Engels proceeded to argue that things were getting better. Chauvinist propaganda, “the turgid phrases proclaiming that German honor or German power is at stake” are no longer effective. The article concluded by turning the argument around. If freedom at home is incompatible with oppression abroad a revolutionary foreign policy also requires a revolutionary domestic one.
. . . we must achieve a really popular government, and the old edifice must be razed to the ground. Only then can an international policy of democracy take the place of the sanguinary, cowardly policy of the old, revived system. How can a democratic foreign policy be carried through while democracy at home is stifled.8
What did the NRZ mean by a “democratic foreign policy”? The clearest editorial statement of what was meant came very early on, little more than a month after the paper began publishing. The occasion was the uprising in Prague.9
The right in Germany attempted to portray this rising, which was brutally crushed by Austrian troops under Prince Alfred zu Windischgrätz, commander of the Imperial forces, as an anti-German nationalist uprising. There were even hints and rumors that the Russians were behind the whole thing. Leading the campaign were German speaking inhabitants of Bohemia organized in groups like the League to Preserve German Interests in the East. The NRZ devoted some space to reports from the scene by German supporters of the uprising. According to these reports the rising was supported by both German and Czech democrats fighting for “the preservation of Bohemia’s independence and the equal rights of both nationalities”;10 the opposition came from the defenders of the old order and the defenders of German minority rights were simply stalking horses for the right with no significant support. How accurate were these reports? Contemporary sources as well as modern historians tend to endorse this description of the Czech national movement at this stage of the revolution.11 The uprising was, apparently, based on the largely Czech-speaking lower class with the energetic leadership of students.
Both Czech nationalists and German chauvinists reacted to this class threat by backing off from the uprising.12
In short, modern historians generally tend to support Engels view of the situation. But that is not really the relevant question if what we want to know is: What was the foreign policy of the NRZ? If the paper did exaggerate for polemical purposes the degree to which the uprising was a social rather than a national revolution that is significant in itself. Political propaganda in this kind of situation is not simply an impartial commentary on events. It is an attempt to intervene, to strengthen one side or the other. The NRZ editorial on the report from Prague concluded that “German reaction is seeking to rouse a narrow-minded nationalism just as in Posen and in Italy, partly in order to suppress the revolution in the interior of Germany and partly to train the soldiery for civil war.”13
Looking at the events in Prague from the perspective of the German revolution, the NRZ boasted that:
Despite the patriotic shouting and beating of the drums of almost the entire German Press, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from the very first moment has sided with the Poles in Posen, the Italians in Italy, and the Czechs in Bohemia.14
The old regime “shaking in its foundations in the interior of Germany” sought to save itself by “calling forth a narrow-minded national hatred. Were the Germans to “crusade against the freedom of Poland, Bohemia and Italy” under the leadership of the very governments they were fighting at home? No, the editorial claimed:
Only a war against Russia would be a war of revolutionary Germany, a war by which she could cleanse herself of her past sins, could take courage, defeat her own autocrats, spread civilization by the sacrifice of her own sons as becomes a people that is shaking off the chains of long, indolent slavery and make herself free within her own borders by bringing liberation to those outside.
A modern editor would undoubtedly send the article back for revision or insert a transitional paragraph or two herself. In 1848, it wasn’t necessary. Everyone understood the connection between revolution at home and a war against the Holy Alliance.
4. War With Russia
There were three incidents which forced the Frankfurt Assembly to face up to the prospect of war with Russia. In each case, the Assembly backed off. And, in each case, the result was a weakening of the Assembly itself within Germany.
The incident that caused the most trouble, naturally, concerned the Poles. The problem was: what to do with the large chunk of Poland that had been seized by the Kingdom of Prussia? The proposal debated by the Frankfurt Assembly, the proposal that eventually passed, Engels rightly called a new partition of Poland. Poland was to be reduced to a strip of land on the fringe of the Russian occupied area. A new Duchy of Posen(present day Poznán) was to become part of the German Confederation.
This decision was presented as a defense of the national rights of the alleged half-million German speaking inhabitants of Posen. Included in this total were some 80,000 allegedly German-speaking Jews. Although they probably spoke Yiddish rather than German and would have been deprived of civic rights in the German states because of their religion, in the debates of the Assembly they became representatives of German culture.
Engels’ reports on the debates are an extended and detailed comment on his 1847 thesis that Germany could only be free if she renounced all claims to Poland.
So long, therefore, as we help to subjugate Poland, so long as we keep part of Poland fettered to Germany, we shall remain fettered to Russia and to the Russian policy, and shall be unable to eradicate patriarchal feudal absolutism in Germany. The creation of a democratic Poland is a primary condition for the creation of a democratic Germany.15
There was, of course, plenty of rhetoric in favor of Polish freedom in the debates of the Assembly. The cause of Polish freedom was also dear to middle class public opinion. Engels reports on touching demonstrations of this concern such as the rallies and speeches praising Polish freedom fighters as they passed through railway stations. Practical steps to end the occupation of part of Poland by Prussian troops, however, would certainly turn the area into a staging ground for a Polish insurrection in Russian and Austrian occupied Poland.
. . . but to start a war with Russia, to endanger the European balance of power and, to cap it all, hand over some scraps of the annexed territory—only one who does not know the Germans could expect that.
And what would a war with Russia have meant? A war with Russia would have meant a complete, open and effective break with the whole of our disgraceful past, the real liberation and unification of Germany, and the establishment of democracy on the ruins of feudalism and on the wreckage of the short-lived bourgeois dream of power. War with Russia would have been the only possible way of vindicating our honor and our own interests with regard to our Slav neighbors, and especially the Poles. . . . We shrank from it and the inevitable happened—the reactionary soldiery, beaten in Berlin, raised their head again in Posen; under the pretext of saving Germany’s honor and national integrity they raised the banner of counterrevolution and crushed our allies, the revolutionary Poles.16
Engels in these reports ridicules the claims put forward on behalf of the German-speaking minority in Poland. Had the German revolution from the beginning come out for Polish independence and backed the demand up by force of arms, the matter of border disputes would have been a minor issue. “. . . both parties would have had to make some concessions to one another, some Germans becoming Polish and some Poles German, and this would have created no difficulties.”17
Even
