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The Prague Uprising (Neue Rheinische Zeitung)
First published: in Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 18, June 18, 1848.
Cologne, June 17. Another massacre similar to that of Poznan[1] is being prepared in Bohemia. The possibility of a peaceful association of Bohemia and Germany has been drowned in the blood of the Czech people shed by the Austrian army.
Prince Windischgratz had cannons mounted on the Wyshehrad and Hradschin[2] and trained on Prague. Troops were massed and a sudden attack on the Slavic Congress[3] and the Czechs was being prepared.
The people discovered these preparations; they went in a body to the residence of the prince and demanded arms. The demand was rejected. Feeling began to run high and the crowds of people with and without arms were growing. Then a shot was fired from an inn opposite the commandant's palace and Princess Windischgratz dropped, mortally wounded. The order to attack followed immediately; the Grenadiers advanced, the people were driven back. But barricades were thrown up everywhere, checking the advance of the military. Cannons were brought into position and the barricades raked with grape-shot. Torrents of blood were shed. The fighting went on throughout the night of the 12th and continued on the 13th. Eventually the troops succeeded in occupying the wide streets and pressing the people back into the narrower quarters of the city where artillery could not be used.
That is as far as our latest news goes. But in addition it is stated that many members of the Slavic Congress were sent out of the city under a strong escort. It would appear that the military won at least a partial victory.
However the uprising may end, a war of attrition between the Germans and Czechs is now the only possible outcome.
In their revolution the Germans have to suffer for the sins of their whole past. They suffered for them in Italy. In Poznan they have brought down upon themselves once more the curse of the whole of Poland, and to that is now added Bohemia.
The French were able to win the recognition and sympathy even of the countries to which they came as enemies. The Germans win recognition nowhere and find sympathy nowhere. Even where they adopt the role of magnanimous apostles of liberty, they are spurned with bitter scorn.
And so they deserve to be. A nation which throughout its history allowed itself to be used as a tool of oppression against all other nations must first of all prove that it has been really revolutionized. It must prove this not merely by a few indecisive revolutions, as a result of which the old irresolution, impotence and discord are allowed to continue in a modified form; revolutions which allow a Radetzky to remain in Milan, a Colomb and Steinacker in Poznan, a Windischgratz in Prague, a Hueser in Mainz, as if nothing had changed.
A revolutionized Germany ought to have renounced her entire past, especially as far as the neighboring nations are concerned. Together with her own freedom, she should have proclaimed the freedom of the nations hitherto suppressed by her.
And what has revolutionized Germany done? She has fully endorsed the old oppression of Italy, Poland, and now of Bohemia too, by German troops. Kaunitz and Metternich have been completely vindicated.
And the Germans, after this, demand that the Czechs should trust them?
Are the Czechs to be blamed for not wanting to join a nation that oppresses and maltreats other nations, while liberating itself?
Are they to be blamed for not wanting to send their representatives to the despondent and faint-hearted National Assembly at Frankfurt, which is afraid of its own sovereignty?
Are they to be blamed for dissociating themselves from the impotent Austrian government, which is in such a perplexed and helpless state that it seems to exist only in order to register the disintegration of Austria, which it is unable to prevent, or at least to give it an orderly course? A government which is even too weak to save Prague from the guns and soldiers of a Windischgratz?
But it is the gallant Czechs themselves who are most of all to be pitied. Whether they win or are defeated, their doom is sealed. They have been driven into the arms of the Russians by 400 years of German oppression, which is being continued now in the street-fighting waged in Prague. In the great struggle between Western and Eastern Europe, which may begin very soon, perhaps in a few weeks, the Czechs are placed by an unhappy fate on the side of the Russians, the side of despotism opposed to the revolution. The revolution will triumph and the Czechs will be the first to be crushed by it.
The Germans once again bear the responsibility for the ruin of the Czech people, for the Germans have betrayed them to the Russians.
- â The seventeen âtreated menâ who represented the German governments were summoned after the March revolution in Germany by the Federal Diet, the central body of the German Confederation (which was founded in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna). The âtrusted menâ, among them Dahlmann, von Schmerling, Uhland and Bassermann, met in Frankfurt am Main from March 30 to May 8, 1848, and drafted an all-German Imperial Constitution based on constitutional-monarchical principles.
The Federal Diet consisted of representatives of the German states. Though it had no real power, it was nevertheless a vehicle of feudal and monarchical reaction. After the March revolution of 1848, reactionary circles in the German states tried to revive the Federal Diet and use it to undermine the principle of popular sovereignty and prevent the democratic unification of Germany. - â Auerswaldâs decree, dated May 22, 1848, and published on May 23, 1848, in the Preussische Staats-Anzeiger No. 21, p. 215, included Raveauxâs proposal. At the sitting of the Frankfurt National Assembly on May 19, 1848, the liberal Deputy Raveaux proposed that Prussian deputies elected to both the Berlin and Frankfurt Assemblies should have the right to be members of both. The Berlin Assembly, i. e. the Prussian National Assembly, was convened on May 22, 1848, to draft a Constitution âby agreement with the Crownâ. The Assembly was elected under the electoral law of April 8, 1848, by universal suffrage and an indirect (two-stage) voting system. Most of the deputies belonged to the bourgeoisie or liberal bureaucracy.
- â The article was first published in English in the collection: Karl Marx, On Revolution, ed. by S. K. Padover, New York, 1971 (âThe Karl Marx Libraryâ series), Vol. 1