘The two Great Powers truly have a place in a Föderation of Germany, but not in a Bundesstaat’, he warned; and whereas the ‘new Gotha’ party attempted ‘to banish whole-German federalism through unitarism under Prussia’s auspices and with Austria’s marginalisation’, supporters of the Habsburg monarchy in the southern German states were able to emphasise the affinity between legality, local patriotism and confederation, benefiting from fear of Prussian hegemony and civil war in the medium-sized and small German states.¹⁷ The concepts of nation, nationality, historical law, sovereignty and autonomy had been misused, contended the sociologist, ignoring the fact that cultures and relations between individuals were varied and organic.¹⁸ A reformed Confederation incorporating the whole of the Habsburg monarchy would accommodate the German nation’s ‘entire cultural life’ and its extended areas of settlement.¹⁹

An overburdening of the concept of nationality was ill-advised, he wrote in 1863, because it concentrated on institutional structures of power at a time of movement towards an international sphere in which the fortunes of a nation would rest on ‘the richness of the inner, natural unfolding of its spiritual and material cultural life’.²⁰ For this reason, as well as for purely economic ones, Schäffle backed the Habsburg monarchy’s entry into the Zollverein, pointing out the North’s dependency on the South and designating the role of broker between Prussia and Austria to the economically independent states of South West Germany.²¹ The inclusion of Austria in a common customs’ union and a reformed Bund offered the prospect of a larger German-dominated economy and a more powerful and extensive ‘German’ territory from the Adriatic to the Baltic and from the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube. In the words of the inaugural statement of the Wochenblatt des Deutschen Reformvereins, of which Schäffle was a correspondent, the aim was to pursue everything which ‘can increase the greatness, power and reputation of Germany abroad and its material or spiritual development, its harmony and strength at home’.²² ‘Germany should not become smaller and mutilated; it should remain strong enough to be able for once to play the role in Europe which it deserves’, it continued.²³ As a consequence, declared Schäffle in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in September 1859, the kleindeutsch Nationalverein would be unsuccessful in convincing proponents of Grossdeutschland to support it: ‘The South German people (Volk), in an overwhelming majority not only according to a head-count but also its intelligentsia and its educated and influential classes, will not be made, by inducements and restrictions, to incline towards the programme.’²⁴ To the sociologist and later Austrian minister, significant sections of public opinion in South Germany would not accept the idea of Kleindeutschland.

Some newspapers and periodicals in the South and in other parts of the third Germany gave a similar impression, especially during the wars of the 1850s.²⁵ During the Crimean War, many publications had backed Vienna. The Allgemeine Zeitung, Casseler Zeitung, Frankfurter Postzeitung, Hamburger Correspondent, Hannoversche Zeitung, Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung, Mainzer Journal, Augsburger Postzeitung, Weser Zeitung, and Deutsches Volksblatt, published in Stuttgart, had all supported Austria’s stance, aided by its alliance with the more liberal western powers.²⁶ Similarly, during the Italian War, much of the press and public opinion sympathised with the Habsburg monarchy’s supposed defence of German interests against France. ‘There are only a few partially developed schoolboys who still doubt whether there will be a separate Austria, Prussia and Bavaria in the case of war, or simply Germany,’ wrote one former South German deputy from the Frankfurt parliament to Georg Cotta, the owner of the Allgemeine Zeitung, in February 1859: ‘No neutral German government would have strong enough shoulders to bear the curses of their people and the contempt of Europe.’²⁷ Even the pro-Prussian periodical the Grenzboten, edited by Gustav Freytag in Leipzig, conceded that much of the public supported Austria.²⁸ Vienna, wrote a ‘South German democrat’ in Stimmen der Zeit, was leading the call of the German nation for unification: ‘The breaking of the constraints of the territorial state and the rise of the nation towards unity (Einigkeit), with the support of Austria, which has been drawn onto the path of German development, that is the true sense of the national movement, which we see emerging following the threat of war.’²⁹

The Habsburg monarchy had a legal right to remain in Italy, asserted the Bayrische Wochenschrift, notwithstanding its links with liberals and the government in Berlin: Italy was simply ‘the ground on which Austria and France fought for dominance; it has been so for centuries and it will remain so until Italy gains the moral force for regeneration from within, of which there are still no noticeable signs’.³⁰ The German lands should support Vienna

because we see the political direction of Austria as a transitory one, just as the Manteuffel-Westphalen way of governing was a transitory one in Prussia, and because we do not assess the development of our people in decades; also because we – to declare our deepest and ultimate ground – esteem the national integrity of Germany more highly than one more or one less political freedom, which over the long term cannot be denied to any people that has shown itself, through its education and moral seriousness, as worthy as the German one.³¹

Economically, too, it was essential, noted the Saxon weekly Glocke, that Germany in its entirety fought alongside the monarchy ‘for the sake of Germany’s well-being and its commercial significance for the East’, that it kept ‘the Danube free for Germany, Austria and Hungary’s right to the sea, and that possession of its Adriatic lands be assured to the Kaiser state’.³² The free-trade Bremer Handelsblatt and the Frankfurt Deutsche Blätter made a similar economic case for an Austrian war against France in Italy.³³ With the re-establishment of Austria as the greatest power in Germany and with its defence of German causes during the 1850s, many commentators in the third Germany refused to write it off.

The largest and most reputable newspaper in the South, the Allgemeine Zeitung, was also widely believed to be the most pro-Austrian.³⁴ In 1855, the Habsburg Presseleitungskomitee, which had been founded two years earlier to monitor and influence the press in Germany, claimed that the ‘importance of the paper’ not only encouraged governments to place articles, but also ‘to maintain the most agreeable relationships in person’.³⁵ ‘In certain people’s eyes’, the publication was famous for ‘its bias towards Austria in the entire field of foreign policy’.³⁶ The editor, Gustav Kolb, was said to be ‘inclined towards Austria’, as were many of the journalists.³⁷ These biases were thought by some to have worsened by 1859. Thus, immediately after the signature of Austria’s armistice with France in July, Sybel attacked the publication for its ‘support, not of the Reich and the people of Austria, but for the Austrian constitutional system’.³⁸ Other treatises defended the paper, but accepted its backing of the Habsburg monarchy.³⁹

By this time, Hermann Orges, who had risen to prominence after Kolb succumbed to illness in the mid-1850s, had moved the paper further towards Vienna’s point of view, allowing himself ‘to be beaten to death for Austria’ and channelling his ‘Austrianness into a complete system’, in the editor’s estimation.⁴⁰ ‘You cannot deny that this shift in the nature of the A.Z. has been brought about by me with some skill,’ wrote Orges to Georg Cotta in June 1859: ‘I let no opportunity pass to act as if this has been the natural development of the paper, the latent aim of its founding. As you consented to my programme, you gave your indirect authorisation for this shift.’⁴¹ To Orges, the Habsburg monarchy had become a German state after the Frankfurt Parliament had shown the redundancy of the unitary ‘small German’ model.⁴² The monarchy guaranteed the continuance of the Bund and the individual states, underpinned by international law. It also defended German interests in the East: ‘We say openly that, if a member of the German Confederation, if Austria did not already possess these extra-German lands, the German people would have to conquer them at any cost as absolutely necessary for its development and its position as a world power’, commented the journalist in January 1859.⁴³ As the Habsburg monarchy began to lose its war against France, the newspaper’s partisanship became a talking point amongst its opponents, with Carl Vogt, for instance, singling out Orges as the ‘clever inventor of that truly colossal sentence’ in praise of Austria’s evacuation of Milan and its retreat to the Mincio line.⁴⁴

When the journalist left the newspaper in 1860, denounced as ‘thoroughly incapable’ by Kolb, the publication toned down rather than altered its attitude to Vienna.⁴⁵ In the opinion of the deputy editor in 1861, the newspaper’s line should be an ‘unconcealed preference for Austria, but not inaccessible to other confederal and specifically greater German views concerning the powerful reorganisation of Germany’.⁴⁶ Looking back from the vantage point of 1863, Kolb admitted that his championing of Austria had been long-lived and public. ‘If we wanted to change, the idea of a Prussian Union shows us the path that we would have to tread,’ he warned Cotta’s son, who had just become the owner of the paper: ‘But after we have defended the connection (Anschluss) to Austria for fourteen years, and had to defend it in my strongly-held opinion, how could we now suddenly change? Wouldn’t everyone point the finger at us, and wouldn’t we meet with justified mistrust on one side and complete contempt on the other?’⁴⁷ The Allgemeine Zeitung neither should nor could repudiate its long-standing predilection for Austria, for it was part of a cultural and geographical southern sphere which included the German-speaking lands of the Habsburg monarchy.

