The history of the Servite Church is more fascinating than its modest appearance suggests. Anna Catarina Gonzaga (1566–1621), the second wife of Archduke Ferdinand II, founded the first establishment of the “Ordo Servorum Mariae” (Order of the Servants of Mary) in Innsbruck in 1612 with the Servite Monastery. At that time, the monastery was the only convent north of the Alps dedicated to Saint Joseph. The mosaic in the colorful entrance vault displays the coat of arms of the Duchy of Mantua with its four black eagles and red lion, alongside the coat of arms of the Archduchy of Austria. It symbolizes the union of Ferdinand and Anna Catarina Gonzaga and their dynasties. Although the Italian city-states had already passed their prime, they still possessed the means to marry into the highest circles of European aristocracy. During this era of church division, the northern Italian principalities and the Habsburgs formed the Catholic stronghold of Europe. Establishing this strict order was a major concern for the devout rulers from northern Italy. As a mendicant order, the Servites initially devoted themselves to caring for the poor. During the Reformation, the Servite Order, which originated in Tuscany, was completely dissolved in German-speaking regions and only began to spread again from Innsbruck in the 17th century.

The Servite Order faced many challenges in Innsbruck. Just a few years after the church was consecrated, the first building largely burned down in 1620. The Gothic entrance area of the original church with its distinctive columns survived. The founder’s plan to be buried in the church she had endowed had to be postponed. Johann Martin and Georg Anton Gumpp designed the new building in Baroque style in 1626. By then, Anna Caterina Gonzaga had already passed away. Instead of being buried in the Servite Church as planned, she was first interred in the Servite nuns’ convent and later in the Jesuit Church. It was not until 1693 that she was reburied in the Servite Church alongside her daughter. In the 20th century, the Servite Monastery once again faced dissolution. On November 3, 1938, the National Socialists dissolved the Servite Order as the first monastery in Innsbruck “for the protection of the people.” In Catholic Tyrol, actions against the Church had to be carefully planned and communicated. Often, the most outrageous stories were fabricated for this purpose. The Austrian edition of the “Völkischer Beobachter” on November 4, 1938 stated the reason as follows:

“State police investigations in the Servite Monastery in Innsbruck revealed such immoral conditions that it is impossible to present them publicly. The monastery in question is a den of vice of the highest order, behind which the anti-state behavior, evidenced by discovered writings, fades into the background.”

On December 15, 1943, the Servite Church was destroyed during the first air raid on Innsbruck. Only small parts of the historic structure and some paintings and relics in the art chamber and monastery museum remained intact. The striking painting on the exterior was recreated after 1945 during reconstruction by Hans Andre (1902–1991), who also restored the damaged Hospital Church after the war. Born in Innsbruck, Andre attended the trade school—today’s HTL—like many Tyrolean artists of the 20th century. After five years at the University of Applied Arts and a brief collaboration with Clemens Holzmeister, he returned to Innsbruck. After World War II, he focused on restoring churches damaged by the war. His interpretation of the Crucifixion scene on the exterior façade, simultaneously baroque and modern, reflects the subdued mood of the post-war era. Andre also created the paintings inside the church.

