Traitors Everywhere! Political Trials in the late Habsburg Monarchy

Abstract

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.”