Phd thesis defence by Christopher Wendt
This thesis explores how Catholic conservatives, a group that enjoyed power, privilege, and influence within the Habsburg Monarchy, negotiated the collapse of the imperial order in Central Europe after 1918. More specifically, it uses the regional case of Austrian North Tyrol to trace how dominant political Catholics were challenged by imperial collapse, and forced to answer in religious, political, and social terms across the interwar years. Employing local sources that uncover the actions of diverse actors—priests and politicians, men and women associational activists, youth leaders and paramilitary men—this thesis advances arguments about post-war Catholicism, political Catholic hegemony, and the relationship between religion and other points of identification, namely region and nation, in interwar Austria. Rather than being merely a source of familiar comfort after the war, the Catholic religious sphere could be one of conflict, in which authority and hierarchy were renegotiated. Behind its thick veneer, political Catholics’ control of interwar Tyrol was quite fragile, concealing deep personal, interest-based, ideological, and generational fissures. My thesis also shows that while regionalism reemerged after the war as a key political resource, Tyrolean conservatives continually stumbled over just how to reconcile their Catholic, regional affinities with increasingly assertive nationalist projects—a point of friction that contributed to radicalisation within Tyrolean Catholic politics itself by the 1930s. Ultimately, by looking to interwar Austria’s 'Black Provinces', this thesis reorients our view away from familiar Vienna to overlooked processes of conservative resuscitation and conflict in the countryside. By doing so for Tyrol, a province typically characterised by its Catholic devotion and political conservativism, this thesis shows how these values were not innate, but rather required specific, intentional reinvestment to maintain their meaning, particularly in times of upheaval.
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