The most important cultural characteristic of the ‘South’ was arguably Catholicism, notwithstanding the haziness of confessional boundaries in areas of mixed settlement. To opponents such as the radical Heinrich Simon, writing from Zurich in 1859, the belligerent support of southern Germans for Austria rested on ‘Ultramontanes” fear of isolation if Prussia were to come to dominate Germany.⁴⁸ Contemporaries were aware that the inclusion of the Habsburg monarchy in a reorganised German Confederation would have guaranteed a Catholic majority: in 1855, even discounting Austrian lands outside the Bund, 23 out of 43 million inhabitants of the Confederation, or 52.5 per cent, were Catholics.⁴⁹ If the Austrian confederal lands were removed to create a small German state, 11 million Catholics would have been outnumbered by 20 million Protestants. The main Catholic periodical, the Historisch-politische Blätter, denied that it was part of an ‘Austrian party’, as was often claimed, but admitted, ‘we are convinced that the integrity of Germany can only be saved through the most intimate connection of Austria to our fate … The French Emperor does not want to destroy the Habsburg monarchy, but he does want to destroy its connection to Germany; we want the exact opposite for national and … religious reasons.’⁵⁰ The Bavarian publication did not accept that Catholicism, nationalism and Austria’s involvement in Germany were incompatible.⁵¹

Whereas liberal proponents of Grossdeutschland viewed the German question ‘as a domestic constitutional question’, Catholics saw it as ‘the great world-question of the century’, which involved Austria as a Great Power and would require ‘a violent upheaval of Europe’ for its solution, warned the Historisch-politische Blätter in 1863.⁵² Prussia was criticised for its ‘un-German stance’, seeking to dominate or annex the third Germany.⁵³ ‘In the 17th century, the Protestant princes wanted to make Gustavus Adolphus Kaiser, and in the 19th century our great fatherland should be ruled by a parliamentary regime and Prussia, as a Protestant power, should be its head,’ noted an article in 1866: ‘Austria was an obstacle to this transformation as a result of its composition and its power, but it was an obstacle principally as a Catholic power.’⁵⁴ The Nationalverein, North German liberals and the Prussian state were equated by the Historisch-politische Blätter as a common threat to Catholics; Austria was perceived as a means of self-defence. The Nationalverein’s criticism, therefore, ‘that Catholics carried their confessional sympathies and antipathies into their politics of the fatherland’ had an element of truth in it, but only as a reaction to the aggression of Protestants, ‘for, as the unification of Germany should lead to the domination of Protestantism, a natural feeling was bound to lead Catholic Germany back to an historical, that is to a Catholic, head of the Reich’.⁵⁵

The Habsburgs, of course, had traditionally assumed the role of Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire, to which the Catholic publication alluded. With the Concordat in place, Austria seemed to have chosen the historical path of a ‘Christian-Germanic Rechtsstaat’, which promised self-government, freedom, legality and the old form of Christian civilisation, prophesied the periodical in 1856.⁵⁶ It allowed the ‘German people (Volksthum)’ to stand between East and West: it was ‘Austria once more’ which defended ‘its mission’ and ‘defends it up to the present’.⁵⁷ In Prussia, everything was intertwined with ‘the purposes of the state’, promoting ‘despotic arbitrariness’ and the ‘caprices of particularism’.⁵⁸ Austria pursued German interests in the Alps, in Eastern Europe, in Schleswig-Holstein and in Europe in general.⁵⁹ The Habsburg monarchy, the Historisch-politische Blätter repeated, was a ‘German Great Power’ and was much less threatening than Prussia.⁶⁰ ‘If Germany must merge into a great state, the South German individual peoples (Völkerschaften) would much prefer to be unified with Austria,’ declared an article on ‘The German Question’ in 1862: ‘The relationship of descent (Stammesverwandtschaft) with the Germans in Austria draws them to the latter, the acceptance of a constitutional form of government has removed an inequality of conditions, and with the Diploma of 20 October Austria can grant to the Bund lands their autonomous standing to a far greater extent than Prussia can.’⁶¹ For southern Germans, contended the Historisch-politische Blätter, Austria was closer to Germany than Prussia was: it consequently had to be included in any reorganisation of the German lands.

Despite such goodwill towards Austria, and fear of Prussia, in the third Germany, it was difficult to envisage exactly how the Habsburg monarchy could be incorporated into a German nation-state, which most commentators believed was necessary in some form or other. The Historisch-politische Blätter, which had backed Austria strongly during the Crimean and Italian wars, demonstrated many of the difficulties facing supporters of Vienna in the German lands. ‘The revolution had inherited the omnipotence of monarchy and its institutions, and it had stretched both to their outer limits,’ remarked the federalist Catholic publication in 1861, regretting that these French-inspired centralising traditions had remained in place: ‘As the revolution was defeated in 1849, unfortunately with the help of the Russians, the idea of a unitary (einheitlich) state and a strongly concentrated government seemed to be completely natural and simple, and it was scarcely asked whether the necessary conditions existed for its realisation.’⁶² The national idea had been pursued in an extreme way at the urging of a French Empire which would eventually become ‘the shadow of a memory’.⁶³ Italy might attain ‘a certain unity’, but it would quickly collapse, with the Vatican reacquiring its former territories and Austria Lombardy.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, although ‘the old territorial settlement can perhaps again be made good’, ‘the old order’ never could: ‘After a generation the ideas of nationality and popular sovereignty will no longer blind people, they will no longer drive them to dizzying giddiness and they will no longer serve the quest to dominate in the face of existing laws – but they will also not completely disappear, they will take on other forms and they will be expressed more mildly in public law,’ predicted the Historisch-politische Blätter, accepting the irreversibility of nationalism in Germany, Austria and elsewhere: ‘At first, these ideas were mocked, then they were feared, and now they have become facts.’⁶⁵ The challenge for Vienna was to unite ‘the elements of the monarchy into one great body’, given that a ‘bureaucracy can never carry out such a work … less so in Austria than in any other land’.⁶⁶ Since Germans held the pursuit of ‘the unification of the tribes in a nation’ to be an absolute right, they could ‘not deny the natural justification of other nationalities’.⁶⁷ In the Habsburg monarchy, this meant that the ‘administration of the bureaucratic central state’ – the ‘system’ of ‘the modern state’ – could ‘never again balance the variety of its parts’.⁶⁸ Whereas ‘in most countries, descent and language create a natural equality of relations, which collect the inhabitants of a state territory together in a particular unity, in the Austrian monarchy descent and languages are elements of division’.⁶⁹ The periodical’s solution of ‘self-government’ on the British model seemed unconvincing, especially when extended to Austria’s role in the reorganisation of Germany.

Many purported to have the solution to the Habsburg monarchy’s difficulties, claimed the Historisch-politische Blätter in 1861, but they ignored the external aspects of the question, which had rendered the terms of an internal debate about federalism and centralisation, nationalities and state interests, autonomy and constitutionalism inadequate.⁷⁰ Initially, the publication linked its advocacy of federalism at home to the cause of Grossdeutschland abroad, since a greater Germany would cross the border between Austria and the South German states. Favouring Fröbel’s prediction that the transition from ‘small’ to ‘greater’ Germany was inevitable, the Historisch-politische Blätter was reassured that Schmerling had appeared to switch to the ‘greater German’ camp.⁷¹ All the same, it acknowledged that many of the Minister of State’s former ‘greater Austrian’ colleagues had not changed allegiances, threatening to leave the ‘small Germans’ a free hand in Germany.⁷² ‘Nowhere are there as many “Gothaer” in Germany as in Austria, especially unconscious ones’, noted a New Year’s survey in 1863.⁷³ Although the fact that everything was ‘provisional’ in the Habsburg monarchy seemed to offer an unusual opportunity for the establishment of Grossdeutschland across traditional state borders and against the grain of existing constitutional theory, it also pointed to the monarchy’s instability and possible demise.⁷⁴

Austrians had reached a crossroads, unable to justify their continuing presence in Germany at the same time as consolidating a system with so many non-German interests: ‘If Austria wants to remain German, then it must again become as German as it was once was; otherwise, it must rest completely on a non-German basis. The artificial halfway-house, a relationship and non-relationship, can only last if the status quo in the German Bund were forever assured, but who can believe in that?’⁷⁵ The Confederation had proved difficult to reform and had an uncertain future, with many advocates of ‘autonomy’ in the third Germany simply using Austria for their own ends, wrote the Munich periodical.⁷⁶ By 1863, it seemed obvious that the Bund was in ‘crisis’ and that the notion of Grossdeutschland was problematic: ‘It is time to say a few serious words about the position of those organs, outside the two German great states, which are termed and known to be ‘Catholic’… May they identify without reservation with the greater German Toms, Dicks and Harrys? We say a decisive “no”.’⁷⁷ The ‘greater German’ party had declined and the Reformverein was weak by the mid-1860s, admitted the Historisch-politische Blätter.⁷⁸ Austrians preferred Great Power politics to entanglements in Germany, and Germans saw the Habsburg monarchy as ‘das Ausland’.⁷⁹ Given such entrenched positions, in addition to the perceived obstinacy of Berlin, the periodical increasingly asserted that a reorganisation of Germany which included Austria could only follow a vaguely defined foreign-policy ‘catastrophe’, most probably a civil war.⁸⁰

