PILGRIMS OF '48 One Man's Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848 and a Family Migration to America By JOSEPHINE GOLDMARK WITH A PREFACE BY JOSEF REDLICH Professor of Comparative Public Law in Harvard University New Haven • Yale University Press LONDON • HUMPHREY MlLFORD · OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1980 PUBLISHED ON THE MARY CADY TEW FUND Pilgrims of '48 ~l oseph Gold mark In the coat of the Academic Legion, 1848 COPYRIGHT 1980 BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA All rights reserved. This book may not be re­ produced, in whole or in part, in any form, ex­ cept by written permission from the publishers. C , ~, , '\ aµ.epai o E1TtA0£1TO£ , ,I. , µ.apropec; uo'YwraTo£ PINDAR BUT THE DAYS THAT COME AFTER BEAR TRUEST WITNESS. Preface ISS GoLDMARK's book is, in my opinion, a Mvery original piece of historical writing. The first part portrays old Austria, particularly old Vienna, the leading men of the Vienna Revo­ lution of 1848, and the principal events of that fateful year. The author achieves this by con­ necting the biography of her father, one of the most prominent men of the Vienna Revolution, with a very careful description of the social, po­ litical, and cultural features of old Austria and the life of her people. For this purpose the au­ thor makes full use of the original sources of the history of the Revolution which she has studied in the libraries and archives of Vienna. More­ over, she combines with it very interesting source material from the letters and papers of her own father and her family. The documents and speeches which she thus contributes are of real historic value. This whole first part of Miss Goldmark's work is, so far as I know, a first, and a successful, attempt by a modern writer in Eng­ lish to give a lively description of this part of Austrian history. It is a most useful work for all American university students of modern Euro­ pean history. At the same time it is written in x Pilgrims of '4-8 such a charming style that it will not fail to at­ tract a large reading public in general. The second part, which describes the immigra­ tion into America of the parents of the author and their friends, also is founded on private let­ ters and papers printed for the first time. They are particularly interesting because they give a very good insight into the character and ideals of those cultured men and women who, as typi­ cal Forty-eighters, emigrated to the United States after the defeat of the liberal and demo­ cratic ideas for which they had fought in their old homes in Central Europe. I believe that the second part of the book should also stimulate the keen interest of a wide reading public in the United States. JOSEF REDLICH. Cambridge, Massachusetts, June, 1930. Introduction N presenting to American readers the story of the Revolu­ I tion of 1848 in Vienna, a historical episode which may at first thought seem antiquated in sentiment and remote from the modern scene, two convictions have dominated my mind. The Revolution of Vienna is, first, in itself of heroic propor­ tions and dramatic quality. It is a story of compelling tragic interest. It has, in addition, a special appeal for Americans. In the flux of peoples who came to this country at the middle of the nineteenth century, one special group became known as the "Forty-eighters." These were people who, after the failure of their hopes in mid-Europe, sought in the new world the liberty for which the liberal youth of France and Italy and Germany and Austria had died in vain. The Forty-eighters were folk distinguished by certain characteristics. They brought to this country a certain strain, a certain quality and :flavor recog­ nized as distinctive. Their lives were knit up into the fabric of the nation. What they contributed is part of the American heritage. As a background, then, of American life, as one of the spiritual sources from which it has drawn, the Revolution of '48 is significant for Americans. The year 1848 was, indeed, one which left an ineffaceable mark on European society, and the last ripples of that tragic wave of failure which engulfed its high hopes did not die away until they merged into the greater world disaster of 1914. The year 1848 [says G. M. Trevelyan] was the turning-point at which modern history failed to turn. The military despotisms of Central Europe were nearly but not quite transformed by a timely and natural action of domestic forces. It was the appointed hour, but the despotisms just succeeded in surviving it, and mod­ ernized their methods without altering their essential character. The misfortunes of European civilization in our own day sprang in no small degree from those far-off events. •• Xll Pilgrims of '48 The special story of the Revolution of Vienna has been over­ shadowed by the more famous revolutionary movements of France and Italy. y·et the Viennese episode has a :flavor and an entity all its own. Conceived and carried through in the burn­ ing enthusiasm of that extraordinary year, at a period of dy­ namic emotional and spiritual release, the Revolution of Vienna for a brief time succeeded beyond the imagining of men. Met­ ternich's fall resounded through the world. And for the subse­ quent twelve months, from March, 1848, to March, 1849, the young men who shaped the destinies of the anci,~nt Austrian Empire, who faced death on the barricades of the beautiful old city, steered with success a middle course between the parties of reaction and of mob passion. More than that, in the brief period of a few months they hammered out a modern, liberal constitution for Austria, more just to its minority races than any subsequent one. That constitution was, unhappily, never adopted; and Europe, blind to the implications of Austria's South Slav problem, proceeded on the path which was to in­ volve mankind in the supreme disaster of the World War. In 1848 this critical problem-the equal treatment of races in a federal state-had been clearly envisaged. On the mo­ mentous thirteenth of March, when the Revolution of Vienna broke out, Adolf Fischhof, one of the characters of our story, Joseph Goldmark's closest friend, in the first public political speech ever made in Vienna pleaded for the reconciliation of national discords within the empire. Again, the most powerful speech of the liberal Reichstag of '48 was made by a member of the Left on behalf of the amity of their constituent races ; and his prophecy of disaster to come from unjust racial dis­ criminations was borne out to the letter, after seventy years, in 1918. The events of the modern day are thus closely linked to the progress of events in '48, and lend a special interest to that struggle. The Revolution of '48 is significant in another connection. ... Introduction Xlll It was a movement of liberals at a time when liberalism was a potent force in the world: never perhaps more potent than in the wave which swept over Europe in that momentous year. To the men of the time liberalism seemed indeed the hope of the world. They had lived under an autocracy which denied them some of the elementary safeguards of life. They had lived in insecurity of person and belief; in imminent danger of the all-powerful police system, when freedom of speech, or of the press, or of education, was a scarcely whispered hope. It is easy today to recognize the limitations of that con­ temporary liberalism; its preoccupation with political aims; its failure to apprehend the industrial slavery which was even then, in Austria, in process of growth. The new economic pat­ tern of society and its control did not enter into the thought of the March liberals any more than it entered into the liberal thought of other lands. Karl Marx, who spent a week of Sep­ tember, '48, in Vienna to preach his doctrine of the class con­ flict and the true nature of capital, found neither the workers nor their leaders of the university group ripe for his more radical doctrine. In England one of the greatest liberals, John Bright, was, as a m.ill owner, an opponent even of Lord Shaftesbury's factory acts. It was the liberal doctrine of laissez faire in industry which contributed in substantial measure to the terrible plight of English factory workers, and thus led indirectly to the widespread emigration of skilled artisans to America. Yet the only constructive opposition to the tyranny of Met­ ternich's era was the liberal opposition; before this onset the Austrian autocracy fell with a crash. It was the liberal Reichs­ tag of Vienna, of whose Left Goldmark was an active member, which has forever to its honor two durable achievements of that liberty they had won at the sword's point: the enfranchise­ ment of the peasants from cruel serfdom, and the liberation of the Jews from humiliating taxes and restrictions. Again, it was the Left of that Reichstag which offered to • XIV Pilgrims of '48 Austria's Italian policies a minority opposition which was as steadfast as it was bold; and while the Left failed to check Austria's military program, they stood for Italian liberties in no uncertain terms-to their own cost, as Goldmark subse­ quently learned. Their protest should in justice be recorded as opposed to the traditional and execrated Austrian policy in Italy.