In May 1913 a local group of the German School Association (Deutscher Schulverein or DSV) from the West Bohemian town of Mies near Pilsen reported to its management in Vienna: “Only because of our persistent and prudent work in warding off all the attacks—sometimes hidden from view by detours, sometimes carried out completely in the open—were we able to construct beautiful German schools in Wranowa, Hermannshütte, Wrbitz, Piwana, and Sittna to counteract the Czech desire for conquest.”Footnote 2 Such meticulous and obviously emotionally exaggerated reports about the number of primary schools erected in the bilingual regions of the Bohemian lands were no exception on the eve of the Great War, and they implicate a long-lasting unsolved political conflict about the language question, especially between the German centralist liberal politics and the federalist efforts of the increasing non-German political nationalities in the Habsburg Empire, including the Czechs in Bohemia. The question of national schools was a key piece of the Czech-German political negotiations on a national compromise in Bohemia, which dragged on over the entire period from the dualization of the monarchy in 1867 to World War I.Footnote 3
Thanks to the recent historicizing of the nationalization efforts in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a new methodological and linguistic framework for researching topics concerning “national activism,” especially regarding its attitude toward the “nationally indifferent” inhabitants of the “language frontier,” has been established.Footnote 4 Pieter Judson used the constructivist stance on understanding national identities as ideological constructs involving a fluid or opportunist ascription of identity rather than a set of organic characteristics, as was the case with the primordialist/essentialist approach.Footnote 5 Inspired by authors of the “constructivist turn” of the 1980s, like Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm,Footnote 6 Benedict Anderson,Footnote 7 and Rogers Brubaker, he used this theoretical background, including concepts such as “imagined community” (Anderson) or “the invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm), for a genuine rethinking of the nationalist approach to the Habsburg Empire that has dominated twentieth-century historiography. As Gary Cohen remarks, there is currently a growing group of revisionist historians, like Judson, Tara Zahra,Footnote 8 and Jeremy King,Footnote 9 who see the nationalist battles not as an immediate struggle for power but in longer terms of the influx of developing modern societies, seriously challenging or questioning the primordialist perspective. To be sure, Judson and Zahra convincingly show not only the ambiguity, indifference, or mutability of the national loyaltiesFootnote 10 but also the fact that “national activists” of all kinds shared many assumptions and goals. By contrast, this perspective downplays not only the nationalist narratives but also, as a result, the key environmental differences among Central European national movements, accentuating their mirrorlike nationalization attitudes.Footnote 11 This is in contrast to the predecessor studies on the Czech and German national defense associations in Bohemia, such as those by Gary Cohen, who based the description of the situation in Prague on the general political and numerical decline of Germans challenged by the Czechs, and also Jeremy King, who stressed the “historically conditioned asymmetries between the two national movements” that he observed in nationalist conflicts in the South Bohemian town of Budweis.Footnote 12
The aim of this article is to use a comparative analysis of the most common activities of the central school associations that were the two most prominent national defense associationsFootnote 13 of imperial Austria, namely the German Deutscher Schulverein in Vienna and the Czech Ústřední Matice Školská (ÚMŠ) in Prague, to explain the rules and dynamics of national contestation developed over schooling in Bohemia prior to World War I and to show how the possibilities and limits of both German and Czech national movements in the example of Bohemia unfolded against the background of the processes of political liberalization, democratization, and the development of civil society with special regard to permeating the nationalizing efforts by the social question.Footnote 14 A comparative approach is used for the most important categories of activity of the school associations: foundation, organizational development and position toward the state, methods for creating minority schools, and political contacts and influence on the local level. These four categories correspond to the four sections of this article. The consciously narrow, but surely not isolated, perspective on these two associations brings new insight to the convergent yet asymmetrical development of two competing national movements in Bohemia. It shows the decisive impact of the processes of the fin-de-siècle period, particularly on the Czech national constituency that significantly benefited from political democratization.
National School Associations as a Derivative of the 1860s
The strong but officially suppressed legacy of the liberal and national revolutions of 1848‒1849 permeated the Habsburg Empire after the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859. The Austrian neo-absolutist regime conceded to the liberals, for instance, by issuing the Imperial Municipalities Act (Reichsgemeindegesetz) in 1862, establishing the self-governance of municipalities. At the same time, it tolerated the growing number of associations, leading to a “flood of associations” (Hochflut von Vereinen)Footnote 15 before the constitutional changes of 1867 that followed the Austro-Prussian War. This meant the exclusion of Austria from the German national unification process, which in turn witnessed the acceleration of constitutional liberal reforms in Austrian domestic policy. Article 19 of the State Basic Law on the General Rights of Citizens, in compliance with the revolutionary drafts of the constitution in 1848/1849, stipulated equal rights for all national groups (Volksstämme) in the monarchy in terms of protection (Wahrung und Pflege) of their nationality, which indeed was guaranteed by the state. On the one hand, German liberals herein conceded the rights of the other nationalities. On the other hand, they sought to protect themselves from the recently issued law that introduced the Czech language as an obligatory subject in Bohemia and stipulated bilingualism in 1866. To use the words of Gerald Stourzh, the rejection of this perceived “forced language use” (Sprachenzwang) was, therefore, a conditio sine qua non of their approval of the new constitution.Footnote 16 So came the principle of the so-called Sprachenzwangsverbot into the third sentence of Article 19, acknowledging that “in the crown lands inhabited by several ethnic groups, public schools shall be set up in such a way that, without compelling that a second provincial language be learned, each of these national groups will receive the necessary resources for education in its language of instruction.”Footnote 17 Constitutional