South German liberal proponents of Grossdeutschland were less apocalyptic, perhaps because they were less convinced by the Austrian model. Published in Bavaria and owned by the Stuttgart Cotta family, the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung was arguably the main South German repository of greater German liberal points of view. Although it was broadly pro-Austrian, it continued to be a ‘forum’ (Sprechsaal), as even Orges recognised.⁸¹ ‘The Allgemeine Zeitung should, according to its original programme, be “unpartisan”, i.e. to let all (at any rate, permissible) views and interests be represented in its columns’, recorded the Austrian Presseleitungskomitee in 1855.⁸² Whereas the newspaper had sold half of its copies in the Habsburg monarchy until 1848–49, acting as an organ for the German-speaking lands of the South, it had witnessed its Austrian circulation drop to only one-sixth of the total by the early 1850s.⁸³ The owner and editors saw their publication as the mouthpiece of the southern German lands, which had become increasingly separate from the Habsburg monarchy during the 1850s and 1860s. When Lorenz Stein approached Cotta at the request of the Austrian government in 1862 to try to convince him to move the newspaper to Vienna, he was politely turned down, with the owner prophesying that a Viennese Allgemeine Zeitung would be seen as ‘the foreigners’ or Swabians’ paper’ in Austria and that it would ‘lose touch with Germany and all its good German colleagues’.⁸⁴ Throughout the period, the publication was criticised by Austrian correspondents for being anti-Austrian. During the 1850s, Johann Christoph von Zedlitz, who had worked for the paper in the 1830s, wrote a series of letters to Cotta deploring the lack of energy with which the newspaper had mediated between Austria and Germany.⁸⁵ Schwarzenberg, reported Zedlitz, had been disappointed that the Allgemeine Zeitung had supported Gagern’s solution to the German question, even if it had ‘never been for a Prussian Kaisertum nor a separatist Klein-Deutschland’.⁸⁶ Although the publication was lauded for supporting Vienna in the Crimean and Italian wars, its outlook seemed, to Zedlitz, to be insufficiently ‘Austrian’, partly because it did not take into account the diplomat’s own strictures.⁸⁷ In the early 1860s, the pro-Austrian articles of the Viennese academic and Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent Karl von Hock were likewise regularly overlooked.⁸⁸

In some respects, it had proved easier for the South German newspaper to support the Habsburg monarchy during the wars of the 1850s, when the majority of public opinion seemed to back Vienna’s defence of German interests, than during the period of constitutionalism in the 1860s, when the Austrian government attempted to reform the Bund and to work with Prussia: Vienna’s attempts at reform appeared half-hearted, leaving Schäffle ‘in no way satisfied’, and its flirtation with Prussia, most notably in the war with Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, seemed to ignore the national feelings of the public in favour of the reasons of state of the two Great Powers.⁸⁹ Furthermore, with Belcredi’s suspension of the constitution in 1865, Vienna’s endeavour to unite domestic and German reform had effectively come to an end, as Gustav von Lerchenfeld, the leader of the moderate Bavarian liberals and an Allgemeine Zeitung correspondent, conceded in October 1865: ‘Austria places itself not only before the impossibility of having any success in Germany, it also goes to great efforts to destroy from the bottom up the last residue of sympathy which remains for it … If the decline and fall is unavoidable, one must know how to let it happen in silence.’⁹⁰ Like August Joseph Altenhöfer, the long-standing deputy-editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung, Lerchenfeld was still opposed to Prussia, but found it hard to support Austria: ‘Not that I personally like the Berliners; I am a South German, and Bavarians, Austrians etc. are much closer to me in temperament than Pomeranians and Brandenburgers, but I recognise a logic of facts and rights in the existence of North German power and in its advances.’⁹¹ For most correspondents of the Allgemeine Zeitung, sympathy for Austria had to be balanced against a desire for German unification, which the Habsburg monarchy increasingly seemed to obstruct.

In Kolb’s opinion, ‘Germany’ stood apart from such changing political constellations and shifting state interests. In this context, it was even more important to oppose Berlin, which had acted aggressively to impose Prussian hegemony in 1848–50, 1854–56, 1859 and under Bismarck after 1862, than it was to oppose Austria, which often seemed to act defensively. ‘Orges and I are certainly German (deutsch gesinnt), not remotely Austrian,’ he wrote to one of his opponents in May 1859: ‘but this mistaking of a living spirit in Germany only in order to put Prussia at the helm and to marginalise Austria has shocked us.’⁹³ On Georg Cotta’s death in 1863, Kolb was anxious to impress on Lerchenfeld that he would ‘never’ ‘defend the small German business and vote in the same sense as the Süddeutschen’.⁹⁴ ‘I am convinced,’ he wrote to Cotta’s pro-Prussian son in June of the same year, ‘that you hold sacred the principles of your father, who wanted a whole Germany, not a Prussian one.’⁹⁵ As one contemporary remarked of Kolb, he had little contact with North Germany and little liking of high politics: ‘he was a completely Swabian, but very appealing, person who, although diplomats and statesmen often came to court him, preferred to be with his own kind, and showed himself to be unusually undemanding and modest in their company’.⁹⁶ As such, he was reluctant to exclude Austria altogether and to accede to Prussia’s policy of force majeure, which seemed to militate against the interests of ‘Germany’. Yet Kolb was not, by the same token, a strong supporter of Vienna’s German policy.

Parties in the Third Germany

In the only other ‘Catholic’ state, Baden, which had almost twice as many Catholics as Evangelicals, the press was similarly split between ‘ultramontane’ or pro-Austrian papers, such as the official Karlsruher Zeitung (1,500) and the Freiburger Zeitung (2,000), and liberal ones, such as the Mannheimer Journal (2,000) and the Frankfurter Journal (10,000), which was published in the neighbouring city-state. By contrast, the political balance in Baden tipped much more pronouncedly towards the ‘liberal party’: at least 32 out of 63 deputies were liberals in 1850 and 1859, rising to 48 in 1861, 54 in 1863, and 59 in 1865.¹⁰² As in Bavaria, many liberals were not in favour of Kleindeutschland, with the majority undecided and a smaller number – above all in the largely Catholic southern Oberland – supportive of Grossdeutschland, but they were more inclined than their Bavarian counterparts towards a constitutional, federal nation-state, which was difficult to reconcile with the policy of the Austrian government and the structure of the Habsburg monarchy.¹⁰³ ‘It is a known fact’, wrote Hohenlohe in 1862, ‘that “German unity” nowhere enjoys greater popularity than in the South-West German states.’¹⁰⁴ At the Fürstentag of 1863, the Grand Duke of Baden had, according to his father-in-law the King of Saxony, ‘agitated against the entire project’ of the Austrians: ‘Behind the Grand Duke stands the Gotha party with Ludwig Häusser and Johann Caspar Bluntschli at its head, which wants to oppose Austria.’¹⁰⁵ Although the Badenese liberal leader and, from 1861, effective first minister Franz von Roggenbach refused for the sake of party unity to force liberals to choose between a small and a greater Germany, he was himself, like many graduates of Heidelberg, a critic of Austria and an advocate of Kleindeutschland, to the extent that the Crown Prince of Prussia expressed ‘his joy’ over his ‘activity’.¹⁰⁶ In a meeting with Hohenlohe in September 1862, Roggenbach had explained that ‘now Austria starts with the idea of destroying Prussia and putting itself at the head of a Reich of the Mitte. By opening the German-national question, Austria is playing a dangerous game, since it is awakening the national sympathies of its German population for Germany, for which there is no form and over which the unitary state [that is, Austria] will collapse.’¹⁰⁷ To Badenese liberals, it was difficult to imagine how the Habsburg monarchy could be accommodated within a German nation-state.

The states surrounding Frankfurt – the Duchy of Nassau, the Electorate and Grand Duchy of Hesse – demonstrated the weakness of any Austrian-backed ‘alternative to German unification’.¹⁰⁸ In Frankfurt itself, there had seemed briefly to be the possibility of an alliance between democratic Grossdeutsche and the ‘Geldaristokratie’ of financiers, who – in the words of a police report of July 1862 – ‘were rather Austrian-minded as a result of their interests’.¹⁰⁹ On his tour of Germany in 1861, designed to assess the strength of the greater German cause, Fröbel estimated that ‘in Frankfurt am Main the grossdeutsch view is by far the preponderant one’, yet his evaluation proved to be wildly over-optimistic, with the democrats failing to cooperate with the city’s financial elites and with the Reformverein failing to find a foothold before disappearing completely by the end of 1863.¹¹⁰ As L. W. Fischer-Goullet, the editor of the Deutsche Stimmen and the Austrian-sponsored Frankfurter Postzeitung, put it in March 1863, ‘The great influence of “new Gothaism” rests above all on its domination of journalism in its entirety. This gives it the means not only to dictate the political opinion of the people, but also to dominate science, art and literature as a whole.’¹¹¹ The Frankfurter Journal, with its circulation of 10,000 in 1862 outstripping the combined total of 1,600 copies of the pro-Reformverein Postzeitung and the democratic Volksfreund für das mittlere Deutschland, remained the dominant newspaper in the region and was, in the opinion of the Viennese Presseleitungskomitee, pro-Prussian, Protestant and nationalistic, publishing ‘systematic attacks on the Kaiserstaat, its conditions and government, and against the maintenance of the Confederation with Austria’.¹¹² Together with the Mainzer Zeitung, the Mainzer Anzeiger, the Rhein-Lahn-Zeitung, the Rheinischer Kurier, the Mittelrheinischer Zeitung, the Hessischer Morgenzeitung and the Zeit, the Frankfurter Journal eclipsed clerical publications such as the Mainzer Journal and official ones such as the Darmstädter Zeitung. To Ketteler, the pro-Austrian bishop of Mainz, ‘the press, a very large majority of which serves the Devil, is now the highest power in Germany which fights against the kingdom (Reich) of God’.¹¹³

