In late July, another Reichstag election gave the Nazis more than 200 seats— thus ratifying their claim to being the strongest party in the nation. Unemployment stood at six million,

and street battles between the private armies of the extremists had become almost a daily occurrence. Papen, like Brüning before him, found the ground slipping from under his feet. The Reichstag was completely unruly, and Hindenburg was losing confidence in the chancellor of his own choice. Bewildered and senile, the field marshal had only a few lucid hours a day, and in these was governed by those who were close at hand. Among them was General Kurt von Schleicher, still more of an intriguer than Papen and at least as confident of his ability to outwit Hitler. In early December, Schleicher became the German Republic's last chancellor.

Papen had behaved in office as a frank reactionary; his successor embarked on a more subtle policy. Schleicher decided to try demagogy, hoping to break the power of both the Communists and the Nazis through a pseudo-leftist appeal. And he felt that he had reason for optimism because Hitler, for the first time since the onset of the depression, had lost ground in the second Reichstag election of the year, and the economic situation was slightly improved. More particularly, Schleicher decided to investigate the illegal profits that some of the great landowners had made through the agrarian relief measures enacted by his predecessor. At this point conservatives took alarm—an alarm that put within Hitler's grasp the power that had very nearly eluded him (see Chapter 9, II).

Austria: Party Strife and the Accession of Dollfuss

To Austria, which had not wanted to be a separate state, the postwar years had brought less apparent turmoil than to Germany. After a battle with inflation almost as severe as that which the neighboring Reich was about to experience, Austria seemed to settle into relative stability. This impression of calm was reinforced by the fact that the Austrian political situation was far simpler than the German: Two great parties, the Socialist and the Christian Social, between them virtually monopolized the field. -

This might suggest that Austria had found its way to the two-party system that students of parliamentary democracy—with the British experience in mind—usually regarded as the optimum. In reality, there was a thoroughgoing difference between Austrian and Anglo-Saxon politics. In Britain, the two parties agreed on fundamentals; and this remained true even after Labour had replaced the Liberals as the second party. In Austria, no such agreement was possible. The divergences between the parties split the national community wide open, reflecting not only the usual cleavage between Right and Left but also the two radically different types of society that the Treaty of Saint-Germain, in reducing Austria to its German-speaking provinces, had forced to live together.

On the one hand there was the city of Vienna, which had a quarter of the country's population—a vast metropolis shorn of its imperial function, cosmopolitan, industrial, and freethinking, with a large percentage of its inhabitants of Slavic or Jewish origin. Vienna regularly voted for socialism, which was rather more leftist and militant than its German counterpart. Joined to Vienna in unhappy union were the Danubian and Alpine provinces of the old empire—Tyrol, Salzburg, and the rest—overwhelmingly rural, conservative, Catholic, and inclining toward anti-Semitism and distrust of foreigners. These naturally voted Christian Social. This was a Catholic party not unlike the

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