AUSTRIA: Royal Restitution

Sure are pious Austrians that an exceptionally righteous Chancellor will be found in Heaven at no great distance from Jehovah’s Throne, and they know of no dead Chancellor more righteous than the late Engelbert Dollfuss who was just the right size to sit beside a cherubim. Last week the Austrian Government of deeply pious Chancellor Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg cast up their eyes to Heaven and declared they were taking a momentous step which they felt would please departed Dollfuss. This step was to ask Austria’s hand-picked and subservient State Council to restore over 50,000,000 schillings ($9,510,000) worth of worldly goods to Archduke Otto, the young Austrian pretender who heads the House of Habsburg, sometime Holy Roman Emperors.

After the secret Government session at which this decision was taken Count Coreth, the official rapporteur, announced with apostolic zeal: “The Austrian people could no longer endure the injury done the Habsburgs in 1919 when they were deprived of their citizenship and property. Dollfuss, from his place in Heaven, will surely be glad to know that the Austrian Government is canceling this unjust law!”

If Count Coreth had meant by “the Austrian people” the proletariat rather than the devout peasantry no assertion could have been more monstrous. In 1919 as an act of Marxist right and mass justice the Imperial and Royal House of Habsburg—they of the curling ”Habsburg lip” —were stripped of their lands and property down to the very nightgown of fugitive Empress Zita. Spurned by a Socialist Austrian Government, which exercised mercy only in saving the Habsburgs from being butchered as the Romanovs were butchered, Little Otto’s uninspiring father, Kaiser Karl, was allowed to slip away and die on the Island of Madeira. Last week the double eagle of the Habsburgs screamed again. From Vienna a member of the Government rushed post haste to Castle Steenockerzeel in Belgium, the retreat of exiled “Kaiser Otto.” All the Government asked of “His Majesty” was that he should behave with procrastination and discretion. Would he please be so discreet as not to return to Austria next week, by which time the Government would have handed him or be about to hand him 63,000 acres in eight districts of Austria, real estate in Vienna which in normal times yielded some $50,000 a year, the Mannersdorf Dairies which sell 4½ million litres of milk annually, a list of other Habsburg property which grew daily, and a lump sum indemnity of $10,000,000 for destroyed or confiscated property which the Government was sorry not to be able to return?

Why such stupendous gifts to Otto von Habsburg by a country financially near the rocks? The obvious explanation, that Chancellor Schuschnigg plans a Monarchist coup in the next few weeks as the last card in his desperate game to keep Austria from going over to the Nazis, seemed last week a trifle too obvious. In Vienna seasoned wiseacres believed that Dr. Schuschnigg merely wished to be able to get Kaiser Otto down his sleeve should the emergency arrive for playing the Habsburg card. He could not slam a Habsburg Kaiser down on Europe’s board with sufficient speed so long as Austrian law condemned the Habsburgs to banishment and their lands to confiscation. Some years ago the Hungarian Government also cleared for possible action by restoring to the Habsburgs their properties but no restoration of Otto as King has occurred in Budapest.

Admittedly in Vienna today the crisis is many times more tense. Assassination has taken the greatest Austrian of his time, and incurable Viennese optimists have learned to take a spate of machine gun bullets in the streets now & then as calmly as they sip their chocolate with whipped cream. Austria, still on the brink of a violent government upset at any time, was in fact taking the crisis so calmly last week that advance bookings for the Salzburg Festival were nearly double last year’s, with a boom season in prospect.

Said Otto von Habsburg, who is attended by a Gentleman-in-Waiting even when he steps up to a kiosk to buy a packet of cigarets, last week: “I regret that I cannot now discuss these matters.”