Seedtime for Fascism by George V. Strong

Author:George V. Strong [Strong, George V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781315293035
Google: X58YDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16T17:27:02+00:00

 6

The Final Transformation: The Impact of Bourgeois Kunst and Kapital on the Austrian Idea

Most formidable of the popular mass political movements rising to the support of the Austrian idea was Christian Socialism. This popular political synthesis advocating socialism with God—in contrast to Marxist socialism’s atheism—also stood, somewhat paradoxically, for a traditional Austrian state supported by the twin pillars of throne and altar. Its driving force derived from a number of currents: monarchist, Catholic pietist, and German racist traditionalist, to name the most important. Its intellectual underpinnings involved a plethora of disparate German Austrians, Habsburg loyalists all, such as Baron Karl Vogelsang and Prince Alois (von and zu) Liechtenstein, Catholic priests such as the Bohemian Ambros Opitz, and grassroots politicians such as Ignaz Mandl and Karl Luegar.1

Perhaps, however, it was not Mandl but Karl Luegar, popular and controversial mayor of Vienna from 1899 to 1910, who gave Christian Socialism its reputation as a volatile, potentially violent mass political movement.2 Like many other emotive mass political movements, Christian Socialism pursued the politics of scapegoatism, whereby it designated victims so as to gather in followers by preaching to them what elements in society were to blame for their discontents. Foremost among the weapons belonging to the arsenal of this politics of victimization was Christian Socialism’s use of what Luegar called political anti-Semitism, which Luegar wielded as a weapon to attack the tenets of economic liberalism structural to the perspective of much of the Austrian haute bourgeoisie. Further, the lethal twist in this strategy rested on the truism that a goodly proportion of this same haute bourgeoisie was, or at least had been in some sense or other, Jewish.3 In the same fashion, but by playing anti-Semitism as a counterpoint to Catholicism, Christian Socialism rallied Catholic pietism in support of the Habsburg dynasty. All the while Luegar and his followers buttressed these attacks on the unfolding industrial capitalist world by promoting a kind of pragmatic, home-grown variety of socialism sponsored by the city government. In a sense the political circus generated by scapegoatism was balanced by the bread of socialism. But it must be admitted that Christian Socialism patently did improve the lot of Vienna’s masses. It did so, however, at a high price, for while these tactics cemented the loyalty of many Viennese to the Christian Socialists, they were also won over to its violent rhetoric as it was molded by the hands of demagogues of the likes of Karl Luegar. Thereby the mayor of Vienna created in himself not only a prototype of those political incendiaries that bedeviled central Europe in the twentieth century, but also a mass political movement that threatened as much as it cajoled the political order of things. Consequently, it was for negative reasons that neither the mayor nor his movement could be ignored by the imperial and royal government.4

For his part, Emperor Franz Joseph disliked Luegar’s demagoguery and especially the anti-Semitic hue of his variety of Christian Socialism. But, by the same token, the emperor did come

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