Introduction to the Political & Social Environment

INTRODUCTION

This is a true story about events that took place in Vienna, Austria in 1927.
The fictional narrative is woven into the events outlined ...

In the afternoon of January 30, 1927, in a small town called Schattendorf hard against the Hungarian border, a meeting of the Heimwehr took place in a Country Inn. Coincidentally another group, the Schutzbund was marching past the Inn. The two groups are ideologically opposed and the clash that ensued left an old man in a wheel chair and child dead, both from the Schutzbund.

Those accused of the murders are brought to trial and the resulting verdict unleashed the greatest riot the streets of Vienna had seen since 1848. There is a spontaneous general strike, shopkeepers and civil servants pour into the streets to be confronted by mounted police charging, sabres drawn, cutting down unarmed civilians on the orders from the police minister in the Christian government. After a day and night of fighting in the streets, the city is in turmoil. Half a dozen buildings have been burnt to the ground, ninety people are dead and more than a thousand injured.

The reason I chose this incident in history was because I noticed a strange anomaly in 20th Century history. In relationship to the rise of Fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain, I was shocked to see the historical record show that International(America and Britain) Corporate Capitalism funded the rise of fascism totally, (Under the banner of 'Free Market' economics) while the so-called Democratic Nations (USA) persecuted their citizens who took to the streets against fascism. Of course where history is concerned, you should use my information as a template and check the historical record for yourself. Don't take my word for it!

Basic Introduction to the Political Environment Vienna in the twenties was one of the most enigmatic and contradictory cities on earth. It was an architectural facade. Only seventy years earlier it was a mediaeval walled city. The Austro-Hungarian Empire-The Dual Monarchy- was itself only sixty years old, and Charles, the last Emperor, reigned for all of two years. In European terms it was a sapling. The Ringstrasse Boulevard was an architectural Madame Tussauds, because of Franz Joseph's attempt at mirroring civilizations great epoch's. Each building designed to represent an influential era. The Parliament was Greek democracy. The Town Hall, Renaissance learning . . . People and ideas were on the move. I have tried to capture a fragment of this.^[1]
On November 11^th, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor was told by the Imperial Minister for Foreign Affairs, that the Council of State had proclaimed Austria a Republic. The Emperor did not object. Instead, that afternoon in the palace of Schonbrunn, he signed away his role in the Government of Austria. The country his family had ruled since 1273.

For the next decade, workers and the media would muse over the semantics of the word Revolution. Unlike more famous Revolutions, no Monarchist was imprisoned, let alone put to death. No monuments of imperial history were destroyed. Comparisons with the great French Revolution and the Bolsheviks were embarrassing. The Habsburgs, like the British Monarchy at the opposite end of the Century, were far less radical in their vision of their own mortality than some of their Monarchist supporters.

Seven months later the Peace Treaty of Versailles was signed. Harold Nicolson, the long-suffering husband of that glorious English heroine, Vita Sackville-West, wrote on the events he witnessed.

“We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established. Determined that a Peace of justice & wisdom should be negotiated: we left convinced that the new order merely fouled the old. Conscious that the Treaties imposed upon our enemies were neither just nor wise. The Paris Peace Conference was guilty of disguising an Imperialistic peace under the surplice of Wilsonism, that seldom in the history of man has such vindictiveness cloaked itself in such unctuous sophistry. Hypocrisy was the predominant unescapable result.”^[2]

Two months after Versailles, the Treaty of Saint Germain was signed. Almost as harsh as that of Versailles Austria was forced to surrender large territories to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Italy. The former empire was cut to less than one third, and lost one-fifth its population. Hungary’s Treaty of Trianon was the most severe of all post war treaties.

The Republic lost its heavy industry, along with important markets to its neighbours. Coal and oil became desperately short, affecting almost every area of society. Inflation destroyed more fragile commodity markets. The republic lost investment, and banks refused loans to struggling industry, preferring foreign speculation.

For many, a Republic and Parliamentary Democracy, represented unnecessary hardship. The former Austro-Hungarian Empire was a familiar beast, a vast bureaucratic state that delivered a sense of security and homeliness. Now it had lost the war to the bastions of democracy, the West. So democracy was lashed to the mast of military defeat. This was to play heavily on the psyche of many people; fuelling the fire of anti democracy that drove the pro-monarchist right wing violence, and the sympathy that would find them not guilty. This too was a legacy that characterized the late twenties.

For the first half of the twenties Vienna was a model of social democracy, a workable system of socialist microeconomics. “The schools, hospitals and welfare services in Vienna were without equal in Europe.”^[3]

The coalition government of the Christian Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party delivered a welfare state that saved many from certain starvation. It wasn’t long before the coalition fell apart and the right wing Christian Socials were unfettered in their drive to destroy social democracy.

With the break-up of the old empire, Vienna was left with a massive bureaucracy. Six hundred thousand civil servants with very little work. The country areas held a great animosity towards the Viennese. All of a sudden the bourgeois was in control of Austria. The Nationalists and racists found much to despise.

The Austrian military was a lame duck. ^[4] Private armies were all the rage. There were no dictates from peace treaties on their behaviour. Servicemen traditionally had working class roots and the Christian Social War Minister, Vaugoin, methodically set about ridding the army of its bias towards Social Democracy.

The general fear of the Government was of Bolshevism, not the far more omnipresent danger of violent reaction from the pro-Monarchists. The fact that a Bolshevist revolution required much more organization and effort than a Fascist revolution was overlooked. The point was proven in 1933 when the authoritarian Dollfuss government suspended Parliament along with many democratic institutions.

When politics of an unpopular nature, adheres to the aphorism on how to boil a frog. (You raise the temperature slowly, lest he jump straight out of boiling water.) You end with a society driven by lies, deceit, and vested interests.

