The history of Austria stretches from the first settlement in the Palaeolithic to the present. First mentioned in 996 under the name "Ostarrichi", the country initially belonged as a margraviate to the Duchy of Bavaria and was an independent part of the Holy Roman Empire from 1156 to 1453 as a duchy and from 1453 to 1806 as an archduchy. The Habsburg dynasty, as the House of Austria, acquired a large dominion and provided the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire for several centuries. The Austrian Empire, proclaimed in 1804 (which also included Hungary and Bohemia at the time), was part of the German Confederation from 1815 to 1866 with its western part and formed the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy from 1867 with the now independent Kingdom of Hungary. After they broke up at the end of the First World War, Austria came into being in its present borders in 1918-1921, after the victors of the First World War prevented the democratic union with Germany. Having become a dictatorship in 1934, Austria was incorporated into the German Reich in 1938 by the National Socialist regime. Austria has been an independent republic since 1945, a sovereign republic since 1955 and joined the European Union in 1995.
In the Palaeolithic Age, people first settled in what is now Austria.
In the Celtic period from 800 to 400 BC. The kingdom of Noricum was
established on this territory. At the turn of the century, the Romans
conquered and settled the country south of the Danube. The most
important Roman settlement in Austria was Carnuntum.
From the 6th
century, Bavarians settled in the country, which was incorporated into
the Frankish Empire in the 8th century. Around 800 AD, Charlemagne
established the Awarenmark, a border mark in what is now Lower Austria,
to stop further advances by Slavs and Avars from the east. In the 10th
century, the Margraviate of Austria was established east of the Enns,
which was under the Duke of Bavaria. The oldest surviving document in
which the country is named "Ostarrichi" (meaning "Eastern Mark") dates
from the year 996. Independent dukes from the Babenberg family ruled in
Lower Austria since 1156 (privilege minus). The areas of present-day
Austria gradually broke away from Bavaria. They belonged to the Holy
Roman Empire until 1806 and to the German Confederation from 1815 to
1866.
After the death of the last Babenberger, the German King
Rudolf I became the first Habsburg to take over Austria in 1276. In the
centuries that followed, Austria became the ancestral home of the
Habsburgs, under whom it rose to become the leading power in the Holy
Roman Empire. In the 15th and early 16th centuries, the Habsburgs
extended their rule to Spain, the Netherlands and parts of Italy,
primarily through clever marriage policies. This is how the
Habsburg-French antagonism arose, which shaped European politics for
more than 200 years. Emperor Charles V transferred the Austrian lands to
his brother Ferdinand I in 1521, who created the first central
administrative structures. In 1526 Ferdinand inherited the kingdoms of
Bohemia and Hungary. However, the latter was largely under the control
of the Ottoman Empire after the Battle of Mohács, which now directly
bordered the Austrian lands. Even after the unsuccessful first siege of
Vienna by the Turks, the Ottoman threat continued for a century and a
half.
In the 16th century, the Reformation also spread to the
Austrian lands. The Habsburgs' re-catholicization policy, which began
around 1600, was a triggering factor in the Thirty Years' War, at the
beginning of which it seemed as if the Habsburgs could transform the
Holy Roman Empire into a centrally controlled monarchy under their rule.
From 1648 onwards, however, under pressure from the anti-Habsburg
coalition of France, Sweden and most of the Protestant German states,
they had to confine themselves to their Austrian and Bohemian lands
within the empire. In 1683, the Ottoman forces were defeated a second
time before Vienna and pushed back to behind Belgrade in the Great
Turkish War.
When the main Spanish line of Habsburgs died out in
1700, the War of the Spanish Succession began between the Habsburgs and
King Louis XIV of France. From the inheritance Austria received the
Spanish Netherlands, Naples and Lombardy in 1713 in the Treaty of
Utrecht. With this and with the conquests in the Balkans, it reached its
greatest territorial extent. Also in 1713, the Pragmatic Sanction was
issued, which provided for a uniform succession and was intended to
prevent a division of the Habsburg Empire. Nevertheless, in 1740, after
the accession of Maria Theresa, who had founded the new
Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty by marrying Franz Stephan von Lorraine, the
War of the Austrian Succession began, in which Silesia was lost to
Prussia. The dualism between Austria and Prussia began with the Silesian
Wars, and from then on it had a significant influence on imperial
politics. Under Empress Maria Theresa, far-reaching reforms were
introduced in all areas of the state, which were continued by her son,
Emperor Joseph II.
Franz II reacted to the coronation of Napoleon
I in 1804 by proclaiming the Austrian Empire. In 1806 he laid down the
imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which thus
ceased to exist. Austria took part in the Napoleonic Wars and played a
leading role in the reorganization of Europe by hosting the Congress of
Vienna in 1814/15. In the 19th century, the nationalist currents in the
countries of the Habsburg monarchy increasingly endangered their
existence. Towards the end of the 19th century, the differences between
the individual ethnic groups could no longer be overlooked. Since the
German element of the state was weakened after Prussia forced it to
leave the German Confederation in 1866, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise
came about in 1867 and the imperial and royal dual monarchy was created.
In the long run, however, it was not possible to reduce the nationalist
tensions in the multinational state. They culminated in the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne,
in Sarajevo in 1914, which led to a chain reaction that led to the First
World War.
Towards the end of the lost war, the non-German ethnic
groups broke away from the state association. As a result of this and
the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), Austria came into being in its
current borders. It was proclaimed a republic on November 12, 1918 under
the name German Austria. In February 1934, the persistent, severe
consequences of the global economic crisis and domestic political
tensions led to conflicts similar to civil wars, which culminated in an
authoritarian corporate state with the May 1934 constitution. Only two
months later, the Austrian National Socialists, who wanted to annex the
country to the German Reich, attempted a coup in which Chancellor
Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated. The coup was defeated, but with the
invasion of the German Wehrmacht on March 12, 1938, Adolf Hitler's
government forced Austria to be annexed. As "Ostmark" it remained part
of the Nazi state until 1945. After the Second World War, Austria was
restored as a republic, but remained occupied by the victorious Allied
powers for another ten years. In 1995 Austria joined the European Union.
The geological history of the Alpine region and the granite and gneiss plateau of the Bohemian Massif and its foothills can be traced back to the Proterozoic era. The Alpid mountain formation and the development of the marginal sea Paratethys since the Cretaceous period were essential for the geology and today's geography of Austria.
The oldest traces of humans in Austria, more than 250,000 years old,
have so far been found in the Repolust Cave in Styria.
Old Stone
Age
During the ice ages, the Alps were glaciated and little or not at
all accessible. The oldest traces of human presence in Austria belong to
the Middle Paleolithic, the time of the Neanderthals. About 70,000 years
old traces of the Neanderthal are known from the Gudenus Cave in
north-western Lower Austria. Many sites from the early Palaeolithic are
also in Lower Austria. The most well-known are in the Wachau, including
the sites where the two oldest Austrian works of art were found, the
figurative female representations of the so-called “Venus vom
Galgenberg” from Stratzing/Krems-Rehberg (36,000 years old, relief
plastic, 7.2 cm, green serpentine) and the Venus of Willendorf (30,000
years old, 11 cm, oolite). A double burial of an infant discovered in
2005, embedded in red chalk and located under a mammoth shoulder blade,
from the Wachtberg in Krems an der Donau from the Gravettian period is
the oldest burial in Austria with an age of around 27,000 years (dated
using the radiocarbon method).
Mesolithic
Shelters (rock
protection roofs) from the Lake Constance Rhine Valley, a burial of
Elsbethen and a few other sites with microlithic artefacts are sparse
witnesses to the transitional period between groups living as hunters
and gatherers and sedentary farmers and cattle breeders.
Neolithic
During the Neolithic Age, all regions of Austria where
agriculture is possible or where raw materials are available are
gradually settled. The first proven rural settlement from the time of
the oldest Linear Pottery Culture comes from Brunn am gebirge. The
oldest industrial monument in Austria, the hornstone mine at
Mauer-Antonshöhe, also dates from this period. Subsequently, a dense
settlement of the Lengyel culture is proven, during which a series of
circular ditches were built in Lower Austria.
Chalcolithic
The
oldest copper objects have their origins in the Carpathian Basin,
including the Stollhof depot (Lower Austria). Hilltop settlements are
widespread in eastern Austria. In the course of the Copper Stone Age,
the inner-Alpine areas were also fully developed in search of raw
materials - especially copper. The most important find is the glacier
mummy Ötzi (man from the Tisenjoch), who died around 3300 BC. lived. The
Mondsee culture is characterized by stilt houses around the alpine
lakes.
bronze age
The ramparts, which were already appearing
more and more at the beginning of the Bronze Age, seem to have overseen
the mining, processing and trading of copper and tin as centers of power
and trade. The flourishing trade in raw materials and semi-finished
products is reflected in the furnishings of the graves (Pitten,
Franzhausen, Lower Austria). In the Urnfield period, salt mining began
in the northern group of the Hallstatt salt mines.
iron age
The Iron Age in Austria was shaped by the influences of the
Mediterranean high cultures and the steppe peoples. The transition
between the older Hallstatt period and the younger, Celtic-influenced La
Tène period was smooth.
Hallstatt culture
The early Iron Age
is called “Hallstatt Age” after the famous site of Hallstatt (Upper
Austria). The west and east Hallstattkreis are separated by the rivers
Enns, Ybbs and Inn. The West Hallstatt district was in contact with the
Greek colonies on the Ligurian coast. In the Alps, contacts are
maintained with the Etruscans and regions in Italy under Greek
influence. The East had close ties to the steppe peoples native to the
Carpathian Basin to the southern Russian steppes. The population of
Hallstatt becomes rich from the salt. Imports of luxury goods from the
North and Baltic Sea regions to Africa have been discovered in the
Hallstatt burial ground. The oldest evidence of Austrian wine was
discovered in Zagersdorf (Burgenland) in a burial mound. The cult float
from Strettweg (Styria) is evidence of religious life. The most visible
evidence of the Hallstatt period are the burial mounds in today's
Weinviertel, the largest being the 16 meter high Leeberg in Großmugl.
La Tène culture
The younger Iron Age, Latène culture, is the time
of the Celts. For the first time, population groups can be named. With
the Regnum Noricum (Celtic Norig) - a merger of several Celtic tribes -
under the leadership of the Noriker, the first state entity was formed
on Austrian soil. It was limited to the south and east of present-day
Austria. The west was populated by various Rhaetian tribes.
Dürrnberg and Hallein (Salzburg) become Celtic salt metropolises. In the
east of Austria, a thriving iron industry in the Oberpullendorf Bay
(Burgenland) extracts the high-quality Ferrum Noricum (Noric iron) that
was so coveted by the Romans. Fortified hilltop settlements (oppida)
such as on the Magdalensberg (Carinthia), near Schwarzenbach or on the
Braunsberg near Hainburg not far from Carnuntum became the centers of
public life.
Roman Empire
Most of today's Austria was founded around 15 BC.
annexed to the Roman Empire after there had previously been lively trade
relations and military alliances between the kingdom of Noricum and the
Romans. This marked the beginning of the Austria Romana period, which
lasted around 500 years.
The Roman Emperor Claudius set up the
Roman province of Noricum during his reign (AD 41–54), whose borders
stretched to the Danube in the north, to the Vienna Woods in the
northeast, along the current eastern border of Styria in the east, and
in the southeast and south beyond Eisack and Drava. Later, under
Diocletian (284–305), the province along the main Alpine ridge was
divided into a northern (Noricum ripense, "Ufernoricum") and a southern
(Noricum mediterraneum, "Inland Noricum") province. The area of today's
federal states of Vorarlberg and Tyrol bordering on the Ziller to the
west of Noricum became part of the province of Raetia, in the east
Pannonia joined Noricum with today's Burgenland. The Danube (Limes
Noricus and Limes Pannonicus) formed the imperial border to the northern
parts of Upper and Lower Austria, which were settled by the Germans
(Marcomanni and Quadi).
