Karl Lueger

Karl Lueger (born October 24, 1844, Vienna, Austria—died March 10, 1910, Vienna) was a politician, cofounder and leader of the Austrian Christian Social Party, and mayor of Vienna who transformed the Austrian capital into a modern city.

Lueger, from a working-class family, studied law at the University of Vienna. Elected to the capital’s municipal council as a liberal in 1875, he soon became popular for his exposure of corruption. Lueger did not hesitate to exploit the prevalent anti-Semitic and nationalistic currents in Vienna for his own demagogic purposes: he supported politicians who actively perpetuated the myth of the blood libel and frequently inveighed against an alleged Jewish influence on academia and the press. Though Lueger’s personal beliefs remained a matter of scholarly debate long after his death, he provided the virulent anti-Semitism of extremists such as Georg, Ritter (knight) von Schönerer, with a patina of mainstream respectability. Lueger had his largest following among artisans and the lower-middle class. Lueger was elected to the Austrian Reichsrat (parliament) in 1885 and in 1889 was one of the founders of the Christian Social Party, remaining one of the party’s most effective leaders until his death.

Lueger opposed Austro-Hungarian dualism and advocated a federal state. When the Christian Social Party won two-thirds of the seats in the Viennese municipal council in 1895, he was elected mayor, but the emperor, Franz Joseph I, regarding Lueger as a social revolutionary, refused to confirm his appointment for two years. From 1897 on, Lueger served as mayor of Vienna. He incorporated the suburbs; brought streetcars, electricity, and gas under the city government; and developed parks and gardens, schools, and hospitals. Under his administration, Vienna became an efficient, modern metropolis.

Lueger was a champion of universal male suffrage, which was introduced in Austria in January 1907. The Christian Social Party’s platform of federation to solve the empire’s nationalities problem was also decisively influenced by him. Throughout the 20th century, historians largely dismissed Lueger’s anti-Semitism as a matter of political expediency and as a reflection of the age. Adolf Hitler—who had moved to Vienna in 1908 and had witnessed Lueger at the apex of his power—praised Lueger’s charisma and popular appeal in Mein Kampf and elsewhere, although Hitler’s own brand of anti-Semitism adhered more closely to the racist demagoguery of Schönerer and Julius Streicher. The events of the Anschluss, World War II, and the Holocaust did not lead to an immediate reappraisal of Lueger and his influence, but by the early 21st century Vienna had begun to distance itself from his legacy. In 2012, in a move that was strongly opposed by members of the far-right Freedom Party, a section of the Ringstrasse, the city’s central boulevard, that had borne Lueger’s name since 1934 was renamed Universitätsring (University Ring).