Friedrich Funder

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Friedrich Funder (born November 1, 1872 in Graz , † May 19, 1959 in Vienna ) was an Austrian journalist and Catholic publicist. As a longtime editor of the Christian-social Viennese daily Reichspost (1894–1938) he shaped the political reporting in the monarchy and contributed significantly to the rapid rise of the Christian Social Party .

Funder joined the Reichspost in 1896 and in 1902 became its editor-in-chief as well as a leading functionary of the Cartell Association (Catholic student and academic association). He represented Christian social doctrine , a policy for the middle class and a Slav-friendly reform of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy . After the founding of the republic in 1918, he was an important voice against the generally desired " connection " of the now small state to Germany . His political history book From Yesterday to Today describes the transition from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the Republic of Austria and the explosive years between the wars . Liberated from the concentration camp at the end of the war, he founded Die Furche , a politics and ethics magazine that still exists today.

Childhood and youth

Friedrich Funder was born as the son of the Graz confectioner and hobby poet Ludwig Funder, who after eight years of wandering through Austria, Germany and England had founded a small business in Saxony (the diary of his “ boyhood years ” 1862–1869 was published in Vienna in 2000 in a social history book series ). Economic difficulties forced Friedrich's parents to give up the bakery in 1879. The family moved to a small industrial town near Dresden because his father found a job there. This time awakened in the then seven-year-old boy a premonition of what the proletariat and being a worker meant. He was also shaped by the Protestant environment, which brought the Catholic, Austrian family even more into a ghetto situation.

In 1887 the Funder family traveled back to Graz and Friedrich attended the “Prince- Bishop 's Boys' Seminar ” to become a priest. The school system in Saxony was very different from that in Austria, which is why Friedrich had to spend a few semesters longer at the seminar. His teachers recognized his talent for journalism early on. He was active in the secret literary society "Der Eichenbund", which he co-founded. The official school newspaper Walhalla later emerged from it . Funder's graduation trip took him to Linz in 1892 for the 3rd Austrian Catholic Day . At this major event, the resolution was passed to found a "modern, independent daily newspaper for the Christian people of Austria" as a counterpoint to the liberal press, which was then unrestrictedly dominant . The Reichspost newspaper emerged from this project in 1894 , and Friedrich Funder later became its editor-in-chief .

The turn to journalism

With doubts, but determined to become a priest , he enrolled at the theological faculty of the University of Graz . There he joined the K.Ö.HV Carolina Graz in the ÖCV on May 30, 1893 . At the universities of Graz, hostilities against this, at that time the only existing Catholic, color-bearing corporation, took on critical forms. In October 1893, twenty members of the Carolina were attacked by several hundred right-wing national students. The police were powerless. When Funder saw this, he took off his robe and joined the attacked. "If this little group of Catholic students was harassed, I wanted at least to be in their midst," Funder wrote later in his memoir. The theology student was then arrested by the police for alleged violence , but was eventually acquitted. Marked by this event, he decided to become a Catholic journalist . The bourgeois- liberal press reported on such "actions" usually in the sense of the right-wing fraternities . That is why Friedrich Funder formulated the goal of serving the Christian mass enlightenment.

With the support of a few professors, he came to Vienna , where he began his legal studies . He initially earned his living as a private teacher and proofreader for the Reichspost newspaper , which took him on as an editor in 1896. Two years later, Friedrich Funder received his doctorate in law from the University of Vienna , which marked the beginning of a steep career. At the age of 30 he became editor-in-chief of the most important Christian-social newspaper in Austria-Hungary, the Reichspost , in 1902 , which he ran until it was banned in 1938, and its publisher in 1904 . In this position he had decisively influenced the politics of the Christian Social Party and thus became a key figure in the political development before the First World War .

Funder supported political trialism , the Slavic reform attempts of the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand . The Reichspost itself was designed for politically interested groups and for Catholic readers of the middle class . It represented a politically conservative, Christian-social, but economically anti-Semitic line and formed a strong counterweight to the powerful liberal press landscape.

The "ministerial maker"

Registration card of Friedrich Funder as a prisoner in the National Socialist concentration camp Dachau

Friedrich Funder never went into politics personally, but secured a certain degree of independence through the Reichspost . In 1905 the first contact was made between the editor-in-chief of the Reichspost and the heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand . Friedrich Funder worked in the “workshop in the Belvedere” on a reorganization of Austria-Hungary and thus belonged to the narrow circle of advisors to the Archduke. His assassination put an end to the ambitious plans Funder had worked on. In the First Republic, he helped many politically active people and their ideas to publicize, but did not put himself in the limelight on the political stage. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of it, he became a “ministerial maker” and a close political advisor to Ignaz Seipel , Engelbert Dollfuss and later to Kurt Schuschnigg . On March 13, 1938, Funder was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Dachau concentration camp and later to the Flossenbürg death camp . He was only released there in 1939 through laborious intervention by the Vatican . The Reichspost building had meanwhile been looted and the newspaper had to be shut down. Funder was banned from writing and it was only after 1945 that he was able to found a new weekly newspaper called Die Furche .

For a new togetherness

After the Second World War , Friedrich Funder repeatedly called for inner peace, togetherness and balance. But he wasn't always like that. For many decades Funder was often a tough opponent of the Austrian Protestants and a fighter of ruthless harshness in the political field. But he never stopped learning. He had to experience the hardest and most painful learning process in the concentration camp . After that he was decisive in promoting cooperation between the two major political camps, as it had become clear to him that the reconstruction of Austria could only be done with united forces. Bruno Kreisky said of Friedrich Funder: "He was an opponent of socialism and the socialist movement".

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Friedrich Funder: From yesterday to today. From the Empire to the Republic. Herold-Verlag, Vienna 1952