1. Ignaz Seipel was an Austrian Catholic priest and conservative politician, who served as the Chancellor of the First Austrian Republic twice during the 1920s and leader of the Christian Social Party.
35 Facts About Ignaz Seipel
1. 2.
Ignaz Seipel is considered the most prominent statesman of the Austrian right in the interwar period.
3.
Ignaz Seipel studied theology and was ordained as a priest in 1899.
4.
Ignaz Seipel took an interest in social, educational, and economic issues and became friends with Heinrich Lammasch, a prominent Austrian jurist and the last Imperial Minister-President, who appointed him Minister of Social Welfare in his cabinet in late 1918.
5.
Ignaz Seipel built up political Catholicism by aligning the clericals with Vienna's large bourgeoisie, often of Jewish descent.
6.
Disillusioned with democracy, by 1927, Ignaz Seipel advocated for replacing it with an authoritarian system with clerical.
7.
Ignaz Seipel played a crucial role in both the Christian Socialists' acceptance of the republic and their eventual abandonment of democracy.
8.
Ignaz Seipel died in 1932, suffering from diabetes and tuberculosis.
9.
The son of a Viennese carriage driver, Ignaz Seipel graduated from an academic high school in Vienna in 1895, then studied Catholic theology at the University of Vienna.
10.
Ignaz Seipel was ordained a priest on 23 July 1899 and received his doctorate in theology in 1903.
11.
Ignaz Seipel was a member or honorary member of numerous Catholic student fraternities.
12.
At the beginning of November 1918, Ignaz Seipel handed over his official duties to the government of Karl Renner of the Social Democratic Party of Austria.
13.
On 16 February 1919 Ignaz Seipel was elected on the Christian Social ticket to the Constituent National Assembly, the body that adopted the constitution for the First Austrian Republic, which replaced the Republic of German-Austria.
14.
Ignaz Seipel prevented the party from splitting in 1918 over the question of the abolition of the monarchy that was advocated by the Social Democrats and the greater Germans, the name for those who wanted Austria to join the German Reich.
15.
Ignaz Seipel served as chairman of the Christian Social Party from 1921 to 1930.
16.
Ignaz Seipel focused on the right-wing Front Fighters Union of German Austria under the anti-Semite Hermann Hiltl, which he helped re-arm with financial resources from the Hungarian Horthy regime.
17.
Ignaz Seipel reorganized state finances with the aid of a League of Nations loan which was obtained when Austria officially renounced annexation to Germany.
18.
Ignaz Seipel did not want the putschist and troublemaker back in Austria and sent Bavaria a statement saying that Hitler had become a German by serving in its army.
19.
Bavaria attested that Austria had recognized the Austrian citizenship of German soldiers in other cases, but Ignaz Seipel adhered to his legal opinion.
20.
The Innsbruck newspaper quoted him saying that Ignaz Seipel was "as a character of integrity in every respect, a diligent, selfless worker".
21.
From 1926 to 1929, Ignaz Seipel was again Chancellor, fighting in particular against the Social Democrats.
22.
Ignaz Seipel united the CS with the Greater German People's Party, the Landbund, and the National Socialist "Riehl and Schulz Group" to form an anti-Marxist front.
23.
Ignaz Seipel resigned from the office of chancellor on 4 April 1929, although he continued in office until 4 May, when he was succeeded as head of government by Ernst Streeruwitz, of the Christian Social Party.
24.
Ignaz Seipel was not satisfied with the First Republic's form of government.
25.
Ignaz Seipel was a major driver behind the push to strengthen the role of the federal president that was realized in the 1929 amendment to the federal constitution.
26.
Ignaz Seipel negotiated it with the Social Democrats and "probably thought of himself as the future holder of the office".
27.
In 1930 Ignaz Seipel was briefly Austrian foreign minister in the cabinet of Carl Vaugoin.
28.
Ignaz Seipel had offered Otto Bauer, the head of the Social Democrats, a coalition at the height of the world economic crisis.
29.
Ignaz Seipel had seen in the Jews a class that represented mobile large capital and a "certain kind of merchant mentality" by which the people felt threatened in their economic existence.
30.
Ignaz Seipel suffered from tuberculosis and from diabetes as a consequences of the assassination attempt against him.
31.
Ignaz Seipel died in 1932 in the Lower Austrian sanatorium Wienerwald.
32.
Ignaz Seipel fought us with all means and all weapons; we fought him too.
33.
Since Ignaz Seipel was regarded by the Social Democrats as the epitome of reaction and of the alliance between clericalism and capitalism, the article was received with incomprehension by the party base.
34.
The corporatist, Austro-fascist Federal State of Austria considered Ignaz Seipel to be the founding father of the regime.
35.
Ignaz Seipel's coffin was interred in the crypt of the church in the fall of 1934.