changes were completed by the ensuing laws of the era of the German liberal Bürgerministerium governing associations (1867) and schools (1869), which brought not only a legal basis for the later phenomenon of national minority schools and their institutionalization on the civic level but also a definitive verdict over bilingual education. The main idea of all of the important new school laws, namely the Schule-Kirche-Gesetz (1868), the Reichsvolksschulgesetz (1869), and the Schulerrichtungsgesetz (1870), was to take control of the schools away from the churchFootnote 18 and to put it into the hands of the state. The highest body of the new school supervision became the provincial school board (Landesschulrat) led by the provincial governor (Statthalter). Its members were representatives of political groups, religious communities, and capital cities, as well as school inspectors, teachers, and experts. With district school boards led by district governors and local school boards led by local mayors, the three-level system of school supervision was completed. Only a few years later in 1873, this system experienced a national division of local and district school boards, which, according to the new law on school supervision (Schulaufsichtsgesetz), was due to an insufficient covering of the particular school interests of the nationalities.Footnote 19 The higher in the hierarchy the school supervision bodies were, the more dependent they were on the provincial government, which is why the provincial school board was the last supervising body to divide in 1890.Footnote 20 A completely autonomous position was held only by local school boards whose members were, by contrast to the provincial and district school boards, elected by the municipal authorities without any influence of the state or provincial governments.Footnote 21 Further, the role of other state bodies in the local school conflicts was determined by their affiliation to state power. The Ministry of Education, the provincial government, and the governor were the most important state bodies engaged in schooling matters. Above them stood the courts of justice, such as the Imperial Court (Reichsgericht) founded in 1869 and the Administrative Supreme Court (Verwaltungsgerichtshof) founded in 1876, interpreting or defining the new laws and defending the official arbitrary position of the state toward the feuding nationalities.Footnote 22 Because of the absence of a sufficient legal treatment of the national minority schools and the need for an election for the nationally exclusive organs, such as the local school boards, the judicial courts were given a crucial role in interpreting the laws and defining the disputed category of nationality. While the Administrative Supreme Court put the Reichsvolksschulgesetz and Article 19 together and developed a special procedure for establishing a new minority school in a way that favored slightly the “Personalitätsprinzip” as a nationality principle, the Reichsgericht acknowledged the Czech theory stemming from a proposal of the Czech politician Josef Kaizl. This enabled the same position of both languages in all parts of the crown lands, tending to an objectification of the characteristics of national affiliation.Footnote 23 The judgments of the Administrative Supreme Court left the importance of the decennial censuses, which began in 1880 and reflected solely the “language of daily use.” Already in 1884 this was an aside because the courts considered this category insufficient for determining one's nationality and, in consequence, one's ability to become a member of nationally exclusive bodies, making its judgments “mostly minority-friendly”Footnote 24 and justifying the personality principle of the problem of claiming the mother tongue a decisive aspect of a nationality. This went against the German idea of a territorial division based on the “language of daily use”—the main demand of the Germans during the Czech-German political negotiations on a Bohemian compromise. In other crown lands such as Moravia, where the territorial principle could not be used for its linguistically closely interdependent regions, it was also the personality principle that formed the basis for the so-called Moravian compromise of 1905.Footnote 25
Immediately after 1867, we can see how municipalities and associations rushed to create and protect national schooling. One of the earliest school associations was the German Komittee zur Unterstützung der deutschen Schulen in Welschtirol und and der Sprachgrenze (known since 1876 as “Deutsche Schulgesellschaft”), already in place by 1867 in Innsbruck to support German schools in South Tyrol.Footnote 26 Comparable activity was undertaken as early as the late 1860s by the liberal German Casino in Prague, which provided support for German schools and kindergartens in the capital of Bohemia.Footnote 27 The very first Czech local school initiative emerged in Vienna as the so-called Komenský Association (1871), promptly followed by local school associations, called “Matice,” established predominantly in Moravia. By the end of the liberal era in 1880 there were already seven local Czech school associations situated in linguistically mixed towns: Proßnitz (Prostějov) and Olmütz in 1872; Budweis (České Budějovice) in 1873; Brünn (Brno) in 1878; and Troppau (Opava), Leitmeritz (Litoměřice), and Znaim (Znojmo) in 1880.Footnote 28 The decisive impetus for centralizing the “national defense” of the German liberals, who had to adjust to their fall from power, were the Stremayr language ordinances that accepted the Czech language as an equal external official language in Bohemia and Moravia. This was unacceptable from the German point of view because it would automatically give advantage to the Czechs entering the state services.Footnote 29 On 13 May 1880, only a few weeks after releasing the new ordinances, the liberal Viennese academic circles (particularly student associations) around Engelbert Pernerstorfer established the central DSV in Vienna.Footnote 30 Subsequently, Czech teachers in Prague around Václav Kredba formed the central Czech School Association (ÚMŠ) in Prague on 5 May of the same year; both were aimed at establishing national minority schools in linguistically mixed regions.Footnote 31
Convergence and Asymmetry of the Growing National (School) Movements
The example set by the central school associations instigated the establishment of other national defense associations that targeted the national economy and so-called national property (nationaler Besitzstand). The economically focused national defense associations were more locally oriented and usually had regional headquarters. The first such association, the Deutscher Böhmerwaldbund, was established in 1884 in Budweis (České Budějovice) and sought to promote the economy of the Bohemian Woods by providing job services to people in the area, introducing new cultural activities, and supporting small business, agriculture, and tourism. A quick answer came from the Czechs of Budweis, who established the Národní Jednota Pošumavská that same year. Prompted by both German and Czech local elites, similar associations were established in other regions, such as Národní Jednota Severočeská (Prague, 1885), Bund der Deutschen Nordmährens (Olmütz, 1866), Národní Jednota pro Jihozápadní Moravu (Brünn, 1866), and Bund der Deutschen in Böhmen (Teplitz-Schönau, 1894), to name only the most important partner organizations for the central school associations. In addition to providing scholarships and grants, these comprised a much-needed backup source for the school associations, most importantly engaging in the purchase of estates and property suitable for building national minority schools.Footnote 32
