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Hans Eibl: A Religious Nature in a Psychopolitical Idiom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Richard Geehr
Richard Geehr
Affiliation:
Bentley College
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Extract

In few Austrians were preoccupations with post-empire culture and politics stronger than in Hans Eibl, Richard von Kralik's most enthusiastic disciple. Like may young Austrians who had wintnessed the crumbling of the Habsburg empire, Eibl longed for vanished glories, for an all-encompassing Germanic community, and for a leader who combined regenerative religious qualities with political greatness. Though Eibl himself tried to fill these needs with a synthesis of religion and politics, he fell victim to his own endeavors. Given his personality and professional specialization, as well as him mentors, plus the instability of the First Republic, it perhaps could not have been otherwise.

Type
The First and Second Republics
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 17 , January 1981 , pp. 156 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1981

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References

1 Eibl's assertion that Bielitz was part of “former Austrian Silesia” gives evidence of his strong nationalist feelings. “Hans Eibl öber sein Leben und Wirken” (typewritten vita in the possession of the Wissenschaftliche Kommission des Theodor Körner-Stiftungsfonds und des Leopold Kunschak-Preises zur Erforschung der österreichischen Geschichte der Jahre 1918 bis 1938), p. 1.

2 Kraus, Karl, “Kralikstag,” Die Fackel, November, 1922. p. 128.Google Scholar

3 The party evidently denied Eibl admission because he was a devout Catholic. Zawodsky, Felix, “Hans Eibl. Mehr als ein bloßes Einzelschicksal.” Die Furche, December 6, 1958, p. 4.Google Scholar Friedrich Muckermann states that Eibl was so devout that he took communion almost every day. Muckermann, Friedrich, Im Kampf zwischen zwei Epochcn (Mainz: Mat-thias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1973), p. 342.Google Scholar

4 Eibl, Hans, “Abendland und Christentum,” Deutsche Frömmigkeit, March. 1940, p. 38.Google Scholar Eibl was less successful with the Germans. On March 25. 1933. he warned Josef Paul Goebbels during a personal interview in Berlin that National Socialism needed the Church to avoid succumbing to bolshevism. Goebbels was of the opposite opinion and subsequently refused to receive him. Eibl, , “Hans Eibl öber sein Leben und Wirken,” p. 3.Google Scholar

5 Eibl, Hans. unpublished “Erinnerungen.” September 17, 1944. p. 2. Eibl's “Erinnerun-gen,” at the time of my research, were in the possession of one of his sons, Erich Eibl, who resided in Linz.Google Scholar

6 A number of Eibl's former students told me that he was a very popular figure in the classroom.

7 In a letter of May 12. 1932. to Hitler. Eibl may have included his plans for three documentary films dramatizing Germany's embattled position. In the spring of 1975 Erich Eibl, Hans Eibl's youngest son. informed me that Hitler replied to his father's letters. To prevent possible Russian reprisals, these letters were destroyed at the end of World War II.

8 Taylor, Robert R.. The Word in Stone (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1974), p. 276.Google Scholar

9 Friedrich Heer first mentioned the need for such a study shortly after the publication of his Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler (Munich: Bechtle Verlag, 1968).Google Scholar

10 Stern, Fritz, Gold and Iron (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 161.Google Scholar

11 See Photo No. 1.

12 Hans Eibl, “DerTempel des Menschen,” Die Warte, April, 1936. p. 12.

13 Dreher, P. Ansgar, “Zur Beuroner Kunst,” in Beuron 1863–1963, Festschrift zum hun-dertjährigen Bestehen der Erzabtei St. Martin (Beuron/Hohenzollern: Beuroner Kunstverlag, 1963), p. 372.Google Scholar

14 ”Ibid., p. 384.

15 Undated letter from Eibl, to Kralik, , Vienna Stadtbibliothek, Nachlaß Richard von Kralik. Carton I (Städtische Bibliothek), Inventory No. 120/45.Google Scholar

16 This sketchbook is contained in the Nachlaß Kralik.

17 Eibl, Hans, “Zur rechten Würdigung des Lebenswerkes von Richard von Kralik,” Schö-nere Zukunft, December 11, 1927. p. 237.Google Scholar

18 Kralik to Ottmann. February 7, 1912, Vienna Stadtbibliothek, Nachlaß Richard von Kralik. no inventory number given. Two years earlier the mortally ill Karl Lueger had proposed the building of a Valhalla at a municipal council session to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Emperor Francis Joseph. Lueger's idea probably stemmed from Kralik, who served as the main cultural spokesman for the Christian Social Party before World War I. It is interesting to note that the “Valhalla idea” had assumed a political importance even before Lueger's death on March 10, 1910. See Kuppe, Rudolf, Karl Lueger und seine Zeit (Vienna: Öster-reichische Volksschriften, 1933), pp. 423 and 424.Google Scholar

19 Gabriele Eibl to Kralik, May 30, 1915, Vienna Stadtbibliothek, Nachlaβ Richard von Kralik, Carton VI (Städtische Bibliothek), Inventory No. 120/45.

