Engelbert Dollfuss-Austrian Patriot

[Barbarossa]

Engelbert Dollfuss

Austrian Patriot



"Simple, homely, without demands on life, highly intelligent, with absolute integrity as a fundamental of his character, social, jolly, always on the move, swift - sometimes too swift - in decision, a foe to all pose or ostentation, yet carefully mindful for the respect due his office of representing the Fatherland; direct and courageous, effective by reason of his personality, which needed to put no distance between himself and his surroundings to carry his purpose - and this despite the fact that his actual person was certainly not impressive - all these he was. A loyal friend to companions and fellow workers, always ready to be helpful; a man of faith and ideals, a true son of the German people, yet a fanatical believer in his Austria - as such we have seen and known him, we who were privileged to be at his side at the height of his activity, from the beginning of his public life, along that path of success and fortune, and up to the hour of departure - we who now bear witness, and will so long as life is granted us, for Engelbert Dollfuss and his Austria" Kurt Schuschnigg, "My Austria" 1938

There are some truly great men who are so maligned by an antagonistic press during their lifetime that, even though their names make the headlines when they die or are murdered, history must rediscover them. Engelbert Dollfuss was murdered by Nazi agents - it makes us realize that this victim of National Socialism deserves to be placed on a pedestal as one of the very great leaders of the twentieth century - and possibly one of the finest Catholic statesmen of all time. Why then should his name be unknown to the vast majority of American and English citizens who have no sympathy at all for National Socialism and who should be eager to have an acquaintance with one of the most remarkable of its opponents?

Engelbert Dollfuss was one of the few political leaders of the day who saw with matchless clarity the evil of the National Socialist philosophy and who, in spite of the weakness of his country, which had been largely dismembered in the wake of World War I, became a new David confronting a new evil Goliath, Adolf Hitler.

Himself the son of peasants, who worked all through his early years in unforgiving agricultural labor, Dollfuss stands as a noble contrast to the resentful idler Adolf Hitler, the narrow-souled pamphleteer Lenin, or the dreary Socialist time-servers of the French Third Republic. His actual experience of rural life inoculated Dollfuss against intellectual fantasies that romanticized the lifestyle, exalting as "folkish" whatever narrow and bigoted ideas a polemicist wished to promote. Nor had Dollfuss any patience for those on the Left who dismissed the peasantry as a reactionary barrier to progress which must be eliminated. Instead, he saw the maintenance of a strong, independent farming class as a critical guarantor of both the nation's cultural continuity and liberty and its economic security. If anything, Dollfuss followed the Popes of his era in seeing the proletariat as the one class which must be "redeemed" - not eliminated, of course, but rather delivered from their dependence on the vagaries of employment in the factories, and granted a share in the means of production, either in the form of land, or small businesses, or at least some say in the administration of the industries which provided their livelihood.

More than most self-defenders of the working man, Dollfuss knew the bitterness of hard labor, and what a privilege it is to enjoy afterwards a truly liberal and humane education. But the severities of his youth did not lead Dollfuss to resentment against those who had earned or inherited greater wealth; as a faithful student of human nature and a son of the Church, he knew that the diversity of conditions within society is part of the hierarchical nature of the State, and the inevitable result of human freedom and natural inequalities among individuals. Instead of working to collapse or exploit these differences, to punish the achiever or repress the needy, Dollfuss struggled in all of his writing and work to bridge the gap of understanding that divided rich from poor, urban from rural, skilled from unskilled. In his "Corporate State" which Nazi putschists strangled in its infancy, he sketched out one attempt to forge links among the classes, by uniting men politically according to their particular trades - regardless of their station. Thus factory workers and owners, farmhands and landowners, tailors and fashion designers, respectively, would be represented in "corporations", whose variety was meant to displace the partisan multiplicity of political parties. The desire to do away with factions must have seemed especially urgent to a citizen of a nation whose two most prominent political movements were a variant of Socialism, one "German" and National, the other Bolshevik and International.

Inspired by the writings of Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI, Dollfuss sought to create the first sate directly modeled on Catholic Social Teaching - drawing on the recent organic traditions of guilds and crafts unions which for so long had flourished in Austria, to forge a political experiment in solidarity among classes, and charity among men. Before we dismiss this idea as quixotic , we ought to note that the same idea was in fact partly implemented in post war West Germany; to achieve labor peace, and avoid the historically crippling effects of general strikes, the Adenauer government instituted a mechanism it called "co-determination", through which labor unions were granted important voting powers on the corporate boards of their companies.

On a smaller scale, we see here the very "corporations" which Dollfuss hoped to construct. And indeed the, this institution largely succeeded in eliminating strikes, and reducing the polarization that once pitted workers against their employers in murderous hate.

Whereas National Socialist ideology sought to cancel class conflict by channeling aggression outward towards neighboring countries or inward against those citizens of Jewish background, Dollfuss sought to diffuse it altogether, by concretely encouraging men to view their economic relationships as cooperative, rather than competitive. If there is some necessary tension tension between the interest of an employer who seeks low labor costs, and a worker who yearns for a higher wage, it is nevertheless true that they also must cooperate if either of them is to profit; in fact, this truth is primary, essential if anything is to be created or accomplished. Whatever ways in which these men's interest diverge are secondary to the greater truth of their mutual dependence. Where this ceases to be the case, where mutual interests are outweighed by conflicts, it's time to dissolve the business relationship and find a new employer or worker.

Instead of making international affairs the realm of sublimated aggression, pseudo-Darwinian competition, or grandiose "historic" crusades, Dollfuss saw that the relations between governments must be ruled by the same laws of justice and charity that should prevail in families, among co-workers and employers, even among competitors in the same business; because he accepted the Natural Law as a universal mandate, which applied equally from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Dollfuss was never tempted to delusional notions of the significance of the nation, to the grand-scale national egotism that so often masqueraded as patriotism - usually to the ruin of the actual concrete nation. Since the rump of post-Imperial Austria was not a promising candidate for territorial expansion, men who were tempted to such dreams of empire tended to gravitate towards the parties of the political extremes - the Socialist partisans of a universal Bolshevik revolution, beginning in Moscow but radiating throughout the world, or the National Socialists who abandoned their homeland and its tender claims, identifying instead with a bloated, expansionist Germany that sought to gobble up bleeding hunks torn from its weaker neighbors.

Dollfuss was tempted by neither of these crass alternatives. Instead, he remained loyal to his concrete patria, his little fatherland with its local customs, its variegated texture and internal contradictions, its ancient traditions, and deep rooted Catholic Faith. For all imperial past - which had provided such a rich cultural background and immeasurably enriched Vienna - the new German Austria was more akin to her ancient rival Switzerland in population and political importance. The patriotism which Dollfuss championed and attempted to awaken throughout his countrymen in his short term of office in many ways resembled the proud particularism one finds among those mountain cantons - a human sized loyalty to genuine human goods, instead of a grandiose attachment to fetishes of gigantism.

For an image of of the contrast, compare one of the tiny, jewel-like onion-dome churches of Tyrol or Carinthia with the hulking constructions Albert Speer threw together for Hitler. The former still shine after centuries, while Speer's very marble, revealed by a few decades as defective, rots away with each year's rain. Like another great opponent of National Socialism and defender of the moral component of economic life, Wilhelm Röpke, Dollfuss found the spirit of greatness amidst the small things of this world.

Of Dollfuss' life and death, others are more qualified to write. The narrative which follows is a little window into the life of a saintly and courageous man, whom history has neglected most unjustly. When people write of the first opponents of Adolf Hitler, how many think of Dollfuss? He is dismissed, by the typical left-leaning historian, with the label "clerico-fascist," as if the term signified anything beyond the author's biases. In fact, it is simply a leftist slogan of abuse. What we want to make clear is that Dollfuss ought to be remembered alongside all other principled, patriotic opponents to totalitarianism. When he held supreme power in Austria, Dollfuss used the minimal force necessary to repress terrorist groups of the extreme right and left, each of which cherished openly treasonous plans to turn their homeland over to foreign invaders or revolutionaries. In the depths of the Great Depression, he attempted bold economic and political reforms, experiments such as have never been tried before, in the attempt to diffuse the hatred that separated social Austrian Christian Falangist Youth March 1934classes, and prevent the poison of biological racism taking root in his homeland. He never imposed Catholic Faith or practices on religious minorities, and rejected the wild anti-Semitism that was appearing across the continent at the time. How many men in position of leadership recognized the evils of their day so clearly, fought them so forthrightly, and offered their lives so bravely, as this little-remembered Austrian peasant statesman? The list is sad and short. The biography that follows will forever enshrine Dollfuss in his rightful place in that list, just as he will be forever enshrined in the Christian Falangist Party of America. A humane, generous, brave and decent man, Engelbert Dollfuss' merits ought to commend him to the attention of the Church. If we may speculate, let us suggest that this story may someday serve as the first exhibit proving Dollfuss' heroic sanctity. How fitting it would be if the humble Dollfuss someday joined his last sovereign, the Blessed Emperor Karl, among the saints of the Roman Calendar. Reading his story, one cannot help thinking Dollfuss would be embarrassed by the attention.

The Early Years

That rich, tranquil wedge of land between the Wachau Valley of the Danube and the foothills of the Alps was the right soil to have bred Austria's first patriot. For this is a rib of the green cradle of the nation. No foreign borders can be seen here, or even sensed. There are no pockets of Slav or Magyar settlers to recall the patchwork Empire of a dozen peoples over which the Austrians once ruled. It is an enclosed, compact, homogeneous and, above all, a deep-rooted country side. The house of the Dollfuss family, where he was born on October 4, 1892, belongs to the hamlet of Great Mairerhof, which together with a dozen other peasants' dwellings forms part of the commune of St. Gotthard. It stands some distance back from the road leading to Texing - it was in the parish church of Texing that the future Chancellor was baptized - and the little house with its old thatched roof is almost entirely hidden by the surrounding fruit trees, in this neighborhood an important source of income for the peasants. The property, which has been in the hands of the Dollfuss family for centuries, was occupied in 1935 by a maternal uncle of the late Chancellor. On the ground floor to the left of the main door is the room in which Engelbert Dollfuss was born. It has remained unchanged. In the corner is a great table with the sign IHS inlaid in the middle. Its smoothly polished surface shows that many generations have sat to eat at it. The Dollfuss family were old-established independent peasant-farmers whose roots went deep into the rich soil they ploughed. Their Stammbaum, or table of ancestors, is still being embellished today in 2004. It is an impressive chart the size of a hearth rug, eight feet long by three feet wide, covered with name-squares in blue and gold like a colored quilt, and backed, somewhat incongruously, with flowered kitchen linoleum so that it can be rolled up tidily after the privileged visitor's inspection and stored again in the great oak cupboard. At the very top, in a square thickly bordered in gold, stands the first Dollfuss to be traced in the church registers of the neighborhood - André Dollfuss, who died in 1588, already working the land of Lower Austria as a free man. By the time little Engelbert opened his eyes onto this same landscape, therefore his family had been settled and respected for over 300 years.

Not far away is the commune of Kirnberg, and it was here, in his stepfather's house, that the Chancellor spent the days of his youth. On the road itself are only a few houses. As you approach the village the first thing that meets the eye is a massive church tower, already indicating that the church itself is an unusual one. The way to it leads through a pleasure-garden and under the archway of a monastic building which surrounds the sacred edifice. Thus enclosed, yet standing by itself, the little church, which in part dates from the year 1336, towers high above the surrounding building. This latter, once the home of a community of hermits dedicated to St. Jerome, it served as a country house for the bishop of Vienna in the 1930's. It was one of these who contributed with the parish priest to the expenses of the young Engelbert's education, which his parents were not in a position to bear alone.

The home of the Chancellor's parents is situated some distance from the road. It is a small detached farm-house, and to reach it you must cross a stream and walk about two miles up hill. The farm is surrounded by pasture and arable land, planted with the fruit trees characteristic of the region. From here the little "Engel," as he was called at home, had quite a long walk to go to school in Kirnberg. Though he had to be there at an early hour for his various duties, as well as being occupied in the church, he also had to help at home whenever he was available. He would often be outdoors looking after the cattle, only a couple of beasts, it is true, but enough for the little fellow to manage.. When on Sundays his stepfather walked round their little estate Engel would often accompany him. Sometimes his father would stop and look intently at the trees or at the ground, and the little boy would ask "What are you looking at Father?" And when he received the reply: "To see if anything is growing, and whether we are going to anything to eat and drink," then he too would look earnestly with his father, as if he also understood that, in a small farm where there is never anything forthcoming more than the absolutely necessary, the prospects of the harvest are a matter of greatest importance. Such was the lesson which the young Engelbert learned from his earliest years: that life is work, and that work gives life its meaning and value.

Dollfuss' way out, and up, into the world, as with countless generations of gifted peasant boys before him, was through the Catholic Church. Apart from his strong, happy personality, the only sign of anything exceptional about the child had been his insatiable appetite for reading. The moment he had mastered the mysteries of print, he lived with a book in his hand, either tending the cattle in the meadows during the long summer days or squinting under a kerosene lamp in his bedroom during the even longer winter nights. The problem, on that isolated farm, was to find something to read; and it was a great moment when he discovered a heap of old Austrian "Peasant Calendars" which, in the days of Emperor Franz Josef, were the staple literature, often the only literature, of the farm-dweller.

He himself later described to a friend how he had first learned about the problems of the country around him from this hoard of well-thumbed annuals, just as his first geographical notions of the greater world beyond that came from the novels of Karl May. "It was the custom in our house" he related, "to store up the old calendars, and by a lucky chance I once stumbled on the chest in which they were kept. I used to take three or four of them at a time out with me during the grazing weeks and just and read. You would never believe how much knowledge and self-education one can get that way. From those Calendars I learned the lesson that the peasant must be ready to help and advise everyone, even those people who stand outside his own circle and field of work."

It may have been Bible stories and Saints' days with which those calendars were plentifully sprinkled; it may have been those solemn moments at the table when stepfather Schmutz, the Crucifix in the Herrgottswinkel above his bowed head, called for the Lord's Prayer before the whole family- hired help and all-dipped their spoons into the common bowl of "Stohsuppe" or sour cream soup. Whatever started it off, when "Engel" was eight or nine years old, he began to play at being a priest. He built a little makeshift altar in the house, and read Mass and preached sermons in his piping voice as he had learned in the local church. The household was too close to God to find this either exceptional or blasphemous.

Kirnberg church, which now begins to play a dominant role in his life, with its elaborate baroque chapel, its frescoes, its gilded angels, and its fine altar painting of the Holy Family (which somehow got there from the great Carthusian Abbey at Gaming when the Emperor Leopold dissolved the monasteries), it is an impressive church for such a humble community. Young Engelbert fell completely under its spell. A single ambition surged within him, to become an altar boy and assist at Mass. He first tackled the sacristan Fiala, who protested that the smallest robes he had in the vestry were far too long. But, even in those days, Dollfuss was not one to give up. He had resumed his attack through the village priest, Simon Veith, a kindly man who already had a soft spot for the child. And in the end, Fiala was persuaded to take six inches off the children's vestments (black for ordinary occasions and red for Sundays), and the diminutive Engelbert had his great day, swinging the incense-burners before the assembled farmers of Kirnberg and their Sunday polished broods.

It was when an even greater day arrived, and he was allowed to perform the same service for no less a personage than the visiting Bishop Doctor Schneider, that the Dollfuss boy made up his mind. He announced to his stepfather that he would like to become a priest.

As it turned out, it was a false sense of vocation. What was really driving Dollfuss was simply the impulse to go and meet the great world and put his mark upon it somewhere. And the Church, represented by that glowing baroque altar at Kirnberg and the ornate Sunday robes, just happened to be the first part of that great world to touch him. But the decision was none the less firm for being short lived, and it placed the Schmutz household in a quandary. As we have seen there was barely enough money for the necessities of life; to finance a costly education was out of the question. As soon as the difficulty became known, however, everyone of standing got together to solve it. The head of the village school, Helmberger, pronounced confidently that his small pupil was quite capable of mastering the hard training; his deputy, a certain Neimetz, offered to supply any extra coaching gratis during the intervening months. But it was the priest Simon Veith who solved the vital problem of payment: an eloquent plea to Bishop Schneider promptly produced a free place in the archiepiscopal boys' seminary at Oberhollabrunn, on the other side of the Danube, some thirty miles north of Vienna. It was here in the autumn of 1904, that Engelbert Dollfuss presented himself, after a last excited summer amid the pear trees and rye-fields of Kirnberg.

Peasant boys were nothing new to the priests at Hollabrunn. Indeed, they rather specialized in them, looking among all this rustic chaff for a few grains of precious seed for Mother Church. Yet, for Dollfuss, the beginning must have been a special ordeal, since the challenge was to his courage no less than to his brain. he could not have been more than a tennis net high at this stage and, for the first time, he had to defend himself against the mockery and bullying, not of a handful of familiar village lads, but of two hundred complete strangers drawn from all corners of Austria.

On the whole, his courage did better than his brain. Indeed, the diminutive scholar from Kirnberg failed in his Prima or first year's test and had to repeat the class studies as an external student before he could rejoin the seminary. And though there was never again any such disastrous setback, his whole academic career seems to have been marked by industry rather than by brilliance. (A school list which has survived for one of his early years shows him only 23rd out of 26 in his class.) One of his teachers at Hollabrunn has summed up the general impression he made on the staff in these words: "Dollfuss was certainly among the good students. But I cannot remember him ever standing out especially in his work. He was a very industrious scholar, and he made steady progress; yet he never threw off any sparks."

The sparks were reserved for outside the classroom. The boy found himself instantly absorbed by the other human beings around him, their problems, their weaknesses, their opinions. It was at Hollabrunn that he first discovered his own passionate interest in people and practical issues; and then, as ever afterwards, he greatly preferred them to books. It was here also that he proved, to himself and to others, that his strength of character and his sunny nature were more than enough to make up in the world for his lack of inches. Without arrogance, and apparently almost without effort, the smallest pupil in the school soon commanded respect from the biggest.

He took a full part in the schools' life, was a keen clarinet performer in the school band and an even keener gymnast and soccer player in the school team. But the picture which most comrades will have taken away is of Dollfuss, standing on tiptoe or upon a chair to make himself seen and heard, organizing petitions and protests, reconciling two heated disputants in an argument, or drawing the essentials out of some general debate. The politician in him was, in fact, already awakened, and it was significant that, during his later years at Hollabrunn, young Dollfuss was already devoting far more time to political problems than was natural in a candidate for holy orders.

Many of the actual characteristics of the statesman seem to have been discernible in the schoolboy. One of his classmates who sat next to him for eight years, has described how sociological problems came to absorb Dollfuss when he was still in his early teens. Even at this age, he was deeply interested in the Catholic reforms of München-Gladbach and saw the Christian faith as the only worthwhile impetus for political regeneration.

