Emil Steinbach

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Emil Robert Wilhelm Steinbach (born June 11, 1846 in Vienna ; † May 26, 1907 in Purkersdorf , Lower Austria ) was an Austrian lawyer , politician and finance minister . As a senior civil servant and minister, he carried out a number of significant legislative reforms, some of which still have an impact today.

Emil Steinbach

Life

Youth and education

Emil was born as the first of three children of the independent goldsmith Wilhelm Steinbach († 1877) and his wife Emilie († 1881), née Ofner, in Vienna- Mariahilf . The father came from Arad (then Kingdom of Hungary ) and had converted from the Jewish to the Roman Catholic faith on the occasion of his marriage . The family lived in modest circumstances. Emil's brother Wilhelm died of kidney colic at the age of 18 .

As a secondary school student, Emil tried to support the family with tutoring. In 1862 the extremely committed student switched to the academic high school as an external student and graduated the following year, at the age of 17, with an excellent school leaving certificate.

Steinbach then studied law at the University of Vienna , where, as at school, he made a great impression on colleagues and professors with his almost photographic memory . He received his PhD in 1868 for Dr. jur. Until 1874 he graduated from the Advokaturpraxis as a trainee, the Bar exam took off and became a lecturer and later professor of law and economics at the Graduate School of the Vienna Academy of Commerce ordered. The devout Catholic, who was never married and worked tirelessly, hardly had a private life. After the death of his parents, he joined the family of his second brother Robert. His personal friends were Burgtheater director Max Eugen Burckhard , the writer Eduard Pötzl , the journalist Jakob Herzog and the scholar Hermann von Löhner .

Ministry of Justice

At the end of 1874 Steinbach was accepted into the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Justice as Ministerial-Vicesekretär , because he had attracted attention with good legal articles. In 1880 he was already a section councilor, in 1882 a ministerial councilor and in 1890 section head . He also held his post at the commercial academy until 1885. He was the chief civil law officer and, above all, the representative of the ministry before both houses of the Reichsrat and its committees.

Through his work in committees and bodies, he played a leading role in the introduction of accident and health insurance for workers, worker protection regulations, the Trade Inspector Act, the establishment of the Post Office Savings Bank and the nationalization of the railway network. Usually these were areas that were not directly under the influence of the Ministry of Justice. But the less competent minister Alois Prazak had found a talented helper in Steinbach. Prime Minister Eduard Taaffe also became aware of Steinbach and appointed him as a special advisor.

The reform of the liberal trade regulations , with a restriction of the freedom of trade to protect small business owners, politically wanted by Taaffe, was conceived by Steinbach. However, this also provided for labor protection provisions, such as the prohibition of child labor and night work for women, and created the trade inspectorate based on the British model. The reforms even led the leader of the Social Democrats, Victor Adler, to say in 1891 that Austria, along with England and Switzerland, had the best labor protection law in the world .

In his central function in the ministry, in May 1890, he brought down an attempt by the Agriculture Minister Julius von Falkenhayn to tighten criminal law provisions because of the rampant strike movements .

Finance minister

Minister Emil Steinbach, 1894

From February 2, 1891 to November 11, 1893, Steinbach was Minister of Finance in the Taaffe cabinet. He was instrumental in the social policy legislation of the Taaffe era and advocated an extension of the right to vote . In 1892 he carried out a currency reform to reorganize the economy and a tax reform with the introduction of a progressive income tax . The personal income tax for incomes in excess of 600 guilders was only 0.6% to a maximum of 4% for very large incomes over 100,000 guilders. He was able to carry out the currency reform, a conversion from silver guilders to gold currency, the gold crown , together with the Hungarian finance minister Sándor Wekerle .

He and Taaffe fell while trying to introduce universal suffrage. In addition to the existing voting right, men from the age of 24 should in principle be given the right to vote. German conservatives and the Polish club had allied themselves with their opponents, the German liberals , for the purpose of overthrowing them.

Supreme Court

Subsequent to his ministerial office, Steinbach became President of the Senate at the Supreme Court , a post created especially for him. In 1899 he became second and in 1904 first president of the Supreme Court. He also served as the President of the Legal Society . Emperor Franz Joseph , who particularly valued Steinbach, awarded him the title of nobility, several medals, and in 1899 appointed him a member of the manor house of the Reichsrat.