20 The winner was the famous Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister.

21 Eibl to Maia Kralik, July 16, 1915, Vienna Stadtbibliothek. Nachlaβ Richard von Kralik, Carton VI (Städtische Bibliothek), Inventory No. 120/45.

22 Eibl to Richard von Kralik, July 10, 1915, Vienna Stadtbibliothek, Nachlaβ Richard von Kralik, Carton VI (Städtische Bibliothek), Inventory No. 120/45. This peculiar amalgam first made its appearance in Eibl's prewar writings and drawings. See Hans Eibl, “Ägyptische Gotik. Fragmente aus einem Reisetagebuch von Hans und Gabriele Eibl,” Der Gral, October, 1912-September, 1913, pp. 479–486 and 554–558.

23 Eibl to Kralik, July 10, 1915, Vienna Stadtbibliothek, Nachlaβ Richard von Kralik, Carton VI (Städtische Bibliothek), Inventory No. 120/45.

24 Erich Eibl informed me that the first designs for the temple originated in 1916.

25 Hans Eibl, “Betrachtungen über Architektur,” Das Neue Reich, August 21, 1926, p. 949.

26 Hans Eibl, “Zwei Tiroler Künstler,” ibid., August 15, 1925, p. 1,091.

27 Hans Eibl, “Religion und moderne Kunst,” ibid., May 3. 1924. p. 674.

28 Hans Eibl, “Zum Vertrag von Locarno,” ibid., November 14, 1925, p. 127. It is at this point that Eibl would probably have become especially receptive to Hitlerian politics. According to J. P. Stern, “Politics, in the scheme Hitler evolved, is personalized, whereas all impersonal aspects of politics, including its stable institutions and its foundations in the rule of law. are designated as ‘abstract’, ‘bureaucratic’, or ‘inauthentic’. This ploy. Hitler's major contribution lo the political theory of fascism, owes its success to being part of a specifically German situation. Whereas in other Western countries politics based on the analogy with private experience comes to be distrusted as arbitrary and tyrannical, and is superseded by politics based on and regulated by constitutional and parliamentary devices, German thinking is apt to distrust these devices as ‘mere form’ and sham. The Romantics of the early nineteenth century and after them the right-wing nationalists of the Second Reich acclaim the analogy and see in the charismatic personality—the ‘genuine’ or ‘natural’ leader–the fulfillment of their political hopes. Once a self-consciously German ideology is articulated and Weimar democracy is identified with the Versailles ‘Diktat’, those institutional devices come to be associated with ‘the West’ and correspondingly discredited. This is the moment when the politics of authenticity and of personal experience moves into the centre of the stage.” Stern, J. P., Hitler, the Führer and the People (Glasgow: Fontana, 1975), p. 24.Google Scholar

29 Eibl, “Zum Vertrag von Locarno,” p. 129.

30 Ibid., pp. 128 and 129.

31 Ibid., p. 129.

32 Eibl, Hans, Der Tempel des Menschen. Entwürfe zu einem Reichsehrenmal (Vienna: Chwalas Druck, 1927), p. 12.Google Scholar

33 See Photo No. 2.

34 Hans Eibl, “Der Tempel des Menschen,” Die Warte, April, 1936, pp. 12–13.

35 Hans Eibl, Der Tempel des Menschen. Entwürfe zu einem Reichsehrenmal, p. 5.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 12.

38 Ibid.

39 See Photo No. 3.

40 Eibl, Der Tempel des Menschen. Entwürfe m einem Reichsehrenmal, p. 11.

41 Eibl had originally intended that the temple was to be built “on the heights of the Bisamberg.” Ibid., p. 12. Later, according to Erich Eibl, he wanted to build it “somewhere on the Danube.” Erich Eibl also informed me that some of the windows were actually completed and are now in the art collection of the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna.

42 Hans Eibl, “Zu unsem Bildern,” Der Gral, January, 1931, p. 356.

43 Eibl was perhaps a victim of Greek culture, believing with Richard Wagner “that no progress in modern art [was] possible without considering where that art [stood] in relation to the Greeks.” Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, “Wagner and the Greeks,” Times Literary Supplement, 01 9, 1976, p. 38.Google Scholar

44 Muckermann, Im Kampf zwischen zwei Epochen, p. 342.

45 In a handwritten document probably written late in 1932, Kralik complained about the “dangerously threatening” incursions of nationalism into Christian political movements, adding that such incursions threatened to undermine Lueger's brilliant ideas. See “Christlichsozial, Kirchlichsozial,” Vienna Stadtbibliothek, Nachlaβ Richard von Kralik, Inventory No. 95962.

46 Stern, Hitler, the Führer and the People, p. 58.

47 As late as 1950 Eibl lamented the expulsion of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc., after the end of hostilities in 1945, without mentioning prior German expulsion of other nationalities from the same areas. He evidently still believed that Hitler would have treated the Jews as any other nationality had they had a country of their own. Unpublished “Denkschrift über einen völkerrechtlichen Ausweg aus den gegenwärtigen Schwierigkeiten” in the author's possession, p. 2.

48 Eibl, Hans, “Zum 60. Geburtstag von Professor Heinrich Ritter von Srbik,” Das Kino Journal, 11 19, 1938, pp. 2–3.Google Scholar