The pro-Austrian party would have been strengthened, as Fröbel recognised, if it had been supported consistently by greater German democrats. Radical circles, supported by sections of working-class, lower middle-class, and middle-class opinion in the larger cities, had been powerful in 1848–49 and were believed by Fröbel to be strong – as the representatives of ‘the true Volksmasse or democracy’ – and ‘decisively grossdeutsch’ in Frankfurt during the early 1860s.¹¹⁶ The democratic Neue Frankfurter Zeitung, which later became simply the Frankfurter Zeitung and was edited by Leopold Sonnemann and ex-National Assembly radical Georg Friedrich Kolb, was listed by the pro-Austrian publicist as the second most important Frankfurt newspaper after the Frankfurter Journal and was labelled ‘grossdeutsch,’ if ‘Jewish and negative’.¹¹⁷ Yet the newspaper, although it had supported the Habsburg monarchy in 1859, was generally critical of both Vienna and Berlin, as its commentaries on the Fürstentag made plain in 1863: ‘It is the same to us whether the northern state coerces the southern monarchy, or whether the latter overpowers the former.’¹¹⁸ ‘We are almost daily in a position to report scandals from Prussia and scold Prussian particularism,’ recorded the publication in May 1861: ‘But it doesn’t at all follow that we are speaking specifically for Austriandom or that we want to give the impression that the piling up of terrible conditions in the Kaiserstaat is anything other than it is.’¹¹⁹ The meetings of the German Reformverein in Frankfurt were discounted from the start by the radical Volksfreund, edited by Nikolaus Hadermann, for their ‘aristocratic, ultra-conservative physiognomy’.¹²⁰ ‘Democratic elements’ were ‘very weak’ at such gatherings, not least because radicals fundamentally disagreed with the Reform Association’s espousal of an indirectly elected confederal chamber and an executive directory which left to the individual states many of their old prerogatives.¹²¹ German Austria, wrote Kolb in the Neue Frankfurter Zeitung, could only be an organic part of a federal, republican Germany on the model of Switzerland if it harmonised ‘its internal constitution with the national ideas of freedom and rights’.¹²²

Guarantees from Austria!! A guarantee for the sovereign rights of those princes which help it – a guarantee of the continuation of absolutism and German fragmentation – there will be a guarantee of the domination of the sword and priests, but no other; and the abysmal business of reaction will probably flourish more luxuriantly in Germany under the protective hand of Austria, once Prussia has been torn down, than ever before. Who has not yet understood that German unity and freedom belongs in the realm of fantasy as long as Austria contemplates it in its present form and position as a Great Power, just as with Prussia.¹²⁴

To such democrats, the Habsburg monarchy was no better than its Hohenzollern counterpart.

A good example of radical ambivalence towards Austria was furnished by Johann Baptist von Schweitzer. The son of a wealthy, established Frankfurt family of Italian origin and Roman Catholic faith, Schweitzer was one of the most pro-Austrian democrats, the grandson of the editor of the Oberpostamtszeitung, which was owned by the Thurn and Taxis family. Educated by Jesuits and then by Stahl, Gneist and Mittermaier at Berlin and Heidelberg, he was also a friend of Arthur Schopenhauer and an admirer of Kant and the Enlightenment, which helped to push him towards radical politics, where he was suspected by working-class colleagues such as August Bebel of foppishness and dilettantism. His antipathy towards Prussia and his attachment to Grossdeutschland remained constant, even if relatively weaker, after he turned to social democracy in the mid-1860s. ‘It should be the whole of Germany!’ he proclaimed in a treatise Zur Deutschen Frage in 1862, echoing Arndt: ‘If the mercenaries and toadies of the small German press praise the instruments of Hohenzollern domestic politics as German heroes, independent and reasonable men simply say: riff-raff, just like the others!’¹²⁵ ‘Free of any special interests, we and our colleagues will always use our spiritual weapons in the most disinterested way for the unity and freedom of Germany,’ declared the editorial of Nordstern, on which Schweitzer collaborated, in April 1861:

We didn’t and don’t belong to those false prophets who seek to lead our people astray by speaking for Grossdeutschland or Kleindeutschland; we want the whole of Germany in its natural borders from the Königsau to the Alps and the Adriatic, from the Ardennes to Memel and the March. We shall also continue to hold our black, red and gold banner high, for all Germans must gather under this banner alone when it is a question of fighting for the unity and freedom of the fatherland.¹²⁶

Schweitzer’s view of Austria’s role in such fantasies of greater Germany changed. When he entered politics at the age of 26 in 1859, he argued – in Österreichs Sache ist Deutschlands Sache and Widerlegung von Carl Vogt’s Studien zur gegenwärtigen Lage Europas – that Austrians were safeguarding the legal treaties of the international order, defending German interests against Italy and France, and calling on natural ties of kinship: ‘Where is the cornerstone of a unified national form to be found? Not there, where we calmly look on as the common enemy attacks our fraternal tribe, but there, where we feel ourselves to be a nation (Nation) and recognise in the injury of our brotherly tribe the injury of all.’¹²⁷ With the Habsburg monarchy’s rapid capitulation after two defeats in battle, however, the Frankfurt radical abandoned the weak, supposedly unreformable state in favour of a mass national movement founded on associations of gymnasts and riflemen. Der einzige Weg zur Einheit, published in 1860, described how the ‘old’ German powers confronted the ‘new’ revolutionary potential of the German people, with the ‘traditions of 1848’ having established deep roots.¹²⁸ ‘The democratic party is in Germany at the same time the national one,’ he went on: ‘From the graves of 1848 comes the call: not the Habsburgs, not the Hohenzollern! A united Germany.’¹²⁹ Finally, as a successful mass national movement came to seem unlikely, Schweitzer briefly reverted to support for Austria in Die österreichische Spitze in 1863, but only ‘to nullify a greater evil by a lesser one, to still Prussian and small German agitation by an Austrian and greater German one; in short, to seek to drive out the devil with the devil’.¹³⁰ ‘Since every strengthening and extension of a specific Prussiandom is nothing more than the amplification of an evil, which is already large enough, evidence is mustered at the same time that the small German agitation for Prussia is to be seen as a generally destructive evil’, he continued.¹³¹ If a German Reich of 70 millions could be achieved through Austria’s offices, ‘it would be the heartbeat of this part of the world, it would be the bulwark of civilisation and humanity’, but it was not evident how Austria, which was ‘internally disunited’, would be able to realise such a ‘political dream’.¹³² As the editor of the Social-Demokrat, he advised his readers to fight against both Prussia and Austria by 1865 in order to achieve German unity, which would be ‘a new work, only possible on the rubble of the old’.¹³³ Even Schweitzer, with his increasing hatred of Prussia under Bismarck and of an ‘extra-clever Gotha half-humanity’, refrained from explaining how the Habsburg monarchy fitted into his republican, democratic and national conception of Germany. Austria merely stood closer to ‘Germany as a whole’ than did Prussia or the ‘bourgeois’ Gotha and Progressive parties.¹³⁴

Like other opponents of Berlin in the third Germany, Schweitzer tacitly acknowledged that he was swimming against a tide of scepticism about the Habsburg monarchy in the German public sphere, especially in the North German lands. Internal reform in the monarchy appeared impossible, he admitted in 1860: ‘Even a cabinet composed of Richelieu, Colbert, Pitt, and Machiavelli, with Cicero as the director of the official press, would run its head against a wall in view of this impossible task.’¹³⁵ Most radicals, including Schweitzer’s opponent Carl Vogt, agreed with this diagnosis. Austria’s defeat in Italy was both likely and desirable, since it would reduce Vienna’s nefarious influence in Germany, wrote Vogt in his Studien zur gegenwärtigen Lage Europas (1859). Since the entire history of the Habsburg monarchy was ‘a concatenation of heinous crimes against Germany’s unity, honour, worth, security, freedom, power and greatness’, it was necessary to banish it from German affairs and, possibly, to break it up.¹³⁶ Unlike Prussia, Austria was an extra-German power: ‘Thus, raise the cry for a new structuring of the German Confederation in all organs of the press, all chambers and amongst the people as a whole. No more extra-German provinces in the Bund! No guarantee for the extra-German possessions of a ruler! … A German popular assembly! A political whole to face the wider world! One people! One power! One army!’¹³⁷ Any support for war in South Germany, wrote the radical forty-eighter Heinrich Simon in 1859, derived less from national motives than from the fear of ultramontanes, particularists and reactionaries that Austria’s defeat would mean Prussian hegemony. As long as France did not attack Germany, Berlin should either act against those German states agitating for ‘an un-German war’ that was nothing to do with them or reinstate the Reich constitution of 1849 through a call to the people.¹³⁸ In order to rise, Germany needed to be split from Austria and to be constituted in full before the Germans in Austria could be given a helping hand.¹³⁹

The best thing that could now be written for the enlightenment of Germany would be a short, handy, popular history of the Habsburg dynasty. If only they knew their history! It has been said often enough how poor German literature is in great historical talents, but it has seldom led to an awareness of just how intimately this poor historical education is entangled with the misfortune of the German nation … Is this nation (Volk) really to be helped? A nation which doesn’t break out into laughter when the Habsburgs talk of German brothers, a nation which doesn’t become suspicious when Jesuits preach about nationality, a nation which doesn’t resist when petty despots declare the fatherland in danger? Do you not see what is in danger? The Austrian royal house is in danger, the evil pole of Germany, and everything linked to this evil pole – the rule of the many, fragmentation, obscurity, Jesuitism, backwardness and the corruption of a patriarchal police regime at all levels and in all its forms.¹⁴⁰

The working-class leader Ferdinand Lassalle, still a ‘voice from democracy’ in 1859, likewise traced the failure of German unity to the independent Great Power status of Austria, which rested on its extra-German territories.¹⁴¹ A German reawakening depended on the destruction of the Austrian Gesamtstaat, which would allow the merger of Prussia and Germany: ‘With the dismemberment of Austria, the particularity of Prussia disappears by itself, just as an assertion disappears along with its opposite.’¹⁴² In 1866, the Social-Demokrat recalled Lassalle’s position in 1859 as a guide to current events: Austria, it affirmed, was not a German power; Prussia was, even if also an absolutist one.¹⁴³ Despite the greater German past and anti-Prussian attitude of the majority of radicals, most viewed the Habsburg monarchy with suspicion or contempt.

