Austria demands union with Germany

On 12 March 1919 the Constituent National Assembly of German-Austria – the first Austrian parliament elected by women and men in universal and equal elections – passed a law in Vienna on the form of the state. Its first article contained two sentences. The first said that German-Austria was a democratic republic in which all public authority was established by the people. The second read: “German-Austria is a constituent part of the German Reich.” In this way the deputies deliberately repeated a decision taken four months earlier by the Provisional National Assembly, which had not emerged from fresh elections. As the Austrian historian Rolf Steininger puts it, the November resolution was “solemnly repeated, confirmed and reinforced”. Now it was being stated by a parliament backed by a majority of the new state’s voters. The State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the Social Democrat Otto Bauer, who had returned a few days earlier from secret talks in Berlin, declared in a keynote speech that the union of German-Austria with the great German Republic was “once again our programme today”. The union never happened, because the victorious powers did not want Germany to emerge from a lost war larger than it had entered it. The question returned nineteen years later to the day, in an entirely different form.

A state made from the remnants of a monarchy

In the autumn of 1918 the Habsburg monarchy broke up into nation states. On 21 October the 208 German-speaking deputies elected in 1911 to the Austrian Imperial Council (Reichsrat) met in the Lower Austrian diet building on the Herrengasse as the Provisional National Assembly of German-Austria. It elected three co-presidents who rotated in office every week: the German Nationalist Franz Dinghofer, the Christian Social Jodok Fink and the Social Democrat Karl Seitz. On 30 October the assembly set up a Council of State and a government headed, as State Chancellor, by the Social Democrat Karl Renner. When on 11 November Emperor Charles I renounced “all participation in affairs of state”, the assembly passed a law on the form of state and government the following day, 12 November. Its Article 1 proclaimed a democratic republic, and Article 2 stated that “German-Austria is a constituent part of the German Republic”. According to some sources only two deputies voted against. That same day Dinghofer and Seitz proclaimed the Republic of German-Austria from the ramp of the parliament building.

Several paths led to this step at once. Since 1866, when Prussia had pushed Austria out of Germany, and especially since the unification of the Reich in 1871, many Austrian Germans had regarded themselves as part of a German nation that lived in two states solely because of the dynasty. Union had long been the slogan of the nationalists in the mould of Georg von Schönerer. The monarchy that had justified the separation had just ceased to exist. The Social Democrats had reasons of their own: after the November Revolution their sister party was in power in Berlin, and union with a “red Germany” was meant to bring socialism closer. “Union with Germany today means union with socialism,” proclaimed their election manifesto of February 1919. The Christian Socials, strong in the Catholic provinces, looked on Protestant and revolutionary Berlin with suspicion and were the most reserved, but they did not openly oppose it either.

The strongest argument, however, was economic. Vienna had been the capital of an empire of more than 50 million people and now became the capital of a country of a few million, cut off from Bohemian coal, from Hungarian and Galician grain and from its old markets. In the winter of 1918–1919 the city went hungry and cold, and its neighbours closed their borders. Karl Renner wrote years later that in 1918 the fear of hunger and unemployment made everyone think of union as the only way out. For most politicians an independent Austria was a state that could not survive.

Borders on paper

The new state claimed all the lands of the former Austrian half of the monarchy in which Germans formed a majority. Besides the Alpine lands and Lower Austria, these were the German borderlands of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, organised in the autumn of 1918 into the provinces of German Bohemia (Deutschböhmen) and the Sudetenland; the German language islands in Brno, Jihlava and Olomouc; southern Moravia; and the German part of South Tyrol (PL) – more than ten million people in all. Reality quickly parted company with these claims. From November 1918 Italian troops stood on the Brenner Pass and occupied South Tyrol. At the turn of 1918 and 1919 the Czechoslovak army occupied the German borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia, and their leaders fled to Vienna. In Carinthia local units were fighting the troops of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Union with Germany was meant to help in this matter too. Austrian politicians counted on the great powers, in the name of the principle of national self-determination proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson, not refusing the Austrian and Sudeten Germans what they had granted the Poles, Czechs and Yugoslavs. On 25 December 1918 Otto Bauer, who had taken charge of foreign affairs after the death of Victor Adler on 11 November, sent the Entente powers a note presenting union with Germany as the only proper course.