Given their expanding spheres of activity, it became increasingly necessary and advantageous to coordinate the national defense actions more efficiently by setting up national umbrella organizations such as “Národní Rada Česká” (Prague, 1900) and “Deutscher Volksrat für Böhmen” (Trebnitz, 1903). These consisted of representatives of existing defense associations and thus remained firmly focused on the minority school question. They exerted greater pressure in efforts to gain more leverage over central political decision making, openly appealing to parliamentary deputies as well as to daily newspapersFootnote 33 and thereby trying to make themselves masters of parliamentary politics. For example, the German national umbrella organization in Moravia, the Deutscher Volksrat für Mähren (Brünn, 1903), challenged “a demand repeatedly raised by the Czech side to open a Czech university in Moravia, [calling on] German deputies to resist such demands by all available means.”Footnote 34 The extensive geographical scope of German national defense activity prompted the creation of a German association project for the whole of Cisleithania, the Hauptstelle für die deutsche Schutzarbeit (Vienna, 1908), in which the DSV played the leading role.Footnote 35 Here we can observe the quick rise of the national defense association networks that, as soon as they covered all regions and spheres of the public life, sought to transform themselves into an institutionalized national(ist) corporation that could coordinate the number of national defense activities more effectively.
The initial statutes and the organizational structure of the DSV were inspired mostly by existing non-school associations, such as the Gustav-Adolf-Verein and the Alpenverein, which relied on a network of local groups.Footnote 36 The organizational structure created by the DSV was also adopted by the ÚMŠ, including the internal decision-making processes, publishing framework, funding from dues, initial statutes, and most of the subsequent modifications they underwent.Footnote 37 This situation was not only openly admitted by ÚMŠ proponents but was even used to justify the reactive, defensive reasons for its founding.Footnote 38 The DSV's mission was to support national educational interests throughout Cisleithania, not only in Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia against the Czechs but also in Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola against the Slovenes; Galicia against the Poles; Bukovina against the Romanians; and Austria's Littoral, Gorizia, and South Tyrol against the Italians; and, owing to the extensive nature of these national hinterlands, its membership was larger than that of the ÚMŠ. In 1910, for example, there were already 1,138 local DSV groups versus merely 386 of the ÚMŠ.Footnote 39
School associations derived their income mainly from private sources, including member fees, gifts, testaments, and collections. These allowed them to maintain a budget surplus and prompted the associations to organize events such as balls, festivals, concerts, expositions, and lectures and to produce postcards, stamps, journals, or even table games, coffee, and cigar holders.Footnote 40 Both associations gained support from other countries the ÚMŠ mainly from the United States and Russia, the DSV mostly from the German Empire through the agency of the closely cooperating Reichsgerman school association, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (ADSV), in Berlin.Footnote 41 Because the ADSV oriented itself to support German schools in Transleithania, its financial support of the DSV comprised only a small portion of the budget and was approximately as low as—or even lower than—the support of the Czech schools from abroad (around 3,000 Reichsmark per year). The ÚMŠ, which usually used the picture of the DSV as a big and powerful enemy as a mobilization factor, also had to admit as early as 1889 that the finances coming to the DSV from Germany were “not that significant—they don't even exceed the gifts of our compatriots from the USA.”Footnote 42
It is clear that the financial development of both associations depended on what was happening in the political scene regarding negotiations on the national compromise. During the Viennese negotiations on a Bohemian compromise in 1890 the incomes of both associations decreased at the same time. The Badeni crisis of 1897 brought a dramatic decline not only for German old liberal politics but also for the closely connected DSV, which was even forced to cut its support to some of its minority schools, for example in Prague.Footnote 43 For the first time, the incomes of the ÚMŠ exceeded the incomes of the DSV in 1897 by a bit less than 70,000 crowns. In 1906, the ÚMŠ attained its largest lead in income, taking in 784,238 crowns versus the DSV's 501,818. The trend shifted a bit in 1909 when the DSV called for a substantial funding drive, primarily initiated by the Styrian poet and DSV supporter Peter Rosegger, aimed at bringing in at least one million crowns to use for constructing new German minority schools. The ÚMŠ tried to keep up with the so-called Rosegger collection by calling for a “St. Wenceslas-Million-Collection” (Svatováclavská milionová sbírka) in the same year. These very successful collection efforts didn't stop, however, at one million crowns but continued in succeeding years, and while the lead of the ÚMŠ decreased slightly, the incomes of both associations grew to around 1,500,000 crowns by 1914.Footnote 44
The school associations also gained provincial and state subventions. State subventions funded a small number of tertiary and secondary schools owned by the school associations. Private schools had to apply for a subvention of a provincial diet but were entitled to earn it only in cases of primary schools with a public law status, which was a kind of an intermediary stage before becoming public and being placed under the administration of a municipality. For this reason, the concrete sum of money to be given to the school associations was the subject of controversial debates in provincial parliaments, particularly in the Bohemian Diet. Anton Pergelt, a deputy from the German Progress Party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei), was one who registered a complaint about the allocation of provincial subventions to the school associations: “The schools of the ÚMŠ received a subvention of 12,980 fl., the schools of the DSV 3,115 fl., which is exactly one-quarter the amount. As I've already mentioned, we Germans in Bohemia account for more than a fourth part in both numbers and fiscal power. I must protest in strongest terms that the fight schools (Kampfschulen) of the ÚMŠ are being subsidized using our taxes.”Footnote 45 In addition to facing the Czech opposition in Bohemia, the DSV also had to cope with the obstructionist tactics of antisemitic deputies in the Landtag of Lower Austria, especially from members of the Christian Social Party who tried to block subventions for the DSV—many of whose leading administrative members were Jewish and refused to stop supporting Jewish schools.Footnote 46