[Barbarossa]

Into Manhood

It was when he moved on to Vienna, to complete his studies at the Theological Faculty of the University there, that the religious ecstasies he had been filled with in front of the altar at Kirnberg ten years before began quietly to leak away, like air hissing from a punctured tire. Nothing had changed in him. It was merely the true self that was coming to life in the new setting. For here, at last, was the great world of action and ideas which he once thought to have glimpsed in the church. He was lucky to have seen Imperial Vienna just before the cannons of the First World War blasted away both her gaiety and her glory. Those were its last months as a peaceful Kaiserstadt, the end of end of its long reign as one of the four proud capitals from which the destinies of a continent were decided. But like so many cities and so many empires which have stood, half knowing, on the brink of disaster, the Vienna of those immediate pre-war days had an almost feverish brilliance. This was the climate for which the restless peasant child from Kirnberg had longed; he could scarcely be blamed for not realizing that it was, in fact, only the last brief Indian Summer of his great Fatherland.

Yet as regards to his own career, he was driven by a growing inner emptiness to call a halt within a few months of entering the university. He took the bitter decision to abandon his theological studies, telling his friends, with characteristic bluntness, that he would rather stay a good Christian than become a bad priest. In January of 1914, he went, cap in hand, to his Rector, Prelate Gustav Müller, and was relived to find only sympathy and good wishes. A far greater ordeal was to break the new to his stern stepfather back in Kirnberg; and this task he tackled with a pounding heart a few days later only to escape with the following admonition: "As far as I'm concerned you can become whatever you want, and if you can find people to help, then you can go on studying something else. There's only one thing that matters - grow up to be a decent person and not a rogue."

Engelbert went back to Vienna to study law and thus became a member of the powerful sworn Catholic brotherhood, the Cartell-Verbund or C.V., which was dedicated to social reform. This was a link which was to give him strong political and moral support throughout his life. As a soldier, as an agrarian expert and as a Minister, Dollfuss never ceased to be a social reformer whose heart was with the humble of this earth. There was an odd twist of fate about Dollfuss' time in pre-war Vienna, among the other poor young students who were trampling the same streets and arguing in the same cafés in the Austrian capital of the day was another future Chancellor who was trying in vain to get his pictures accepted by the Fine Arts Academy, and acquiring in the process a lasting hatred for the Habsburgs, her Jews and her Marxists. One wonders whether, without knowing it, Dollfuss ever brushed shoulders with the man who was to murder him less than twenty-five years later....Adolf Hitler.

The Peasant Soldier

On June 28, 1914, the dreams and ambitions of the law student Dollfuss, like those of his colleagues throughout Europe, were shattered by the thunderclap from Sarajevo. On the 28th of July, exactly one month after the assassination of Arch-duke Ferdinand, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the Juggernaut started to roll.

Engelbert was almost fully grown, he now stood at 4' 11", when this miniature defender of the fatherland presented himself to a Military Selection Tribunal in Vienna...."My little fellow you have time to grow a bit; the war may last quite a while yet" the inspecting doctor said. Undeterred, Engelbert set for St. Pölten in Lower Austria to try again only to run across the same military doctor he encountered the day before......"Haven't we seen you already and rejected you for being undersized?" he frowned. "Yes sir," replied Dollfuss unabashed, "but since then I've been concentrating really hard on growing!" And, as he spoke, he rose on tiptoe under the corporal's measuring stick, to reach the extra inch required to meet the minimum. The tribunal came to the conclusion that such ardor should not be analyzed by centimeters and pronounced him fit for service, and for him too the World War began.

He started off his training with a Vienna Infantry Regiment of no particular renown but before long he was in the elite Tyrol Rifles later known as the Kaiserschuetzen. The Army had proved in Dollfuss the man what Hollabrunn had proved in Dollfuss the boy: that he was born to lead those comrades around him who were a head and shoulders above him. Hoots of mirth greeted the arrival of the little recruit at the Bozen training garrison, struggling into the barracks like an ant , under his mountain of rucksacks. The teasing slowly died down and the ridicule stopped before the first week was out, he showed that he could endure, better than the next man, eight or ten hours a day of maneuvers under the blazing South Tyrol August sun. His good humor, calm intelligence and the huge parade-ground voice which he managed to squeeze out of that small body marked him out from the first. Within a few weeks he was made "Commander" of his Barracks, by autumn, platoon leader; and by Christmas of 1914 he had passed with distinction from the Bixen Officers' School. After a few more weeks of training and wine-swigging in the cellars of South Tyrol, Cadet Dollfuss was posted down to the Italian front in command of a machine-gun platoon. It was to be the start of thirty-seven months of almost unbroken active service in the Dolomites and the "Sette Commune".

When Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, on May 23, 1915, there was barely one Austrian soldier for every hundred yards of this southern line, and defense works were completely lacking. Steady endurance spiced with heroism were needed to hold the new front, and Dollfuss produced his share of both. The most remarkable of his exploits during this bitter three-year mountain battle was his successful defense of the so-called "Schrimmlerjoch" in October of 1916. This peak was the key to whole divisional sector, and the right-hand spur allotted to Dollfuss and his machine-gunners was in turn the key to his regiment's position - a flanking fire and observation post from which the approach of the Italians up the steep Val di Calamento could be controlled. As such, it had been pounded by the shells of 28-centimeter Italian howitzers throughout the summer of 1916 (one of which, mercifully or providently a "dud", rolled right into the the small command cavern Dollfuss had hewn out of the mountain-side); and in the autumn the long-awaited ground attack was launched. The Italian commander sent up wave after wave of crack Alpini and Bersaglieri troops, confident that their steel would impale whatever resistance the artillery had left alive in the rocks.

Dollfuss hung onto that shattered Dolomite crag with something that was more than bravery: The peasant tenacity that impelled him, as always in life, to finish whatever he had set his mind on or pledged his word to. His force was reduced at one point to 45 able-bodied men, and those all weary and shell-dazed, in the face 600 fresh attackers. But the right-wing of "Schrimmlerjoch" was held. It was duly christened, for the rest of the war as, the "Dollfuss Breach".

The row of medals can be taken as testimony for Dollfuss' other exploits. More interesting for our purpose than his valor are two other characteristics which began to blossom in this testing climate. One was his personal popularity, based on that charm and resourcefulness which became a Regimental (and later a national) byword. The other was the sheer humanity of the man, which seemed to flow, deep and spontaneous, from some rich, uncontaminated spring in his nature. As to the first, it is enough to cite evidence that the Machine Gun Section Dollfuss, had the longest waiting list of transfer volunteers in the battalion. Everyone wanted to get under his command, for reasons of comfort as well as prestige. For Dollfuss had the knack of getting the best of his surroundings as well as the best out of his men. Up in the Dolomites, he managed to turn those bare holes scratched out of granite in which they lived into homes, equipped even with a makeshift chapel. Many of the good deeds which now started to spread the name of Dollfuss around went far beyond those conventional requirements of the "good officer". They revealed the devout Christian in action. Once for example when there was a lull in the fighting, Dollfuss was making his way with one of his men to buy supplies in Bozen for the unit. They had almost reached the town when they overtook an ominous little group: four men with fixed bayonets escorting an unarmed infantryman. "He's a deserter" replied the corporal-in-charge when asked what was going on. The captive must have seen a glimpse of salvation in Dollfuss' compassionate, questioning look, and poured out a passionate appeal of help. He was 18 years old; two of his brothers had already fallen; and when yesterday, in his first day on the front line, his best friend had been killed standing next to him, he had lost his head. But even then he hadn't meant to desert.

The boy was a raw mountain peasant, a type Dollfuss knew at a glance. He also knew that once the escort had marched him down as far as Brigade Headquarters, nothing could save him from the firing squad. The only hope was to find his battalion commander and persuade him to alter his decision. To do that meant climbing back up into the mountains which would take five hours, he was tired and it really was none of his business but his compassionate heart said otherwise. Not many junior officers in any army in the world would, in those circumstances, have done what Dollfuss did. He ordered the corporal, the astounded escort and incredulous prisoner to turn-about and follow him, thus they all climbed back to the front-line. It took him until dusk to find the boy's commanding officer, an elderly major with the reputation of a martinet. It took him five minutes to find his opening - the major's contempt for the poor training system of the General Staff, and indeed everything connected with the rear echelons; and another twenty minutes of eloquent pleading to save the boy's life as a "worthy but badly-trained recruit". Dollfuss not only got his request granted but was pressed to stay the night. The next morning, after breakfasting on those front-line luxuries - coffee, butter and marmalade - he was dispatched by cable railway to the valley where he found the major's horse waiting to get him speedily to Bozen. The gruff old battalion commander could scarcely have imagined that he had been dealing with the future Chancellor of his country; but he clearly regarded the little reserve lieutenant as something quite out of the ordinary.

There were many such incidents. On a tactical withdrawal after the great spring offensive of 1916 his unit was trapped under heavy Italian artillery fire when camping in open ground on the slopes of Zunga Torta. A salvo fell among the men, killing several outright and maiming others. Among the seriously wounded was Dollfuss' favorite NCO, a Tyrolian called Ploner. Only a speedy operation could save his life, yet there was not a Red Cross vehicle in sight. Dollfuss commandeered a full ammunition wagon which happened to be passing, off-loaded its shells onto the ground despite the driver's vigorous protests, and strapped his wounded corporal into the improvised ambulance. He then drove to valley himself with his already delirious comrade, transferred him, to an automobile, also requisitioned on the spot, and did not rest until he was under the surgeons knife at Calliano, where the retreating Field Hospital had been set up. Late that night, a weary Dollfuss rejoined the remnant of his unit, having been under constant fire for both halves of the journey, and having exposed himself to an even hotter fire of reprimand from his own superiors. After two weeks on the ridge between life and death, Corporal Ploner lived to tell the tale.

Nor was Dollfuss concerned, in these harsh days, only for his own men. Once, during the autumn offensive of 1917 down on the plains, the whole brigade lost touch with its supplies train somewhere in that stony wilderness between the Tagliamento and the Piave. The troops, as they marched, were forced to feed off the countryside. Somebody produced a jocular requisitioning note left by another unit at a roadside farm: This chit is yours; Your pig is mine (weight 450 lbs.). Dear Fatherland rest on in peace. After a vain attempt to identify the unit in question, Dollfuss wrote out a proper receipt of his own in the faint hope that it might indemnify the peasant for his precious pig.

Such is the picture of Dollfuss growing into manhood as a soldier of the old Austria. It must be remembered when we come to judge him as a statesman of the new Austria. For the character it reveals shows decency and compassion well above the normal measure, without a trace of that harshness or intolerance of which his political enemies were so often to accuse him. Did power change the very essence of the man? Were his foes, blinded by their own bitterness, unable to see it? Or were circumstances too much for both of them?

At all events, it was those last months of war which completed the transition in Dollfuss' own mind from officer to politician. After the Emperor Charles' clumsy if well meaning armistice attempts in the spring of 1917, and particularly after President Wilson's Fourteen-Point peace program announced the following January, diplomacy began to dominate the soldier's discussions in the most isolated outpost of the straggling, subsiding Austrian front.

Dollfuss was one of the many to whom, at the time, the dismemberment of the Empire still seemed unthinkable, whichever way the fortunes of war fell out. Not that, as events were soon to show, he was an uncompromising Monarchist. Far from it. As a Lower Austrian peasant-farmer, he had been born and bred to the outlook of a democratic yeoman rather than that of a feudal retainer; and indeed, when the old order which he served so well did collapse beyond repair, he was one of the first to recognize the reality of the new.

Until that turning-point came, however, he did his duty without reserve as an officer of the Emperor - less perhaps out of emotion than out of plain loyalty and habit. After all, for centuries the double- headed eagle had brooded over the fields of his childhood like the winds in the sky - something so accepted and inevitable that one got beyond questioning the good or the bad of its ways. And now, for over three years, he had fought for the same omnipresent emblem in the Dolomites. Discontent and mutiny had begun, it is true, to weaken the ranks of the loyal Alpine army. But until the horror of the final collapse, this "Bolshevik agitation" was regarded by the front-line soldier as just another excrescence of that civilian world with which he had lost real contact. Like profiteers or faulty cartridges, it might help to lose a war; yet it could surely never carry away a fatherland.

"As far as I'm concerned, lets give Italy the South Tyrol up to the Salurner Klause. But the rest of Austria-Hungry must stay as it is in its historic frontiers. It's an economic entity formed over the centuries and it's the heart of Europe. If the pulse gets blocked here, the whole continent will fall sick." He was equally emphatic and prophetic when a comrade asked him about his own future: "I certainly shan't stay in the army. The country also need men out of uniform. I intend to finish my law studies and then I have a strong inclination to go in for a political career. "

A few weeks later, politics caught up with them all. The ancient walls of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had finally caved in, their great motley stones loosened from within and pounded from without. When the armistice was declared, Dollfuss happened to be on a three-day leave of absence in Innsbruck, a chance which saved him from the months of imprisonment which befell his surrounded regiment. The news broke just as he was about to board a train to return to Rovereto. Instead, he got on the next train eastwards for Vienna, and set about putting his front-line declarations into practice.

Entering Politics

When Dollfuss left the train at Vienna ten hours later, he stepped out into a city which was somehow suspended in time. The past had been pulled from under its feet. And the present was confused, clamorous and bitter. The capital had saved its bare bones, but it had lost its soul. Vienna in that autumn of 1918 was a mutilated city condemned by its very assailants to live on in isolation. The spirit of the nation as well as its pride, the roots as well as the blossom, had been swept away. The suddenness had been as numbing as the completeness. Only three weeks before the young lieutenant's homecoming, his Supreme Commander, the Emperor Charles, had been proposing from his throne sweeping eleventh-hour reforms designed to put his ancient Empire on a modern footing. The famous Imperial Manifest of October 16, 1918, had appealed to the peoples of the Danube Monarchy to cling together as a federation of independent states. But these states proclaimed their total independence and, all along the Danube, new nation states tried to found their separate existences - an attempt that was to land them all, after twenty years, in the newer and harsher empires of Hitler and Stalin.

On November 12, 1918 the German-speaking Austrians, who had been left "a people without a state" by these hectic developments, themselves followed suit and proclaimed the "Democratic Republic of German-Austria". In a bid to find shelter, any shelter, in the storm, they went one further and declared themselves an "integral part" of the new German Republic which their blood brothers and war allies had founded across the border. And the Austrians, by trying to unite with Germany in their understandable desperation, hindered the growth of a new Austrian Republican consciousness even before their old Imperial consciousness had faded. The ease with which Hitler overran Austria in 1938 is partly to be traced back to the panic and muddled thinking of Vienna in 1918.

During this period Dollfuss was was working with Catholic student groups who wanted an Anschluss with Germany, he was even given to singing "Deutschland Über Alles" the German national anthem. Quite apart from being dishonest, it does no service to his memory to play down this background, as many of his blind admirers later tried to do. For the true merit of Dollfuss' subsequent defiance of Germany can only be measured against this early attachment to the German ideal, an attachment which remained so strong that he never abandoned hope of reconciling his Austrian patriotism with it. Even after 1932 Dollfuss did not change national coats, but rather turned the coat of pan-Germanism inside out, with the Austrian lining showing.

The second mark left by those early post-war years was Dollfuss' first experience of the "Austro-Marxists". These were, even in those days, amongst the oddest and most unsatisfactory of Lenin's disciples to be found anywhere on the continent. They were too international to be patriotic yet, at the same time, too Austrian to be revolutionary. And throughout the twenty years of the First Republic was to endure, they remained suspended between these two stools of fatherland and World Socialism. It was no uncommon occurrence in the capital in those days for officers straight back from the abandoned fronts to have their rank-badges and decorations torn off their uniforms by socialist hooligans as the detested symbols of Empire. What needs to be recorded here is its impact on the young Dollfuss, a highly decorated war hero from a crack regiment of the old army who had been brought up, both on his native farm and on the battlefield, to put loyalty and comradeship before all else. Around this same time Austria's Social Democrats were also running amok in the streets in the first post-war months, something Dollfuss would never completely forget in later years.

Dollfuss had not yet completed his studies at the University when he obtained a post in the Lower Austrian Peasants Union, which relieved him of the material anxieties that had dogged the whole of his career as a student and moreover gave him a task which was to develop all his powers. He had to organize the the peasants to protect them against the disintegrating influences rife at that time, especially against Marxist-Socialism, and at the same time to sow the seeds of recovery. His extraordinary powers soon became known, and he was sent to Berlin to continue his studies. As he himself said, he did not like all his professors there. Liberalism and Socialism were the dominating influences in the University. Much as it is in present-day America and Europe. In his own studies he devoted special attention to the German and Christian principles of economics. It was here that he found weapons against the two errors above mentioned, as well as the foundations for the building of a new Christian and and German social order, while he gathered practical experience from his work in the Federation of German Peasants Unions and in the cooperative Preussenkasse Bank. During his free time he often went to see Carl Sonnenschein, that leader of social activity among students and the pioneer of the Catholic movement in the capital of the Reich. It is to him, as well as to his own experience gained by an untiring and daily activity, so that he owed much of the enthusiasm for social work which characterized his life. In Berlin he also made the acquaintance of his future wife, Alwine Glienke, the daughter of a Pomeranian family, and it was here Dollfuss fell in love with her. He proved as resolute in matters of the heart as in matters of the mind; on New Year's Eve, 1921 the couple were married before that resplendent altar at his native Kirnberg church which had played such a role in his early childhood.

Their union was one of those happy things which spring from the right blend of contrasts and similarities. There was never the exciting but exhausting tension of being complete opposites, nor the soothing boredom of being complete duplicates. Being the daughter of a small Pomeranian landowner, the wife was born several steps higher than the husband on that social ladder which, fortunately, did not matter to either of them. She had a retiring, almost reserved, disposition as compared with his bubbling gaiety and passionate interest in the world. In fact when she first moved down to Vienna, Alwine Glienke was as much the typical North German as Dollfuss was the typical Austrian, and the difference in outlook led to a great deal of good-humored teasing between the two. Yet, quite apart from the fact that she largely adapted herself to his temperament and his surroundings, there was always far more to link them than to set them apart. Both had the same deep and unaffected piety; both had the same unshakeable sense of duty; both had the same devotion to their home and family; and both - a lucky chance - were of much the same small stature.

The thirteen years of their marriage produced three children, of whom the first died when she was still young, and the others, a boy and a second girl, survived to grow up, after 1938 in exile. The loss of their fist daughter was to be the only shadow on their time together. Alwine Dollfuss provided her husband with the second greatest gift an ambitious man can have (counting health as the first): a harmonious and well run home. With the one exception of the Civil War of February 1934, the political agony of Austria never poisoned the atmosphere of their modest flat in the Stallburggasse; though, as we shall see, many a vital secret discussion was to be held there.

To his wife, the Chancellor of Austria remained essentially the same man she had married in 1921. Whatever Messianic visions it may have brought him, power made him neither pompous nor covetous nor suspicious as a human being, nor did it succeed in corrupting his own personal life by one iota (a tribute even his worse enemies would not quarrel with). Indeed, looking back , Alwine Dollfuss could only find one fault in her husband as a family man; that he regularly gave away to needy friends and war comrades so much of his Chancellor's salary, after the twentieth of the month, the Dollfuss family had to borrow itself to keep going until the next pay-day.

