the numerical relationships. From around 1870, it would have probably been possible to circumscribe the largest section of bourgeoisie with those who were entitled to vote in cities and industrial locations. Later, the extension of the electoral law made this increasingly less likely. If it can be assumed that “bourgeois” presupposes a certain income, the statistics on personal income tax, which were introduced in 1896, provide a first approximation. At the time, around 6.5 per cent of all employed people were taxpayers. The 33 per cent (or about 300,00 wage earners) who had an income of more than 2400 crowns must certainly be classified as middle-class. Assuming that an average bourgeois household was made up of 4 people, the middle classes consisted of at least 1.2 million people or about 4.6 per cent of the total population of the Austrian part of the empire that totalled around 26 million in 1900. The prominent liberal politician Ernst von Plener (1841–1923) also referred to the small size of the Austrian middle classes during the debate on universal suffrage in 1905/06 – according to his calculations, while 3.4 per cent of the Austrian population was subject to income tax, the figure was 9 per cent in Prussia and as high as 13 per cent in Saxony.15
This picture changes if the Western half of the Habsburg monarchy (Cisleithania) is compared with the territory of the Republic of Austria. Of course, this is due to the fact that, after the collapse of the monarchy, the most important bourgeois centre, the metropolis of Vienna, came to lie on its territory.
Around 1900, about a quarter of all taxpayers lived in Vienna and they earned almost exactly one third of all taxable income in old Austria. The dominance of Vienna among the higher income brackets emerges even more clearly: In 1907, only a quarter of the low-bracket taxpayers lived in Vienna, but this rose to 45 per cent among the “rich” (over 12,000 crowns annual income) and close to 52 per cent among the “very wealthy” (over 40,000 crowns annual income). This shows that more than half of all top incomes were assessed in Vienna!16
If one considers the comparatively small number of bourgeois existences, it comes as almost no surprise that these classes were relatively weak in the overall system of the monarchy. The strength of these groups was diminished even more by three additional problems:
1 1 The not especially large bourgeois classes were divided into a few metropolitan (especially Viennese) configurations and many groups in small and medium-sized towns with few parallels in connection with wealth, culture, and political positions. The dense network of large medium, and small large, towns that existed in Germany (and England) was missing. This differentiation was further increased by the fact that, although the Viennese bourgeoisie clearly dominated the economic sphere, it did not take the lead in the cultural and political life of the monarchy – as was the case with the Parisian bourgeoisie for example. This is because, on the one hand, the Viennese bourgeoisie was consciously German – this hindered any identification on the part of this leading bourgeoisie with the non-German middle-classes and on the other hand, it was strongly perceived to be “Jewish” – and this created a considerable gulf between the liberal upper classes and the increasingly antisemitic middle and lower classes. This perception also prevented the identification of the – mainly German-national (or: Christian social) – antisemitic medium and small towns with the liberal bourgeoisie in Vienna.17
2 2 The ongoing democratisation of the political life that ultimately led to universal suffrage for men in 1906 undermined the hardly resilient, precarious domination of the German-Austrian bourgeoisie even more. The nationalistic, antisemitic, and socialist mass movements threatened the bourgeois positions and contributed to “bourgeois” changing from being another word for “progressive” to a metaphor for cautious, security conscious, progress sceptical, and defensive to the demands for further political modernisation. It is possible that democratisation did not reach old-Austria too late, but too early – before the “gentrification” of society that needed to precede a modern democracy.
3 3 The bourgeoisie increasingly differentiated itself into middle classes oriented on national languages. In this way, any individual “national” bourgeois configuration became automatically involved in a war on several fronts: Against the agrarians (nobility and farmers), and their strong ability to enforce themselves in the political system, against the increasingly strengthened workers’ movement, against the specific other national movements, against the petit bourgeois – usually antisemitic – criticism from the cities, and, possibly even against the state.
However, what made all these bourgeois classes stick together until 1914/18 was that they were obviously able to participate in the economic boom and earn considerable wealth. As Roman Sandgruber put it so appropriately, the decades before 1914 were a “dreamtime for millionaires”.18 Although old-Austria had introduced a “progressive” income tax in 1896, the highest rate only lay at 5 per cent! A person who had a good hand for making money could become fabulously wealthy. This was still accompanied by a certain faith in advancement and security, and in the progress of technology and science. And the forms of propriety, civility, everyday culture, summering in the country, stays in the renowned spas – in short, a supernational bourgeois culture – remained across all of the borders separating nationalities and religions. In general, the middle classes progressed upwards economically, and it is possible that this positive material development among the non-German bourgeoisie could have made it possible to smooth the national contours and develop a new consensus at some time.
1918 – the end of the bourgeois world?
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