From his vantage point in Saxony, Biedermann shared Gagern’s diagnosis, if not his inclinations, noting that ‘public opinion at that time was very divided’ between those – ‘almost universally in the South and partly in the North, too’ – who wanted Germany and Prussia to support the Habsburg monarchy and those, like himself, who wanted to act ‘in the well-understood interests of the German nation’ and to avoid being ‘dragged along by Austria’.¹⁵⁰ For the Saxon liberal, ‘the whole logic of relationships led to the result of taking up again the idea of 1848; namely, unification of non-Austrian Germany under the leadership of Prussia’.¹⁵¹ In Prussia itself, it seemed, such a belief had been taken to the point where ‘a thorough-going understanding or even a lively, active interest in the German question’ was not to be found, with contemporaries feeling untouched by Austrian affairs, enjoying the ‘humiliation of Austria’ in 1859 as a ‘sort of nemesis for Olmütz’ or concentrating entirely on domestic politics.¹⁵² Sybel, with his experience of Bavaria, detected a similar incomprehension amongst Prussian liberals and conservatives, with Vincke arguing that the fate of Austria did not concern him, since only a fifth of its population was German and its government was opposed to Berlin. This, he went on, remained a divide between North and South German liberals, with northerners having wanted to expel the Habsburg monarchy from Germany since 1849 and southerners wanting to draw it towards them in order to reinvigorate it.¹⁵³ The need for regeneration was not questioned, however, and the means to include Austria in Germany were not specified. For Sybel, as for Biedermann and Gagern, such southern sentiments did not imply that Austria should be fused with Germany, but rather that it should retain strong links with it. The very terms that Sybel attributed to southern liberals suggested that ‘Österreich’ and ‘Deutschland’ were separate from each other.

The Case against Austria

North German liberals like Aegidi, Rössler and Georg Beseler were fundamentally opposed to the Habsburg monarchy, wrote Ludwig Häusser from Heidelberg to Hermann Baumgarten, who had just returned from Berlin after a tour of the South in May 1859: ‘Beseler hates Austria with all his heart; I have nothing against this. But, in my opinion, he underestimates the ease with which it can be gobbled up and killed off. For him there can be no German future at all without the fall of Austria; thus, he is too indifferent to the dangers which threaten it.’¹⁵⁸ Notwithstanding exceptions such as Gervinus, who blamed the Italian war on ‘Austria’s bellicosity’ and hoped for its ‘defeat and misfortune in the highest measure’, liberals in the third Germany, held Häusser, backed the Habsburg monarchy in the defence of its territory and of wider ‘German interests’, though without changing their view of Austria’s role in Germany itself.¹⁵⁹ The Hanoverian liberal Johannes Miquel exemplified this position in his speech to the second general meeting of the Nationalverein in Heidelberg in 1861. The Habsburg monarchy would survive in a more or less centralised form and it would retain its German core, he proclaimed, but it would remain separate from Germany, fulfilling its mission of colonisation in the East:

Is the construction of a German Bundesstaat incompatible with the strengthening of Austria? Do the interests of both contradict each other? In an Austrian Gesamtstaat, in my view, the Germans will ultimately remain the rulers in fact; at least insofar as they have a forceful and powerfully organised German Bundesstaat behind them … Now, gentlemen, it has already been raised in the committee report that an Austrian Gesamtstaat cannot, now or ever, and certainly not the one presently being built, be incorporated in a German Bundesstaat… nevertheless the building of such a Bundesstaat is in the interest of Germans in Austria. For they will have a powerful, organised brother-tribe (Bruderstamm) at their back.¹⁶⁰

For its own good, Austria had to remain outside Germany, but in a close alliance with it, as in Gagern’s plan of a narrower and a wider union from 1849.

Many southern liberals appear to have agreed with such a position. Like Miquel, the Württemberg publicist and former Frankfurt deputy Paul Pfizer, although sensitive to Gagern’s later refusal – in the 1850s and 1860s – to rule out Austria altogether, remained convinced that the Habsburg monarchy would be peripheral in the process of German unification.¹⁶¹ Throughout, he claimed in 1862, he had doubted that Austria could join a German state.¹⁶² In its own constitutional deliberations in 1849, the monarchy had ‘ignored Germany and failed to mention it in a single syllable’.¹⁶³ Germany, therefore, was justified in replying in kind and excluding all Austrians.¹⁶⁴ ‘Full unification with Austria’, wrote Pfizer in the Schwäbische Chronik in January 1850, ‘meets insuperable obstacles.’¹⁶⁵ On the one hand, Austrian leaders tended to think of their state as a European power, for it was ‘big enough without Germany to exist independently’, taking ‘little notice of those, as is well-known, which it does not necessarily need’; Prussia, by contrast, relied on ‘the rest of Germany’, which was strong enough together to defend itself against the Prussian army, but not against the Austrian one.¹⁶⁶ In the ‘German’ wars against Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein between 1848 and 1850, Vienna had not even withdrawn its envoy from Copenhagen.¹⁶⁷ Its main focus was the Near East, looking to Germany largely as a source of compensation when its eastern ambitions were frustrated.¹⁶⁸ The German Austrians felt themselves to be ‘part, and indeed the dominant part, of a great whole [that is, the Habsburg monarchy]’, making Germany – historically labelled ‘out there in the Reich’ – seem like ‘a purely external work and appendage of Austria’.¹⁶⁹

On the other hand, it was difficult to see how the Habsburg monarchy could be united with Germany, even if Vienna had desired it:

However necessary a narrow alliance of friendship between Germany and the Austrian Gesamtstaat is, however desirable and worthy of sacrifice the participation of Austria in many of the confederal institutions of Germany may be, Austria – which is a powerful and fully independent state without Germany because of its possessions outside the Bund – appears all the less suited to the leadership of the Confederation because it is increasingly losing its character as a German power, given the scope and the mass imbalance of its extra-German territory and the daily increasing demands of its Magyar and Slav population.¹⁷⁰

The German hereditary lands still constitute the kernel or the roots of Austrian power, as well as the dominant element in the whole, extensive Austrian territory; but this is without doubt one of the main reasons for Austria always opposing any plans and demands in favour of the unity of a German state and German national law, just as it was always against a more unified structuring of Germany because of the power of attraction which this could have over Germans in Austria.¹⁷¹

The Habsburg monarchy, concluded the Swabian publicist, was at once an extra-German power and an opponent of a German nation-state, ‘which the people demand’.¹⁷² Since dualism within the Bund was no longer feasible and the incorporation of Austria in a ‘unified Germany’ impossible, Germans were left no choice but to opt for Prussia.¹⁷³

The principal liberal periodical, the Grenzboten, illustrated the evolution and range of charges against Austria from a national point of view. The Habsburg monarchy, commented one article in 1860, had not been ‘German’ for 200 years.¹⁷⁴ ‘The task, on which all others rest, is to free Germany from the political influence of the Austrian dynasty,’ continued the correspondent: ‘This liberation is necessary, and it is also possible without much sacrifice’, since Vienna’s hold over the German lands was tenuous.¹⁷⁵ Even immediately after Olmütz in 1850, Austria was perceived to be ‘losing’ Germany, in spite of the fact that Schwarzenberg’s victory had appeared to be a ‘great’ and ‘complete’ one.¹⁷⁶ Whereas reactionaries in the German lands supported Austria, the ‘constitutional’ party generally backed Prussia because it appeared to embody the ‘principle of movement’ and of ‘reform’, noted the publication in 1851.¹⁷⁷ When the Habsburg monarchy became a constitutional state in 1861 and sought to reform the Confederation a year later, its actions caused only confusion in the rest of Germany, since they ran against the grain of the monarchy’s German policy until that date: ‘That the whole thing is a hollow form, that it can in fact yield no results, that it would further aggravate the chaos and fragmentation of the parties in the German states is no doubt one more reason for the government of the imperial state to pursue its plan.’¹⁷⁸

