Toward a New Central Europe

IDEAS OF AN AUSTRIAN ON THE COEXISTENCE OF NATIONS IN THE DANUBIAN AND CARPATHIAN BASINS

JOSEF MATL

I WOULD like to start with my own experiences in my homeland on the German-Slovenian-Hungarian boundary line in Styria, then still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Here the river Mur abandons the German-inhabited foreland of the Eastern Alps and enters upon the Hungarian Pannonian Plains near Radkersburg. Here Styrian Germans, Slovenes, and Hungarians have lived peacefully with each other through many centuries, intermarried, and entered into many associations in connection with their daily work. As members of the same community, they lived through the same political and social events; for instance, through the Napoleonic wars, the emancipation of the peasant population, etc.

Furthermore, I am able to draw on later experiences when during many journeys I had the opportunity to acquaint myself with the countries of the Danubian and of the Carpathian Basins and with the Balkan Peninsula as well. Again, as an officer in the army in two world wars I came into close contact with the representatives of many nationalities. And last but not least, I have at hand the substance of decades of scholarly work to draw upon which have put me in touch with the cultural problems of these nations, especially the Slavs.

My experience in my homeland, on the German-Slovenian-Hungarian ethnic boundary, seems to underscore some typical features characteristic of the coexistence of nations in this region.

These stand out at once when contrasted with similar traits in the body of my subsequent knowledge of human and spiritual processes in the Danubian Basin. These features are: the factor of peaceful symbiosis and the factor of peaceful ethnical shifts along a flowing, plastic ethnical boundary, a gradual transition and flow or assimilation of Germans, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks into the Magyar ethnic group; and of Slovenes, Croats, Czechs, and Magyars into a German ethnic majority. Assimilation on this level is a socio-psychical and biologic process of integration connected with intermarriage and social or cultural ascent. These are phenomena of a natural process of assimilation - the German, Slavonian, or Magyar ethnic majority absorbing minority elements ("Germanization," "Slavonization," "Magyarization") - which is completely void of any trace of propaganda. One has only to analyze the family names in Graz, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Budapest,

Zagreb, Prague, assessing origins and present national loyalty feelings. We are under the influence of life-processes of biologic origin, which only became controversial during the nationalistic era of the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. The new development of nationalism poisoned the natural relations of the different ethnic groups. The outcome of this was that to belong to a certain individual group, - to have ethnical stability or plasticity, - provided new values with pejorative or meliorative meaning. I myself have witnessed in my homeland - and the same applies to the Czechs, Hungarians, Carniolians - that peaceful symbiosis became at once shattered as soon as a mutual campaign of national hate began to spread in the form of nationalistic power-propaganda.

The main instrument for this propaganda was the so-called "Nazional Freiheitliche Intelligenz" (Intelligentsia Fighting For National Independence), whose faith in nationality was only a substitute for lost religious beliefs.

Symbiosis became disrupted to such an extent that when, for example, the house of a German settler in the "Windischen Bucheln" (a Slavonic region) caught fire, his Slavonian neighbors, under the influence of nationalistic instigations, would no longer come to his aid. Or to quote another instance: during the Second World War, completely alien national-socialistic functionaries evicted Slovenian settlers, those who had been friendly with the Germans in the past, who possessed war medals from the Austrians and whose sons were fighting in the German Wehrmacht. These settlers were forced to leave their properties in 24 hours. These are only isolated examples of individual tragedies suffered by members of national groups; but these instances are multiplied into thousands and hundreds of thousands since 1918, and during and after the Second World War. There is ample documentary evidence for all this. Only the actors changed. The acts themselves followed the same pattern everywhere: whether Germans, Magyars, or Slavonians acted against each other; or whether national leaders of various creeds, or Communist leaders filled with class hatred made the decisions. Only the methods of destruction changed from country to country.

The "national question." with tensions between ethnic groups was entirely unknown until the first decades of the 19th century; that is, until the beginning of the era characterized by the idea of the "national state."

If wee look closely at this symbiotic coexistence which lasted for several centuries, we find a host of subsidiary phenomena - the integration of different ethnic entities the enclaves; and the formation of social strata, which, however, developed as national strata. We find, for instance, in Carniola and in the Slovenian Lower Styria that the merchant class in the cities was predominantly German; as was the greater part of the higher and middle civil servant positions until the second half of the 1 9th century.

In Hungary, the townsfolk and artisan classes were non-Magyar in their origins; however, the civil servants and the gentry were predominantly Magyar. These latter were the protagonists of the Magyar "national state" in a country which before 1918 was confronted v>~iht a near majority of non-Magyar ethnic groups: Slovaks, Germans, Serbs, Ruthenians, and Rumanians. In Bohemia, the industrially and culturally advanced city population was in the 19th century still strongly German, but there already existed a nationalistically-minded Czech city population and intelligentsia.

Given all this, we can understand the roots of the characteristic dualistic consciousness or awareness of belonging both to a state and simultaneously to a different ethnic group or "nation." This dualism developed with the growth of national sentiment in the 19th century and the broadening and progress of education became a characteristic phenomenon in the Danubian and Carpathian Basin under the Habsburgs. It was a diversely stratified, dual consciousness of integration. There have been thousands of cases in which a person was completely at ease professing himself to be a good Croat or Slovene or Czech and a good Austrian patriot. This was especially the case with civil servants and the officers of the army. Such individual duality of loyalties was, however, not restricted to the Habsburg Monarchy. It still persisted, though to a lesser degree, during the era of national states created after 1918. Consciousness of nationality remained solely on the level of the life-functions of a given ethnic group - i.e., language, custom, tradition, a primary sentiment and cultural consciousness - as long as this consciousness did not become contaminated by chauvinistic and imperialistic catchwords. That these circumstances were completely beyond comprehension of a Frenchman, an Englishman, or an American, was clearly shown when prisoners of war were questioned after 1945. English, American. Or French investigating officers took the answer of the defendant. that he was a German from Hungary, or from Yugoslavia or from Rumania, as a Nazi provocation. They were capable of thinking only in terms of a national state, where the respective loyalties of "state" and "nation" were felt to be identical.

