AUSTRIA: Automatic Civil War

At an Austrian reception in Geneva last week an excited Englishwoman plunged down upon little Chancellor Dollfuss and fervently grasped his hand.

“We feel,” said she, “about Austria today the way the world felt about Belgium in 1914!”

Millimetternich was cheered in the streets, at his hotel and at the meetings of the 14th League Assembly (TIME, Oct. 2) whose sessions this week were more than usually routine and futile. When he rose to make his first address, attendants agreed that not since the oratorical pinwheels of the late Aristide Briand had a League audience given such an ovation. From the front row even handsome German Foreign Minister von Neurath started to clap until nudged into silence by beady-eyed Nazi Paul Joseph Goebbels. Said Chancellor Dollfuss:

”Our history, geographical position and culture confer the right and impose the duty on our little Germanic country of being and remaining a useful member of the community of nations. . . . Not by fratricidal strife but by co-operation can the nations solve the great problem of our era.”

Back in Vienna the Dollfuss government was warily picking its way from crisis to crisis. Dissatisfaction of the powerful Heimwehr was settled fortnight ago when Heimwehr Leader Prince von Starhemberg announced that the tentative outline of the new Dollfuss “corporative state” was acceptable to him. Last week the Heimwehr announced its complete absorption in the Dollfuss “Patriotic Front” and its own dissolution as a political party. “This makes the further existence of other parties unnecessary,” read their announcement.

So far so good, but the next step brought the Dollfuss government smack up against a great and solid mass, the Socialists of Vienna. Viennese Socialists have tolerated, even aided, Engelbert Dollfuss because they know that much as he dislikes them they would receive even shorter shrift from a Nazi government. Last week Prince von Starhemberg shrilled at a Heimwehr meeting:

“It is unbelievable that the Socialists are sitting in the City Hall. The Heimwehr will force its way through—if necessary with relentless brutality.”

Nobody knows how many Nazis and pro-Nazis there are in Austria. Beyond the 60,000 uniformed Heimwehr men, estimates of the Heimwehr’s political strength are equally uncertain. But 1,250,000 Socialists signed their names and addresses to a recent petition to Chancellor Dollfuss (TIME, Sept. 18) demanding the reconvening of Parliament and there are less than 7,000,000 souls in Austria.

Socialist spokesmen were brutally frank: “We tolerated Dollfuss because he was fighting the Nazis, but the actual result of the government’s policy has been to strengthen the Nazi movement enormously. . . . Touch our City Hall and you touch off a general strike. Attempt a Habsburg restoration and you touch off an automatic civil war.”

Few days later, after addressing a meeting of Christian Socialists, Chancellor Dollfuss on his way to his offices in Parliament Building was accosted by a youth. The boy handed a paper—apparently a petition—to a soldier guard. Then he stepped back, whipped out a revolver, fired two shots at the Chancellor. Doughty little Dollfuss staggered, then calmly walked to his automobile. Surgeons found one bullet in his shirt where it had bounced off a rib. The other had only scratched his arm. Safe and sound at home, the Chancellor prepared to make a radio broadcast that night. Meanwhile his assailant, an ex-soldier named Rudolph Dertil who had been ousted from the Army as a Nazi agitator, explained: “I wanted to show that Dollfuss is unable to take care of himself, much less the State.”