The sheer fact that an association roughly half the size of its counterpart could not only keep up with but even surpass the DSV's income shows the mobilization potential of the Czech movement, which was dictated not only by demographic trends favoring the CzechsFootnote 47 but also by the democratization processes and the universal suffrage movement in Cisleithania. This is illustrated, for example, by the proclamations of a large demonstration militating for Czech minority schools in 1908: “The participants in today's demonstration gladly accept the results of the conference of minority representatives, which took place on 10 May in Lom [and demand that] the fight for minority schools [be joined to] the fight for universal suffrage in elections for all self-administrative bodies.”Footnote 48 The ÚMŠ clearly articulated its interests, including the introduction of universal suffrage for the Viennese parliament (1907), and called for these new conditions to apply to elections for the Bohemian Diet and municipal councils. This enabled a reliable connection to the Czech Social Democrats, who also directly participated in the demonstration with a march of their own, carrying banners reading: “The Enemies of the [Czech] Minorities Are Enemies of the Universal Suffrage.”Footnote 49 By contrast, the interests of the DSV were not supported by the German Social Democrats at all because there was a much deeper social and ideological gap between them and the German liberals; German Social Democracy aligned itself instead with socialist internationalism.Footnote 50 That two DSV leaders, Viktor Adler and Engelbert Pernerstorfer, were members of German Social Democracy did not change anything in this regard.Footnote 51
The character of both movements was also influenced by how they were perceived by the state, which saw both as dangerous to some extent. Although both associations professed loyalty to state power, they promulgated a negative view of their opponents, each accusing the other of treacherous behavior. Typically, the Czech minority school efforts were accused of destructive socialist or even anarchist tendencies. Thus the lawyer representing the German municipality of Teplice, in a complaint brought by Czech parents, argued against making the Czech minority school public by claiming that the school was a threat to the state: “It is doubtful if the same degree of Austrian patriotism is fostered in the Czech schools as in German ones. That's why no patriot would support such a school. We don't want a hotbed of socialist agitation. The petitioners belong to the lowest echelon of the proletariat.”Footnote 52 These allegations that the Czech schools were a socialist influence were also intended to sway the Ministry of Education. This argument was also frequently used by high-ranking politicians: for example, the German Minister without Portfolio (Landsmannminister) Gustav Schreiner directed the government to regulate Czech school activities “emphasizing the socialist and anarchist character of [Czech] minority school agitation.”Footnote 53
The position of the DSV, however, was often suspected of being able to spread Reichsgerman ideas, which was considered more dangerous by the state bodies and led in some instances to restrictions at the local level. For example, the district governor (Bezirkshauptmann) of Krumau (Český Krumlov) cancelled a part of a planned DSV event called “Tribute to the DSV,” wherein the participants were to pay tribute to an allegorical statue of the DSV, “because there is a legitimate reason for assuming this sort of performance could injure Austrian patriotic feelings.”Footnote 54 The DSV also complained repeatedly about the removal of the black-red-gold German flag from its schoolhouses.Footnote 55 Parliamentarian Wilhelm Ruß, who was a supporter of the DSV, complained to the Reichsrat about this—from his point of view—unequal treatment: “If the Black-Red-Gold of a historical state causes anxieties, there should be an intervention to the same degree against colors meant to symbolize a future state and are Red-White-Blue.”Footnote 56 The pan-German threat was a serious reason for considering the restriction of the activities of the DSV by the state bodies and even by the emperor, especially in the first decade, mainly because of the radical antisemitic faction within the DSV led by Georg Schönerer. It seems that only the exclusion of Schönerer, in connection with the conflict between his faction and the leaders of the DSV over the Aryan paragraph in 1886, helped the DSV save its loyal outlook and encourage a more tolerant approach from the state organs. This is evidenced by the fact that the governor of Salzburg, Count Thun, gave the welcoming speech at a DSV rally in Salzburg that same year.Footnote 57 Supporting the so-called Jewish-German schools in predominantly Czech-speaking regions didn't end in 1913, when such a school in Beraun was shut down, the DSV proclaimed,Footnote 58 but can also be found in the following years—even during World War I—as demonstrated by a request for a subvention for a Jewish school in Gaya (Kyjov) in May 1918: “Because of the present war lasting more than four years, our financial situation became so miserable that our community, despite its selflessness and all German national attitude, is not able to maintain the only German schoolhouse for our children if we won't get sufficient help from the outside.”Footnote 59
Regarding finding sources of funding, the ÚMŠ surpassed its German opponent without difficulty, at least between 1897 and 1909, and had a more advantageous position with respect to the state. The possibility of the DSV disseminating pan-German notions initially made it a potentially more significant threat to the Habsburg state than any flirtation Czech nationalists may have had with socialism, anarchism, or even pan-Slavism. This explains the relative tolerance shown by the Habsburg state organs and the Austrian judiciary to the Czech movement.Footnote 60 Facing the changes in favor of mass political movements, the German liberals became more and more incapable of defending their old liberal standpoints, which had lost their hegemonic position, and faced strong opposition from German Catholics and antisemitic liberals. This also had an impact on the DSV, which could hardly keep up with the dynamic potential of the ÚMŠ—benefitting as it did from mass movements and its more concentrated efforts that were limited to the historical lands of the Bohemian Crown.Footnote 61
Establishment and Maintenance of Public and Private Minority Schools
