Page - 752 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

752 Kerensky Offensive and Peace Efforts son, granted to me by the grace of God, celebrates his holy patron saint. Thus, the hand of a child, who is destined one day to control the fate of My peoples, leads strays back into the parental home.’1752 The ‘hand of the child’, which was understood to be Karl’s own and not that of Crown Prince Otto, was scoffed at.1753 It was still believed that the Emperor had simply been poorly advised. This argument was awry, however, since for one thing Karl had selected his advisors himself and for another the amnesty cor- responded absolutely to his own wishes and ideas. Karl did not let himself be deterred by the criticism of the amnesty decree from 2 July. The next pardon, which affected 73 soldiers this time, occurred on the occasion of his birthday on 17 August 1917 ; 46 of them had been sentenced to death for desertion.1754 Karl was enthusiastic about the idea of accommodating the demands of the Austrian nationalities and in this way of achieving peace without disintegration. He engaged himself with the federalist concepts of the Vienna Professor for International Law Heinrich Lammasch, who formulated these ideas ever more stridently and struggled against attempts at centralisation. Karl thoroughly accepted what Lammasch said re- garding the state of nationalities and the right to self-determination. According to Lammasch, the right to self-determination did not mean ‘that all relationships that have settled over the course of centuries, the relationships that are economically deeply anchored, are torn [and] merely sacrificed to the fetish of language’.1755 Emperor Karl also found the thoughts of the German philosopher and educator Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster very persuasive, and he requested him in summer 1917 to travel from Munich to Laxenburg. In the initiation of contact with Lammasch and with Foerster, the Chief of Staff to the Emperor, Polzer-Hoditz, had played a role that would result months later in his dismissal.1756 It was via Polzer that the so-called ‘Chocolate Party’, the Aus- trian Political Society, which was significantly promoted by Julius Meinl, had gained access to the Emperor. Foerster strongly criticised Bismarck’s idea of the nation state and argued that the Danube Monarchy had also allowed itself to be captivated by this, since instead of the old federalist imperial idea it aspired to realise a centralist great power regime with German nationalist hegemony.1757 Yet, all attempts to implement this concept, which aimed at imperial reform and peace, failed, and the Emperor saw himself increasingly confronted by the resistance of most political forces. He was expe- riencing the same fate as Lammasch, who had been attacked most severely by his own party, the German Mittelpartei, due to his remarks on domestic peace and reconcilia- tion, and then resigned from the party.1758 Josef Baernreither noted in his diary : ‘The pardon of the ringleaders of the subver- sive tendency that encourages our enemies, subverts our domestic conditions and costs the lives of thousands of brave soldiers, has done immense damage and robbed the Emperor of a large part of his popularity.’1759 Here Baernreither referred to a factor to which too little importance had been attached in the context of the amnesty, which had