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Austrian Lives

Günter Bischof, Fritz Plasser, Eva Maltschnig (Eds.)

CONTEMPORARY AUSTRIAN STUDIES | Volume 21

innsbruck university press


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Copyright ©2012 by University o New Orleans Press, New Orleans,Louisiana, USA.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American CopyrightConventions. No part o this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any orm or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,recording, or any inormation storage and retrieval system, without priorpermission in writing rom the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to

UNO Press, University o New Orleans, LA 138, 2000 Lakeshore Drive,New Orleans, LA, 70119, USA. www.unopress.org.

Printed in the United States o America.

Book and cover design: Lauren Capone

Cover photo credits given on the ollowing pages:33, 72, 119, 148, 191, 311, 336, 370, 397

Published in the United States by Published and distributed in EuropeUniversity o New Orleans Press: by Innsbruck University Press:ISBN: 9781608010929 ISBN: 9783902811615


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Siegried BeerUniversität Graz

Peter Berger Wirtschatsuniversität Wien

John BoyerUniversity o Chicago

Gary CohenUniversity o Minnesota

Christine Day University o New Orleans

Oscar GabrielUniversität Stuttgart

Malachi HacohenDuke University

Reinhard HeinischUniversität Salzburg

Pieter JudsonSwarthmore College

Wilhelm KohlerUniversität übingen

Helmut KonradUniversität Graz

Sándor KurtánCorvinus University Budapest

Günther PallaverUniversität Innsbruck

Joseph Patrouch (ex officio) Writh Institute or Austrain andCentral European StudiesUniversity o Alberta

Peter PulzerUniversity o Oxord

Oliver RathkolbUniversität Wien

Sieglinde RosenbergerUniversität Wien

Alan ScottUniversität Innsbruck

Heidemarie UhlAustrian Academy o Sciences

Ruth Wodak University o Lancaster

Contemporary Austrian StudiesSponsored by the University of New Orleans

and Universität Innsbruck

Editors

Günter Bischo, CenterAustria, University o New OrleansFritz Plasser, Universität Innsbruck

Production Editor Copy Editor Bill Lavender Lauren CaponeUniversity o New Orleans University o New Orleans

Executive EditorsKlaus Frantz, Universität Innsbruck

Susan Krantz, University o New Orleans

Advisory Board

Publication o this volume has been made possible through generous grants rom the AustrianMinistry o European and International Affairs through the Austrian Cultural Forum in

New York as well as the Austrian Ministry o Science and Research. Te Austrian MarshallPlan Anniversary Foundation in Vienna has been very generous in supporting CenterAustriaat the University o New Orleans and its publications series. Te College o Liberal Arts atthe University o New Orleans and the Auslandsamt o the University o Innsbruck providedadditional nancial support.


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Table of Contents

PREFACE ix

INRODUCION

Bernhard Fetz: Biographical Narrative between ruth and Lies,Production and Authenticity xix

POLIICAL LIVES

John Deak: Ignaz Seipel (1876-1932) Founding Fatherof the Austrian Republic 32

Ernst Hanisch: Otto Bauer (1881-1938) Politicianand Public Intellectual 56

Gabriella Hauch: “Against the Mock Battle of Words”—Terese

Schlesinger, neé Eckstein (1863-1940), a Radical Seeker 71Philipp Strobl: Tinking Cosmopolitan or How Joseph Became

Joe Buttinger 92

Johannes Koll: From the Habsburg Empire to the Tird Reich: Arthur Seyß-Inquart and National Socialism 123

Elisabeth Röhrlich: A Century in a Lifetime: Biographical Approaches to Bruno Kreisky (1911-1990) 147

Martin Eichtinger/Helmuth Wohnout: Alois Mock— Pioneer of European Unity 164


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LIVES OF HE MIND

Deborah Holmes: “Genia” Schwarzwald and Her Viennese “Salon” 190

Jason Dawsey: Where Hitler’s Name is Never Spoken: Günther Anders in 1950s Vienna 212

imothy Pytell: Viktor Frankl: Te Inside Outsider 240

Stean Maurer: Wolfgang Kraus: Impresario of AustrianLiterature and Cold Warrior 256

COMMON LIVES

Wolram Dornik: orn apart between time and space? A CollectiveBiography of Austro-Hungarian Military Personnel on the Eastern Front, 1914-1918 280

Wilried Garscha: Ordinary Austrians: Common War Criminalsduring World War II 304

Günter Bischo/Barbara Stelz-Marx: Lives behind BarbedWire: A Comparative View of Austrian Prisoners of War duringand after World War II in Soviet and American Captivity 327

Hans Petschar/Herbert Friedlmeier: Te Photographic Gaze— Austrian Visual Lives during the Occupation Decade: A Cross-Section of Ordinary Austrians Photographed by Americanand Austrian Artists 359

Ernst Langthaler: Balancing Between Autonomy and DependenceFamily Farming and Agrarian Change in Lower Austria,1945–1980 385

Oliver Rathkolb et al: Attitudinal Lives: A Survey of Austrian Students Attitudes towards Muslims and Jews,

Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung and World War II,and Democratic Dispositions 405


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BOOK REVIEWS

Peter Berger: Ernst Hanisch, Der große Illusionist: Otto Bauer,1881-1938 422

Alexander Lassner: Peter Broucek, ed., Ein österreichischerGeneral gegen Hitler: Feldmarschalleutnant Alfred Jansa; Erinnerungen 436

Gerald Steinacher: Evan Burr Bukey, Jews and Intermarriagein Nazi Austria 447

Berthold Molden: Dirk Rupnow and Heidemarie Uhl, eds.,Zeitgeschichte ausstellen in Österreich: Museen–Gedenkstätten– Ausstellungen 452

Maria-Regina Kecht: Ingrid Schramm and Michael Hansel, eds.,

Hilde Spiel und der literarische Salon 457

Tomas Nowotny: Manried Rauchensteiner, ed., Zwischenden Blöcken: NAO, Warschauer Pakt und Österreich 462

ANNUAL REVIEW

Reinhold Gärtner: Austria 2011 478

LIS OF AUHORS 484


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Preface

Günter Bischof

Writing biographies (lie stories) or a long time had been a malehegemonic project—writing the lives o great (white) men. Ever sincePlutarch and Sueton composed their vitae o the greats o classical antiquity,to the medieval obsession with the hagiographies o holy men (and a ew

women) and saints, Vasari’s lives o great Renaissance artists, down to theFrench encyclopedists, Dr. Johnson and Lytton Strachey, as well as Rankeand Droysen the genre o biographical writing (“the representation o sel ” or

“the reconstruction o a human lie”) has become increasingly more rened.In the twentieth century male predominance has become contested andthe (collective) lives o women, minorities and ordinary people are now theocus o biographical writing. Te writing o lives (or lives and their times)are always situated between act and ction, ascertainable data and theimagination o the biographer. Leon Edel, the great American biographero Henry James and theorist o biography, insisted that a biographer mustexplore and immerse him/hersel in the thinking and subconscious o hissubject but also know him/hersel. More recent postmodern theorists suchas Ira Bruce Nadel ocus on the narrative technique o biographical writing.1

Te genre o biography has become so popular with the reading public thatit is now applied to the lives o cities and entire nations.2

Biographical writing is not a forte o the historical proession in Austria. Te reasons or this are maniold. Careers at the university level are madeas quasi-“apprenticeships”; aspiring young scholars oten pursue the latestmethodological ashions and approaches in the historical sciences (next toserving the predilections and whims o mentors). Proessors and the young

1. See the splendid Handbuch Biographie: Methoden, raditionen, Teorien, ed. ChristianKlein (Suttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2009) (citations 1-6, 326).2. Simon Sebag Monteori, Jerusalem: Te Biography (New York: Knop, 2011); HankHeietz and Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of a Power (New York: Harper, 1998).


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charges in their seminars rushed rom innovations in quantitative socialhistory in the 1960s/1970s, to the ascination with gender studies in the

1980s, to the history and memory ad in the 1990s, on to the cultural studiesboom more recently. “Great men” were a negative role model through all othese historical trends. It may also be that the book market is not big enoughin Austria to support independent scholars interested in writing the literateportraits o leading gures in the Austrian universe. It is astounding thatsome the more intriguing political gures o the two Austrian Republics(and the National Socialist past in between) have not ound biographers

yet. We have academic biographies o Ignaz Seipel and now o Otto Bauer3,but no adequate scholarly biographies o Engelbert Dolluß and KurtSchuschnigg4; nor have all the “ounding athers” o the Second Republicattracted the attention o academic biographers. Leopold Figl, Julius Raab,Karl Renner, and Teodor Körner have not been the subject o abidingscholarly biographic attention5, Adol Schär and Bruno Kreisky have.6

Te rest o the chancellors o the Second Republic cry out or biographicattention, not to speak o their many ministers and party elites—thepolitical gures operating in the parliamentary arena or the battle groundo party politics. Te same is true or economic tycoons and intellectual and

artistic leaders. When I raised the issue o a lacunae o biographical writingamong historians during the rst Austrian Zeitgeschichtetag (ContemporaryHistory Meeting) in Innsbruck in the spring o 1994, the response wastepid and yawning disinterest.