The procedure of establishing new public minority schools was based on the judgments of the courts. It required a locally sponsored initiative to gather the signatures of parents of the same nationality willing to enroll their children in the new public school on a petition to the provincial school board that demanded a new school be opened. To meet the accuracy requirements for data in accordance with the Reichsvolksschulgesetz, which allowed new schools to be built wherever there were more than forty schoolchildren over five years of age at least four kilometers from the nearest school, the petition had to be examined in a nonpublic “protocol record” handled mainly by the district administrative authorities. Any false information concerning the nationality, age, or residence of the parents was considered sufficient reason to exclude the petitioner from subsequent official procedures on the matter; this decreased the number of the entitled petitioners. The second phase, the so-called commission hearing, was public, and it offered all representatives of municipalities and civil society, including the local school board and national defense association members, the space to protest the planned minority schools for formal reasons.Footnote 62 The most frequent arguments made by German municipalities in rebuffing Czech minority school demands usually claimed that legal requirements would be missed or manipulated and stressed the lower social status of Czechs, population fluctuations, and significant Czech school agitation.Footnote 63 The German municipalities sought to bolster their opposition by questioning the nationality of petitioners based on the latest census results. For example, in the protocol record regarding the establishment of a Czech minority school in Mariaschein (Bohosudov) in Northern Bohemia, the following is recorded: “Nationality has not been reliably determined—Anton Bergmann, for example, is a notorious German, which can easily be proved.”Footnote 64 So participants in the commission hearings often found themselves defending or questioning the personal details of petitioners and developing their own interpretations of lacking or inadequate regulations, as during a commission hearing on a Czech minority school in Seestadtl (Ervěnice). Here, Mayor Fritsch, who stood on the territorial principle of nationality, stated that Article 19 of the State Basic Law on the General Rights of Citizens “recognizes the right for public schools with their language of instruction solely for closed nations” (lediglich einem geschlossenen Volksstamme), but that “a minority cannot demand such a right.”Footnote 65 Such statements were, of course, unacceptable to the ÚMŠ, which sent its people to defend the school interests of the minority during the hearings and complained about the presence of national activists from the other side. The ÚMŠ often protested the participation of the so-called visiting teacher (Wanderlehrer) from the DSV, who was sent to the region to advise the municipal councils as to how they might thwart the demands of the growing Czech minority during commission hearings. The activities of the “Wanderlehrer” and traveling association officials were universally acknowledged and promoted by the associations as demanding missionary work worthy of respect and full of travel, discussion, public lecturing, and documentation.Footnote 66 Although there also were visiting Czech teachers, it was the Germans whose names most frequently cropped up in the daily press due to the fact that the gravest conflicts over Czech minority schools affected particular regions in which German municipalities saw themselves facing a loss of rule to the rising Czech minority. For example, the German newspaper Deutsche Böhmerwald-Zeitung reported that all commission hearings that focused on Czech demands for minority schools were contested by the visiting DSV teacher, Karl Pochlatko, as illegal “because in all cases the commissions were ordered by the head of a district authority (Bezirkshauptmann) attached to the school board, not by the plenum of the district authority, and were led by a district commissioner instead of by a member of the school board.”Footnote 67 This obstruction tactic was used in many such hearings that took place in Mariaschein (Bohosudov), Weißkirchlitz (Novosedlice), Zuckmantel (Cukmantl), Janegg (Jeníkov u Duchcova), Lihn (Líně u Plzně), Zwug (Zbůch), and other locations. Pochlatko, whose presence at these hearings was authorized by German local school boards, was acknowledged as a DSV specialist at thwarting Czech minority school activities in predominantly German municipalities. He was highly appreciated for successful interventions against Czech schools in, for example, Predlitz (Předlice) and Gibacht (Pozorka).Footnote 68
If the demands on the establishment of a new public school were recognized as justified, the municipalities and the local school board involved had to provide the school premises and all necessary equipment. However, because of the “step-parent” relationship the municipalities had with “foreign” minority schools, they were unwilling to do so and sought every possibility for obstruction—mostly through complaints.Footnote 69 Municipalities blocked any kind of support for the national minority, which obviously might have led to miserable conditions for the new public minority schoolhouses. In the first decade of the new century, neglected Czech public schools drew attention to the resistance of the German municipalities, which was supposed to be in conflict with Article 19.Footnote 70 Because the municipalities were responsible for building and maintaining the schools, close ties between the school associations and the municipal councils were a vital precondition for a successful realization of the nationalist local school policy.Footnote 71 However, this kind of “tandem” approach could also actively reject or slow down minority school demands when they were considered not only a national threat but also an unnecessary financial burden for the municipal budget.Footnote 72 The associations, therefore, used their own resources to build private schools as a vital stepping stone to later making them public. Like public schools, these private schools were not safe from countermeasures. In some cases, municipalities managed to shut them down. Among the most notorious of such instances were the revenge school shutdowns carried out by municipalities in the North Bohemian Giant Mountains (Krkonoše). In 1913, for example, the German municipality of Hohenelbe (Vrchlabí) closed the local Czech minority school, arguing that the building was in a poor state hygienically and structurally. In revenge, the German private school in Benetzko (Benecko) was closed by the Czech municipality using a similar argument.Footnote 73 This act then inspired a countermove by the DSV, which argued for the closure of another private Czech school: “To force the Czechs to let our German school alone, we think it will be absolutely necessary to close another Czech school. Therefore, we turned to the municipality of Harrachsdorf (Harrachov), which is ready to close the local Czech school if we can provide them the necessary help.”Footnote 74 This case also shows that using the competencies of municipal councils in national matters needed to be supported by—or at least discussed with—the respective school association.
