Karl Lueger and the Reichspost: Construction of a Cult of Personality

Abstract

This article contributes to the body of research on fin‐de‐siècle Viennese and Austrian history, as well as the history of ideas and press history. It expands on the scholarship by focusing on one newspaper — the Catholic‐conservative Reichspost (affiliated with the Christian Social Party) — to analyse how it perpetuated the cult of personality surrounding the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger (1844‐1910). The Reichspost unwaveringly depicted Lueger as a benevolent patriarch to Christian women and children, a practice which commenced before Lueger's ascension to the mayorship and continued until decades after his death. The newspaper merged aspects of a secular and religious faith around the mayor, creating a genuinely messianic figure. Despite the extensive literature on the culture and politics of fin‐de‐siècle Vienna and the interest it continues to generate, Lueger's cult of personality — well established in the literature — and its manifestation in Christian Social print media have thus far been entirely neglected. Wide‐ranging surveys of the Viennese press (such as those conducted by the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies in Vienna) give practical biographical details of fin‐de‐siècle Austrian print media such as the Reichspost. Still, they offer little in the way of a deeper cultural analysis. Through analysing the Reichspost's positioning of Karl Lueger with ‘the people’, this article hopes to address this gap in the scholarship.