Across the border in Germany the interest o the reading public inbiographical writing is much bigger and academia allows career paths basedon writing the lives o great men and women. In act, ever since Lothar

3. Ernst Hanisch, Der große Illusionist: Otto Bauer (1881-1938) (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011);Klemens von Klemperer, Ignaz Seipel: Christian Statesman in a ime of Crisis (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1972).4. Radomir Lua wanted to write a lie o Schuschnigg; however, Schuschnigg and hisamily did not grant him access to his personal papers.5. Te contemporary biographies o Leopold Figl and Karl Renner written by journalistsErnst rost and Jacques Hannak are dated and not based on the rich archival records. AntonPelinka’s Karl Renner zur Einfűhrung ( Junius Verlag, 1998) is sketchy and not based on thearchival record either.6. Karl Stadler, Adolf Schärf: Mensch, Politiker Staatsmann (Vienna: Europaverlag,1982); Elisabeth Röhrlich, Kreisky’s Außenpolitik: Zwischen österreichischer Identität undinternationalem Programm (Göttingen: Vienna University Press, 2009); Anton Pelinka,

Hubert Sickinger and Karin Stögner, Kreisky – Haider: Bruchlinien österreichischer Identität (Vienna: Brauműller, 2088) is concentrating on identity politics and not biography basedon archival ndings; we do have a scholarly biography o the enfante terrible o postwarAustrian politics Jörg Haider, see Lothar Höbelt, Deant Populist: Jörg Haider and the Politicsof Austria (West Laayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2003).


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Gall’s Bismarck and Hans-Peter Schwarz’s Adenauer biographies one mayspeak o a veritable boom in academics writing biographies in Germany.7 In

the Anglo-American world and uninterrupted stream o great biographieseeds the vast reading public and keeps the publishing industry alive and

well.8 Writing the lives o Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt never ceasesto ascinate those who like to read history. Moreover, the industry o writingpresidential biographies keeps academic and popular writers busy. Stellaracademic careers are made writing biography.

Tis volume o Contemporary Austrian Studies offers a cross sectiono Austrian lives and biographical approaches to recent Austrian history.Here are what may be called traditional biographies o leading politicalgures through the twentieth century. We also suggest that the intellectualbiographies (lives o the mind) o thinkers and proessionals are ertile soilor biographical study. Moreover, the prosopographic study o commonolks in the Austrian population lits these lives rom the dark matter oanonymous masses and gives rich insights into the lives ordinary Austrianshave been leading.

We present here a cross-section o political lives. It is no surprise thatrom John Boyer’s seminar at the University o Chicago, which has been

giving us seminal new insights into Austrian history in recent years, comesa resh and air-minded portrait by John Deak to interpret the lie o thecontroversial Catholic priest-chancellor Ignaz Seipel.9 Ernst Hanisch hassummarized or this volume his recent biography o Otto Bauer (his book isalso extensively reviewed here)—a rare attempt by one o Austria’s leadingcontemporary historians to venture into the eld o biography.10 GabrielaHauch and Philipp Strobl present biographies o two leading socialistactivists o the interwar period—Terese Schlesinger and Joseph Buttinger.

Te later emigrated to the United States as a result o persecution o the

Socialists by the Austro-Corporate regime and the Nazis, a ate that besettens o thousands o Jewish Austrians and political opponents to Nazism. Johannes Koll reminds us that the lie stories o leading Austrian Nazisstill await the study o biographers. Arthur Seyß-Inquart, Hitler’s “willing

7. Lukas Werner “Deutschsprachige Biographik,” in Handbuch Biographie , 265-77.8. Michael Jonas, “Britische Biographik,” and Levke Harders, “US-amerikanischeBiographik,” in ibid., 289-97, 321-30. Fittingly, there is no chapter in this handbook obiography’s “regional developments” on Austria.

9. Based on his lie-long deep immersion in the party politics o the late Habsburg Empire, John Boyer himsel has given us a model biographic study o Karl Lueger, the iconic mayoro Vienna, see Karl Lueger (1844-1910): Christlichsoziale Politik als Beruf. Eine Biographie (Vienna: Böhlau, 2010).10. Hanisch, Der große Illusionist .


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executioner” o the “Anschluss” o Austria, was a leading gure in theoccupation o Poland and the Netherlands. He was one o the Austrians

who ended up in the docket in the Nuremberg War Crimes rials andearned a sentence o capital punishment. Te young German historianElisabeth Röhrlich has been liting the biographical study o Bruno Kreiskyrom the liopietistic/requently hagiographic approach to a more criticallevel o academic biographical engagement. Martin Eichtinger and Helmut

Wohnout offer a rst attempt o interpreting the lie story o Alois Mock.11 Te section on “Lives o the Mind” tries to capture the lives o ascinating

intellectual gures in pre- and post-World War II Vienna. Deborah Holmespresents a subtle and model biographical study o the emale impresario

“Genia” Schwarzwald who acted as a major educational reormer, journalist,entrepreneur, and salonière ; she maintained a notable salon in the interwarperiod where some o Vienna’s leading lights regularly met and exchangedideas. Jason Dawsey, like John Deak a recent PhD rom the University oChicago’s stellar History Department, is presenting a biographical cameothe philosopher and public intellectual Gűnther Anders. Like FriedrichHeer, Anders was consistently ignored and isolated by the native chatteringclasses, yet was a major thinker on postwar Vienna’s intellectual scene. Andersed Nazi Germany and settled in Vienna ater the war, becoming the rstnotable critic o the nuclear age. Dawsey concentrates on unraveling Andersrole as one o the earliest critics o Vergangenheitsbewältigung Austrian style,namely the lie o Austrians as “rst victims” o National Socialism. imothyPytell, on the other hand, demonstrates how the Jewish Auschwitz survivorViktor Frankl made a career in postwar Vienna as a psychiatrist, maybeor the prize o not challenging this very “victim doctrine.” Tere weredifferent strategies, then, o conronting Austrians’ ailing memory o their

World War II past. Stean Maurer analyzes the career path or WolgangKraus, one o the major literary critics and historians o the postwar era

who at the same time also played a major role in the intellectual “cold wars”o Central Europe ghting the communists across the iron curtain. Allo these studies show an extraordinary rich lie o intellectual discoursesinuencing the world beyond stale and provincial postwar Austria, otencontrarian thinkers whose discourses happened outside o the limelight oofficial “state sponsored” debates.

Te approaches to writing biography taken in this volume also suggestthat much work needs to be done to illuminate the lives o ordinary

Austrians. While post-World War II neutralist Austria has studiously

11. See also their ull-edged biography Martin Eichtinger and Helmut Wohnout, Alois Mock: Ein Politiker schreibt Geschichte (Graz: Styria, 2008).


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ignored the lives o millions o Austrian soldiers drated during World War I and II and pulled into the cauldron o wars raging across Europe

and the globe, three essays in this collection adumbrate the individual lietrajectories o these oten aceless Austrian Soldaten-warriors. WolramDornik shows how during World War I they were stationed rom ront toront all over Europe and injured requently in very difficult circumstances.

Wilried Garscha takes apart the lives o our ordinary Austrians tossedout over Nazi occupied Europe and turned into perpetrators/war criminals.One was executed or the crimes he committed during the “death marches”o Jews at the end o the war going through Eastern Austria. Te otherthree managed to escape the retribution o the law in the years ater theAustrian occupation ended and the Austrian judiciary turned sot on warcriminals. Barbara Stelzl-Marx and I ollow our Austrian Wehrmachtsoldiers through World War II and their subsequent ate as prisoners o

war o the Soviets in the East and the Americans in the West. From themillions o Austrians drated as “cannon odder” by their requently ill-advised political leaders during both wars, writing the lives o soldiers inlow ranks gives extraordinary agency to their lives’ trajectories through “theage o extremes”(Eric Hobsbawm) and their enormous suffering on behal

o what Hitler called the Volksgemeinschaft. For political reasons their lives were usually silenced ater both wars and they had to suffer quietly theignominies o deeat and what today would be called “post-traumatic stresssyndrome” (PSD). Tese individual lie stories need to be re-injected inthe grand narrative o Austrian history where their roles have been ignoredor a long time. More than a million Wehrmacht soldiers rom the Ostmark

were perpetrators in and victims o the Hitler state and oten both. Tebiographic approach can do justice to the complexities o their lives’trajectories. Biographies o ordinary people compel the historians to write

in hues o gray rather than in black and white.Modern methodologies and new source materials give biographersadded opportunities to explore collective lives. Hans Petschar and HerbertFriedlmeier pull the visual lives o ordinary Austrians rom the rich photocollection o the United States Inormation Agency, deposited in the PictureArchives o the Austrian National Archives. urning to photography as theprincipal source material, offers a rich menu o possibilities or biographers,especially when it comes to portraiture o ordinary Austrians. ErnstLangthaler utilizes both quantitative and qualitative records to show howarmers in Lower Austrian innovated and adjusted to changing marketconditions to survive and do well through hard work in the shrinkingagricultural sector. Te Austrian armer/peasant is usually ignored as actor


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in contemporary history and, as Langthaler demonstrates, at the peril ohistorians. Oliver Rathkolb and his students did an extensive survey among

Austrian students today and demonstrate that the more education youngAustrians have, the less prejudiced they are vis-à-vis Muslims and Jews, andthe more sophisticated a view they hold about the holocaust and Austrians’role during World War II (among these youngsters the myth o Austriansas “victims” is passé). Tey show how survey data constitute an importanthistorical source to understand “the lives o the mind” o the anonymousmasses.

