History
This chapter sets out the wider background to instances of antisemitism in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It describes how histories of the subject have explained the origins and development of Christian Social antisemitism in Vienna, then it outlines how this work engages with and challenges these histories. It begins the process of demonstrating how antisemitism came to be used in the long term as a weapon against liberalism and liberal views, and against modernism and the modern world. It begins to explain how antisemitism in Vienna came to be viewed as a ‘respectable’ and acceptable stance. It starts to examine who propagated it and how they did so, and why its proponents initially came from the lower bourgeoise and the lower clergy.
This chapter draws together key points from previous chapters and presents conclusions about the roles played by various Christian Socials and those associated with them in the origins and development of organised, political antisemitism in Vienna. It reiterates the point that the Christian Socials began as a Viennese bourgeois protest movement, and that their history is specific to the particular circumstances of Vienna. The chapter compares conclusions reached in this work with those of previous narratives, especially concerning the motivations of those who became involved in campaigning. It reiterates that the Christian Social movement, including large swathes of the Viennese clergy, had, at its heart, an authoritarianism that rejected pluralism. The chapter adds that some previous histories seem to have left little room for doubt and uncertainty, so this work gives a few examples of where analysis would benefit from seeing a grey rather than a black-and-white picture. The work concludes by looking at a how deep-seated antisemitism in Vienna left a legacy that contributed to the destruction of Jewish Vienna.
This chapter analyses how Austria fell victim to increasing civil conflict that encompassed clashes between left and right, the rise of militias that were independent of the state and a realignment of the political right that saw the take-off of the Nazi Party in Austria. It shows how Christian Socials used political institutions to stage what was, in effect, a coup, taking control of state institutions for their own end. It demonstrates how attempts were made to rein in opposition, and then concludes with efforts made by Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, openly supported by the clergy of Vienna, to refashion Austria along the lines of a corporate state, rather than a democracy, after a bloody Nazi coup failed to murder him.
The chapter analyses how the political systems of the day, restricting voting rights to a small minority of the population, worked to the advantage of antisemitic activists. These activists continued to develop political organisations, using the word ‘Christian’ to indicate that they were not Jewish and therefore, in their eyes, not liberal. Claims by activists among the clergy that they were reacting to their ill treatment by the liberal state are found to be wanting. This is a crucial point, as these claims are often held up in other works as key motivating factors for the antisemitism of the clergy. In this work, such claims are shown as secondary to a deep-seated antimodernism, and a desire to make the Catholic Church the supreme moral arbiter in the state, something which could only be implemented in a modern, pluralist world by an authoritarian state. The chapter shows how the senior clergy of Vienna played a part in the rise of politically organised antisemitism.
This chapter considers the democratic, secular Austrian republic that was created as a remnant of the Habsburg Empire, and of which Vienna became the capital. This was a state pulled in multiple directions: by those who wanted to abolish it, and to join with Germany; by those who were happy to keep it, as long as it ceased to be a democracy. It is a chapter that highlights a struggle to make it a Catholic state, but it is also a chapter that highlights considerable social division on many subjects, such as the economic direction the state should take. It is a chapter that highlights the tensions between the national governments of Austria, usually led by Christian Socials, and the Vienna City Council, overwhelmingly controlled by the Marxist Social Democrats.
Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites engages with and challenges some key narratives of one of the darkest periods in the history of Vienna; the rise and sustained presence of organised, politically directed antisemitism in the city between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. Sketching out first the longer-term background, it then focuses on central players in the antisemitic Christian Social movement, which flourished through an ideology of exclusion and prejudice. The work is built on considerable original research into both bourgeois social organisations and activists from the lower clergy, but it also exposes the role played in the development of antisemitism by the senior clergy in Vienna. In addition to a close examination of the antisemitic aspects of the Christian Socials, it analyses how other major social debates in this period impacted on their development as a group: national struggles, especially the desire for German unification; responses to the waves of poverty and social unrest that swept over Europe; and conservative and clerical reactions to modernity, such as liberalism and democracy – debates with a resonance far beyond Vienna. Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites tells its story across this long period, and for the first time in such detail, to give room to the gestation in ‘respectable’ society of antisemitism, an ideology that seemed to be dying in the 1860s, but which was revived and given new strength from the 1880s onwards, even surviving challenges from the more widely known Red Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s.
This chapter considers events from the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand through to the collapse of the Empire at the end of the First World War. It shows how, after initial enthusiasm for war, a number of factors created an atmosphere of bitterness in Vienna: extreme food shortages, rumours of spies among the Slavic population of the city and enhanced antisemitism as large numbers of Austrian Jewish refugees fled to Vienna from the eastern front, where the Russians advanced. When collapse came at the end of the war, and independent nation-states were created from the remnants of the Empire, many German Austrians wanted to join with Germany, but were prevented from doing so by the victorious powers. The chapter also examines how, in standing beside the Habsburgs, the Church helped to bolster anti-democratic sentiment.
An ad hoc extension, comprising sporadic annual entries, begins with the author’s first-hand experience of being cured from a spiritual malady by a drink from a chalice holding the tooth of the monastery’s founder. The author also discusses the monastery’s involvement in and experience of larger events in the mid-twelfth century, including the Second Lateran Council, the Second Crusade (and St. Bernard’s journey through Germany), and an extended period of famine and scarcity that compelled the monks to sell many prized works of art and other goods. A brief hagiography on St. Ratpero, whose oratory was located on land owned by Petershausen, is included. Several chapters that describe the death of religious women and men and other later entries offer a rare acknowledgement in the CP of religious women and men of various sorts at Petershausen, including those the chronicler identifies as hermits and inclusi. This section closes with a dramatic description of the fire that destroyed the monastery in 1159. In offering an eyewitness account of the extent of the devastation and the efforts of the monks to rebuild, the chronicler spins a narrative of trauma that lays the blame with the monks for their many moral failings.
A fifth book, partly the work of a continuator, begins with the continued efforts of the monks to rebuild after the fire. After a brief description of Frederick Barbarossa and the Alexandrian Schism, most of the rest of the book focuses on Abbot Conrad (r. 1127–1164) and his exploits, including some pointed critiques of his many missteps.
Book Four continues the history of the monastery from the death of Theodoric to the author’s own time with an eclectic collection of colorful stories continuing many of themes introduced in Books Two and Three – conflicts with bishops and lay patrons, internal politics, relations with daughter houses, and various miracles. Twice the bishop-proprietor Ulrich I of Constance attempts to intervene in the election or abdication of an abbot, spurring the monastery to assert its libertas in active resistance. Hints of profound troubles in the wake of reform are introduced, including violence in the abbey, economic mismanagement, and failed attempts to found and reform other houses. The monastery is miraculously spared from fire on multiple occasions.