The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schonerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism

Whiteside, Andrew Gladding

University of California Press, 1975

Bound in publisher's red cloth. Hardcover. No dust jacket. Good binding and cover. Shelf wear. Remainder mark. Clean, unmarked pages. x, 404 pages : portrait ; 25 cm. 

"A biography of Georg von Schonerer (1842-1921), a radical and charismatic leader of the Pan-German movement, which arose to promote the merger of Austria with Germany. Relates the rise of Austrian Pan-Germanism after the military defeat of Austria in the war against Prussia in 1866, which ended with exclusion of Austria from the German Confederation. The first organizational embodiment of the movement was the Osterreichischer Reformverein, founded in 1881 and later supported by other organizations. The ideology of the movement combined populist anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, and German racism. From the early 1880s, when antisemitism came to overshadow the traditional anti-Slav and anti-Latin racism of the Pan-German movement, Pan-Germanists presented anti-Jewish policies as a program of social reform for the toiling masses. Schonerer, more than any other leader, made antisemitism the principal tenet of the Pan-German ideology; his views combined anti-capitalist antisemitism with Catholic conservative antisemitism. His radicalism and aggressiveness alienated some German nationalists and leftist radicals. The Pan-German movement influenced Nazi ideology in many ways." -  Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism