In brief, the “Schreckenstage” (“days of horror” or “days of terror”), as they were called by newspapers at the time, were...
In brief, the “Schreckenstage” (“days of horror” or “days of terror”), as they were called by newspapers at the time, were pivotal for the future of Austria. They were a major setback for the Social Democratic Party, which had done well in the April 1927 national elections, narrowly losing to the Christian Socialist Party and its allies. Worse, they enabled the fascist Heimwehr to attract new members and increase its threat to Austria’s democracy.
The riots began as a massive protest against a court decision that had freed three men who had, admittedly, shot and killed two people (an invalid war veteran and his eight-year-old nephew) in a peaceful Social Democratic march in the city of Schattendorf. The court decision was rendered during the evening of July 14, 1927. From most contemporaneous accounts, the protest on July 15th arose spontaneously, catching both the police and Social Democratic leaders by surprise.
Huge crowds of workers and other supporters of the Social Democrats assembled on the Vienna Ring near the University, City Hall, and the Parliament Building. Reportedly, the workers planned to march from the working districts of the city to the parliament and ministry of justice (located across a plaza from the parliament building), then return to their work places and homes. The crowd numbered, at its peak, about 200,000 people or more.
At about 10:00 a.m., the flow of the crowd was blocked at the plaza in front of the Palace of Justice building. This building was guarded by a small number of lightly armed security forces. For some reason, a small Calvary unit rode into the large crowd on horses, with sabers drawn, apparently to try to drive it back toward the Ring. Shortly after that, police security officers fired their pistols into the crowd from the steps of the Palace of Justice.
Enraged, some members of the crowd armed themselves with bricks, tools, boards, and other materials they obtained from a nearby building site. They successfully stormed the Palace of Justice, forcing the police to retreat to higher floors of the building. Shortly thereafter, the building was set on fire. When the fire department came to fight the fire, its trucks were stopped by the crowd which refused them access to the burning building.
The violence escalated in the afternoon when large numbers of police officers came to the Palace of Justice area, and other parts of town, armed with heavy rifles, and began to shoot at groups of people on the street.
The leaders of the Social Democratic Party, belatedly, sent members of its militia, the Republican Guard, to the streets to help calm the crowd. It exhorted Party members to return home. Also, it called a national strike of transportation and communication workers to protest the shooting. At the same time, it refused to provide protesting workers with weapons from its huge arsenal, which included rifles and machine guns.
The clashes between protesters and police continued into the night of Friday, July 15th. By July 16th, the violence had greatly declined, though skirmishes continued. On July 17th, encountering strong resistence in the country’s provinces to its strike, and hearing of plans by the Heimwehr to assemble an army to march into Vienna, the Social Democrats called off the strike.
During the three days, about 85 marchers and bystanders were killed, as were four police officers. About 600 police officers were wounded, 120 of them badly. Between 300 and 500 civilians wounded. Over 1,500 people were arrested.This is the prelude to the Austrian civil war 5 years later when democracy ends in Austria
I think if we’re talking Austrian precedent it would be Red Vienna to the Blue cities - if the leftist movement has the dominant cities but the rightists have the country, they can extract resources from landlords through taxation to build their glorious utopia… until the landlords in the countryside they’ve been leaving alone raise troops there and crush them. America’s not a one-city state like Austria though, where if you hold the countryside and you siege one city you have everything.
Didn’t think Red Vienna could ever extract money from the countryside, while the social democrats held a lock on the gov of Vienna I don’t think they ever got leadership of the country. Stories on Red Vienna invariably mention the local progressive and luxury taxes, although I admit they generally don’t include budget numbers.
But yeah this whole story is basically about Vienna, it’s where this uprising happened and it’s where the fighting in the later civil war happened.
A typical pattern in European capital cities that developed under feudalism is that various significant nobles - whose seat of domain was not in the capital - would own large tracts that they developed, plotted, and built all at once and leased directly. In this way, they made the transition from a funding stream built on the rural agrarian to one built on the urban industrial economy.
A tax on Vienna housing was therefore a draw on the coffers of outlying Austria (and the dead Empire)’s nobles even as they were not formally disposessed.