Abstract: The years of authoritarian rule in Austria ushered in by the Chancellor Dr Dollfuss and the Heimwehr movement in 1933, and continuing after the Chancellor's murder at the hands of nationalsocialists by the government of Dr Kurt Schuschnigg, are sometimes described as a period of fascism or clerical-fascism. The term 'clerical-fascism', however, hardly stands up to scrutiny, for the system in question consisted of a mixture of the most varied right-wing ideas, ideologies, and tendencies which had been trying to make headway in Austrian home affairs since I920 and which, by the middle twenties, had taken shape within the so-called Heimwehr movement. The term 'clerico-fascism' appears in Charles A. Gulick's Austria from the Habsburgs to Hitler (German ed., Vienna, I948). The German historian Ulrich Eichstadt wrote that after the events of March 1933 Austria ceased to exist as a democracy and took the path towards Austro-fascism.1 Ernst Nolte, in his comprehensive survey of the history of fascist thought, comes to the conclusion that Austrian 'Heimwehrfascism' succeeded in putting the state on a new basis, but was not identical with the 'Austro-fascism' which had superseded the parliamentary system of government. In evaluating the personalities who dominated the Austrian scene from I933 to 1938, he suggests that Prince Starhemberg, the leader of the Heimwehr for many years, was probably more of a fascist than an aristocrat, but that the same cannot be said of either Dollfuss or Schuschnigg.2 Given these differing views about Austrian fascism, about its origins and its effect on political events, the present study will be confined to the Heimwehr, that is, to the movement which is still regarded as the sole repository of authoritarian and fascist thought in recent Austrian history. It is unfortunate that of the existing studies of this movement there are only a few which can be called scholarly.
Publication Year: 1966
Publication Date: 1966-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 4
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