Even if the Austrian administration were serious about reform of the Bund, it had put forward its proposals too late, asserted the Grenzboten in 1863: the ‘national party’, which was opposed to Vienna, was already dominant in three-quarters of Germany.¹⁷⁹ Although part of the national party wished to use ‘a German parliament convoked by Austria as a starting-point’, others feared ‘the repetition of the struggle of 1848’ between conservative Habsburg forces and parliamentary ones.¹⁸⁰ The ‘ultimate end’ of both factions – ‘a new construction of Germany’ – in any event ran counter to Vienna’s aims: for this reason, ‘the Austrian government could only count on a cold acknowledgement, not at all on the heart-felt applause, of the national party for its plans, however liberal they might seem. For that, Germany has already been revolutionised to too great an extent, if we are not mistaken in our characterisation of the existing state of affairs.’¹⁸¹ By the end of 1863, it was undeniable that the Austrian plan to reform the Bund and regain a hold over Germany had failed.¹⁸² The Habsburg monarchy was held to be incompatible with the Zollverein when treaties were renegotiated in the early 1850s, notwithstanding its need for rapprochement with Prussia as a consequence of bankruptcy, and it remained so in the early 1860s, it appeared, despite broad acceptance by this time of Friedrich List’s argument that politics and economics were closely connected and that the removal of tariffs within a large, protected, national market would stimulate German industry and create the foundation of German power in the world:

However imposingly and energetically Austria puts itself forward, it can only be the loyal ally of a unified Germany; our spirit, our interests, our education, our hopes and wishes do not fit in with the structure of the Kaiserstaat; it can only be a question of a closer connection of the two trading bodies, not full unification. Our hopes rest on Prussia.¹⁸³

Because of its constitutional form and its diverse nationalities, the existence of which pushed the government to oppose nationalism, the Habsburg monarchy could not play a part in the political reorganisation of Germany.¹⁸⁴ To the Grenzboten, Austria was simply not a German state.¹⁸⁵

Prussian conservatives were more convinced by and less interested in the Habsburg monarchy’s ‘German’ credentials. Vienna was seen by the camarilla as Berlin’s main ally in the counter-revolution, with Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach going so far as to represent Olmütz – in a retrospective essay – as the saving of Prussia, Austria and Germany, which had been ‘standing on the edge of an abyss’.¹⁸⁶ As the reactionary leader wrote in the Neue Preussische Zeitung during the death throes of the revolution: ‘The soul of the German Bund is the unity (Einigkeit) of Austria and Prussia.’¹⁸⁷ However, even in the immediate aftermath of the revolutionary events in Germany and Austria, the Gerlachs were anxious not to be seen as ‘Austrian’, telling Wagener – the editor of the Kreuzzeitung – in September 1850, for instance, to emphasise the ‘pettiness and myopia of Austrian policy’.¹⁸⁸ All conservatives in Prussia, as Bismarck-Schönhausen spelled out in September 1849, put their Preussentum before any counter-revolutionary or national affiliation with Austria. ‘What preserved us [in 1848–49] was that which constitutes the real Prussia,’ he proclaimed: ‘It was what remains of that much stigmatized Stockpreussentum, which outlasted the revolution: that is, the Prussian army, the Prussian treasury, the fruits of an intelligent Prussian administration of many years’ standing, and that vigorous spirit of cooperation between king and people which exists in Prussia … You will not find in the army, any more than in the rest of the Prussian people, any need for a national rebirth. They are satisfied with the name Prussia and proud of the name Prussia.’¹⁸⁹

This degree of loyalty to the Prussian dynasty, army and state distanced most conservatives from the Habsburg monarchy, especially during the turbulent years of the Erfurt Union, Olmütz and Dresden between 1849 and 1851, when the ministries of Brandenburg and Radowitz and of Manteuffel came into conflict with Vienna. Although such conservative administrations were divided in their attitude to Austria, the two Minister-Presidents and the Foreign Minister, together with other colleagues, were all sceptical of the Ballhausplatz’s intentions. ‘The relationship of Austria to Prussia constitutes a particular difficulty in the judgement of the state of the German business,’ wrote Manteuffel in July 1850, despite having come to oppose Radowitz’s Union by that date:

It seems to me that the persisting difference between the two states has a more profound cause than mutual insults and sensitivity to insults; there is in my opinion really a considerable split present, for which one can find different forms of expression, but which I shall limit myself to characterising: Prussia wants the organic formation of all or some of the German lands into a genuine whole, Austria notably negates this aim, insofar as it is a question, in the sphere concerned, of a radius capable of expansion and thus touching on the Austrian–German states. Both states seek to find justification for their demands from the old laws and rights of the Bund. The negative position of Austria gives it the advantage that it is backed overwhelmingly abroad, whereas in Prussian leanings the transformation of existing relations and possible complications are feared.¹⁹⁰

Reinforced by the actions of the ministry and the attitude of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who railed that ‘Austrian scandal sheets have never ridiculed Prussia’ as much as Ludwig von Gerlach had in 1850, the wider ‘party’ of conservatives generally avoided the pro-Austrian sentiments of the camarilla, leaving the latter feeling isolated and weak.¹⁹¹ Radowitz, who was the main target of the Gerlach circle’s criticism, quipped after the Erfurt parliament elections of February 1850 that the Kreuzzeitungspartei and the ‘ultramontanes’ had won only a sixth of the seats, meaning that ‘the entire party of the Kreuzzeitung has enough space in just one room’.¹⁹² By far the biggest faction at Erfurt, with 120 seats out of a total of 222 in the Volkshaus, was the Bahnhofspartei, which was largely liberal but also contained a handful of moderate conservatives such as Vincke and Ernst von Bodelschwingh-Velmede. To its right was the so-called ‘Klemme’, with about 40 seats, and the main conservative grouping, the Schlehdornpartei, which counted only 35 deputies, including the Catholic representative Peter Reichensperger. The former tended to follow the line of the Prussian government.¹⁹³ The latter was led by Stahl, who supported most aspects of the Union and was labelled ‘Radowitzian’ by Gerlach.¹⁹⁴ On 12 April, Stahl outlined his programme to the parliament, basing his case on ‘German’ values and implicitly accepting the exclusion of Austria from the narrower union: Prussia and Austria were to be two pillars of monarchism, but the Prussian-led Union was only to be tied to the Habsburg monarchy by a lasting and extensive agreement, not by a merger.¹⁹⁵ A month later, the conservative politician reiterated the point that Prussia had to work closely with the German princes in order ‘strongly to resist both the attacks of Austria and the endeavours of the liberal (Gotha) party to absorb monarchical powers’.¹⁹⁶ For Stahl, as for Manteuffel, Austria was a rival and even an ‘enemy’ by 1850.¹⁹⁷

The pro- and anti-Austrian sentiments of conservatives were subjected to conflicting forces in the 1850s. During the Crimean War, the camarilla sided with Russia against Austria and the western powers, with Varnhagen going so far as to spread the false rumour that ‘the Russian government is giving huge sums of money to the Kreuzzeitung people so that their scandal sheet eagerly takes Russia’s side’.²⁰³ ‘Of this money’, he went on, ‘Wagener, Goedsche, Stahl and Gerlach received the greater part.’²⁰⁴ Leopold von Gerlach ignored such defamation, but nevertheless was critical of Austria, contending that it had desperately and wrongly sought France’s aid in order to protect its weak position in Italy, bringing it into conflict with Russia, ‘which alone shares its policy’.²⁰⁵ The Habsburg monarchy’s position was again ‘negative’, ‘lacking the courage to undertake a struggle of the Germans, i.e. of Austrian institutions, against the Slav-Greek-and-Turkish, especially since (viribus unitis) Austria is ruled largely by gendarmes’.²⁰⁶ The monarchy’s precarious internal order seemed to have led it to act against the political interests of the ‘reaction’ and against its own interests abroad. The Manteuffel administration, however, was much more cautious, maintaining an armed neutrality which alienated both St Petersburg and Vienna. According to Prokesch, who had served as Austrian ambassador to Prussia in the early 1850s, this anti-Austrian party was ‘the strongest in Berlin’.²⁰⁷ ‘Since all the people in Berlin are the same as during my time there,’ he remarked in August 1854, ‘I cannot get rid of my conviction that all the thoughts and endeavours of Pruss. policy have the sole purpose of diminishing the position of power of Austria and its prestigious influence in all spheres, and that this purpose is the only one which exists in Berlin during the present crisis.’²⁰⁸

The other main strand of conservatism by 1854, the Wochenblattspartei led by Bethmann-Hollweg, eventually advised Prussia to support Austria, but only as an ally of the maritime powers, having initially asserted that, ‘if we must go to war, it would be more advantageous for us to have Austria as an enemy rather than as a friend’.²⁰⁹ Bunsen, a prominent member of Bethmann-Hollweg’s party and the Prussian ambassador in London, had even written a memorandum in 1854, before Vienna had allied itself with London and Paris, in which he contemplated backing the maritime powers and expanding Prussia at Austria’s expense. He also recommended the formation of a German Bundesstaat, ‘as demanded by Prussia and Germany, as desired by England, and as tolerated by France’.²¹⁰ Although he was subsequently pushed to resign by Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who thought he had had a nervous breakdown, Bunsen’s actions had demonstrated the confusion of conservatives’ allegiances, exacerbated by Austria’s abandonment of Russia and its alliance with Britain and France.

