Michael Carter-Sinclair 
Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites 
A study of the Christian Social movement

Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites offers a radical challenge to conventional accounts of one of the darkest periods in the city’s history: the rise of organised, politically directed antisemitism between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Drawing on original research into the Christian Social movement, the book analyses how issues such as nationalism, mass poverty and social unrest enabled the gestation in ‘respectable’ society of antisemitism, an ideology that seemed to be dying in the 1860s, but which was given new strength from the 1880s. It delivers a riposte to portrayals of the lower clergy as a marginalised group that was driven to defend itself from liberal attacks by turning to anti-liberal, antisemitic action, as well as exposing the nurturing role played by senior clergy. As the book reveals, the Church in Vienna as a whole was determined to counter liberalism, to the point of welcoming any authoritarian regime that would do so.

Table of Content

Introduction
1 Before the rise of the antisemites
2 Antisemites begin to organise, 1873–89
3 To the brink of power, 1889–95
4 A Christian, socially engaged movement? 1896–1914
5 A German movement? 1896–1914
6 War and the end of empire, 1914–18
7 An unloved republic? 1919–26
8 The right asserts itself, 1927–33
9 Building a Christian and German Austria? 1934–8
10 An end to Austria?
11 Principal conclusions and further questions
Index

About the author

Michael Carter-Sinclair is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of History at King’s College London