Читать книгу Civl society - Группа авторов - Страница 26

However, a global conflagration that the Habsburg monarchy would not survive was ignited in Vienna in 1914. Not only the monarchy collapsed in 1918; this was also the fate of the secure world of the bourgeoisie – the world of solid, traditional business relationships between Reichenberg, Prague, Prossnitz, Vienna, and Budapest; between Lemberg and the Balkans, Trieste and Alexandria. The common market and unified state crumbled. What happened to the middle classes at the time? The traditional security strategies of the middle classes (even the lower ones) proved to be deceptive. Neither being in possession of securities (especially government bonds) nor a tenement building and neither having a high-level position in the state administration nor in the private service sector offered protection against suddenly losing one’s wealth – going as far as putting one’s very survival in question – in the wake of the inflation that occurred during and after the war. Even those extremely cautious people of private means who did not fall for war bonds lost as much as three or four fifths of their fortunes.¹⁹

But this rupture did not affect all bourgeois classes in the same way. Of course, almost all of those in possession of Austrian (and Hungarian) bonds suffered certain financial losses. However, just how quickly the Czechoslovakian redevelopment bonds issued immediately after the foundation of the state in 1918 were oversubscribed is astonishing – the Czech bourgeoisie obviously still had sufficient financial reserves, which they had withheld from old-Austria, that they willingly put into the hands of their own (!) new state. In words that have often been quoted, Otto Bauer – the Austrian Social Democrat who is considered one of the leading thinkers of the left-socialist Austro-Marxist faction – expressed that the main losers as a result of the change were the members of the German-Austrian, and particularly Viennese, bourgeoisie:

“… The same process of currency devaluation…has pauperised broad layers of the old bourgeoisie. At first, this fate hit the men of private means… and, with them, the house owners were expropriated… The higher civil service was also depressed by the devaluation of the currency… It was the old Viennese patriarchate, the top strata of the Austrian intelligentsia, large sections of the middle and lower classes, who had become impoverished by the devaluation of the currency. They had actually been the ruling class of the Habsburg monarchy. They were the bearers of Austrian patriotism, of old-Austrian traditions. They had provided the Habsburg monarchy with its civil servants, with its officers. For a century, they had been the bearers of a specifically Austrian culture, Viennese literature, Viennese music, and Viennese theatre. They are the ones who were really defeated in the war. It was their empire that collapsed in October 1918. And they lost their wealth together with their empire…”²⁰

However, rent control in particular enabled impoverished middle-class people to maintain a standard of living that would have been impossible in a completely free housing market.²¹ Leisure and summer holiday habits had also hardly changed. On the contrary – immediately after the war, people often sought refuge in the summer retreats in the silent hope that the farmers would still be able to find some food for them. The lack of capital also did not lead to a significant buyer’s market for summer holiday homes – this is also evidence of a quite astonishing continuity.²²