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Traitors Everywhere! Political Trials in the late Habsburg Monarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

T. Mills Kelly
T. Mills Kelly*
Affiliation:
History at Texas Tech University, U.S.A.
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Extract

On 4 March 1914 the Young Czech party newspaper Národní listy published the startling accusation that a prominent Czech politician, the National Socialist Karel Šviha, was a paid informant of the Habsburg imperial police. The paper alleged that for several years Šviha, who was the chairman of the National Socialist party's parliamentary club, had exchanged information on the activities of his colleagues for a police stipend. In the weeks that followed, the public was treated to a daily diet of charge and counter-charge in the Prague newspapers, a carnival of mutual recrimination that concluded with an elaborately staged public trial of Šviha in an attempt to settle once and for all whether he was truly an informant. During the proceedings leading figures of most of the main Czech political parties either sat in judgement of Šviha or testified for one side or the other, many of them displaying for all to see a level of personal animosity previously reserved for the Bohemian Germans or the Imperial government. As one observer (a National Socialist) put it, by the summer of 1914, “there was no nation in Europe as internally disorganized as were the Czechs” and according to another (a Young Czech), political life in Prague had reached a state where it was “everyone against everything.”

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 175 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Národní listy , 4 March 1914. The Czech National Socialist party was no relation to the later German parties with the similar name.Google Scholar

2. Published transcripts of the trial include Zrádce dr. Karel Šviha před porotou (Prague: Ústřední delnické knikupectví, 1914) and were reproduced in the Prague newspaper Čas, March–June 1914. Šviha's personal defense is set forth in Dr. Karel Šviha, národně-sociální zrádce národa. Dokumenty a úvahy k aféře Dra. Karla Švihy (Prague: 1914). Commentary on the trial from a Young Czech party perspective can be found in Karel Hoch, Alois Rašín: jeho život, dílo a doba (Prague: Orbis, 1934), pp. 126–132. Commentary from the National Socialist perspective can be found in Bohuslav Šantrůček, ed., Buřiči a tvůrci 1897–1947 (Prague: Česká strana národně socialisticka, 1947), pp. 140–146. The most complete description of the trial in English is Stanley B. Winters, “T.G. Masaryk and Karel Kramář: Long Years of Friendship and Rivalry,” in Winters, ed., T.G. Masaryk (1850–1937) (New York: Macmillan, 1990), Vol. 1, pp. 174–178. In Czech, see Milada Paulová, Dějiny Maffie. Odboj Čechů a Jihoslovanů za světové války 1914–1918 (Prague: Československá grafická unie, 1937), Vol. I, pp. 70–76.Google Scholar

3. Šantrůček, Vaclav Klofáč (1868–1928): Pohledy do života a díla (Prague: Melantrich, 1928), p. 145; Hoch, Alois Rašín, p. 130.Google Scholar

4. United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: Austria-Hungary, 1912–1920 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1968), dispatch from the Consulate General in Budapest, 24 July 1913.Google Scholar

5. Pester Lloyd (Budapest), 4 June 1913, p. 2.Google Scholar

6. T. Mills Kelly, “Taking it to the Streets: Czech National Socialists in 1908,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 29, 1998, pp. 93–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. František Červinka, “The Hilsner Affair,” in Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 135–161. A similarly well-known (at the time) and lurid case occurred in Hungary during the previous decade in the town of Tiszaeszlár. On this case, see Andrew Handler, Blood Libel at Tiszaeszlar (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1980).Google Scholar

8. Masaryk's most important speeches in the Reichsrat on the Zagreb trials are located in Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Hauses der Abgeordneten des Reichsrates , 19th Session, 14 May 1909, pp. 1094–1089; 18 May 1909, pp. 1115–1128. See also T. G. Masaryk, Der Agramer Hochverratsprozess und die Annexation von Bosnien und Herzegowina (Vienna: S. Márkus, 1909).Google Scholar

