Communication
Conciliation in Austria
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sia—It has been made pretty clear that the Powers will not allow a National Socialist coup in Austria to succeed. The central problem before the Schuschnigg Government remains, therefore, the problem of conciliating the industrial workers ; to the importance of this problem Government declarations in the Press, on the wireless, at meetings at home and before the League representatives abroad, have paid daily tribute. For every serious observer knows that, although the General Strike last February was a failure, and although no one stirred in the Socialist quarters of Vienna on the day Dr. Dollfuss was murdered, the spirit of the working-men is deeply hostile to the regime. The queStion is, of course, primarily Viennese, since the industrial population is largely concentrated in the capital city.
' The Government programme is to preserve the workers' rights with regard to wage and hour agreements, and to give them just representation in the new corporative institu- tions. At the same time it still keeps a considerable number of the Socialists, who were arrested in connexion with the February fighting, in prisons or concentration camps, and maintains a strict surveillance over the moderate leaders against whom it has not been possible to bring a case. It nominates the workers' representatives instead of allowing them to be elected, and in doing so chooses only orthodox Catholics. The anti-clerical working-man remains indignant ; " I will believe in your benevolence," he answers the Govern- ment, " when you release all my comrades who have never been tried." This puts the Government in a real difficulty, for they quite rightly suspect that the Socialists they release will work against them. Dr. von Schusehnigg has been accused, since his speech at Innsbruck on September 2nd, of holding the Socialist prisoners as hostages for the émigré leaders. The situation is indeed so embittered that every conciliatory step may be exploited by revolutionary influences, and yet conciliation is indispensable.
Behind an official screen, various individual efforts are being made, and among them the so-called Winter-Aktion is by far the most interesting. Last April Dr. Dollfuss appointed his old school-fellow, Dr. Ernst Karl Winter, to be one of the three Vice-mayors of Vienna, the one, in fact, who should stand for the Labour cause. Dr. Winter is a remarkable figure. This is a man who has kept in close touch with the exiled Hapsburgs, and at the same time with Otto Bauer (the Left Wing Socialist leader now an emigre in Czecho-Slovakia) in sincere understanding of the ideals of both Monarchists and Marxists. For he is acutely aware of the organic develop- ment of a social idea from the enlightened despotism of the eighteenth-century Hapsburgs, through the reforms of the late nineteenth century, to those of the post-War Socialists. He is profoundly desirous that the workers shall, by self- help, achieve better conditions of life ; he would like to see the Monarchy restored as their best guarantee. For he believes that, however reactionary the restorers of the Hapsburgs might be, the Monarchy would have to lean to the left, and he claims that the Archduke Otto has a real under- standing of this necessity.
It is a pleasure, in talking to Dr. Winter, to be clear of the envenomed suspicions and party slogans which impregnate the conversation of the adherents or the opponents of the Government here. For this sociologist is fa; less dogmatic than the practical politicians of the day. " Socialism and Catholicism share certain ideals." he emphasizes ; " can we not build something up upon this common basis ? " The Socialist attitude today is to regret having compromised with the Christian Socials at all ; to this Dr. Winter replies " Economic development has made the substitution of authori- tarian for democratic forms inevitable ; had you co-operated' more fully, you would now be sharing authority."
Dr. Winter's immediate programme, as restated by him at the beginning of this month, consists of ten points of which the most important are Austrian independence and European co-operation on the one hand, and, on the other, economic planning, extensive land settlement, the fusion of the
co-operative organizations of town and country, and the construction of a new Austrian Labour Movement. It is this last point which is the central focus of his activities. After the Socialist rising the Government, which had dissolved the Socialist Trade Unions, established the Eirtheitgewerk- sehoftsbund, one big Union which all workers were invited to join. Ever since, Dr. Winter has urged the workers to flock into this organization ; he begs them to face the fact that their old institutions have been destroyed by joining this new one in such numbers that it becOmes their own. Meanwhile Winter has been fighting bravely for governmental conces- sions. He has constantly urged the release of prisoners. At a time when freedom of speech appears to have vanished, Winter arranges meetings at which people are allowed to speak freely. The Press with which he is associated is allowed sonic freedom ; appended to his book on Labour and the State are many of the Socialist letters he has received which could have been published nowhere else. And it will not be forgotten that when the rents of the municipal flats were raised, he arranged that the poorest tenants should virtually be let off.
The obstacles in Winter's path have an insurmountable appearance. He is disliked by the Mayor of Vienna, and detested by the leaders of the Heimwehr ; he has an Austrian distaste for German methods, and repels Nazis and Pan- Germans. Though the new Chancellor approves his efforts, Winter is not the personal friend of Schuschnigg as he was of Dollfuss. People distrust the fact that Winter protested. in 1933, against the shelving of the parliamentary constitution, and has now accepted the corporate state ; for he holds that the February fighting blotted out the past, and that one must make the best of the present. Orthodox Marxists regard him as a dangerous seducer who is playing into the hands of Fascist capitalism. Although he is Catholic himself, the Church, and more particularly the Catholic Trade Unions, oppose him, because they are only interested in rights for Catholic workers ; they regard the Einheitgewerlesehaftsbund with suspicion because it is not exclusively Catholic.
Some of these difficulties are inherent in the Austrian situa- tion, and Dr. Winter is not depressed. The whole thing is bound to go very slowly. He does not wish to be associated with any political group, for this would at once involve him in the little political machinations with which Austria abounds_ Though the Einheitgeeeerkschaftsbund is unpopular, a con- siderable number of the metal-workers, for example, have come into it—largely through the anti-clerical influence of a Heimwehr man. And finally Winter may be a quixotic intellectual who uses unfamiliar phrases, but he is a man of undying tenacity, and of unquestionable sincerity and benevolence. He has hitherto succeeded in one impossible task, that of supporting a large family of young children in post-War Austria through specialized scholarship and by the journalistic expression of his sociological convictions. Should he fail in a second impossible task, the attempt he has made could not cease to be interesting.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A VIENNA CORRESPONDENT.
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