As for the numbers of primary schools established and maintained, we can again see that the Czech ÚMŠ had a dominant position during the last two decades of the Habsburg monarchy. Before World War I, the DSV established far fewer schools than its geographically narrower counterpart. Until 1913, only 24 of the DSV schools in all parts of the monarchy were made public. On the side of the ÚMŠ, there were 34 in the Bohemian lands alone. In 1913, the DSV owned 51 primary schools (44 of them were granted legal public status), the ÚMŠ owned 84 primary schools with 62 with legal public status.Footnote 75 Thanks primarily to the “Rosegger collection,” the DSV was able to increase the numbers of its schools (the so-called Rosegger schools) especially in Silesia. The only primacy the DSV could keep over the ÚMŠ was in the number of kindergartens; in 1913 it owned 113, while the ÚMŠ had only 76. Given the geographical scope of the activities of the ÚMŠ, however, this hardly bolstered the DSV's fading dynamic, which was also, despite the usual defensive rhetoric, admitted to have the stronger position in the final phase of the prewar school battle: “If we take into consideration, that Matice has 152 institutions just within the area of the Bohemian Crown while the Schulverein [has] only 145 (seven less) in all of Austria, . . . we come to the opinion that the mighty Schulverein, supported in every possible way by Germandom inland and abroad, lags behind the results of our diligent, honest work.”Footnote 76 Remarkably, such proud statements are in opposition to recent Czech historiography that stresses German dominance in the association sector because of broader geographical scope and higher membership numbers and does not take into consideration the data on incomes and the number of schools established and maintained.Footnote 77
Connecting the Center and the Periphery
The close connection between the existence and activity of school associations and negotiations on a national compromise in Bohemia is visible not only in the establishing of the 1880 Stremayr language ordinances but also in the close personal connections to the national parties. The formally strict apolitical school associations could not give official statements on everyday political questions, but they did try to support their respective national parties in practical ways, especially with regard to the most controversial point in the negotiation talks: administrative partition by national spheres. This demand of the German political parties was clearly expressed in their “Pfingstprogramm” of 1899, denying the Czech political program on the basis of the historical unity of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown.Footnote 78 Here again the DSV supported the “territorial principle” of nationality, trying to preserve and isolate German dominance and assimilating other smaller groups—deemed unacceptable practices by the Czech side, which claimed there was no “closed German language area” in Bohemia.Footnote 79 Different approaches are also well documented in the attitudes toward census taking, which, once the category “language of daily use” was implemented in 1880, became the most powerful way to measure national wins and losses. This category nevertheless favored the German view of nationality and prompted Czech associations to question the propriety of the census as a whole.Footnote 80 Neither the ÚMŠ nor the DSV, however, were directly involved in trying to influence or put pressure on the census-taking procedure. Perhaps because of the fear that their involvement might threaten the very existence of the highly important school defense associations, such actions were instead carried out by economic defense organizations such as Národní jednota severočeská and Bund der Deutschen in Böhmen, umbrella organizations like Deutscher Volksrat in Böhmen and Trebnitz (Třebenice) and the Národní Rada Česká (Prague), and by their local groups, primarily on the language frontier.Footnote 81 Through these associations an attempt was made to gain control over the procedure of filling out of census surveys. First of all, they exerted direct influence over the decision-making process of the municipalities by motivating them to fully use their competence to avoid or at least weaken the influence of the official authorities, especially for questions concerning the appointment of “nationally reliable” census takers (mostly local teachers), who were able to persuade respondents and contribute the best possible census result from the standpoint of what were seen as national interests.Footnote 82 Statistics derived from the census results were vital at all levels: central, provincial, and local. In central politics, the census results were used for propositions about the new national compromise targeting the creation of new administration zones (German, Czech, and mixed zones), which was clearly expressed in the Gautsch Language Ordinances of 1898.Footnote 83 The census results also played a role in the creation and enforcement of provincial laws, as they were used, for example, in the “Schulaufsichtsgesetz” of 1873 to divide school supervision in Bohemia along national lines to reclaim members of the “wrong nationality” from these nationality-based institutions.Footnote 84 For the school associations, these numbers were a significant indicator of where members of the respective nationality were present in sufficient numbers to potentially foster the creation of a national minority school. Underestimating the decennial census was considered dangerous, and the associations were therefore highly interested in statistical studies stemming from the official decennial census results, as well as in studies based on private census taking carried out mostly by the economic national defense associations.Footnote 85
The interests of school associations and the national liberal political parties were closely aligned, and there were close personal ties between them. On the one hand, these associations were most often led by parliamentary politicians; on the other, the principle activities in school associations seem, especially in the German case, to have played an essential role in the subsequent political careers of young student activists born around 1848, such as Viktor Adler, Engelbert Pernerstorfer, and Otto Steinwender (DSV). Thanks to association leaders like the prominent liberal politicians František Ladislav Rieger (ÚMŠ) and Gustav Groß (DSV),Footnote 86 the school associations had several options by which to supply their representatives in the parliaments with material about concrete conflicts, and not only about minority schools. Although the school associations—as apolitical entities—could not involve themselves directly in Czech-German negotiations, they enabled and almost forced the instrumentalization of controversial minority school questions and the refinement of victim narratives in central politics. Thus, the German liberal deputy Gustav Schreiner complained about obstructions placed in the way of an existing German school by the Czech municipality of Schüttenhofen (Sušice), saying: “The German minorities in the Czech speaking regions . . . are hereditary citizens (erbeingessesene Bürger) who are constantly being Czechified by the Czech majority.”Footnote 87 Such proclamations of the German side simultaneously emphasized their hereditary propertied position, whereas the Czechs highlighted the heroic fight of the (poor) “people” for their rights: “The news this year, too, is full of terrible stories about the desperate battle our brave people must fight for guaranteed laws, so they may enroll their children in schools of their language.”Footnote 88
