Political Considerations of Vienna Period
the general line of development still bore down on the Germans. Particularly when the Imperial succession began to give a certain influence to Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the increase of Czech influence began to proceed by orderly plan from above. By every possible means this future ruler of the Dual Monarchy tried to promote de-Germanization, to encourage it, or at least to cover it up. By way of the civil servants, purely German towns were slowly but surely pushed into the danger-zone of mixed language. Even in Lower Austria this began to progress even more swiftly, and many Czechs already considered Vienna their greatest city.
The family of the new Hapsburg spoke only Czech (the Archduke’s morganatic wife, a former Czech countess, belonged to a group whose Germanophobia was a tradition). His guiding principle was gradually to set up in Central Europe a Slavic state built on a strongly Catholic foundation as a bulwark against Orthodox Russia. Here again, as so often with the Hapsburgs, religion was made the servant of a wholly political idea, and—at least from the German standpoint—of a disastrous idea at that.
The results were more than sad in several respects. Neither the House of Hapsburg nor the Catholic Church got the reward it expected. The Hapsburgs lost their throne; Rome lost a great state.
For by putting religious elements to work for its political calculations the Crown awakened a spirit which it had not dreamed was possible.
In answer to the attempt to exterminate Germanity in the old Monarchy by every means came the Pan-German movement in Austria.
By the eighties, Manchester liberalism of Jewish fundamental tendency had reached, if not passed, its height even in the Monarchy. But like everything in old Austria the reaction against it was chiefly founded not on social but on national considerations. Self-preservation forced Germanity to defend itself with the utmost vigor. Only as an afterthought did economic
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