The Heimwehr was the most ubiquitous of the pro-Monarchist anti democratic militia. Like the Austrian army, it too came from peasant stock; Although the leadership fell into the hands of the upper classes in the villages and small towns, like aristocrats, ex-officers, monarchists, lawyers and others, who felt an allegiance with the old order. They were financed by the Jewish banker Rodolph Sieghart.^[5] Whose bank collapsed in 1929 partly due to his commitment. Right wing Jews preferred active anti Semitism to socialist taxation. ^[6] The apparent contradiction of (many) a Jew bankrolling an anti-Semitic paramilitary group would be the bane of post holocaust Jews. This was the beginning of the ‘betrayal of the century’.

The Heimwehr became agent provocateurs for the Christian Social government, initiating a long series of violent clashes. More often that not they were caught, many times the jury system failed to work, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to convict. When they were found guilty, the magistrate would give the most lenient sentence, often commenting on the guilty’s good intentions in protecting the old empire. But according to law he must convict. He would impose a $1 fine. ^[7]

The Front Fighters were a similar militia who patrolled the border between Hungary and Austria. The Peace treaties gave West Hungary to Austria and the local nationalists never forgave the democracy of the West. The area had been in their hands for centuries. A republic that sort to temper their traditional -privileged- way of life now governed them.

The Schutzbund was the Republican Defence League. Not an army, more a people’s unarmed militia. Its statute outlined clearly that it should protect the constitution, maintain law and order, and protect the government against any attempted putsch and to help during natural disasters. It wasn’t long before the Schutzbund became the private army of the Social Democratic Party, and the bitter enemy of the Heimwehr.

The Swastika Men were young boys, the flotsam and jetsam of disillusionment. They wandered the streets in gangs, (much the same as in Germany today) where racist ideology and simple mindedness curdle, forming an animal that sort out Jews and Socialists, bashing them to death.

The Social Democratic Party became known as Austro-Marxists, a peculiar non-revolutionary form of Marxism, long on rhetoric, but very short on action. It was a party lead by intellectuals. Otto Bauer was called the man with two left hands, while the Christian Social Party spent little time on intellectual issues, preferring well-worn dogma from an ancient regime, when democracy was seen as something those vile sodomites of ancient Greece invented.

The Nazis and the Catholic Church formed an opposition block against the republic and socialism. They agreed to a ‘corporate state’ that was the first step to abolishing the unions. ^[8] It was a slow disintegration, hidden by the formal functioning of parliamentary debates. (On how to boil a frog) People lived a pragmatic existence; economic difficulties and political violence took precedence over parliamentary slight of hand.

The problem for Otto Bauer and the Social Democrats was the aristocracy and Leninism, not fascism. While President Seipel saw parliamentary democracy and Leninism as the problem, both parties for their own reasons failed to see the rising tide of simple-minded authoritarian violence. During the 20's Seipel and the Christian Socials verbally distanced themselves from Nazi groups, but not from espousing their own brand of fascism.

On July 15, 1927, the verdict in a murder trial, against 3 Nazi’s, accused of killing an old man and young boy, unleashes the greatest riot the streets of Vienna had seen since 1848. For the previous eight years fascists had been absolved by a biased application of the law. The ancient regime was dead, but it wouldn’t lie down. The riot showed those with most to lose from a workable democracy, that the workers of Vienna would not lie down in the face of the authoritarian right and its increasing attacks on ‘their’ republic.

Intellectual nihilism may be a contradiction in terms, if so; it suits the persona of 1920's Vienna. Combined with an ostentatious carpe diem, and militant politics -both sides- a symbiotic energy emerged, ann energy that has rarely surfaced in the twentieth century with such disastrous consequences.

It is ironic that in 1926, the Austrian Physicist Erwin Schrodinger, discovered a mathematical equation that exposed the inner workings of the atom. He proved Werner Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle’. The physical world was indeed made up of our impressions. The wave-particle duality was ‘real’; it depended upon the position of the observer. But, if impressions are subjective, how can we build an awareness of the world that can be shared on a universal level, without contradiction and disagreement.

This, along with other problems of existence, occupied the heads of painters, writers, musicians, society ladies and railway workers. Well, the last two in renunciation. Even so, the therapeutic nihilist had to entertain the notion before rejecting it. Still, impressionist ideas were driving the paradigm of early modernism, and combined with a light-hearted sense of frivolity and occasion; the Viennese psyche could be excused for wondering if he or she was Arthur or Martha. Which, at least kept Herr Freud in business.

So, this is the story of a young man who thought he was Prometheus, stealing fire from the God’s so all humankind would benefit. It only required Reason! Or so he thought.

One thing that remains eternal for humanity is the failure to learn from our mistakes.

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^[1] For a comprehensive and excelent view of Vienna’s life and times; see Gulick. C. (1948) Austria from Habsburg to Hitler. 2 vols. Cal Uni Press. Also Johnston. W. M. The Austrian Mind; An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938. (1972) Cal Uni Press.

^[2] From Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1933), pp. 187-88.

^[3] Kitcher. Martin. The Coming of Austrian Fascism. (1980) p. 15

^[4] 4 ibid. See chapter 5. The Army and the Police.

^[5]Bullock, Malcolm. Austria 1918-1938; A Study in Failure. London, 1939. P. 185.

^[6]Krauss. W. Austria to Australia An Autobiography of an Austrian Jew from Birth to Emigration. Melb Political Monograph. p82

^[7] Gulick. C. see vol 2. Chapter XX. ‘July 15, 1927'. pp 717-720.

^[8] ibid. Krauss.W p. 82.