Rise and Fall: From Messianic Expectations to the ‘Christian Regime’, 1918–1945

Abstract

This chapter discusses the defeat in the war and the two revolutions in 1918 and 1919 that led to the White Terror and the ‘Christian Regime’ in the rump state defined by the Trianon Peace Treaty. The new state was Christian in the sense of anti-Semitism and the reversal of former policies of liberal secularism. The political turn brought about the anti-Jewish numerus clausus in universities and the outlawing of former sociological movements, whose main representatives were forced to emigrate. The nationalist branch was revived thanks to the active educational policies of Minister of Education Klebelsberg, although it did not reach the same influence as before. In spite of successes achieved by the ‘populist’ civic movement of ‘village researchers’, the discipline just started to accomplish its institutionalization with the first university chairs until the early 1940s during the period of Nazification.