Political Considerations of Vienna Period
helped to consolidate the foundation of my political way of thinking.
Among the institutions which most plainly showed the decay inside the Austrian Monarchy, even to the otherwise hardly keen-eyed bourgeois Philistine, the chief was the one which ought rightfully to have been strongest—Parliament, or, as it was called in Austria, the Reichsrat.
The model for this body was plainly in England, the land of classical “Democracy.” The whole beneficent arrangement was taken thence and transported to Vienna with as little change as possible.
In the House of Deputies and the House of Lords the English bi-cameral system was resurrected. Only the “houses” themselves were somewhat different. When Barry had caused his parliamentary palace to sprout from the waves of the Thames, he had resorted to the history of the British world empire, and had got thence the decorations for the twelve hundred niches, consoles, and pillars of his splendid building. Sculpture and painting made the House of Lords and Deputies into the nation’s temple of fame.
Here was Vienna’s first difficulty. For when the Dane Hansen had finished the last gables on the new marble house of the peoples’ representatives, by way of ornament he could do nothing but borrow from Antiquity. Roman and Greek statesmen and philosophers beautify this theater of “Western Democracy,” and with symbolic irony the four-horse chariots above the two houses pull toward the four quarters of the compass, a perfect expression of what was then going on inside.
The “nationalities” had objected to any glorification of Austrian history in this building as an insult and a provocation—just as in Germany itself it was only in the thunder of the World War’s battles that anyone dared dedicate the Wallot Reichstag building with an inscription to the German people.
When I, not yet twenty, first went into the splendid building on the Franzensring to see and hear a sitting of the House of Deputies, my feelings were mixed.
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