Already in the last years of World War I it had become necessary to make concessions to workers in order to keep the war economy running. The most important legislation included Tenant Protection in January 1917 and Grievance Commission in March 1917. Immediately after taking power on 30 October 1918 the provisional cabinet of Karl Renner began with an extensive programme of social reform under the Secretary for Social Affairs Ferdinand Hanusch. By applying clever tactics Hanusch succeeded in carrying out revolutionary reforms that would not have seemed possible earlier. He negotiated with employers and achieved material and institutional reforms for workers, always pointing to the Communist revolutionary attempt in Hungary as a threat to Austrian democracy. …
Statistical data of the time just before the outbreak of the First World War still show a considerable amount of children below the age of 14 at work in Vienna. This seems proof of a very slow retreat of child labour in Vienna. The phasing out of child labour was more due to a change in work technology than social protest. Another important impetus for the end of child labour in Vienna was the introduction of the “Reichsvolksschulgesetz” of 1869. This law extended compulsory schooling from six to eight years. Although it has to be noted that the law stipulated several exceptions because especially working class families depended on the income of the children and a loss of this income would have jeopardised their existence. Many working class parents considered obligatory school attendance a nuisance and refused to have the state prescribe what they were supposed to do with their children. Most considered three years of schooling as sufficient. In the late 19th century compliance with obligatory school attendance was the exception rather than the rule in Vienna. Before the turn of the century the authorities executed more rigid supervision, so that by 1900 the start of work for Viennese working class children had been postponed to 12 – 14 years of age.…
In 1849 governmental autonomy was granted to all municipalities in the Habsburg Empire. Although thereafter Vienna enjoyed self-government, repeatedly the emperor intervened in its affairs. From 1850 onward, Vienna underwent rapid growth, expanding in 1890 to incorporate suburbs across the Danube and along the Vienna Woods. A municipal constitution of 1850 established a city council to be elected by tax-paying citizens divided into three classes. In 1885 the minimum taxation for suffrage was lowered to 5 gulden, excluding the poor until universal suffrage came in 1907. After 1890 the unwieldy city council of 138 members was directed by 25 of its members, the Stadtrat, who together with the mayor ran the city. As mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910 Karl Lueger (1844-1910) so dominated public life that next to Franz Josef he was the city’s best known citizen. Although Lueger had entered the city council as a Liberal in 1875, over the next decade he broke with liberalism and denounced international capitalism as a ”Jewish monopoly”. After being briefly an ally of Schönerer, he became a friend of Vogelsang whose doctrines he incorporated into the Christian Social Party, founded in 1893.…
The Catholic church fostered several varieties of social thought in Austria. Chief among those was the Christian Socialism disseminated by Karl Baron von Vogelsang (1818-1890). During the 1880s his writings paved the way for Karl Lueger’s founding of the Christian Socialist Party. A converted Prussian protestant, he came to Vienna to edit the Catholic daily “Vaterland”. He wanted Christian ethics to replace capitalist competition and state socialism and Marxism only added to the evils of capitalism and liberalism in his opinion. In contrast with all these systems, Vogelsang sought not to increase productivity or to expand political rights, but to restore the hierarchical structure of medieval society. Vogelsang desired every business to become an industrial “family”, in which workers and owners would share management, each firm would belong to a branch corporation and each of these to the Industrial Chamber, where workers and owners would legislate economic and social policy for each industry. Artisans would be required to join a guild, which would fix the numbers of masters and apprentices. This medieval institution would shield its members from the dangers of individualism. But this sort of Catholic socialism could not stem the rise of anti-clericalism. In the forefront of anti-clericals, Social Democrats and free-thinkers denounced the control that the church retained over marriage and primary education. Catholics who married outside their faith were faced with so many impediments that in 1914 approximately 1 mill common-law marriages existed in the empire. The church further prohibited divorce and forbade former priests to marry, all of which contributed to the popularity of the “Los-von-Rom” movement. Concerning anti-Semitism the clergy was openly divided. Parish clergy, who were recruited from the lower middle class, often scandalised the episcopacy by openly preaching anti-Semitism. In 1898 the Viennese anti-Semite Georg Ritter von Schönerer (1842-1921) initiated the “Los-von-Rom” movement protesting against the power of the state church and offering a rehearsal for an eventual union of Cisleithania(western part of the empire) and the German Empire. In Austria Christian Socialism somehow blunted the “Los-von-Rom” movement. Although it did not perceptibly weaken the church, Schönerer’s success in branding the Roman Catholic Church an enemy of Germans predisposed some Catholics to accept Hitler’s anti-clericalism.…
Central European architecture: Prague, Czech Republic
A question to be asked is whether the historical and cultural entity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Danube basin and special cultural relationships of the past in any way promoted the expansion of Austrian banks, insurances and other businesses in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe after 1989.
