Mein Kampf
less in any similar struggle on the Germans’ part, but they could not offer the necessary resistance to the attacks of the other side. Thus, by way of a misuse of religion on the one hand and by inadequate defense on the other, Germanity was slowly but unceasingly pushed back.
If it happened as described on a small scale, unfortunately things were not very different on a large scale. Here too the anti-German attempts of the Hapsburgs were not resisted as they should have been, particularly by the higher clergy, while the upholding of German interests was pushed entirely into the background.
The general impression could not but be that the Catholic clergy as such had committed a grave infringement on German rights.
In other words, the Church did not seem to feel itself as one with the German people, but unjustly to take the side of its enemies. The root of the whole trouble (particularly in Schönerer’s opinion) was that the Catholic Church did not have control in Germany, and that for this reason if for no other it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.
In this, as in almost everything in Austria, so-called cultural problems were almost entirely in the background. What determined the Pan-German Party’s position toward the Catholic Church was not nearly so much the Church’s attitude toward science, for instance, as its insufficient efforts on behalf of German rights, and its constant advocacy of Slavic presumption and greed in particular.
Now Georg Schönerer was not the man to do things by halves. He took up the struggle against the Church in the conviction that this struggle alone could save the German people. The “Freedom-from-Rome” movement seemed the most violent, but also the hardest method of attack, and one which must surely destroy the enemy fortress. If it succeeded, the unhappy Church schism in Germany was also at an end, and the inward strength of the Empire and the German nation could not but gain enormously from such a victory.
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