9. For a discussion of the relevant legislation on language rights, see Ernst Mischler and Josef Ulbruch, eds, Österreichisches Staatswörterbuch: Handbuch des gesamten österreichischen öffentlichen Rechtes (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1905), Vol. I, pp. 530–597.Google Scholar

10. Zdeněk Tobolka, Politické dějiny československého národa od roku 1848 až dnešní doby (Prague: Československo kompasu, 1932), Vol. V, pp. 499–500.Google Scholar

11. Stenographische Sitzungsprotokolle der Delegation des Reichsrates , 42nd Session, 11 February 1908, p. 40.Google Scholar

12. See, for example, Emil Špatný, Z rakouskýkch žalářů (Prague: Mladé proudy, 1910).Google Scholar

13. R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965), p. 278.Google Scholar

14. Dušan Kováč, “Politická dráha Andreja Hlinku do roku 1918,” in Andrej Hlinka a jeho miesto v slovenských dejinách (Bratislava: DaVel pre Mestský úrad v Ružomberku, 1991), pp. 47–48.Google Scholar

15. See, for example, Austro-Magyar Judicial Crimes: Persecution of the Jugoslavs. Political Trials, 1908–1916 (Chicago: Jugoslav Committee in North America, 1916).Google Scholar

16. This case is discussed in detail by Seton-Watson in The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), pp. 178–328, and by T.,G. Masaryk in Der Agramer Hochverratsprozess und die Annexation von Bosnien und Herzegowina (Vienna: C. Konegen, 1909).Google Scholar

17. For a critique of these traditional accounts see Gary B. Cohen, “Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and Government in Late Imperial Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 29, 1998, pp. 37–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Charles F. Abel and Frank H. Marsh, In Defense of Political Trials (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 2.Google Scholar

19. Ibid.Google Scholar

20. An important qualification of this equality before the law had to do with the language of the proceedings. In Hungary after 1868 the language of the courts was Magyar and non-Magyar speakers who needed translation services had to pay for those services themselves. Similarly, as the Eger/Cheb dispute demonstrated, the language of court proceedings in the Austrian half of the state likewise could present handicaps for one or the other side in a dispute.Google Scholar

21. On this last aspect of trials as political theater, see Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and Katherine Fischer Taylor, In the Theater of Criminal Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

22. On the interlocking dramas of court proceedings, see Richard Harbinger, “Trial by Drama,” Judicature, Vol. 55, No. 3, 1971, pp. 122–128.Google Scholar

23. On the subject of trials as a mechanism for testing constitutional legitimacy, see John Louis Lucaites, “Constitutional Argument in a National Theater. The Impeachment Trial of Dr. Henry Sacheverell,” in Robert Hariman, ed., Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media and the Law (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1990), pp. 31–54.Google Scholar

24. During the First World War it became clear to all that the government had maintained an extensive network of spies who kept tabs on most of the prominent Czech political figures. The extent of this surveillance came out during the treason trials of Kramář, Alois Rašín and Klofáč, among others. In the Haus-, Hof, und Stattsarchiv in Vienna, there are large files for both Klofáč and Kramář, providing careful documentation of their political activities, especially their trips abroad. See Personalia II/208, Box 786 (Kramář) and II/70, Box 778 (Klofáč).Google Scholar

25. Karel Čapek, President Masaryk Tells His Story (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1934), p. 219; Garver, “Masaryk and Czech Politics,” p. 241.Google Scholar

26. Eva Schmidt-Hartmann, Thomas G. Masaryk's Realism (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1984), p. 38.Google Scholar

27. For example, see České slovo , 7 January 1914.Google Scholar

28. The National Socialist exposé is found in České slovo , 24 February through 4 March 1914, and the Young Czech admission of the acceptance of government money in Národní listy, 3 March 1914.Google Scholar

29. České slovo , 4 March 1914.Google Scholar

30. Národní listy , 4 March 1914.Google Scholar

31. České slovo , 5 and 6 March 1914.Google Scholar

32. The National Council was founded in June 1900 to coordinate the activities of the Czech political parties on those “national” issues upon which all parties could agree. To date little has been written about the history of the Council with the exception of pamphlets published by the National Council itself. See, for example, Augustin Seifert, Sebeobrana Čechoslováků a Národní Rada Československá v Praze (Prague: Národní rady československé, 1923), and A. Granatier, Národná Rada Československá (Prague: Národní rady československé, 1931).Google Scholar