Following the end of the war, US troops controlled Tyrol for two months starting in May 1945, before administration of the occupied territory was handed over to France. While the end of the war meant the air raids were over and the danger of a destructive final battle in the streets of Innsbruck was averted, hardship and anxiety persisted. During the first three postwar years, hunger was the greatest enemy. Fiorello La Guardia, head of UNRRA (*United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration*)—which supplied war-devastated areas with basic necessities—counted Austria "...among those nations of the world closest to starvation." May 1945 was less a "month of bliss" and more freezing cold, with snow reaching all the way into the valleys. The winter of 1946/47 went down in Tyrolean climate history as particularly cold and long, followed by a summer that was exceptionally hot and dry. Crop failures reached up to 50%. The supply situation was catastrophic, especially in the city. Obtaining daily food became a life-threatening, everyday worry for the people of Innsbruck. In addition to its own citizens, thousands of Displaced Persons, liberated forced laborers, and occupation soldiers had to be fed. Milk, bread, eggs, sugar, flour, fat—there was a shortage of everything. The Tyrolean state government and the French occupation forces could not cover the required per capita kilocalorie intake. To improve the logistics for incoming supplies, the French laid the foundation for the new airport on the *Ulfiswiese* in Höttinger Au as early as 1946, which replaced the airbase in Reichenau (opened 20 years earlier) after two years of construction. Contemporary witnesses remember with horror the flown-in food cans and their far-from-tasty contents, such as whale meat, that were allocated to them. Food supply was managed through ration cards. Adults had to present confirmation from the employment office to receive these cards. Rations varied depending on the worker category: heavy laborers, pregnant women, and nursing mothers received food worth 2,700 calories. Craftsmen with light jobs, civil servants, and freelancers received 1,850 kilocalories, while office workers received 1,450 calories. Housewives and other "ordinary consumers" (*Normalverbraucher*) received 1,200 calories. Foreign relief organizations ran charitable initiatives such as soup kitchens and school feeding programs. The American welfare organization CARE (*Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe*) sent CARE packages. Many children were sent to foster households in Switzerland during the summer to regain their strength and put a few extra pounds on their bones. However, these measures were not enough for everyone. Housewives and other "ordinary consumers" in particular suffered under the low allocations. Despite the risk of being arrested, many Innsbruck residents set out for the surrounding villages to forage for food (*hamstern*). Those with money paid astronomical prices to the farmers; those without had to beg for food. In extreme cases, women whose husbands had fallen in battle, were prisoners of war, or were missing saw no other way out than prostitution. Women who became pregnant as a result faced severe verbal abuse targeted at both themselves and their offspring. Decriminalized abortion in Austria was still 30 years away. For the most part, politicians were powerless in the face of this. Satisfying all interests was impossible even in normal times. Many decisions made between the parliament in Vienna, the Tyrolean state parliament (*Landtag*), and Innsbruck City Hall were incomprehensible to the public. Office buildings and commercial enterprises were given free rein by the Innsbruck municipal electric company, while private households faced repeated restrictions on power access starting in October 1945. This disadvantage of households compared to the economy also applied to the coal supply. While children suffered from malnutrition, some enterprising farmers legally distilled profitable schnapps from fruit. The old divides between city and countryside grew larger and more bitter. Innsbruck residents accused the surrounding rural population of deliberately withholding food for the black market. Raids, thefts, and illegal logging occurred. Transports at the train station were guarded by armed units. Appropriating food from a warehouse was both illegal and an everyday reality. Hungry children and teenagers roamed the city, seizing any opportunity to get food or fuel. The first Governor of Tyrol, Karl Gruber—who had himself been part of the illegal resistance during the war—understood the situation of people rebelling against the system, but could do nothing to change it. Innsbruck Mayor Anton Melzer's hands were tied as well. It was not only difficult to reconcile the needs of all interest groups; time and again, cases of corruption and favors for relatives and acquaintances surfaced among the civil service. Gruber's successor in the governor's chair, Alfons Weißgatterer, had to weather several minor uprisings when public anger boiled over and stones were thrown at the *Landhaus* (state parliament building). The state government's response came via the *Tiroler Tageszeitung*.