Some cities and towns in Austria go back
to the Celts like Linz (Lentos). Numerous other settlements were
established by the Romans. The city of Carnuntum, east of Vienna, was
the largest Roman city on Austrian soil today, other important places
were Virunum (north of today's Klagenfurt), Teurnia (near Spittal an der
Drau), Iuvavum (Salzburg) and the legionary camps Vindobona (Vienna) and
Lauriacum (Enns). Important excavation sites for Roman times include
Kleinklein (Styria) and Zollfeld (town on the Magdalensberg).
In
the 2nd century AD Christianity began to spread; the ecclesiastical
organization of the country at that time dates back to the 4th century
AD. After the settlement by the Bavarians, however, the country was
re-missionized, especially by the bishops Rupert and Virgil von Salzburg
(Iro-Scottish mission).
mass migration
The migration of
peoples sealed the decline of Roman power in the West. From the 5th
century, the two Roman empires were massively harassed by Germanic
tribes. After several incursions into Italy, the Goths invaded Noricum
for the first time in 408 under Alaric I, coming from Emona (today's
Ljubljana) across the Carnic Alps, which was then ruled by the Roman
regent and general Stilicho. From 472 Ostrogoths and Alamanni moved
through the country without being able to conquer it. Even after Odoacer
had deposed the last Western Roman emperor in 476, isolated structures
of late antique Roman administration remained in the provinces before
they finally collapsed in this area (see Severin of Noricum and
Flaccitheus). Shortly after the death of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric in
526, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy also perished without regaining
control of Noricum.
From the 6th century onwards there was
continuous settlement by the Bavarians and in what is now Vorarlberg by
the Alamanni. By the end of the 6th century, the last remnants of the
Western Roman Empire had dissolved. Besieged by the Avars, the Slavs
migrated from the east and, since the remaining Celto-Romanic population
could not prevent them, pushed further and further west along the Drau
until they met the Bavarians around 610, who coming from the north
already ruled the Pustertal. The settlement boundary between Slavs and
Bavarians roughly corresponds to the line Freistadt, Linz, Salzburg
(Lungau), East Tyrol (Lesachtal).
Early Middle Ages (until 976)
In the early Middle Ages, what is
now Austria was politically fragmented. From the middle of the 6th
century, the Bavarian tribal duchy had formed in the northern Alpine
region, whose rulers came from the Agilolfinger family and were under
Frankish suzerainty. During this period, the settlement area of the
Bavarians was extended to the south to today's South Tyrol and to the
east to the Enns. Avars and later Slavs settled east of it and in what
is now Bohemia. The seat of the Bavarian dukes, who ruled largely
independently for a long time, was Regensburg.
In the south of
present-day Austria, the Slavic tribes that had settled in the valleys
of the Drau, Mur and Save formed the first independent Slavic dominion
in Europe, Carantania, around the year 600; The center of Carantania was
the customs field. They were united with the remnants of the local
Celto-Romanic population by the will to resist further advances by the
neighboring Franks and Avars into the south-eastern Alps.
After
the Avars under Baian had destroyed the kingdom of the Gepids in 567,
they took control of Pannonia, from where they ruled an empire for about
250 years that included Vienna, Lower Austria, Burgenland and parts of
Upper Austria and Styria. For the 8th century, the settlement area of
the Avars is estimated at around 140,000 to 160,000 km². The Enns formed
the border between the Avars and Bavaria and was known as limes certus.
However, there are also significant Avar sites in Linz and
Enns-Lauriacum. In 595, the Merovingian Childebert II invaded Avar
Austria, but was crushed on the Drau. According to the Fredegar
Chronicle, from 627 to 658 the Vienna area was the scene of a major Slav
uprising led by the Frankish merchant Samo against the Avars. However,
as early as 650, the first Avars returned to the rebellious areas.
The tripartite division of today's Austria by Bavaria, Avars and
Carantania was to end in the 8th century: under the Carolingians, the
Frankish Empire grew stronger. Carantania had already recognized
Bavarian suzerainty before 743, the last largely independent duke of
Bavaria was Tassilo III. He was deposed in 788 by the Frankish king
Charlemagne, who eliminated the older Bavarian tribal duchy.
In
791, Charlemagne led a first unsuccessful campaign against the Avars,
but was able to push them back to the Vienna Woods and establish
Frankish bases in Comagena-Tulln and Aelium Cetium-St. Build Polten. A
civil war in the Avar Empire in 795 ended with the new ruler (Tudun)
offering Charlemagne submission and acceptance of Christianity, which
the Franks only used to attack again. In 795/796 Erich von Friuli and
King Pepin of Italy captured the famous Avar treasure, among other
things, whereupon Tudun personally came to the king to submit. He
received his own ruling organization within the Frankish Awarenmark, the
so-called Awaren Khaganate in today's Lower Austria between Carnuntum
and Sabaria. In the years 797, 799 and 803 there were significant Avar
uprisings and invasions of non-subdued Avars in present-day Austria,
during which the Frankish Counts Cadaloc and Goteram (Prefect of the
Bavarian East Country) were killed at the Guntio Castle (possibly in
northern Burgenland). .
After conquering the Avar Empire, the
Frankish ruler Charlemagne established a border mark in the region of
today's Lower Austria between the rivers Enns, Raab and Drau around 800,
which was also known as the Awarenmark, and south of it the Mark
Karantanien, both together were the Marcha orientalis, a prefecture of
the Duchy of Bavaria.
The border mark against the Avars was
destroyed by the Hungarian incursions. After the Battle of Pressburg in
the summer of 907, the border of the subsequent East Frankish Empire was
taken back to the Enns. The subsequent accession of Arnulf I as Duke of
Bavaria is also seen as the beginning of the younger Bavarian tribal
duchy, which included the entire eastern Alpine region. After the
victory in 955 in the Battle of Lechfeld under East Frankish King Otto
I, the Hungarian threat was averted. This was followed by a second wave
of Bavarian settlements in the east, gaining areas in what is now Lower
Austria, Istria and the Carniola. In the second half of the 10th
century, another margraviate was established east of the Enns, which was
subordinate to the Duke of Bavaria.
The Roman-German Emperor Otto II enfeoffed Luitpold (Leopold) from
the Babenberg family with this mark in 976. This eastern mark was part
of the Bavarian tribal duchy and is considered the nucleus of the later
duchy of Austria. In the same year 976, the Duchy of Carinthia was
separated from the Bavarian Duchy. In a deed of donation from Emperor
Otto III. from 996 the name Ostarrîchi was mentioned for the first time.
The spelling Austria later developed from this. In addition, the name
form Osterlant (Ostland or country in the east) has also been in use for
a very long time, the inhabitants are the Easter man and the Easter
woman. The Latinised form Austria for this area only appears in the
writings in the 12th century under Leopold III. on (cf. Austria as the
eastern part of the Frankish Empire).
The Babenbergs pursued a
purposeful policy of clearing and colonization and - in cooperation with
other houses, such as the Kuenringers - established a solid sovereignty.
The residence was initially in Pöchlarn, later in Melk and Gars am Kamp.
Margrave Leopold III. managed to marry into the imperial family; in the
power struggle between Emperor Henry IV and King Henry V, he switched to
Henry V and thus made a significant contribution to his victory. As a
reward he received the hand of Heinrich's sister Agnes von Waiblingen.
He was canonized after his death because of his monastery foundations -
especially Klosterneuburg.
In the course of the conflict between the Staufers and the Welfs, the Duchy of Bavaria came to the Babenbergs in 1139. When Friedrich I. Barbarossa wanted to end this dispute, he gave the Duchy of Bavaria back to the Guelphs - as a sort of compensation, Austria was raised to the duchy of the Holy Roman Empire with the Privilegium minus of 1156. The first duke was Heinrich Jasomirgott, who made Vienna a royal seat in 1156. Due to the Georgenberg strongholds (1186), the Duchy of Styria, which included the Traungau, the central part of today's Upper Austria, and the county of Pitten in southern Lower Austria as well as large areas in today's Slovenia, fell to the Babenbergs when the Traungauers died out in 1192.
With Leopold VI. High medieval Austria reached a cultural peak – it was under him that the then revolutionary Gothic art was introduced. However, his childless son Frederick II, known as "the Quarrelsome", soon got into trouble with several neighbors, including Hungarians. When Béla IV of Hungary, to whom he was related through his second wife Agnes von Andechs-Meranien, asked for help against the Mongols, he initially took part in the war in the spring of 1241. Soon after, however, he demanded money and three western Hungarian counties for it. The fulfillment of these conditions laid the foundation for the Babenberg-Hungarian conflicts that culminated in the Battle of the Leitha in 1246, in which Frederick II died. With him, the Babenbergs died out in the male line. The period known as the “Austrian interregnum” began, during which the lands of Frederick II became caught up in a long-lasting power struggle between rival powers.
Received recognition from the Austrian nobility, but died in 1247.
Gertrud's two following husbands were just as unsuccessful as Otto von
Bayern, who was appointed by the Emperor. In 1251 the Přemyslids
invaded, and the Austrian estates quickly recognized Ottokar II Přemysl
as duke. Although not approved by the emperor, Ottokar based his reign
on his strategic marriage to Margarete.
In Styria, on the other
hand, the estates chose the son of the Hungarian king as their duke. In
1254 Ottokar and Bela, mediated by the Pope, agreed on this separation
of the former Babenberg countries (Peace of Ofen), in 1261 Ottokar also
conquered Styria (Battle of Kressenbrunn). In 1270, Ottokar inherited
Carinthia from Ulrich III, which marked the course of his common future
with Austria. His policies were aimed at pushing back the nobility and
promoting the urban bourgeoisie, which is why he was fondly remembered
by the Viennese well into the Habsburg era. His grasp for royal power in
the Holy Roman Empire was countered by Rudolf von Habsburg, who defeated
him in 1278 at the Battle of Dürnkrut and Jederspeigen. The Habsburgs
were then able to establish themselves as dukes of Austria and Styria
and were to rule here until 1918, i.e. for 640 years.
From the middle of the 13th to the end of the 14th century
Austria was the scene of intensive persecution of heretics by the
Inquisition. A first major wave of persecution around 1260 in over
forty parishes in the southern Danube region between the
Salzkammergut and the Vienna Woods was mainly directed against the
Waldensians. Further inquisitions took place in Steyr, Krems, St.
Pölten and Vienna in 1311-1315. From 1391 to 1402, under the
inquisitor Petrus Zwicker, there were again severe persecutions,
including in Steyr, Enns, Hartberg, Sopron and Vienna. In 1397,
between 80 and 100 Waldensians were burned in Steyr alone, which is
commemorated by a memorial erected there in 1997.
In 1335 the
Habsburgs were able to inherit the Meinhardiner in Carinthia and
Carniola, and in 1363 Tyrol also fell from Margarete von Tirol to
Duke Rudolf IV.
Rudolf IV was the busiest ruler of the late
Middle Ages. He initiated many measures that were primarily intended
to increase the importance of the city of Vienna. He also had the
Privilegium Maius forged, which made Austria an archduchy and
secured a number of privileges within the empire.
In 1379,
the Habsburg rule was divided for the first time in the Treaty of
Neuberg. After that there were further divisions in 1406 and 1411.
This resulted in three country complexes:
the Lower Austrian
provinces (Upper and Lower Austria),
the inner Austrian states
(Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Inner-Istria as well as Trieste)
the Vorderösterreichische Länder (Tyrol, Vorarlberg and the Swabian
and Alsatian foothills).
Almost the entire 15th century was a
phase of confused inheritance divisions and family disputes, which
largely weakened the political and economic importance of the
Habsburg lands. Frederick V († 1493) finally succeeded in reuniting
the countries by surviving and inheriting all his opponents.
Albrecht V had already been elected Roman-German king as heir to the
Luxembourgers. This position subsequently passed to Friedrich, who
was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1452 and henceforth Friedrich III.
called.
