Austria From Habsburg To Hitler Volume 1

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1948.

“A detailed and moving picture of how the Habsburgs suffered under the Nazi regime…scrupulously sourced, well-written, and accessible.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) It was during five youthful years in Vienna that Adolf Hitler's obsession with the Habsburg Imperial family became the catalyst for his vendetta against a vanished empire, a dead archduke, and his royal orphans. That hatred drove Hitler's rise to power and led directly to the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The royal orphans of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—offspring of an upstairs-downstairs marriage that scandalized the tradition-bound Habsburg Empire—came to personify to Adolf Hitler, and others, all that was wrong about modernity, the twentieth century, and the Habsburgs’ multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were outsiders in the greatest family of royal insiders in Europe, which put them on a collision course with Adolf Hitler. As he rose to power Hitler's hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinand's sons, who became outspoken critics and opponents of the Nazi party and its racist ideology. When Germany seized Austria in 1938, they were the first two Austrians arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Germany, and sent to Dachau. Within hours they went from palace to prison. The women in the family, including the Archduke's only daughter, Princess Sophie Hohenberg, declared their own war on Hitler. Their tenacity and personal courage in the face of betrayal, treachery, torture, and starvation sustained the family during the war and in the traumatic years that followed. Through a decade of research and interviews with the descendants of the Habsburgs, scholar James Longo explores the roots of Hitler's determination to destroy the family of the dead Archduke—and uncovers the family members' courageous fight against the Führer.

A varied, vivid view of the literary culture of the often-neglected interwar Austrian republic. The literary flair of fin-de-siècle Vienna lived on after 1918 in the First Austrian Republic even as writers grappled with the consequences of a lost war and the vanished Habsburg Empire. Reacting to historical and political issues often distinct from those in Weimar Germany, Austrian literary culture, though frequently associated with Jewish writers deeply attached to the concept of an independent Austria, reflected the republic's ever-deepening antisemitism and the growing clamor for political union with Germany. Spanning the two momentous decades between the fall of the empire in 1918 and the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, this book explores work by canonical writers suchas Schnitzler, Kraus, Roth, and Werfel and by now-forgotten figures such as the pacifist Andreas Latzko, the arch-Nazi Bruno Brehm, and the fervently Jewish Soma Morgenstern. Also taken into account are Ernst Weiss's "Hitler" novel Der Augenzeuge and 1930s works about First Republic Austria by the German Communist writers Anna Seghers and Friedrich Wolf. Andrew Barker's book paints a varied and vivid picture of one of the most challenging and underresearched periods in twentieth-century cultural history. Andrew Barker is Emeritus Professor of Austrian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

While it is dubious that Adolf Hitler ever will receive the attention which has been lavished upon Napoleon Bonaparte, there are increasing indications that Hitler's rise and fall continue to interest the generations which suffered from the forces he represented. -- Preface.

Before World War I, Linz was a center for the antisemitic Pan-German nationalist movement led by Georg Ritter von Schönerer. The more pragmatic local leader, Carl Beurle, also used antisemitic propaganda, though few Jews lived in Linz. After 1918 the city was ruled by Social Democrats. From the late 1920s on, fascism and Nazism were on the rise, yet the reactionary antisemitic Bishop Gföllner and the Church opposed Nazism as anti-Christian and condemned racism. From 1936 the Nazis began to publish the antisemitic "Österreichischer Beobachter" and to attract the middle class. In February 1937 there was a violent campaign against Jewish businesses. Linz welcomed Hitler and the Anschluss, and Hitler's program of full employment and beautifying the city ensured general support for Nazism. While Bishop Gföllner tried to resist Nazi control of the Church, he took no action on behalf of converted Jews.

First published in 1990. During the last twenty years, prodigious scholarly effort has gone into the study of fascism and the right in twentieth-century Europe. Quite apart from the study of particular fascist and national socialist movements and of individual right-wing regimes (Fascist Italy, the Third Reich, Franco's Spain, etc.), scholars have striven to locate the essential nature of fascism; to determine what is distinctive about its ideas, programmes, policies and support; to identify what, if anything, differentiates it from other forms of rightism; and to decide whether a satisfactory definition of 'fascism' can be arrived at. This volume is intended to assist the further consideration of these and related problems.