Back in Vienna , as secretary of the Lower Austrian Peasants Union he took a leading part in consolidating that industry to which he had now entirely devoted his energies and with which he had been associated intimately since childhood. He was mainly instrumental in founding the provincial Chamber of Agriculture of Lower Austria. , whose secretary and director he became; in organizing the Federation of Agriculture and the Agricultural Laborers' Insurance Institute; in forming the new Agrarian policy of Lower Austria and in laying the foundations for the corporative organization of agriculture. A few years later as representative of Austrian agriculture at the International Agrarian Congress he attracted such general attention by his exposition of principles and by his practical suggestions that his name in this sphere became internationally famous. Still more important is the fact that by reason of his practical knowledge, his personal character and his universal success, he became recognized as the leader of the peasantry. Supported by these, he was able to maintain his position in the fight for the Fatherland until he was recognized as the leader of the whole Austrian nation.

On October 1st. 1931 he was appointed to the post of President of the Federal Railways. The task that lay before him - that of restoring order in this, the greatest industrial corporation in Austria, freeing it from the Party isolation in which it had been imprisoned by Marxian-Socialism, and making it once more a factor in national prosperity - was one which must have appealed to the heart of a man whose social and economic ideas were always directed to the good of his country. But the short period he held this office he gained an insight into the workings of public departments as he came into contact with almost every department in the state. In a few short months he turned the Federal Railways once more into a profitable service of the State.

But Austria needed him for another and much more responsible post. On March 18th ,1931 he was appointed Federal Minister of Agriculture and Forestry. Not that Dollfuss himself had gone out of his way to seek office. The news of his appointment reached him when he was relaxing with a group of friends at a coffee-house in the Vienna Prater.

During his fourteen months at the Agriculture Ministry, he managed to revise customs laws which finally broke away from the semi-free trade position adopted earlier and brought Austria into line with the highly protective systems already in force throughout the continent. Having erected these sheltering tariff walls, Dollfuss proceeded to boost home food production behind them. The wheat yield was raised as a first priority because, as he told a peasants' meeting in November 1932, in Austrian Christian Falangist Dollfuss Posterwords which had an unusual patriotic ring, "whoever neglects to ensure a bread supply within his own country sacrifices a portion of the nation's political and economic freedom". He increased butter output by the introduction of a special export subsidy; he expanded Austria's live-stocks by creating compulsory centralized markets which guaranteed minimum profits to the cattle farmers who supplied them; and, above all, by vigorous state intervention, he managed to keep prices for all agricultural products fairly stable in times of both shortage and surplus. That 75% level of self-sufficiency in food which the First Austrian Republic reached in 1937 (the last pre-war year for which independent statistics are available) was due not the least to Dollfuss' continuous fifteen-year struggle for the peasants' interest, first as a provincial official, then as Federal Minister, and finally as Chancellor.

This final rung of the ladder he climbed on the 10th of May, 1932, when still under forty years of age. as with every post he had assumed in life, his entry into the last and highest office was clouded with difficulty and danger. And this time the problems were of an order that no mere crusading zeal or administrative talent could resolve. Indeed the new Chancellor, probably the youngest Head of Government in the Europe of his day and certainly the shortest in both stature and experience, had been summoned to rule a country which seemed politically, morally and financially beyond hope of repair. The name of this badly-built contraption which was now grinding to a halt was Parliamentary Democracy, Austrian style.

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The Road to Chancellor

The only way to understand the difficulties Dollfuss faced on his accession to power and the manner he tackled them afterwards is to take another and more searching look at that political merry-go-round which he was called on to operate. The riders were often restless opportunists, as well as genuinely confused as to where they probably belonged, and a great deal of seat-shifting went on accordingly. But the Austrian, in his politics as in his way of life, is a conservative animal, so that the central pattern of the carrousel stayed unaffected by these motions. Indeed, throughout all the clamor and commotion of the First Republic's life, the same eight basic political groupings can always be identified. Some were, at times, little more than tiny isolated sects. Others were dissident wings of larger parties to which, in a crisis, they invariably adhered. Some were philosophical and racial cults who diffused their influence over several political groups without ever becoming a stable party themselves. Others were were really armed bands led by condottieri rather than parliamentary factions led by statesmen and, as such, they relied on bullets and not on ballots to help them to power. But, one and all, they clung to a distinctive philosophy or a special approach, and one and all thought that their own wisdom was the only answer to the nation's plight. Taken together, they did indeed produce all of the answer; but without a single solution.

The Political Groups

Looking from left to right consecutively around the circle, there is first, the minute band of Austrian Communists; second, the radical wing of the Socialists or "Austro-Marxists" under the leadership of Otto Bauer; third, the moderate wing of the same party under Karl Renner; fourth, the "liberal" section of the Catholic Christian-Social Party, personified by men like Leopold Kunschak; fifth, the remaining mass of the Christian-Socials who carried the Republic for most of its twenty years, and from where Dollfuss himself started out; sixth, the Heimwehr movement and its "Heimatblock" parliamentary front, which together formed an entity in Austrian political life despite their numerous internal rifts and rivalries; seventh, the pan-Germans, taken here in their broadest sense to range from those with one foot still in Austria to those with nine toes already across the Bavarian border; and eighth, the Austrian Nazis, who had just begun to be the most vicious bane of the Republic's life a few months before Dollfuss took office.

In this seating arrangement the radicals, both left and to right, have been placed as much with regard to their differing loyalty to Austria as with regard to their political philosophy as such. Austrian politics are peculiar in that patriotism, even more than democracy, is their vital touchstone. And here comes the special, and ultimately the lethal, tragedy of the First Republic. The ideological fanatics on both flanks, though poles apart in creed, were united in denying the validity of a separate Austrian state. The Nazis and the Communists actively worked for its destruction. And next to them, respectively, the far bigger camps of the pan-Germans and their radical Austro-Marxists undermined its existence with their ultramontane theories. Here was a case of the extremists, however unwillingly, actually joining forces to drag the rest of the company down. Only the center in each arc of this political circle were there moderate elements in the two main parties - Social Democrats and Christian-Socials - who could have postponed disaster by acting together. And they were kept apart by the fanatics on their wings than by their own failings. It is thus no wonder that both the historical achievement of Dollfuss and his personal undoing lay in the re-awakening of an Austrian patriotism, for he had to fulfill this mission among a people of whom at least one third, actively or passively, had written off their own state. Before going on to this struggle, however, we must examine each of those basic groupings among whom Dollfuss was to find all of his political allies and foes.

Communists

The "Communist Party of German Austria" had been founded in Vienna in November 1918, a small but virulent weed which sprouted from the ruins of the Empire. The seed had been sown by Austrian prisoners of war returned from a now Bolshevist Russia, in conjunction with a group of radical students and café intellectuals. There were times in the following months when the growth looked menacing enough. During the brief Communist coup d' état in neighboring Budapest, for example, the Hungarians sent across the frontier a special Commissar, Ernst Bettelheim, with orders to stage a similar revolt in Vienna. Twice in the first six months of 1919, on the 18th of April and on the 15th of June, the Austrian Communists, helped by amateur radicals, launched putsch attempts, and on both occasions their failure was absolute. This was not because the leadership was raw and clumsy, nor because both the peasantry and the mass of the workers refused to respond. It was also because their own following, by Bolshevik standards, was woefully weak-kneed. One could no more have raised a nation of Communists than one could have raised a whole nation of Nazis. True, the Austrians produced some choice examples of of both in their time. But, as a universal philosophy, both Communism and Nazism demanded too much discipline and too much effort (and also too little humor and too little tolerance) ever to become popular Austrian fare.

After the fiasco of 1919 the Communists sank for nearly fifteen years into oblivion. Only one of their founder members, the Styrian leader Johann Koplenig, survived the First Republic, and returned from Moscow in 1945 to try and plant the hammer and sickle in the Second Republic. The others, such as Frey, Toman and the Friedlaender couple, had already disappeared from the stage in the 1920s. Dollfuss himself was probably only conscious of the Austrian Communists as a political force during the last few months of his life, when he had banned the political parties and the Socialist para-military Schutzbund army as part of his authoritarian experiment. The Socialist' defeat in the Austrian Civil war of February 1934 had been complete and humiliating; their radical leaders had promptly sought safety across the Czech border, leaving an embittered rank and file on the lost battlefield behind them. The Austrian Communist managed to stage a brief revival by exploiting the situation. They stepped forward as the "real revolutionaries" who were alone capable of dealing with the "Dollfuss-Heimwehr dictatorship", and made a small but durable penetration into the Socialist trade unions, women's and youth movements and similar party organizations. They did not invade the political field so much as remain a marker on the far left flank, a marker separating the ranks of Austria's "Marxists in theory" from those of Russia's Marxists in practice. They were dedicated to destroy such Austrian state-patriotism as existed, their indirect and unconscious effect may well have been the opposite. At all events, their part in the Austrian story was a minor one.

Social Democrats

The picture becomes very different in both respects when we look at the powerful group just next to them, the radical Social Democrats of Otto Bauer. Bauer, the son of middle-class parents was 33 when the First World war broke out and was approaching the apogee of his considerable mental powers. he belonged to that type of pure Jewish intellectual who is more interested in theories than in either situations or human beings and who regards even politics as a lifetime exercise in dialectics rather than as a public career. By the turn of the century, young Otto Bauer had become an ardent Marxist. Indeed, much of his early fame as a Left-Wing ideologist rested on his book, Social Democracy and the Nationalities Questions, which was an attempt to interpret the life and death problems of the Empire in terms of his party's creed. Bauer's brief spell in office as State Secretary for Foreign Affairs in Austria's first and only Socialist Government reflected his party's hope that the New Republic's destiny in 1919 lay with her allies for world revolution. The hope gradually faded, to him and his colleagues, the first logical step was the extinction of the infant Republic as such, and he accordingly led the fight on the Left for the absorption of "German Austria" into the neighboring Weimar Republic. It was Bauer who, on March 2nd, 1919, signed in Berlin a formal "Anschluss Protocol" with the then German Foreign Minister Brockdorff-Rantzau. In this remarkable document, the two partners expressed their intention of concluding a state treaty to unite their countries. German-Austria was to join the Weimar Republic as a closed unit, retaining separate rights in the fields of foreign affairs, customs, trade, finance and so on. this was, in fact, simply the familiar vision of Vienna as the "second German capital", seen through red spectacles.

Bauer was partly driven by that genuine idealism of his which regarded this "Anschluss with Socialism" as one stage in a predestined Marxist integration process. But his own subconscious urge to appear as an international, and not just as an Austrian, apostle may well have played a hidden role. His own party colleague, Dr. Adler, wrote Bauer's epitaph when he described him as the "talented misfortune" of the Austrian Socialists. With each session of Parliament and every speech outside, he helped to widen that ditch between the : "Austro-Marxists" and the "Austro-Fascists" which Dollfuss was eventually called upon to straddle.

Ironically, it was the fantastic Austro-Marxist prayer of "Please hit me first" which was answered, and in the very same city where the prayer had been offered up. In 1934 a police search for hidden arms in the Socialist' headquarters at Linz was the random spark which set off the brief Civil War between Right and Left. What needs to be noted is the formidable psychopathic resistance which Austria's Social Democrats, under Bauer's leadership, were bound to put up to any working truce with the bourgeoisie. (This was no one-sided phenomenon: similar complexes we shall see, on the Austrian Right Wing.) Because he was so reluctant to fight with sticks and stones, Bauer fought all the more mercilessly with words and programs. For ten years Chancellor Seipel was the target of all this hate and, and after his first bitter clash with the Socialists in Parliament, Chancellor Dollfuss soon inherited it.

It needed the lesson of the Civil war to drag the Austrian Social Democrats out of Bauer's land and bring their practical leaders like Karl Renner back into the force. But by then the Austrian Right Wing, partly led by Dollfuss, partly dragging him with it, was fast moving off into a special land of its own. When we turn to Renner and the pragmatic camp of the Socialists, our feet, like his are much more on the ground. Whereas Bauer sought theories, Renner sought solutions, and his so-called "personal nationality" scheme stands as one of the most ingeniously simple blueprints ever drawn up to solve the racial rivalries of the Empire. Renner advocated in his plan the regrouping of the Hapsburg domains into a federation of the main national groups, each with cultural and administrative autonomy. But a completely new element was his proposal that each citizen of the multi-racial Empire, whether living in a compact ethnic bloc or in an isolated pocket of his kinsman, should be attached to his parent people by enrolment in a national register. By this means Renner sought to achieve the maximum racial harmony with the minimum political upset. There were those who claimed that, had the Empire survived, he would have been its first Socialist Prime Minister. And, true to character, he ended his career as president of the Second Austrian Republic, having served twice as Chancellor in the crisis period which followed World War Two.

Christian-Social Party

The Christian-Social Party was the major pillar of the Austrian Right Wing, and indeed of both the First and Second Austrian Republics. The dominance of the Christian-Socials over Austria's political life between the wars can be judged from the fact that they supplied the country's Chancellors from 1922 right through to 1938, with the sole exception of the 1929/30 pan-German Government of Dr. Schober, for which they provided the Vice-Chancellor.

The ChristiEngelbert Dollfussan-Social Party developed as a mass movement during the last forty years of the Empire's life, and it grew up as double-headed as the Emperor's eagle. With one face, it was the conservative party of tradition, the political voice of the Church and the landed aristocracy. With the other face it was violently reformist, the voice of Vienna's white-collared Catholic proletariat who were clamoring for greater security in the age of Liberalism. Under Karl Lueger (1844-1910), who led the Christian-Socials to victory in Vienna, the reformist aspect triumphed for a radiant spell. The capital was laboring under the effects of the Bourse collapse of 1873; the discontent of the craftsmen, shopkeepers and other petite bourgeoisie was at its height; and Lueger was finally borne up by this wave of economic unrest to the office of Vienna Burgomaster, despite the initial opposition of the Emperor and the Vatican.

The golden age of Catholic social reform in Austria now began. Lueger and his circle inspired a stream of legislation, all of which was designed in one way or another to protect the economically weak and under-privileged from exploitation. Working hours were revised, health and hospital benefits introduced, new taxation schedules were drawn up, Vienna's municipal services were expanded beyond recognition and, the nationalization of the railways was driven forward. Lueger was simply putting into practice the theories of Catholic thinkers like Vogelsang, who had called on the Church to lead society out of the moral and economic abyss into which the Industrial Revolution had thrown it. In 1881 both men had the satisfaction of seeing the papacy swing round in their favor; the famous Encyclical Rerum Novarum which Pope Leo XIII issued in that year threw the Vatican's weight whole-heartedly behind the Christian-Social reform movement and bestowed a special blessing on Lueger as its leader.

Incidentally, social reformism was not the only thing which Vogelsang advocated and Pope Leo blessed: it is here, at the very genesis of the Christian-Social movement, that the doctrine is enunciated of the Catholic corporative state as the sanctified form of political life destined to end all class strife. Lueger had enough on his hands in the 1880's without trying to turn the Hapsburg domains into a corporative society.

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Incidentally, social reformism was not the only thing which Vogelsang advocated and Pope Leo blessed: it is here, at the very genesis of the Christian-Social movement, that the doctrine is enunciated of the Catholic corporative state as the sanctified form of political life destined to end all class strife. Lueger had enough on his hands in the 1880's without trying to turn the Habsburg domains into a corporative society. But, fifty years later, the Christian-Social Dollfuss was to make the attempt in that tiny part of the Empire left to him ; and it was back to his own Vienna of Vogelsang and Lueger that he looked in the first place for inspiration, rather than to the Rome of Mussolini.

The triumph of the Christian-Socials in the Town Hall and Parliament carried the seeds of their eclipse. Success brought power ; power brought responsibility ; and responsibility brought with it commitment to the existing order. Thus the other face of the party - its conservative aspect - slowly swung more and more into prominence. By the turn of the century, the Christian-Socials were themselves too much a part of the status quo to continue with their transformation work at the old pace; and in 1907 this development was consummated politically when they merged with the Conservatives proper. Within less than a generation the Christian-Socials had thus changed from the party of the little man' to the "party of state", linked more and more with the peasantry and with the very industrialist interests they had started off by fighting. This robbed them of their impetus and, in 1910, death robbed them of their great leader. Lueger had only been in his grave a year when his party suffered decisive defeat at the polls, and even lost control of the capital to the rising Social Democrats.

A Socialist bastion the city has remained ever since; yet it is ironical to think that this "Red Vienna", complete with its new gasworks and tramway, was in fact the creation of Catholic reformers, whose radicalism was snuffed out by power. The Christian-Social party which returned to such a commanding position in the Austria of the 'twenties picked up, as regards conservatism where Engelbert Dollfuss Lueger had Ieft off and very soon went one further. For its new leader, the statesman-priest Ignaz Seipel, made the Catholic faith as such, rather than Catholic reformism, the touchstone of membership and policy; and the faith, then as always, clamped itself on to the strongest temporal arm available. Yet, though one could never talk of a duality in approach comparable to that which divided the Social Democrats, a restless and sometimes critical radical movement lived on in the Christian-Social party - a nagging souvenir of its old pioneer days as the champion of the under-dog. The spokesman of this group was Leopold Kunschak who, as a young saddler's apprentice, had already founded, back in the 'nineties, a 'Christian-Social Workers' Union for Lower Austria'.

Kunschak's Catholic Trade Unionism survived as a political force in the Republic, where it came to represent his party's last surviving link with the urban proletariat. Thus the party which, in 1932, Dollfuss came to lead in the Government (he never became its Chairman) was itself a coalition from Austria's past. In the first years of the Republic, more even than in the last years of the Empire, it was the "party of state" par excellence: a political alliance between bourgeoisie, peasantry and industry which, for all its faults, managed to preserve for the Austrian people that tradition and way of life which the Socialists were ready to sacrifice. As such, its rank-and-file became the main supporters of all Dollfuss's experiments with state-patriotism, even when he coupled those experiments with ventures into "Austro Fascism" and dissolved his own party in the process. But all the time, in the person of Kunschak and his group, this embodiment of Catholic conservatism carried on its shoulders its own uneasy social conscience. And every step which Dollfuss took towards the far Right - whether it was the suspension of Parliament, the banning of parties, or the working alliance with the Heimwehr - produced a loud outcry from this conscience.

There was no open party split, and Dollfuss had little difficulty in silencing Kunschak's protests in public. Whether he also succeeded in completely stifling their echoes in his own innermost soul is more debatable, for he was himself a man of the people and a social reformer with every fiber of his being. Like any party representing the Austrian middle-classes of the day, the Christian-Socials had a racial fringe which bordered on pan-Germanism and a political fringe which bordered on Fascism. But it is best, for simplicity's sake, to ignore them. The truest judgment of the party as a whole is that it combined more love for Austria with more respect for Parliament than any other political force in the Republic, and that is why it belongs in the very center of the arc.