State archives usually hold the documents and written records on thepeople that shape the ate o nations—politicians, diplomats, military and

maybe business leaders and the institutional settings in which they operate(rom the ministerial and war councils to diplomatic conerences and ondown). Only recently have historians begun to collect the “ego” materialso representative groups o ordinary men and women to document theirlie stories. Te essays on ordinary Austrians in this volume use a varietyo source materials to demonstrate that the biographies o common olkscan be researched deeply beyond the state archives, where they are ignoredas collective historical actors. Oral histories are prominently used, as arediaries and letters, as well as archival records (written and visual), databases, polls and surveys, photographs and lm. Te historical proession hastaken the quantitative methods o the social sciences to collect the data on

vast groups o people and/or developed polls and public opinion methodsto survey tens o thousands o people. All o these materials offer thehistorians rich source collections to write history rom the “bottom up” andendow historical agency to masses o ordinary people both as individualsand group actors.

Most in this volume o our lengthy book review essays also deal withbiographical approaches. Peter Berger’s review o Ernst Hanisch’s Bauerbiography gives ull credit to this complex lie story and the biographer’schallenges in doing justice to his/her subject matter. Alexander Lassner’sreview o Alred Jansa’s memoir raises issues about the genre oautobiography and the pitalls o writing an “apologia pro vita sua .” EvanBukey’s book on Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria is a prosopographyo sorts as it deals with the Nazi ascription o Jewishness during World WarII and the resulting game o complex identity politics as a means o survival.Regina Kecht reviews the rst scholarly work on Hilde Spiel, the World

War II émigré and postwar literary grande dame who continued the arto the Viennese salonières in the grand tradition o “Genia” Schwarzwald,Berta Zuckerkandl and Alma Mahler-Werel. Tomas Nowotny’s reviewo Rauchensteiner’s Österreich zwischen den Blöcken is an autobiographical


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piece o sorts as the ormer staffer in Kreisky’s cabinet reacts strongly to thescholarly critique o Kreisky’s national security policy.

* * * * *

I rst explored the easibility o the subject matter o this volume inMay 2011 with Bernhard Fetz, the Director o the Austrian LiteratureArchives in his spectacular office in Vienna’s Hoburg Palace. Fetz haddirected a Ludwig Boltzmann Institute at the University o Vienna on

writing biography, which had thoroughly theorized the writing o biography.Armed with his encouragement and good advice, some suggestions orpossible authors, and a theoretical text on biography o his—a translation

o which ended up providing a subtle introduction to this volume. Giventhe disinterest o contemporary historians in biography, Fetz’s advice andmy good riend Peter Berger’s encouragement and suggestions or urtherbiographies were crucial to pursue this topic. I returned to New Orleansin June and began surveying the eld and inviting potential authors. Te

volume outline came together in the course o the summer and essays beganarriving in the offices o CenterAustria at the end o the year. We are verygrateul to all the authors or their agreement to contribute articles, someon very short notice, and always with grace and good cheer and mostly on

time. Not all invitations to pen essays or this volume were answered. Aprominent biographer o Habsburg amily members did not answer mymails whether she would contribute a biographical sketch o the late OttoHabsburg who passed away recently. Win some, lose some.

Some people were particularly helpul in bringing this volume towardspublication. Eva Maltschnig arrived in August as the 2011/12 AustrianMinistry o Science and Research ellow, beginning research or herdissertation on Austrian women marrying American GIs during thepost-World War II Austrian occupation. She quickly immersed hersel in

her work as assistant to the editor and soon began to make substantivecontributions towards the completion o the volume. She maintained theroutine correspondence with all contributors to this collection, workedhard to obtain illustrations and copyrights or the essays, became a realexpert in correcting ootnotes in line with our CAS style sheet and theChicago Manual and usually scrutinized the essays to provide a rst roundo corrections. She also gave some sound advice in the design o the volume.Her contributions to the volume’s completion were so substantive that Ipromoted her to guest editor. Similarly, Inge Fink o UNO’s Department

o English and a native o Austria was kind enough to translate three o theessays rom German into English. She did it with her usual aplomb andsuperior skill and in some cases turned German academese into readableEnglish. Gertraud Griessner o CenterAustria held my back ree, when


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important CAS work waited to be completed. Lauren Capone at UNOPress was a superb copy editor o all essays. Her good cheer turned the

drudgery o editing into a joy. Tis editorial team, too, represents a cross-section o sorts o Austrianlives: Inge Fink and mysel represent a small cohort o Austrians who werelucky to be among the rst postwar rural small town generation to receiveaccess to higher education and prot rom international student mobility.Inge Fink rom Lustenau, one o the old textile capitals o Austria onthe Swiss border in Vorarlberg, came to UNO more than 20 years ago tobecome an English instructor and a big an o Mardi Gras. I was born inthe small Alpine village o Mellau in Vorarlberg with its traditional peasant

stock turned tourist entrepreneurs and lived in the U.S. or the past 30 years.Contrary to our rather unusual education backgrounds, one year researchellow Eva Maltschnig rom Zell am See, Salzburg, embodies the decadeso education expansion Austria has witnessed more recently. Globalizationmight make lie experiences more universal than regionally rooted—herexperiences as a graduate student in Vienna may not be so different romIsleño-American Lauren Capone’s lie as a creative writing MFA studentat the University o New Orleans, where she also gains valuable workexperience as a copy editor and book designer at UNO Press.

Editorial team o volume 21 o CAS: Lauren Capone, Inge Fink, Gűnter Bischo, Eva MaltschnigPhoto: Kimberly Edwards or CenterAustria


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Bill Lavender at UNO Press and Birgit Holzner at i up did their sharein bringing the volume towards completion. We elt that all biographies

needed to be illustrated and worked hard to obtain portraits o all our subjectsto help visualize their character. Tese pictures also provide a trajectory osorts o Austrian portrait photography through the twentieth century. Nextto the authors, a number o archivists were very kind in being cooperative

with our search or images. Hans Petschar at the Pictures Archives othe Austrian National Library in Vienna has been incredibly helpul tomake us obtain portraits, and so were Bernhard Fetz and the archivistsat the Austrian Literary Archives o the National Library. Maria Mesneranswered our queries at the Kreisky Archives and Wolgang Maderthanerat the Austrian Labor History Association in Vienna. Without these kindand helpul colleagues this volume would not be as lavishly illustrated as itis or this journal issue.

As always, we are grateul to our sponsors or making the publicationo this volume possible: at the Universities o Innsbruck and New Orleansour thanks got to Matthias Schennach o the Auslandsamt as well asKlaus Frantz and Christina Sturn o the UNO Office as well as SusanKrantz, the Dean o the College o Liberal Arts. We are also grateul to

the new Rektor ilmann Märk and President Peter Fos or their supporto the UNO – Innsbruck partnership agenda. At the Austrian CulturalForum in New York Andreas Stadler and Hannah Liko have supported our

work as has Martin Eichtinger, the chie o the Cultural Division o theAustrian Ministry o European and International Affairs. In the Ministryo Science and Research and its student exchange office Ősterreichischer Auslandsdienst (ŐAD), we are grateul to Barbara Weitgruber, ChristophRamoser, Jose Leidenrost and Florian Gerhardus. Eugen Stark and theboard members o the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation have been our

strongest supporters or more than a decade now. It is a great pleasure andprivilege to work with them all and acknowledge their unerring support oCenterAustria and its activities.

New Orleans, April 2012


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Bernhard Fetz1

Paradoxically in biography, the dramatization o authenticity creates

the biographical effect. Te answer to the question o whether biographerslie depends on several actors: the biographer’s interpretations o his/herrole, the expectations o the audience, and the biographical genre, be thata eulogy, a curriculum vitae , an encyclopedia entry, a literary or a scholarlybiography. In different disciplines, the gathering o biographical data hasclose ties to scholarship, such as the portrayal o the Other in ethnography,the transcription o autobiographical interviews in biographical sociology,or the interviewing o witnesses in Oral History. Daily lie, too, constantlygenerates biographical evidence: police protocols, evaluative reports, entriesin personnel les, or records o conversations between therapists andpatients. Generally, we do not grant these documents much biographicalpower or dignity because they are “artless” and seemingly ree o narrativemanipulations. Te claim to “biographical truth” uctuates considerablyin the production and reception o these texts. In police protocols, theapparent emphasis on cold acts can obscure the mendacious, denunciatory

1. Tis text was rst published as Bernhard Fetz: Biographisches Erzählen zwischen

Wahrheit und Lüge, Inszenierung und Authentizität, in: Handbuch Biographie. Methoden, raditionen, Teorien. Herausgegeben von Christian Klein. S. 54 –60. © 2009 J.B.Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag GmbH in Stuttgart. Wethank Inge Fink, Department o English, University o New Orleans, or translating thistext rom German to English.


