Into Manhood

It was when he moved on to Vienna, to complete his studies at the Theological Faculty of the University there, that the religious ecstasies he had been filled with in front of the altar at Kirnberg ten years before began quietly to leak away, like air hissing from a punctured tire. Nothing had changed in him. It was merely the true self that was coming to life in the new setting. For here, at last, was the great world of action and ideas which he once thought to have glimpsed in the church. He was lucky to have seen Imperial Vienna just before the cannons of the First World War blasted away both her gaiety and her glory. Those were its last months as a peaceful Kaiserstadt, the end of end of its long reign as one of the four proud capitals from which the destinies of a continent were decided. But like so many cities and so many empires which have stood, half knowing, on the brink of disaster, the Vienna of those immediate pre-war days had an almost feverish brilliance. This was the climate for which the restless peasant child from Kirnberg had longed; he could scarcely be blamed for not realizing that it was, in fact, only the last brief Indian Summer of his great Fatherland.

Yet as regards to his own career, he was driven by a growing inner emptiness to call a halt within a few months of entering the university. He took the bitter decision to abandon his theological studies, telling his friends, with characteristic bluntness, that he would rather stay a good Christian than become a bad priest. In January of 1914, he went, cap in hand, to his Rector, Prelate Gustav Müller, and was relived to find only sympathy and good wishes. A far greater ordeal was to break the new to his stern stepfather back in Kirnberg; and this task he tackled with a pounding heart  a few days later only to escape with the following admonition: "As far as I'm concerned you can become whatever you want, and if you can find people to help, then you can go on studying something else. There's only one thing that matters - grow up to be a decent person and not a rogue."

Engelbert went back to Vienna to study law and thus became a member of the powerful sworn Catholic brotherhood, the Cartell-Verbund or C.V., which was dedicated to social reform. This was a link which was to give him strong political and moral support throughout his life. As a soldier, as an agrarian expert and as a Minister, Dollfuss never ceased to be a social reformer whose heart was with the humble of this earth. There was an odd twist of fate about Dollfuss' time in pre-war Vienna, among the other poor young students who were trampling the same streets and arguing in the same cafés in the Austrian capital of the day was another future Chancellor who was trying in vain to get his pictures accepted by the Fine Arts Academy,  and acquiring in the process a lasting hatred for the Habsburgs, her Jews and her Marxists. One wonders whether, without knowing it, Dollfuss ever brushed shoulders with the man who was to murder him less than twenty-five years later....Adolf Hitler.

The Peasant Soldier

On June 28, 1914, the dreams and ambitions of the law student Dollfuss, like those of his colleagues throughout Europe, were shattered by the thunderclap from Sarajevo. On the 28th of July, exactly one month after the assassination of Arch-duke Ferdinand, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the Juggernaut started to roll.

Engelbert was almost fully grown, he now stood at 4' 11", when this miniature defender of the fatherland presented himself to a Military Selection Tribunal in Vienna...."My little fellow you have time to grow a bit; the war may last quite a while yet" the inspecting doctor said. Undeterred, Engelbert set for St. Pölten in Lower Austria to try again only to run across the same military doctor he encountered the day before......"Haven't we seen you already and rejected you for being undersized?" he frowned. "Yes sir," replied Dollfuss unabashed, "but since then I've been concentrating really hard on growing!" And, as he spoke, he rose on tiptoe under the corporal's measuring stick, to reach the extra inch required to meet the minimum. The tribunal came to the conclusion that such ardor should not be analyzed by centimeters and pronounced him fit for service, and for him too the World War began.

He started off his training with a Vienna Infantry Regiment of no particular renown but before long he was in the elite Tyrol Rifles later known as the Kaiserschuetzen. The Army had proved in Dollfuss the man what Hollabrunn had proved in Dollfuss the boy: that he was born to lead those comrades around him who were a head and shoulders above him. Hoots of mirth greeted the arrival of the little recruit at the Bozen training garrison, struggling into the barracks like an ant , under his mountain of rucksacks. The teasing slowly died down and the ridicule stopped before the first week was out, he showed that he could endure, better than the next man, eight or ten hours a day of maneuvers under the blazing South Tyrol August sun. His good humor, calm intelligence and the huge parade-ground voice which he managed to squeeze  out of that small body marked him out from the first. Within a few weeks he was made "Commander" of his Barracks, by autumn, platoon leader; and by Christmas of 1914 he had passed with distinction from the Bixen Officers' School.  After a few more weeks of training and wine-swigging in the cellars of South Tyrol, Cadet Dollfuss was posted down to the Italian front in command of a machine-gun platoon. It was to be the start of thirty-seven months of almost unbroken active service in the Dolomites and the "Sette Commune". 

When Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, on May 23, 1915, there was barely one Austrian soldier for every hundred yards of this southern line, and defense works were completely lacking. Steady endurance spiced with heroism were needed to hold the new front, and Dollfuss produced his share of both. The most remarkable of his exploits during this bitter three-year mountain battle was his successful defense of the so-called "Schrimmlerjoch" in October of 1916. This peak was the key to whole divisional sector, and the right-hand spur allotted to Dollfuss and his machine-gunners was in turn the key to his regiment's position - a flanking fire and observation post from which the approach of the Italians up the steep Val di Calamento could be controlled. As such, it had been pounded by the shells of 28-centimeter Italian howitzers throughout the summer of 1916 (one of which, mercifully or providently a "dud", rolled right into the the small command cavern Dollfuss had hewn out of the mountain-side); and in the autumn the long-awaited ground attack was launched. The Italian commander sent up wave after wave of crack Alpini and Bersaglieri troops, confident that their steel would impale whatever resistance the artillery had left alive in the rocks.

Dollfuss hung onto that shattered Dolomite crag with something that was more than bravery: The peasant tenacity that impelled him, as always in life, to finish whatever he had set his mind on or pledged his word to. His force was reduced at one point to 45 able-bodied men, and those all weary and shell-dazed, in the face 600 fresh attackers. But the right-wing of "Schrimmlerjoch" was held.  It was duly christened, for the rest of the war as, the "Dollfuss Breach".

The row of medals can be taken as testimony for Dollfuss' other exploits. More interesting for our purpose than his valor are two other characteristics which began to blossom  in this testing climate. One was his personal popularity, based on that charm and resourcefulness which became a Regimental (and later a national) byword. The other was the sheer humanity of the man, which seemed to flow, deep and spontaneous, from some rich, uncontaminated spring in his nature. As to the first, it is enough to cite evidence that the Machine Gun Section Dollfuss, had the longest waiting list of transfer volunteers in the battalion. Everyone wanted to get under his command, for reasons of comfort as well as prestige. For Dollfuss had the knack of getting the best of his surroundings as well as the best out of his men. Up in the Dolomites, he managed to turn those bare holes scratched out of granite in which they lived into homes, equipped even with a makeshift chapel.  Many of the good deeds which now started to spread the name of Dollfuss around went far beyond those conventional requirements of the "good officer". They revealed the devout Christian in action. Once for example when there was a lull in the fighting, Dollfuss was making his way with one of his men to buy supplies in Bozen for the unit. They had almost reached the town when they overtook an ominous little group: four men with fixed bayonets escorting an unarmed infantryman. "He's a deserter" replied the corporal-in-charge when asked what was going on. The captive must have seen a glimpse of salvation in Dollfuss' compassionate, questioning look, and poured out a passionate appeal of help. He was 18 years old; two of his brothers had already fallen; and when yesterday, in his first day on the front line, his best friend had been killed standing next to him, he had lost his head. But even then he hadn't meant to desert.

The boy was a raw mountain peasant, a type Dollfuss knew at a glance. He also knew that once the escort had marched him down as far as Brigade Headquarters, nothing could save him from the firing squad. The only hope was to find his battalion commander and persuade him to alter his decision. To do that meant climbing back up into the mountains which would take five hours, he was tired and it really was none of his business but his compassionate heart said otherwise. Not many junior officers in any army in the world would, in those circumstances, have done what Dollfuss did. He ordered the corporal, the astounded escort and incredulous prisoner  to turn-about and follow him, thus they all climbed back to the front-line. It took him until dusk  to find the boy's commanding officer, an elderly major with the reputation of a martinet. It took him five minutes to find his opening - the major's contempt for the poor training system of the General Staff, and indeed everything connected with the rear echelons; and another twenty minutes of eloquent pleading to save the boy's life as a "worthy but badly-trained recruit". Dollfuss not only got his request granted but was pressed to stay the night. The next morning, after breakfasting on those front-line luxuries - coffee, butter and marmalade - he was dispatched by cable railway to the valley where he found the major's horse waiting to get him speedily to Bozen. The gruff old battalion commander could scarcely have imagined that he had been dealing with the future Chancellor of his country; but he clearly regarded the little reserve lieutenant as something quite out of the ordinary.