Berlin hesitates, then agrees

In Berlin the news from Vienna was at first received with reserve. Germany was just suing for peace and feared that courting Austria would worsen its terms. Over the winter the mood changed. The electoral law for the German National Assembly of 30 November 1918 mentioned the possible accession of German-Austria, and the law on provisional Reich authority of 10 February 1919, passed in Weimar the day before Friedrich Ebert was elected president, provided that if German-Austria joined the Reich it would have its own representatives in the Committee of States.

At the end of February Bauer travelled to Berlin. From 27 February to 2 March 1919 he held confidential talks with the Reich Foreign Minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau. On 2 March the two signed the so-called Berlin Protocol. As Bauer later explained to parliament, it set out “how the union with Germany is to be carried out once it becomes feasible”. The two sides agreed to proceed step by step and, out of regard for the peace conference in Paris, not to present the victors with a fait accompli. The protocol set no date. In the spring, however, a commission began meeting to prepare the union. The talks were meant to be secret, but their main conclusions reached the Entente powers. German diplomats in Vienna, for their part, warned their government against annexing a bankrupt little state that would have to be kept afloat.

The elections and the first free parliament

On 16 February 1919 German-Austria elected its Constituent Assembly. Women voted for the first time in the country’s history. The Social Democrats won the most votes, about 41 per cent, ahead of the Christian Socials and the German Nationalists, who were split into several groups. In a parliament that eventually numbered 170 seats, the Social Democrats had 72, the Christian Socials 69 and the German Nationalists 26. There were eight women among the deputies. No vote was held, however, in the territories occupied by Czechoslovakia and Italy. By the reckoning Renner presented to parliament, more than three and a half million Germans from the Bohemian and Moravian lands and a quarter of a million inhabitants of South Tyrol were unable to elect their representatives.

On 4 March the Constituent Assembly held its first sitting in the former Imperial Council building on the Ring. That same day, in many towns of the German borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia, people took to the streets to protest against their exclusion from the elections and to demand the right to self-determination. In several places Czechoslovak soldiers opened fire. According to the figures most often given, 54 people were killed and 84 wounded. The Sudeten Germans afterwards marked 4 March as a day of remembrance, and in the 1930s the victims of that day became one of the arguments of the propaganda that portrayed them as an oppressed minority. On 5 March the assembly elected Karl Seitz as its president, and since a law of 14 March, in force from the following day, abolished the Council of State, the president of the Constituent Assembly became the sole – though untitled – head of state. He held that role until December 1920.

12 March 1919

The law on the form of the state of 12 March 1919, published in the State Law Gazette as No. 174, added nothing new in substance to the November law. It was above all a demonstration. First a democratically elected parliament confirmed the republic – something all the major parties agreed on, including the Christian Socials, who in November had still wavered between monarchy and republic. Then, in the same article, it repeated that the country was part of the Reich. The wording differed slightly from November’s. In 1918 the text had spoken of the “German Republic”, now of the “German Reich”, because that was still the name of the republican German state, in the Weimar constitution too. The same day the assembly passed a second law, on the occupied state territory. It protested against the armed occupation of the German borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia, of the language islands of Brno, Jihlava and Olomouc and of the southern fringes of Styria and Carinthia, and against the occupation of South Tyrol, and declared these lands, “by virtue of the right of peoples to self-determination”, inseparable parts of German-Austria. Both laws were in essence addressed to the peace conference in Paris.

In a speech setting out the programme of his foreign policy, Otto Bauer called union with the great German Republic “once again our programme”. Bauer was the most ardent advocate of union in the whole Social Democratic party. At the party congress at the turn of October and November 1918 he had already argued that as Germans and as internationalists they must demand it. In parliament he called the opponents of union traitors. The same day the Constituent Assembly elected as its third president Dinghofer, who had previously been absent through illness, and on 14 March it passed a law on the government. On 15 March it elected Renner’s second cabinet, a coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Socials in which Bauer kept foreign affairs.

A veto from Paris

Vienna could pass laws, but the decisions were made in Paris. At the peace conference the strongest opposition to the union came from the France of Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. The French had no intention of letting a defeated Germany gain six and a half million new citizens, the Alpine passes and borders with Italy, Yugoslavia and Hungary, and thus come out of the war stronger. Italy, which wanted a weak neighbour on the Brenner, thought the same. Wilson, whom the Austrians reminded of his own principles, did not take up their cause. Self-determination was granted to the Poles, the Czechs and the South Slavs, but not to the Germans of Austria and the Sudetenland. For twenty years this inconsistency was one of the strongest arguments of German revisionism.