The duchy of Austria was raised to the status of archduchy in 1453 by Emperor Friedrich III. accepted. From then on, the Habsburg princes referred to themselves as archdukes, which referred to the electors, also known as archprinces. From then on, the duchy was an archduchy of the Holy Roman Empire in order to put it on the same legal footing as the electorates – only their lords, the electors, were involved in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. As a duchy de facto equal to the electorates, primogeniture and indivisibility applied to Austria. It was later officially referred to as the Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns, and was finally divided into the Archduchy of Austria above the Enns and the Archduchy of Austria below the Enns in 1861.
The rise of Austria to become a great power
The power of the
emperor in the empire was not particularly great, since the many
noble ruling houses within and outside the empire strived for their
own political power. So left the lackluster but tough politics of
Frederick III. a solid rule. Its importance was increased by the
marriage (1477) of his son Maximilian to Maria, heiress to the
Burgundian lands complex between the Holy Roman Empire and France.
After Maria's early death, Maximilian married the Breton princess
Anne de Bretagne, who had a right to inherit Brittany. However, an
intervention by France prevented the Habsburgs from taking power
there. In 1496 Maximilian I married his son Philip the Handsome to
the Infanta Joanna (the Mad) of Castile and Aragon. In doing so, he
not only secured the Habsburgs' inheritance rights to Spain, Naples,
Sicily and Sardinia, but also to the Spanish colonies. The marriage
policy of the Habsburgs is expressed in the famous saying: Bella
gerant alii - tu felix austria nube ("War may be waged by others -
you, happy Austria, marry!"). The Swabian War ended in 1499. The
Habsburgs had to give up their homeland with the Habichtsburg in the
Peace of Basel. This began the legal separation of Switzerland from
the Holy Roman Empire, which was finally sealed in the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648. In 1500 Maximilian inherited the County of
Gorizia. Due to the rapid expansion of the dominion, the Habsburgs
were about to set up a universal monarchy around the world around
1500, which is expressed in the motto of Charles V, who was crowned
in 1519: Plus Ultra (beyond everything that had gone before).
Although he was unable to redeem this claim in the face of strong
opponents, he is still regarded as the most powerful Habsburg of all
time.
At the Diet of Worms in 1521, the Austrian lands were
handed over by Emperor Charles V to his brother Ferdinand I, who
established the beginnings of central administrative structures. In
the same year, Ferdinand I married Anna, who brought succession
rights into the marriage in Bohemia and Hungary. In 1524 Charles V
added Friesland to the Habsburg household. In 1526, after the
unfortunate Battle of Mohács, Ferdinand (thanks to his wife's
claims) not only inherited the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia (with
the neighboring countries of Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia), but also
the constant threat of the Ottoman Empire, against which Hungary had
previously inherited had been a territorial shield. In addition, the
Habsburgs came into conflict for the first time with the Hungarian
nobility, who at the time supported the anti-king John Zápolya. In
1528 Overijssel and Utrecht came under Habsburg rule. In 1531,
Ferdinand I was elected Roman-German king with the help of bribes.
Charles V annexed the Duchy of Milan.
In 1538 the Kingdom of
Hungary was divided into three:
Royal Hungary (present-day
Slovakia, Burgenland, western Croatia and parts of present-day
Hungary) remained with the Habsburgs.
The middle of the country
fell to the Turks.
Transylvania came under the control of rival
Hungarian nobles.
In 1555/56 Charles V abdicated after the
Augsburg Religious Peace. This led to the division of the Habsburgs
into a Spanish and an Austrian line. The Austrian line provided the
Holy Roman Emperor almost without interruption until 1806.
In the Austrian provinces (with the exception of Tyrol), the
population converted almost unanimously to Protestantism.
Re-Catholicization only began around 1600 (see also
Counter-Reformation), but with all the greater violence and violence.
The Jesuits and Cardinal Melchior Khlesl, Archduke Matthias' chancellor,
excelled in this process. A leading promoter of this policy was
Ferdinand II, who took up the topos and announced that he would rather
rule a desert than a country full of heretics.
Because of this
policy, the Austrian lands also became involved in the Thirty Years' War
brought about by the uprising in Bohemia. For a time it looked as if the
Habsburgs could turn the Holy Roman Empire into an absolutist monarchy
(see also Battle of White Mountain, Edict of Restitution); however, by
the end of that war they were thrown back to the Austrian and Bohemian
lands. So they tried to form an integrated state structure out of them.
Economic theorists such as Philip Wilhelm von Hornick and Johann
Heinrich Gottlob von Justi had been pushing in this direction since the
1680s.
After incursions by Turkish marauders from the late 15th century, the
Ottoman army advanced as far as Vienna in 1529 and besieged the city.
Only the fact that the attackers were forced to break off the siege
because of the late season was able to save the city at the time. In the
almost 200 years that followed, the Turks posed a serious threat to the
Holy Roman Empire and the Turkish wars (with requests for help from the
imperial estates often being answered with restraint) were a topic at
the imperial diets again and again.
In 1683, the Ottomans
unsuccessfully besieged Vienna a second time. The relief army led by
Duke Charles of Lorraine under the supreme command of the Polish King
John III was decisive. Sobieski, which with its hussars from Kahlenberg
fell in the rear of the besiegers. In the years that followed, the
liberation against the Ottoman threat finally succeeded. With the help
of capable generals such as Charles of Lorraine and Prince Eugene of
Savoy, the Ottomans were thrown back to beyond Belgrade during the Great
Turkish War of 1683-1699 and in another Turkish War of 1716-1718. In the
Peace of Karlowitz in 1699, all of Hungary and Slavonia came into the
possession of Austria. The other territorial gains from the Peace of
Passarowitz (1718) were reversed in the Peace of Belgrade (1739), with
the exception of the Banat.
This enabled an unprecedented
flourishing of Baroque culture, which developed a specifically Austrian
form and profoundly shaped the city (“Vienna gloriosa”) and the country.
After the Spanish Habsburgs died out in 1700, the Austrian Habsburgs
fought Louis XIV in the War of Spanish Succession for the inheritance of
the monarchy there. The war was waged with verve and success above all
by Emperor Joseph I. However, everything collapsed after his death. His
brother Karl was the last living male Habsburg; he would have inherited
a world empire, which the other European powers prevented. In the Treaty
of Utrecht in 1713, the French Bourbons were installed as Spanish
rulers; the Habsburgs were left with all of Spain's neighboring European
countries (Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Lombardy) from the inheritance.
In the same year, Charles VI issued also the Pragmatic Sanction,
which can be regarded as the first basic law for the Habsburg monarchy.
The Pragmatic Sanction determined the indivisibility and inseparability
of the monarchy and, to this end, introduced a uniform succession to the
throne based on the principles of primogeniture and subsidiary female
succession. This arrangement lasted until the end of the Habsburg
monarchy in 1918, and was explicitly confirmed by Hungary in the 1867
Compromise.
In historiography it is often stated that Charles VI.
made possible the female succession to the throne because he only left
two daughters, Maria Theresia (1740–1780), born in 1717, and Maria Anna.
However, this does not correspond to the facts, since at the time the
Pragmatic Sanction was issued in 1713 none of the emperor's four
children (one son, three daughters) had been born and it was not
foreseeable that his first-born son would not survive the year of his
birth in 1716.
After the successful Turkish war from 1714 to
1718, the Habsburgs received northern Bosnia, northern Serbia
(approximately the area of today's Vojvodina), Banat and small
Wallachia. The so-called Swabian migrations organized the settlement of
these areas, almost deserted as a result of the Turkish wars, with
predominantly German-born Catholic subjects. With the exchange of
Sardinia for Sicily, the Austrian Habsburg Empire achieved its greatest
territorial expansion.
With the death of Charles VI. In 1740 the
Habsburgs had died out in the male line. Therefore, due to the Pragmatic
Sanction, his daughter Maria Theresa took over the rule in the Austrian
lands. With her husband Franz Stephan von Lothringen she became the
founder of the new Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty. She was able to largely
defend her legacy during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748).
However, in the Preliminary Peace of Breslau, which was confirmed in the
Peace of Berlin in 1742, most of Silesia, with the exception of
Austro-Silesia, fell to Prussia and, despite many efforts and two
further wars (including 1756-1763), could not be regained.
In the years that followed, Maria Theresa made some changes for the
hereditary lands in Austria and Bohemia:
Special rights in the
monarchy were restricted.
The neighboring countries lost the right to
their own administration.
The Estates lost their say in government
decisions.
Judiciary and administration were separated.
The court
chambers of the Austrian and Bohemian lands were combined into one
central financial and military authority.
The nobility were obliged
to serve the monarchy.
Compulsory teaching was introduced.
The
Hungarian nobility, who had supported Maria Theresa in the power
struggle at the beginning of her reign, retained their privileges. This
resulted in an Austro-Hungarian dualism.
Under Maria Theresa
people began to settle the then very sparsely populated areas in Galicia
and Lodomeria, the Banat and Transylvania. The most influential group of
immigrants were the Danube Swabians. This settlement policy was
continued until the collapse of the monarchy and led, among other
things, to the settlement of Jews in Bukovina, who had a strong
influence on the culture there in the late 19th century.
In 1765 her son Joseph II became Emperor of the Roman-German Empire
and was appointed co-regent, but he was only to take over full official
duties after the death of Maria Theresa in 1780. Joseph II carried out
many reforms; his form of government (Josephism) was later described as
enlightened absolutism (everything for the people, nothing by the
people.) From 1766 he opened the former private parks of the imperial
court to everyone. He abolished serfdom in 1781 and closed monasteries
that were only contemplative and did not provide services to the general
public. After the Innviertel was won for Austria in the Peace of Teschen
in 1779, the attempt to exchange Bavaria for the Austrian Netherlands
failed in 1785. Further reforms were prevented mainly by resistance from
Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands, where the Brabant Revolution broke
out in 1789. Nevertheless, Joseph is considered an important enlightener
and decisive pioneer of civil society.
Austria participated in
the first partition of Poland in 1773 and subsequently in the third
partition in 1795. (In 1773, Maria Theresa did not want to sit idly by
and watch Prussia and Russia gain territory.) During the first division,
Austria received Galicia with the area around Lemberg and founded the
Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. During the third division, Austria was
able to win over the area later called West Galicia, which included
Lesser Poland and stretched south-east from Warsaw.
Joseph II
died in February 1790; He was succeeded by his brother Leopold II, who
was six years his junior. His help - together with Prussia's Friedrich
Wilhelm II - for the French king Louis XVI. did not come about; Leopold
II died in March 1792 at the age of 44.
The Enlightenment
approaches were quickly frozen after the shock of the French Revolution:
Leopold's son Franz II (as Roman-German Emperor, later Franz I of
Austria) pursued an "downright stubborn reaction policy", which was
primarily associated with the name of the State Chancellor von
Metternich connected is. This political stagnation was to last
throughout the first half of the 19th century. As a result, Austria's
social and economic development fell behind Prussia, France and Great
Britain.
After the French Revolution, Austria was also involved in the
Napoleonic Wars. The coronation of Napoleon in 1804 was answered by
Franz II with the proclamation of the Austrian Empire; Emperor Franz II
was now also Emperor of Austria as Franz I. The empire encompassed the
entire Habsburg dominion, including Hungary, which ultimately
successfully resisted being merged into a unified Austrian state. In the
Peace of Pressburg at the end of 1805, Austria had to cede large areas,
including Venetia, Tyrol and Vorarlberg, to Bavaria, an ally of
Napoleon; instead, Salzburg, until 1803 an ecclesiastical imperial
principality, became part of Austria. In 1806, at Napoleon's urging,
Francis II laid down the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire, which
thus ceased to exist.
