The time of Austrofascism

Kirche St. Jakob im Defereggental Dollfuß
The Bocksiedlung and Austrofascism

In the First Republic, two large political and paramilitary blocs faced each other. The Republican Protection League on the side of the Social Democrats and the Christian-socially orientated Heimwehr, for the sake of simplicity the different groups are summarised under this collective term, were hostile to each other. Many politicians and functionaries on both sides, like a large proportion of the male population, had fought at the front during the war and were correspondingly militarised.

In Innsbruck, there were repeated small clashes between the opposing groups of Social Democrats, National Socialists and the Heimwehr. The so-called Höttinger Saalschlacht Hötting was not yet part of Innsbruck at that time. The community was mainly inhabited by labourers. In this red National Socialists planned a rally in the Tyrolean bastion at the Gasthof Golden Beara meeting place for the Social Democrats. This provocation ended in a fight that resulted in over 30 people being injured and one death from a stab wound on the National Socialist side. The riots spread throughout the city, with the injured even clashing in the hospital. Only with the help of the gendarmerie and the army was it possible to separate the opponents.

After years of civil war-like conditions, the Christian Socialists under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß (1892 - 1934) prevailed in 1933 and abolished parliament. Dollfuß's goal was to establish the so-called Austrian corporative statea one-party state without opposition, curtailing elementary rights such as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. In Tyrol in 1933, the Tiroler Wochenzeitung was newly founded to function as a party organ. The entire state apparatus was to be organised along the lines of Mussolini's fascism in Italy under the Vaterländischen Front united: Anti-socialist, authoritarian, conservative in its view of society, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic and militarised.

Dollfuß was extremely popular in Tyrol, as photographs of the packed square in front of the Hofburg during one of his speeches in 1933 show. His policies were the closest thing to the Habsburg monarchy and were also supported by the Church. The Fatherland Front with its paramilitary units cracked down on socialists. The press was politically controlled and censored. The articles glorified the idyllic rural life. Families with many children were supported financially. The segregation of the sexes in schools and the reorganisation of the curriculum for girls, combined with pre-military training for boys, was also in the interests of a large part of the population. The unspoken long-term goal was the restoration of the monarchy. In 1931, a number of Tyrolean mayors joined forces to have the entry ban for the Habsburgs lifted.

On 25 July 1934, the banned National Socialists attempted a coup in Vienna, in which Dollfuß was killed. In Innsbruck, the "Verfügung des Regierungskommissärs der Landeshauptstadt Tirols“ der Platz vor dem Tiroler Landestheater als Dollfußplatz led. Dollfuß had met with the Tyrolean Heimwehr leader Richard Steidle at a rally here two weeks before his death.

Dollfuß' successor as Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg (1897 - 1977) was a Tyrolean by birth and a member of the Innsbruck student fraternity Austria. Er betrieb lange Zeit eine Rechtsanwaltskanzlei in Innsbruck. 1930 gründete er eine paramilitärische Einheit mit namens Ostmärkische Sturmscharenwhich formed the counterweight of the Christian Socials to the radical Heimwehr groups. After the February Uprising in 1934, as Minister of Justice in the Dollfuß cabinet, he was jointly responsible for the execution of several Social Democrats.

However, Austrofascism was unable to turn the tide in the 1930s, especially economically. The unemployment rate in 1933 was 25%. The restriction of social welfare, which was introduced at the beginning of the First Republick was introduced had dramatic effects. The long-term unemployed were excluded from receiving social benefits as "Discontinued" excluded.

The housing situation was a particular problem. Despite the city's efforts to create modern living space, many Innsbruck residents still lived in shacks. Bathrooms or one bedroom per person were the exception. Since the great growth of Innsbruck from the 1880s onwards, the housing situation was precarious for many people. The railways, industrialisation, refugees from the German-speaking regions of Italy and the economic crisis had pushed Innsbruck to the brink of the possible. After Vienna, Innsbruck had the second highest number of residents per house. Rents for housing were so high that workers often slept in stages in order to share the costs. Although new blocks of flats and homeless shelters were built, particularly in Pradl, such as the workers' hostel in Amthorstraße in 1907, the hostel in Hunoldstraße and the Pembaurblock, this was not enough to deal with the situation. Several shanty towns and settlements were built on the outskirts of the city, founded by the marginalised, the desperate and those left behind who found no place in the system.

In the prisoner-of-war camp in the Höttinger Au, people were quartered in the barracks after being mustered out. The best known and most notorious to this day was the Bocksiedlung on the site of today's Reichenau. From 1930, several families settled in barracks and caravans between the airport, which was located there at the time, and the barracks of the Reichenau concentration camp. The legend of its origins speaks of Otto and Josefa Rauth as the founders, whose caravan was stranded here. Rauth was not only economically poor, but also morally poor as an avowed communist in Tyrolean terms. His raft, Noah's Ark, with which he wanted to reach the Soviet Union via the Inn and Danube, was anchored in front of Gasthof Sandwirt.

