Did the Slavs Speak German at Their First Congress?

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 33, Heft 3, S. 515-521

Abstract

"The language spoken at the congress was German, then regarded as the Esperanto of the Slavs."—Albert Mousset, Le Monde slave (1946)"The story that German was used at the congress is a hostile invention."— Lewis Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1946)In his Pan-Slav treatise of 1837, On Literary Reciprocity Between the Different Branches and Dialects of the Slav Nation, Jan Kollár recommended that all educated Slavs ought to know the four principal Slavic "dialects": Illyrian (Serbo-Croatian), Russian, Polish, and Czecho-Slovak. He thought that the scholar, however, should be able to use all the Slavic dialects, as well as the languages of the Slavs' neighbors. But in a less frequently cited passage, in which he explained why his work was appearing in German, Kollar bemoaned the still limited knowledge of the various Slavic idioms, even among so-called learned Slavs: "When one wishes to make himself understood on any important matter to brother Slavs, he must use a foreign, non-Slavic tongue."