The Early Years

From the book "Dollfuss" published in Austria in 1935 by Father Johannes Messner 
and from the book "Prelude to Infamy" published in 1961 by Gordon Brook-Shepherd

That rich, tranquil wedge of land between the Wachau Valley of the Danube and the foothills of the Alps was the right soil to have bred Austria's first patriot.  For this is a rib of the green cradle of the nation. No foreign borders can be seen here, or even sensed. There are no pockets of Slav or Magyar settlers to recall the patchwork Empire of a dozen peoples over which the Austrians once ruled. It is an enclosed, compact, homogeneous and, above all, a deep-rooted country side. The house of the Dollfuss family, where he was born on October 4, 1892, belongs to the hamlet of Great Mairerhof, which together with a dozen other peasants' dwellings forms part of the commune of St. Gotthard. It stands some distance back from the road leading to Texing - it was in the parish church of Texing that the future Chancellor was baptized - and the little house with its old thatched roof is almost entirely hidden by the surrounding fruit trees, in this neighborhood an important source of income for the peasants. The property, which has been in the hands of the Dollfuss family for centuries, was occupied in 1935 by a maternal uncle of the late Chancellor. On the ground floor to the left of the main door is the room in which Engelbert Dollfuss was born. It has remained unchanged. In the corner is a great table with the sign IHS inlaid in the middle. Its smoothly polished surface shows that many generations have sat to eat at it. The Dollfuss family were old-established independent peasant-farmers whose roots went deep into the rich soil they ploughed. Their Stammbaum, or table of ancestors, is still being embellished today in 2004. It is an impressive chart the size of a hearth rug, eight feet long by three feet wide, covered with name-squares in blue and gold like a colored quilt, and backed, somewhat incongruously, with flowered kitchen linoleum so that it can be rolled up tidily after the privileged visitor's inspection and stored again in the great oak cupboard. At the very top, in a square thickly bordered in gold, stands the first Dollfuss to be traced in the church registers of the neighborhood - André Dollfuss, who died in 1588, already working the land of Lower Austria as a free man. By the time little Engelbert opened his eyes onto this same landscape, therefore his family had been settled and respected for over 300 years.  

Not far away is the commune of Kirnberg, and it was here, in his stepfather's house, that the Chancellor spent the days of his youth. On the road itself are only a few houses. As you approach the village the first thing that meets the eye is a massive church tower, already indicating that the church itself is an unusual one.  The way to it leads through a pleasure-garden and under the archway  of a monastic building which surrounds the sacred edifice. Thus enclosed, yet standing by itself, the little church, which in part dates from the year 1336, towers high above the surrounding building. This latter, once the home of a community of hermits dedicated to St. Jerome, it served as a country house for the bishop of Vienna in the 1930's. It was one of these who contributed with the parish priest to the expenses of the young Engelbert's education, which his parents were not in a position to bear alone.

The home of the Chancellor's parents is situated some distance from the road. It is a small detached farm-house, and to reach it you must cross a stream and walk about two miles up hill. The farm is surrounded  by pasture and arable land, planted with the fruit trees characteristic of the region. From here the little "Engel," as he was called at home, had quite a long walk to go to school in Kirnberg. Though he had to be there at an early hour for his various duties, as well as being occupied in the church, he also had to help at home whenever he was available. He would often be outdoors looking after the cattle, only a couple of beasts, it is true, but enough for the little fellow to manage.. When on Sundays his stepfather walked round their little estate Engel would often accompany him. Sometimes his father would stop and look intently at the trees or at the ground, and the little boy would ask "What are you looking at Father?" And when he received the reply: "To see if anything is growing, and whether we are going to anything to eat and drink," then he too would look earnestly with his father, as if he also understood that, in a small farm where there is never anything forthcoming more than the absolutely necessary, the prospects of the harvest are a matter of greatest importance. Such was the lesson which the young Engelbert learned from his earliest years: that life is work, and that work gives life its meaning and value.

Dollfuss' way out, and up, into the world, as with countless generations of gifted peasant boys before him, was through the Catholic Church. Apart from his strong, happy personality, the only sign of anything exceptional about the child had been his insatiable appetite for reading. The moment he had mastered the mysteries of print, he lived with a book in his hand, either tending the cattle in the meadows during the long summer days or squinting under a kerosene lamp in his bedroom during the even longer winter nights. The problem, on that isolated farm, was to find something to read; and it was a great moment when he discovered a heap of old Austrian "Peasant Calendars"  which, in the days of Emperor Franz Josef, were the staple literature, often the only literature, of the farm-dweller.

He himself later described to a friend how he had first learned about the problems of the country around him from this hoard of well-thumbed annuals, just as his first geographical notions of the greater world beyond that came from the novels of Karl May. "It was the custom in our house" he related, "to store up the old calendars, and by a lucky chance I once stumbled on the chest in which they were kept. I used to take three or four of them at a time out with me during the grazing weeks and just and read. You would never believe how much knowledge and self-education one can get that way. From those Calendars I learned the lesson that the peasant must be ready to help and advise everyone, even those people who stand outside his own circle and field of work."

