• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Karl Lueger

Karl Lueger [born Oct. 24, 1844, Vienna, Austria died March 10, 1910, Vienna], was a politician, cofounder and leader of the Austrian Christian Social Party, and mayor of Vienna who transformed the Austrian capital into a modern city. Lueger, from a working-class family, studied law at the University of Vienna. Elected to the capital's municipal council as a liberal in 1875, he soon became popular for his exposure of corruption. Though he was not himself a violent anti-Semite and regarded German nationalism with skeptical antipathy, Lueger did not hesitate to exploit the prevalent anti-Semitic and nationalistic currents in Vienna for his own demagogic purposes.

The natural and healthy reaction against the State "system" that co-ordinated with marvellous skill the agencies of the Police, the Church, the Bureaucracy and the Army in the work of stamping the progressive spirit out of Austria, brought into power during the later 1860s and 1870s a party that strove for a time to correct the worst anachronisms and to remedy the most flagrant abuses of the obscurantist past.

According to the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia, "Liberalism had come to mean economic advancement for the capitalist at the cost of the small tradesman, the capitalist being usually a Jew. The result was an appalling material moral degradation and a regime of political corruption focussed at Vienna, which city in the seventies of the last century was the most backward capital in Europe, enormously overtaxed, and with a population sunk in a lazy indifference, political, economic, and religious. The Jewish Liberalism ruled supreme in city and country public opinion was moulded by a press almost entirely Jewish and anti-clerical..."

By another account "liberty" and "freedom" in Austria then " ... meant, in most cases, liberty for the clever, quick-quitted, indefatigable Jew to prey upon a public and a political world totally unfit for defence against or competition with him. Fresh from Talmud and synagogue, and consequently trained to conjure with the law and skilled in intrigue, the invading Semite arrived from Galicia or Hungary and carried everything before him. Unknown and therefore unchecked by public opinion, without any " stake in the country" and therefore reckless, he sought only to gratify his insatiable appetite for wealth and power. The Press, which he invaded, corrupted, and dominated, denounced resistance to him as "religious intolerance," and clamour for protection against him as " anti-Liberal." Little by little the "Liberal" Jew established himself, as he thought, in an impregnable position. But the excess of the evil brought, if not remedy, at least a palliative in the ugly form of an anti-Semitic agitation that drew strength from the financial and building crisis of 1873. For that crisis the Jews were not alone responsible, though their unbridled speculative habits and mushroom fortunes undoubtedly started the speculative mania which led to the crash; and while the aristocracy and the middle classes, which had been caught by the mania, lost heavily in the inevitable catastrophe, the Jews extricated themselves more nimbly and were little the worse.

"Resentment and envy rapidly found vent in an anti-Jewish outcry that made of the Jew a scapegoat for the sins of the community. The Jewish "Liberal" press hastened to denounce as "religious" intolerance this not unnatural reaction ; and the Catholic Church, taking the hint, added a " religious" count to the general indictment. The anti Semitic movement might have subsided as soon as the Jews had learned the lesson of prudence, had not a demagogue of genius, Dr. Karl Lueger, placed himself at its head and used it to bear him aloft to the Burgomastership of Vienna. Though often a Jew-baiter, Lueger was no Jew-hater. He knew the Jews too well to cherish indiscriminate rancour against them, however wildly he may have talked in his political harangues. Had his political career not been blocked at the outset by the dog-in-the-manger attitude of the Vienna " Liberals," Lueger might perhaps have saved the "Liberal" party from itself and have prolonged its lease of power."

But he was determined to find his opportunity, and found it in leading the "Christian Social anti-Semitic" forces to an assault upon the strong places of Jewish and capitalistic liberalism. His great political talent, his personal integrity, his ability to put Viennese ideas into Viennese words, his freedom from Jewish Liberal " progressive "cant, gained him an ascendancy over his native city and a prestige in the Empire such as few Austrian politicians had previously enjoyed.

In 1882 Lueger's party, called the Democratic was joined by the Reform and by the German National organizations, the three uniting under the name Anti-Semitic party. In 1885 Lueger associated himself with Baron Vogelsang, the eminent social-political worker, whose influence and principles had great weight in the formation of the future Christian Socialists.