To the left of it were those who worshipped parliamentary democracy as an instrument of Socialism but cared little about Austria. To the right of it were many who still loved Austria and some who still respected democracy ; some who did neither ; but none who did both. The first of these other groups we meet with are Dollfuss's disastrous allies, the paramilitary Heimwehr, who might be called the classic case of the patriots who were not democrats. For once, there is no need to dip back into Imperial history. The Heimwehr or Heimatschutz movement was a direct product of the Republic's first uneasy years ; it was born, flourished, and died never to rise again, all in the space between the two World Wars. As its names suggest (Heimwehr = Home Guard, and Heimatschutz = Protection of the Homeland) the movement was purely defensive and non-political in origin. It did not, in fact, begin as a movement at all, but rather as an uncoordinated chain of emergency self-help organizations which sprang up all over Austria in the winter of 1918/19 to keep local law and order and protect the naked frontiers of the new Republic.

Most of the bands of foreign marauders or demobilized Austrian soldateska it had to deal with were certainly chanting the revolutionary slogans of the hour as a sort of pagan benediction on their plundering. But in the first year or two, it was their violence rather than their Marxism that these voluntary defense units fought against - as factory guards, railway guards, village police, or as mere gamekeeper patrols armed with shotguns and raised by local landowners. Indeed, in this initial phase, Socialist worker were occasionally to be found in the Heimwehr's ranks, while the stocks of ex-army weapons which served as its basic armament were sometimes jointly distributed by representatives of both main parties. This defensive function was even more plain and even more vital along the borders of Austria: it was Heimwehr units under the command of General Ludwig Huelgerth who drove Yugoslav invaders out of Carinthia in 1919 and helped to save this southern province for the Republic. The first solid act of faith in the new Austria was, in fact, a Heimwehr one, and this basic patriotism clung to the movement throughout its life, underneath all the dross of demagogy and Fascism.

Whatever mistakes and excesses were committed by the leadership, for thousands of its supporters the Heimwehr remained the only active organization which a good Austrian bourgeois could join - being both anti-Marxist, anti-Nazi and dynamic into the bargain. The lack of both an adequate federal army and even a strong central civil authority kept these local forces in existence when the first months of crisis had passed. And, as so often, the historic provinces provided the framework which the capital of the Republic lacked. By the early 'twenties, Heimwehr organizations raised on a regular provincial basis existed, apart from Carinthia in the Tyrol (commanded by an Innsbruck lawyer Dr. Steidle); in Styria (commanded by another local lawyer, this time the notorious Dr. Pfrimer of Judenburg) ; and in Upper Austria (headed by that gifted but feckless playboy of the First Republic, Prince Rudiger Starhemberg).
__________________

[Barbarossa]

All these "private armies" were first in the field as regards regional groups, and all were Right Wing in leadership and flavor. By 1923 they had abandoned their non-political origins and were loosely united as an anti-Marxist force. That same year the Left Wing caught up and went ahead with one bound by converting their local "workers guards" into the so-called Schutzbund, which was the official paramilitary arm of the Social Democrats, trained and organized on a national basis. The name ('Protective League') suggests again the defensive concept. The party sought protection against a Habsburg restoration in Hungary (the Emperor Charles had led two vain attempts in March and in October of 1921) and against the shadows of dictatorship which were lengthening across two other borders (Mussolini's March on Rome of October 1922 and Hitler's Munich putsch of November 1923 were even fresher in the memory). And, after 1926, it had to arm itself anyway for that defensive-offensive Marxist Millennium which Otto Bauer was always preaching about, that tremendous day when the Socialists would be driven by the reactionaries into becoming true sons of the revolution.

These motives were all doctrinal rather than patriotic (it was significant that the Socialists talked of a "League" and not of a "Homeland"), and the last factor particularly injected a permanent element of party strife into the paramilitary struggle. By their own security standards, and by the political standards of the day, the Social Democrats were certainly justified in acting as they did in 1923. But their decision must rank as one of two happenings which made the Civil War ten years later as inevitable as anything can be in the affairs of man. The second fatal event was the serious rioting in Vienna on the 15th of July, 1927, when a Marxist mob set fire to the Ministry of justice, cordoned off the blazing building, and turned back even their own beloved Burgomaster Seitz when he appeared mounted on the fire engines to try and put out the flames. It was left to an old servant of the Emperor's, the then Police President Dr. Schober, to clear the streets by force, helped by Schutzbund units who turned out to keep their own extremists in check. The cause of the riot was rooted in the paramilitary struggle: anger that a Vienna court had acquitted a group of Heimwehr men who had taken two lives in a clash with the Schutzbund six months previously. And the effect of the riot was to promote that struggle to the status of an undeclared nation-wide war.

The Socialists, now faced with the bitter truth that even their `comrades' in the police would fire on them if ordered to, redoubled their drive to equip their Schutzbund as a powerful fighting force. On the other side, the Chancellor of the day, Prelate Seipel, took the even graver decision to back and build up Austrian Christian Falangist Leader Dollfuss 1934the Heimwehr as an anti-Marxist counter-army to support the weak regular forces of the Government. The 15th of July 1927 thus gave birth to the Heimwehr as a facto in national politics. It had already dealt mortal wounds to the cause both of justice and of democracy in Austria, for the Vienna court's verdict was as inexcusable as the violence which followed it. Taken together, they formally enthroned party strife over law and order. On that fatal day, which was the beginning of the end of the First Republic, it should be noted that Dollfuss was still far removed from politics. In fact, he had only just been promoted Director of the Lower Austrian Agricultural Chamber and was preparing to get down in earnest to his social reforms among the peasantry. The Heimwehr, which now found itself being commended to the nation by nobody less than the great Seipel ('The yearning for true democracy is one of the strongest driving forces in the Heimwehr movement', the prelate had declared in Graz in December 1928), was forced to shake itself out of its purely provincial framework. The search began for national leaders and for a national program. Both ended miserably.

The provincial basis, which had kept the movement together at the beginning, helped to tear it apart by accentuating personal rivalries at the end. Of these feuds, the most bitter and important was that between Starhemberg and the leader of the Vienna group, Major Emil Fey, whom we shall eventually meet in the Chancellery building on the day of Dollfuss's murder. This and other quarrels would have sufficed by themselves to condemn the Heimwehr to a secondary role in the state's affairs. But an even greater organic weakness was the lack of any unifying philosophy or program beyond the negative slogans of anti-Marxism which, after 1927, often drowned its patriotic undertones and gave the whole movement a shrill and vicious sound. Not that the Heimwehr can be blamed for this. It had suddenly been transplanted by Seipel's influence from the provinces to the capital, where it found all the standard theories of politics already appropriated by the existing parties. So it was forced to go shopping for something out-of-the-way, like a newcomer to smart female society who looks for an extravagant hat. It soon found what it wanted: the old model of Vogelsang's "Catholic corporative state", now being fashioned up-to-date by the lectures of Othmar Spann at the Vienna University and the practical example of Mussolini in Rome.

"Faute de mieux", Spann's theory of the "vertical grouping" of society according to professions and occupations, instead of the `horizontal grouping' of the class system, was adopted as the Heimwehr credo. As it was something few of the leaders had ever thought about before, and which even fewer of them ever properly digested, the program always looked somewhat lop-sided. But, for the moment, it suited the Heimwehr's need for novelty and for dynamism well enough. The fact that the Heimwehr had been summoned onto the national stage to play the strong-armed hero against Marxism gave it yet another woeful characteristic - the natural leaning to violence as its own justification for existence. And the adoption of the Spann Ständestaat doctrine gave this tendency a political content by preaching an alternative to parliamentary democracy as such. As a result of all this, it was little wonder that the lusty captains of the Heimwehr, who were mostly of modest intellectual stature, soon began to regard the abolition of Parliament as a sort of sacred duty which God, through the intermediary of the omniscient Prelate Seipel, had thrust upon them. (The fact that Seipel also swung over to corporative doctrines during the last phase of his life made this all the more plausible.)

The Heimwehr's defeat in their first and only attempt to achieve power by quasi-constitutional means broke theAustrian Christian Falangist V Flag last barriers on their restraint. In September 1929 - probably the peak period of their influence - they had been largely instrumental in securing the appointment of the pan-Germans' hope, Johannes Schober (the `hero of 1927'), as Chancellor. Schober took office with the mandate, and with the firm personal intention, of revising the Constitution in order to make it less 'Parliament-heavy'. But the extremists who had hoped that he would introduce an authoritarian Praesidial form of government had misjudged this conscientious, almost pedantic, guardian of law and order. His new constitution removed the Austrian Presidency from being a mere nominee of Parliament and introduced a long overdue centralization of the security forces; but it strengthened rather than weakened the legal democratic framework of the Republic. The Heimwehr, having saddled a fiery horse for Schober, were furious that he refused to gallop, and they now sought other mounts themselves. What resulted was an outright putsch philosophy and at least one actual putsch attempt.

The philosophy was enunciated by the radicals of the Heimwehr leadership in their notorious "Korneuburg Oath" of May 1930. The "formal democracy" of Parliament was condemned outright by the oath-takers, who declared their readiness to seize power by force in Austria and turn the country into a Führerstaat with a corporative basis. And the putsch itself came barely four months later, when the Styrian Heimwehr leader Pfrimer suddenly announced to an astonished country that he was the stern Messiah Austria was waiting for, and proceeded to march on Vienna to mount his throne. A few Heimwehr units from Upper and Lower Austria took to the road as well, but the revolt soon bogged down in the quicksands of utter popular indifference. Like Bauer in 1934, Pfrimer in 1931 found the Austrians very difficult people to push up on to the barricades. Unhappily, the Government showed itself almost as indifferent as the general public, and what had been a blatant act of revolution was treated as a naughty student prank-yet another sign of the low ebb of the Republic's political conscience. The reader might well ask, in view of this sorry chronicle of irresponsibility and violence, why the Heimwehr have been placed in our circle to the immediate right of the Christian Socials as regards their `positive' qualities.

The justification is the argument that what the First Austrian Republic needed even more than true democracy (which it never had) was a true sense of its own national identity (which Dollfuss was to give it too late). And, for all its lunatic fringes, for all its philandering with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, for all the nonsense talked by its extremist leaders most of the time, and the harm they did nearly all of the time, the Heimwehr deep down had an Austrian heart. This often took a lot of finding and gave off confusing sounds but, especially among the rank-and-file, it kept beating somehow. Even that veteran Anschluss friend Field-Marshal Bardolff found this essential "Austrianness" of the Heimwehr to his liking. By 1929 he had become one of its leading propagandists and defined its aims in that year as `the rooting out of Marxism, the sweeping away of the parliamentary party system, the rebuilding of Austria into an authoritarian state corporatively organized, the reorganization of the economy on the principle "common interests before private interests", and finally, the re-establishment of Austria as the Eastern Mark of the German Empire. In a program like this, there was something for almost everybody, and the Heimwehr following was composed accordingly : anti-Semites rubbed shoulders with middle-class Viennese Jews seeking protection in anything which fought both Marxists and Nazis; social reformers, attracted by its bogus revivalism, jostled with industrialists who saw security in its promises of a "vertical" state; Monarchists mingled with Republicans and outright Fascists with disillusioned democrats. The only common planks which this motley company could tread on together were their desire to destroy Social Democracy and a desire to preserve Austria and her way of life in one of various strange settings. The first aspect has been stressed often enough in the writings of Austrian Left-Wing émigrés ; the second has been conveniently ignored. Yet it was Hitler himself who paid the most eloquent tribute to this latter characteristic. Several thousand Heimwehr officials in Vienna and the provinces were among the 90,000 Austrians whom, it is estimated, the Nazis arrested between the 12th and 21st of March, 1938 - the first ten days of the seven-year German domination. Even those who, at one time or another, had bargained secretly with the Nazis were not immune, for the bargain they sought had been an Austrian one.

To sum up, the Heimwehr had nothing to be ashamed of in their origins and nothing to be ashamed of in their end. Their record in between was a strange blend of the valuable and the vicious. They helped Austrian patriotism into its cradle and Austrian democracy into its grave. The Austrian pan-Germans we have encountered briefly already in dealing with Bardolffs' circle and the early post-war enthusiasms of Dollfuss himself. They stemmed just as clearly from the old Empire's problems as did the Heimwehr from those of the young Republic. In fact, the pan-Germans symbolized that great dilemma which the logic of Bismarck had posed and the cannon of Koniggratz had tried in vain to resolve: how should the two German-speaking powers of Europe, Prussia and Austro-Hungary, live separately once they could no longer live together? Seen from the Austrian end, three basic solutions had crystallized during the second half of the 19th century.

At one extreme stood those who, like Prince Schwarzenberg, wanted to make Vienna the centre of a revived Holy Roman Empire; these men were the spiritual fathers of an Austrian patriotism, and were pan-German only in the sense that they regarded the whole racial community of seventy millions, from the Adriatic to the Baltic, as proper subjects for Franz Josef. In the middle were the more classic cases - a large, earnest and confused batch of thinkers who searched for some form of coexistence and partnership between Wilhelmian Germany and Habsburg Austria. This lot were always torn between Vienna as their political capital and Berlin as their spiritual and intellectual center. In their purest form, they lived on in the Austrian Republic as the advocates of the Zusammenschluss, a voluntary merger with Germany which would guarantee some measure of Austrian independence. At the other extreme in the Empire stood that group, inspired above all by Georg von Schonerer, who wished to dismantle Austro-Hungary altogether and attach its German speaking provinces to the Prussian crown. These were the purists, the masochists of Austria's pan-German community, seeking salvation in self-injury and, ultimately, in suicide. Their influence under the Habsburg crown they disavowed was small. But their anti-clericalism, their anti-Semitism, their worship of power, their Bismarckian-type personality cult, and their leaning towards violent and clear-cut solutions were all to find stronger and more sinister echoes in the Austrian Republic among the ranks of the Nazi sympathizers.

The nomination of Dollfuss as Chancellor on the 10th of May, 1932, took the general public somewhat by surprise, for the young Minister of Agriculture was not yet a national figure, despite the energetic mark he had made on the capital. But that jealous little world of Ministers, ex-Ministers, deputies, churchmen, intellectuals, industrialists end bureaucrats which misruled Austria at the time understood well enough the reasons behind President Miklas's choice. To begin with, by the fleeting standards of the day, Dollfuss was no newcomer to power; Government changes and reshuffles had been so frequent since the final retirement of Seipel and the collapse of the Bourgeois Bloc three years before that Dollfuss found himself one of the senior members of the outgoing Buresch Cabinet. Furthermore, he was a Minister who had never been a member of Parliament ; and it spoke volumes for the disrepute into which that body had already sunk by 1932 that this could be considered a political virtue in itself.

Engelbert Dollfuss at his deskAfter less than fifteen years of life, the Republic had already got round to the bad habits of the Habsburgs, and was seeking its salvation in periodic bouts of 'rule by experts'. The weight of support which the new Chancellor-designate could hope to command was, moreover, both large and varied. He was sure of the solid backing of the peasantry and above all of the Lower Austrian peasantry who, in his time even more than today, were the squat pillar of state. Just as the peasants revered him as their image and their benefactor, so the Catholic Church blessed him as one of her most ardent sons. Indeed, for the Vatican. Dollfuss' appearance on the Vienna scene might almost have been providential. It was almost exactly a year after Pope Pius XI had produced his famous encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno' ; and now, in one Catholic country of Europe at least, a vigorous and devout social reformer had come to power who was to try and turn those ideas into reality.

A new political papal legate was needed in Austria, for the great Monsignor Seipel had at last burnt out his feverish reserves of strength. Dollfuss had entered politics too late to have had much substantial contact with that formidable Christian gladiator. But, though they were total contrasts in social background, upbringing and temperament, there was much that linked the young agrarian with the old ascetic. Both were driven by the same religious inspiration which made them see everything as sub auspicious aeternitatis; both had the same simple tastes and relentlessly high standards of personal integrity; both had the same deep love of their Austrian fatherland and the same struggle to reconcile this with their loyalties to the German race; above all, in the previous decade, both had gone through the same transformation in their political thinking, that silent, almost unconscious swing from Left to Right, from radicalism to authoritarianism, which characterized so many Austrian Catholic intellectuals of the period. Whatever conflicting points can be traced in their development arise mainly from the fact that the pace of this change was different in the two men. The direction remained the same, and both arrived inexorably at the same destination: the ideal of the Christian corporative state which was supposed to solve both the external dilemma of Austrian nation versus German race and the internal riddle of preserving democracy without parliamentarianism.

It was their faith in this ideal, and the belief that they were destined as Catholic statesmen to achieve it, which gave both men their strength, Seipel the cold immovability of a marble statue, and Dollfuss the instinctive sure-footedness of a sleep-walker. Seipel was a mortally sick man when his successor came to power. But, after a long bedside talk with Dollfuss a few days before the end, he died happy in the conviction that the Kingdom of God, as Pius XI had seen it, would now be established in Austria. 'Sister, the world is getting healthy again', the dying statesman called out to his nurse after Dollfuss had visited him to report on his success over the Lausanne loan and discuss his plans for the future. So Dollfuss inherited Seipel's blessing and was widely regarded as his successor, almost in the same flesh, a sort of rustic Emperor Bonaparte emerging out of the prelate's First Consul. This was no small advantage, for the mystique of Seipel was great. Of equal importance was the very tangible support which the new Chancellor got, at his nomination and throughout his brief career, from the "Cartellverband or C.V., the Catholic students" association, a branch of which he had joined in his university days. The power of the 'C.V.' in pre-war Austria was something unique: a combination of a Hindu caste, a medieval gild, an American freemasons' order and the British school-tie clique.

The 'C.V.' had sprung up soon after the 1848 revolution as an association of the Catholic elite designed to combat liberalism and nationalism (the two arch-enemies of the 19th-century conservative) throughout the German lands. It was ultramontane in origin; the movement started in Munich in 1854 and the first Vienna branch, the 'Austria', was founded in 1859, seven years before Bismarck flung the Habsburg Empire out of the German Confederation. In the 1930's, its Austrian members did not number more than a few thousand. But, between them, they counted most of the best brains and stoutest anti-Marxist hearts to be found anywhere on the Catholic Right Wing. Unlike their brothers in Germany, who could vote Center or even Left if they chose, the 'C.V.' in Austria were forced by party strife into an uncompromising Conservative stand and thus, incidentally, forced into politics: support for the Austro-Marxists or the Jewish liberals was automatically ruled out, while the Austrian extreme pan-Germans, though socially acceptable, had heinous anti-Roman leanings. What emerged was a tightly-knit Catholic social and intellectual clan whose political inflexibility was both its strength and its weakness. Every recruit had sworn on joining to be 'a true friend and brother' to his comrades, and the effects of this oath were to be seen in the unfailing support which 'C.V.' members afforded each other throughout their lives in every public and private endeavor.