„Are the broken windows that clattered from the country house into the street yesterday suitable arguments to prove our will to rebuild? Shouldn't we remember that economic difficulties have never been resolved by demonstrations and rallies in any country?“

The newspaper had been founded in 1945 under the administration of the US armed forces to promote democratization and denazification. Its first editor-in-chief, Anton Klotz (1889–1961), had worked for the conservative *Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger* before being sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp by the National Socialists. After just one year, the daily newspaper was transferred to *Schlüssel GmbH* under the leadership of ÖVP politician Joseph Moser. In the first few months after the war, a paper shortage made it the only available newspaper in the region. The second paper, the *Tiroler Nachrichten*, which began publication in late 1945, was under the direct administration of the ÖVP. Thanks to high circulation and almost direct control over the content, the Tyrolean state government was able to shape public sentiment. However, this dominance over public opinion did nothing to change reality, such as the precarious housing situation. An estimated 30,000 Innsbruck residents were homeless, living in cramped conditions with relatives, or residing in temporary barracks settlements. These included the former labor camp in Reichenau, the settlement colloquially known as the "*Ausländerlager*" (foreigners' camp) for displaced persons from formerly German areas of Europe, and the *Bocksiedlung*. Maria-Theresien-Straße, Museumstraße, the railway station district, Wilten, and Pradlerstraße would likely be much more visually appealing today had officials not been forced to quickly plug the gaps in the cityscape to create housing as fast as possible for the many homeless residents and returning soldiers. Aesthetics, however, was a luxury that no one could afford in this situation. Tens of thousands of citizens pitched in to clear the rubble and debris left behind on the streets by air raids. The exhausted population urgently needed new living space to escape the unhealthy living conditions, in which large extended families were sometimes squeezed into single-room apartments.

"The emergency situation jeopardises the comfort of the home. It eats away at the roots of joie de vivre. No one suffers more than the woman whose happiness is to see a contented, cosy family circle around her. What a strain on mental strength is required by the daily gruelling struggle for a little shopping, the hardship of queuing, the disappointment of rejections and refusals and the look of discouragement on the faces of loved ones tormented by deprivation."

What could be read in the *Tiroler Tageszeitung* was only part of the harsh everyday reality. Just as after the First World War, when the Spanish Flu claimed many victims, 1945 also saw a surge in dangerous infections. Vaccines against tuberculosis could not be delivered during the first winter, and hospital beds were in short supply.

Even though the situation eased after 1947, living conditions in Tyrol remained precarious. It took years before noticeable improvements occurred. Food rationing was finally discontinued on July 1, 1953. In the same year, Mayor Greiter was able to announce that all buildings destroyed during the air raids had been fully restored. This was also thanks to the occupying forces. The French troops under Émile Béthouart behaved very leniently and cooperatively toward their former enemy, treating the Tyrolean culture and population with friendliness and an open mind. Although people were initially hostile toward the occupying power—yet another war had been lost—the skepticism of Innsbruck's residents faded over time. Thanks to the soldiers of the *4th Moroccan Mountain Division*, many Tyroleans saw Black people for the very first time. The soldiers were especially popular among children because of the chocolates and sweets they handed out. Many locals also found employment within the French administration. The French Monument on Landhausplatz commemorates the era of the French occupation. On the *Émile-Béthouart-Steg*—the footbridge connecting St. Nikolaus and the inner city across the Inn River—a commemorative plaque encapsulates the relationship between the occupying forces and the local population:

"Came as a victor

Remained as a protector.

Returned home as a friend."