His often ruthless agitation against the Jews, his fiery denunciations of their malpractices, compelledthem, under pressure, to observe a circumspection of which they had previously seemed incapable. Lueger's agitation was attended by many drawbacks. While it rendered a service to Austria by rousing an "Austrian" consciousness, and by revealing to a public opinion which decades of pseudo-liberal influence had hypnotized, the real character of the Magyar State and of the Austrian position in regard to Hungary, it tended to degrade political controversy to a pothouse level and to raise local interests and cupidities to the rank of political principles. It set party advantages above social and electoral justice, facilitated a revival of militant Clericalism in a peculiarly dangerous form, and replaced, albeit inadvertently, a system of "Liberal" corruption by a "Christian Social" concatenation of interests and offices scarcely less tyrannical and corrupt. In a word, the employment of impure means to attain ends not in themselves impure entailed consequences almost as deleterious as the evils Lueger had set out to combat.

As the Jews represented capitalist individualism masquerading as "Liberalism," Lueger struck at them - but met his match in the Social Democratic movement which, under Jewish leadership, gathered force as rapidly as "Liberalism" lost it. "Red" Socialism compelled the "Black" Socialists under Lueger to assume the defensive. He, the genial, irreverent demagogue, gradually became the champion of law and order, the darling of the Church, a pillar of the Throne, a symbol of all that is positively and consciously conservative in the State. In 1890 Lueger had been elected to the Lower Austrian Landtag; here again he became the guiding spirit in the struggle against Liberalism and corruption. In municipal, state, and national politics he was now the leader of the Anti-Semitic and Anti-Liberal party, the back-bone of which was the union of Christians called variously the Christian Socialist Union and, in Vienna especially, the United Christians, This union developed later into what by 1910 was dominant party in Austria, the Christian Socialists. In 1895 the United Christians were strong enough to elect Lueger burgomaster of Vienna.

The Lueger tradition that Austria, with all her faults, weaknesses, and "Asiatic" characteristics, is a living, growing, cohesive, not a decrepit State; that the interests of the people are mainly coincident with those of the dynasty ; that the Austrian Germans, though the leading, are not the only State-preserving element, and that their first duty is to their country and their second to their race.

Large numbers of Slavic peoples were moving into Vienna, undercutting wages and changing the nature of tradition life and culture. The German Viennese were deeply threatened and the retreat into pan-Germanism and the dream of uniting all the German people into one Volk was very attractive. The task required a man from the people and of the people. "The Viennese Liberals," says Hermann Bahr in his witty book on Vienna, "fought shy of the people. They were quite right. They were quite unable to talk to them. The people understood neither their thoughts nor their words: for they were artificial, imported from abroad and evolved from books. And therefore this Austrian Liberalism broke down when there came along a man who talked Viennese with the Viennese and put Viennese thoughts into Viennese language. That was the magic of Lueger." It is to the heart of the Austrians that the successful orator appeals. Genial and impulsive natures can alone hope to win them: and impulsiveness under stress of great excitement becomes violence. So, if certain inflammatory speeches are to be regretted-and, perhaps, no one regrets them more than the Burgomaster himself-for the immediate passions they stirred, a large degree of their violence must be discounted for the natures of audience and speaker.

In December, 1905, the "Jewish troubles" were at their height in Russia and it was considered in many quarters that the infection was beginning to spread among the Semitic elements in Austria. Unfortunately Lueger was in a truculent mood. "I warn the Jews in Vienna," he said, "not to go so far as their co-religionists in Russia, and not to make common cause with the Social Democrat revolutionaries. I tell them emphatically that, if they do, what has happened in Russia may equally well happen here. We in Vienna are anti-Semites. We are not addicted to murder, but, still, if the Jews threaten our fatherland and its institutions we will have no mercy on them. I am anxious that they shall have full warning before things come to such a pass." The very natural result of this speech was considerable alarm among the Austrian Jews, and deputations waited on the Government to ask for State protection. Lueger was astonished at having been taken so seriously and immediately took occasion to explain. "Everyone knows," he said, "that I am not a bloodthirsty man and that I am the last person in the world either to commit or to urge others to commit murder. But as my speech has been interpreted as an incitement to bloodshed-I will remove the bad impression by begging you not to kill the Jews, not to persecute them, not to do anything to them,and above all-not to buy from them!"

From his arrival in Vienna in 1908 until he left for Munich in 1913, historians really don't know what Hitler did in relation to this movement. However, there is enough data to show that Vienna of 1908-1913 did indeed have a strong impact on Hitler. He lived and observed a world in which anti-Semitism was at the forefront of political discourse under the leadership of Georg Schonerer and Karl Lueger. He was deeply influenced by Lueger that in politics the end justifies the means, and having a focused enemy like the Jews was politically quite useful.