Die verweifelte Republik: Österreich 1918–1922 by Walter Rauscher (review)

In November 2018, Austria will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the “First Republic.” During such “memory years,” the book market is teeming with anniversary literature (Jubiläumsgeschichtsschreibung). Two signal publications deal with this quasi-stillborn republic. Political scientist Anton Pelinka terms it “the failed republic” (Die gescheiterte Republik, Vienna 2017). Historian Walter Rauscher, in the book under review, calls it, less deterministically, “the desperate republic.”

(German-)Austria emerged after the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in the waning days of World War I. The German speakers of the monarchy were already hungry and desperate from the long war. Both “Kampfesunlust an der Front und knurrender Magen im Land” sealed the fate of the Monarchy (15). Austria had lost more than one million soldiers on the brutal war, and almost two million returned home wounded or maimed; 1.7 million ended up in prisoner-of-war camps (57). Civilians (particularly in Vienna) had been hungry and cold for months. Workers in the factories were overworked and hungry. There was a revolutionary mood in the air. If that was not enough, the unhappy ethnic groups of the monarchy were in a rebellious mood and, based on President Woodrow Wilson’s 14-point peace program, demanded “self-determination.” New Czechoslovak, Yugoslav, and Polish states formed in the waning days of the Monarchy. Rauscher maintains that “the Austrians’ German course and the Hungarians’ nationalism virtually drove the Czechs and Slovaks towards independence” (21). In his book Der Papierkrieg zwischen Washington und Wien 1917/18 (Innsbruck 2017), Kurt Bednar makes the opposite argument—it was the Czechs’ agitation on the topic of separation from Austria-Hungary that drove the Habsburg Monarchy toward dissolution.

Left dangling, the German-Austrians met in a Provisional Assembly on October 21 and decided to form the new state of German-Austria (Deutschösterreich). The Habsburg armies dissolved on the front line in late October; an armistice was signed on November 4, while the Provisional Assembly was discussing whether German Austria should be a “monarchical republic” or a democratic republic as the monarchy dissolved (37). The provisional chan-cellor Karl Renner bemoaned the fate of the German-Austrians: “during the night we suddenly became a people without a state” (41). Since most obser-vers thought that the new “German-Austria” was economically not viable, the idea of an “Anschluss” to Germany grew stronger and stronger during these early postwar years. On November 11, the last Habsburg Emperor, Karl I, finally resigned from his office but he did not abdicate the throne (61).

On November 12, the new Republic of Deutschösterreich exercized its right to self-determination and proclaimed its existence. The same day the Communists launched a putsch in Vienna to seize power, but it failed. The exact borders of Austria were not known at the time, as Czechoslovakia and Hungary did not want their Germans (some on Austria’s border) incorporated in Deutschösterreich; the new Yugoslav state made territorial demands in Carinthia; and Italy claimed the South Tyrol. The problem of uncertain borders was made worse domestically when the Western Austrian states Salzburg, Tyrol, and Vorarlberg threatened to leave the fledgling state, hoping for Anschluss with Germany or Switzerland (78). The Christian Social and federalist Western Austrians did not want to live under a regime of what they termed “Wiener Sozialistenzentralismus” (81). The deep political divisions among the political camps (Christian Social rural Austria and “Red Vienna”) began to emerge. “Leftover” Deutschösterreich lacked any patriotism or national identity. In Pelinka’s diction, the “unloved republic” earned no “emotionale Zuwendung.”

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the horrible privations of war left the new republic swooning and powerless. The successor states of the monarchy, hating the Austrians, whom they blamed for the centuries of Habsburg oppression, cut Austria off economically. Hungary refused to ship food to Vienna, Czechoslovakia coal. Austrians—especially the Viennese—were desperately hungry and cold. Many Austrians, particularly in the Socialist camp, saw their only rescue in...