Karl Lueger and the Reichspost: Construction of a Cult of Personality

This article contributes to the body of research on fin-de-siècle Viennese and Austrian history, as well as the history of ideas and press history. It expands on the scholarship by focusing on one newspaper - the Catholic-conservative Reichspost (affiliated with the Christian Social Party) - to analyse how it perpetuated the cult of personality surrounding the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger (1844-1910). The Reichspost unwaveringly depicted Lueger as a benevolent patriarch to Christian women and children, a practice which commenced before Lueger's ascension to the mayorship and continued until decades after his death. The newspaper merged aspects of a secular and religious faith around the mayor, creating a genuinely messianic figure. Despite the extensive literature on the culture and politics of fin-de-siècle Vienna and the interest it continues to generate, Lueger's cult of personality - well established in the literature - and its manifestation in Christian Social print media have thus far been entirely neglected. Wide-ranging surveys of the Viennese press (such as those conducted by the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies in Vienna) give practical biographical details of fin-de-siècle Austrian print media such as the Reichspost. Still, they offer little in the way of a deeper cultural analysis. Through analysing the Reichspost's positioning of Karl Lueger with 'the people', this article hopes to address this gap in the scholarship.