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character o biographical portraits created in the process. Michel Foucaultplanned to explore this very phenomenon—the production o authenticity

in the discourse o state authority—in a collection o curriculum vitaeo “inamous persons,” a collection that was never realized sae or anintroduction describing his intent.2

Te ollowing example illustrates the tension between imaginative(literary) memory and politically motivated storage memory; theconrontation between the two creates “biographical memory,” consistingo acts, legends, lies, and the urge to tell the truth: Te Hungarian writerPéter Esterházy had to write his ather’s biography twice. Te rst timehe did so voluntarily, producing an opulent, 1000-page antasy about thehistory o the legendary Esterházy dynasty, whose chronicler he consideredhimsel to be.3 He did not have a choice in writing the second biography,and he gave it the orm o a report, which lacked all the literary imaginationthat distinguished the novel Harmonia Caelestis . Esterházy had stumbledupon his ather’s police les, which indicated that he had been an inormantor the Hungarian secret service.4 Many biographies had to be re-writtenonce the Eastern European archives had been opened. Te archive turnedrom a place o secrets and repression, a potential source o danger because

it stored les on spies and those spied upon, into a place o biographicalrevision. Te archiving o judicial, police, and medical records taughtbiographers—Péter Esterházy among them—that guilt cannot be wipedout through ritualistic gestures such as conessions: “Statements made inthis ashion are registered, accumulated, and preserved in les and archives.

Te single, immediate, trackless voice making a conession, which wipesout evil because it wipes out itsel, has now been replaced by many voices,

which come down like a massive avalanche o documents and constitute theceaselessly growing memory o all the evil in the world.5

We cannot escape the dilemma created by truth, lies, aesthetics, andmorality. Tis is the biographer’s dilemma par excellence . In the discussiono truth and lies with regard to biography, Friedrich Nietzsche supplies thecrucial questions in his 1873 essay On ruth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense :

Why do people lie? Where does the desire to tell the truth come rom? o what extent does language express this desire? Nietzsche argues rom ananthropological standpoint: I we do not want to live like worms, i.e. i we

2. Michel Foucault, Das Leben der infamen Menschen, ed. and trans. Walter Seitter (Berlin:Merve, 2001).3. Péter Esterházy, Harmonia C ælestis, trans. erézia Mora (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 2001).4. Péter Esterházy, Verbesserte Ausgabe , trans. Hans Skirecki (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 2003).5. Foucault, Das Leben der infamen Menschen, 29.


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want to prevail against weaker individuals in the “ght or existence,” wemust question the means we employ to do so. Unlike animals, we do not

have sharp horns or a predator’s teeth, which could give us direct accessto truth; we have to rely on our “intellect” as a means o sel-preservation.However, man has developed his “major powers through deception”: “Inhumans, the art o deception has reached its peak: humans dissemble,atter, lie, deceive, talk behind each other’s backs, pretend to be morethan they are, live in borrowed splendor, wear masks, hide behind socialconventions, play a role or others and or themselves … to the point where

we must nd it inconceivable that a honest and pure desire or truth couldhave sprouted up among the human race.”6 Man’s desire or truth dependsless on his impulse to combat lies than on the consequences o telling lies.

We have no problems accepting comortable truths; we do not care about“insight without consequences,” but when truth becomes destructive, weght against it.7

“So then, what is truth?” Nietzsche asks. For an answer, he writes theollowing momentous sentences not only into the biographers’ amilyregister: “A mobile army o metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,in short a sum total o human relationships, which have been poetically

and rhetorically enhanced, translated, decorated, and which, ater longusage, have become binding and canonical: truths are illusions, but we haveorgotten that, worn metaphors deprived o any sensual power. …”8 Telong history o trivial biography, with its xed stereotypes and its clichés,has provided plenty o examples since the early 19th century.

Literary scholars are not the only ones who have long rejectedRousseau’s Romantic notion o an authentic lie avant la lettre and whohave embraced the polyvalent and rhetorical nature o texts; however, theunquenchable desire or biographical evidence keeps (cultural) scholars,

readers, and theoreticians active in their elds.

Te multi-aceted concept o biographical truth has been an ambivalentidea since Nietzsche’s destruction and deconstruction. Biographical truthhas no easy denition; it is a multi-relational construct, orever materializing

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,” in

Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, eds. Giorgio Colli and MazzinoMontinari, vol. 1, Die Geburt der ragödie; Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I-IV; NachgelasseneSchriften 1870-1873 (Munich: dtv/de Gruyter, 1999), 875.7. Ibid., 878.8. Ibid., 880-81.


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in the interactions between the biographical narrative, its subjects, and itsreaders. While biographical truth is an effect created by the rhetorical

nature o a text, it is always on the run rom a mobile army o metaphorstrying to overtake it. According to Nietzsche, the struggle or truth is astruggle between the living, graphic metaphors created by rst impressionsand rigid conventional metaphors.9 Seen rom this perspective, truth issubversive. It attacks outmoded ideas and dissolves them; it undercuts theoundations o one o the most powerul metaphors: the monument andthe memorial. (Even Herder tries to create monuments or great men inhis biographical essays, albeit living monuments, which will continue tobear witness to their lives.) We nd this kind o truth predominantly in thearts, where it relies on the aristocratic “creative act”10 and the notion that apoet’s imagination transorms act into a higher kind o truth. Te poet—and the biographer raised to the ranks o poetic nobility—rees acts romthe straitjacket o their historical context and blesses them with a rebirthunder new and very different conditions. Nietzsche sees truth as a linguisticconvention. Te “thing in itsel”—we can substitute biographical truthhere—“is inconceivable even to the artist o language. … He only identiesthe relationships between things and humans and employs the boldest

metaphors in the process.”11

Similarly, Ira Bruce Nadel, the Americantheorist o biography, insists on the ctional character o all biographicaltexts: “A biography is a verbal artiact o narrative discourse.”12 However,in biography, their universal useulness makes metaphors the mediatorbetween a general and a specic truth “which is the recognition o universalaspects o human behavior through the particular actions o an individuallie.”13

Péter Esterházy’s double biography o his ather—one literary and theother quasi documentary-actual—is particularly instructive as it points

out the two central concerns o biography: on the one hand, biography isan imaginative (narrative) construction; on the other, biography dependson acts, the search or truth, detective investigation, as well as the desireor mystery and the shock o discovery. Te idea o biographical truth istied to a changing notion o the subject, to the differentiation betweenpublic and private spheres, to the development o autobiographical sel-

9. Ibid., 881-82.

10. Virginia Wool, “Te Art o Biography,” in Collected Essays , vol. 4 (London: HogarthPress 1967), 221-28, 228. Te essay was originally published in 1939.11. Nietzsche, “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge,” 879.12. Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 8.13. Ibid., 166.


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condence, and to the cultural relativity o the idea o biographical truth. We can see this phenomenon very clearly in a quotation rom Samuel

Johnson, who—as a theorist o biography and subject o one o the mostamous biographies, James Boswell’s Life of Johnson—ound himsel onboth sides o the biographical discourse. Despite his reservations, Johnsonregards sel-knowledge as an advantage over the biographical insight oothers because only the kind o sel-investigation ound in autobiographymanages to resist the temptation o alse praise and sycophantic attery:“[M]any temptations to alsehood will occur in the disguise o passions, toospecious to ear much resistance. Love o virtue will animate panegyric, andhatred o wickedness embitter censure. … But he that speaks o himsel hasno motive to alsehood or partiality except sel-love, by which all have sooten been betrayed, that all are on the watch against its artices.”14

Where the unction o biography is concerned, the genre has undergonebig changes: biography as a normative-pedagogical orm during theEnlightenment became a means o creating national identity in the portraitso great men. Especially in the 19th century, the expression o cultural normsand values oscillated between the desire or supranational balance andthe production and propagation o national clichés.15 In the 20th century,

biography more or less rees itsel rom these constraints; instead, it triesto explain how artistic creativity, scientic and scholarly accomplishments,or political actions play out in individuals. In the same measure in whichthe “alse” character o trivial biography becomes the subject o historicalbiography criticism, the demands o modern biography oscillate betweenliterature and scholarship. Seen rom a historical standpoint, the notiono the whole truth about a person has shited rom a moral to an aestheticand epistemological perspective. “[A]nd while I am telling nothing butthe truth, I have reminded mysel that I cannot reveal the whole truth all

the time,” James Boswell writes in the dedication o his Samuel Johnsonbiography in 1791.16 Modern biographers are challenged by precisely thesegaps in biographical accounts. Tey see and discuss ormerly taboo issues,such as sexuality, as the motors o artistic and scholarly accomplishments.

Joachim Radkau’s biography o Max Weber, which is subtitled “Te Passion

14. Samuel Johnson, “Te Rambler, No 69, 13. October 1750,” in Biography as an Art: SelectedCriticism 1560-1960, ed. James Clifford (London: Oxord Univ. Press, 1962), 40-45, 45.

15. Deborah Holmes and Hannes Schweiger, “Nationale Grenzen und ihre biographischenÜberschreitungen,” in Die Biographie: Zur Grundlegung ihrer Teorie , ed. Bernhard Fetz, withthe assistance o Hannes Schweiger (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 385-418.16. See James Boswell, Das Leben Samuel Johnsons und Das agebuch einer Reise nach denHebriden (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1984; orig. 1791), 6.


