THE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1876-1909 THE CHURCHMAN AND SCHOLAR

Politics and Society in Vienna at the Turn of the Century

Seipel has been presented as an imperial figure. Growing up in the last decades of the long reign of Francis Joseph, who had virtually become the symbol of everything Austrian as well as of the European monarchic order, he was taught to see his sovereign as the successor of the Holy Roman emperors, the earthly manifestations of God's universal rule on earth. He thought of Austria as a kingdom of kingdoms, a nation of nations, an empire whose mission was not to conquer and subjugate but to unite its peoples, an empire which in defiance of modern nationalism could assert its claim to the cherished fifteenth-century device, Austria erit in orbe ultima, and was comparable only to the Roman Empire.

But to the perceptive observer the Austria of the late nineteenth century represented a diminishing empire. In spite of Austria's triumphs at the Congress of Vienna, the Habsburg Monarchy had been seriously weakened by the upheavals of 1848-1849, the strains of the Crimean War, and two unsuccessful wars in 1859 and 1866. And though the Empire reemerged after the fatal setback of 1866 in the form of a Danubian Monarchy, based essentially upon possession of the Austrian hereditary lands, of the crowns of St. Wenceslas and St. Stephen, the domestic settlement of 1867, the so-called Ausgleich, was in itself the cause of serious dissension, since it divided the Monarchy between the Germans (in Cisleithania) and the Hungarians (in Translei thania). Its double centralism was interpreted, particularly by the Slavic groups, as a setback to their aspirations. But the Ausgleich appeared as a denial and betrayal of the Austrian supranational idea to the more thoughtful Germans also, and among others to Seipel. They tended to look back to the days of the Kremsier diet when Austria had come close to solving its nationality problem. "Since the diet of Kremsier," argued Hermann Bahr, one of Austria's leading men of letters at the turn of the century and an elderly friend of Seipel's, Austria moved about "merely as a ghost." It was the nationality struggle, after all, that paralyzed much of political life within the Monarchy in the last decades before the war, and at the same time undermined its position among the European powers.

Vienna itself, where Seipel grew up, was a truly imperial city, though much of its splendor was carried over from the past, taken for granted but not tested against contemporary political realities. While remaining a "metropolis of the baroque," it had lost its political function and become the metropolis of the European "value-vacuum." For better or worse it was strangely immunized against the conflicts which were agitating