Ignaz Seipel


Ignaz Seipel was an Austrian prelate and politician of the Christian Social Party, who served as Federal Chancellor twice during the 1920s.

Career

Seipel studied theology at the University of Vienna and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1899. He gained his doctorate in theology in 1903, followed by his habilitation at the University of Vienna, being one of the first scholars writing on business ethics in the context of Catholic social teaching. From 1909 until 1917 he taught moral theology at the University of Salzburg.
Seipel was a member of the clerical conservative Christian Social Party established by the Vienna mayor Karl Lueger in 1893, and served as cabinet secretary in the Austro-Hungarian government during World War I. At that time he also wrote and published a number of famous works, including Nation und Staat , which helped cement his later prominent role in the party. In these writings, unlike most contemporaries swept up by Wilsonian rhetoric, he saw the state as the primary vindication of sovereignty, rather than the nation. In October 1918 he was appointed Minister for Labour and Social Affairs in the last Cisleithanian cabinet under Minister president Heinrich Lammasch.
After World War I, Seipel, a member of the constituent assembly of German Austria, re-established the formerly monarchist Christian Social Party, now operating – the empire having been lost – in the First Austrian Republic. Party chairman from 1921 until 1930, he served as chancellor between 1922 and 1924, and again from 1926 until 1929, then also as Foreign Minister.
To restore the Austrian economy, Chancellor Seipel and his delegate Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein on 4 October 1922 signed the Protocol for the reconstruction of Austria at the League of Nations: by officially renouncing accession to Germany, he obtained an international bond. In order to fight the hyperinflation of the Krone currency, the government at the same time re-founded Austria's central bank Oesterreichische Nationalbank with the task of securing monetary stability. However, these policies let to growing discontent by socialist workers' organizations, and in June 1924 an attempt was made on Seipel's life by a frustrated worker .
Leading a right-wing coalition government supported by the Greater German People's Party and the Landbund, his main policy was the encouragement of cooperation between wealthy industrialists and the paramilitary units of the nationalist Heimwehren. During this time there was an increase in street violence and armed conflicts with the left-wing Republikanischer Schutzbund, culminating in the Vienna July Revolt of 1927 claiming numerous casualties. The Social Democratic opposition thereafter referred to Seipel as the "Bloody Prelate". He finally resigned in 1929 and was succeeded by his party fellow Ernst Streeruwitz. In the following year he once again served in a short-time term as Foreign Minister in the cabinet of Chancellor Carl Vaugoin.
Seipel was assassinated by a socialist during a stay at a sanatorium in the Vienna Woods. He is buried in an Ehrengrab at the Vienna Zentralfriedhof.

Legacy

Seipel's antisemitic manners were the pattern for the character of Chancellor Dr. Schwerdtfeger in Hugo Bettauer's 1922 novel Die Stadt ohne Juden, picturized by Hans Karl Breslauer in 1924.