The rise of Bismarck to power in 1862 increased the isolation of Austrian supporters amongst the ranks of Prussian conservatives. From the early 1850s, during his time as Prussian envoy to the Bundestag, Bismarck had been known as a cynical defender of Prussian interests and opponent of Vienna. Prokesch, his Austrian counterpart in Frankfurt, was certain that ‘the party to which Herr v. Bismarck belongs has no other aim in view than the reduction of Austria’s position of power. This seems to them to be the key to Prussia’s greatness.’²¹⁴ Bismarck’s sponsorship of confederal neutrality in the Crimean War, wrote the Austrian envoy in July 1854, rested ‘not so much on love of Russia as envy of Austria, not so much on any conservative principle as on a ravenous appetite for more power in Germany’.²¹⁵ Rechberg, who had served opposite Bismarck in Frankfurt and had become embroiled in a mutual antagonism with him during the mid-1850s, was appalled by Bismarck’s Realpolitik, even in the wake of Austrian and Prussian cooperation in the Danish war of 1864, since it seemed to contradict many of the principles – legality, preservation of the status quo, the Concert of Europe – on which Vienna’s policy was founded:

when one has to deal with a man who displays his political cynicism so openly that he replies to that part of my letter – that we must make the maintenance of the Confederation and the hereditary rights of the German princes the foundation of our policy – with the hair-raising phrase that both of us must place ourselves on the practical terrain of cabinet policy and not let the situation be obscured by the fog that derives from the doctrines of a German policy of sentiment. Such language is worthy of a Cavour. Adherence to the basis of legality is a nebulous policy of sentiment! The task of keeping this man in bounds, of dissuading him from his expansionistic policy of utility … surpasses human powers.²¹⁶

From Bismarck’s own point of view, Vienna sought unjustifiably to maintain its position of superiority in Germany and in its other spheres of interest. Although Bismarck had eventually praised Olmütz in public, he had contemplated war as late as 13 November 1850, if ‘Prussia, our black and white Prussia, is not assured by clear and conclusive treaties of rights in Germany that are everywhere on a par with Austria’s’.²¹⁷ He resented the complacent sense of Friedrich von Thun, the Austrian envoy in Frankfurt in November 1851, that ‘a predominant Austrian influence in Germany was in the nature of things’.²¹⁸

Such an innate sense of superiority had to be countered ‘with facts, not with ideals’: ‘a Prussia that, as Bismarck put it, “renounced the inheritance of Frederick the Great” in order to be able to dedicate itself to its true destiny as Lord High Chamberlain to the Emperor did not exist in Europe, and before I sent home a recommendation for such a policy the issue would have to be decided by the sword’.²¹⁹ Prussia was at least Austria’s equal, in Bismarck’s opinion, and it should maintain an independent sphere in Germany and insist on parity within joint German institutions. Thus, at the start of the Crimean War, he warned against ‘binding our spruce and seaworthy frigate to the wormy old warship of Austria’ and, in the aftermath of the Franco-Austrian war, he repeated that ‘I am neither Austrian, nor French, nor Russian, but Prussian, and that I see our welfare only in trust in our own strength and that of the German national movement’.²²⁰ After becoming Minister-President, Bismarck stated his position baldly to Alois von Karolyi, the Austrian ambassador, avoiding the meaningless notion of Austrian–German brotherhood and acknowledging ‘only the uncomfortable politics of self-interest’, before going on to argue that the period between 1815 and 1848 had been characterised by Austrian concentration on its European role and Prussia’s free hand in Germany.²²¹ If Vienna would give up Schwarzenberg’s policy of seeking hegemony in Central Europe and would ‘shift [its] centre of gravity to Ofen [Buda, in Hungary]’, ‘instead of looking for its centre of gravity in Germany’ and administering its non-German territory, particularly Hungary, ‘as an appendage’, Berlin would cooperate with the Habsburg monarchy.²²² Such brusque disregard of Austria, labelled ‘insane’ by some contemporaries after the Hofburg leaked the details of the Minister-President’s conversations with Karolyi, directly contradicted the pro-Austrian outlook of the Gerlach circle, but found support in other sections – bureaucratic and Junker – of conservative opinion in Prussia.²²³ Whether or not Austria was ‘German’, it should refrain from interfering in Germany.

The wars of the 1850s, especially the Franco-Austrian war, appeared to belie the claim that Austria stood outside Germany, with many newspapers and a flood of pamphlets coming to the aid of the Habsburg state.²²⁴ However, support for Austria’s ‘national’ wars was conditional and limited. Of the 32 German newspapers surveyed by the Austrian Presseleitungskomitee in 1855, 14 supported Vienna’s stance in the Crimean War and 10 opposed it, yet the majority of publications continued to back Prussia (17) rather than Austria (8) and to criticise the Habsburg monarchy in more general terms.²²⁵ There was a similar response in 1859, with much of the press and public opinion initially on Austria’s side. ‘There are no longer democrats and ultramontanes, backward-looking men and a revolutionary party, only Germans who are ready to mount a common defence when danger and disadvantage threaten the whole fatherland’, commented the Freiburger Zeitung in January 1859, while the Badische Landeszeitung was impressed by ‘the patriotic spirit’ infusing ‘the whole of Germany’.²²⁶ Even leading pro-Prussian publications such as the National-Zeitung and the Grenzboten could not deny the existence of an ‘agitated mood that today grips the German people’, as it sought ‘a significant role for our great nation in this European drama’.²²⁷ Guido von Usedom, the Prussian delegate at the Bundestag, was convinced that ‘the whole of South Germany is mad about Austria’ and ‘identifies Austria with Germany’, making it difficult even for reluctant governments such as those of Bavaria and Württemberg to avoid entering the war.²²⁸

Yet the meaning of such national feeling was contested. According to the Grenzboten, ‘public opinion’, which in ‘quiet times is a matter of indifference’ but which ‘now begins to become a serious and dangerous power’, had experienced an ‘awakening of German national sentiment’ largely because of deep-rooted animosity towards France and identification with national struggles of the past, recalling ‘Germany’s shame in the years 1805–1813’ and ‘hapless reminiscences of 1847 and 1848’.²²⁹ ‘By far the larger part of the German public’ seemed to support Austria faute de mieux, since its ‘flags at least give the impression of representing the German cause’.²³⁰ In fact, ‘the masses’ were ‘still completely unclear about what they wanted’, the article asserted.²³¹ After Vienna had allegedly ignored British and Prussian efforts to keep the peace, nullifying the treaty rights granted to Austria in Italy by the Congress of Vienna, the Grenzboten began to denounce the Austrian campaign as dynastic rather than national, even though the South German states continued to support the monarchy.²³² The Leipzig periodical was joined by other important North German publications such as the Preussische Jahrbücher and the Preussisches Wochenblatt.²³³ Even before Austria’s defeat, opinion in Germany was divided. Whereas Buol, who resigned part way through the conflict in May 1859, was confident that ‘the whole of Germany’ would ‘gather round a hard-pressed Austria’, if it lost the war, Kempen thought ‘this hope … merely a chimera’.²³⁴ Once the Habsburg monarchy had been vanquished, there was a rapid reappraisal of Austria and its role in Germany which suggested that the police chief’s scepticism had been well-founded. By 1860, ‘the view in Germany that participation in the Italian war would have been a great national misfortune, that we would have sacrificed our national and free interests for an Austrian retreat’, was now ‘overwhelmingly’ accepted, wrote the North German liberal politician and publicist Wilhelm Beseler.²³⁵ National support for Austria in its war against France did not imply backing for its activities in Germany itself.

Many commentators, especially those in the North, had little sympathy for the Habsburg monarchy in the Italian war. For radicals such as Arnold Ruge, with their memory of persecution under Metternich and counter-revolution under Schwarzenberg, Prussia, ‘with its objectionable love affair with the police’, was ‘the only salvation for Germany from Jesuits and reactionaries in politics’, who were associated with Austria: ‘If Germany is not now capable of using this position to free itself from Austrian tyranny, it will be wasting another great opportunity … German freedom means separation from Austria.’²³⁶ In Bamberger’s opinion, the Habsburg monarchy was ‘a hundred times deadlier’ than France for German freedom and unity.²³⁷ ‘By declaring ourselves against Parisian tyrants, we are not preaching sympathy for tyrants in Vienna’, declared Karl Blind in a confiscated treatise, before going on to welcome the day when Lombardy, Venice, Hungary and Galicia demanded their freedom from Austria.²³⁸ Jakob Venedey went even further, arguing at first for support for Vienna against Napoleon III, but then switching allegiances after the peace of Villafranca to Prussia as the only defence against both Austria and France.²³⁹ The spectre of Austrian tyranny was usually present in radicals’ response to the Franco-Austrian war, sometimes mixed with sympathy for Italian nationalism.²⁴⁰

In comparison, liberals were less worried by the former and less attracted to the latter, even though the Società Nazionale Italiana served as the model for the Nationalverein. Droysen, despite harbouring ‘all imaginable sympathies’ for the ‘unfortunate’ Italians, wanted Austria to ‘have and rule Italy’ so that it was not tempted to ‘put even more pressure on Germany’, the interests of which were his ‘first concern’.²⁴¹ ‘That the war which has been started in Italy is directly a German affair has not even been claimed by those who have taken it up, notwithstanding the fact that, where Germans fight, the sympathy of all other Germans will always be on their side’, proclaimed the rector of Berlin University Heinrich Wilhelm Dove in August 1859.²⁴² Austria’s war, insinuated Rössler, was the corollary of its unnatural, imperial character, contradicting the imperatives of nation-building: ‘Austria hinders natural development. But its nemesis stands before the door … The Schwarzenberg system has been judged and made forever impossible.’²⁴³ Prussia should not be misled into joining Habsburg wars in Italy and the Near East, but should assume the leadership of Germany, after the withdrawal of Austria, and solve the ‘German’ problem of Schleswig-Holstein, concluded the publicist.²⁴⁴