The influence of this organization on Dollfuss was enormous, with corresponding benefits and handicaps. For him, the 'C.V.' was not only a constant source of personal comfort and spiritual strength ; it was also a physical Praetorian Guard. Wherever and whenever he was not absolutely forced to accept a Heimwehr nominee for a key post he put in a 'C.V.' colleague : Schuschnigg, Ender, Stepan, Schmitz, Gleissner, Kemptner and E. K. Winter are a few of the many examples we shall meet with later on. It is worth noting here that, despite differences of opinion, none of these betrayed his personal trust. Especially when compared with the woeful standards of the time, the best of Dollfuss' 'C.V.' following were outstanding for their loyalty and integrity. But even if Church, 'C.V.' and peasantry stood solidly behind Dollfuss in 1932, it must not be assumed that he was the nominee of a closed ultra-conservative group.

The unique strength of the new Chancellor was that, while enjoying all this traditional support, he could also look hopefully across to rival camps. His pioneering social reform work in Lower Austria made him one of the very few Catholic leaders acceptable to the Left Wing. In these days, he had good personal relations with both Bauer and Deutsch, while his record showed, plainly and almost embarrassingly, that Dollfuss entered office as good a practical Socialist, if not better, than either of these Austro-Marxist radicals. Moreover, his old pan-German enthusiasms and his strong peasant ties suggested that he might be able to lead back both the Greater Germans and the agrarian Landbund into the Right-Wing Coalition. These were all vital factors in the complicated political arithmetics of the day. At Dollfuss accession, Parliament consisted of 66 Christian-Socialists, 10 members of Schober's Greater German group, 9 representatives of the liberal Landbund,
8 Heimwehr deputies and 72 Social Democrats. The true balance between Right and Left was even slimmer. The month before, on the 24th of April, 1932, municipal elections had been held in Vienna, Lower Austria, Styria, Salzburg and Carinthia, whose outcome indicated that this distribution of seats no longer reflected the electorate's mood.

For the first time, the Nazis had competed at the polls, leaping through a costly propaganda paper hoop into the Austrian political arena. They achieved spectacular successes, mopping up large slices of the Greater German, Landbund and Heimwehr vote and even, in Vienna, making inroads into the Christian-Social camp. Only the Socialists held their ground and could now claim, with every justice, to be the biggest single party in the land. Not unnaturally, therefore, they headed the clamor for new general elections. The Christian-Social leadership panicked. They failed to realize that the whole pan-German following in Austria, though regrouping noisily under the swastika, was still heavily outnumbered by the two main democratic parties. Instead, frightened by the rather improbable bogy of a Marxist-Nazi majority partnership, they contrived to postpone new elections, first for six months and then for a further year.

Those elections were never held; for when, in March 1933, this unworkable, unrepresentative Parliament obligingly committed suicide, Dollfuss promptly nailed down its coffin and sat himself on the lid. Thus, when the moral challenge of the Anschluss finally came in 1938, Austria's leaders had been tapping in the dark for nearly six years as to the nation's true political loyalties. This was a costly error of the whole Catholic Right Wing, for which the hapless Schuschnigg was called on to atone.

In the spring of 1932, however, the sky over Vienna was too full of local squalls for the gathering German tempest to be seen. There had already been a handful of stop-gap administrations since the great Bourgeois Bloc partnership had broken down (the Christian-Socials Streeruwitz, Vaugoin, Ender and Buresch as well as the Greater German leader Schober had all tried their hand) ; and the only concern of the day was the typically Viennese one of 'muddling on'. So Dollfuss was picked to try his skill at the old game of constructing a Right-Wing majority out of the awkward out-of-date parliamentary fragments available.

It took him till May 20, and it is not too much to say that, in those ten days and nights of search for a mandate, Austria's domestic future, as well as his own political destiny, were sealed. His first proposal to his party colleagues, a little-known fact, was for a working agreement with the Socialists. Something might conceivably have come of this, in view of his personal standing with the Left Wing at the time, had it not been for those April municipal elections. But the Socialist now wanted a new ballot, not a new Coalition, so the idea was dropped.

Even more fateful was the refusal of the Greater German Party, who were trying to maintain their political profile by staying in opposition, to throw in their lot with Dollfuss. For though, as had been hoped, he won over the Landbund, their 9 seats added to his own party's 66 still only gave him 75 seats in the Parliament of 165. There remained, as the solitary alternative, the eight Heimwehr deputies, with whom he had little contact and less sympathy, but without whom he could not even start. His friends testify to the reluctance with which he approached them to join his Coalition, and President Miklas himself is said to have hesitated loudly before agreeing; but if a Government was to be formed by Dollfuss, there was no other way. The misgivings of both Chancellor and President were amply fulfilled. The Heimwehr clambered into power on Dollfuss' shoulders and they hung on there to the tragic end, like a tiger at the kill.

[Barbarossa]

With their pledge, Dollfuss now had a majority of exactly one vote: the 83 of his assorted Right-Wing camp against 82 of the Socialist and Greater German opposition combined. The first Cabinet he presented showed the price at which this slender lead had been bought. He retained for himself the portfolios of Foreign Affairs and Agriculture and, of his own circle, Schuschnigg and Vaugoin were reappointed Ministers of Justice and War respectively. The Landbund leader Winkler was paid for his support by the post of Vice-Chancellor. The Heimwehr presented, and were paid, the highest bill for the smallest yet most indispensable service. Their nominee, Guido Jakoncig, became Minister of Trade and two other men with strong Heimwehr sympathies, Hermann Ach and the notorious Rintelen, were appointed to the Ministries of Interior and Education. Dollfuss's Cabinet thus started off Heimwehr-heavy', and the weight only seemed to grow heavier with time.

Once a majority of sorts had been achieved, however, the immediate problems to be tackled were not political but economic. Indeed, quite apart from tactical party considerations, it was also the wave of economic misery surging in Austria which had borne Dollfuss into office. The 'little miracle' of stabilization he had achieved the previous year with the Federal Railways was still green in the memory, and it was hoped he could now perform the greater miracle of steadying the economy as a whole. His first governmental program, produced on the 27th of May, reflected these hopes. Its ideological aspects had to be rewritten two or three times to meet the demands of his Heimwehr and Landbund allies — an ominous portent of things to come. But the national message was clear enough : the priority of economic requirements over party politics and a call for a concerted effort to overcome the emergency.

Austria's plight at the time was enough to daunt the bravest heart. The collapse of the Creditanstalt bank twelve months before had thrown not only the little Republic but great countries and continents abroad into confusion. At Chequers, country seat of the British Prime Minister, the Governor of the Bank of England broke into a conference between Ramsay MacDonald and the visiting German Chancellor Brüning with the dramatic cry: South-East Europe is in flames. The Creditanstalt in Vienna has closed its counters.' And, in faraway Uganda, the same news, received over the tom-toms a few days later, was said to have promptly decreased the number of bullocks being offered for a comely wife. The Creditanstalt was the last of the great old Austro-Hungarian banks still operating in the Austrian capital, and it still carried the magic nimbus of the vanished Empire. It was as though the outside world, despite the reparations burdens which it had piled on Vienna, simply could not believe that this particular piece of history could collapse.

But collapse it did, with a current deficit of 140 million schillings, which leapt up by another 71 million dollars or 500 million schillings after the claims of foreign creditors had poured in. Nearly all of this gigantic sum had to be underwritten by the Government, and years of sacrifice and tortuous negotiations were to follow before the debt could be finally settled. What Dollfuss inherited were the short-term repercussions : at home, a shattering blow at the country's finances and with it, another blow at the nation's sorely-tried faith in its rulers; abroad, the delivering-up of Austria, trussed like a diplomatic turkey, to the Western Powers, who would produce financial aid only on their terms.

Despite the problem, and despite the issues involved in solving it, Dollfuss did, in fact, achieve that greater miracle of rescuing the nation's economy. Whatever else he failed in, or left half-completed at his death, he succeeded within two years in changing Austria's bankruptcy into near-stability and her despair into hope. This achievement, so often blotted out by the political storms which surround his memory, deserves recording briefly here. When he took over power the Austrian Budget was over 300 million schillings in the red, not counting the then incalculable burden of the Creditanstalt affair ; the number of registered unemployed stood at 329,627and was soon to rise to a new record of nearly 377,000; in less than a year, the savings banks' deposits had dropped by 20 per cent, the gold and foreign currency reserves by 25 per cent, while the amount of currency in circulation had risen by over 10 per cent. The excess of imports over exports equaled a quarter of the country's total trade and the musty smell of inflation was in the air.

By the time Nazi bullets removed Dollfuss from the scene he had presented a completely balanced Budget for 1934; the figures of registered unemployed had been reduced by 54,000; the savings banks' deposits were once more above their pre-crisis level of 2000 million schillings; the tills of the National Bank were filling up fast, and note circulation had been cut back by almost 30 per cent. The currency had become healthy enough to withstand the effects of all the Western devaluation measures of 1933, and the nation's adverse trade balance had been reduced from 25 to 19 per cent of the total. Economically at least, the dying Seipel's prophecy had come true.

It is true that all Dollfuss' economic thinking and reform work stood in the shadow of his peasant origin and that he tended to look at the whole economic picture through a farmer's spectacles. This was social, as much as anything else. As he declared in Budapest shortly before his death: "The days when the poets had to warn that the peasant was no toy are long passed. Today we all know that the peasant is the foundation of a healthy people from the national as well as the economic point of view." He believed Passionately that "any nation which fails to secure its own bread supply within its own borders gives up a good portion of its political freedom" (Graz, November 6, 1932). And he was greatly impressed by the argument that the first crisis of the world-wide depression was the agrarian crisis' (Innsbruck, April 22, 1933).

Yet though he drove up agricultural production with every means at his disposal, fostering Austria's peasants with his `neighbor-state preference treaties', he never lost sight of those broader perspectives with which he was less familiar; to have done so, indeed, would have betrayed the whole corporative ideal to which he had become committed. Economically speaking, it is not so much narrow vision he might be reproached with as a view taken habitually from the same standpoint. This he expressed perfectly himself: "There can be no Austrian economy if the peasant is ruined; but the peasant cannot exist by himself unless industry and commerce also flourish" (Salzburg, May 10, 1934). In fact, some of the most spectacular strides which the Austrian economy made during his two years of Chancellorship were in the industrial field. The overall index of industrial output jumped from 78 to 88 in the one twelve-month period between October 1932 and October 1933. All branches shared in this expansion, with textiles, timber, cellulose and steel well to the fore. Dollfuss may not have grasped the full significance and speed of the new industrial revolution, but he did not fail to promote it.

The entrance ticket which he had had to pay for his Chancellorship was the alliance with the Heimwehr ; and, just as inevitably, the initial price for all these economic reforms was the Western loan. In the summer of 1932 Austria's only road to stability lay through Lausanne. This brings us, as it brought Dollfuss, abruptly back to the domestic political scene.

The name ofEngelbert Dollfuss at the speaker's podium Engelbert Dollfuss as Austria's leading agrarian reformer, as her economic savior, as the first and foremost patriot of the young Republic, and as the first challenger of Hitler anywhere on the European continent, is secure. So secure that, despite the bitter and biased controversies of the day, even his Austro-Marxist opponents have endorsed all of these achievements, or at least have left them unchallenged. The central charge leveled by all of his enemies and some of his admirers both in Austria and abroad, is that he was personally responsible for the failure of the Catholic Right Wing to reach an emergency working agreement with the Socialist Left. A corollary to this charge is that the tragedy which resulted, the brief but bloody Civil War of February 1934, was either provoked by him, suppressed by him with unnecessary harshness, or both.

No political study of Dollfuss would be complete which did not attempt to examine this charge as objectively as the old polemical material of the time permits, while drawing on as much new material as the survivors of that period can provide. It is, in fact, the essence of the period, as well as the essence of the man. For to trace the story of his relations with the Socialists is also to trace Austria's via dolorosa into domestic ruin. (His parallel problem of how to bridle the Nazis belongs essentially in the field of foreign affairs, and is dealt with separately under that heading.)

Dollfuss's relations with the Austro-Marxists during his two years of power can be divided into three phases: first, between his accession in May 1932 and the disappearance of Parliament in March 1933; second, the eleven-month period between the suicide of Parliament and the explosion of February 1934; and third, between the Civil War itself and its aftermath and the death of Dollfuss five months later. They might be called the 'pre-March', 'pre-February', and 'pre-July' phases respectively.

It must again be recalled that, when Dollfuss came to power, his personal standing with the Socialists as a practical social worker and a 'progressive Catholic' was high; on his part, loaned for twenty years ; the political price was an extension of the 1922 Anschluss ban' between Austria and Germany for a further ten years. The aid meant everything ; the price, by 1932, meant almost nothing, least of all to the Germany of the day, who still had a few months of democracy left in front of her, and was anyway sick to death of Vienna's halfhearted courtship.

Yet, having fought for the pact at Lausanne, Dollfuss got home to find he would have to fight for it all over again in his own Parliament. Socialists and Greater Germans combined to try and block the passage of the bill. Their arguments were that the extended Anschluss ban was unacceptable and that, economically, Austria could outride the storm without foreign help. To what extent they believed in either argument in the Vienna of 1932 is questionable. Their real aim was tactical: to break the struggling Dollfuss Government at all costs and clear the way for new elections.

A nerve-wrecking battle now began which was not calculated to endear the Chancellor either to the opposition or to the current Parliament itself. He carried the first challenge by default on the 3rd of August with an 81 : 81 vote, a respite obtained only because a substitute voter for Dr. Seipel, who had died the day before, was produced at lightning speed. A fortnight later he squeezed through by the razor-edge majority of 81 : 80, thanks to the providential absence of an opposition deputy. The Socialists in the Federal Council promptly passed a suspensive veto, but on August 30 Dollfuss was finally able to confirm the bill with an 82 : 80 majority. Again, the death of an ex-Chancellor, this time the veteran pan-German leader Schober, came to his aid; and again, a lucky defection occurred in his opponents' ranks.

These bitter weeks taught Dollfuss two things. The first was that Austria's Socialists had as yet no national foreign policy and, on their radical wing, were just not capable of thinking as Austrians tout court. They knew loyalty to a party narrower than their state and to an ideology broader than their state; but the one was too little and the other too much for the country's needs. The second was that, as regards the Parliament of the day, the country's fate hinged either on the undertaker or on one single Left-Wing deputy missing his early morning tram or one single Right-Wing member going off to shoot roebuck for the week-end. It is possible to blame him, later on, for not facing the challenge of forming a new Parliament. But he can hardly be reproached in those first months of office for getting heartily fed up with the existing one.

The heated debates over the Lausanne loan had already caused epithets like 'Traitor' and 'Bolshevik' to fly between Dollfuss and Bauer. The gap between the Chancellor and the rest of his parliamentary opposition widened out more in the autumn, when the Greater Germans rejected a direct and secret appeal which Dollfuss sent them to save him from increasing concessions to the Heimwehr. These worthies were now demanding, in addition to their existing posts, the nomination of their Vienna leader Major Emil Fey as State Secretary for Security, and had threatened to walk out of the Government Coalition unless the demand were met. Through his Vice-Chancellor Winkler, Dollfuss explained his dilemma to the Greater Germans and implored them once again to join forces, thus enabling him to shed the Heimwehr burden. They refused; Major Fey was appointed ; and with him, the first shadows, both of February 1934 and July 1934, fell across the Vienna scene.

As regards the Socialist sector of the opposition, the Chancellor's second decisive breach was produced by the so-called Hirtenberg Arms affair', which broke out in January 1933. Socialist railway workers at the Carinthian rail junction of Villach discovered large consignments of rifles and machine-guns in the sidings which were being transported, under falsified consignment notes, from Italy to Hungary.

The Austrian arms magnate Mandl, an intimate member of the Heimwehr circle grouped around Prince Starhemberg, was involved in the operation, which appears to have been inspired by Rome. The Socialists could scarcely be blamed for making the most of their discovery, and banner publicity followed in the party organ Arbeiter Zeitung. But though it was a party advantage they sought, what followed was a national embarrassment. Protest notes rained in on Vienna from the Western Powers and the Little Entente against this illegal strengthening of revanchist Hungary'. It was only after much prevarication, coupled with alleged attempts to push through the deal by bribery, that the offending arms were requisitioned, and were eventually used to re-equip the Austrian Army.

Hitler's arrival to power in Germany soon gave the Cabinets of Europe more substantial food for thought, and the Hirtenberg affair, judged as a diplomatic incident, subsided almost as rapidly as it had arisen. But Dollfuss, somewhat unreasonably mistaking outcome for intention, accused the Socialists of deliberately trying to discredit the Republic before the world. In fact, the whole affair, which had an unsavory flavor of Fascist intrigue and private arms-running, must be booked to the debit account of his own Right-Wing coalition, or rather, to those dubious Heimwehr allies it reluctantly nourished in its midst.

Dollfuss's initial honeymoon with the Socialists was therefore already over and done with, and his patience with Parliament sorely tried, when that quarrelsome body climaxed its rather clownish career with a public and accidental suicide. The details of the tragi-comedy of the 4th of March, 1933, need only be briefly recounted here. Parliament was debating disciplinary action against striking railway workers (what with his term as Board President, and the munitions train of the Hirtenberg affair, railways seem to have haunted Dollfuss' career). The vital vote to carry an opposition motion of censure had somehow got mixed up in the urns. The Socialist First President of the Assembly, Dr. Renner, laid down his office in order to be able to cast his ballot from the floor in a new division. The Second President, the Christian-Socialist Ramek, followed suit after a confused interval, partly in order to safeguard the Government's majority. There was still a Third President left (the Parliament was as strong on Presidents as the state was weak). But this last bastion of the Assembly, the Greater German Dr. Straffner, acted on a dumb reflex like Pavlov's famous dog. For no apparent reason other than that resignations were in the air that day, he also laid down his office and even forgot, in the general clamor, to declare this monstrous session closed.

No Right-Wing deputy on that fateful afternoon had dreamed of murdering the Assembly as a constitutional body; and no one of the Left Wing was even aware that, politically speaking, they were taking their own lives. This very self-centered witlessness summed up, better than any words, the deficiencies of Austria's Parliament, which perhaps needs a brief epitaph here. As we have seen, it had been called into life fifteen years before to replace overnight in the Republic all that massive authority that the dynasty had represented for six centuries in the Empire. Even more was expected of those neo-classical caryatids. For if Franz Josef was a 'latent despot', Parliament in the early 'twenties was an active despot, appointing and controlling both the Head of State and the Federal Government; the vox populi gone somewhat hoarse and berserk. Every party bore with this system; but basically, it was the Socialists' creation, for their only hope of burying all Austrian history before November 1918 was to erect a huge parliamentary structure over its open grave.

[Barbarossa]

The Dream

In Vienna on the 1st of May, 1934, the first and almost certainly the last attempt was made in the 20th century to erect the Kingdom of God upon earth. Despite all its deficiencies and absurdities, despite its pathetically artificial birth, its brief four years of painful half-life and its ignominious end, this is how the 'May Constitution' of Dollfuss should be judged; for this was how he judged it himself. For him, it was not an instrument of secular tyranny but an emergency charter of divine enlightenment. It drew its basic inspiration not (as has so often and so falsely been stated) from the contemporary Fascism of Mussolini but from the ancient vision of St. Augustine's Civitas Dei. With it, Dollfuss made a desperate and utterly doomed attempt to cure the ills of Austria and of Europe with the forgotten political physic of the Universal Church, summoning back the medieval order of life from behind the Renaissance to redress the wrongs of his modern age.