In addition to material hardship, a collective war trauma shaped society. The adults of the 1950s were products of interwar upbringing and National Socialism. Men who had fought at the front could only speak of their horrifying experiences as losers of the war within certain circles, while women usually had no platform at all to process their fears and anxieties. Domestic violence and alcoholism were widespread. Teachers, police officers, politicians, and civil servants had frequently been part of the National Socialist follower base—a demographic that did not simply vanish with the end of the war, but was merely met with a wall of silence in public life. Although a large number of proceedings against National Socialists took place at the Innsbruck People's Court under the direction of the Allied powers, the number of convictions failed to reflect the true extent of what had occurred. The vast majority of the accused went free. Particularly implicated representatives of the system were imprisoned for a time or lost their public service positions, but after serving their sentences, they were able to return to their old lives relatively unmolested—at least professionally. People not only wanted to draw a line under the past decades; the perpetrators of yesterday were needed to keep the society of today running. At the latest with the growing tensions between the superpowers and the USSR, former Nazis were viewed as the lesser evil compared to socialists and communists. The problem with this strategy of suppression was that no one took responsibility for what had happened, even though enthusiasm and support for National Socialism had been widespread, especially at the beginning. There was hardly a family without at least one member who had an inglorious history between 1933 and 1945. Shame over what had transpired since 1938 and during those years in Austrian politics blended with the fear of being treated as war culprits by the occupying powers—the USA, Great Britain, France, and the USSR—much like in 1918. An atmosphere emerged in which no one—neither the generation that took part nor the one that followed—spoke about what had taken place. This attitude long prevented any critical examination of the events since 1933. The myth of Austria as the "first victim" of National Socialism—which only slowly began to crumble with the Waldheim affair in the 1980s—was born. Police officers, teachers, judges—they were all left in their positions despite their political stance. Society needed them to keep functioning. A prime example of this generously spread blanket of forgetting, with strong ties to Innsbruck, is the biography of the physician Burghard Breitner (1884–1956). Breitner grew up in a wealthy upper-middle-class household. The Villa Breitner at Mattsee housed a museum dedicated to the German nationalist poet Josef Viktor Scheffel, who was revered by Breitner's father. After passing his school-leaving exams (Matura), Breitner decided against a career in literature in favor of studying medicine. He subsequently completed his military service and launched his medical career. In 1912/13, he served as a military doctor in the Balkan War. In 1914, he was deployed to the Eastern Front, where he was taken prisoner by Russian forces. As a physician, he selflessly cared for his comrades in the prisoner-of-war camp. It was not until 1920 that he returned to Austria from the POW camp, celebrated as a hero and the "Angel of Siberia." In 1932, his career at the University of Innsbruck began. By 1938, Breitner faced the problem that he could not provide the "Greater Aryan Certificate" (Großer Ariernachweis) due to the Jewish background of his paternal grandmother. However, thanks to his good relationship with the rector of the University of Innsbruck and key National Socialists, he was ultimately able to continue working at the university clinic. During the Nazi regime, Breitner—as head of the Innsbruck Clinic—was responsible for forced sterilizations and "voluntary castrations," even if he likely did not perform any of the surgeries personally. After the war, the "Angel of Siberia" managed, with some effort, to maneuver his way through the denazification process. In 1951, he was nominated as a candidate for the federal presidential election by the VdU (Federation of Independents), a political collecting basin for staunch National Socialists. In 1952, Breitner became Rector of the University of Innsbruck. Following his death, the City of Innsbruck dedicated an honorary grave to him at the Westfriedhof (Western Cemetery). In the Reichenau district, a street is dedicated to him in the immediate vicinity of the site of the former concentration camp.

The abundance of churches, chapels, crucifixes, statues, and paintings in public spaces strikes many visitors to Innsbruck from other countries as unusual. Not only places of worship, but also many private houses are decorated with depictions of Jesus, Mary, saints, and biblical scenes. For centuries, the Christian faith and its institutions shaped everyday life throughout Europe, and Innsbruck—as a residence city of the strictly Catholic Habsburgs and the capital of the self-proclaimed Holy Land of Tyrol—was particularly richly endowed with ecclesiastical buildings. In terms of number and scale relative to the conditions of earlier times, churches appear as gigantic features in the cityscape. In the 16th century, Innsbruck, with its approximately 5,000 inhabitants, possessed several churches whose splendor and size surpassed every other building, including the palaces of the aristocracy. Wilten Abbey was a vast complex in the midst of a small farming village that had developed around it.