Three weeks earlier, at Napoleon's request,
German princes had founded the Confederation of the Rhine, which he was
obliged to follow in the army. At the urging of Metternich, who had
meanwhile been promoted to foreign minister, Archduchess Marie Louise,
the daughter of Emperor Franz I, was married to Napoleon Bonaparte in
1810. In October 1813, combined Austrian, Russian and Prussian troops
defeated Napoleon's troops in the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig. In
April 1814 he abdicated; in September the Congress of Vienna to
reorganize Europe began. Here Austria regained many areas lost to France
and exchanged the Swabian foothills for the archbishopric of Salzburg,
which was now definitively part of Austria. Through secondary lines, the
Habsburgs now also ruled large parts of central Italy (more here).
The Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna shattered state
finances to such an extent that Austria went bankrupt in 1811 and 1816.
The banco slips, the paper currency of the time, lost their value
dramatically and could only be exchanged for so-called “redemption
notes” at a ratio of 5:1.
In March 1815 Napoleon returned to
France from his exile in Elba and was finally defeated in June 1815 at
the Battle of Waterloo. In 1815 the German Confederation was founded
with the Bundestag in Frankfurt under the permanent presidency of
Austria as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time,
Prussia, Austria and Russia formed the Holy Alliance, which was supposed
to guarantee political stability in Europe against all ideas of
liberalization and democratization that were migrating eastwards from
Western Europe.
The first years after the wars were economically
difficult; The mid-1820s saw the beginning of a period of economic
growth, a growing population and technological advances. State revenues
grew; expenses could be reduced. In agriculture, the arable area
increased and productivity increased through the use of iron ploughs,
increased crop rotation and better fertilizer management. This had a
positive effect on the nutritional situation of the population. More
thorough training of doctors led to better medical care and a reduction
in infant mortality. Despite a cholera epidemic in 1830/31, the
population (excluding the foothills, Lombardy and the Austrian
Netherlands) rose from 22 million in 1790 to 31 million in 1850.
The use of steam engines triggered a proto-industrial innovation push,
existing manufactories were expanded. Textile production increased.
Mining, metallurgy and the paper industry were also growing sectors of
the economy. The transport system became more effective during this time
and increasingly favored social mobility. Stagecoaches have been
technically improved; the post road network was expanded and provided
with better gravel. Steam engines enabled more efficient shipping for
people and goods. In 1829 the First Danube Steamship Company was
founded, in 1833 the Austrian Lloyd. The railway, initially designed as
a horse-drawn railway, soon relied on steam locomotives; In 1835 the
concession was granted for the construction of the Kaiser
Ferdinands-Nordbahn as the first steam railway in Austria (see also
History of the railways in Austria).
Industrialization began
later in Austria than in some other European countries. Areas of raw
material extraction, processing centers and sales markets were often not
directly connected, which meant that no large industrial areas
developed. The construction of railway lines was time-consuming and
expensive in the hills and in the mountains, because railway lines are
only allowed to have a low maximum gradient; therefore numerous railway
tunnels and railway bridges had to be built. The construction or
expansion of Alpine passes was often time-consuming.
Nationalist
movements gained strength in the first half of the 19th century.
Different nationalities in the multi-ethnic state of Austria worked
vehemently against each other and could be played off against each other
by the imperial family. This disunity of nationalities and the help of
Russia saved the empire from falling apart in the revolution of 1848.
In 1848, in the course of the March Revolution, uprisings also broke
out in Austria. On March 13, 1848, numerous groups petitioned for
freedom of the press, jury trials, and academic freedoms. However, the
subsequent demonstrations were bloodily suppressed. Violent uprisings
then broke out in Vienna; Metternich was released and fled to Britain.
Censorship was lifted, freedom of the press and a formal constitution
were promised. The Pillersdorf constitution was promulgated on April 25,
1848, but never came into force. It met with rejection, above all
because of the provisions on the composition of the Reichstag, which is
why it was declared provisional on May 16 (with the promise of universal
and equal suffrage) and finally withdrawn entirely in July.
Like
all other member states of the German Confederation, Austria took part
in the elections to the Frankfurt National Assembly, which met from May
18, 1848 to May 31, 1849 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. It sent 102
members to the first freely elected parliament for the German successor
states to the Holy Roman Empire.[7][8] After there was no majority in
the assembly for the Greater German solution pursued by Austria and
instead the Little German solution was decided upon, the Austrian
delegates withdrew from Frankfurt on April 5, 1849.
On the basis
of Pillerdorf's constitution, the Reichstag, the first Austrian
parliament in the modern sense, met in Vienna on July 22, 1848. The
Winter Riding School was used as temporary accommodation because there
was no parliament building.
Meanwhile the revolution spread to
other parts of the monarchy (Hungary, Milan, Venetia and Prague). The
uprising in Northern Italy was put down by Josef Wenzel Radetzky von
Radetz, the Prague Whitsun Uprising in June by Alfred I zu
Windisch-Graetz. In September, Lajos Kossuth took power in Hungary and
raised an army. When imperial troops in Vienna refused to march into
Hungary and were supported by citizens, fierce fighting broke out.
Hungary could only be recaptured with the help of Russia.
The
court fled to Olmütz in Moravia and moved the Reichstag to the
neighboring town of Kremsier. At the end of the Vienna October Uprising,
Vienna was conquered on November 1 by troops loyal to the Emperor led by
Windischgrätz and Joseph Jelačić von Bužim. Around 2,000 people died in
the fighting, and 24 leading revolutionaries were executed. The
revolution was bloodily suppressed by the imperial Austrian army and
thus failed.
In Olmütz, where the leading Habsburgs discussed the
future of their dynasty, Emperor Ferdinand I abdicated in favor of his
18-year-old nephew Franz Joseph Karl, who ascended the throne as Franz
Joseph I in December 1848 and was supported by Prince Felix
Schwarzenberg as prime minister became. The Reichstag of Kremsier was
dissolved on March 4, 1849. On the same day, a new constitution was
imposed by the emperor (Octroyed March Constitution), which, however,
only became effective to a small extent; in particular, no new Reichstag
was convened. After the uprisings in Italy and Hungary had been
completely suppressed, Franz Joseph also repealed the imposed March
Constitution of 1849 with the New Year's Eve patents of December 31,
1851 and initiated a phase of neo-absolutism.
In 1853 the
alliance with Russia was severely shaken because neither Prussia nor
Austria intervened in the Crimean War. From then on the Austro-Russian
antagonism dates, which was exacerbated by the Balkan crises of the
following decades.
The era of neo-absolutism came to an end with
the defeat of the imperial troops in Italy in 1859 against the Italian
unification movement (Risorgimento): The direct government by the
emperor and his ministers without any parliament no longer had any
supporters, even among the upper classes and could not get through
either legitimize success. After his unfortunate command of the army in
1859, the Kaiser never acted as general again. The October Diploma of
1860 and the February Patent of 1861 were short-lived constitutional
experiments; the state constitutions of the crown lands introduced with
the February patent and their state parliaments as state parliaments
existed until 1918.
The defeat of Königgrätz in the German War of
1866 (German Confederation chaired by Austria against Prussia) led to
the dissolution of the German Confederation. The background to the war
was that Bismarck was striving for a German alliance system under
Prussian hegemony. According to Bismarck, such a hegemony was only
possible without Austria within the framework of the “small German
solution”, since Austria, as the previous hegemonic power of the German
Confederation, was economically and militarily too important. After the
Prussian victory, which was achieved by technically superior weapons,
Bismarck was able to establish a North German Confederation without
Austria against the will of Austria. In the war of 1866, Venetia was
lost (despite the naval battle of Lissa under Admiral Wilhelm von
Tegetthoff, which was successful for Austria); the reputation of Franz
Joseph I reached a low point.
The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, also known as k.u.k. Monarchy, or
unofficially known as the Danube Monarchy, was established in 1867 as a
result of the so-called Compromise with the Kingdom of Hungary. Hungary
thus left the previous unitary state and received its own royal
government. On June 8, 1867, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria was
crowned Apostolic King of Hungary on the castle hill in what was then
Ofen (Hungarian: Buda), later on the right-bank part of Budapest. The
Kingdom of Hungary was now, internally independent, a state with equal
rights in a real union with Austria, which only covered foreign policy,
war and the joint financing of these two departments; voluntarily, but
without common ministries, common regulations for currency, economic and
trade policy, the recognition of patents and company registrations, etc.
were added. Foreign policy was initially shaped by the League of Three
Emperors and later by the Dual Alliance with the German Reich and the
Triple Alliance (with Italy).
On December 21, 1867, the
non-Hungarian crown lands (the kingdoms and states represented in the
Reichsrat) that remained in the empire received the December
Constitution, which consisted of several basic laws and essentially
lasted until the end of the monarchy. An increasing problem was that the
previously dominant nationality, the Germans, could be overruled by the
Slavic nationalities (Poles, Ruthenians, Czechs, Slovenes, Croats) when
they appeared together. Forming a majority in the Reichsrat became
increasingly difficult as the democratization of electoral law
inevitably progressed.
During this time, nationalism – previously
suppressed by the ruling houses – began its triumphal march through the
countries of Europe and in particular the Habsburg monarchy. Intended to
weaken Hungarian nationalism, the Compromise of 1867 aggravated rather
than calmed tensions. This balance created the situation in which the
national conflicts were additionally fueled by the Hungarian
government's Magyarization policy. The Poles in Galicia often cooperated
with the Vienna government and received significant infrastructure
investments for Galicia from the Cisleithanian state budget. The other
Slavic nationalities of Old Austria did not feel equal to the Germans,
who dominated the state bureaucracy. The unsuccessful efforts of the
Czech national movement in Bohemia and Moravia to achieve an
Austro-Czech compromise competed with the efforts of the German minority
there and the German nationalist workers' party. The introduction of
official bilingualism in 1880 in Bohemia and Moravia, in 1882 in the
Slovene areas and in Austrian Silesia did not help either. The Moravian
Compromise of 1905 took some of the edge off the nationality conflict in
this Crown Land, but a similarly balanced solution could not be achieved
for Bohemia. In Carinthia and Styria, with their Slovene areas, and in
Tyrol, with its Italian areas, the German majority in the state
parliaments brusquely rejected the respective minority's desire for
autonomy.
Bohemia and Moravia grew into the industrial centers of
Old Austria in the second half of the 19th century. It was easier to set
up businesses here than in the mountainous Alpine region, the
geographical location (close to the metropolitan areas of Berlin and
Vienna and the Upper Silesian industrial area of the German Reich) was
favorable, and there were sufficient workers available.
In 1878,
the Berlin Congress granted Austria-Hungary the right to occupy and
administer the Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had
previously been governed from Istanbul. The dual monarchy invested
heavily in the modernization of the country, which neither part of the
empire begrudge the other, so that it was administered by the common
Ministry of Finance, neither part of Austria nor Hungary. When the
monarchy annexed the province in 1908, this led to strong tensions with
the Kingdom of Serbia, which now saw itself as the advocate of all
southern Slavs, and was also a reason for the assassination in Sarajevo
in 1914.
The Dual Alliance was formed with the German Empire in
1879 and the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882. He was to be decisive
for the First World War. From the outset, the Triple Alliance had to
struggle with the Italian Irredenta, which put a strain on relations
with Austria in particular.
Around 1880, the electoral census
(minimum tax payment as a condition for men's suffrage; women still not
eligible to vote unless they were large landowners) was relaxed, which
enabled the formation of new parties:
the Christian Socials with Karl
Lueger, who were first shaped by the petty bourgeoisie (with their fear
of the proletarians and big capitalists) and later by the peasants;
the Social Democratic Workers' Party under Viktor Adler, which broke up
into a German-Austrian and a Czech party in 1911;
the German Liberal
Party, which divided into a radical (pan-German unification; sought the
connection of German Austria to the German Reich under the Hohenzollern
emperors) and a moderate group.
