Political Considerations of Vienna Period
But neither the premise nor the conclusion of this struggle was correct.
Undoubtedly the power of nationalist resistance among the Catholic clergy of German nationality in all questions concerning Germanity was less than that of their non-German, particularly their Czech colleagues. And only an ignoramus could fail to see that it almost never even occurred to the German clergy to take the offensive for German interests. But anyone except a blind man had also to admit that this was due chiefly to a fact from which we Germans all suffer most bitterly: the objectivity of our attitude toward our nationality as toward everything else.
The Czech priest’s attitude toward his people was subjective, toward the Church only objective, while the German pastor was subjectively devoted to the Church, and remained objective toward his nation. This is a phenomenon which, to our misfortune, we can also observe in a thousand other cases.
This is by no means a special heritage of Catholicism; it very soon contaminates almost every one of our institutions, particularly state or intellectual institutions.
We have only to compare, for instance, our civil servants’ attitude toward attempts at a national revival with the attitude which the civil servants of another nation would take in such a case. Is it possible to suppose that any army officers in the world would put aside the interests of their nation designating them “governmental authority” as ours have done for the past five years, nay, are even thought specially meritorious for so doing? Do not both Churches today take a standpoint in the Jewish question which suits neither the interests of the nation nor the real needs of religion? We have but to compare the attitude of a Jewish rabbi on all questions of any importance for Jewry as a race with the attitude of by far the greater part of our clergy—our clergy of both Churches, at that.
With us this phenomenon always occurs whenever it is a question of maintaining an abstract idea.
“Governmental authority,” “democracy,” “pacificism,” “international solidarity,” etc.—these are ideas which we almost always
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