The spatial dimensions of these places of worship reflect their importance within the political and social structure. For many inhabitants of Innsbruck, the Church was not only a moral authority but also a secular landowner. The Bishop of Brixen was formally equal in rank to the territorial prince. Peasants worked on the bishop’s estates just as they did on those of a secular ruler. The clergy exercised both taxation and judicial authority over their subjects, and ecclesiastical landowners were often regarded as particularly demanding. At the same time, it was also the clergy in Innsbruck who were largely responsible for social welfare, healthcare, care for the poor and orphans, food distribution, and education. The Church’s influence extended into the material world in a way comparable to how the modern state operates today through tax offices, police, schools, and employment services. What democracy, parliament, and the market economy represent for us today, bishops, the Bible, Christian devotional literature, and parish priests represented for people of earlier centuries: a reality that maintained order.

It would be incorrect to believe that all clergymen were cynical power-hungry figures who exploited their uneducated subjects. The majority of both clergy and nobility were devout and God-fearing, albeit in a manner that is difficult to comprehend from today’s perspective. It was not the case that every superstition was blindly accepted or that people were arbitrarily executed based on anonymous accusations. In the early modern period, violations of religion and morals were tried before secular courts and punished severely. Charges were brought under the term heresy, which encompassed a wide range of offenses. Sodomy—meaning any sexual act not serving reproduction—sorcery, witchcraft, and blasphemy, in short any deviation from the correct faith, could be punished by burning. The act of burning was intended both to purify the condemned and to destroy them and their sinful behavior completely, thereby removing evil from the community. For a long time, the Church regulated everyday social life down to the smallest details. Church bells structured people’s daily schedules. Their sound called people to work or worship, or informed the community of a death through tolling. People were able to distinguish individual bell signals and their meanings. Sundays and holidays structured time. Fasting days regulated diet. Family life, sexuality, and individual behavior were expected to conform to Church-prescribed morality. For many people, salvation in the afterlife was more important than happiness on earth, which was seen as predetermined by the course of time and divine will. Purgatory, the Last Judgment, and the torments of hell were real and served to frighten and discipline even adults.

While parts of Innsbruck’s bourgeoisie were at least gently awakened by the ideas of the Enlightenment after the Napoleonic Wars, the majority of the population remained deeply attached to a blend of conservative Catholicism and superstitious folk piety. Religiosity was not necessarily a question of background and social status, as the social, media, and political debates along the fault line between liberals and conservatives repeatedly demonstrated. Although the freedom of religious practice had been legally enshrined since the December Constitution (Dezemberverfassung) of 1867, state and religion remained closely intertwined. Thanks to the 1855 concordat between the Pope and the Emperor, marriage law and the school system were under the control of the Catholic Church. It was only under pressure from liberals in parliament that these bastions of everyday social life began to crumble, yet particularly in Tyrol, the pastor's word remained sacrosanct. In the First Republic, a conservative backlash occurred. Ignaz Seipel, a Christian Social politician who went down in history as the Iron Prelate (Eiserner Prälat), rose to the highest office of the state in the 1920s. Federal Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß saw his Corporate State (Ständestaat)—a construct built on a Catholic foundation—as a bulwark against socialism. In 1933, the concordat with the Vatican was renewed. Even after World War II, church and politics in Tyrol formed a powerful double act in the persons of Bishop Rusch and Governor Wallnöfer. In 1957, the government of the Second Republic reconfirmed the agreement, which formally remains valid to this day. A genuine separation of church and state did not begin until the 1970s. Although people leaving the church in recent decades have dented official membership figures and recreational events draw larger crowds than Sunday masses, faith and the church still hold a fixed place in the daily lives of Innsbruck’s residents, even if often unnoticed. The Roman Catholic Church still owns a vast amount of land in and around Innsbruck, even beyond the walls of its monasteries and educational institutions. A number of schools in and around Innsbruck also remain under the influence of conservative forces and the church. And whoever enjoys a public holiday, cracks Easter eggs against one another, or lights a candle on a Christmas tree does not have to be a Christian to act in the name of Jesus—disguised as tradition.