It is clear that the idea of the national state as a focus of power and the simultaneous endeavors to invest right and power in Hungary only in the Magyar population; in Czechoslovakia only in the Czechs; in Carinthia only in the Germans; and in Yugoslavia only in the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Macedonians; in other words this nationalistic idea of the power state - as widely held and practiced in the policies of Hungary before 1918 and in all the new states after 1918, - must be regarded today as a residuum of chauvinistic intoxication. In the present stage of the world situation, all this appears nonsensical and anachronistic. It is anachronistic in the same manner as a restoration of the German "Drang nach Osten" appears today to

be anachronistic; or a Magyar claim would be to hold sole control in the Carpathian and the Danubian Basins; or the Pan-Slavonic "Drang nach Westen"; or a restoration of the Habsburg Monarchy. All these belong to the past. Such illusory claims are only an impossible drawback to any attempt to rebuild a feasible symbiosis in East Central Europe, especially in the Carpathian Basin. Our value-judgments are no longer connected with national statistical figures but with human security and the inviolability of the law and with the spiritual and moral responsibility of the individual self.

As long as the members of the emigrant groups retain their fascination with such intoxicating psychic complexes of power as are incorporated in the practice of the "national state," and stubbornly petrify it along with an openly asserted or latently understood aim assimilating the other ethnic national groups, e.g., Pan Croat, Pan Serb, or Pan Magyar ideas; they will eliminate themselves from any new attempts at reorganization. It is becoming increasingly clear that the platform of the Austrian Social Democratic Party as promulgated in Brunn dealing with a solution of ethnical problems in the Danubian and Carpathian Basins, and also the so-called Renner Pro gram, with the idea of a national register are still the politically most feasible solutions for a symbiosis of discrete ethnic units into a supranational state. It was a tragedy caused by the interplay of historical forces that this solution could not be realized. I profess myself to be a partisan to this solution, although ideologically and politically I do not stand on their platform. So much for the general description of the problem.

In the Austrian Republic of today the situation is the following: the older generation of the so-called "nationalists" still entertains feelings of superiority, especially in the frontier-regions in Styria, and in particular in Carniola, when facing the Slovenian minority. It does not come to light openly as before, but only in a latent way, when handling practical questions of the cultural autonomy of the Austrian Slovenian minority; e.g., the question of schools. They take a peaceful national and cultural assimilation of this minority as granted and as necessary. This is true, above all, in Carniola, where both groups display an aggressive attitude: a radically-minded German national group and a radical Slovene national group with Titoistic sympathies.

In Burgenland the Croat question did not create acute national tension as in the above-mentioned case. Symbiosis in satisfactory because the Croats are able to live their national life in their hamlets undisturbed. They have their own schools and are well integrated into the general economic life of the state with connections to Vienna. In the Western and Northern States these questions simply do not crop up. In general it can be stated that the remnants of the former civil servant and officer classes of the late Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, who still retain memories relating to peaceful coexistence of

the individual ethnic units within the state, are dwindling in numbers from year to year, dying out slowly, and no longer posses political significance. Only a small faction of "Monarchists" tries to keep up the "tradition," but they have no political weight in the realm of public opinion. The new aims of the "welfare state" have disintegrated historical tradition. The younger Austrian generation does not care about problems of coexistence of different ethnic units in the Danubian Basin as these problems no longer exist in the practical affairs of their everyday life. They have adjusted themselves to the problems of their homeland - the minute Austria. The Iron Curtain is seen as a grim reality, as an existing boundary between two politically and economically different systems. Otherwise, interest is focused on Western Europe and on the United States of America.

There is no longer the faintest awareness of possible new opportunities for future cooperation and symbiosis with the adjacent Slavs and Magyars in the Danubian and Carpathian Basins. The same applies to children of emigrants now growing up in Austria, whose parents, (Germans, Slavs or Magyars) were born in the Eastern Bloc countries. Any contacts still maintained with their country of origin are strictly on a family level.

What can be done? We must emphasize in education and in journalism the common foundations of evolution in the Danubian and Carpathian Basins, thus building our consciousness of history on the facts of symbiosis while giving due regard to the perpetuation of particular ethnic traditions in language, music, and customs. We should not repeatedly probe into old wounds which nations of this region have suffered from each other during a century of overheated national antagonisms - German-Czech, German-Magyar, Magyar-Slav, German-Slovene. We should avoid creating new resentments. History, above all, must be taught from a European and Central European viewpoint, and not with a chauvinistic German, Magyar, Czech. or Slovene bias. It is one's duty to clarify historically and rationally, what truth, peace and national justice mean to a whole region.

Perhaps the day will come, when instead of present dual state and political systems and ideologies, there will again emerge a new community of European nations within a European federation. I can fully appreciate the psychology of a crusading spirit so much cherished by emigre groups. Whether there is any hope of success in it when measured against the world situation of today is another question entirely. I, unfortunately have become somewhat skeptical; perhaps because the supporters of the crusade for a "Christian Western World and its Human Liberties" have completely overlooked the deep demoralization inherent in this Christian West and the Western World as a whole caused by the totalitarian traits of a society saturated with luxury and well-being, and are therefore at a loss to notice the weakening of the sacrificial and fighting spirit and of the will to sacrifice self.

Toward a New Central Europe