The Christian Social Movement in Austria began organizing in the 1880s, mainly in reaction against the politically dominant liberals. Catholicism and loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty provided the basis for the movement; its general objective was to adapt modern economic and technological innovations to the premodern corporate society that most members believed to be the ideal. In 1891, the movement created the Christian Social Party to represent its values and pursue its goals on the political stage. In the urban sphere, it was predominantly the lower middle class that was attracted by the idea of a traditional corporate order, seeing in it a guarantee of protection from the market economy, industrialization, and the resultant influence of the proletariat. In the countryside, a majority of the peasantry came to regard the movement as a bulwark against secularization and the decline of agriculture. In both rural and urban areas, the lower clergy played the major leadership role. The party was less successful in attracting workers, the vast majority of whom supported the Social Democrats.
Antisemitism was central to the party’s ideology. Jews were regarded as representatives of capitalism and cultural liberalism and, as such, antagonistic to Christianity. Christian Social rhetoric stigmatized liberal economics as the work of the “Jewish-liberal Manchester party.” It portrayed the Liberal and Social Democratic Parties as the creatures of Jewish patronage and the “Jewish” press. The Hungarian elites, supposedly much too beholden to Jewish influence, provided another opportunity for the Christian Socials to vent their antisemitism. The so-called Judeo-Magyar clique was corrupt, disloyal (secessionist), and oppressive to the non-Magyar peoples in Hungary, according to the electoral manifesto of 1907.
The Christian Social Party rose to dominance in Vienna in the 1890s. Its charismatic leader, Karl Lueger, ruled the capital between 1897 and his death in 1910, borne aloft by his adoring Christian Social following. Mayor Lueger’s masterful exploitation of antisemitic emotions later won him rare praise from Adolf Hitler, who witnessed his methods firsthand while living in the capital and later wrote about the “greatest German mayor” in Mein Kampf.
After 1918, in response to the influx of Jews from the former eastern territories of the defunct Habsburg Empire, the Christian Social Party strengthened its identity as a German Catholic party by opposing immigration and naturalization in order to preserve what it saw as the German character of Vienna. Jews, the Viennese Christian Social Party program of 1919 said, were a separate nationality. Jewish children
“German Christians, Vote Christian-Social, Save Austria!” says this election poster. The two-headed eagle symbolizing the Austro-Hungarian monarchy is here replaced by a serpent and a vulture with stereotypical Jewish features. (Courtesy of Richard S. Levy)
Its federal chancellor. It is fair to say that the Christian Social Party was successful in establishing its brand of antisemitism as a central element of Austrian political culture both before and after World War I. The party continued until September 1934, when the launching of the “corporate state” led to its voluntary dissolution. However, its influence on Austrian antisemitism lived on.
—Werner Suppanz
See also Austria; Hitler, Adolf; “Jewish” Press;
Lueger, Karl; Mein Kampf; Ostjuden; Vogelsang,
Karl von
References
Boyer, John W. Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897—1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Suppanz, Werner. Osterreichische Geschichtsbilder: historische Legitimationen in Standestaat und zweiter Republik (Cologne, Germany: Bohlau Verlag, 1998).
Should be sent to separate schools or put in segregated classrooms, to guarantee German youth a proper Christian education. In Linz in 1923, the Christian Workers of Austria called on their compatriots to overcome the corrosive influence of Jewry in the intellectual and economic life of the German people. In 1926, the new party program declared: “The nationally minded Christian Socials demand the cultivation of the German way and fight the predominance of subversive Jewish influence in the fields of the intellect and the economy.”
The focus of the Christian Socials’ antisemitic discourse was not racist but rather economic and cultural, insinuating a distinct Jewish mind, values, and behavior, incompatible with Christianity or Germanness. In Austria’s First Republic (1918-1938), the Christian Social Party was a major force, usually providing the country with
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