The point of action of the school associations was to implement “central” national positions at the local level. This meant active preelection agitation, especially in municipal elections in the language border regions. The crucial relationship in municipalities that had national defense associations may be seen in the running of national activists in municipal elections with the intent that they might win mayoral posts and thereby completely penetrate local politics. Winning municipal elections brought the desired influence in appointing local school board members and, with it, full access to using all the important municipal competencies for changing or preserving the national character of the community. This is why the existing municipal councils also tried, with the help of the defense associations, to prevent the growing minority from being represented in municipal elections by redrawing school,Footnote 89 electoral, and judicial districtsFootnote 90 or by other means, like changing the numbers of voters in electoral curias so that none of the existing curias could fall entirely into the hands of the national opponent.Footnote 91
If a municipal council could not be counted on to cooperate for national reasons, which was regularly the case when supporting minority claims, the school associations directly supported local school initiatives for the national minority. Despite providing help and information to be used in establishing national schools, the associations were also involved in other possible solutions for the problematic coexistence of the national majority and the national minority. The DSV, for example, supported an attempt by German parents in Sitzkreis (Čížkrajice) to be excluded from the Czech school district of Slabsch (Slavče) and become a part of the German school district of Neudorf (Nová Ves), establishing a subdivision in their village (Expositur).Footnote 92
The school associations’ primary focus, however, was on elections to local school boards, which had been nationally separated since 1873. Making sure the elected members preserved loyalty to the nation was seen as indispensable to the undisturbed development of local national schools. As soon as the results of the election were announced, the defense associations filed complaints against any elected local school board members perceived to be affiliated to the other nationality or who were national “renegades” that did not really represent or even betrayed the interests of their nation.Footnote 93 In elections to local school boards, the school associations often instructed their communities as to which candidate to support or protest. Remarkably, the ÚMŠ recommended to the Czech municipal council in Trebnitz (Třebenice) that Josef Titta,Footnote 94 a leading German national activist and the head of Deutscher Volksrat für Böhmen who had been elected to the German local school board, be labeled a “renegade,” in the hope that this would at least delay the seating of the German local school board.Footnote 95
To fulfill the legislative requirements for establishing new schools, the school associations were highly active in agitating at the local level. Propagandizing took place in tandem with the assertion of political demands for the emancipation of the Czech language from the perceived dominance of German and must have started very early on in an attempt to persuade parents to send their children to the new schools with Czech as the language of instruction.Footnote 96 The alleged advantages of separate Czech schools needed to be explained to parents of school children using leaflets, circulars, lectures,Footnote 97 and the like. Because arguments regarding the danger of “denationalization” did not always work, one of the most frequently used themes of Czech school associations was that attending schools in which the language of instruction was not Czech was a threat to children and a cause of mental and emotional disorders that could even lead to youth delinquency.Footnote 98 This is remarkably different from the agitation of the DSV, which saw its role as fighting back against such characterizations.Footnote 99 Its propaganda was just as impressive in extent and aimed largely at keeping Czech schools out of German municipalities. Worth mentioning again is the role played by Karl Pochlatko, the DSV's visiting teacher, who made huge efforts to instruct “endangered” municipalities about how to resist the claims of Czech minorities.
The implementation of national minority schools was often blocked by sharp resistance from local municipalities against any kind of minority promotion and led in many places to radical actions, such as school strikes, in which Czech parents—to the extent they were under the influence of a school association—stopped sending their children to existing German schools unless it was agreed that a Czech school could be built. There was another sufficient reason for striking or holding a demonstration: if the schoolhouse was in poor condition, the municipality was responsible for its upkeep.Footnote 100 The state, of course, critically viewed the school strikes, not only because of the decline in school attendance they caused but also because such actions allegedly involved “anarchist elements.”Footnote 101 The ÚMŠ was ready to organize and pay home tuitions for striking children.Footnote 102 This was necessary to protect the parents from paying fines or even suffering imprisonment for neglecting the education of their children.Footnote 103 Suppressive measures at the local level included legal moves such as court suits, as well as punitive, retaliatory, or deterrent methods that went beyond the law and were intended to show the strength of the majority community. Some of the most controversial and therefore most instrumentalized methods were attempts by municipalities to have minority activists and parents who signed petitions in favor of minority schools evicted from their homes or terminated from their jobs. These took place mainly in the mostly German municipalities of Northern Bohemia that had a higher percentage of Czech-speaking workers whose national claims often seem to have depended heavily on the involvement of the national defense associations, which observed every new eviction at the language border and gave it a vivid nationalist interpretation. Many complaints brought by Czech associations against municipalities engaged state authorities, whose task was to deal with the concrete personal reasons given by landlords for evicting national minority members. Both the reports of the district counties (Hauptmannschaften) and available police reports show that Czech complaints of evictions for national reasons were rather exaggerated, and this corresponds to the statements of municipalities and landlords.Footnote 104
Looking at the overall functions of the school associations concerning municipal governments and political parties, we can see how historical and organizational factors came together to create what Pieter Judson called the “schoolhouse drama.” Even the physical violence against schoolhouses, which Judson depicted well, was not left aside.Footnote 105 The pressure exerted by the defense associations (not necessarily by the school associations) on municipal councils is evident, as they tried to thwart the minority school efforts through redundancies. Petitioners’ evictions, even if this topic is hardly quantifiable, were demanded by the umbrella defense associations, especially the German Volksrat. The municipal governments in mostly German-speaking regions were far more likely to influence the employers or landlords to evict them due to the social inequality of the Czech inhabitants.Footnote 106 Although Czech evictions targeting German residents cannot be entirely ruled out, no such complaints have survived for the period before 1918.