33. Winters, “Masaryk and Kramář,” p. 175.Google Scholar

34. Zrádce dr. Karel Šviha , p. 9.Google Scholar

35. Taylor, In the Theater of Criminal Justice , p. 22; Berenson, Madame Caillaux, p. 241.Google Scholar

36. Zrádce dr. Karel Šviha , pp. 24–27.Google Scholar

37. Zrádce dr. Karel Šviha , pp. 42–45. Rašín's behavior was not improved by the fact that he had just lost a bruising parliamentary by-election to a National Socialist supported candidate in 1910. Hoch, Alois Rašín, pp. 108–109. See also České slovo, 10 January 1910. Masaryk's testimony is described in Winters, “Masaryk and Kramář,” p. 176.Google Scholar

38. Národní listy , 8, 13 July 1914.Google Scholar

39. The reason that such a connection was deemed possible was Klofáč's supposed desire to influence Franz Ferdinand to moderate the Bienerth government's persecution of the National Socialist party beginning in 1909. Šviha and the National Socialist leadership consistently denied that there was any connection to the heir to the throne. Klofáč's biographer Šantrůček also denies that Klofáč was linked to the heir apparent and denounces Šviha as an opportunist, but does credit Šviha with working to moderate the National Socialist party's attacks on both the government and the Young Czech party between 1909 and 1911. Šantrůček, Václav Klofáč , pp. 141–145. The only evidence I could find to the contrary was Marek Pečenka's brief biographical essay on Šviha in Kdo byl kdo (Prague: Libri, 1993), and Masaryk's own account of the affair in Čapek, President Masaryk, p. 219. Neither cites any evidence that can be verified.Google Scholar

40. Hoch, Alois Rašín , p. 129.Google Scholar

41. Šantrůček, Buřiči a tvůrci , p. 147.Google Scholar

42. On the effect of the Šviha affair on attempts to craft a Bohemian compromise, see Karel Kazbunda, Otázka česko-německá v předvečer velké války (Prague: Univerzita Karlova, 1995), pp. 376–383. On the compromise negotiations themselves, see Peter Mirejovsky, “In Search of a Bohemian Compromise: Czech–German Negotiations, 1908–1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1982, and Suzanne Konirsh, “Constitutional Aspects of the Struggle Between Germans and Czechs in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1955, pp. 231–262.Google Scholar

43. Andrew C. Janos, The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 99–101.Google Scholar

44. Revue Naše Slovensko , May 1910, pp. 389–390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. On the events of the period under discussion, see Géza Jeszenszky, “Hungary through World War I and the End of the Dual Monarchy,” in Peter F. Sugar, ed., A History of Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 267–294.Google Scholar

46. Apponyi to Roosevelt, 20 June 1910, Theodore Roosevelt Papers , Library of Congress, Reel 91.Google Scholar

47. This description of the events of the Lukács-Désy affair is drawn from the previously mentioned dispatch from the American Consulate General in Budapest on 24 July 1913; press coverage in the Budapest daily newspaper Pester Lloyd; and András Gerö, The Hungarian Parliament (1867–1918): A Mirage of Power (Social Science Monographs: Highland Lakes, NJ, 1997), pp. 78–81.Google Scholar

48. Pester Lloyd , 19 February 1913.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. See, for example, a letter from Apponyi to Theodore Roosevelt, written in the midst of the Lukács–Désy affair, in which he expresses his frustration with the “mock solution planned by our present reactionary government.” Apponyi to Roosevelt, 31 March 1913, Theodore Roosevelt Papers , Library of Congress, Reel 90.Google Scholar

50. Quoted in Janos, Politics of Backwardness , p. 103.Google Scholar

51. Winters, “Masaryk and Kramář,” pp. 176–177.Google Scholar