“Years of Blood and Darkness”: Czech Extra-Parliamentary Representation and Austrian Democratization during the Hilsner Affair, 1899-1900

Abstract

This article re-evaluates the Bohemian Hilsner affair by considering it in terms of the democratization of imperial Austria’s nationally divided body politic. It treats the participation of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk and Karel Baxa in Leopold Hilsner’s blood ritual murder trials in 1899 and 1900 as a form of extra-parliamentary representation and draws connections between their informal representative activities and formal parliamentary matters. It consequently assesses how this larger picture of representation hinged on practical strategies, tactics, and active public debate. But in so doing, it also addresses the critical problem of representing identity vis-à-vis the Habsburg state, locating within this spectrum of civic action examples of sub-national, non-linguistic group identification. Hence, Masaryk’s and Baxa’s battle over Hilsner’s guilt became an argument over how Czech identity addressed anti-Semitism, but also over what sort of popular leader Czechs should have and how Czechs should behave democratically, whether as street rioters or as a loyal opposition. Thus, the article’s main argument posits that representation, broadly conceived, became a mechanism by which these sub-national expressions of identity were associated with state power. Ultimately, this thesis challenges the idea that these nationalist politicians anticipated their people’s engagement with the state in purely linguistic or ethno-cultural national terms, even as it suggests that their instrumentalization of the Jewish question to this end confirms a different developmental trajectory for Austrian minority representation.