“The Public’s Interest in Invalids Has Waned”

Abstract

Abstract The chapter first reconstructs the tension within the war victim movement in 1919 and 1920. It then discusses the declining political weight of war victim welfare that was built on the Invalid Compensation Law and its companion piece, the Invalid Employment Law (Invalidenbeschäftigungsgesetz) of 1 October 1920, when the deepening financial and fiscal crisis forced a retrenchment starting in 1922. The 1924 reforms, engineered by the Christian Socials, transformed postwar war victim welfare into a more bureaucratically-controlled apparatus, rather than the original codetermination process. Organized war victims’ waning institutional influence was in tandem with the consolidation of the milieu parties’ stranglehold of public life in interwar Austria.