Austria's culture and economy
experienced a heyday around 1900, while the state was often only able to
develop further due to the nationality quarrels by Fortfretten and
Fortwuschteln (Viennese expressions for "hardly getting ahead"). After
all, the Reichsrat was able to decide on the New Alpine Railways project
in 1901, an extensive railway construction project, of which two
important new lines are located in today's Austria. Around 1900, in the
fin de siecle, Johann Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach,
Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler and many other
artists and scientists lived in Vienna. These approximately two decades,
in which an unprecedented number of cultural and scientific
personalities worked in Vienna, is also referred to as Viennese
Modernism.
In 1906, after a Hungarian ban on imports of Serbian
pork (meat export was a main source of income for Serbian agriculture),
Serbia gave up its allegiance to Austria-Hungary and, with Russian
support, began to work towards the separation of the southern Slavic
areas of the dual monarchy (they were Slovene, Croatian, Serbian and
Bosniak populated areas in both halves of the empire). This perennial
conflict is known as the "pig war."
In 1905, negotiations between
the Social Democrats and the k.k. Government that - as historians assess
the result - ended with a historic compromise: In 1907 the first
Reichsrat election took place, in which every adult male citizen was
entitled to vote and every vote counted equally. Women's suffrage was
first introduced in the republic in 1918. The Christian Socials won in
1907 ahead of the Social Democrats and the Liberal parties. In 1911, the
Social Democrats won the most seats. (Both large parties were far
removed from the absolute Reichsrat majority, since there were also
numerous smaller political parties, often only effective regionally.)
In the last decades of the dual monarchy, Old Austria found itself -
apart from its nationality issues - in the situation that Transleithania
only covered about a third of the joint expenses for the army, navy and
diplomatic service, but without the consent of the Budapest government
no significant foreign, economic and or military-political decision
could be made. The Reichsrat as a parliament was often paralyzed by the
Czech policy of obstruction; many necessary regulations were therefore
made at the suggestion of the k.k. Government by Imperial Decree rather
than by Parliamentary Act. The state was essentially taken over by the
k.k. bureaucracy and the k.u.k. Army, both internationally sworn to the
person of the monarch, held together. It was discussed in political
circles that as long as he lived (meaning the aged Emperor Franz Joseph
I, already eighty years old in 1910) there would be no significant
changes, but these were seen as inevitable for the reign of his
successor.
Domestically, Hungary was comparatively pre-modern:
only a very small proportion of men were eligible to vote; In contrast
to Austria, the nationalities were not formally equal, since
Magyarization was the government's goal. Aristocracy and the upper
classes asserted their interests. As king, Franz Joseph I did very
little about it.
However, the assassination attempt in Sarajevo
on June 28, 1914 by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, who was paying an official visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina,
completely changed the situation. While individual top functionaries of
the entire monarchy, such as Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf,
had advocated a war against Serbia years earlier, the so-called war
party now prevailed in Vienna and Budapest during the course of the July
crisis. Bypassing the Reichsrat, which had been adjourned since March
1914, it was suggested to the monarch that a war against Serbia was
inevitable and a question of the honor of the monarchy. Franz Joseph,
who had a rather bad relationship with his nephew, who was not married
according to his social standing, and initially did not want to "atone"
for his death, was finally convinced by the war advocates and had his
Foreign Minister Leopold Berchtold - with the backing of the German
Emperor - address an ultimatum to Serbia . This caused the activation of
the alliance systems and support obligations existing throughout Europe
and thus led to the First World War.
The monarchy on the eve of
World War I is described in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without
Qualities, abbreviated k.k. and k.u.k. allusively, aptly described as
morbid "Kakanien".
The First World War was fatal for Austria-Hungary because the state
and its army were not prepared for a war of this magnitude. The conquest
of the Kingdom of Serbia – in Vienna, in 1914, they had imagined an easy
“punitive expedition” based on their own superiority – only succeeded
after more than a year with German and Bulgarian support. In the war
against Russia, the army of the Danube Monarchy suffered irreparable
losses at the beginning of the war and had to evacuate a large part of
Galicia. The immediate threat to the Hungarian lowlands, which was of
central importance, was averted when in the spring of 1915, as a result
of the breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow, most of Galicia was reconquered
with German help. However, the entry of Italy (1915) and Romania (1916)
into the war extended Austria-Hungary's fronts. In the Romanian theater
of war, which opened in the late summer of 1916, the initiative and the
dominance lay with the German side from the start. Their support had
previously averted an impending disaster on the Eastern Front caused by
the Russian Brusilov offensive. Austria was more successful in the war
against Italy and was able to prevent an incursion by the Italian army
in twelve Isonzo battles. At the end of 1917, again with German help, a
deep advance into Friuli was possible, which, however, did not bring any
decision either. Although Russia withdrew from the war after the October
Revolution in the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the reputation of the
imperial central authority was severely damaged by the Sixtus affair. A
last offensive by the Danube monarchy on the Italian front failed in
June 1918. In October the front collapsed due to a lack of personnel and
material, war fatigue and signs of dissolution of the army and the
entire monarchy. The Austrian army was only involved in the war on the
Western Front in 1918 with limited forces. Based on the national
territory of the republic, the losses in the war amounted to 180,000
dead and 60,000 civilian victims.
The supply of the old Austrian
population was very bad, especially in the last years of the war, and
there were great famines. In November 1916 Emperor Franz Joseph I died
and Karl I became his successor. His chances of an early peace agreement
and preservation of the dual monarchy were slim. When the Reichsrat, the
old Austrian parliament, was convened by the new monarch in 1917 for the
first time since spring 1914, the representatives of the nationalities
announced their intentions after the end of the war. The preservation of
the state and the monarchy was not one of them. It was therefore already
clear in 1917 that Old Austria would disintegrate.
On October 16,
1918, Emperor Karl I attempted to preserve Imperial Austria as a
federation. In a manifesto, he called on the nationalities to found
their own national councils and saw his government as a kind of arbiter
for a peaceful reorganization of the monarchy: according to the will of
its people, Austria should become a federal state in which each tribe
had its own community in its settlement area forms.
The
nationalities accepted the invitation to set up national councils, since
this legalized their previously separatist plans from the point of view
of the state as a whole. However, they ignored arbiters who were not
chosen by their people: They decided to found their own states and had
no interest in a monarchical federal state. The Provisional National
Assembly for German Austria - consisting of the Reichsrat deputies
elected in 1911 from the majority German areas of Old Austria - ordered
its own government on October 30, 1918 and notified this to US President
Woodrow Wilson on November 6; the German-Austrian government did not
present itself to the Kaiser.
In autumn 1918, as in Bavaria and Hungary, there were fears of
uprisings and a Bolshevik takeover. This could be prevented by working
together and cooperatively handing over government power to the Renner I
state government, which was elected on October 30, 1918, with the
outgoing Lammasch ministry (the last imperial cabinet) and the emperor.
On November 11, 1918, the Kaiser renounced "any share in state
affairs" and dismissed the Lammasch ministry. On November 12, 1918, the
Provisional National Assembly for German Austria then decided that the
state initially called “German Austria” should be a democratic republic.
At the same time, Article 2 of the law stated that the country was part
of the German Republic that had been proclaimed three days earlier.
While the Danube monarchy was dissolving, Great Britain and Italy were
now trying to preserve a residual Austro-South Slavic monarchy in order
to prevent central Europe from being balkanized and Austria from being
annexed to the German Reich. This was intended to create an essential
counterweight to Germany and prevent German hegemony in Europe.[10]
The first state chancellor was Karl Renner (SDAP), who headed a
grand coalition. Parts of the newly formed states of Czechoslovakia
(province of German Bohemia, province of Sudetenland, parts of Moravia)
and Poland (Silesia) as well as South Tyrol annexed by Italy (for more
details see History of South Tyrol) and Marburg were claimed but not won
for the new state the Drava (see Maribor). Large parts of the population
and most representatives of the political parties were of the opinion
that this “residual” or “rump state” – without Hungarian agriculture and
Bohemian industry – would not be viable on its own. The publicist
Hellmut Andics expressed this later (1962) in the book title "The state
that nobody wanted".
The merger with the German Reich (Weimar
Republic) was excluded by the allied victorious powers in the 1919
Treaty of Saint-Germain, in which a formal independence requirement for
Austria was determined in Art. 88. In Austria and Germany, the article
was referred to as a ban on connection. According to the treaty, the
state name Republic of Austria was also established. On October 21,
1919, with the ratification of the State Treaty by the Constituent
National Assembly, this name became binding (it was used until 1934 and
has been used again since 1945). When Federal Chancellor Ignaz Seipel
later agreed with the League of Nations on the so-called Geneva
restructuring to support the inflation-ridden state budget, the
principle of independence was reaffirmed. In 1931 Austria's plans for a
German-Austrian customs union were prevented by the victorious powers
with reference to the provisions of the State Treaty of Saint-Germain.
In Salzburg there were moves to join Germany independently of other
parts of Austria; but this was rejected by Germany. In Tyrol, a small
part of the citizens advocated a union with Italy in order to preserve
the unity of Tyrol. Another political line aimed at joining Germany. In
the 1919 plebiscite in Vorarlberg, 81% of those voting were in favor of
conducting follow-up negotiations with Switzerland. There was also an
initiative in this regard in Switzerland; However, the Swiss state
government did not want to jeopardize the balanced modus vivendi between
Protestant and Catholic cantons and between German-speaking and
other-speaking cantons and therefore distanced itself from this idea.
However, the Kaiser had not yet abdicated. The state of German
Austria therefore presented him with the alternative of formally
abdicating or leaving the country. In March 1919, the ex-Emperor Karl I
left German-Austria, and in April 1919 the Habsburg Law and the Law on
the Elimination of Nobility were passed.
On November 12, 1918,
general women's suffrage was introduced in Austria.
The content of the constitution adopted in 1920 was shaped primarily
by Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), a respected constitutional law expert. Due
to his political wishes (Social Democrats: centralism; Conservatives:
federalism), he had to combine state principles with a strong position
of the National Council and the Federal Government. The function of the
Federal President was initially weak; at the request of the social
democrats, parliament was the central organ of the republic (a reaction
to the previous monarchy).
There were conflicts between the
principles of national unity and the right to self-determination in
Carinthia from 1918 because the Slovene population of southern Carinthia
tended to join the new southern Slavic state and the Kingdom of SHS
militarily occupied southern Carinthia in May/June 1919 in order to
create facts. The Carinthian defensive struggle against the South Slavic
troops was militarily hopeless, but mobilized the international public
and, at the request of the victorious powers, led to a referendum in
South Carinthia on October 10, 1920. In this, the citizens of the voting
area south of the Drau clearly spoke out in favor of belonging to the
republic Austria out.
Two treaties – the Treaty of Saint-Germain
(September 1919) with Austria and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary
(the Hungarian delegation signed the treaty under protest on June 4,
1920) – provided for Western Hungary, which had been German-speaking for
centuries, to be annexed to Austria. (Thus, considerations of building a
Slavic corridor from Slovakia to Slovenia, through which the losers of
the war Austria and Hungary would be separated, were shelved.) Despite
the attempt by Hungarian volunteers to prevent this, "German-West
Hungary" was 1921 with the Burgenland is the ninth federal state of the
new republic. For the natural capital of the region, Sopron, a
plebiscite was held in Sopron in 1921 at the request of Hungary,
supported by Italy, in which the majority of citizens chose to belong to
Hungary. Numerous divergences can be observed in contemporary Austrian
and Hungarian accounts of this plebiscite.
In 1918, Lower
Austria, with over three million inhabitants, was by far the most
populous and also the largest federal state in Austria. It was difficult
to harmonize the political intentions of the conservatives, who were
strongly represented in rural areas, and the social democrats, who were
particularly strong in Vienna. For this reason, Vienna was defined in
the federal constitution that came into force on November 10, 1920 as a
separate – eighth – federal state, which at the end of 1921 also agreed
on the legal division of common property with Lower Austria in the
Separation Act.
The economy of the new state was in shambles due
to the consequences of the war (loss of territory, new customs borders).
