"Neue Rheinische Zeitung" — Vienna and Frankfurt

Vienna and Frankfurt

["Neue Rheinische Zeitung" No. 244, March 13, 1849]

*
Cologne
, March 12. On the 15th of this month the Reichstag in Kremsier intended to begin debate on the draft constitution completed by the committee. For the imperial-royal martial-law beasts, this was the moment to hurl the constitution "by the Grace of God"—which had long been ready—in the face of the Reichstag, and to put an end to the whole farce of popular representation in Kremsier that had been tolerated up to now.

The whole trick of octroying was settled as early as the summer of last year between the anointed and unanointed counter-revolutionaries in Schönbrunn Vienna, Potsdam-Berlin, London (where Metternich, like a cross-spider of the Holy Alliance, sits at the centre of the web slowly spun around the peoples rising for freedom), and Paris. That the Potsdam king put it into effect first depended solely on circumstances in Prussia, which allowed such a step earlier than in Austria.

In November official Austria flung the bleeding head of Robert Blum at the feet of the St. Paul's Church men. The lovely twin pair of Reich Commissioners, Welcker-Mosle, had returned a few days earlier from Windischgrätz's antechamber and the feeding session in Olmütz covered with so much ignominy that anyone else, other than the honourable Welcker-Mosle, would have preferred to put a few bullets through his brain-box rather than to venture to look any human being on earth in the eye. Instead, this diplomatic pair of brothers still boasted of their travels criss-cross <see
"The Report of the Frankfurt Committee on Austrian Affairs"
>.

The majority of the National Assembly was "satisfait", was satisfied, just as the French Chamber under Louis-Philippe even at the

greatest infamies, at the most striking proofs of corruption, declared itself satisfait, satisfied.

Let the blood of the murdered Robert Blum spurt in the faces of the St. Paul's Church men as it might. Their cheeks reddened, indeed, but not with shame or rage and the deepest outburst of anger, but with the colour of smugness and satisfaction. Admittedly, new Reich Commissioners were sent to Austria. But the result they achieved was merely a redoubling of the scorn that had previously been heaped from that quarter on the so-called members of the National Assembly and on the Germany they betrayed.

"No matter, 'tis all one!" was and remained the motto of those gentlemen too.

Let us recall that shortly before the acts of violence by the Prussian government, Bassermann, Simson and, of course, the "noble" Herr Gagern, etc., were in Berlin as Reich Commissioners.

And once again we have Reich Commissioners in Austria, in Olmütz, while here, as in Berlin, the Reichstag is being dispersed and a constitution "by the Grace of God" is being octroyed upon the people by means of Croats, Seressaners, Hukulers, etc.

Everywhere the people's freedom was to be clubbed to death, commissioners of the so-called Central Power have appeared like carrion vultures scenting their prey in advance. Their olfactory organ has always proved reliable.

Now, at last, the Frankfurt frog-pond may realise that its turn will soon come. Its sins will be visited upon itself. On the commemorative plaque to be erected at the site of its unholy activity, the wanderer will read: "Perished through its own fault, through cowardice, professorial idiocy and chronic abjectness, partly amid vengeance-quenching scornful laughter, partly amid the complete indifference of the people."

Nevertheless, a part of those wretched thieves still dares at present to boast of the "fundamental rights" that emerged from the factory in Frankfurt, and to imagine that they have accomplished a great deed. With
"fundamental rights"
they bandied words, as garrulous as washerwomen, like the scholastics of the Middle Ages, while the
"fundamental power"
of the Holy Alliance and its accomplices organised itself ever more enormously, and laughed louder and louder in scorn at the fundamental-rights professorial and philistine chatter. The former consolidated their "fundamental rights" on a scrap of paper; the latter, the masters of counter-revolution, inscribed their "fundamental power" on freshly sharpened swords, cannons, and Slavonic red-coats.

As soon as the German people, in any part of the Germanic fatherlands, exercised or appeared to want to exercise its primordial fundamental right—the right of rising against feudal or petty-bourgeois constitutional tyranny—Frankfurt hastily dispatched "Reich troops" to chastise and wear down the people by quartering, plundering, massacres and military excesses of all kinds, and to keep the tools of counter-revolution in good condition, that is, to feed them up properly at the expense of the people and their "fundamental rights", and to strengthen them for further heroic deeds.

In such cases, the Frankfurt gentlemen always possessed the necessary power, for they received it on loan from the ranks of the above-mentioned "fundamental power" of our gracious territorial lords.

Thus it is no wonder that the Frankfurt frog-pond must keep impotent silence, must look on powerlessly, whenever the anointed gentlemen proclaim
*their*
"fundamental rights", even when the fundamental rights of the lords "by the Grace of God" are directly directed against it.

It will therefore and must calmly look on now as the Austrian Tamerlane <Emperor Franz Joseph I.> has octroyed upon his beloved "subjects", among them a considerable number of Germans, by the Grace of God and of Sophie, 13 fundamental rights, and with this coup, at the same time, he has once again octroyed a sound box on the ear to the Frankfurt heroes. And rightly so!