Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis (4 page)

The renewed strength of pro-Anschluss sentiment was revealed two years later in two local plebiscites. In April 1921, 90 percent of the eligible voters in the Tyrol cast 145,302 ballots in favor of the province’s joining Germany whereas only 1,805 opposed the proposition. The next month a plebiscite in the province of Salzburg resulted in over 98,000 voting for an Anschluss whereas only 877 opposed the issue out of a total electorate of 126,482.
⁸¹
A similar vote in Styria was prevented in June only by pressure from the Allies, who threatened to resolve the Burgenland dispute in Hungary’s favor if the plebiscite were not canceled.
²²
In subsequent years Anschluss passions in Austria cooled but never died completely. The departure of the Social Democrats from the German government in 1923 and the election of the ultraconservative Paul voa Hindenburg as president in 1925 made Germany far less attractive to the Austrian Socialists, but far more appealing to the bourgeoisie. Consequently^the years between 1925 and 1929 continued to be filled with Anschluss demonstrations, including one in Vienna in 1928, which drew some 200,000 participants. A year later a questionnaire distributed to members of the Austrian National Assembly revealed that two-thirds of its delegates still backed the union with Germany.
²³

The Anschluss remained almost the single goal of Austria’s foreign policy until 1933.
²⁴
The Great Depression served only to solidify the conviction that a union with Germany was the one hope for recovery. With its extreme dependence on foreign trade, Austria was harder hit by the Depression than perhaps any other industrialized country in the world. But to imagine that a merger with Germany could cure Austria’s economic ills was wishful thinking. Except for the period 1925-29, Germany was as impoverished as Austria. At best an Anschluss could have produced temporary political and psychological gains for the German and Austrian governments.

The latter two goals were in fact exactly what the Austrian chancellor, Johannes Schober, had in mind when he secretly negotiated a customs union with Germany in 1930. No other governments had been consulted when the project was suddenly publicized in March 1931. The result was predictable. Although Britain and the United States were sympathetic, France, and the so-called Little Entente countries of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania were bitterly opposed, seeing in the plan a thinly disguised Anschluss. France’s opposition was decisive. Only it had the financial resources to supply Austria with another desperately needed loan; but its price was the cancellation of the customs-union project. The upshot was a diplomatic victory for France and a humiliating defeat for the German and Austrian governments. Moderates in the two German-speaking countries suffered another setback. Only the Nazis benefited. The Austrians, denied the forbidden fruit once again, wanted it more than ever. Not until the Nazis rose to power in Germany would some Austrians begin to reconsider their Anschluss ambitions.

*

• The Austrian Constitution and Parliament
  
• New Beginnings: Walter Riehl and the DNSAP, 1918-1923
  
• 34 - Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis
  
• 44 - Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis
  
• Hitler and the Party Schism
  
• • |l" -
    
  • jlK .
    
• iLL
  

The Austrian Constitution and Parliament

Adding to the problems of the Austrian Republic were flaws in its constitution. Of course, not even the most perfect constitution can guarantee the success of democracy. In the case of Austria, however, the constitution tended to accentuate already existing political problems.

Before the war the Austrian people had felt a sense of loyalty to their emperor, their German nationality, and their province. When the object of their first devotion disappeared, the German Austrians fell back on the other two. After the war the new Austrian constitution of 1920 accorded the nine provinces (Upper and Lower Austria, Burgenland, Styria, Salzburg, Carin-thia, Tyrol, Vorarlberg, and Vienna) a wide degree of local autonomy. Vienna, which had been the capital of Lower Austria as well as the Austrian Empire, was made into a separate province. The Socialists took advantage of Vienna’s new autonomy to push through Western Europe’s most advanced social welfare program. Including such things as subsidized housing, health care, and adult education, the costly program was largely paid for by the taxes of Vienna’s middle and upper classes.

The decentralizing character of the Austrian constitution could also be seen in the role of the president. His functions were mostly decorative; unlike the German president, he had no emergency powers.
²⁵
Most observers now believe that the reaction against the relatively centralized rule of the Habsburgs went much too far. Parliament, the least experienced and least responsible branch of government, secured the most authority, whereas the executive, the most experienced branch of government, retained the least power, at least during the 1920s.

Although the Imperial Austrian Parliament had performed some useful services before the war, it had never overcome the reputation established by the disgraceful behavior of its deputies during the “Badeni crisis” just before the turn of the century. In order to prevent the passage of a language law supported by the Czechs and Premier Kasimir Badeni, the German delegates had resorted to all manner of wild antics, which were later imitated by the non-German representatives. Parliament consequently became the butt of innumerable jokes, which were still being repeated in the Republic.
²⁶

Unfortunately, the behavior of the parliamentarians did not greatly improve after the war. The worst offenders this time were the Social
Democrats.
Although they had cooperated with the Imperial Parliament, they became obstructionists in the Republic in order to block legislation they disliked. The strongest proponents of parliamentarianism thus became the worst offenders against parliamentary decorum. Party rivalries were such that legislation was judged, not on its intrinsic merits, but on how its passage would affect the various political parties. Obstructionism thus ultimately served to discredit democracy itself.

Austrian democracy, like that of Germany, was also hampered by the system of proportional representation. Of course proportional representation did not make democracy impossible, as was seen in Switzerland. Under this arrangement, a given party’s candidates for Parliament were Selected by the party secretary. The concomitant “closed list” system required the voter to cast his ballot for a single party list of candidates. Voting a “split ticket,” so common in the United States, was therefore impossible. The politician who hoped to be reelected had to be far more concerned about the dictates of the party secretary than he did about the feelings of the voters.
²⁷

Because the voter was not allowed to choose individual candidates from different parties, it became customary, even before the war, to vote for the same party, election after election, regardless of the issues. By 1911 Austria' was already divided into three almost equal political “camps” or
Lager,
which have endured down to the present day: the pan-Germans, the conservative Catholics, and the Marxian Socialists. Proportional representation and the voting habits of most Austrians therefore prevented any “landslide” victories and any large government majorities.