It may have been Bible stories and Saints' days with which those calendars were plentifully sprinkled; it may have been those solemn moments at the table when stepfather Schmutz, the Crucifix in the Herrgottswinkel above his bowed head, called for the Lord's Prayer before the whole family- hired help and all-dipped their spoons into the common bowl of "Stohsuppe" or sour cream soup. Whatever started it off, when "Engel" was eight or nine years old, he began to play at being a priest. He built a little makeshift altar in the house, and read Mass and preached sermons in his piping voice as he had learned in the local church. The household was too close to God to find this either exceptional or blasphemous.

Kirnberg church, which now begins to play a dominant role in his life, with its elaborate baroque chapel, its frescoes, its gilded angels, and its fine altar painting of the Holy Family (which somehow got there from the great Carthusian Abbey at Gaming when the Emperor Leopold dissolved the monasteries), it is an impressive church for such a humble community. Young Engelbert  fell completely under its spell. A single ambition surged within him, to become an altar boy and assist at Mass. He first tackled the sacristan Fiala, who protested that the smallest robes he had in the vestry were far too long. But, even in those days, Dollfuss was not one to give up. He had resumed his attack through the village priest, Simon Veith, a kindly man who already had a soft spot for the child. And in the end, Fiala was persuaded to take six inches off the children's vestments (black for ordinary occasions and red for Sundays), and the diminutive Engelbert had his great day, swinging the incense-burners before the assembled farmers of Kirnberg and their Sunday polished broods.

It was when an even greater day arrived, and he was allowed to perform the same service for no less a personage than the visiting Bishop Doctor Schneider, that the Dollfuss boy made up his mind. He announced to his stepfather that he would like to become a priest.

As it turned out, it was a false sense of vocation. What was really driving Dollfuss was simply the impulse to go and meet the great world and put his mark upon it somewhere. And the Church, represented by that glowing baroque altar at Kirnberg and the ornate Sunday robes, just happened to be the first part of that great world to touch him. But the decision was none the less firm for being short lived, and it placed the Schmutz household in a quandary. As we have seen there was barely enough money for the necessities of life; to finance a costly education was out of the question. As soon as the difficulty became known, however, everyone of standing got together to solve it. The head of the village school, Helmberger, pronounced confidently that his small pupil was quite capable of mastering the hard training; his deputy, a certain Neimetz, offered to supply any extra coaching gratis during the intervening months. But it was the priest Simon Veith who solved the vital problem of payment: an eloquent plea to Bishop Schneider promptly produced a free place in the archiepiscopal boys' seminary at Oberhollabrunn, on the other side of the Danube, some thirty miles north of Vienna. It was here in the autumn of 1904, that Engelbert Dollfuss presented himself, after a last excited summer amid the pear trees and rye-fields of Kirnberg.

Peasant boys were nothing new to the priests at Hollabrunn. Indeed, they rather specialized in them, looking among all this rustic chaff for a few grains of precious seed for Mother Church. Yet, for Dollfuss, the beginning must have been a special ordeal, since the challenge was to his courage no less than to his brain. he could not have been more than a tennis net high at this stage and, for the first time, he had to defend himself against the mockery and bullying, not of a handful of familiar village lads, but of two hundred complete strangers drawn from all corners of Austria.

On the whole, his courage did better than his brain. Indeed, the diminutive scholar from Kirnberg failed in his Prima or first year's test and had to repeat the class studies as an external student before he could rejoin the seminary. And though there was never again any such disastrous setback, his whole academic career seems to have been marked by industry rather than by brilliance. (A school list which has survived for one of his early years shows him only 23rd out of 26 in his class.) One of his teachers at Hollabrunn has summed up the general impression he made on the staff in these words: "Dollfuss was certainly among the good students. But I cannot remember him ever standing out especially in his work. He was a very industrious scholar, and he made steady progress; yet he never threw off any sparks."

The sparks were reserved for outside the classroom. The boy found himself instantly absorbed by the other human beings around him, their problems, their weaknesses, their opinions. It was at Hollabrunn that he first discovered his own passionate interest in people and practical issues; and then, as ever afterwards, he greatly preferred them to books. It was here also that he proved, to himself and to others, that his strength of character and his sunny nature were more than enough to make up in the world for his lack of inches. Without arrogance, and apparently almost without effort, the smallest pupil in the school soon commanded respect from the biggest.

He took a full part in the schools' life, was a keen clarinet performer in the school band and an even keener gymnast and soccer player in the school team.  But the picture which most comrades will have taken away is of Dollfuss, standing on tiptoe or upon a chair to make himself seen and heard, organizing petitions and protests, reconciling two heated disputants in an argument, or drawing the essentials out of some general debate. The politician in him was, in fact, already awakened, and it was significant that, during his later years at Hollabrunn, young Dollfuss was already devoting far more time to political problems than was natural in a candidate for holy orders.

Many of the actual characteristics of the statesman seem to have been discernible in the schoolboy. One of his classmates who sat next to him for eight years, has described how sociological problems came to absorb Dollfuss when he was still in his early teens. Even at this age, he was deeply interested in the Catholic reforms of München-Gladbach and saw the Christian faith as the only worthwhile impetus for political regeneration.