According to classic Marxist theory, socialism and nationalism form incompatible opposites. In the everyday lives of many workers in late Habsburg Austria, however, both worldviews merged with and occasionally even reinforced each other. This seeming paradox forms the centerpiece of Jakub Beneš’s innovative study. Based on diverse sources ranging from police reports and the minutes of party congresses to newspapers, autobiographies, and especially fictional literature, the author examines the mobilizing power of early-twentieth-century nationalism in the service of both progressive and reactionary ends. Although it is organized chronologically, the study does not provide a contiguous narrative, but focuses on select political turning points during the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy.
The book portrays the development of Austro-Bohemian Social Democratic culture in both its combined expressions and its distinctly Czech and German ones. Demarcating himself from established interpretations that explained nationalism among Habsburg workers by emphasizing petit-bourgeois influences within especially Czech Social Democracy, Beneš chooses a culturalist approach. He describes a poetic Social Democratic culture, in which popular orators and literature overshadowed orthodox Marxist theory. Party leaders such as Victor Adler adapted the cultural project of Austrian Social Democracy to existing mentalities. In this process, they both imitated the imagery of Central European Catholicism and strove to replace it with their own.
After their long struggle for universal male suffrage had largely succeeded by 1907, both Austro-German and Czech Social Democrats tended to present themselves as the most genuine representatives of their respective national communities. Taking issue with middle-class chauvinism and self-interest, they argued that true commitment to the nation was built on the working class. Austro-German Social Democrats defined their own nation as emancipatory and inherently democratic and argued that self-determination for the German people also entailed granting self-administration to other nationalities. Many of their Czech comrades saw themselves as the victims of twofold oppression and demanded fundamental changes in both the social and the national sphere. Party leaders of both nationalities also tried to imbue their working-class followers with an appreciation of their respective high cultures, personified by such national icons as Jan Hus and Friedrich Schiller.
A majority of Czech Social Democrats eventually supported the creation of separate party structures that broke up the interethnic unity of Austrian Social Democracy. Nationalist groupings among Czech and German Social Democrats did not put ethnic solidarity above class solidarity, however, and did not imagine an ethnic brotherhood that transgressed class lines. Yet at the same time, they did not believe in an intrinsic commonality of all workers’ interests. They found national authenticity and solidarity among the workers of their own nation, distinguishing them both from bourgeois conationals and from workers of other nationalities.
Workers and Nationalism provides captivating insights into the influence of nationalism on late Habsburg working-class culture. It shows a Social Democracy that strove to maintain internationalist ideals in an environment of growing nationalist activism. Yet it also documents that many Social Democrats did not define internationalism as hostile to nationhood. Varying concepts of internationalism competed, and the study would have profited from further quantification. Beneš convincingly documents the unmistakable nationalist tendencies within Czech and Austro-German Social Democracy, but we cannot always assess their concrete strength among party loyalists.
Beneš shows a thorough command of both Czech and German political and cultural life in the late Habsburg monarchy. Occasionally, one senses a slight preference for Czech interpretations, such as the designation of Social Democratic attempts to include the German-speaking regions of Bohemia in the Austro-German state in 1918 as secessionist, which may not seem the most obvious term in a period of imperial disintegration and conflicting territorial claims (228). Overall, however, the study fairly and diligently traces developments within both the Czech and Austro-German spheres.
The study also puts recent literature on national indifference and bilingualism into perspective. Beneš reminds the reader that most Bohemians were not fluent in the respective other language and that this limited proficiency had concrete personal implications. By the same token, a rejection of nationalist agitation did not automatically imply national indifference, and even outright internationalists frequently considered themselves genuine supporters of their respective national communities. These findings make the study relevant beyond the confines of Habsburg history.
