“Not Another Square Foot!” German Liberalism and the Rhetoric of National Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Austria

Abstract

Early on involume 3 of his massive political memoirs, German Liberal party leader Ernst von Plener offhandedly introduces the reader to a I new word that had entered Austrian political discourse in the 1880s. The word isNationalbesitzstand, or “national property,” and Plener calls it “ a word taken from our party's rhetoric.” Most historians remember Plener as the quintessential Austrian centralist, a Liberal party leader of the bureaucratic mold whose annoyance with German nationalist agitation was equaled only by his discomfort with the public demands forced on him by constituent politics. And yet in the late 1880s and early 1890s we find the sober Plener increasingly resorting to an aggressively nationalist rhetoric organized around this concept ofNationalbesitzstand, a rhetoric often invoked by the very radical nationalists, populists, and anti-Semites he scorned. In this article I explore the growing use of such rhetoric by Liberals like Plener in the 1880s as a way to suggest some new approaches to understanding the development of German nationalism among nineteenth-century Austrians. In particular I consider how the concept ofNationalbesitzstandmediated a transformation in the rhetoric employed by self-identified Germans in the monarchy to justify their privileged position vis-à-vis other national groups. Where formerly German nationalists had rejected arguments based on empirical data like population or land ownership statistics to legitimize their political claims, in the 1880s and 1890s they began to embrace such arguments.