Die Wiener Christlichsoziale Partei, 1910–1934

Viennese political history in the early twentieth century is usually written from the perspective of the winners: the Christian Social Party of Karl Lueger from 1895 until 1919, and then the era of ‘Red Vienna’ under the Social Democrats until 1933/4, when the democratically elected government of Vienna was ousted by the Austrofascist regime of Engelbert Dollfuss’s Ständestaat. It is an interesting exercise to write the history of the times from the perspective of the losers, which is, more or less, what Markus Benesch has done, with much thoroughness and political acumen. Given that this was a book commissioned by an institutional arm of the Austrian People’s Party, modern heirs to the Christian Socials, there is also a welcome degree of historical honesty, although there could have been more. On paper, this is not just about a party of losers. The book ostensibly covers a period of success which lasted from Lueger’s death in 1910 when the Christian Socials were in power in Vienna (and the leading party in the Cisleithanian—the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy—government) up until the after the end of the First World War, being officially removed from power in Vienna in 1919. Benesch’s point, however, is that from Lueger’s death onwards, and especially after the catastrophic parliamentary elections of 1911, the party in Vienna was in a great deal of trouble. Without much real political organisation on the ground, running with a platform that was both anti-working class and anti-Semitic (in a city where both the proletariat and Jews were of decisive political and economic significance), blamed for the economic and political collapse occasioned by the war that occurred on their watch, riven by the change from a monarchical regime (which, as Catholic conservatives, they had largely supported) to a republic, compromised by the change to a universal suffrage, and then cut off from the Christian Social reservoir of Lower Austria when Vienna became its own federal province in 1920, the Viennese Christian Socials went from being the predominant force in Habsburg politics to a small, neutered, minority party which could only look on in frustration as the Social Democrats in Vienna instituted a revolutionary new, socialist regime in ‘Red Vienna’. On the other hand, when the immediate crisis after the end of the war had passed, the ‘bourgeois’ political forces resumed their predominance in the new Austrian Republic overall, with the main conflict for most of the 1920s being between socialist Red Vienna and the largely Christian-Social, Catholic and conservative regions of the rest of the country. As Benesch argues quite effectively, this meant that Viennese Christian Socials, such as Ignatz Seipel and Karl Vaugoin, to name but two, still held a great deal of power over Vienna, but from the federal level, from, politically, outside Vienna, while the Viennese party leadership looked on impotently. It is this dialectic between Viennese Christian Social impotence at the local level, but power at the federal level, which is the main thread of Benesch’s narrative

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