nationalists in Austria-Hungary was henceforth problematic. In 1867 the Hungarians were granted political independence within a dual state. The growth of the Pan-German movement in Austria in the following decades reflected the dilemma of Austrian Germans within a state of mixed German and Slav nationalities. Their programme proposed the secession of the German-settled provinces of Austria from the polyglot Habsburg empire and their incorporation in the new Second Reich across the border. Such an arrangement was ultimately realized by the Anschluss of Austria into the Third Reich in 1938. (6)
The idealised, romantic image of a rural, quasi-medieval Germany suffered under the programme of rapid modernisation and industrialisation undertaken by the Second Reich. For many, who saw their traditional communities destroyed by the spread of towns and industries, the foundations of their mystical unity had become threatened. In addition, these anti-modernist sentiments resulted in the rejection of both liberalism and rationalism, while paradoxically hijacking the scientific concepts of anthropology, linguistics and Darwinist evolution to ‘prove’ the superiority of the German race.
A set of inner moral qualities was related to the external characteristics of racial types: while the Aryans (and thus the Germans) were blue-eyed, blond-haired, tall and well-proportioned, they were also noble, honest, and courageous. The Darwinist idea of evolution through struggle was also taken up in order to prove that the superior pure races would prevail over the mixed inferior ones. Racial thinking facilitated the rise of political anti-Semitism, itself so closely linked to the strains of modernization. Feelings of conservative anger at the disruptive consequences of economic change could find release in the vilification of the Jews, who were blamed for the collapse of traditional values and institutions. Racism indicated that the Jews were not just a religious community but biologically different from other races. (7)
As mentioned earlier, the fears and aspirations of German nationalists led to the formation of two highly influential movements, volkisch nationalism and Pan-Germanism. The intention of the volkisch movement was to raise the cultural consciousness of Germans living in Austria, particularly by playing on their fears for their identity within the provinces of mixed nationality in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The word volkisch is not easy to translate into English, containing as it does elements of both nationalism and a profound sense of the importance of folklore. The main principles of volkisch thought were the importance of living naturally (including a vegetarian diet); an awareness of the wisdom of one’s ancestors, expressed through the appreciation of prehistoric monuments; and an understanding of astrology and cosmic cycles. (As more than one commentator has noted, there is a distinct and rather sinister similarity between these principles and those of the modern New Age movement.)
The ideas of the volkisch movement were propagated through educational and defence leagues called Vereine. In 1886, Anton Langgassner founded the Germanenbund, a federation of Vereine, at Salzburg under the banner of Germanic Volkstum (nationhood). The Vereine were particularly popular amongst young people and intellectuals; such was their popularity, in fact, that an unsettled Austrian government dissolved the Germanenbund in 1889, although it re-emerged in 1894 as the Bund der Germanen. Goodrick-Clarke estimates that by 1900, as many as 150,000 people were influenced by volkisch propaganda.
According to the historian of Nazism, Eugene Davidson, the followers of the volkisch movement: believed the troubles of the industrial order — the harshness, the impersonality, the sharp dealing, the ruthless speculators — would only be exorcised by a return to Ur-Germanism, to the German community, the ancient Teutonic gods, and a Germanic society unsullied by inferior, foreign intrusions. Nations might endure such foreign elements, but a Volk was an organic unity with a common biological inheritance. The culture-bearing Volk of the world, incomparably superior among the races, was the German; therefore, the only proper function of a German state was to administer on behalf of the Volk; everything international was inferior and to be rejected. A sound economy would be based on agriculture rather than on industry with its international, especially Jewish influences; and in religion, a German God would have to replace the Jewish God. (8) [Original emphasis.]