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o Tinking” (2005), provides an excellent example.17 It shows that thedriving orce behind biographical production is not so much enlightenment

as the thrill o biographical mysteries: “What is let out appears as a gap inthe text and has to be lled with writing and thinking, but these gaps alsomake the text mysterious and interesting.”18

Te rhetoric o autobiography is a particularly importantepistemological tool in the biographer’s work. How can one do justiceto public gures without analyzing the literary and genre-specic (sel)dramatization and not consider it a part o biographical “truth”? Te sameholds true or psychological processes. According to Sigmund Freud’s latearticle Konstruktionen in der Analyse [Constructions in Analysis ], the goalo case histories is to reach “the conviction o truth in a construction.”Freud maintains that these constructions can serve the same purpose asrecaptured “authentic” memories. When it comes to one’s own biography,even a surrogate memory can be effective; whether the therapeutic successis based on an illusion or a “real” memory is ultimately irrelevant.19 Tismeans that biographical truth can never do without a certain measure oillusion and dramatization. However, biography must reconcile a universalclaim to truth with the production o truth, which is as a part o writing,

and with sel-dramatization, which is a part o autobiographical testimony.Artistic license in biography ends at the point where the biographer mustexpose biographical rhetoric, political evasion, and the attempt to hide anindividual’s guilt.

Biographers can take the roles o detectives, historians, their subjects’attorneys, prosecutors, or therapists. We see the same variety in the different

types o biographical texts: they run the gamut rom scholarly biographies, which document every detail in ootnotes, to novels, which ollow thebiographical model and relish in its claim to truth. In his quasi-biographicalnovel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Julian Barnes uses this technique at the verybeginning when he describes a statue o Flaubert that has seen better days.His novelistic depiction o an English author who ollows Flaubert’s trailthrough France shows a lot o comical potential. Barnes’s novel makes

17. Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munich: Hanser, 2005).18. Harald Weinrich, Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich: Beck, 2005), 17.19. Karl Wagner, “Glanz und Elend der Biographik,” in Spiegel und Maske: Konstruktionenbiographischer Wahrheit , eds. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006),58-59.


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it clear that truth and authenticity are not the same thing. Statues andbiographical relics such as stuffed parrots do not have to be genuine in

order to appear authentic. Biographical truth relies on the suggestion oauthenticity. Rousseau’s notion o autobiographical truth in his Confessions escapes the “laws o verication”: “We nd ourselves no longer in the realmo truth, the true story, but we have crossed over into authenticity .”20 Teproduction o authenticity requires imagination, the inusion o material andimmaterial ragments o memory with emotions. In a culture o memory,“antasy cannot be equated with ction and orgery but with abricationand invention, in short with the kind o construction that lies at the hearto all culture.”21 In this regard, individual and collective memory workresembles literature. Biography provides the link between an “atmospheric”truth, which belongs to artists, and a “actual” truth, which is the realm ohistorians.22 In the words o Julian Barnes, “Te past is an autobiographicalnarrative passing itsel off as the minutes o a parliamentary session.”23

While authors and psychoanalysts inclined toward the literaryemphasize biographical narrative with all its subplots, historians and scholarsin various disciplines stress the veracity o sources that have been cleansedrom all manipulations: “Te historian must understand and disable the

power over uture memory, the power o immortalization,” says Jacques LeGoff, historian and biographer.24 Historians cannot turn themselves intothe assistants o a politics o memory, which operates by arranging andmanipulating documents in an attempt to attain everlasting interpretativeauthority. Tey must be able to distinguish between an authentic and aabricated source, and they must recognize whether a source is part o acontrolled tradition or a factum brutum, a remnant and random witnesso some historical act. Teir work resembles that o police investigators.However, once the historical event, the crime scene o biography, is secured,

literary historians and imaginative investigators make their entrance.“In classical mystery stories, the detective imaginatively reconstructs scenes rom newspaper notices, conversations, and messages; he uses his own lifeexperiences as a hypothesis until the scenes orm a sequence, a plausible drama.

Te inconsistencies in his lie experiences inspire him to rearrange the

20. Jean Starobinski, Rousseau: Eine Welt von Wiederständen, trans. Ulrich Raulff (Munich:Hanser, 1988), 294.

21. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses(Munich: Beck, 1999), 83.22. Ibid., 277.23. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Papagei (Munich: Heyne, 1993; orig. 1984), 128.24. Jacques Le Goff, Geschichte und Gedächtnis (Frankurt am Main: Campus, 1992), 229.


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scenes until a plausible plot emerges.”25 I, in this quote rom psychoanalystAlred Lorenzer, we substitute the detective not with the analyst but with

the biographer, the amily circle widens to include a third. In his analysis oEdgar Allen Poe’s amous story Te Murders in the Rue Morgue , Lorenzercontrasts the police preect’s attempts at analytical reconstruction, which isbased on language and causal logic, with the detective’s “scenic perception.”

Tis scenic perception translates the inormation gained rom sourceanalysis into the context o experience. Like the detective and the analyst,biographers must be able to conront “messages, i.e. ‘linguistic ormulas’

with ‘lie experience.’”26 Approaching truth in biography, psychoanalysis,or crime requires a critical awareness o language, that is to say, the abilityto critique sources, combined with empathy and imagination. We can readthe ollowing quotation as a virtual catalogue o analytical qualities requiredo the biographer: “As we have seen, openness toward the outrageous mustcomplement the critical attitude toward textual discrepancies. Critical acuitymust be balanced by imagination and the ability to envision abnormal ordeviant liestyles.”27

For the most part, the theory o biography has taken the side oimagination; it preers the company with writers to that o strict historians.

Te progress o civilization becomes visible in the combination o pastmemory, still present in some traces, and the memory o the present: this isthe humanizing effect o biography, rom Johann Gottried Herder through

Wilhelm Dilthey to Leon Edel, biographer and theorist o biography.According to Leon Edel, biographers have an ethical obligation not tomanipulate sources: “[A]nd the telling must be o such a nature as to leavethe material unaltered.”28 His claim tallies with the demand that biographyrecapture (at least partially) what was once the “authentic” substance orabric o lie. Te challenge consists in “[shaping] a likeness o the vanished

gure.”29 However, likeness means difference, means shaping, not identity, anotion that clashes with the ethical imperative not to alsiy anything. Te“human element” is called upon to reconcile these seemingly contradictorydemands—not to alsiy sources and “to shape a likeness.” In reerence toLytton Strachey, who occupies a similar position in 20th century Englishbiography as Boswell does in the 18th century, Edel endows biography

25. Alred Lorenzer, “Der Analytiker als Detektiv, der Detektiv als Analytiker,” Psyche 39,no. 1 (1985): 2.

26. Ibid., 3.27. Ibid., 7.28. Leon Edel, Literary Biography: Te Alexander Lectures 1955-56 (London: Hart-Davis,1957), 5.29. Ibid.


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with a humanizing unction: “Humane, because, inevitably, the biologicalprocess is a rening, a civilizing—a humanizing—process.”30 Biography

makes a stronger claim to “memory work” than genuine scholarly insight:“It assigns meaning, acts with partiality, and creates identity.”31 In their largecollection o materials, History and Obstinacy , which, among many otherthings, contains bits and pieces o a theory o biography, Alexander Klugeand Oskar Negt present a variation on this idea: “In the manner o LeviStrauss’s bricolage , we must recognize the subjective ragments, collect them,and reassemble them into an anthropocentric world.”32 However, when were-assemble subjective ragments in this manner, we may risk supportinguntruths when the ideal clashes with political reality; this Péter Esterházyound out to his chagrin.

Biography, in one possible denition, describes an individual’s deviationrom a model or type. It makes a big difference whether the individual hailsrom classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, or modern times. In the caseo medieval persons, the biographical method might consist in creating

a reconstructed normative model on one hand, and then showing theindividual’s deviation rom this model on the other. Te description oindividual behavior rests on the existence o source documents that putthe “truth” o the person next to social and historical “truth.” Te differencebetween role and behavior as emanations o the sel would then serve as a

yardstick or individuality, as an indication or that which is biographical inthe modern sense. Literary projects like Stean Zweig’s biography o MarieAntoinette33 demonstrate how a role model , an “average character,” turns intoa tragic gure with individual eatures (in Zweig, a mysterious bundle o

letters plays an important role in this regard), whereby the description, theplane o presentation, depends, to a smaller or larger degree, on ideologicalpreconceptions, cultural clichés, narratives and stereotypes, or the processo transmission.

Biography at least has the potential to capture the individual in themidst o structural connections and to describe the space the individual

30. Ibid., I.31. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume , 133.

32. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt: Geschichte und Eigensinn, vol. 1, Die Entstehung derindustriellen Disziplin aus rennung und Enteignung (Frankurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993),151.33. Stean Zweig, Marie Antoinette: Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag,1932).


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gains rom these connections. Individual reedom—and the descriptionthereo—is created by how the individual gains this space, be that

through the therapeutic illusion o “authentic” memory in psychoanalysis,as the narrative construction o the (auto)biographical lie story, or as aposthumous description o “correspondences” derived rom a dead person’sestate (see Sigrid Weigel’s biography o Ingeborg Bachmann34). Writingslet behind as a part o an estate are not just an archive o mightily ormativediscourses; they are also the place where an individual gains a voice and aace. A person’s biographical truth can neither be xed nor dened by anyamount o exact reconstruction and research; this truth is negotiated anewin every biographical project.