The system of proportional representation and closed lists gave the political parties so much power that many frustrated voters, unable either to choose or oust individual politicians, began calling Austria a
Parteienstaat
(state of parties). The only way to change this system was to reform the constitution. But only the political parties had the power to do this, and they were the very groups that profited from the status quo. In this impasse it appeared to many opponents of the system that the only solution was a dictatorship.

Mortal Enemies: The Political Parties of Austria

The hatred and contempt the Nazis felt for their opponents was by no means unique in the politics of interwar Austria. Despite a similar historical development, all three of the political
Lager
of Austria regarded each other as mortal enemies. The Christian Socials and Social Democrats managed to form a coalition government in the first two years of the Republic and cooperated during the crises presented by the Paris Peace Conference and the early postwar reconstruction. But unlike the coalition governments of the other Successor States, which faced large and hostile national minorities, there was no common enemy inside or outside Austria to hold the coalition together after October 1920.

Austrian politics was infused with a religious fervor. The Christian Socials and their Roman Catholic Weltanschauung and the Social Democrats clung tenaciously to their Marxist ideology. The CSP staunchly defended the rights of the Catholic church; the SDP was equally determined to advance the cause of anticlericalism. The Catholics regarded the “Marxists” as “revolutionaries,” and the Marxists saw the Catholics as “reactionaries.” The Catholic church tended to equate democracy with socialism and bolshevism, whereas the Socialists blamed all the country’s problems on clericalism (and capitalism).
²⁸

Several factors contributed to this deep fissure in the Austrian body politic. For one thing, the Social Democrats had been virtually excluded from power before 1918. Their revolutionary ideology together with bourgeois prejudices had given rise to electoral laws that were deliberately weighted against the proletariat. Universal and equal manhood suffrage for the Imperial Parliament was not introduced until 1907; discriminatory franchise laws for some local electoral districts remained on the books until the very end of the Empire. Then, from a position of near political impotence the Socialists suddenly found themselves in an unaccustomed position of power at both the federal and local level in 1918. Thereafter the Socialists steadily increased their representation in Parliament until 1930 when they became the largest party in the country. On a per capita basis the SDP was also the largest Socialist party in the world outside the Soviet Union.
²⁹

The bourgeoisie, already stunned by the passing of the monarchy, was horrified enough that the dreaded Socialists were now in positions of authority. But what alarmed them still more was the SDFs continued radical rhetoric. Marxist parties in other European countries had been split over their attitude toward the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; radicals had joined new Communist parties while the more moderate Socialists remained in Social Democratic parties. In Austria, however, such a split, for all practical purposes, never occurred. Most of the radicals stayed in the SDP, but only at a price. The left-wing radicals were appeased with a large dose of hard-line Marxist slogans about class warfare and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Indeed, the party now saw itself as a kind of bridge between Soviet communism and Western European socialism.
³⁰

The SDFs split personality—ideological radicalism and moderation in practical affairs—was most apparent at a party congress held in Linz in 1926. The party’s left wing, headed by Otto Bauer and Friedrich Adler, the son of the party’s founder, wanted to retain the party’s traditional radical rhetoric; right-wing moderates, led by Karl Renner, saw slogans like “dictatorship of the proletariat” as obsolete and dangerous. The result was a tortured ideological compromise. The Linz program announced that the SDP strove to control the democratic Republic in order to place it at the service of the working class. But Bauer, the principal draftsman of the compromise, was convinced that the Austrian conservatives would resist a Socialist election victory with force. Then, and only then, would the Socialists be justified in defending their hard-earned victory with force. Violence was thus inevitable, but only for defensive purposes. The hypothetical situation envisioned by Bauer’s compromise was highly unlikely. Yet the Linz program was ambiguous at best and dangerous at worst, as many Socialist leaders themselves realized. Its wording could easily be misconstrued or deliberately misinterpreted. To the very end of the Republic the Socialists could never quite decide between their ideological extremism and their pragmatic moderation. Not su*-' prisingly, they succeeded neither in conciliating their rivals nor in eliminating them through revolution.

The continuing dogmatism and radical rhetoric of the Socialists did manage to pacify the party’s left wing and to prevent the growth of a large Communist party. But the ideological extremism also alienated the bourgeoisie and peasantry. A more flexible policy, like that followed by the Scandinavian Socialists, might very well have broadened the social base of the SDP among groups such as intellectuals and the bourgeoisie, which were sympathetic towards the party in the early postwar years.
³¹
The breakup of opposition party meetings and rallies was also a perilous precedent that the Nazis were later only too willing to imitate. The elaborate, tight, and almost totalitarian organization of the party likewise found an admirer and follower in none other than Adolf Hitler.
³²
And because the Socialists were such strident advocates of democracy and republicanism, the anti-Socialists became antidemocratic and antirepublican.

The radical rhetoric of the Socialists frightened the Austrian bourgeoisie and peasantry into believing that a proletarian revolution was imminent. In reality there was never a serious possibility of a violent revolution, except possibly by the tiny Austrian Communist party in 1919. Yet the bourgeois fears were sincere, even if unfounded, and helped lead to a conservative and even fascist reaction. Similar developments took place in other European countries between the world wars, above all in Italy and Germany.
³³