Conclusion
This study shows the striking importance of the national school associations as an intermediary between the parliamentary (central) and the local levels. Showcasing their activities with the political as well as the legal and institutional developments and depicting the game these associations were playing makes it evident that they were at once instruments and beneficiaries of the development of a civil society and political liberalization. The associations can be understood as an embodiment of the Austrian liberal era arising from changes to the law made in the years around 1867 that did away with the requirement for education to be bilingual and enabled the political processes of national differentiation in a critical area for liberal politics. The result was national schools. Nevertheless, protecting national(ist) interests by a constitution of an officially nonnational Cisleithania was not considered sufficient at all and was expected to be substituted by the civil society. Seeing the particular interests as underrepresented at the state government level was, nevertheless, an essential impetus for action, as it was seen especially in the political watershed of 1879/80.
The comparative analysis of the most important activities of the two competing school associations in Bohemia shows a picture of asymmetry instead of convergence, as the study assumes the moments of convergence were very well covered by the recent studies of King, Judson, Zahra, and others, especially toward national indifference. It is obvious that the foundation of school associations came from the German side first (1867), and the statutes, organizational development, and events such as the “Rosegger collection” were consciously copied by the Czech side. This strategy helped support the notion of a rhetoric of defensive reactiveness of the growing Czech movement, signified by the establishment of many local Czech school associations already at the beginning of the nationalist school battle. The presence of the German old liberals connected ideologically with the 1870s era in the management of the DSV, which also incorporated Jewish members and adopted Jewish schools and brought significant losses for the DSV at the end of the nineteenth century. This was illustrated in financial development, in which the ÚMŠ gained an advantageous position in all respects starting in 1897. Having the Reichsgerman ADSV as a partner did not bring the DSV a significant advantage. Despite its smaller geographical scope of activity and the number of local groups, the ÚMŠ was able to find more finances in the pockets of taxpayers and could also rely on provincial subventions. Even if the accusations of state treachery seem to be slightly exaggerated for both associations, the ÚMŠ and its activity somewhat symbolized what the state constitution stood for, which demonstrates that the judgments of the courts were somewhat in favor with the Czech nationalist point of view.
Further, the propaganda and methods used to attain the goals of the two organizations were quite different. While the DSV saw itself as saving the status quo, the ÚMŠ made tremendous efforts to reclaim Czech children from the German schools; for which purpose, of course, different forms of propaganda were necessary. Here we can see that the ÚMŠ did not have to fight against the DSV directly but rather fought against the German municipalities supported by the DSV and its visiting teachers. In a few cases, such as in Schüttenhofen (Sušice), the opposite was true. It was precisely the resistance of the municipal governments against the Czech minority schools, standing on the principle of a territorial, exclusive German area confronted with Czech minority school demands, that escalated the situation, causing redundancies, demonstrations, and school strikes on the Czech side. Due to the advocacy of Czech workers in Northwestern Bohemia—whether their school interests were real or created by the associations—the ÚMŠ made a reliable connection to the Czech Social Democrats and the universal suffrage movement, giving the ÚMŠ significant dynamism in the first decade of the century. Despite the close personal affiliation of DSV leaders like Viktor Adler and Engelbert Pernerstorfer to the German Social Democrats, the DSV was not able to involve this political power in its minority school activities—an effect of the deeper stratification within the German-speaking society of Cisleithania.
Beyond the realization or thwarting of minority schools, both associations brought centralized homogenizing politics to the local level and, having close connections with the parliamentary politicians, they tried to influence elections for municipal governments and local school boards. The associations engaged in the decennial censuses only indirectly, and the special role, in this case, consisted of filing complaints to the state bodies and courts regarding the ceaseless efforts to define the borders of the minority schools. The absence of a school minority law was, on the one hand, criticized by both sides and, on the other hand, the ongoing school battles only made a consensual solution more complicated, as the school associations tried to ensure a most advantageous position for any possible legislative changes or reorganization of the minority school issues.
Finally, the study also shows that establishing nationalism at the local level depended not only on the creation of modern “imagined communities” but also was vitally bound to the political liberalization and democratization processes that brought new democratic institutions and successively enabled broad political participation. By exploiting the institutional venues opened up by the December Constitution and following the central political arenas, the defense associations brought the disputed agenda gradually into the everyday life of the millions of inhabitants of the Habsburg monarchy. The asymmetrical strength and growth of the two competing movements shows the specific geographical, political, and social bases on which the liberalization, democratization, and mass mobilization processes had differing impacts, helping, in particular, the Czech national constituency to integrate the lower strata quite successfully.