Anyone traveling through Austria is familiar with the domes and onion-shaped towers of churches in towns and villages. They are the characteristic hallmark of the Baroque architectural style, which reached its peak during the Counter-Reformation and continues to shape the cityscape of Innsbruck to this day. The most prominent churches—such as the Cathedral, St. John’s Church, or the Jesuit Church—are built in the Baroque style. Places of worship were meant to be splendid and magnificent, symbols of the triumph of the true faith. The exuberant, all-encompassing piety of elites and subjects alike was reflected in art and culture: great drama, pathos, suffering, splendor, and glory combined to form the Baroque—a style that left a lasting imprint on the entire Catholic sphere of influence of the Habsburgs and their allies between Spain and Hungary. From the seventeenth century onward, the Gumpp family of master builders and Johann Georg Fischer fundamentally transformed Innsbruck’s cityscape. The Old Provincial Government Building in the Old Town, the New Provincial Government Building on Maria-Theresien-Strasse, countless palazzi, paintings, and sculptures—the Baroque was the defining stylistic force of the House of Habsburg in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became embedded in everyday life. The bourgeoisie did not wish to lag behind the nobility and princes and therefore had their private residences built in the Baroque style as well. Farmhouses were adorned with images of saints, depictions of the Virgin Mary, and representations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Yet the Baroque was more than an architectural style; it was a way of life that emerged in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War. The Ottoman threat from the east, culminating in the two sieges of Vienna, dominated the empire’s foreign policy, while the Reformation shaped domestic affairs. Baroque culture became a central element of Catholicism and its political self-representation in public space—a countermodel to the austere and rigorous way of life advocated by Calvin and Luther. Christian holidays were introduced to brighten everyday life. Architecture, music, and painting were rich, full, and exuberant. In theatres such as the Comedihaus in Innsbruck, dramas with religious themes were performed. Ways of the Cross with chapels and representations of the crucified Christ crisscrossed the landscape. Popular piety, expressed through pilgrimages and the veneration of Mary and the saints, became firmly embedded in everyday church life. Multiple crises shaped daily existence. In addition to war and famine, plague epidemics occurred particularly frequently in the seventeenth century. Baroque piety was used as a means of educating subjects, teaching them to interpret these calamities as expressions of God’s dissatisfaction—misfortunes that could be remedied through a devout and virtuous way of life. Although the sale of indulgences was no longer common practice in the Catholic Church after the sixteenth century, vivid notions of heaven and hell persisted. Through a virtuous life—that is, living in accordance with Catholic values and displaying proper conduct as a subject within the divine order—one could come significantly closer to paradise. So-called Christian devotional literature became the most popular reading material following the educational reforms of the eighteenth century and the rising literacy of the population. The suffering of the Crucified for humanity was regarded as a symbol of the hardship endured by subjects on earth within the feudal system. Through votive paintings, people sought assistance in times of hardship or expressed gratitude—most often to the Virgin Mary—for surviving dangers and illnesses. Particularly impressive votive paintings can be admired in the Wilten Basilica. The historian Ernst Hanisch described the Baroque and its influence on the Austrian way of life as follows:

“Austria emerged in its modern form as a crusading imperialism—externally against the Turks and internally against the Reformers. This brought bureaucracy and the military, and externally a multiethnic society. State and Church attempted to control the intimate sphere of citizens’ lives. Everyone had to reform themselves through the confessional; sexuality was restricted, norm-compliant sexuality enforced. People were systematically trained to dissemble.”

Rituals and submissive behavior toward authority left deep traces in everyday culture, distinguishing Catholic countries such as Austria and Italy to this day from Protestant-influenced regions such as Germany, England, or Scandinavia. Austrians’ passion for academic titles has its roots in Baroque hierarchies. The term Baroque prince refers to a particularly patriarchal and patronizing politician who knows how to captivate an audience with grand gestures. While political sobriety is valued in Germany, the style of Austrian politicians remains theatrical—entirely in keeping with the Austrian adage “Schaumamal” (“let’s see”).