Robert Musil sarcastically describes in his famous novel “The Man Without Qualities“ the disintegration of Austrian hierarchical society and liberal-rational culture: “Kakania”. “Kakania was the first country at the present stage of development, from which God had withdrawn all credit, all love of life, all belief in itself and the capacity of all cultural nations to spread the useful imagination that they had a task to fullfill.” This Kakania is at the same time a model of an intellectual concept of Central Europe – more imaginary than a real geographically and historically defined area – today. Again Robert Musil: “…after having taken stock of the bulk of Central European ideas, he found out, not only to his regret, that it consisted only of contradictions, but to his astonishment he also realised that these contradictions are melting into each other when you look at them carefully.” “People who were not born then,” wrote Musil about the Austrian fin-de-siècle , “ will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel…. But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards; nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backward.”…
“When someone went up the Danube to Vienna, it was said that he went to Europe”, Elias Canetti (the name is derived from the Spanish city of “Canete”, from where the family seemed to have been expulsed) wrote in the first part of his autobiography “The Rescued Tongue” in 1977. Canetti was born in Rustschuk / Ruse, Bulgaria, at the Danube and his native town became the symbolic start of the journey of the later winner of the Noble prize for literature. His Jewish forefathers were expelled from Spain after the Christian Reconquista and settled in Rustschuk as merchants. This “second diaspora” made Canetti a “Sephardic Jew”, who chose German as the “mother tongue” of his literature. Canetti’s path of life was a European one and it started in Vienna after he had crossed an invisible frontier when going up the Danube. …
If there is a distinctive division, where does east and west meet? There is an ancient invisible line from Gdansk in the north to Trieste in the south that separates the two parts with remarkable continuity from the eastern border of the Carolingian Empire to the frontier between the Austrian and Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire to the western border of “real existing socialism” after 1947. From the Dalmatian coast to Lithuania there is a line dotted with fortresses, frontier settlements, strategic towns and historic cross roads. For centuries this area has been a point of encounters of Germans and Slavs, Austrians and Turks, Catholics and orthodox Christians. But it falls across a terrain, where peoples for centuries have met, mixed and fought. Contrary to other areas in Eastern Europe, Bohemia was until 1948 a flourishing component in the Industrial Revolution, which marked the western part off from the rest of the continent more than anything else, and it was firmly settled in the western European culture.…
Map of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Archive S.Wurm
Curiously, one of the things that Europeans have long shared, that has bound them together is a sense of their divisions. The east – west distinction was remarkably well established at a very early time in history. It is sometimes supposed today that the line dividing Eastern from Western Europe was an artificial creation of the Cold War, but that is not so. The division of the continent started with the break-up of the Roman Empire into two distinct parts in the 4th century AD. The emergence of the Carolingian Monarchy reinforced the division by giving the hitherto anarchic western part distinction and enduring frontiers. Charlemagne’s 9th century empire corresponded, curiously enough, with precision the post-war “Europe of Six”; it just left out central and southern Italy and Catalonia. The eastern boundaries of the Carolingian Empire were still imprecise just as the northern borders of Byzantium, but by the 14th century the east-west distinction was well established. Although partly based on prejudices, historical documents confirmed that invisible line that separated east from west. Conradus Celtis in the 15th century recorded a sentiment that was wide-spread in Western Europe since the 10th century: Where the Roman/Carolingian, Lothringian and Hohenzollern empires ended, there ended Europe. An Englishman travelling the Habsburg lands in 1669, Edward Brown, remarked upon entering Hungary that he left his world and entered a land quite different from western countries. Long after the Habsburgs had established effective authority over territories stretching well into today’s Ukraine, Metternich spoke of “Asia beginning at the Landstrasse [a street in the eastern part of Vienna then]”. …