There were many such incidents. On a tactical withdrawal after the great spring offensive of 1916 his unit was trapped under heavy Italian artillery fire when camping in open ground on the slopes of Zunga Torta. A salvo fell among the men, killing several outright and maiming others. Among the seriously wounded was Dollfuss' favorite NCO, a Tyrolian called Ploner. Only a speedy operation could save his life, yet there was not a Red Cross vehicle in sight. Dollfuss commandeered a full ammunition wagon which happened to be passing, off-loaded its shells onto the ground despite the driver's vigorous protests, and strapped his wounded corporal into the improvised ambulance. He then drove to valley himself with his already delirious comrade, transferred him, to an automobile, also requisitioned on the spot, and did not rest until he was under the surgeons knife at Calliano, where the retreating Field Hospital had been set up. Late that night, a weary Dollfuss rejoined the remnant of his unit, having been under constant fire for both halves of the journey, and having exposed himself to an even hotter fire of reprimand from his own superiors. After two weeks on the ridge between life and death, Corporal Ploner lived to tell the tale.

Nor was Dollfuss concerned, in these harsh days, only for his own men. Once, during the autumn offensive of 1917 down on the plains, the whole brigade lost touch with its supplies train somewhere in that stony wilderness between the Tagliamento and the Piave. The troops, as they marched, were forced to feed off the countryside. Somebody produced a jocular requisitioning note left by another unit at a roadside farm: This chit is yours; Your pig is mine (weight 450 lbs.). Dear Fatherland rest on in peace. After a vain attempt to identify the unit in question, Dollfuss wrote out a proper receipt of his own in the faint hope that it might indemnify the peasant for his precious pig.

Such is the picture of Dollfuss growing into manhood as a soldier of the old Austria. It must be remembered when we come to judge him as a statesman of the new Austria. For the character it reveals shows decency and compassion well above the normal measure, without a trace of that harshness or intolerance of which his political enemies were so often to accuse him. Did power change the very essence of the man? Were his foes, blinded by their own bitterness, unable to see it? Or were circumstances too much for both of them?

At all events, it was those last months of war which completed the transition in Dollfuss' own mind from officer to politician. After the Emperor Charles' clumsy if well meaning armistice attempts in the spring of 1917, and particularly after President Wilson's Fourteen-Point peace program announced the following January, diplomacy began to dominate the soldier's discussions in the most isolated outpost of the straggling, subsiding Austrian front.

Dollfuss was one of the many to whom, at the time, the dismemberment of the Empire still seemed unthinkable, whichever way the fortunes of war fell out. Not that, as events were soon to show, he was an uncompromising Monarchist. Far from it. As a Lower Austrian peasant-farmer, he had been born and bred to the outlook of a democratic yeoman rather than that of a feudal retainer; and indeed, when the old order which he served so well did collapse beyond repair, he was one of the first to recognize the reality of the new.

Until that turning-point came, however, he did his duty without reserve as an officer of the Emperor - less perhaps out of emotion than out of plain loyalty and habit. After all, for centuries the double- headed eagle had brooded over the fields of his childhood like the winds in the sky - something so accepted and inevitable that one got beyond questioning the good or the bad of its ways. And now, for over three years, he had fought for the same omnipresent emblem in the Dolomites. Discontent and mutiny had begun, it is true, to weaken the ranks of the loyal Alpine army. But until the horror of the final collapse, this "Bolshevik agitation" was regarded by the front-line soldier as just another excrescence of that civilian world with which he had lost real contact. Like profiteers or faulty cartridges, it might help to lose a war; yet it could surely never carry away a fatherland.

"As far as I'm concerned, lets give Italy the South Tyrol up to the Salurner Klause. But the rest of Austria-Hungry must stay as it is in its historic frontiers. It's an economic entity formed over the centuries and it's the heart of Europe. If the pulse gets blocked here, the whole continent will fall sick." He was equally emphatic and prophetic when a comrade asked him about his own future: "I certainly shan't stay in the army. The country also need men out of uniform. I intend to finish my law studies and then I have a strong inclination to go in for a political career. "

A few weeks later, politics caught up with them all. The ancient walls of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had finally caved in, their great motley stones loosened from within and pounded from without. When the armistice was declared, Dollfuss happened to be on a three-day leave of absence in Innsbruck, a chance which saved him from the months of imprisonment which befell his surrounded regiment. The news broke just as he was about to board a train to return to Rovereto. Instead, he got on the next train eastwards for Vienna, and set about putting his front-line declarations into practice. 

11.23.06