The first words of this extraordinary document read : 'In the name of God, the Almighty, from Whom all Justice derives, the Austrian people receive . . . this Constitution'. And the last words of the famous speech in which Dollfuss announced his new project ran: 'We all go away today in the faith that we are fulfilling a higher mission. Just as the crusaders were permeated with this same faith . . . so we also look with firm trust to the future, in the conviction — God wills it!'' There were many other ingredients in the experiment, either borrowed direct from Fascist Italy or culled indiscriminately from the political and religious philosophies of the previous fifty years. Most were of Dollfuss's own choosing; some he was talked into and some he was forced into. The end product of all this ideological compromise and crossbreeding would scarcely have been recognized by Augustine. Yet that venerable saint would have detected, however submerged and distorted, his own spirit pulsating somewhere beneath its creation.

What sets Dollfuss apart from all the dictators and semi-dictators of the authoritarian age in which he lived is that it was this Christian ideal which always drove him on, and it was the Christian values and responsibilities by which he always sought to act. This was not a mere cloak of respectability to throw over his ambition, no more than those opening words of the Constitution were intended as a mere gloss over despotism. As far as is possible in politics, the man was the statesman; and Dollfuss as Chancellor was still, at heart, that pious peasant child who had been struck dumb by the altar-piece at Kirnberg, or that earnest divinity student who had abandoned theology 'because he would rather be a good Christian than a bad priest'.

Before examining the various elements in Dollfuss's reform program, and the various ends it was designed to fulfill, it is worth glancing at some of the main provisions in the Constitution itself. From the political point of view, the 1934 Constitution was simply an attempt to provide Austria with an alternative to that form of parliamentarianism which had capsized so dramatically in Vienna the year before. The Constitution was thus the legal and logical extension of the Fatherland Front. Like that movement, it also tried to adapt the overwhelmingly authoritarian trends of the day to suit Austria's history and national character and, above all, to give her unity, security and protection against those who tried openly to destroy her. Whatever ancient and divine parentage it could trace in St. Augustine and Pope Leo XIII, the May Constitution was directly descended on the distaff side from

Adolf Hitler. Those same bricks with which Dollfuss hoped eventually to build a new Christian order were also used immediately for a protective wall to keep out the Nazis. He tried to learn from the past to guide the future; but it was Austria's present he was really trying to save. The whole concept thus inevitably became a hopeless mixture of long range idealism and short term improvisations.

This is reflected in the elaborate system of advisory bodies it set up. These were meant to represent the new order of society more democratically than Parliament had ever represented the old, yet without impairing that strong centralized authority on which the country's best hopes of safety were thought to depend. Thus the Dollfuss Constitution provided for no fewer than five legislative bodies to 'advise' the Government. All were interlocked and interconnected and the sum total of their real power was, to begin with, slight. Yet their mere presence reflected the Chancellor's wish to avoid any one-man despotism a wish he could not have fulfilled in the Austria of his day even had he tried.

The first of these queer components in the new Legislative was the so-called Council of State, a sort of Senate consisting of not less than 4o and not more than so persons, appointed and selected by the Federal President from among 'worthy citizens of good character whose behavior and achievements to date justify the expectation that they will have complete understanding for the needs and tasks of the state'. This prim, almost Cromwellian-sounding body was to sit in permanence, 'renewing itself by the replacement of its individual members', to discuss the Government's draft laws in conjunction with three other organs. Two of these, the so-called Federal Cultural Council and the Federal Economic Council, reflected the corporative-syndicalist structure of the new system. The third, the Provincial Council, embodied the reduced powers and privileges which Austria's ancient provinces were allowed to carry forward into the centralized state.

The Federal Cultural Council consisted of 30-40 representatives drawn from the recognized churches and religious communities, the school and education authorities, and the world of Austrian science and culture. On paper, this looked a reasonably compact and homogeneous organ. But the composition of its sister body, the Economic Council, showed up the awkward jagged edges of Dollfuss's Ständestaat at their worst. This was to be made up of 70-80 delegates from the various professional or occupational groupings (the nearest translation for Stand' in this context) into which the new Austrian society was being reshuffled. These groupings were seven in number, Agriculture and Forestry; Industry and Mining; Crafts (Gewerbe); Trade and Communications; Banking, Credit and Insurance; the free professions; and finally, the Civil Servants.

Even when set down in the bold, fat type and neat subparagraphs of the official Constitution text, this looks a strangely inadequate way to try and organize 62 million Europeans in the 20th century; and real life was to present difficulties of which even the lawyers had never dreamed. By comparison, the Provincial Council seems natural and straight*forward enough. This is no wonder, for the historic provinces of Austria were the real foundations of the state centuries older and far more firmly rooted in the soil than the Republic itself. Their joint Council in the new legislative system consisted simply of the eight Provincial Governors (plus the Mayor of Vienna), together with their respective financial advisors.

All of these four bodies were consultative only and could merely comment on the laws passed to them by the Government. Together they elected from their own ranks the 59 members of the so-called Federal Diet, which was given the power of accepting or rejecting the measures put before it. As, however, the Government, which was the initiator of all legislation, could determine which laws to send to the Diet, and as that same Government anyway retained emergency powers to legislate by simple Cabinet decree, the Diet's pre*rogative of rejection did not amount to much.

Other salient points of the Constitution will be dealt with when describing Dollfuss's eleven-month struggle to save his original concept from the clutches of the Heimwehr. Only one symbolic feature need be mentioned here the coat-of*arms which he had designed for the new Austria. That heraldic abortion which the Socialists inflicted on the Republic in 1918 a single-headed eagle with broken chains dangling from its spurs and a hammer and sickle brandished in its claws, was blown clean off its perch. Dollfuss brought back the familiar double-headed eagle which had flown over the Austrian lands since the 13th century; he restored it without, of course, the Habsburg insignia, but also without all the Marxist trimmings.

This was a deliberate attempt to summon back the old Imperial glamour to flout in the face of the swastika and typified his whole endeavor to reach back into a past of which the Austrians could be proud, in order to give their hesitant new patriotism some emotional ground to stand on. Whatever one may feel of the rest of the 1934 Constitution, it is difficult not to regret that this particular reform was to last less than four years. Hitler brought in his own German eagle in 1938, and when Austria re-emerged again in 1945, the old single-headed eagle of 1918, still clanking its chains and brandishing its political tools of trade, rose up again from the smoking ruins with it, like a tattered and obstinate Phoenix.

The May Constitution was inorganic politically simply because the new social order which it was supposed to embody was itself an unnatural one. For Dollfuss, the idea of the Stände had conscious medieval associations; yet he over*looked the fact that it could only have made real sense in the Middle Ages. In a relatively undeveloped society, whose primitive industries could be confined within the straitjacket of the gild system, a people could be divided into those who fought, those who prayed, those who traded and those who ploughed. But after the Industrial Revolution, the mechanism of human society had become too intricate, and the divisions between classes and occupations too blurred, to organize a whole nation simply according to what its individual citizens did for a living. The idealism of the old crusading age helped to give Dollfuss and Austria the spiritual faith they both sought. But when he copied the economics of the Middle Ages, Dollfuss tripped over the very history he was trying to lean upon.

Having once said that, however, a whole series of provisos must be made to modify the generally accepted picture of the 1934 Constitution as a pure 'instrument of Fascism' and of Dollfuss as its cynical creator. And we must begin with a partial contradiction of what has just been stated. For, however impracticable any form of Ständestaat might ultimately be in the 10th century, the one people with whom it could conceivably have worked in Europe were, and still are, the Austrians. Whatever nonsense Dollfuss' blueprint may have made economically, it responded socially to many of the natural instincts of his countrymen: above all to their worship of Stand in the broader sense of professional or technical standing, and all those visible trimmings and attributes which go with it.

Even in his day, this was not just the nostalgia of the Austrian bureaucracy and bourgeoisie for the outward prestige and the inner security of the old Empire (though this played a major role). Both the workers and their leaders, caught up in their own vast ordered hierarchy of party and trade unions, had joined in the search for what are now known as 'status symbols'. Anyone who thinks that, on the social level, Dollfuss was tapping in the dark with his fellow countrymen need only look at a complete Ball Calendar for the Vienna Carnival season, either of his time or today. For here, quite unconsciously, the whole Ständestaat turns out each year in a spontaneous fancy dress parade. It is not simply the industrialists, the doctors, the lawyers, the journalists, the scientists, the actors, the civil servants, policemen and firemen who organize their separate functions.

The electricians, the seamstresses, the butchers, the chimney-sweeps and a score of other trades join in as well, sometimes representing the whole capital and sometimes one district, but one and all insisting that their particular ball is the only worthy social manifestation of their calling. Indeed, one is tempted to think that if Vienna really did dance all the year, as the Prince de Ligne once accused it of doing, Dollfuss might have squeezed through with his reforms. Were any further evidence on this point needed, Austria's system of motor-car registration could provide it. If the Vienna police today could be persuaded to publish the com*plete list of the owners of car registration numbers from 1 to 2000, together with the reasons, official or unofficial, as to why those numbers were issued, in separate blocks to separate groups of claimants, the 1934 Council of State, Cultural Council and Economic Council would all re-emerge once again, this time changing gear instead of changing partners.

Near to Dollfuss's own grave in the Vienna suburb of Hietzing there is a tombstone erected to the memory of a `Federal Railways Locomotive Driver's Widow'. The good woman had nothing else to leave on record about herself; and she needed nothing else. The railways in Austria were nationalized, and to have been married to a state employee, however humble, was a good enough recommendation to posterity. So the title was solemnly chiseled in for her. That humble tombstone is perhaps the most genuine tribute the murdered Chancellor could have desired to have near his last resting place. The man and the social psychology of his New Order have their permanent monuments side by side.

A more fundamental and controversial issue is the political one: to what extent was the May Constitution designed as an instrument of oppressive state power? Were liberal and democratic aspects included somewhere in its rigid super*structure? If so, were they included deliberately or accidentally? And, as it is Dollfuss who concerns us, how did he personally try and distribute this emphasis between authority and popular rights?

It must be noted to begin with that, even in the severe form in which it was finally adopted, the new system was far from being a dictatorship in the sense of the Nazi or Communist tyrannies. It was, indeed, some distance removed from Mussolini's Fascism, which influenced it more powerfully than any other foreign model. Its genuine basis of Christian morality mentioned above was only one of the factors which rescued it historically from this ignominious company. Another equally important distinction was that, unlike his powerful neighbors, Dollfuss never preached nor practiced the doctrine of state omnipotence. The Government kept total powers in reserve for an emergency, and the Nazi putsch which ended Dollfuss's life showed that this was no idle whim. But there was no attempt made, beyond earnestly preaching patriotism and Catholic reformism, to condition the thinking of the individual citizen or to control every aspect of his private life.

[Barbarossa]

Dollfuss himself opposed all efforts made by his extreme Right-Wing allies to drive him down that path of tyranny which so many countries of contemporary Europe were treading. His own words reveal this opposition; they show, incidentally, that in trying to soften the harsh trend of the age for his own people he was acting as an Austrian as well as a Christian. It was not merely that he morally condemned the excesses of a Hitler. His peasant's instinct told him that, in terms of practical politics, they could never be imposed on the mass of his own countrymen.

Thus, on the theme of state omnipotence he once declared: ' Authority does not mean arbitrary rule or dictatorship, but leadership by men who are aware of their responsibilities and prepared to make sacrifices. The national character of the Austrian people would make a so-called Gleichschalterei (political integration) which conceals nothing but a centralized mechanization, quite intolerable. . . In order that her own spiritual and material resources can be developed, Austria needs a free folk life, one that gives room for the individual personality and his native creative power to grow, all bound together by the duties of neighborly love, common racial descent and the common enjoyment of a thousand years of historical experience.' This is not just a different language from Mussolini's in the Piazza Venezia; it is a different philosophy of life. And to have mentioned Dollfuss in the same breath as Hitler would have been as unjust, and as offensive, to both.

The story which has now become available of that bitter behind-the-scenes dispute over the new Constitution between the Chancellor and the radical Heimwehr leaders shows, more*over, that Dollfuss tried honestly to live up to his words. We have seen how the suicide of Parliament in March 1933 created a temporary political vacuum and how, after the long period of sterile deadlock, a new approach to the problems and perils of the day was almost invited; we have also seen how Dollfuss, for four weeks undecided how to proceed, was first launched on his non-party and non-Parliament course by that personal experience in Villach in early April. The non*party aspect of his program had taken shape already the following May with the hurried creation of the 'Fatherland Front'. But the non-Parliament aspect called just as urgently for a new theory of government, in other words a new Constitution; and on June 29, 1933, while on a visit to Bregenz, Dollfuss requested his former chief, Dr. Ender, to undertake this task. Ender at first hesitated, smelling trouble for his own conscience as well as for Austria. It was only when Dollfuss assured him that the constitution he had in mind 'must be and will be democratic' that the ex-Chancellor gave his consent. Three weeks later, assisted by a small flock of legal advisers, Ender moved back into the Vienna Ballhaus*platz as 'Minister for Constitutional Reform'. The violent struggle within the Austrian Right Wing over the new political order had begun.

This continued throughout that summer, autumn and winter, and it was not until the 2nd of February, 1934, that the Austrian Cabinet first glimpsed a provisional text of the Constitution. The document presented to them then was the product of no fewer than thirteen major re-drafts, whose com*promises and internal contradictions reflected all the ideological confusion and the clash of wills which bedeviled Dollfuss at his task. In true Austrian style, what had emerged was not a simple instrument for dictatorship or for anything else, but rather a mixed bag of political tools thrown together in the hope that, even if most of them could not be used at the moment, a use would be found for all of them some time.

This very muddle provided, however, a certain measure of checks and safeguards on that authoritarian government which was installed at the centre. The Federal President was not a powerful figure; but he was no mere nominated nonentity. The provinces had relinquished much of their prized freedom to the capital, but they still retained their separate personality. The five advisory chambers of the Stände had no power to make or break laws, but their mere existence served to clog up the wheels of any state authority, whether Fascist or liberal. And quite apart from the nineteen unexceptionable articles on the Rights of the Citizen, the theory of democracy itself got a somewhat pathetic honorable mention in the introduction. The commentary to the very first article which (quite dishonestly) declares the new Austria to be a Federal State reads: `How far the democratic principle will be given expression can only be judged after the laws concerning the creation of the Federal Cultural Council etc. are in force'.
In fact, just before Hitler marched in four years later, negotiations had started up to give the two most important of these advisory bodies, the Council of State and the Federal Diet, the right to initiate laws as well as discuss them. This was not a contradiction of Dollfuss's concept but the expression of his own desperate long term hope that somehow, some*time, when the Nazi threat had been mastered abroad and the `honest workers' had been turned into loyal patriots at home, a sort of paternalist democracy would evolve in Austria. It was just as typical a compromise with reality as Austro*Marxism, and just as doomed.

Even the vaguest of these democratic loopholes had to be fought for, however, against the Right-Wing extremists, above all against the Heimwehr leaders Fey and Neustadter*Stürmer. The very first concept which Ender worked out had described Austria, for example, as a 'democratic corporative Republic' (his own view, and that of Dollfuss, being that these two attributes could easily be reconciled). And, though the word 'democratic' was later dropped, the word `Fascist' was never substituted, despite the fact that the Heimwehr were busy at the time proclaiming this as the only possible basis for the new order.

Dollfuss' own efforts to give the Constitution as liberal a flavor as possible are best illustrated by the dispute over the election of the Federal President, which held up agreement over the final draft until a few days before its publication. The Right-Wing extremists were determined to have an indirect election either by the Council of State or by a special Electoral College in order to emphasize that the President was purely a nominee of the Stände. Dollfuss' democratic advisers above all Ender and the Landbund leader Winkler insisted that the Head of State must be freely elected by the people, even if their choice of candidates were to be restricted. It was Dollfuss himself who found a formula in between, but leaning closer to the democrats than to the Heimwehr: the President was to be elected in secret ballot by all the mayors of Austria, choosing between three names selected by the State Council.

A similar conflict raged over the degree of centralization the new system was to possess. Ender urged the retention of wide autonomy for the provinces; the Heimwehr clamored for a strongly centralist order based on the Fascist pattern. Again, Dollfuss tried to mediate in order to get Cabinet agreement for the text. Again a compromise emerged, though this time it was one which suited the Heimwehr better than the Right-Wing democrats. However, even those con*cessions which the Chancellor made to the Heimwehr thesis on these points were directed more against Adolf Hitler than against liberalism.

Dollfuss was too much of an Austrian not to have realized that, in the long run, the provinces would always remain the pillars of the state, and his views on diversity as the essential basis of Austrian life have already been quoted. But, in the immediate future, a higher degree of centralism seemed vital on security grounds, for the provinces were the entrance gates to the capital. This consideration was, for example, decisive in the Chancellor's mind in agreeing to the appointment of a Security Director, nominated by Vienna, to guide each Pro*vincial Governor. His object in trimming such traditional rights of the provinces was not to destroy their existence, but to preserve it. That his Socialist opponents came to agree with him here is shown by the fact that this particular aspect of his centralization program was retained by the Coalition Government of the Second Republic, to deal with the new emergency of the occupation, and is 'still in force in the free Austria of today.

Here we come up against the hard rock underlying all the tangle of legal shrubbery with which the Constitution was invested. Despite the idealism which, on Dollfuss's part, inspired it, for the Austria of the day it was a `Provisorium' designed to meet an emergency rather than to match any one ideology or destroy another. Just as the supreme convenience of the Fatherland Front had been the excuse it provided for dissolving the Nazi Party along with all other parties, so the supreme object of the May Constitution was to ward off a German Anschluss by its tightened security at the top and its patriotism at the bottom. That Dollfuss intended to ease off this firm anchor of state control as soon as he thought the ship could ride the Nazi storm has been testified to by all his principal advisers and friends who have survived from those hectic days.

The best known of them, his successor Kurt Schuschnigg, has put it in the, following words: `Dollfuss's ultimate aim was to revive the old Parliament, even if in a modified form, and build the various corporative Councils and Diets of the 1934 Constitution around it. We all knew that the system as it stood was too rigid and inorganic. But none of us saw how any relaxation of the central authority could be permitted as long as the Nazi pressure, inside and outside the country, was so strong. It was a vicious circle. Hitler's threats seemed to justify our adopting even some of the Heimwehr's political demands as a temporary stiffening of the Government's power. Yet the threats and the pressure only went on mounting steadily after May 1934. We were given no peace and no time to make adjustments. However, I am sure of one thing: something new and drastic had to be attempted after 1933 to jolt some sense into the radicals on both sides. Even a Left-Wing dictatorship would have been better than continuing with the suspicious, intolerant deadlock of the old party system.'