The associated hyperinflation ("galloping inflation") - for 10,000
crowns you could have bought a block of houses in 1914, in December 1922
only a loaf of bread - could only be stopped by a currency reform on
December 20, 1924, 13 months after the German currency reform. being
stopped. In the first few months of 1925, the old crown currency was
replaced by the new schilling at a rate of 10,000:1; The prerequisite
was a loan from the League of Nations (Geneva Protocols) negotiated by
Ignaz Seipel. With the introduction of the shilling, the government
began a consistent hard currency policy, which soon earned the currency
the nickname Alpine dollar, but severely restricted the economic design
options in times of crisis.
The timid economic upswing in Austria
that followed ended with the global economic crisis of 1929. The major
economic crisis had joined the latent structural crisis, symbolized by
the Postal Savings Banks scandal of 1926. In 1931 the
Creditanstalt-Bankverein, at that time the largest bank in Central
Europe, threatened to collapse and the government felt compelled to
intervene; but this threatened the stability of the currency. In 1932
Austria therefore again received a League of Nations loan (300 million
schillings); in return, it had to confirm the connection ban for the
next 20 years at the Lausanne conference. During the Second World War,
the debts were not serviced any further, after the end of which the
repayment of the still outstanding League of Nations bonds was resumed
by the Second Republic and settled by 1980. In 1933 about a third of the
workforce was unemployed (mass unemployment).
The strengthening
of the conservatives prompted the social democrats to agree to a
constitutional amendment in 1929 that once again created a prominent
head of state: the federal president was no longer elected by parliament
but by the people. He appointed the government and, on their suggestion,
was able to dissolve parliament for the purpose of new elections (until
1929 this was only possible by parliamentary resolution). However, most
of the Federal President's powers were tied to a proposal by the Federal
Government, which was accountable to the National Council. The federal
constitutional law in the 1929 version was in force until 1934 and has
been in force again since 1945.
From 1920 to 1934, social democracy was in opposition to the
conservative government in federal politics and created its political
counter-model in Red Vienna. As the distance from the decisive year 1918
grew, more and more opponents of democracy formed on the right wing of
the party spectrum. The Social Democrats fueled their fears of
Bolshevism by writing in their party program about the dictatorship of
the proletariat and mouthing Marxism, although in fact they practiced
moderate social-democratic politics.
Both major political camps
soon formed paramilitary units: the Heimwehr (close to the Christian
Socialists, but without clear party affiliation), formed in part by
soldiers who had returned from the First World War, was intended to
protect the homeland from undesirable changes. The Republican Protection
League of Social Democrats was supposed to protect democracy against
right-wing radicalism.
On January 30, 1927, the Republican
Protection League demonstrated in Schattendorf (Burgenland) against the
Home Guard. Right-wing "frontline fighters" fired on the peaceful,
unarmed demonstrators. They killed a child and a war invalid. With the
Schattendorf verdict, the alleged perpetrators were acquitted by a jury
in July 1927 - according to the "Arbeiter-Zeitung" an unforgivable
judicial scandal. The large-scale demonstration against the verdict that
took place on July 15, 1927 in front of the Palace of Justice in Vienna
escalated: Radical elements among the demonstrators stormed the Palace
of Justice and set it on fire.
After police guard rooms had also
been stormed, the police received the order from their president, Johann
Schober, to break up the demonstration by force of arms, and shot at
many who were completely uninvolved in the riots, including people who
were fleeing the unrest. The balance sheet: 89 dead (including 84
demonstrators), 1,057 wounded. The publicist Karl Kraus took the
overreaction as an opportunity to publicly address the police chief with
posters: "I call on you to resign."
In the weeks that followed, a
thousand new members joined the Austrofascist-oriented Heimwehr under
their leader Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg. Because Chancellor Prelate Ignaz
Seipel said about the event during the National Council debate that "no
leniency" could be demanded of him, 28,000 people left the Roman
Catholic Church by the end of 1927. From then on, the Social Democrats
always referred to the Chancellor as a "prelate without clemency".
Social Democracy felt weakened by the events. She saw it as a defeat
that the state power had ruthlessly hunted down workers. In the last
National Council election of the first republic (on November 9, 1930),
the SDAP was the parliamentary group with the most votes.
Opponents of the two major parties were the Austrian National
Socialists, who mainly had supporters outside of Vienna (e.g. in
Styria). At times there was cooperation between Christian Social and
National Socialist politicians. In the National Council elections in
1927, Christian Socialists, Greater Germans, the National Socialist
Riehl and Schulz Group and other groups formed a single list.
In
1930, the Heimwehr organized the so-called Korneuburg Oath, a meeting in
Korneuburg near Vienna, at which the participants renounced the
"Western, democratic party state" and, under the leadership of
Starhemberg, worshiped authoritarian politics.
In the early
1930s, fascist movements began to assert themselves in a number of
European countries. A similar development took place in Austria. The
Heimwehr in particular represented fascist ideas modeled on Italy.
Mussolini was seen as the mainstay of the Austrian government, isolated
abroad.
The Christian Social Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss used a
stalemate on March 4, 1933, to vote on railway wages and the
resignations of the three parliamentary presidents for tactical reasons,
to announce that the parliament would “switch itself off”. The
reconvening of the National Council on March 15 was prevented by police
who had surrounded the parliament building.
Dollfuss used the War
Economy Enabling Act of 1917 to govern without parliament. On March 7,
1933, the Council of Ministers issued a ban on meetings and marches and
reintroduced censorship for Austrian newspapers. With the withdrawal of
the Christian Social members, Dollfuss also paralyzed the Constitutional
Court. Federal President Wilhelm Miklas did not intervene, although –
according to his own private records – he was aware of the
unconstitutionality. He ignored a petition from over a million voters
calling for Parliament to be reconvened.
This paved the way to an
authoritarian corporate state modeled on fascist Italy. As a political
reservoir, Dollfuss founded the Fatherland Front, an association of the
Christian Socials with the Home Guard, the Landbund and a few other
military associations. Political opponents were arrested. On March 31,
1933, the government dissolved the Republican Protection League. On May
10, 1933, the government ordered the suspension of all federal, state,
and local elections. On May 26, the Austrian Communist Party and on June
20 also the NSDAP were banned from any activity in Austria. For a long
time the Social Democrats could not bring themselves to resist this
policy; she was undecided as to how to counter Dollfuss's undemocratic
actions. Since the state parliaments of the nine federal states remained
functional, the situation still seemed open.
As a result of a house search for weapons in the Hotel Schiff, a
party home of the Social Democrats in Linz, armed conflicts broke out on
February 12, 1934 between the Social Democrats and the Heimwehr or the
federal army. These escalated into a civil war that the government
dubbed the "February Uprising." The events had not been planned by the
Social Democratic party leadership in Vienna, and the top functionaries
were surprised by the uprising of the grassroots. Accordingly, fighting
took place only very selectively and by no means throughout the country.
These struggles can be described as acts of desperation, since it soon
became clear that there would be no popular uprising and that the
dictatorship would therefore be victorious.
In Vienna and the
industrial centers (Steyr, Upper Styria, Linz), in particular, there was
heavy fighting for two to three days. The police, army and the Home
Guard departments supporting them were able to defeat the desperately
fighting Republican Protection League relatively easily. The Social
Democratic party leadership under Otto Bauer, Julius Deutsch and others
fled to Czechoslovakia. The mayor of Vienna, Karl Seitz, was forcibly
removed from the town hall. The Social Democratic Party was banned and
its assets confiscated. Some February fighters, including Koloman
Wallisch and Karl Münichreiter, were sentenced to death by a
court-martial and executed. Dollfuss was therefore often referred to by
the Social Democrats as a worker murderer. The civil war went down in
history as the first armed struggle against fascism. That is why the
sympathies in Great Britain, for example, were clearly on the side of
the losers.
After the mandates of the Social Democrats had been
declared expired, the National Council was convened again for April 30,
1934. The Fatherland Front deputies decided to give the government all
the powers previously held by the National Council and the Federal
Council. On May 1, 1934, the authoritarian May Constitution came into
force. Vienna was declared a federal city, and the republic was given
the name of the Federal State of Austria. The influence of Mussolini
played an important role in the construction of the corporate state.
For most historians since the last decades of the 20th century, the
First Republic in Austria was and is over with the events of 1933/34.
Not only the unconstitutional transition from democracy to dictatorship
contributed to this assessment, but also the fact that the dictatorial
regime strictly avoided the term "republic". In the years immediately
after the Second World War, this differentiation in historiography was
not yet common knowledge. Conservative historians at the time tended to
equate the First Republic with the period 1918–1938.
On July 25,
1934, there was an attempted putsch by the Nazis, the so-called July
Putsch. 154 Austrian SS men disguised as soldiers and police officers
stormed the Federal Chancellery, where Engelbert Dollfuss was shot and
died hours later as a result of the gunshot wounds because medical help
was not allowed. A second group of putschists occupied the radio studios
of Radio-Verkehrs-AG and spread the false news that Dollfuss had handed
over government affairs to Anton Rintelen. This was the agreed signal
for a National Socialist uprising throughout Austria, especially in
Styria, which, however, was put down by the police and army after a few
days. Immediately after Dollfuss's murder, Federal President Miklas
entrusted the former Minister of Education, Kurt Schuschnigg, with the
office of Federal Chancellor.
Schuschnigg received help from
Mussolini's Italy, which had pledged to support Austria's independence.
Italian troops marched into South Tyrol and the Carinthian border,
whereupon Adolf Hitler, the Austrian-born dictator of the German Reich,
strenuously denied any influence on what was happening in Austria. The
Reich was then militarily incapable of risking a conflict with Italy, in
which Britain and France, as Hitler erroneously feared, might support
Mussolini.
Although Schuschnigg oriented himself towards the
independence of a “free and German Austria”, he encountered growing
resistance, especially as Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became
increasingly dependent on the German Reich and was therefore less and
less able to maintain his policy of Austria’s independence .
Schuschnigg's popular base was narrow: Social Democrats and National
Socialists worked underground against his regime. In the late 20th
century his policies were dubbed "competitive fascism" as he sought to
"overhit" the Nazis and make Austria appear as the "better German
state".
Many artists and intellectuals fled from the German
Reich, which was becoming more and more unbearable from year to year, to
Austria, where they – such as Carl Zuckmayer and Max Reinhardt – found
opportunities to perform and work until March 1938.
In 1936, the
Rome-Berlin “axis” was forged, and on October 25, 1936, a secret treaty
of friendship was signed between Italy and the German Reich.
Kurt
Schuschnigg decided to come to terms with Hitler. In July 1936 he
concluded the "July Agreement" with the German Reich, as a result of
which 17,000 Austrian National Socialists were granted amnesty. Edmund
Glaise-Horstenau and Guido Schmidt were accepted into the Austro-fascist
government cabinet as confidants of the National Socialists.
Furthermore, a "People's Political Department" was created as a
sub-organization of the Fatherland Front, with which the illegal
National Socialist opposition was to be incorporated into the party.
Numerous previously banned National Socialist newspapers were legalized.
Old Greater German ideas became increasingly important. Many people
hoped for an economically better future through the 1918 affiliation
that all of German-Austria was striving for – which the Social Democrats
had removed from their program after Hitler came to power in 1933;
Austria continued to suffer from high unemployment and an economic
crisis. In this way, the Austrian National Socialists – admittedly still
illegal – gained support from more citizens.
Since Adolf Hitler “seizured power” on January 30, 1933, he and the
NSDAP have worked partly openly and partly covertly to integrate Austria
into the German Reich.
The idea of annexation had been popular in
Austria, most of whose inhabitants at the time saw themselves as
Germans, since 1918, although internationally proscribed by the ban on
unions. On November 12, 1918, German Austria had decided through its
provisional parliament to be a republic and part of the German republic
from that day on. In 1933, the Social Democrats removed the wish to join
their party from their party program, and the Christian Socialists set
about introducing their own variety of dictatorship (see Corporate State
(Austria), Austrofascism). People now spoke out for Austria's
independence and banned National Socialist organizations, but were put
under increasing pressure by Hitler. Nazi ideas gained more and more
supporters in Austria; in particular the difference between the booming
economy in Germany and the high unemployment in Austria was excellent
advertising for Hitler.
