Ernst Rüdiger (Graf von) Starhemberg

Aus: G.E.R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions – The Central European Tragedy, London 1939 (hier wird aus der 11. Ausgabe 1946 zitiert)

Gedye war von 1926 bis 1938 Korrespondent der London Times in Wien:

"It was not long before I paid my footing in the way that all newly-arrived journalists did, by writing an article in praise of the Vienna Gemütlichkeit, 'charm' , whipped cream and tolerance. It was a good article, I still maintain, although it only found a different way of saying what so many had said before me and continued to say after me. The Times liked it and gave it a good place. It was merely an unfortunate accident for me that just as it had been set up in type and was waiting to run off the press, a one-column telephone message, also from me, reached the office and had to appear simultaneously with my tribute to the charm of the sentimental, easy-going Viennese, under the headlines 'Rioting in Vienna. Fierce Demonstrations against the Jews.' Thus my first stories from Vienna, like my last, twelve and a half years later, dealt with street excesses against the Jews ."


Über Starhemberg:

"Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg was able to wear by turns the colours of every political movement (except the democratic) because politics were for him no more than a change from the serious business of life of keeping himself amused. What 'going on the binge' is to the type of alcoholic that the Austrians call Quartalssaeufer were politics to Starhemberg. At recurrent intervals he seemed to be seized with an irresistible craving to appear in the political limelight and induldge in political intrigue. Aristocratic, good-looking and endowed with an unfair share of sex-appeal, far more intelligent than his birth and upbringing led people to expect, with a romantic and adventurous background from the days when as a mere boy he got himself mixed up in Adolf Hitler's 'Beerhouse Putsch' of 1923 and challenged death light-heartedly against the ill-armed proletariat with the reactionary Prussian Freikorps, it was an easy matter for the young prince to become the idol of the young Austrian Fascists. Suffering from chronic impecuniosity which led him, the aristocratic Anti-Semite, into all kinds of curious relationships with Jewish moneylenders, it may be justly assumed that Starhemberg was no more indifferent to the prospects of garnering the spoils of office than many humbler Fascist conspirators. Unquestionably deeply imbued with what is called patriotism, he only wavered back and forth in alternate devotion to the Austrian and German brand.

Starhemberg looks well in any uniform. When he entered Graz on November 12th, 1929, at the head of his own Jaeger battalions to join a great Heimwehr parade, he became at one stroke the darling of the young Fascist students of both sexes. He has an easy manner (due to an innate consciousness of his own ineffable superiority to everyone he has ever met, not excepting the whole house of Habsburg) with everyone, aristocrat, official, peasant and worker, who is prepared to take him at his own very high evaluation. Democrats, 'marxists', parliamentarians and socialists are, of course, the lesser breeds without the law, to be converted by fire and sword and then (reasonably well) kept in their place, or utterly rooted out.

Withal he is a likeable personality who would have done little harm and come to none on polo-ground, race-track or night-bar, had he been kept away from his great vice, politics. In 1934 he, too, was guest of our Anglo-American Press Association, and paid for his lunch in a speech in which he talked in what sounded like genuine terms of respect for the rank and file of the workers whose lives and liberties he and his Heimwehr had destroyed. Of course he had constantly in his mouth the Nazi-Fascist cliché of 'Jewish-Marxist betrayers of the workers' applied to the intellectual leaders who, in Parliament with their brains and at the barricades with rifles in their hands, had opposed the progress of reaction. Here are a few quotations from the variegated political album of Starhemberg's speeches:

'The object of our movement is to create a people's State in which every Volksgenosse will have the right to work and bread. By a Volksgenosse I mean only one inspired by the race instinct of the German in whose veins German blood flows. In 'the people' I do not include those foreign, flat-footed parasites from the East who exploit us.'

This was in March 1930. Six months later he declared himself in Graz for a 'German and Christian' Greater Germany. In Salzburg a year later he called the Austrian Republic "a monstrosity". In the autumn of 1930, despite his responsible position as Vice-Chancellor and Minister of the Interior in Vaugoin's Government, he declared: 'We shall fight on to victory even at the cost of a few Asiatic heads rolling in the sand', and, with a dramatic gesture at the Rathaus, declared of the duly elected city fathers that 'We shall hang that gang from their own City Hall". Thus he proved himself an apt pupil of those who were then his (German) Nazi masters. In February 1933 he declared that the Austrians were 'a part of the whole German race', denied 'that we are people of or own' and said that the Austrians would let no one force them into an anti-German position.

But barely a year later this volatile and superficial person was declaring that 'the Austrian miracle has taken place again in 1934. Austria has found the strength to resist the stormy attack of a sixty million Reich, to overthrough armed Bolshevism at home, and to break the Nazi terror and Putsch'. He declared that Austria 'must remain independent even if Berlin should gain the power to put through the Anschluss of Austria and Germany'. 'There can be no Anschluss for us, because we know that it would mean nothing but the degradation of Austria to a colony of Prussia-Berlin.'

While the fit was on him, he displayed tremendous energy and driving-force. But in between these bouts of political intoxication, Starhemberg led the normal humdrum existence of an idle and self-indulgent young aristocrat. Boredom with politics, or the discovery of someone pleasanter to look on than an embryo fascist putschist would intervene. Then for months on end the Prince's desk piled high with untouched papers marked 'Very Urgent'. For weeks his closest political associates had no knowledge of his whereabouts. The Putsch of July 1934 caught Starhemberg bathing on the Lido and cost him the Chancellorship, for when he got back to Vienna the fighting was over and Mussolini had installed Schuschnigg as his nominee. When Schuschnigg neatly jockeyed Starhemberg out of the Cabinet, he had to be fetched from a gay party in the Kobenzl bar to learn his fate. And while the harrased Schuschnigg was playing a lone hand in 1938, during the last terrible month after Hitler's brutal bullying in Berchtesgaden, Starhemberg was ski-ing at St. Moritz."


Nach 1945:

Ab 1937 hauptsächlich in der Schweiz lebend, schloss sich Starhemberg, dessen Güter von den Nazis 1938 enteignet wurden, 1940 der französischen Armee an und übersiedelte nach deren Kapitulation nach Argentinien. Er kehrte 1955 nach Österreich zurück, um die Rückgabe seiner früheren Liegenschaften durchzusetzen. Starhemberg starb 1956 in Vorarlberg. 1971 erschienen seine Memoiren.