Abstract:
At the beginning of the First World War conflicts occurred inside the Party of Bohemian
Conservative Great Landowners. They became apparent in the arguments about
keynote addresses and newspaper articles. The disunity culminated between 1916 and 1917
as some prominent conservatives decided to leave the election committee. This step
prolonged the distance between the two already existing political streams inside the party.
One of them, around Friedrich Schwarzenberg, stressed the federalisation programme and
sympathised with Czech national parties, whereas the second stream around Heinrich
Clam-Martinitz advanced towards German-Austrian centralism. Simultaneously with these
trends, the competing aristocratic Party of Constitutional Landowners underwent a process
of nationalisation and came close to German national political parties. The new differences
of opinion on important issues, e.g. the internal organisation of the monarchy or language
questions were caused by various hues of patriotism (covering a wide spectrum from the
Reichsdeutsch patriotism to the Bohemian patriotism). In spite of this fact, the landowners
constituted a social group in the first place (and political parties in the second place), for
which the above mentioned issues represented favourite topics for friendly conversation at
common meetings.