His unhealthy lifestyle, too much work, and too little sleep caused serious health problems. After a stroke he was brought to the Purkersdorf Sanatorium to recover , where he died on May 26, 1907 of paralysis on one side and a pulmonary edema . He was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery . It was the year that universal suffrage had finally been introduced in Austria.

Political opinions

Due to the conditions experienced in his childhood, Steinbach developed into a radical democrat and fundamental opponent of the capitalist market economy . Steinbach was already influenced during his studies by his teacher Lorenz von Stein and his views on the containment of the evils of capitalism through a balancing role of the state. The anti-Semitism and backwardness of this school of thought did not prevent Steinbach from adhering to it all his life. In his reforms, Steinbach advocated the idea of using bureaucracy as an element to overcome class differences .

Initially belonging to the left-wing liberal camp, Steinbach moved to the conservative camp in later years. His ideas showed points of contact with those of Bismarck and Karl von Vogelsang . Although he was the spiritus rector of the electoral reform, which meant a fundamental democratization, he maintained that democratically elected parliaments were completely incapable of legislative work . For him, the electoral reform was a means of calming the labor movement, suppressing liberalism, weakening and fragmenting parliament and strengthening the emperor and government.

His friend the social politician Joseph Maria Baernreither described Steinbach and his views critically:

“Basically he was a good person, but he hated property […] The possessing, educated, often enough half-educated middle class, he disliked what is called the bourgeoisie , middle class in England, he considered them to be socially and politically incapable to solve government tasks. He completely underestimated the economic importance of this class and tried to limit it wherever he could [...] Hence his overestimation of the civil servant status. His ideal was the exercise of all state and economic functions as an office. In this he was entirely an older-style socialist. He only had contemptuous words for self-administration and self-activity […] German liberalism had no greater enemy in Austria than Steinbach. His recipe for healing Austria was therefore very simple. The representatives of these strata are incapable of governing the state; one must reach deeper where the healthy forces of the Austrian peoples rest unused. The bourgeois classes must be restricted by a radical right to vote and the lower, politically untouched strata come to the surface. "

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , pp. 5 and 19.
  2. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , p. 7f.
  3. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , p. 10f. and 18ff.
  4. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , pp. 25 and 35.
  5. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , pp. 35ff.
  6. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , pp. 45ff.
  7. ↑ Gerald Stourzh: On the institutional history of industrial relations and social security - an introduction. In: Gerald Stourzh, Margarete Grandner (ed.): Historical roots of social partnership . Verlag für Geschichte u. Politics, Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-7028-0242-8 , pp. 13–37, here p. 18.
  8. ^ Kurt Ebert: The introduction of freedom of association in Austria. In: Gerald Stourzh, Margarete Grandner (ed.): Historical roots of social partnership . Verlag für Geschichte u. Politics, Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-7028-0242-8 , pp. 69–122, here pp. 116f.
  9. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , pp. 125 and 130f.
  10. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , p. 179.
  11. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , p. 208.
  12. ^ Emil Steinbach grave site , Vienna, Central Cemetery, Group 72, Group Extension A, Row G1, No. 28.
  13. ^ Wolfgang Fritz: Finance Minister Emil Steinbach - the son of the gold worker. Biography . Verlag Lit, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0515-9 , pp. 7 and 138.
  14. ^ Herbert Hofmeister: The role of the social partnership in the development of the social partnership. In: Gerald Stourzh, Margarete Grandner (ed.): Historical roots of social insurance . Verlag für Geschichte u. Politics, Vienna 1986. ISBN 3-7028-0242-8 , pp. 278–316, here: p. 286.
  15. ^ Peter Schöffer: The struggle for the right to vote of the Austrian social democracy 1888 / 89-1897. From the Hainfeld Unification Party Congress to Badeni's electoral reform and the entry of the first Social Democrats into the Reichsrat . Verlag Steiner, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-515-04622-4 , p. 225.
  16. ↑ Oskar Mitis (ed.), Joseph Maria Baernreither: The decline of the Habsburg empire and the Germans. Fragments of a political diary 1897–1917. Verlag Holzhausen, Vienna 1939, p. 168.
personal data
SURNAME Steinbach, Emil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steinbach, Emil Robert Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian lawyer, civil servant and finance minister
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH May 26, 1907
Place of death Purkersdorf