In February 1938, the Führer and Reich
Chancellor demanded the lifting of the NSDAP ban and the participation
of the Austrian National Socialists in the government, under threat of
the Wehrmacht marching in. Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg bowed to the
dictation. A little later, however, he still tried to prevent the
imminent union with Germany: with a surprisingly announced referendum
for a free, independent, German and Christian Austria, scheduled for
March 13, 1938.
Hitler forestalled this provocation: threats from
Berlin prompted Federal President Miklas to appoint the National
Socialist Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Interior Minister since February, as the
new Federal Chancellor on the evening of March 11. At the same time,
NSDAP supporters took power in the provincial capitals, and the first
Gestapo leaders flew to Vienna on March 11. On March 12, Hitler had the
Wehrmacht invade Austria. The soldiers were enthusiastically received by
part of the Austrian population.
Hitler had initially planned to
be the head of state of Germany and Austria for a transitional period.
The completely smooth, partly acclaimed takeover of power prompted him
on March 12 to announce the immediate annexation of Austria to the
German Reich on March 13. In Austria, the affiliation law of March 13,
1938 was passed by the Nazi federal government. At the same time, with
the so-called wild Aryanization, terror and theft of Jewish Austrians
began. The retired Federal Chancellor Schuschnigg was taken into
protective custody, where he remained until 1945.
On March 15,
1938, many companies were given a day off so that the employees could
cheer for Hitler on Vienna's Heldenplatz. While Nazi opponents were
already being arrested en masse and Jews were being harassed at will by
the German master race as subhuman beings, Hitler declared that my
homeland would join the German Reich. He did not use the term “Austria”
and avoided it in other ways as well. He subsequently had the
affiliation confirmed by a referendum on April 10 (official result:
99.73% in favour). By then, around 8% of those entitled to vote had
already been excluded from voting (Jews, "half-breeds", arrested
opponents of the National Socialists).
Hitler had Austria
replaced by the name “Ostmark” derived from the medieval marcha
orientalis, later by “Alpen- und Donau-Reichsgaue”, and the enlarged
German Reich later called “Greater German Reich”. The Ostmark Law, which
came into force on May 1, 1939, determined the complete dissolution of
Austrian central offices; his execution ended on March 31, 1940.
Vorarlberg was connected to Tyrol, and Burgenland was divided between
the Reichsgauen Niederdonau and Styria. Seven Reichsgaue, governed
directly from Berlin, succeeded Austria. During this time, when
Austrians spoke of Germany in its pre-annexation borders, they
unofficially called the area “Altreich”.
In 1938/39 Austria was reorganized governmental, military,
economically, culturally and socially according to the Reich German
model. All Reichsgaue on Austrian territory were directly subordinate to
the Berlin central authorities, and the term "Austria" very soon
disappeared from official communication. For purposes of
differentiation, one spoke of the Altreich and the Ostmark. Later, the
term "Danube and Alpine Reichsgaue" had to suffice.
Discrimination, disenfranchisement and deprivation of the residents of
the Jewish religion, which had been carried out step by step in Germany
for five years, were caught up and overtaken in the Ostmark in a few
weeks. Private desires for revenge and robbery played a major role.
War and Nazi ideology claimed around 380,000 lives in Austria,
including 247,000 dead or declared dead (permanently missing) in the
Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, 65,500 murdered Jews, 16,000 others murdered in
concentration camps, including 8,000 "gypsies", 10,000 in the Gestapo
Imprisonment and more than 6,000 Austrians killed in prisons in
countries occupied by the German Reich, 2,700 sentenced to death as
resistance fighters and about 35,000 dead civilians as a result of
hostilities and bombardments. 140,000 Jewish Austrians were able to flee
or were expelled and most of them never returned to the country after
the war.
Austrians such as Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Alexander Löhr,
Irmfried Eberl, Franz Stangl, Amon Göth, Odilo Globocnik, Adolf Eichmann
and Ernst Kaltenbrunner were involved in war crimes; the proportion of
Austrians in leading positions in the regime was disproportionately
high. Some of the Nazi crimes committed by Austrians also had serious
repercussions on the Second Republic.
Many buildings from the
Nazi era have survived, including entire districts in Linz that became
necessary as accommodation for tens of thousands of workers during the
construction of the Hermann Göring works, today's Voestalpine, and the
nitrogen works in Ostmark, and six Vienna anti-aircraft towers. In Linz
there are also particularly striking testimonies to National Socialist
building activity in the form of the Nibelungen Bridge and bridgehead
buildings.
In 1938, the Mauthausen/Gusen double camp system was
set up, which included the Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps.
Over the years, this camp system was connected to a network of branch
offices that stretched across the whole of Austria (Loibl concentration
camp, Klagenfurt-Lendorf concentration camp sub-camp, Bretstein
concentration camp sub-camp, Redl-Zipf concentration camp sub-camp,
Steyr-Münichholz concentration camp sub-camp, KZ Ebensee, Raxwerke and
others). Forced laborers from all over Europe were used in these
concentration camps under inhumane conditions, for example in armaments
production and road construction. Around 100,000 prisoners died in
Mauthausen alone.
In the Moscow Declaration of 1943, the wartime
opponents of the Third Reich declared that after the end of the war,
Austria would be reestablished as an independent state independent of
Germany. They called Austria the first victim of Hitler's aggression
against other states, but also referred to the joint responsibility of
many Austrians for the crimes of the regime.
Air raids did not
take place in Austria until August 1943, as up until then it had been
partly outside the range of Allied bombers or their escort fighters.
Compared to the old Reich, far fewer civilian targets were hit by air
raids in Austria, but armaments industry and transport hubs, which means
that the old building fabric was largely preserved. The Second World War
ended in Vienna after the Battle of Vienna on April 13, 1945; the next
day politicians from the Second Republic met for the first meetings
while fighting was still going on in the outskirts of the city.
Austria's independence was proclaimed on April 27th. The Allies did not
invade the other parts of the country until the beginning of May 1945.
When the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht came into force on
May 8, 1945 and the Second World War in Europe came to an end, Allied
troops had already advanced far into the so-called "Alpine and Danube
Reichsgaue". On April 13, 1945, the Soviet troops had won the Battle of
Vienna (around 19,000 German and 18,000 Soviet soldiers died). In late
April and early May, the Western Allies advanced from the west.
As early as April 1, Karl Renner, the first state chancellor of the
First Republic, had made contact with Soviet troops who had advanced
into Burgenland. Soviet plans to restore the state of Austria after the
war had been in existence since 1941. In 1943, the Allies (USA, Great
Britain, Soviet Union, a little later also the "French Committee for
National Liberation") stated in the Moscow Declaration that they
regarded the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938 to
Hitler's German Reich as null and void and the liberation of Austria was
one of their war aims. Before that, especially in Great Britain, there
had also been other models of thinking, which included a federalist
“Alpine state” with Bavaria or a “Danube confederation”, similar to the
former Danube monarchy, in addition to their own state.
Renner
was commissioned by the Soviets to form a provisional state government.
Originally, Renner only wanted to help form a government. However, he
was directly commissioned by Stalin to head a government. Therefore, the
Western Allies suspected him of collaborating with the Soviets. As a
result, the SPÖ (made up of Social Democrats and “Revolutionary
Socialists”) was founded on April 14, and the ÖVP (Christian Social and
Land Union) and the KPÖ were founded on April 17. On April 27, 1945 –
before the end of the Second World War – the Austrian Declaration of
Independence was proclaimed, which was to officially come into force on
May 1, 1945. On April 29, the provisional Austrian state government met
(ten representatives of the SPÖ, nine ÖVP, seven KPÖ and three
independent). Most of the MPs from the KPÖ came directly from Moscow,
where they had lived in exile. Initially, the government was only
recognized by the Soviet Union; the USA, Great Britain and France
followed in the course of the year. The goal of the government was to
restore the Austrian Republic on the basis of the 1920 constitution and
the 1929 amendment. On November 25, 1945, the first national elections
took place. The ÖVP became the strongest party, the communists received
only 5%. In the elections of 1949 and 1953, the ÖVP was able to maintain
its majority, but in 1953 it was narrowly outstripped by the SPÖ.
As a former part of the German Empire, Austria was divided into four
occupation zones: Vorarlberg and North Tyrol belonged to the French
zone, Carinthia, Styria and East Tyrol to the British zone, Salzburg and
the part of Upper Austria south of the Danube to the US and Upper
Austria north of the Danube, Lower Austria and Burgenland to the Soviet
zone. Like Berlin, Vienna became a four-sector city, with the “Innere
Stadt” (the first district) being administered jointly by the Allies.
The Soviet occupation forces dismantled industrial complexes in
their zone, and much of what had been declared "German property" was
confiscated under the name USIA. In contrast, the Marshall Plan was
launched in the occupation zones of the USA, Great Britain and France.
The agreement between the USA and Austria was concluded on July 2, 1948;
After that, Austria received aid from the Marshall Plan as grants
(guarantee of financial aid) in the form of material goods. In order to
stabilize the schilling, Austria implemented a currency reform. Not
least because of this, the October strikes of 1950 followed. Because of
the unequal distribution of the Marshall Plan funds, independent
industrial development began in the west of the country for the first
time.
After the collapse of the German Reich, millions of Germans
were expelled from their settlement areas in Eastern and Southeastern
Europe; some of them moved or fled to Austria.
In 1955, in contrast to the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR,
the Republic of Austria regained its full state sovereignty through the
State Treaty of May 15 with the four occupying powers. In return, the
Second Republic had to declare its “perpetual neutrality” and enshrine
it in a constitutional law. The last Soviet soldiers left the country in
September 1955, followed by those of the Western Allies on October 25.
On October 26, 1955, the National Council passed the Neutrality Act. In
the decades that followed, the Austrian economy developed in a similar
way to that of the Federal Republic of Germany, with the economy in the
former Soviet zone having a great deal of catching up to do compared to
the western federal states and this east-west divide only leveled out
after decades (see also the economic miracle).
In its policy of
neutrality, Austria also tried to act as a bridge between the blocs in
the Cold War. So on June 3rd and 4th, 1961 in Vienna there was a
historic summit meeting in Vienna between John F. Kennedy and Nikita
Sergeyevich Khrushchev.
By joining the United Nations on December
14, 1955 and the Council of Europe on April 16, 1956, among other
things, Austria integrated itself into the international community
shortly after sovereignty was restored. Austria became an important
refuge for participants in the uprising in Hungary (1956) and for many
participants in the Prague Spring (1968). Especially in 1956, when
eastern Austria in particular was still badly affected by the
occupation, the humanitarian aid for the neighboring country was very
large. Entire settlements were built from scratch for refugees. Although
most of the refugees were taken in by countries overseas, many stayed in
Austria. The federal army, which had just been reorganized, also had its
first test. In both cases, the ORF also played a major role in informing
the population in the affected neighboring countries as neutrally as
possible as a state broadcaster.
Federal Chancellor Bruno
Kreisky, who was one of the first Western politicians to hold talks with
Arafat and Gaddafi, took part in the international discussion on how to
resolve the Middle East conflict. Vienna became the seat of many
international organizations such as the UN (Vienna International
Centre), the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe.
With the collapse of the communist regimes
in the Eastern Bloc countries and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989
(opening of the borders to Western Europe), the country lost its special
character as a neutral buffer state between the warring blocs.
Consequently, Austria joined the European Union in 1995, which was
considered unthinkable for a long time due to the neutrality law, and
subsequently also joined the Schengen agreement to open the borders and
thus became part of the Schengen area. As a result, border controls were
now also abolished for passenger traffic, first on Austria's borders
with Germany and Italy (December 1, 1997), ten years later also on the
borders with the neighboring countries of the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary and Slovenia (December 21, 2007).