Gradually, an area emerged on the edge of both the town and society, which was run by the unofficial mayor of the estate, Johann Bock (1900 - 1975), like an independent commune. He regulated the agendas in his sphere of influence in a rough and ready manner.

The Bockala had a terrible reputation among the good citizens of the city. And despite all the historical smoothing and nostalgia, probably not without good reason. As helpful and supportive as the often eccentric residents of the neighbourhood could be, physical violence and petty crime were the order of the day. Excessive alcohol consumption was common practice and the streets were unpaved. There was no running water, sewage system or sanitary facilities, nor was there a regular electricity supply. Even the supply of drinking water was precarious for a long time, which brought with it the constant risk of epidemics.

Many, but not all, of the residents were unemployed or criminals. In many cases, it was people who had fallen through the system who settled in the Bocksiedlung. Having the wrong party membership could be enough to prevent you from getting a flat in Innsbruck in the 1930s. Karl Jaworak, who carried out an assassination attempt on Federal Chancellor Prelate Ignaz Seipel in 1924, lived at Reichenau 5a from 1958 after his imprisonment and deportation to a concentration camp during the Nazi regime.

The furnishings of the Bocksiedlung dwellings were just as heterogeneous as the inhabitants. There were caravans and circus wagons, wooden barracks, corrugated iron huts, brick and concrete houses. The Bocksiedlung also had no fixed boundaries. Bockala In Innsbruck, being a citizen was a social status that largely originated in the imagination of the population.

Within the settlement, the houses and carriages built were rented out and sold. With the toleration of the city of Innsbruck, inherited values were created. The residents cultivated self-sufficient gardens and kept livestock, and dogs and cats were also on the menu in meagre times.

The air raids of the Second World War exacerbated the housing situation in Innsbruck and left the Bocksiedlung grow. At its peak, there are said to have been around 50 accommodations. The barracks of the Reichenau concentration camp were also used as sleeping quarters after the last imprisoned National Socialists held there were transferred or released, although the concentration camp was not part of the Bocksiedlung in the narrower sense.

The beginning of the end was the 1964 Olympic Games and a fire in the settlement a year earlier. Malicious tongues claim that this was set to speed up the eviction. In 1967, Mayor Alois Lugger and Johann Bock negotiated the next steps and compensation from the municipality for the eviction, reportedly in an alcohol-fuelled atmosphere. In 1976, the last quarters were evacuated due to hygienic deficiencies.

Many former residents of the Bocksiedlung were relocated to municipal flats in Pradl, the Reichenau and in the O-Village quartered here. The customs of the Bocksiedlung lived on for a number of years, which accounts for the poor reputation of the urban apartment blocks in these neighbourhoods to this day.

A reappraisal of what many historians call the Austrofascism has hardly ever happened in Austria. In the church of St Jakob im Defereggen in East Tyrol or in the parish church of Fritzens, for example, pictures of Dollfuß as the protector of the Catholic Church can still be seen, more or less without comment. In many respects, the legacy of the divided situation of the interwar period extends to the present day. To this day, there are red and black motorists' clubs, sports associations, rescue organisations and alpine associations whose roots go back to this period.

The history of the Bocksiedlung was compiled in many interviews and painstaking detail work by the city archives for the book "Bocksiedlung. A piece of Innsbruck" of the city archive.

"Children save up for a pig"

Published: Innsbrucker Nachrichten / 21 August 1937

The Spiderbrain family - may the reader forgive this name, but that's what people are called, and why shouldn't they be called that? - has moved from the city to the countryside. The family consists of a father, mother and four children, whose first names are Fritz, Wolfgang, Herzelinde and Henriette. The head of the family is a writer, not to say a poet. This poet gets himself and his loved ones through life with the fruits of his pen, which are not unpopular with newspapers and magazines, book publishers and radio stations. The profession of the poet Spiderbrain is not bound to a particular place, it can be practised from anywhere, because the postal service ensures in an exemplary manner that what Mr Spiderbrain's brain comes up with in the evening is already on the desks of the editorial offices the next morning. And so our poet has decided to live with his family in the good country air close to nature rather than in the haze of the city.

The four children of the poets feel at home in the countryside. The wide expanses of green meadows make better playgrounds than the courtyards wedged between tall houses. The village children in their unbent, fresh and coarse behaviour make wonderful playmates. The uninhibited light of the sun and the memorable face of a beautiful landscape make the children bright and free. There is only one thing that the spider-brain children find lacking when they compare the conditions in which they live with those of the villagers, namely that the farmers own milk-giving cows while their parents have to buy milk by the litre, that the farmers harvest grain from the fields while they have to go to the merchant for every kilo of flour, that the farmers can slaughter pigs while they have to bother the butcher.

