Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

part of a flourishing socialist public culture

While the city government was firmly in social democratic hands, the federal government, elected by the entire, largely rural country, was controlled by the Christian democrats under the leadership of “the pitiless prelate,” Ignaz Seipel, a Catholic priest

His vision for the country was faith-based and authoritarian.

conservative Austrian nationalists

promoted the Trachten, the traditional dress of the Upper Austrian, Styrian, and Tyrolian peasants,

The metropolitan intellectuals were horrified by what they saw as the progressive provincializing of an erstwhile European cultural hub, particularly as nationalists of all stripes propagated their ideas with increasingly strident anti-Semitic overtones.

Even before the war, the assimilatory success of Vienna’s Jews had turned against them, as the resentful losers of modernity looked for an object on which to vent their anger.

Like the demonic machine Maria in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, they were now caricatured as the epitome of a new urban, rootless, soulless, sexualized, neurotic, money-grabbing present.

singling them out not on religious grounds, as once would have been the case, but on “scientific” and “racial” grounds, and particularly as the embodiment of international capitalism, which appeared to be destroying the certainties of the old ways. Now, after the war, anti-Semitism was being plied with renewed force.

as the debate about Austrian identity became more restrictive and more removed from the Habsburg embrace of variety, the visions for the future became less optimistic.

Hugo Bettauer

Stadt ohne Juden (City Wit...

Elias Canetti

his principal philosophical work, Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power),

Heimito von Doderer.

his sense of living outside of his own time.

Vienna, however, was now a city for people who did not belong. In fact, nobody felt at home in the new state that was post-Habsburg Austria.

THE TENSIONS BETWEEN the visions and forces of the left and right in Austria increased with each year. In 1920, the conservatives had founded the Heimwehr (Home Defense), an armed militia that functioned as the military wing of the Christian Democratic Party,

Their demonstrations of power eventually led the social democrats to create the Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection League), which was also armed.

Sporadic confrontations between members of the Heimwehr and the Schutzbund were part of life during the First Republic, creating a constant atmosphere of menace in Vienna and other parts of the country.

Schattendorf shooters,

acquitted of all charges and fully rehabilitated as “honorable men.”

thousands of workers were already gathering in protest. It was not an organized gathering.

Apparently without direction, they converged on the Palace of Justice,

LIKE AUSTRIA, POSTWAR FRANCE SUFFERED a lacerating and traumatic postwar legacy that the intervening decade had done little to heal.

Just as in Austria, the country’s character, civilization, and future—its soul, as it were—were contested in a series of battles fought in newspapers, debating chambers, and the streets.

Opposing the socialists, communists, and trade unions was a vigorous monarchist movement

along with militant Catholics and fascist admirers of Mussolini—the latter three overlapping in various constellations and associations. It was, as often in recent French history, a struggle of identities between the Catholic emblem Jeanne d’Arc and the republican symbol Marianne.

The towering figure of ultraconservative France was a man with a perfect intellectual pedigree for th...

his newspaper, L’Action Française,

he despised,

Léon Blum,

Antidemocratic, nationalist, and anti-Semitic as he was, Maurras was nonetheless no friend of fascism, mainly because he distrusted its totalitarian impulses. He wanted to turn back the clock to a time before the 1789 revolution, before democracy, individualism, and liberalism had sullied what he regarded as the French genius.

His dream was a revival of a French monarchy, supplanting the Third Republic and restoring a sense of greatness and moral purpose to the nation. To this end, he needed the Catholic Church (in whose doctrines he did not believe) as a guarantor of stability and to encourage a sense of sacrifice in the population, just as he wished for an aristocratic elite willing to fight and a social order inspired by the estates of the Middle Ages.

This muddled and to some extent contradictory vision (though a rabid anti-Semite, Maurras despised other kinds of racism, regarding them as too German) exerted a considerable intellectual pull, not only on French thinkers of the right but also on conservatives as diverse as Charles de Gaulle, Spain’s Francisco Franco, King Albert of Belgiu...

some other intellectuals in France were more immediately in step with the grand fascist march toward a brighter, cleaner future.

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

Robert Brasillach

even in France, armed militias began to be a factor in daily politics.

in 1934, after the suspicious death of Serge Stavisky, “Beautiful Sacha,” a French con man of Ukrainian Jewish origin,

police, who had erected barricades on the bridge linking the Place de la Concorde and the Palais-Bourbon and who were now fighting off angry and determined but uncoordinated demonstrators armed with sticks, stones, and some small firearms. The battle for the Solférino Bridge

policemen were ordered to fire into the crowd.

ACROSS THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT, ideologically opposing factions were engulfed in bloody clashes about ideology, and more specifically about the role modernity was to play in their societies.

In Austria, where the 1927 burning of the Palace of Justice had become a symbol of the country’s desperate and increasingly deadly battle for a new identity, events would not stop at a single bloody riot, as they had done in France. In 1934, only two weeks after the siege of the Palais-Bourbon that had cost seventeen lives, the tensions in Vienna erupted into a civil war.

The front lines in the Austrian struggle for nationhood were drawn mainly between socialists and conservative Catholics, between visions of a modern workers’ paradise and a rigid, rightist autocracy of national virtue. With Dollfuss, the latter had won by what amounted to a coup d’état. A new, dictatorial Austria rapidly took shape. Dollfuss introduced censorship of the press, prohibited political assemblies, and outlawed the paramilitary wing of the socialist party, the Republikanischer Schutzbund. Political opponents were arrested and sent to prison camps, and the death penalty was reintroduced for even usually non-capital offenses, including “public violence and malicious damage to foreign property.” From the very beginning of his dictatorship, Dollfuss was particularly concerned to reverse the secular reforms of previous governments and to make his homeland into an obedient daughter of the Catholic Church.

By early 1934, thousands of socialists were interned in camps or prisons for political reasons, and members of the now-illegal Schutzbund were stockpiling weapons.

the Schutzbund capitulated after three days of fighting,

Fueled by a real conflict of social visions and cultural identities, Europe’s political map was rapidly changing.

Betty Boop. To a young generation of Americans, the ingénue glamourpuss was a symbol of their own determination to get out, get away from their parents, and enjoy life.

The cheerful nihilism of the flappers was a child of economic success and general escapism. After the first unsettled postwar years, with their violent strikes, race riots, Red Scare, and social strife, the peace economy had taken off and a new sense of optimism was making itself felt.