Biography navigates between truth and biographical evidence and thenotion that all biographical writing is nothing but an ideological or aestheticconstruct. As the vehicle or expressing the truth o the body, the truth oideas, and the truth o posterity, biography creates different denitions otruth. Biography is always concerned with truth, even in a ctional sense:the truth beore God, the truth o the sel, the truth beore a court o law,the truth o a historical person, the truth o legend, the truth that goesbeyond biographical mystications, the truth o a certain lie, lived in a

certain social and cultural context. Biographical truth includes the truth orepression, i.e. a undamental lie that governs a person’s lie and actions, as well as the textual expression o testimony in certain ormats and genres.

34. Sigrid Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann: Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1999).


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Political Lives


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John Deak

Biographies all in and out o avor, both among publishers and in thehalls o academe.1 Historical consciousness has its own ashions and trendsto be sure. Since Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “Idee zu einer allgemeinenGeschichte in weltbürglicher Absicht,” history has had pretensions o seeingthrough the widest lens. Kant’s cosmopolitanism asked us to grapple withbig pictures and movements in order to capture the long-term trajectoriesand sea changes. But, o course, the stories o individuals always seem toask us to switch camera lenses rom the panorama to the strongest zoom.For every major sea change, there is a biography that distills the story andmakes it more accessible and more human. For every Renaissance, there is aLeonardo da Vinci and a Cosmo the Great; or every French Revolution wehave our Napoleons, our Neckers, our Laayettes. G. W. F. Hegel remindedus that these “great men,” or heroes, embody the movement o the age, the

spirit o the times and help us to understand how the world can changeundamentally and drastically. But Hegel gives us another conundrum with which we must deal: must prominent gures o the past embody ortranscend their time? o what degree do they merely dimly reect the lightand darkness o our age? Are individuals worth studying in their own right?

For Austria’s twentieth century, biography can be a ticklish subject.Biographies are all too oten reminders o larger ailures: the all o themultinational Habsburg experiment; the ailure o interwar democracy; theailure o international organizations; the ailure o individuals to stop the

slide down the slippery slope toward ascism, totalitarianism, and genocide.And while they teach us lessons about the ragility o democracy andcivil society at large, twentieth-century biographies rom central Europecan present us with inconvenient inormation. Biographies remind usall too well o what we would rather orget or re-write about the past. Ithe twentieth century teaches us anything in the twenty-rst, it will beabout the ambiguities inherent in humanity. In many ways, the ashion ohistoriography and Austrian studies has been to write about the Gardeno Eden beore the all. Te study o modernism and artistic discourses, o

1. For a recent introduction to biography and its relationship to history see the ne andreadable study Barbara Caine, Biography and history , Teory and History (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).


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Vienna 1900 and the cultural owering o the old empire, are where we ndAustria as a place o cosmopolitan ideas. In a way, cultural and scienticideas have become Austria’s heroes. Tey are less ambiguous than thehumanity that biographies inconveniently put beore us.

Te gure o Ignaz Seipel (1876-1932), Catholic priest, politician, andChancellor o the Austrian First Republic, is one o those inconvenient

Austrian lives. August Maria Knoll, the erstwhile secretary to Ignaz Seipel who later became prominent as a let leaning Catholic and historicalsociologist, asked his readers in a 1934 essay “What is Seipel’s political

Ignaz Seipel as Priest and Federal Chancellor, March 1927,© Austrian National Library


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Deak: Ignaz Seipel34

legacy? His body o thought? His political ideas? His political journey?”2Knoll asked such questions as Engelbert Dolluß’s Austroascist regime

was purging institutions o the Austrian Republic in order to erect a newstate. As biographers sought to answer Knoll’s questions in the 1930s,they oten praised Seipel as the orerunner o Dolluß and Schuschnigg’sAustro-Fascist state.3 Ater the Second World War, the social democratsmerely had to keep the same arguments and invert the logic o approbationinto scorn. For them, Seipel was the great conniving priest who used hisintellectual gits to undermine democracy.

For all the love and hatred which Seipel evokes, we have not reallycome to a consensus answer on Knoll’s basic questions. Te last book-length biography o Seipel was published in 1972.4 Its author, Klemens

von Klemperer, is an Americanized central European who has roots inboth Berlin and Vienna. Born in 1916, Klemperer ound that the distancebetween the United States to the European continent both protected himrom the slings and arrows in his work on contemporary history in Europeand provided him with historical distance to write a balanced, i conservative,biography o “one o the chie architects o the Austrian Republic.”5

In many ways, von Klemperer’s biography o Seipel is an exception.

Seipel is one o those characters whose lie is oten seen in respect tosomeone else. Paired with his social democratic arch-nemesis, Otto Bauer,6or with the architect o Austro-ascism, Engelbert Dolluß,7 Seipel isdened either through his enemies and conicts or as a precursor to thedestroyers o Austrian democracy. Our stand-alone studies have likewiseallen into the extremes. “Saint Seipel” appears in hagiographic publicationsattesting to his superhuman qualities as a man and statesman, oiled by the

2. August M Knoll, Von Seipel zu Dollfuß: Eine historisch-soziologische Studie (Vienna: Manz,1934), 8.3. For instance, Knoll, Von Seipel zu Dollfuß ; Eduard Ludwig, Ignaz Seipel: Der Wegbereitereiner neuen Zeit (Vienna: E. Ludwig, 1936); Franz Riedl, Kanzler Seipel: Ein Vorkämpfervolksdeutschen Denkens (Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druck und Verlag, 1935).4. Klemens von Klemperer, Ignaz Seipel: Christian Statesman in a ime of Crisis (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). o this I should add that the last book-lengthstudy was the “biographical documentation,” Friedrich Rennhoer, Ignaz Seipel: Menschund Staatsmann. Eine biographische Dokumentation, Böhlaus zeitgeschichtliche Bibliothek 2(Vienna: Böhlau, 1978).5. See Klemperer’s revealing and ascinating memoir, Klemens von Klemperer,Voyage through

the wentieth Century: A Historian’s Recollections and Reections (New York: Berghahn Books,2009), 84.6. Viktor Reimann, Zu Groß für Österreich: Seipel und Bauer im Kampf um die Erste Republik,1st ed. (Vienna: Molden, 1968).7. Knoll, Von Seipel zu Dollfuß .


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hatred and party-politics o the social democrats.8 But, on the let, Seipelassumed many orms. Walther Federn, the ounder o the liberal journal

o economics and politics, Der Österreichische Volkswirt, called Seipel in theoreword to Charles Gulick’s magnum opus on the First Republic, the “evilgenius o the republic,” who laid the groundwork or the all o Austriandemocracy.9 Federn merely oreshadowed what lay between the pages oCharles Gulick’s two-volume Austria from Habsburg to Hitler.

For Gulick, who was a heterodox economics proessor at the Universityo Caliornia at Berkley or his entire proessional career, Seipel’s genialnesslay in the act that he was able, through his powerul wits, to underminedemocratic practice in the Republic. As such, he was Dolluß’s (and ascism’s)

John the Baptist—laying the groundwork or authoritarianism and theclerical-ascist state. Nearly every mention o Seipel’s name among theover 1800 pages o text reers to Seipel’s attempts to “exclude parliament,”“throttle parliamentary committees,” “increase parliamentary difficulties,”or his “campaign against the constitution.”10 For Gulick, as well as countlessothers on the let, Seipel provided the stubborn, evil, “Prälat ohne Milde,”

who abandoned democracy, civil rights, and embraced authoritarianism and violence.

Tere hardly seems much o a middle ground to understandingSeipel, or his time. Distance may help us to transcend the party-politicalinterpretations o hagiography and demonology now that we are removedby eighty years rom Seipel’s death and nearly seventy-ve years since theend o Austro-Fascism and the Anschluss. O course, the ocus in this

volume is on “Austrian lives” and thus the underlying question is whatdo these biographies (not hagiographies or demonologies) o prominentpoliticians and thinkers, as well as biographies o groups, tell us abouttwentieth-century Austria? In what ways do these lives reect the times,

successes and tribulations, o Austrians who have stood at the center o the world-shaping events o the twentieth century?Ignaz Seipel’s biography resists telling us one story. Indeed the many

narratives one could make out o Seipel the priest, the scholar, and thepolitician offer many morality tales as well as reections on the Austrian Mensch and his predicament in the last century. Tereore, the difficulty

8. Gottlieb Ladner, Seipel als Überwinder der Staatskrise vom Sommer 1922: Zur Geschichte der Entstehung der Genfer Protokolle vom 4. Oktober 1922, vol. 1 (Vienna: Stiasny Verlag, 1964);

Bernhard Birk, Dr. Ignaz Seipel: Ein österreichisches und europäisches Schicksal (Regensburg:G.J. Manz, 1932).9. See Walther Federn’s oreword to Charles A. Gulick, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler(Berkeley: Univ. o Caliornia Press, 1948), i, xi.10. Coner the index entries or Seipel in Ibid., ii, 1895–96.