Domestic politics, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was strongly
influenced by the consequences of the February fighting in 1934.
Attention was paid to an equal distribution of power between the ÖVP and
SPÖ ("Proporz"). In the national elections in Austria in 1959, the ÖVP
was again behind the SPÖ in terms of votes, but as the party with the
most seats, it continued to provide the chancellor. After Interior
Minister Franz Olah, who had been expelled from the SPÖ, founded his own
party (DFP) in 1965 and won around 3% of the votes in the 1966 National
Council elections, most of which came from the SPÖ, the ÖVP won the
absolute majority. This paved the way for a one-man government of the
ÖVP. The federal government of Klaus II ruled until 1970.
On
March 1, 1970, the SPÖ under Bruno Kreisky won the National Council
elections and formed a minority government with the toleration of the
FPÖ, which in turn benefited from an electoral reform. With the early
elections on October 10, 1971, the SPÖ gained an absolute majority of
votes and seats, which was maintained in the 1975 election and even
increased in the 1979 election. In 13 years of sole government and in
the coalitions that followed, the SPÖ was able to largely implement its
concepts and ideas and expand Austria into a social, modern and
economically powerful state. Chancellor Kreisky became a symbol of
modernization and cosmopolitanism for a whole generation in the early
1970s. With the help of the absolute SPÖ majority in the National
Council, he created a modern welfare state. At the same time, he fought
unemployment, so in the 1970s Austria remained the only OECD country
with consistently positive economic growth. Pope Paul VI called Austria
an "Island of the Blessed" because of its inner peace and stable social
conditions. In return, higher budget deficits and rising government debt
were accepted. From 1976, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank unofficially
tied the exchange rate of the Schilling to the Deutsche Mark after the
dollar exchange rate collapsed (more here).
Furthermore,
important social modernization steps were taken, for example
decriminalization of abortion (regulation of deadlines), abolition of
tuition fees, introduction of an environment and health ministry,
creation of the Ombudsman Board, reduction of weekly working hours
(40-hour week), more minimum vacation time, introduction of community
service, the legal equality for women in marriage, the mother-child
pass, free travel for schoolchildren and free textbooks, as well as
co-determination in schools and universities. Furthermore, Kreisky
represented a very liberal immigration policy, Austria served as a
transit point for many Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union. Austrian
criminal law was modernized by Christian Broda.
In 1978, the
referendum on the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant caused a stir, and the
commissioning was rejected with a narrow majority. The SPÖ's loss of
votes in the National Council elections in April 1983 (loss of the
absolute majority) resulted in Federal Chancellor Kreisky resigning.
Fred Sinowatz took over the affairs of state. A “red-blue” (small)
coalition (SPÖ/FPÖ) was formed with Norbert Steger as vice chancellor.
After the presidential election in Austria in 1986, in which the ÖVP
candidate Kurt Waldheim was elected, Sinowatz resigned. He was succeeded
by Franz Vranitzky. A few months later, after Jörg Haider was elected
party chairman of the FPÖ, the coalition came to an abrupt end, as the
new SPÖ Federal Chancellor categorically rejected a coalition with
Haider. After the SPÖ had again become the strongest party in the early
National Council elections in 1986, despite a significant loss of votes
- the ÖVP had also lost - there was a new edition of the "grand"
coalition. In the years that followed the red-black governments under
Franz Vranitzky (1987-1997: II, III, IV, V) and Viktor Klima
(1997-2000), the government pursued an austerity course to overcome the
economic crisis, some social benefits and taxes were abolished again,
the budget under Finance Minister Ferdinand Lacina (SPÖ) was partially
reorganized and the immigration laws under Interior Minister Franz
Loeschnak (SPÖ) were gradually tightened. The government was under
pressure from the FPÖ, which aggressively pursued right-wing populist
policies. The FPÖ had a huge increase in votes (from about 5% in 1983 to
27% in 1999). In 1993 there was a break with the liberal wing of the
party: the Liberales Forum (LIF), which was represented in the National
Council until 1999, was formed as a split-off.
One of the most
important Austrian issues in the 1990s was the Yugoslav wars. Shootings
between Yugoslav troops and the Slovenian territorial defense on the
Austrian border in 1991 and several border crossings by the Yugoslav Air
Force into Austrian airspace caused a stir. The wars that followed in
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo led to many people from these
countries coming to Austria as refugees. Austrians also provided help
with fundraisers such as "Neighbor in Need" and with construction
projects during and after the war.
A sensational right-wing
extremist criminal case shook Austria for several years: It was the
attacks that Franz Fuchs carried out in the name of a "Bajuwarian
Liberation Army". He carried out three series of letter bombs and also
planted several pipe bombs, which killed some people: four Roma died in
the attack in Oberwart. The most prominent victim was Helmut Zilk, the
mayor of Vienna, who was seriously injured by a letter bomb.
As a result of recent history, the experiences after the "annexation", the crimes of the National Socialists and the complete defeat of Hitler's empire in World War II, the understanding of state identity has also changed. While self-image and the relationship to the state in the First Republic were still largely shaped by German national ideas, this idea now increasingly receded into the background. However, this Austrian national consciousness, which was also combined with a dissociation from the new Federal Republic of Germany, also had the consequence that many Austrians, "normal citizens" as well as politicians, now wanted to see themselves as the first victims of National Socialism (also referred to as the "victim theory"), although Hitler had brought about the "annexation" to the jubilation of large parts of the population. Participation in National Socialist crimes was therefore hardly dealt with for a long time. This "blind spot" in historical awareness attracted international attention in the Waldheim affair in 1986 during Kurt Waldheim's candidacy for the presidency. Despite global outrage about Waldheim's initially concealed SA membership and his role in the Wehrmacht, he won the presidential election in the second ballot. It was only under the government of Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky in 1991 that there was an explicit acknowledgment that many Austrians shared responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism.
After the National Council elections on October 3, 1999, Wolfgang
Bowl (ÖVP) formed the Federal Government Bowl I, a black-blue coalition
of the bourgeois-conservative ÖVP with the right-wing populist FPÖ. On
February 4, 2000, the other 14 EU countries reacted with so-called
"sanctions", the symbolic freezing of diplomatic relations. In
particular, the then French government (Jospin cabinet) and the Belgian
government explained these measures as a sign against right-wing
populism in Europe. They were rescinded due to the "Wise Men's Report"
because it quickly became clear that civil rights in Austria would not
be restricted by the new government. The attempt to exert political
pressure on Austria from abroad tended to strengthen the ÖVP-FPÖ
government, as it was able to appeal to patriotic feelings domestically.
On January 1, 1999, the new EU currency, the euro, was introduced in
Austria as book money. From January 1, 2002, the euro also replaced the
shilling currency as a means of payment. On May 11, 2005, Parliament
ratified the EU constitution, which later failed due to the "No" votes
from France and the Netherlands. Austria supported the EU's Common
Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). In 2008 Austria took part in EUFOR
Tchad/RCA, a military EU mission in Chad.
After the SPÖ suffered heavy losses in the National Council elections
on October 3, 1999 - but remained the strongest party - and the ÖVP,
with smaller losses, fell just behind the FPÖ in terms of the number of
votes, lengthy coalition talks by the previous government failed in
January 2000. After After 13 years of the Grand Coalition (1987-2000),
the ÖVP and FPÖ agreed against the will of Federal President Thomas
Klestil on a coalition under Federal Chancellor Wolfgang Bowl, to which
- because of the FPÖ participation - large parts of the Austrian
population reacted with outrage and against it at times there were
regular "Thursday demonstrations". Under this coalition, the
liberalization and austerity course of the SPÖ/ÖVP coalition was
continued.
An inner-party break in the FPÖ (Knittelfeld FPÖ
Assembly 2002) after disappointing regional election results and Jörg
Haider's increasing dissatisfaction with his own government members led
to the resignation of most of the FPÖ ministers and as a result to early
elections in November 2002 ÖVP increased its share of the vote from 26.9
to 42.3 percent and became the party with the most votes for the first
time since 1966, while the FPÖ slipped from 26.9 to 10.0 percent of the
vote (SPÖ: 36.5%, Greens: 9.5%) . Once again, a “black-blue” coalition
was formed.
In April 2005, due to a renewed rift within the FPÖ,
the previous members of the government and most of the parliamentarians
of the FPÖ left the party and joined the “Bündnis Zukunft Österreich”
(BZÖ) newly founded by Carinthian Governor Jörg Haider. Government work
continued in a “black-orange” coalition.
After the National
Council elections on October 1, 2006, in which the SPÖ achieved a
relative majority after massive ÖVP losses, a grand coalition was formed
in January 2007 under Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer (SPÖ) and
Vice-Chancellor Wilhelm Molterer (ÖVP). However, this government only
lasted about a year and a half, not least because of mutual distrust.
Despite heavy losses, the SPÖ emerged from the new elections on
September 28, 2008 as the party with the most votes. The ÖVP lost
massively, the FPÖ and BZÖ made strong gains, and the Greens stagnated.
Federal President Heinz Fischer gave the new federal party chairman of
the SPÖ, Werner Faymann, the mandate to form a government. On November
23, 2008, Werner Faymann and the new executive federal party chairman of
the ÖVP, Josef Proell, announced that they had agreed on a renewed grand
coalition with Werner Faymann as federal chancellor. In 2011, Michael
Spindelegger followed Proell.
In the 2013 National Council
election (the legislative period was extended to five years in 2007),
the two coalition parties were again able to achieve a narrow absolute
majority despite losing votes, after which the coalition was continued.
In August 2014, Reinhold Mitterlehner succeeded Michael Spindelegger as
Vice Chancellor.
In 2015, Austria became a transit and sometimes
destination country for hundreds of thousands of refugees (mainly from
Syria) and migrants who tried to reach Central and Northern Europe via
the so-called Balkan route (refugee crisis in Europe 2015/2016).
In May 2016, Faymann resigned as party chairman and federal chancellor
after a very weak result (11.2%) for the SPÖ candidate in the federal
presidential election, Rudolf Hundstorfer, and after internal party
criticism. He was succeeded in both functions by the CEO of ÖBB,
Christian Kern. The run-off election for the Federal President was
initially won by the former party leader of the Greens, Alexander Van
der Bellen, against the FPÖ candidate Norbert Hofer. After an election
challenge by the FPÖ, the Constitutional Court declared the run-off
election invalid on July 1, 2016 due to serious irregularities and the
resulting possible manipulation in the counting of postal votes. The
second round of voting therefore had to be repeated throughout Austria.
Van der Bellen received 53.79% of the votes and was sworn in as Federal
President on January 26, 2017.
After a change at the top of the
ÖVP in May 2017, the new chairman Sebastian Kurz spoke out against
continuing the governing coalition with the SPÖ, whereupon early
elections were set for October 15, in which the ÖVP became the strongest
party, while the Greens left the National Council after 31 years. A
turquoise-blue government was formed under Chancellor Kurz and
Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache and sworn in in December of the
same year. The coalition broke up in May 2019 in the course of the
so-called "Ibiza affair" surrounding Strache, whereupon another early
national election was held on September 29, 2019, in which the ÖVP was
able to further expand its majority, while the FPÖ and SPÖ suffered
losses. The Greens, on the other hand, were able to move back into the
National Council and, together with the ÖVP, formed the first
black-green coalition at federal level on January 7, 2020, the Federal
Government Kurz II.
The global COVID-19 pandemic also hit Austria
in 2020, causing unemployment to peak at 588,000 in April 2020. The
economy suffered heavy losses and during the year recorded its sharpest
slump since the Second World War.
On October 9, 2021, Prime
Minister Kurz resigned as a result of the ÖVP corruption scandal. His
successor in office was initially Alexander Schallenberg on October 11,
2021, and Karl Nehammer on December 6, 2021.