1927: The Defeat of Austrian Freedom

ON 15 JULY 1927, A DEMONSTRATION outside the Vienna Palace of Justice ended with corpses on the street and the building gutted by fire. It was a decisive moment in the chain of events leading to the suspension of parliamentary government in March 1933, the Civil War of February 1934, the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss in July 1934 and the instant demise of the “state that nobody wanted” when Hitler's German troops marched in on 12 March 1938.

The effects of what Erich Fried dubbed “Bloody Friday” went far beyond the political sphere, highlighting the extent to which literature in Austria reflected (and refracted) these turbulent times. Writing as late as 1975, Manès Sperber claimed that the experience of July 1927 had never ceased being felt. Initially, the demonstration inspired Karl Kraus to a campaign against Johannes Schober, the Vienna police chief, whose men had fired on the crowd demonstrating against the acquittal of right-wing paramilitaries who had killed a child and a war veteran during a skirmish with Socialists. In Die Fackel, then in its twenty-eighth year, Kraus denounced the social system that made such atrocities possible, a religion that denied mercy and charity to the victims, a republic that pinned medals on the breast of murderers.

For Kraus's ambivalent devotee, the later Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, the fire at the Palace of Justice was crucial in the conception of the novel Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fé), first published in Vienna in 1936; for Heimito von Doderer it represented the “Cannae of Austrian freedom” (recalling the devastating defeat of the Romans by Hannibal at the battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.), and inspired the vast panoramic novel he finally published as Die Dämonen (The Demons) in 1956. Already completed in its first but unpublished draft in 1936, Doderer's novel is set largely in the Vienna of 1926–27 and culminates in a depiction of the chaos on 15 July. Shortly before publication of Die Dämonen, the State Treaty of 1955 had finalized the establishment of a Second Republic far more resilient than the First, whose end could already be anticipated when the flames leapt from the roof of the burning law courts.