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o evaluating Seipel’s importance, his contributions and his ailings,are ultimately worth the effort. Moreover, Seipel warrants a sustained

conversation, since he reects so much o the ambiguities and pressureso a world transitioning between absolutism and democracy, between thelocally-centered economic lie to a modern industrial world. He can tell usmuch about the transition rom monarchy to republic and the changingrole o the Catholic Church in public lie rom the nineteenth to thetwentieth century. More specically, Seipel’s lie reects the major problemso the times ater the all o the monarchy: the dilemmas o Austrianconservatism; the search or the proper post-imperial scope o Austrianpolitics and the resistance to and acceptance o a narrowing horizon opolitics and statecrat; the ambivalence to parliamentary democracy and theproblematic search or alternatives to it; the distrust o party politics whileat the same time becoming enmeshed in the mire o it; last but not least,Seipel can remind us o the powerul claim o Catholicism in Austrianpublic lie.

What Seipel’s lie reects then are the ambiguities o the AustrianRepublic and the simultaneous, yet incompatible, identities o Austriaand its peoples ater the First World War and the all o the Habsburg

Monarchy. Moreover, the questions—undamental questions—as to howthe Austrian republic would make its difficult transition rom being thecollection some o the core provinces o the old Habsburg Empire to a stateand people in its own right, how parliamentary democracy would unctionin a state where the tendency was or public policy to be administeredby state officials rather than by parties themselves, and how the CatholicChurch would unction in a new republic without the implicit and explicitprotection o the Habsburg dynasty, all worked to shape the inconvenientbiography o Ignaz Seipel. Finally, Seipel reects the ways in which party

politics have come to dominate not only Austrian parliamentary lie, butthe outlook and habitus o Austrian public lie. Seipel’s political career takesthe course o a setting sun, shimmering on a wide horizon o Europeanscale. By the end o his political career, he descended into a course ohatred, o violence, and irreconcilable opposition to the social democrats.In essence, as we are orced to make sense o Seipel’s descent into Austrianpolitics, we are orced to conront the ambiguities and rough transitions oAustria’s imperial heritage, its long transition to democratic practice, andthe conict-ridden struggle to be an independent, parliamentary republic.

Te main argument in this article, beyond the recognition that Seipel was a gure who reects the deep and unresolved political problems ohis times, is that eighty years ater Seipel’s death, we must recognize him


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as a ounding ather o both the Austrian Republic and the Austroasciststate. Even Seipel’s hagiographers have recognized the ambiguities o

Seipel’s lie and times. Such balanced criticism tends to come rom the“liberal Catholic” school o thinkers who have written on Seipel. AugustMaria Knoll has categorized Seipel’s political course into our phases or“stages” which encompass Seipel’s engagement with constitutional reormin the monarchy; his engagement with the social democrats to establish aparliamentary democracy in the republic; a pragmatic capitalist period inthe early 1920s when Seipel, as chancellor, worked to stabilize the Austrianeconomy through a major restructuring o the Austrian state; and nally,a rightist-stage, when Seipel searched or alternatives to parliamentarydemocracy.11

Te criticism evident in Knoll’s contemporary treatment o Seipel stemsin act rom Seipel’s political transitions between his taking up politicsduring First World War, to his death at the end o the democratic era othe Austrian First Republic. Seipel did not maintain one xed politicalplace—he was always engaging and moving with his political opponentsand the events o the time. But Seipel’s own movement rom stages orpositions, his weaving between two poles o a dialectic, began in the great

transormations o Austrian politics long beore he ound himsel head othe Austrian Republic.12 In act, his lie was ull o transitions and changethat orced Seipel to continually reormulate his own ideas.

Political participation expanded rapidly during the course o Seipel’searly lie while at the same time the city o Vienna was undergoingrapid change. Te early part o Seipel’s lie would have seen the gradual

incorporation o people like Seipel’s ather into the leagues o voters. Atthe same time, Catholicism in Austria became interwoven with the gradualopening o the political process.

Ignaz Seipel was born on 19 July 1876 in working class Rudolsheim,Vienna, in what was then the ourteenth district. His ather was a Fiakercoachman who got his nickname, “Deutschmeister-Karl” rom his servicein the 4th Inantry “Hoch-und Deutschmeister” Regiment, based in Vienna.Ignaz’s mother was a armer’s daughter rom Weitenegg, Lower Austria,

11. Knoll, Von Seipel zu Dollfuß , 8–10.12. For a dialectical analysis o Seipel’s phases, see the criticial intellectual biography:Ernst Karl Winter, Ignaz Seipel als dialektisches Problem: Ein Beitrag zur Scholastikforschung ,Gesammelte Werke 7 (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966).


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which lies on the banks o the Danube in the morning shadows o Melk’sBaroque Benedictine Abbey. Ignaz’s mother brought ve children into the

world, but Ignaz would be the only one who would survive inancy. She diedo tuberculosis, three years ater Ignaz’s birth. Ignaz’s ather transerred thethree-year-old boy to his mother’s and sister’s house in nearby Sechshaus,

just south o the Westbahn train tracks. Tere Ignaz would spend his youth,in humble circumstances, on the border between the working and lower-middle classes, sheltered rom the growing and busy city by his overbearinggrandmother and aunt.13

Seipel was thus born into a petit bourgeois amily in the Viennesesuburbs but lived in the humble circumstances o the workers. As he would

write to his long-time political riend and colleague Heinrich Mataja,“I come rom ar, ar below.”14 Certainly Seipel meant this to reer to hiseconomic situation, but one can read—as a larger take on his “Austrianlie”—this language to reer to his political station as well. As such hisbirth and education occurred at the beginning o the constitutional era inImperial Austria.

Seipel was born into a amily that would not have the property nor thestatus to vote under the suffrage laws o the time. In the early years o the

constitutional period in Imperial Austria, suffrage was awarded to a man oSeipel’s class depending on whether he paid over ten Gulden in direct taxes.Because he was raised by his grandmother and aunt, Seipel did not likelybelong to an active political household. Moreover, Seipel did not comerom the legions o lower noble amilies or the high bourgeois. Tus, hedid not benet rom educational institutions which had normally producedAustria’s ministerial elite—and certainly not its Minister-Presidents.15 Inessence, Seipel’s home lie and his educational opportunities made hima political outsider. Te young Seipel began his secondary education in

1887 at a municipal gymnasium in Meidling just as this typical worker’sdistrict underwent a municipal transormation with the regulation o theVienna River and the connection to the streetcar network.16 It was in this

13. Rennhoer, Ignaz Seipel, 3–4.14. Quoted in Ibid., 1.15. Gerno Stimmer, “Zur Herkunt der höchsten österreichischen Beamtenschat: DieBedeutung des Teresianums und der Konsularakademie,” in Student und Hochschule im 19.

Jahrhundert: Studien und Materialien, Studien zum Wandel von Gesellschat und Bildung im

Neunzehnten Jahrhundert 12 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975), 303-345. Fora more thorough treatment on the education and social milieux o Austrian governmentalelites in the monarchy, see Gernot Stimmer, Eliten in Österreich 1848-1970 , Studien zuPolitik und Verwaltung 57 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), especially vol. i.16. Rennhoer, Ignaz Seipel , 1–8.


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atmosphere and at this point that politics spread to the ar reaches o working-and-lower-middle-class Vienna. In 1882, Count Edward aaffe’s

government produced a suffrage reorm that extended the suffrage to “ve-gulden men”—adult males who paid more than ve Gulden in direct taxes.17

Seipel’s gymnasium and university years were thus periods o immensepolitical change, both or Austria’s working citizenry and or AustrianCatholics. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, while itcondemned socialism and communism, it at the same time challengedCatholics to nd ways to overcome the excesses o industrial capitalism. As

John W. Boyer writes, Rerum Novarum “ostered a common discourse thatgave European Catholics a shared starting point in dealing with industrialmodernity.”18 Te encyclical, through its condemnation o the capitalistinstrumentalization o human beings and the urging o active orms ocitizenship and participation, encouraged Catholics to work through thestate to ameliorate the deleterious effects o industrialization. It ueled theres o Catholic political participation, participation that could advocateunder and against the authority o the bishops.

In this atmosphere, Austrian political Catholicism set down its roots inthe city o Vienna in the orm o the Christian Social Party, a party which

responded to the capitalist transormation o Vienna in the late nineteenthcentury with anti-Semitic rhetoric and middle-and-lower class economicprotest.19 At the same time the social democrats pushed even harder or theexpansion o the suffrage; and radicals and democrats in parliament agreed.In 1896 the Austrian parliament passed a third major suffrage reorm,adding a th curia, elected by all male citizens over the age o twenty-our. en years later, the curial system would be completely abolished orparliamentary elections with the promulgation o equal, universal malesuffrage.20 Te rst elections under universal male suffrage were held in 1907,

vaulting the Christian Social and Social Democratic parties respectively

17. Gustav Kolmer, Parlament und Verfassung in Österreich (Vienna & Leipzig: C. Fromme,1902), iii, 137–62; Karl Ucakar, Demokratie und Wahlrecht in Österreich: Zur Entwicklungvon politischer Partizipation und staatlicher Legitimationspolitik, Österreichische exte zurGesellschatskritik 24 (Vienna: Verlag ür Gesellschatskritik, 1985).18. John W. Boyer, “Catholics, Christians and the Challenges o Democracy: Te Heritageo the Nineteenth Century,” in Political Catholicism in Europe 1918-45, ed. Wolram Kaiserand Helmut Wohnout, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2004), 25.19. Ibid., 17–20. See also John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna:

Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897 (Chicago: University o Chicago Press,1981).20. For an overview o the development o suffrage and the expansion o the curial system,see above all Stanisław Starzyński, “Reichsratswahlen,” Österreichisches Staatswörterbuch(Vienna: Alred Hölder, 1909), iv, 871–94.