In mid-April a British officer in Vienna passed on to Bauer the advice that he should avoid the question of union in the peace negotiations. On 7 May 1919 the Germans received the draft treaty at Versailles. The provision that became Article 80 of the final text obliged the Reich to recognise and strictly respect the independence of Austria, which could not be altered without the consent of the Council of the League of Nations. The Germans nevertheless wrote into the Weimar constitution, adopted on 31 July, an Article 61 whose second paragraph gave German-Austria seats in the Reichsrat after accession and, until then, a consultative voice. In September 1919, under threat from the great powers, Berlin had to declare this paragraph void. On 26 July Bauer, whose policy had failed, resigned, and Renner took over foreign affairs. On 10 September Renner signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain, whose Article 88 repeated the ban on the Austrian side. On 21 October 1919 the Constituent Assembly changed the state’s name to the Republic of Austria and, “in execution of the Treaty of Saint-Germain”, repealed the sentence stating that German-Austria was part of the German Reich. It had been in force for seven months.

Not everyone in Austria wanted to join Germany. In May 1919, in Vorarlberg, more than 80 per cent of voters came out in favour of opening negotiations on joining Switzerland, which did not take up the offer. Some historians point out that enthusiasm for union was strongest in Vienna and among the political elites, and weaker among the peasants and in the Catholic provinces. Bauer himself later admitted that the bourgeoisie and the peasantry had rather wanted an independent Austria.

The long shadow of the Anschluss

The ban of 1919 did not close the matter. In 1921 union became the slogan of provinces that wanted to free themselves from “red” Vienna. In Tyrol more than 98 per cent voted for union with Germany on 24 April, and in Salzburg about 99 per cent in an unofficial vote on 29 May. Further plebiscites were halted under pressure from the great powers. In October 1922 Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, in return for a League of Nations loan, undertook in the Geneva Protocols that Austria would not give up its independence for twenty years. In 1931, during the Great Depression, a plan for a customs union between Vienna and Berlin collapsed under French pressure and after a ruling by the court in The Hague. Throughout the 1920s union was advocated by the Social Democrats, who abandoned the slogan only in 1933, after Hitler came to power. As Bauer later put it, they had wanted union with the German Republic, “not with Hitler’s penitentiary”.

Hitler, born in Austrian Braunau, wrote on the very first page of Mein Kampf that German Austria must return to the great German motherland. The first point of the NSDAP’s programme of 1920 demanded the union of all Germans in a single state on the basis of the right to self-determination – the same right the Constituent Assembly had invoked in 1919. The Austria of Chancellors Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg, ruled in authoritarian fashion after 1933, resisted him until, in March 1938, it found itself alone. On 12 March 1938, exactly nineteen years after the Constituent Assembly’s resolution, the Wehrmacht crossed the Austrian border. The following day a law on the “reunification of Austria with the German Reich” was drawn up in Linz. Its first article, “Austria is a land of the German Reich”, echoed the formulas of 1918–1919 with fatal resemblance, though it meant something entirely different: not a voluntary union of two democracies but the absorption of a country by a dictatorship, with terror against opponents and the persecution of Jews from the very first hours. In the plebiscite of 10 April 1938 more than 99 per cent of voters officially came out for the Anschluss, and among those who publicly announced they would vote yes was Karl Renner.

The Anschluss was Hitler’s first seizure of a foreign state and, after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, another breach of the Treaty of Versailles to which the great powers responded only with protests. It gave the Reich Austria’s gold, industry and manpower, and above all it outflanked Czechoslovakia from the south. Six months later, after the Munich Agreement, Germany took the Sudetenland, which the Constituent Assembly had already claimed in 1919, and in March 1939 it occupied the rest of the Czech lands. Next on that road was Poland. Austrians went on to fight in the Wehrmacht and to serve in the Reich’s apparatus of terror. In the Moscow Declaration of 1943 the Allied powers called Austria the first free country to fall victim to Hitler’s aggression, but also reminded it of its responsibility for taking part in the war on Germany’s side. After 1945 it was reborn as a state that, unlike in 1919, no longer wished to be part of Germany.