The liberal historian and military commentator Theodor von Bernhardi, writing in the Preussische Jahrbücher, went so far as to blame Austria for attacking France as a means of propping up its ailing imperial system of rule and re-establishing a conservative order in Europe: ‘What it was actually about was the entanglement of Germany and especially Prussia in a war, the shifting of the war to the Rhine, the invasion of France with a powerful, superior military force, the destruction and banishment of the Napoleonists, and the return of Heinrich V and his befriended clerical coterie to the throne of his ancestors.’²⁴⁵ Austria’s intentions were ‘very easy to see through’, he explained to Usedom in April 1859: Vienna wanted ‘to transfer the war to Germany at any price’, meaning that the decisive battles would be fought on the Rhine and that the ‘main burden of the war’ would pass from Austria to Prussia.²⁴⁶ 1859 was the last episode in a long history of Habsburg exploitation of both Italy and Germany, according to Wilhelm Beseler. Such anti-Austrian rather than pro-Italian sentiment was what linked Italian and German nationalism, in the view of many liberals:

The German nation has no interest at all in seeing the territorial possessions and influence of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine maintained or even increased. It must be admitted, however difficult this is for many Germans, who have become accustomed – with no reason whatsoever – to looking down on the Italians, that Germany and Italy are largely in the same position vis-à-vis Austria, and that we scarcely suffer less under Austrian pressure in Germany than do our neighbours on the other side of the Alps as a result of the Austrian position in Italy.²⁴⁷

In Beseler’s view, Prussia had to lead Germany, not Austria. Some North German old liberals – Waitz, Droysen and Duncker – were less openly against the Habsburg monarchy in 1859, but few were for it. For their part, conservatives were divided between outright supporters of Austria in the camarilla around the Gerlach brothers, a handful of opponents such as Bismarck-Schönhausen, and an uncomfortable majority, including Stahl and Wagener, who backed the Prussian government’s policy of armed neutrality.²⁴⁸

The Habsburg monarchy, as the Italian war of 1859 had demonstrated, was not a predominantly German power in the eyes of many observers. As Austrian commentators themselves made plain, the existence of increasingly powerful nationalities in the Habsburg lands meant that the German minority could only exercise a ‘hegemony of culture’ not politics and that it was tempted to espouse centralisation as a defensive mechanism and as a means of creating what Hans von Perthaler termed an Austrian ‘political nationality’.²⁴⁹ Combined with the centrifugal proclivities of its non-German nationalities, which forced Austria to look to Italy and the Balkans rather than Germany, the state-supporting reflexes of German Austrians helped to reinforce ‘the political dividing wall which separates Austria from the rest of Germany’, in the words of the pro-German Minister of Commerce Karl von Bruck in 1860.²⁵⁰ The Habsburg monarchy seemed to be trapped by the principle of nationality: if it championed the principle, it would strengthen the position of Prussia in Germany and weaken its own hold over its own diverse nationalities; if it opposed the principle, it would lose ‘the residue of its influence in Germany’, since most of the German political public saw the nation as the necessary underpinning of the modern state.²⁵¹

Even supporters of Austria in Germany such as the journalists associated with the Historisch-politische Blätter and the Stimmen der Zeit, edited by the Viennese émigré Adolph Kolatschek in Gotha and then Leipzig, were obliged to admit that nationality obstructed a merger between German and Austrian lands, with non-German interests in the latter and Prussian aims in the former relying on each other: ‘Germany will never become Greater Prussia without a Magyarised and Slavicised Austria, and vice versa.’²⁵² Because of the threat posed by its nationalities, recorded the Stimmen der Zeit in 1861, German Austrians had to concentrate the powers of the Habsburg state, despite aggravating the division between Austria and Germany: ‘Although Austria, like Germany, can only exist as a federal state, the attainment of unity must be emphasised here, where the tendency of the nationalities towards independence has achieved a sudden and dangerous breakthrough.’²⁵³ If Austria did not leave Germany, commented Joseph Edmund Jörg, the editor of the Historisch-politische Blätter, a year later, it was possible that the Habsburg dynasty would fall, so great was nationalist opposition to ‘Germans’ in the monarchy.²⁵⁴

Many North German liberals agreed with this diagnosis. ‘As long as Germany wishes to be more than nothing,’ wrote Aegidi, ‘German Austria must either separate itself as a state from non-German Austria – that is, the Austrian monarchy must collapse – or, since it cannot belong to two states at once, it must take up a privileged position in Germany, namely remain part of the Bund, without becoming part of the Bundesstaat, so that, as I have said, the German Confederation is comprised of a Bundesstaat and of Austria.’²⁵⁵ Personally, Aegidi preferred to maintain the Habsburg monarchy intact as ‘a colony of Germany’, but it could not therefore be fused with the other German lands.²⁵⁶ Wilhelm Beseler went further: ‘Austria is in its innermost being not a German state but a Reich, which has its own spheres of interest that are mostly foreign to Germany and often inimical. Germany has no obligation to defend the existence of Austria, just as it has none to defend the existence of France or Russia.’²⁵⁷ Austria as a multi-national empire seemed to be alien to Germany, in which the modern principle of nationality had become one of the driving forces of politics.

If one ignores specific Slav tribes in the Austrian population, whose cultural level will tolerate an absolute regime and the rule of priests for a long time, the other nationalities are, in accordance with their natural situation and with their advanced development, no longer to be governed exclusively by the interests and whims of princely rule … think of a Reichstag for the whole monarchy with the inclusion of Magyar and Latin tongues; it must certainly be held to be completely impossible that all the greater and smaller nationalities make themselves understood, not to mention coming to an agreement in the representation of the Austrian monarchy over the common interests of the Reich, over the division of its burdens, over the treatment of claimed special rights and provincial needs, over the necessary limitation of strivings and desires, over the taming of passions and prejudices on the part of individual lands and races.²⁵⁹

Although premonitions of Austria’s collapse were offset by assessments of its military strength, population and territory, they were nonetheless common amongst commentators across the political spectrum. Liberals like Beseler and Rössler were quick to condemn the Habsburg monarchy’s backwardness, arguing that it hindered the ‘natural development’ of Germany and that its ‘nemesis’ was imminent, with the ‘Schwarzenberg system’ having become forever unrealisable.²⁶⁴ Both small and greater German liberalism, by agitating for a parliamentary German Bundesstaat, had promoted the separation of Austria and Germany, and had made possible the Habsburg monarchy’s collapse, claimed Jörg in 1862.²⁶⁵ The monarchy’s nationalities were fragmentary, argued Miquel, threatening to ‘reinstall old Austrian absolutism or destroy Austria’.²⁶⁶ ‘I can imagine’, he continued to the delegates of the Nationalverein in 1861, ‘that quite a few of us desire the latter outcome … I openly confess that I previously had this point of view.’²⁶⁷ Although Miquel had changed his mind, believing that a ‘lasting refashioning of Austria’ could take place ‘under the predominant influence of the German race (Rasse) and of the German Austrians’, he had no inhibitions in considering the future collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, which still seemed likely if Austria were not fundamentally restructured.²⁶⁸ Such a collapse appeared to menace Germany, too, according to a pamphlet co-authored by the liberal-minded Ernst II of Coburg. By 1860, Austria faced a revolution ‘which not only endangered the system of government, constitution and dynasty, but also the integrity of the Kaiserstaat’.²⁶⁹

Many radicals and democrats actively welcomed such an outcome, delighted to envisage the end of a reactionary system and contemplating what would happen to its various parts.²⁷⁰ Catholics, conservatives and southerners were much less willing to portray the Habsburg monarchy as a likely victim of revolution or collapse, but they regularly discussed the ‘future of Austria’, with the implication that it might not have one.²⁷¹ To the Hessian liberal Oetker, there were two sets of opinions concerning Austria: one set saw the necessity of retaining the Habsburg monarchy as a bulwark against the East; the other wanted to exclude it completely from Germany, leaving it to become weaker and eventually to unravel.²⁷² Like other ‘empires’ in the East, most notably the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian ‘Reich’ appeared to have an uncertain future because it contradicted the modern state-building principle of nationality. Although many commentators in Germany believed that the significance of such a principle had been overstated, few were prepared to deny its importance altogether. It was in these circumstances that prophecies of the Habsburg monarchy’s decline and fall, which had seemed so improbable before 1848, gained a purchase and further weakened the case for Austria’s inclusion in a reorganised Germany.

The Austrian Vielvölkerreich, it was held, lacked the internal strength and external compatibility required to sustain its role in Germany. To the majority of German commentators, it seemed impossible to reconcile the multinational empire with the nation-state. ‘The unclear, perpetually vacillating policy which Austria followed after 1849, abroad as well as in its own interior,’ wrote the Saxon minister Richard von Friesen in his memoirs, ‘all this had destroyed almost every sympathy for Austria in the public opinion of Germany, and led, more than all the efforts of Prussia, to the alienation of the German Volk from Austria and its delivery into the hands of Prussia, which one alone wanted to credit with the capability of reasonably furthering the material interests of Germany and to entrust with the power for the realisation of the national idea.’²⁷³ Many southerners, in particular, were still fearful and critical of Prussia, but few thought that Austria could take its place as the main sponsor of national unity. This left the German Confederation as the main alternative to Prussian-led unification.

3 The Habsburg Monarchy and the Germans

Germany in the Presses of the Mittelstaaten

Parties in the Third Germany

The Case against Austria