Volkisch ideology was propagated through a number of racist publications, one of the most virulent of which was the satirical illustrated monthly Der Scherer, published in Innsbruck by Georg von Schonerer (1842–1921), a leader in the movement, whom Davidson describes as ‘anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and often ludicrous’. (9) The anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic articles in Der Scherer were accompanied by drawings of fat priests and big-nosed Jews, the latter a prototype of the Jewish stereotype that would be later used in National Socialist propaganda. In one picture, a Jew and a priest are sitting on a mound of writhing people, who represent the Volk, while another shows the Devil in Hell, with a sign saying: ‘Spa for Jews and Jesuits.’ (10)
Jews were consistently attacked from two directions: volkisch anticlerical groups linked them with the reactionary Church, while clerical anti-Semites linked them with volkisch heathenism. Jews were therefore seen as ‘either godless socialists or capitalist exploiters … and the hidden, international rulers of financial and intellectual life’. (11) As we shall see later, these views would survive Nazism, and have extended their pernicious influence through various right-wing groups active today. One Catholic paper, Die Tiroler Post, wrote in 1906 that the goal of the Jew was world domination, while another, the Linzer Post, defended anti-Semitism as no more than healthy self-preservation. In the same year, the volkisch Deutsche Tiroler Stimmen called for the extermination of the Jewish race. (12)
If the volkisch movement attempted to raise German national and cultural consciousness, Pan-Germanism operated in a more political context, beginning with the refusal of Austrian Germans to accept their exclusion from German affairs after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. The movement originated among student groups in Vienna, Graz and Prague, which were inspired by earlier German student clubs (Burschenschaftern) following the teachings of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1850). Jahn, a purveyor of volkisch ideology, advocated German national unity, identity and romantic ritual. These groups advocated kleindeutsch (or ‘little German’) nationalism, which called for the incorporation of German Austria into the Bismarckian Reich. As Goodrick-Clarke notes, ‘This cult of Prussophilia led to a worship of force and a contempt for humanitarian law and justice.’ (13)
Georg von Schonerer’s involvement with Pan-Germanism transformed it from a nebulous ‘cult of Prussophilia’ into a genuine revolutionary movement. Following his election to the Reichsrat in 1873, Schonerer followed a progressive Left agenda for about five years, before making demands for a German Austria without the Habsburgs and politically united with the German Reich. Schonerer’s Pan-Germanism was not characterised merely by national unity, political democracy and social reform: its essential characteristic was racism, ‘that is, the idea that blood was the sole criterion of all civil rights’. (14)
The Pan-German movement experienced something of a setback in 1888, when Schonerer was convicted of assault after barging into the offices of Das Neue Wiener Tageblatt and attacking the editor for prematurely reporting the death of the German emperor, Wilhelm I. He was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, lost his title of nobility (15) and was deprived of his political rights for five years.
When the Austrian government decided in 1895 that Slovene should be taught in the German school at Celje in Carniola, and two years later the Austrian premier, Count Casimir Badeni, ruled that all officials in Bohemia and Moravia should speak both Czech and German (thus placing Germans at a distinct disadvantage), the flames of nationalism were once again fanned throughout the empire. The result was that the Pan-Germans, together with the democratic German parties, followed a strategy of blocking all parliamentary business, which in turn led to violent public disorder in the summer of 1897.
By this time, Schonerer had identified an additional enemy in the Catholic Church, which he regarded as inimical to the interests of Austrian Germans. ‘The episcopate advised the emperor, the parish priests formed a network of effective propagandists in the country, and the Christian Social party had deprived him of his earlier strongholds among the rural and semi-urban populations of Lower Austria and Vienna.’ (16) The association of Catholicism with Slavdom and the Austrian state could further be emphasised, Schonerer believed, by a movement for Protestant conversion; this was the origin of the slogan ‘Los von Rom’ (‘Away from Rome’). The movement claimed approximately 30,000 Protestant conversions in Bohemia, Styria, Carinthia and Vienna between 1899 and 1910, (17) although it was not at all popular among either the volkisch leagues or the Pan-Germans, who saw it as ‘a variation of old-time clericalism’. (18) For that matter, the Protestant Church itself was rather dissatisfied with Los von Rom, and felt that its profound connection of religion with politics would make religious people uneasy. By the same token, those who were politically motivated felt religion itself to be irrelevant.
By the turn of the century, Pan-Germanism could be divided into two groups: those who, like Schonerer, wanted political and economic union with the Reich, and those who merely wanted to defend German cultural and political interests within the Habsburg empire. These interests were perceived as being radically undermined, not
