VOGELSANG, KARL VON°

VOGELSANG, KARL VON ° (1818–1890), Austrian conservative clerical publicist, and antisemite. Vogelsang was born in Liegnitz (Legnica), Silesia, and studied jurisprudence. A Protestant by upbringing, Vogelsang embraced Catholicism like many other citizens in Mecklenburg after the crisis of the 1848 revolution. In 1850 he therefore lost his position. In the 1860s he and his family moved to Austria. He finally settled in Vienna in 1875 and became the editor of Vaterland, an ultra-conservative and clerical daily, the ideological organ of the antisemitic Christian Social movement. His first year was devoted, inter alia, to attacking the minister of justice, Julius *Glaser (a converted Jew), and defending the striking Brno textile workers (many of whose employers were Jewish). A fierce opponent of liberalism and capitalism, which he blamed for all the ills of society, he identified modern Jewry with capitalism, the disrupter of the ideal Christian, feudal, corporative, social fabric. Though not a racial antisemite, he prepared the grounds for modern conservative antisemitism by furnishing it with a wide social appeal: castigating the insolent "Judenpresse," despising godless and greedy "Reformjuden," and thundering against the "Judenboerse." The demagogic talent and later mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, took over Vogelsang's political objectives and popularized them. Notwithstanding his antisemitic ideology, Vogelsang was highly respected by the Austrian Conservatives even after the Shoah; in 1990 a special Austrian stamp recalled the 100^th anniversary of his death.

bibliography:

P.G.J. Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (1964), index; D. van Arkel, Anti-Semitism in Austria, (Ph.D. thesis, Leiden University, 1967), 56–66. add. bibliography: E. Bader (ed.), Karl v. Vogelsang… (1990); W. Pollak, Tausend Jahre Oesterreich (1973), 250–55; Christliche Demokratie, 2 (1991–92).

[Albert Lichtblau (2^nd ed.)]