Friedrich Engel-Janosi, Ein Kampf um Österreich in Berlin und Frankfurt 1849–1855

Engel-Janosi’s text is a single historical essay in diplomatic and intellectual history, organized in two parts, “Berlin” and “Frankfurt.” Its scope is the struggle between Austria and Prussia from the aftermath of 1848 to the Crimean War, followed through Anton von Prokesch-Osten’s missions as Austrian envoy in Berlin and then at the German Bundestag. The central thesis is that the conflict was not accidental or merely personal: Prussia and Austria embodied rival answers to the German question.

Aber das Hauptproblem blieb jahrzehntelang ungelöst: sollte Deutschland in ein vergrößertes Preußen umgestaltet werden oder sollte der preußische Staat einem politisch geeinten Deutschland geopfert werden?

English translation: But the central problem remained unsolved for decades: was Germany to be transformed into an enlarged Prussia, or was the Prussian state to be sacrificed to a politically unified Germany?

The Berlin section begins from Prussia’s post-1815 fragility: religious, regional, economic, and national tensions made the Hohenzollern monarchy less unified than its later legend suggested. Yet its middle classes increasingly imagined Prussia as the “purely German” power. Austria’s counter-project under Schwarzenberg was not simple restoration, but a Mitteleuropa in which the Habsburg monarchy, including its non-German lands, would shape the German federation.

Schwarzenbergs Programm gipfelte darin, daß Wien, der Mittelpunkt Österreichs, auch das Zentrum Deutschlands werden sollte — das Zentrum Mitteleuropas.

English translation: Schwarzenberg's programme culminated in the aim that Vienna, the centre of Austria, should also become the centre of Germany—the centre of Central Europe.

Prokesch is Engel-Janosi’s biographical lens for this project. His passage from youthful German nationalism to Austrian patriotism, his conservatism, literary cultivation, archaeological interests, and social brilliance all matter because Engel-Janosi treats diplomacy as a collision of political cultures. Prokesch at first hoped for conservative cooperation with Berlin against revolution; by Olmütz, Dresden, and the Zollverein conflicts, he came to see Prussian policy as structurally anti-Austrian.

War Preußen auch zu schwach, das eigene Ziel, den vollständigen Dualismus in Deutschland, zu erreichen, so erwies es sich wenigstens als stark genug, jeden österreichischen Versuch zu durchkreuzen, das politische Gerüst für Mitteleuropa aufzubauen.

English translation: Even though Prussia was too weak to attain its own goal—complete dualism in Germany—it proved at least strong enough to thwart every Austrian attempt to construct the political framework of Central Europe.

The Frankfurt section shifts the struggle to the Bundestag and to Bismarck. Engel-Janosi refuses the later nationalist dismissal of the Confederation as mere farce: for Prokesch, it preserved a romantic-federal idea of unity through plurality, against both centralization and Prussian hegemony.

Dieser Bund, so fährt er fort (wiederum an Ideen der Romantiker, vor allem an Novalis' Aufsatz »Christenheit« erinnernd), verwirklicht im kleinen, was einige Idealisten »für die Gesamtheit der christlichen Welt« ersehnt hatten.

English translation: This league, he continues (again recalling the ideas of the Romantics, above all Novalis's essay "Christendom"), realizes on a small scale what a few idealists had longed for "on behalf of all Christendom."

Against this conception stood Bismarck’s tactical “Borussianism.” Engel-Janosi’s portrait is sharply comparative: Prokesch’s elegant, expansive, sometimes imprecise humanism meets Bismarck’s harder political will. The rivalry becomes personal, but the author’s deeper point is that personal hostility expresses incompatible state logics.

Prokesch war nicht der Mann des exakten Details, er konnte es auch seinem ganzen Wesen gemäß nicht sein.

English translation: Prokesch was not a man for exact detail; nor, by his entire nature, could he be.

Bismarck’s Bundestag policy is shown in concrete institutional skirmishes: the federal fleet, fortress questions, religious jurisdiction, and procedural reform. Each minor matter becomes a test of whether the Confederation can act or must be reduced to impotence.

So erreichte es Bismarck, Prokesch zum Verkauf der Flotte zu zwingen, die während der Revolution in der Hoffnung auf eine wachsende Seemacht gebaut worden war; Preußen war nicht daran interessiert, daß der Bund eine eigene Marine besaß.

English translation: Thus Bismarck succeeded in forcing Prokesch to sell the fleet that had been built during the Revolution in the hope of a growing naval power; Prussia had no interest in the Confederation possessing its own navy.

The Crimean crisis gives the essay its final turn. Austria saw the Eastern Question as a German and European security issue; Bismarck saw it as leverage to isolate Austria and make the smaller states prefer Prussian neutrality. Engel-Janosi’s conclusion is bleak: before 1866, Austria’s federal alternative had already been strategically defeated.

Dank der überlegenen Taktik Bismarcks und der Furcht der kleineren Staaten triumphierte Preußen im Bundestag.

English translation: Thanks to Bismarck's superior tactics and the fear of the smaller states, Prussia triumphed in the Federal Diet.

The work’s relevance lies in recovering the contingency of the 1850s: German unification was not yet inevitable, and Austria’s Mitteleuropa was a real political imagination, not merely nostalgia. But Engel-Janosi also shows why it failed: Prussia could block without yet building, while Austria could neither reform the Bund nor bind the smaller states. Prokesch leaves Frankfurt exhausted, later recognizing Bismarck’s ability while remaining convinced that Prussia’s ascent threatened both Austria and Germany.