This is of course the heartfelt cry of politicians in all ages and all nations: reformers have always pleaded for more time just as generals have always pleaded for more arms. But in the case of a Chancellor who, in the space of two years, tried to rescue his country's economy, recast its whole social and political system, restore its faith and pride in itself, realign its foreign policy and keep the most ruthless tyrant of the 20th century from its throat, the plea, for once, might be considered reasonable.

Having looked at some of the strange blossoms of Dollfuss's New Order, we must now search briefly for its roots. To a far greater extent than is generally realized, these can be found in Dollfuss himself. The version presented by his poli*tical opponents that Dollfuss more or less took down the 1934 Constitution at dictation from Mussolini is just as bad history as it is good propaganda. We have seen what battles in fact raged over the creation of the new system. Reference has also been made earlier to those corporative theories of government which had been current in Austria since the time of Vogelsang and which, in Dollfuss's day, had been vigorously revived by philosophers such as Othmar Spann. Indeed it can be proved, not only that Dollfuss was familiar with these theories, but that he personally subscribed to them, long before he could ever have dreamed of applying them politically. Dollfuss's law teacher and lifelong friend Dr. Rischanek has described how, in 1920, he entered his Vienna lecture room to hear a lively debate in progress between young Dollfuss and another law student, a woman employee of the Town Hall. Like any true representative of that Social*ist stronghold, she was defending the merits of the Trades Union system. Dollfuss, on the other hand, was supporting the thesis that the relationship between the craftsman and his apprentice or between the peasant-farmer and his laborer, which was both paternal and fraternal, made far better social sense. At this time, Mussolini was still an unknown adventurer and the word Fascism had barely been heard north of the Alps.
During the following ten years, when his work as an agrarian reformer absorbed all his interests, Dollfuss's thinking was basically non-political. Yet, if only because the peasantry constituted the Ständ, the closed interest community par excellence, these convictions must have unconsciously ripened. Sure enough, Schuschnigg confirms that when he first met Dollfuss in 1930 at a time when neither was yet even in the Cabinet the little peasant leader spoke at length of solving Austria's current difficulties by the corporative approach of the Stände, which alone might settle the friction between employer and employed. Typically, it was of practical economic problems which Dollfuss was thinking to be precise, the difficulties of ensuring stable wheat prices for his farmers. But the philosophy itself seems to have been already fully implanted, and it only needed power, added to opportunity, for him to transpose it into the political field..

It is true that, from the early 1930's onwards, Rome gave a mounting impetus and an increasing authority to these ideas for Dollfuss as for all of Vogelsang's followers. It is also true that, by the beginning of 1934, the personal pressure of Mussolini in this respect was prodding Dollfuss along and driving his Heimwehr allies forward in a headlong rush. But, in that spring of 1933, when Dollfuss took his first decision about the New Order, it was to the Vatican rather than to the Palazzo Chigi whence he looked for inspiration. The initial Italian influence, and a dominating one throughout, was spiritual.

On May 15, 1931, Pope Pius XI issued his famous encyclical on Catholic social reform Quadragesimo Anno', thus called because it was published on the fortieth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's pioneering encyclical on a similar theme, the Rerum Novarum. Pope Pius's words gave the devout Dollfuss all the blessing and the backing he needed to turn his back on the wreckage of a self-detonated Austrian Parliament. As he declared himself two years later: 'We want to be the first to turn the words of this noble encyclical into reality'.

It must be made clear that, though Quadragesimo Anno' was patently anti-Communist and anti-Socialist, it gave no support to the idea of the authoritarian state as such, let alone to any form of Fascism. Indeed, the political framework in which the Pope's ideas were to be fulfilled was left by him deliberately open with these words: 'The people should have complete liberty to choose any state form they please, provided it meets the needs of justice and of the common good'. But the corporative ideal, with all the negation of normal party and parliamentary systems it implied, was backed up to the hilt.

The encyclical begins by deploring the 'split of society' into two classes brought about by the Industrial Revolution: One class, small in number, enjoying almost alone the amenities so richly provided by modern inventions; the other class, comprising the vast mass of the workers, suffering under the burden of piteous need, and unable, despite their most vigorous efforts, to free themselves from their woeful situation'. Unscrupulous Liberalism had become the doctrine of the possessing class, and equally unscrupulous Marxism the doctrine of the dispossessed. To prevent the Christian values of society being destroyed by the conflict between these two, both the state and the individual, inspired alike by the religious faith of true neighborly love, must make a completely new approach to the problems of social and economic organization. The aim of this new approach must be to end the conflict between capital and labor, preached by the Marxists, by showing that such a conflict is not only unnecessary but unnatural. Thus: 'Capital can do just as little without labor as labor can without capital . . . it is completely contrary to justice when one side or the other, claiming exclusive rights, tries to appropriate the total gain for itself'. The new approach needed can only offset the 'sweet-tasting poison' of Marxist doctrine by deproletarizing the proletariat’; and this, in turn, can only be done by enabling the worker to accumulate property and some reserve of capital himself.

[Barbarossa]

Politically, the encyclical continues, these aims can only be achieved by reorganizing human society on a corporative basis: 'The revival of a corporative order is the socio*political aim . . . really effective remedies can hardly be achieved except through creating properly-fashioned limbs of the social organism, in other words Stände, which the individual joins not because he belongs to the different labor market camps of employer and employed, but because of his own individual social function'. Once these Stände have been organized, they should take over the day-to-day adminis*tration of 'less important matters'. Having delegated these responsibilities the state authority 'thus becomes freer, stronger and more effective to discharge those tasks which are its exclusive province guiding, supervising, emphasizing and chastening according to needs and circumstances'.

And finally, unless any believer should be under the illusion that this could all be brought about through the current Social Democratic doctrines of the day, a six-line paragraph is added with the terse heading : Catholic and a Socialist cannot be reconciled'. Despite some of its positive aspects, the theory of Socialism is declared to be 'in contradic*tion with the true Christian concept'. Then follows the categorical edict: 'It is impossible to be at the same time a good Catholic and a real Socialist'.

These were the doctrines, not Mussolini's parody of them, which Dollfuss seized upon — doctrines which, as we have seen, already formed the central pole of his simple political philosophy. And it is safe to say that, despite the emergencies of the hour, Dollfuss only let himself be driven down Mus*solini's path to the extent to which he thought he could reconcile this with the Vatican's teaching. It was the crossed keys of St. Peter, not the Fascio of the Black Shirts, which he tried to hold before him. Pope Pius's concept of the state as a strong, untrammeled guiding hand; benevolent, yet severe if need be ; paternal yet brotherly, and firmly marshalling humanity along the road to corporative bliss, was exactly the Dollfuss ideal.

When related to the intricacies of modern society and to the harsh realities of his own dictatorship era it was, of course, hopeless to try and achieve this ideal and naive even to con*template it. But what we are concerned to demonstrate here is the sincerity, not the profundity, of Dollfuss's political thinking; and also its unique Christian inspiration. He read and re-read the 1931 Encyclical a hundred times, and direct echoes of it are always appearing in his speeches. The whole of the historical introduction to his major Trabrennplatz speech of September II, 1933, is a faithful copy of the Pope's words, even down to the conflict described between those two political 'evils' — Manchester Liberalism and Marxism.

In this way, Pope Pius XI both completed and sanctified the Chancellor's vision Austriam Instaurare in Christo'. And this Dollfuss linked, in turn, with his rediscovery of Austria's `historical mission'. For him, the May Constitution was a 20th-century projection of the Habsburgs' role in the Counter-Reformation or of the part played by Vienna in 1683 in saving the Empire (and Europe) from the Turks. The awful snag was that, instead of Martin Luther or the Sultan Kara Mustafa, it was now, according to Pius XI, the Socialist who was the Infidel. Those fateful six lines in the Encyclical caused Dollfuss — and probably Austria — a lot of trouble.
On the crucial point of authoritarianism, it can be argued that this seemed to some extent 'justified' by the Pope's references to a 'strong state arm' which would chide as well as guide. But it must also be remembered that there was much in Dollfuss's own background and training which made `healthy discipline' appeal to him. His education at Holla*brunn had been strict and regulated, and his years in the Army had continued the conditioning process. Dollfuss as a young man never showed the slightest tendencies to becoming either a martinet in public life or a bully in private life. Yet, before he entered into politics, he was a man who had learnt to give orders by the simple process of first learning to obey them.

Above all, of course, it was the strong paternal discipline of his stepfather's farm in Kirnberg which remained with him all his life — as a political model as well as a spiritual support. The fact, already noted, that the peasantry of Austria repre*sented the one really natural Stand (they and the civil servants were in fact the only groups to get properly- organized in the new system) made this model even more compelling. This comes out quite literally in the speech with which he announced the forthcoming reforms. To quote this again : 'In the farm*house where the peasant sits down at the same table with his laborers after their common work, eating his soup out of the same bowl — there you find a real sense of corporative belonging, a true corporative conception. And their relation*ship becomes even nobler when they kneel down together to say their prayers.' As one sees, the Pope did not need to add anything to that picture. All he had to do was to bless it.

But however devout a Catholic Dollfuss may have been, he was also Chancellor of Austria, and a fighter. His new order had to fulfill certain practical objectives, which were separate from the religious ideal, even if related in some way to it. The most immediate of these objectives has already been mentioned: to devise a non-party system which could swallow the Austrian Nazis with the maximum of security to the country and the minimum of offence to Hitler.

There were two other aims in Dollfuss's mind — broader, deeper and of longer range. One was to fashion a mass move*ment which would both reflect and foster the new doctrine of state-patriotism he was preaching vis-a-vis Nazi Germany. The second was to devise an ideology which would justify, to himself and to posterity, this opposition to that parent German race whose tongue and culture Austria shared, and in which so many Austrians, Dollfuss included, had sought salvation after the war. He found both. The Fatherland Front and the May Constitution not only matched his spiritual needs. They also solved the problem — as far as it ever was

Above all, of course, it was the strong paternal discipline of his stepfather's farm in Kirnberg which remained with him all his life — as a political model as well as a spiritual support. The fact, already noted, that the peasantry of Austria repre*sented the one really natural Stand (they and the civil servants were in fact the only groups to get properly- organized in the new system) made this model even more compelling. This comes out quite literally in the speech with which he announced the forthcoming reforms. To quote this again : 'In the farm*house where the peasant sits down at the same table with his laborers after their common work, eating his soup out of the same bowl — there you find a real sense of corporative belonging, a true corporative conception. And their relation*ship becomes even nobler when they kneel down together to say their prayers.' As one sees, the Pope did not need to add anything to that picture. All he had to do was to bless it.

But however devout a Catholic Dollfuss may have been, he was also Chancellor of Austria, and a fighter. His new order had to fulfill certain practical objectives, which were separate from the religious ideal, even if related in some way to it. The most immediate of these objectives has already been mentioned: to devise a non-party system which could swallow the Austrian Nazis with the maximum of security to the country and the minimum of offence to Hitler.

There were two other aims in Dollfuss's mind — broader, deeper and of longer range. One was to fashion a mass move*ment which would both reflect and foster the new doctrine of state-patriotism he was preaching vis-á-vis Nazi Germany. The second was to devise an ideology which would justify, to himself and to posterity, this opposition to that parent German race whose tongue and culture Austria shared, and in which so many Austrians, Dollfuss included, had sought salvation after the war. He found both. The Fatherland Front and the May Constitution not only matched his spiritual needs. They also solved the problem — as far as it ever was solved, or ever will be — of how to be a good Austrian without being a bad German.

For all these solutions, spiritual or secular, Dollfuss sought the blessing of history. Indeed, the revolutionary thing about his unashamed patriotism (and it was revolutionary in the Vienna of 1934 to cover the capital with placards proclaiming Österreich über alles !') was that — deliberately and publicly — he tried to link the country's troubled present with her resplendent past. He was the first to nail down that lie implicit in the whole Austro-Marxist approach to life, the lie that the Austrians only began existing in November 1918. All those centuries which the fanatics of the Left Wing tried to ignore he brought back to their rightful place in the affec*tions of his people.

In all this, even his bitterest enemies could never accuse him of trying to put the clock back by restoring the Imperialist order in the Danube Basin. In his upbringing, Dollfuss had been Republican rather than Monarchist (as his student conflict with E. K. Winter showed); and as Chancellor he never lent his influence to any Restoration schemes, if only because he considered them totally impracticable. Talking to that same E. K. Winter on the eve of his own murder he remarked: `The House of Austria, with its ancient roots, must anyway be able to wait if it ever hopes to come to power again'. Here was the realism of a Republican Chancellor, combined with the respect of a former Imperial Army lieutenant.

But if he did not fight for the return of the Empire he fought for its memory. What else indeed — except the fatalistic cosmopolitan pipe-dreams of the Austro-Marxists did the Austrians have to help them look Nazi Germany squarely in the face? Their present was altogether too `nasty, brutish and short'.

Accordingly, when Dollfuss announced his new program to the nation, on a date deliberately picked because it was the 25oth anniversary of the defeat of the Turks before

Vienna, this was the note he struck with his opening words: St. Stephen's Cathedral and the memory of the Turkish siege recall for us the great history of our homeland. Two hundred and fifty years ago the Viennese held out, loyal and brave, under Starhemberg, the commander of the defense. We rejoice that the name of Starhemberg has been preserved in our homeland and that one of the descendants of that Rudiger Starhemberg of old is among those who are rebuilding Austria today.'

After a few words of praise for Prince Eugene, whose relief army raised the great siege, Dollfuss went back lovingly to the Middle Ages, that period in which the people were organized and formed up according to their calling or occupa*tion ; when the worker was not incited against his master ; when the economy and social order were both based on the grouping together of all those who earned their bread by the same form of work'.

Then came the attacks, already referred to, on 19th-century Liberalism; on Marxism, its equally evil rival ; and on Austria's post-war parliamentarianism, in which this barren con*flict of ideologies had continued until its own selfdestruction as an institution the year before. All this led up to the cen*tral pledge which was as resonant as it was confusing: 'The age of the capitalist system and of the capitalist-liberalist economic order is past; the days of materialistic Marxist betrayal are also finished. The rule of parties is over and done with. We reject terror and Gleichschalterei. What we want is the social, Christian, German state of Austria, built on a corporative basis and under firm authoritarian leadership.'

Everything is in this pledge, including the acknowledge*ment of Austria's German character. This led Dollfuss on to his second theme the resolving of the state versus nation antithesis within the new order. In words directed at Adolf Hitler as well as at that split personality which hovered like ectoplasm over his audience, he continued:

`We are German, so obviously German that it seems to us superfluous to stress the fact. And we declare here that it is our aim to serve this German people, in loyalty and honor. What we seek to do is to preserve the good qualities of the German race . . . and we refuse to be talked out of this even if attempts are made to deny our essentially genuine German character. We believe that it is our duty to preserve the true German culture in these Christian lands of Central Europe . . . to fashion this culture into an Austrian mold. We leave it to future generations to judge who in this question is serving the German cause the best.'

A few months later, he developed this theme in that same Christmas address in which he had rejected the Nazi-type tyranny and state omnipotence as a model for Austria. Our guiding principle in our relations with other people is universalist', he said, 'and in this we have preserved an important and characteristic element in the German way of life. . . . It is thus unfair to reproach us Austrians for standing apart from and even opposing the German nation. It is precisely in our Austrian way that we feel ourselves to be a genuine component of the German whole . . . and it is our duty as individuals and as a people not only to safeguard this Austrian way of life but to get it realized in the life of the whole German people and of Europe.'

In other words, Austria could be proud of her new patriotism directed at Nazi Germany because what this essentially sought to do was to rescue the old German values, prostituted by Hitler, for future happier generations which would be unplagued by dictatorships. It was, in particular, the universalist concept of the old Holy Roman Empire which Hitler (and the Prussian nationalists before him) had betrayed: both at home, by seeking to bend all cultures and all opinions to one mold, and abroad, by trying to impose the swastika on the whole of a diversified continent. Austria's task was to preserve this ancient German universalism, with all the tolerance which the concept implied, from the clutches of Goebbels and Rosenberg; to blend and combine, as Barbarossa had once done; to recreate, on the quaking political battle*field of the present, her own cultural miracle of the Baroque; to preserve, in a sort of Danubian Shangri-La, the essence of German civilization for a calmer future to enjoy.

The fact that it was a David and Goliath proposition only lent the struggle a Biblical radiance. `Nolite timere, pusillus grex.' 'Fear not, little flock.' And when one thinks of the odds, the surprising thing is not that Dollfuss failed in his task, but that he, or any other Austrian of his time, should ever have tackled it.

Before passing on to Goliath's bloody triumph we must try and fix a closer personal picture of his little challenger. The only similarity between the two unequal protagonists, apart from the fact that both were born on Austrian soil, was the magnetism they exerted on their fellow-men. Yet even this common factor pointed the contrast rather than the likeness. The force of Hitler's personality was demonic and therefore impersonal: it was the complexes, expressed in passions, which compelled, and not the human being. Dollfuss, with his huge mild eyes of a quite startling blue, his infectious smile, and his almost childish simplicity of manner, drew others in his wake primarily as a warm and likeable person. His political passions, such as they were, sprang from his own nature and were filtered through it into action.

This essential humanity shone through all the trials and temptations of power. For the statesman, as for the student, family and friends remained an indispensable part of his life, and he never sought to replant his own personal roots in the artificial soil of politics. The company of others was always a mental as well as a social necessity. He was incapable of brooding, and Hitler's concept of the politician as a solitary the Stallburggasse, or at a game of `Taroque' in the local Cafe 'Korb', anything was allowed that was not vicious or in doubtful moral taste. (He had no love for the dirty joke, whether it concerned him or not.) Such was Dollfuss the man. But in public life, where the man was also the statesman, the same liberty was not permitted. Thus he never resigned himself to the mocking soubriquet of `Millimetternich': partly because it had been coined by the Nazis, partly because it concerned his official self and was therefore aimed against Austria as well as against his person. This sensitivity to the dignity of his office was always near the surface, and it was no respecter of persons.

Early in 1934, for example, one of his closest supporters reproached him privately in the Chancellery for his excessive patience under the constant provocation of Austrian Nazis (it was shortly after an evening when the entire audience at the Graz Opera, borne aloft on waves of Teutonic music, had risen from their seats and given the Hitler salute). 'The Nazis are just laughing at an Austrian Chancellor and at an Austrian Government which can be insulted with such impunity,' the friend urged, and went on : 'What do you suppose would have happened had the same sort of provocation taken place in Germany?' For the first and last time in this particular colleague's presence, Dollfuss exploded with rage. The anger subsided almost as quickly as it had risen, but his final words, spoken quietly from the great window recess of his office, were significant : 'You may be right in what you say and I know you meant it for the best. But remember one thing. You just cannot talk in that way to the Chancellor of Austria.' It was not Engelbert Dollfuss, but the leader of his country, on whose corns the friend had trodden.

It is an irony that the man who was so often portrayed by his political opponents as a ruthless tyrant should be remembered by all those who came into personal contact with him as the kindest and gentlest of mortals. The evidence here is overwhelming : even from the camp of his enemies, not a single anecdote has survived which points to viciousness or brutality in his private character. And those who knew and loved Dollfuss remember him, quite simply, as the best of men.