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into rst and second place in the Imperial parliament.21 So as Christiansocialism emerged as a strong-massed based party in Vienna through the

expanding suffrage in the old Austrian state, so too did its major ideologicalopponent, social democracy.

Ignaz Seipel saw these changes happen as he himsel entered adulthood.As the working-class suburbs o Vienna where he lived and attended school

were more rmly incorporated into the Habsburg metropolis, as politicallie opened up to the lower classes but also took on orms o occupationaland anti-Semitic protest, Seipel dedicated himsel to his studies. With his Matura in hand, as Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party won its rst major victory in Vienna’s municipal elections in 1895, Seipel joined the Viennaseminary while beginning the study o Teology at the University o Vienna.

Tere Seipel was steeped in the subject o moral theology. In 1899 Seipel was ordained a priest and spent the next our years serving the Church in apastoral role. His rst assignment was to the parish church in Göllersdor,Lower Austria, where he ministered to 1700 people. Four months later he

was transerred to Staatz, a market town near the Moravian border. Seipel would spend the next two years in the Lower Austrian countryside beorebeing transerred back to Vienna in 1902.

In Vienna, Seipel worked not only as a chaplain and a religion teacherin a girls’ school, but on a doctorate in Teology. He would receive hisdoctorate in December 1903. Seipel continued his academic career with aHabilitationsschrifton the “economic teachings o the Church athers,” which

was published in 1907.22 wo years later, he received a ull proessorship o Teology in Salzburg, which at that time only possessed a small theologicalaculty. Tere he taught courses on moral theology, economics, and sociology,and became involved in the struggle to reestablish a ull-edged universityin the baroque city on the Salzach. In Salzburg Seipel became a thinker

who used his theological knowledge to take on, and resolve, conicts insociety. Salzburg provided Seipel with a group o intellectuals with whichto discuss issues o the day. As he expressed himsel in literary journals orin the group o intellectuals who included literati like Hermann Bahr andlegal scholars like Heinrich Lammasch, the young Seipel used his liberalbrand o Catholicism as an approach to questions o government andChurch policy as well as the First World War.

Seipel brought his own thinking on moral theology to bear on the world around him. His conviction that Christianity offered a rm basis

21. Ucakar, Demokratie und Wahlrecht in Österreich, 362.22. Ignaz Seipel, Die wirtschaftsethischen Lehren der Kirchenväter (Vienna: Mayer & co.,1907).


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or understanding and living in the world brought Seipel to criticizenationalist attitudes during the Great War and subsequently to publish

his “expression o dissent” rom mainstream Austro-German thought inan impressive tract, Nation und Staat. In the book, Seipel asks his readerto reect, in the midst o nationalist eeling in the First World War, “on

what our patriotism is and where it has it roots.”23 In the work he laidout the basis or a Catholic approach to European politics that was at thesame time a cosmopolitan and Austrian approach. Te central point orSeipel is to distinguish, rather than conate, nation and state. For Seipel,nationalism was an exaggeration, one which rested on the chimerical ideathat “belonging to a nation represented the highest good o humanity.”24

Rather, or Seipel, nations were cultural institutions, the extension o theamily where one could nd his place to do God’s work. As bases or politicalorganizations, however, they were unsuitable. Rivers, mountains, valleys,the natural rontiers, hardly corresponded to linguistic rontiers at all—especially in the Dual Monarchy.25 Te supranational empire, however, andits own acceptance o its supranationality, provided or Seipel the real basisor a Christian commonwealth. In many ways the book looked to reject thenation-state and see the possibilities o alternatives to it. Nation und Staat

reected the wide horizon o Austrian politics and Seipel’s own thoughtbeore the all o the Habsburg Monarchy, when “Austria” could be usednot to denote a nation, but rather to denote a special cosmopolitanism andsupranationalism. From this intellective position, Seipel became involved incircles o reormers who wanted to save the Monarchy in the midst o thehunger and deprivations o the First World War. Lectures on the themeso Nation und Staat drew him to Vienna and in late 1917 he took on aproessorship at the University o Vienna. He would remain in Vienna therest o his lie. Seipel’s descent into politics had begun.

Vienna in 1917 was a shadow o its ormer sel. Tough intellectuallyit remained vital and vibrant, physically it began to grow malnourished andgaunt. Te ood situation grew steadily worse over the course o 1918 andcontinued into the early years o the Austrian Republic. Te Sektionschef (and later Staatssekretär ) in charge o ood provisioning, Hans Loeweneld-

23. Ignaz Seipel, Nation und Staat (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1916). For a discussion o the work in the context o Seipel’s lie, see above all Klemperer, Ignaz Seipel, 54–65, 54.24. Ignaz Seipel, Nation und Staat , 70.25. Ibid., 14.


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Russ, noted in his memoirs that “Te year 1918 showed all the symptomso the worst sort o crisis, and the office o ood provisions ound itsel in a

perpetual state o so-called alarm or the entire year, which challenged thenerves o all its officials and unctionaries.” In each and every meeting othe Office o Food Provisioning, it was clear that the state was unable tocover the daily needs o the populace. “Te domestic harvest ell to 50% opeacetime production. But this act was not as decisive or the ood situationas the near total cessation o ood deliveries rom Romania and Hungary,

which…normally covered over 70% o the need o the non-sel-nourishingpopulace and had in the course o the year sunk to about 5%.” Such statisticsmeant complete hunger and devastation or the urban population, whichnow had to nourish itsel using 50% o a normal harvest, no grain imports,and anything that was available on the black market.26

It was in this atmosphere o cold and deprivation that the rst majorturning point in Seipel’s proessional career occurred. Firstly, Seipel movedinto the inner circles o politics through his advocacy o administrative andconstitutional reorms o the Monarchy. Seipel was admired by the youngEmperor Karl and ound himsel drawn increasingly into the ChristianSocial Party. On 22 October 1918, Seipel became the Minister o Social

Welare in the government o Heinrich Lammasch—it was to be the lastministry o “Old Austria.” When the Monarchy constitutionally crumbled between the Kaiser’s

maniesto on 28 October and the proclamation o a republic on 12November, Seipel showed his political dexterity. Without abandoning hisallegiance to the emperor and his idea o a multinational Catholic polity,over the next two years Seipel steered the Christian Social party—theormer sel-styled Reichspartei —into a party or parliamentary democracyand republican government, without giving up a respect or the larger “old

Austrian” roots o the party and the new state. “Te total collapse o Austriacould have been avoided,” Seipel wrote in the Reichspost in November 1918,“i a true democratic spirit had inused our politics.”27 What was now thetask o Austria’s Germans, according to Seipel, was to make sure the newstate enacted a democratic constitution—and did not attempt at all to limitsuffrage (even to women). Such a democratic course would provide Austria

with the peace and order that Austria would need in the new Europe and

26. Hans Loeweneld-Russ, Im Kampf gegen den Hunger: Aus den Erinnerungen desStaatssekretärs für Volksernährung; 1918-1920 , ed. Isabella Ackerl, Studien und Quellen zurösterreichischen Zeitgeschichte 6 (München: Oldenbourg, 1986), 94–96.27. Ignaz Seipel, “Die demokratische Verassung,” Reichspost (Vienna, 21 Nov. 1918),morning edition, 1.


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prevent the dictatorship o one class.28 In essence, Seipel’s articles and hispolitical activities in the rst months ater the all o the monarchy served

to chart a course between a conservative rejection o the republic andparliamentary democracy and a socialist attempt to establish a revolutionarystate. As such, Seipel advocated or the democratic system as the path to lawand order—to prevent a dictatorship o the proletariat. Trough his articlesand intra-party advocacy, Seipel was able to lead his ellow Christian socialsinto supporting the new state. In act, one o Seipel’s major biographers,Klemens von Klemperer, takes care to emphasize that Seipel’s work withinthe Christian Social party and in his series o articles in the Reichspostpresented a exible stance on parliamentary democracy. Seipel thus opened“up the possibility o a constructive conservative unction within the newAustrian Republic.”29

Seipel accompanied the political transition rom Monarchy to Republicin Austria with a transormation o his own. His transition rom Proessoro Moral Teology to Christian Social politician brought him a rise inprominence in his new-ound political career. Allowed by cardinal Pifflto stand or elections in February 1919, Seipel began his parliamentarycareer working in good aith with the social democrats to settle the postwar

peace treaties and to write a constitution or Austria. But his connectionsto the Church and the moral theology o its intellectual world still tuggedat him and did not let go. Seipel was elevated into the prelature in August1919. Seipel’s early political career saw him climbing two ladders at once:one in Austria’s political world, the other in Austria’s ecclesiastical world.

Tough Seipel would be tempted at least two times to become a bishopin the Catholic Church and thus commit himsel ully to climbing theChurch ladder, he would continually choose the political ladder as his

vocation. In his own mind, this choice was one o sel-sacrice—serving

God through politics instead o doing what he would preer. Politics inAustria would become dirty and hard; Seipel’s role as compromiser andChristian-cosmopolite would ade into the background.

Te early years o the Republic brought Seipel two opportunitiesto work with the social

austrian lives

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