One day, Fritz, the eldest, twelve-year-old, enters the poet's room, where Father Spiderbrain - in his honour - works not only with his brain but also with his heart, and says: "Father, buy a sow!" "I'm a poet, not a cattle dealer," replies Father Spiderbrain, thinking that he has put his crown prince to shame with these words, but he is mistaken. "Even poets like to eat roast pork," philosophises Fritz. "That's right," says Father Spiderbrain, "we'll be buying another kilo of pork soon, but a whole pig is prohibitively expensive for a poet.

Fritz withdraws. He has long known that poets can't possibly have much money if they are real poets, and he also realises that you can't buy a pig without money. The fact that poets and poets' children cannot enjoy a pig like farmers and farmers' children seems to Fritz to be a glaring injustice, and because he - like most boys his age - has a pronounced sense of justice, this fact becomes an emergency that he has to remedy. Fritz Spinnenhirn thinks about the matter day and night and finally finds a solution, which he realises with youthful impetuosity. He has chosen his three siblings as helpers and they are enthusiastic about his intentions. They decide to act according to two principles when carrying out their plans: Firstly, to be tough, persistent and without false shame, and secondly, not to tell their parents, so that the joy and surprise for them will be all the greater afterwards.

First, the two boys Fritz and Wolfgang set their fretsaws to work and make four little wooden houses, each with a slit in the roof in place of the chimney. These slits are the only openings that lead inside the four little houses, everything else is firmly fitted together, nailed and glued. This means that nothing can get out of the little houses once it has got in; you have to break them open later if you want to enjoy their contents. The two girls Herzelinde and Henriette, nine and seven years old, paint the little houses with bright colours. The captions "Villa Fritz" and "Villa Wolfgang", "Villa Herzelinde" and "Villa Henriette" are emblazoned on each little house. They would have preferred to write "Sau -Sparkasse" on them, but they didn't, because otherwise their parents would have realised what they were playing.

Now the motto is to get as much content as possible into the little houses. When Fritz has to go to the post office for his father, he says "it costs ten pennies" and holds the "Villa Fritz" under his nose. Father Spiderbrain also usually throws ten pennies into the slot because he believes that children should be encouraged to be thrifty. You can almost always spare ten pennies. If Wolfgang sees an uncleaned bicycle somewhere, he tracks down the owner and offers to clean it for thirty pennies. He gets a lot of jobs because everyone likes to avoid such work. As he works cleanly, Wölfgang becomes a very busy man and soon no bicycle in the whole neighbourhood is a stranger to him. The "Villa Wolfgang" becomes increasingly important. Whenever Herzelinde has to dust or clean shoes, it costs ten pennies, which go into the slot of the "Villa Herzelinde". Mum Spiderbrain is of the same opinion as her husband when it comes to saving money. Henriette, the baby of the family, learns well at school. When she brings home an excellent grade, she asks her parents for a tasty reward, which then disappears into the belly of "Villa Henriette". She often receives this sounding reward from both her father and mother on Saturdays, because the little smarty-pants works on both independently of each other.

Whenever there is something to do in the village, the spider-brain children are there. They kindly but firmly refuse the food that is offered to them as payment for their services. They would get enough to eat at home. But they are happy to accept a few pennies for their savings bank. And they almost always get these pennies, because farmers in particular have a strong sense of thrift.

Fritz and Wolfgang, Herzelinde and Henriette never miss an opportunity to get small - and even better, larger - sums for their "villas". Their ambition grows, their sense of saving is trained, their attitude to life becomes more mature, their understanding of all kinds of work more pronounced, their relationship to money more thoughtful, they can suddenly understand their father when he is worried about bread. They have learnt that it is not easy to earn money, and they learn from this experience that one must have respect for any kind of hard work.

The "Villa Wolfgang" is full at first. However, its owner doesn't let up in his sparing but helps his little sister Henriette to fill up her "villa" too. Soon "Villa Fritz" is also full and, with all the help it can get, "Villa Herzelinde". After seven months, the children have made it. They can cover the roofs of their four savings banks. They have raised almost two hundred schillings. They themselves are amazed at this sum.

But even more surprised is the butcher, who deals in pigs and slaughters pigs on the premises of local farmers. When Fritz and Wolfgang, Herzelinde and Henriette visit him to buy a pig, he asks where they got the money and how they came up with this idea. He takes great pleasure in the children. The end of the story is that he gives the four children a splendid three-calf sow at cost price, and that he offers to slaughter this three-calf sow without asking for any money. However, the parents Spiderbrain are most surprised and delighted when the bristle-toothed animal bought by their children is brought into their house slaughtered. There is a slaughter party like never before. The parents are mighty proud of such children and the children themselves are also immensely proud of their fine achievement. And so the poet Spiderbrain has finally got a three-centred sow. And the four poet children are already building new and bigger savings bank houses because they have learnt the value of money and the meaning of saving.

Sights to see...

Back to the overview of the city history

Overview of the city's history