His selfless generosity and constant concern for the lame dogs of this world is his most obviously endearing feature. We have seen examples of this in Dollfuss the soldier and Dollfuss the peasants' friend. The statesman, judged as a human being, was no different. To him, money was some*thing to give, not to spend. He possessed not a penny in the world beyond his Chancellor's salary, yet, soon after taking office, he set up a purely private charity, financed with moo schillings from his monthly earnings, for distribution to deserving cases. A flat immediately under his own, occupied by the police for security reasons, served as the headquarters for this personal activity. The secretary who administered the fund for him has testified that politics did not enter into the distribution. Need, not ideology, was the only yardstick Dollfuss prescribed, and he furthermore gave orders that the whole operation should be kept secret so that it could never be exploited for party or personal propaganda. Month in and month out, an average of thirty requests came in every day, from cranks, spongers and job-seekers as well as the genuinely destitute. All were heard with patience and as many as possible were helped.
Not satisfied with this, Dollfuss became a walking charity himself. His hand was always in his pocket for any 'poor devil' who approached him or whom he had simply glimpsed on the street, and it was small wonder that the pockets rapidly emptied. His widow remembers many a month when the family of the Austrian Federal Chancellor had no house*keeping money left after the twentieth; and his secretary, Dr. Krisch, grew cheerfully resigned to lending his chief a few hundred schillings as the thirtieth approached, and he had nothing left to give an old Kaiserschuetzen comrade who had turned up at the Ballhausplatz to 'pump' him. This was the real charity which sought neither thanks nor advertisement nor reward, and the deep kindness of the man is shown by his concern even to avoid causing pain by his giving.

Once, for example, he sighted in his ante-room an old friend who had fallen on bad days — down-at-heel, bedraggled and perched like a scruffy hen on one of the little gilt chairs outside the Chancellor's office. It was obvious that a request for help was coming and equally obvious that the friend would be acutely embarrassed to be received in this desolate state. So Dollfuss, without giving a sign of recognition as he walked past, summoned a senior official and ordered him to approach the abject figure on any wild pretext he could think up, inviting him for a brief stay at a 'state rest home'. This was simply an inn, picked at random on the outskirts of Vienna, where the bewildered tramp was lodged for a fort*night at Dollfuss's expense, fattened up with good food and made generally presentable. Soon after the end of this 'convalescence' he reappeared in the Chancellor's waiting-room, was received by Dollfuss with a show of delighted astonish*ment, and duly provided with a job and a new start in life.

Dollfuss could never have given at this rate had his own tastes not been frugal in the extreme. Cigarettes, of which he often smoked forty a day, were, in fact, his only indulgence. He was a moderate drinker. Cards, a game of skittles or a horse ride in the Prater Fun Fair satisfied what little need he felt for distraction outside his work and family. Wine he enjoyed, but in moderation, and, to the end of his days, his favorite meal was the Stohsuppe' of the Lower Austrian peasant — a bowl of thick sour milk soup, eaten with slices of that cheap Vienna Salafadi' sausage which, in the Emperor Franz Josef's day, had been the cabman's dinner at five kreutzer a time.
His flat as Chancellor was the same that he had occupied as an agrarian official and, despite the momentous gatherings which convened there, it still breathed the modest rustic spirit of those days. The dining-room was so narrow that the maid had trouble squeezing between the table and the back wall when guests were present ; the sitting-room was plainly furnished with chairs and a sofa of dark leather, and a book*case filled with agrarian handbooks, economic treatises and theological works. The ornaments were few, but they in*cluded another relic of the old days whose history is again typical of the occupant. This was a bronze bust of one Zwetzbacher, a well-known and well-loved Lower Austrian peasant leader of the Empire who had fallen into disgrace and oblivion in the post-war years through some personal scandal. The bust, which had once proudly graced the Conference Room of the Agricultural Chamber, had accordingly been banished to a dusty cupboard. There it languished until Dollfuss, at that time Director of the same Chamber which Zwetzbacher had helped to build up, discovered it and declared he would take it home with him. When asked by a surprised friend what the controversial figure was doing in the drawing-room of the Chancellor, Dollfuss replied with a shrug: brought it here because I simply can't bear to see a man like that being thrown aside like a dirty rag'.

The remark was typical of that loyalty which Dollfuss showed to all who had ever enjoyed his love or friendship. He rose to the top without a trace of `side', and the humblest of his former comrades from the Kirnberg fields, the Hollabrunn school-rooms or the Isonzo trenches was always welcome. Indeed, his staff learned to greet the appearance of any of these old-time friends with a philosophic groan, for, even if Austria and the rest of the world seemed on fire, Dollfuss would push aside his mound of papers and find an hour for a gossip.

Anyone from his lowly past who tried to avoid the Chan*cellor just to save him embarrassment got short shrift. One modest village priest who had sat with Dollfuss in the same class for eight years at Hollabrunn, has described how he turned up at the Catholic Congress in Vienna in 1933, to hear his famous friend make a major speech. The Chancellor was seated at the front, flanked by the Papal Legate, the Cardinal-Archbishop and other high dignitaries of Church and State. The village priest, who had rarely seen such an assembly of purple at close quarters, hid himself shyly many rows behind. But the moment Dollfuss spotted him among the sea of heads; his well meant concealment was over and done with. The Chancellor left his guests, pushed his way back to greet his school comrade, and then insisted on bringing him down to be introduced to all the resplendent figures on the rostrum. This was no electioneering trick, for Austria anyway had passed beyond elections. Dollfuss had found an old friend, and was doing on a public platform what he would have done at home.

His devotion to the old Kirnberg farmhouse and everyone inside it has been mentioned already. One of his greatest joys, in those two terrible years of power, was to be driven home for a day along the dusty, scented side-roads of Lower Austria and there, for a few hours, to feel again the roots of his being. On these visits, politics were forgotten, and the ageless gossip of the peasant took their place: local weddings and scandals, the buying and selling of land, the state of the crops, the health of the cattle, the price of wheat and the ravages of the hail-storm. And though Dollfuss was firmly established as one of the leading agrarian experts of Europe, he listened to his stepfather Leopold Schmutz talking about winter seed or the cattle plague with the same deference he had always shown him. Incidentally, no member of the entire family either asked for or was given a single favor at the hands of their famous son. Nepotism, like materialism, was not in the Dollfuss blood.
As the agony of Austria grew and the work piled up, these visits became steadily rarer. Often, the best Dollfuss could do was to fly over Sattlehen Number Four on his way to or from some foreign capital and wave down at the black and white dots assembled on the meadow before the house. They seem never to have been far from his thoughts. On one of his visits to the Vatican, for example, he asked the Pope if he would bless a crucifix specially for his family. Pius XI gladly consented; but, as Dollfuss was needed with great urgency back in Vienna, the problem was how to deliver the sacred image. The Chancellor decided he would pass over Kirnberg on the return flight and drop the crucifix quite literally from the skies.

One who flew back with him has described the scene: Almost before the small two-engine plane had droned over the familiar village church, Dollfuss had picked out his farm*house and the Schmutz family who had been alerted assembled in front of it. He leant out of the cabin window, his hair streaming in the wind, and ordered his long-suffering personal pilot to circle lower and lower. With complete dis*regard of the pilot's protests, of air safety regulations and of our own skins, he forced the plane down and down until we were banking barely one hundred feet above the farmhouse roof. Then, at the last minute, he dropped the precious relic over the heads of his excited family. He misjudged the distance a little so that the Pope's crucifix fell, safely and softly, right on top of a dung-hill. With a wave of his hand we were up and away to Vienna, the pilot muttering softly and wiping his brow and the Chancellor beaming and chuckling all the way.'

This peasant background was sometimes dominant, but sometimes curiously absent, in Dollfuss's character and behavior as a politician. His mental agility and adaptability, the speed with which he could reach decisions, his sensitivity and, above all, his easy charm of manner — all these belonged more to a cosmopolitan Viennese banker rather than to a heavy slow-thinking farmer. Yet the Lower Austrian peasant stock came out strongly enough in his sheer tenacity and physical toughness, his ability to out-sit and out-talk both colleagues and critics at all-night sessions in smoky rooms; it came out in the moral unshakeability of a man who could never be bribed or bullied out of a course he felt to be right; in his habit of reaching decisions by instinct rather than by logic and sticking to them through thick and thin once they were reached; it came out in his frugality and in his piety.

Inevitably, some of these qualities got bent out of shape by the pressures of power. The mental nimbleness, for example, led him to pursue a dozen possible solutions to a problem at once, like a conjurer spinning his colored balls in the air ; and though Dollfuss's own dexterity rarely failed him, he often succeeded in confusing his colleagues as well as his opponents with his juggling. Politically speaking, his piety was also a double-edged weapon. It robbed him of that minimum of mistrust in his fellows which is useful to any statesman and, towards the end, it took on an irrational crusad*ing tinge. This gave him strength but exposed him to the dangers of political intolerance. He seems to have grown fully convinced of this `divine mission' of his after escaping with slight injuries from an attack by a political crank in 1933. At all events, it was shortly afterwards that he told a circle of close friends: 'As I recovered from those wounds I became convinced that I had been given a task to follow, irrespective of whether I should succeed or not. We are all God's messengers and each of us has a message to pass on. Once I wanted to be a priest. But it seems I was intended for the world after all. Only Christ can save men's souls and only He can help society. I feel I must now try and lead this society to Him. That is my mission.'

This, and other utterances like it were, however, made without any show of 'hybris'. For though his sense of mission had to be identified with his high office, the latter always seems to have been subordinated to it in his mind. He certainly remained under no illusions about the way in which power could eat like a slow acid into men's hearts. Shortly before he was murdered he exclaimed to an old friend who had always kept himself out of public office : One of the reasons why I always enjoy coming to talk with you is that I get an honest opinion, whether it contradicts my own or not. The big trouble which I'm always trying to guard myself against is that, as Chancellor, one is surrounded by "Yes-men" and, before you know where you are, there is a terrible danger of thinking yourself infallible.'

And the same spoken reverie in which Dollfuss first men*tioned his 'mission' was ended by him with these words: `Politics! What on earth do I really care about them? I can't go on anyway for much longer as my hearing is slowly going,’ and in a way I'm glad. When the new Constitution is properly launched, and when the situation abroad has calmed down a bit, then I want to quit and do the thing I've always wanted to do write books. I don't want to hang on until I'm of no use any more. In the middle of one's work — it's anyway never finished — that's how I'd like to go!' This wish, at any rate, was to be granted.

The reader may well be beginning to ask himself with a rather weary curiosity: had this little paragon then no failings? In truth, he seems to have been without a serious moral vice; so much so that, after his death, a sincere agitation could be launched to have him pronounced a blessed martyr by the Church. Of his ordinary human weaknesses, most were of the type that are endearing in a private person and damaging only in a statesman. He was, for example, uncertain in his judgment of men, mainly because of his naïve and almost boundless faith in the fundamental goodness of his fellows. This led him, on at least one occasion, to appoint to public office a friend whose hands were certainly not as clean as his own. More dangerous, it sometimes meant that men were kept too long at their posts who were loyal but ineffective, as was Kemptner, Secretary of the Fatherland Front, or Seydel, Director of the Vienna Police ; or who were even openly intriguing against him, like his own Minister for Security, Emil Fey. In the last critical months of his Chancel*lorship, this particular exhibition of tolerance could only be called hair-raising ; yet, whenever he was reproached in private about his attitude to Fey, Dollfuss would reply : can prove nothing against him and, until I have the proof, he is innocent as far as I'm concerned'.

This trustfulness, verging at times on gullibility, certainly weakened his administration. And, as far as party politics went, he suffered just as plainly from being excessively sus*ceptible. He was quick to feel and slow to forgive any affront to his public dignity and, on occasions, could behave churlishly to the offenders. An example already mentioned is his treatment of Vaugoin, whose election as Chairman of the Christian-Social Party seemed to rouse a personal resentment in Dollfuss's mind. A lesser-known case was that of a certain Baron Beck, a worthy ex-Imperial official, whose career in the Republic was said to have been blighted from the moment he inadvertently announced someone ahead of Dollfuss at the top of a list of platform speakers. This same acute sensitivity came automatically into play whenever the Chancellor was attacked ad personam by his Socialist opponents. After each attack, the piers of that never-to-be-built golden bridge between Left and Right were weakened accordingly.

Yet, right to the end, Dollfuss remained in his private life kindly, tolerant and relaxed — without a sign of that pettiness or touchiness which he was capable of displaying in office. The explanation we have already suggested for this paradox was that, in his eyes, the man counted for nothing and the Chancellor for everything; an insult to his office was an insult to his country and all that he was striving to make out of it. Such ambivalence is not unique in politics.
Indeed, in his mysticism, his pride, his fanatical patriotism, his sense of mission to revive all that was splendid and noble in his nation's past, Dollfuss felt for Austria exactly as, twenty-five years later, Charles de Gaulle was to feel for France. Fittingly enough, both were brave soldiers and devout Catholics; both had the same simplicity of tastes and the same relentless standards of personal conduct ; both were given power in a domestic and external emergency ; both summoned back history to prop up a tottering present ; both feared and despised parliamentary formalism as the canker in the nation's soul ; both introduced a new constitution which replaced democracy with authoritarianism in an attempt to save the day; both saw themselves as the innermost conscience and image of their countrymen and were widely acclaimed as such. Also, fittingly, Dollfuss was a tiny Chancellor for a small country, and de Gaulle a towering President for a great power.
__________________

[Barbarossa]

The Search for Security

It was typical of Dollfuss's dilemma, and just as typical of his countrymen, that he should have been reproached even for doing the inevitable. This irony came out most strongly with his foreign policy which was dominated, from his first to his last day of office, by the ugly brown shadow of Nazi aggression.

There were only three ways to meet this threat, and all of them had to be tried simultaneously, constantly and with every ounce of resource and energy at the Government's command, if the little Republic was to have any chance of surviving. These three parallel courses were the creation of an Austrian patriotism strong enough not to be washed away by all the emotional tides of racial sentiment ; the quest for some form of 'peace with honor' to be concluded directly with the big German neighbor and brother ; and, on the growing assumption that such a truce would either never be reached or not be respected, the search for a foreign protector who was both willing and able to shield Austria from Hitler's blows.
The last requirement gradually became the most urgent of the three, and in the Europe of 1933-34, Vienna could only fulfill it by looking across the Alps to Rome. This was not a question of ideology but of downright necessity; had Austria been ruled at the time by a realistic Socialist of Karl Renner's stamp, he would most probably have swallowed his anti-Fascist pride and sought some form of guarantees from the same direction. A drowning man is in no position to grumble at the color of the life-saver......to be continued

http://www.dollfuss.net/dollfuss2.htm

[Ars Moriendi]

Will take my time to read the entire information in this thread, but on the meantime, here is the song remembering his death at the hands of the nazis:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7gaKswtKWE

1. Ihr Jungen, schließt die Reihen gut,
Ein Toter führt uns an.
Er gab für Österreich sein Blut,
Ein wahrer deutscher Mann.
Die Mörderkugel, die ihn traf,
Die riß das Volk aus Zank und Schlaf.
Wir Jungen stehn bereit
Mit Dollfuß in die neue Zeit!

2. Für Österreich zu kämpfen lohnt,
daß es gesichert sei,
vor jedem Feind, wo er auch thront,
und vor der Verräterei.
Gewalt und Lüge schreckt uns nicht,
Wir kennen nur die frohe Pflicht.
Wir Jungen stehn bereit!
Mit Dollfuß in die neue Zeit!
3. Zerschlagt was uns noch hemmen mag
und nach dem Gestern weist.
Die neue Zeit steigt in den Tag
und will den neuen Geist.
Christlich, deutsch, gerecht und frei
von Klassenhaß und Tyrannei.
Wir Jungen stehn bereit!
Mit Dollfuß in die neue Zeit!

4. O Österreich, o Vaterland,
zu großem Sein verjüngt.
Wir hüten dich mit deutscher Hand,
daß dir dein Bau gelingt.

[Ars Moriendi]

Can a moderator do me an amazing favour?
Could you please add spoiler tags to each of Barbarossa's entries? The information can be overwhelming the way it's displayed right now. I might add a few things here as well (no interested in creating new threads), so better organization would be great.

Thanks in advance.

P.S: I checked the website given as source, and it seems it no longer exists. As such, it's worthy to keep this thread safe as it might be a valid copy of information unavailable elsewhere.

[Elsa]

Can a moderator do me an amazing favour?
Could you please add spoiler tags to each of Barbarossa's entries? The information can be overwhelming the way it's displayed right now. I might add a few things here as well (no interested in creating new threads), so better organization would be great.

Thanks in advance.

P.S: I checked the website given as source, and it seems it no longer exists. As such, it's worthy to keep this thread safe as it might be a valid copy of information unavailable elsewhere.

I have added spoiler tags to all of the entries except the last (which is comparatively short).

Parts of the website can still be viewed on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20101229044349/http://dollfuss.net/

[Ars Moriendi]

I have added spoiler tags to all of the entries except the last (which is comparatively short).

Parts of the website can still be viewed on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20101229044349/http://dollfuss.net/

Much obliged. :)

[Ars Moriendi]

Imagery of the Vaterländische Front (Party created by Dollfuss that represented Austrofascism):

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j313/unitarymoonbat/Fasicsts/austri7.gif

http://sciencev1.orf.at/static2.orf.at/science/storyimg/storypart_100591.jpg

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j313/unitarymoonbat/Fasicsts/dolfus3.jpg

http://forbiddenmusicdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/35__schuschnigg-vaterlc3a4ndische-front.jpg

http://www.doew.at/cms/images/7uvoq/tinymce/1340625188/46a_1.png

http://www.eisenstrasse.info/fileadmin/schatzsuche/pics/detail/pw_0000148.jpg

http://www.plakatkontor.de/images/143vaterlaendischefrontfrontarbeitsopfer08416.jpg

http://cdn.calisphere.org/data/28722/9f/bk0007t7r9f/files/bk0007t7r9f-FID3.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sqPj0a6aMfg/UNw7D7cu6KI/AAAAAAAABFc/Rvu_fWJnt2I/s1600/fatherland+front+086.JPG


Membership card:

http://www.rainerregiment.at/joomla/images/stories/persoenlichkeiten/feldwebeljohannstoeger/Ausweis%20-%20Vaterl%E4ndische%20Front.jpg

Archive pictures of the Vaterländische Front:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CskWNUrg8ag/Uk57G4kk6iI/AAAAAAAAaTQ/2HQ7MrgM_5g/s1600/dollfuss1209i.jpg

http://www.aeiou.at/aeiou.encyclop.data.image.a/a962962a.jpg

http://austria-forum.org/attach/AEIOU/Vaterl%C3%A4ndische_Front/Schmelz_8_10_1936.png

http://austria-forum.org/attach/Bilder_und_Videos/Historische_Bilder_IMAGNO/Vaterl%C3%A4ndische_Front/00320949/scaled-277x215-00320949wm.jpg