About Reichspost

Reichspost

The Reichspost was a German-language Catholic-conservative daily newspaper published in Vienna from 1 January 1894 to 1938. It described itself as a newspaper for the Christian people of Austria-Hungary, and it became the leading paper of Austria's Catholic and Christian Social camp: the daily voice of the movement that, under Karl Lueger and his successors, governed Vienna and, for much of the First Republic, governed Austria. Long edited by Friedrich Funder, one of the most influential journalists in Austrian history, the Reichspost was read by the Catholic middle class and by the clergy, appeared twice daily in its heyday, and was shut down under Nazi pressure in 1938, months after the Anschluss.

The paper's importance exceeded its circulation, which was respectable but never matched the great liberal dailies. The Reichspost mattered because it was wired directly into power: into the Christian Social Party, the Catholic associations, the Cartellverband of Catholic student fraternities and, in the 1930s, the authoritarian state of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg. When Funder founded the weekly Die Furche in 1945, it was initially regarded as the Reichspost's successor, and that lineage connects the paper directly to Austrian journalism still published today.

Founding in 1894: A Paper for the Christian People

The Reichspost was first published on 1 January 1894 in Vienna. It addressed itself primarily to Catholic readers, above all the Catholic middle class and the Catholic clergy, at the moment when political Catholicism was becoming the monarchy's newest mass force. Lueger's Christian Socials were conquering Vienna's city hall in those very years, and the Catholic press associations founded across Austria from 1869 onward were building a confessional newspaper network to rival the dominant liberal press. The Reichspost was the Viennese flagship of that effort.

The paper appeared in two editions a day, a morning edition, the Morgenblatt, and an evening edition, the Abendblatt, a twice-daily rhythm that marked it as a serious metropolitan daily rather than a devotional sheet. It was printed by the Herold Kommandit-Gesellschaft auf Aktien, a Catholic publishing house that also printed titles including the Wiener Montagsblatt, the Badener Volksblatt and the Neues Wochenblatt. From the start, the Reichspost's project was political as much as journalistic: to give the Christian Social movement a daily of record in the capital.

Friedrich Funder and Editorial Leadership

The Reichspost's defining figure was Friedrich Funder, born in Graz on 1 November 1872. Funder joined the paper in 1896, two years after its founding, and became its editor-in-chief in 1902, a post he held for more than three decades. He was also a leading functionary of the Cartellverband, the federation of Catholic student and academic associations, which placed him at the centre of the network of Catholic elites from which the Christian Social and later ÖVP leadership was drawn.

As editor, Funder shaped the political reporting of the monarchy and contributed substantially to the rapid rise of the Christian Social Party. He represented Christian social teaching, a politics addressed to the middle class, and a Slav-friendly reform of the Habsburg monarchy, positions that made the Reichspost more than a party megaphone: it was a place where the reform of the multinational empire was argued out from a Catholic-conservative standpoint. After the founding of the republic in 1918, Funder became an weighty voice against the widely desired Anschluss of the small Austrian state to Germany, arguing for an independent, Christian Austria, the line that later defined the Dollfuß-Schuschnigg state.

Position in the Catholic Press

Within Vienna's Catholic press, the Reichspost rose to first place. The older Catholic daily, Das Vaterland, aristocratic and federalist, had been the monarchy's leading Catholic paper since 1860, but after the Reichspost appeared, the two Catholic dailies entered a rivalry that the Reichspost eventually won decisively. The Reichspost was the more modern, more political and more widely read paper, aligned with a mass party rather than with the Bohemian aristocracy, and by the early twentieth century it was the Catholic daily that mattered in Vienna.

The Catholic Encyclopedia's survey of Austria's Catholic periodical literature, published in the years before the First World War, recorded the Reichspost, under Dr. Funder as editor-in-chief, as issued twice daily with about 16,000 copies to each edition, ahead of the Vaterland's roughly 2,500 copies per edition. The same survey illustrates the paper's world: a dense Catholic press landscape organised by language and crown land, in which the Reichspost served the German-reading Catholics of the capital and the hereditary lands.

Circulation and Readership

The Reichspost never rivalled the Neue Freie Presse or the Neues Wiener Tagblatt as a commercial proposition, but its circulation was substantial for a confessional party paper. The twice-daily 16,000 copies per edition recorded before the First World War grew over the interwar period. In 1937, the last full year of the paper's life, its circulation was approximately 30,000 copies on weekdays and about 45,000 on Sundays, figures that reflect both its loyal subscription base in Catholic households and parishes and the Sunday-reading habits of its audience.

Its readership was its strength. The paper was taken by the clergy, by Catholic associations, by Christian Social voters and by the Catholic middle class of teachers, officials and tradespeople who formed the movement's backbone. For advertisers it offered less value than the mass liberal papers; for politicians it offered something better, a direct channel to one of the two or three organised camps, the Lager, into which Austrian society was divided. To understand what the Christian Social camp thought on any morning between 1894 and 1938, the Reichspost is the first source historians open.

The Paper and the Christian Social Movement

The Reichspost grew up with the Christian Social Party and shared its trajectory: insurgent in the 1890s, governing in the 1900s, and dominant in the First Republic, where Christian Social chancellors, including the priest Ignaz Seipel, led most governments of the 1920s. The paper defended the Church's position in education and marriage, attacked liberalism and socialism, and articulated the Christian social teaching that Funder championed, a doctrine of social reform within a hierarchical, corporative order, hostile alike to unregulated capitalism and to Marxism.

That record also includes the movement's darker inheritance. Christian Social politics in Lueger's Vienna used antisemitism as a mobilising tool, and the Catholic press of the era, the Reichspost included, operated within a political culture in which anti-Jewish argument was commonplace. Historians of the paper treat that as part of its record, alongside its genuine social reformism and its later opposition to National Socialism, and readers of its digitised run encounter both.

The First Republic and the Authoritarian State

After 1918 the Reichspost became, in effect, a governing paper. It supported the Christian Social-led governments of the republic, opposed Anschluss with Germany on Catholic and Austrian grounds, and backed the authoritarian turn of the 1930s. When the Fatherland Front, the regime's single movement, built its propaganda apparatus after 1933, the Reichspost was one of its principal press voices: its pages carried the regime's self-presentation, including Chancellor Dollfuß's September 1933 speech introducing the Fatherland Front as a movement above parties.

The paper thus ended its life aligned with the Austrofascist Ständestaat, the corporative authoritarian order of Dollfuß and, after Dollfuß's assassination by Nazi putschists in July 1934, of Kurt Schuschnigg. That state censored and banned socialist and Nazi papers alike, imprisoned Nazi activists, and presented itself as the Christian, German bulwark against Hitler. The Reichspost shared that identity, which made its own destruction by the victorious Nazis in 1938 a foregone conclusion once the Anschluss came.

Closure in 1938

The Reichspost was closed in 1938, under pressure from the Nazi regime, with its final cessation dated to 30 September 1938. Unlike the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, which the Nazi press authorities chose to keep as their central organ, the Reichspost, confessional, Austrian-patriotic and tied to the fallen Schuschnigg order, had no place in the coordinated press of the Ostmark. Its closure, within months of the Anschluss, ended a run of almost forty-five years.

Funder himself was persecuted: he spent part of the war in a concentration camp and was freed only at the war's end. His survival completed an unusual arc: the editor who had built the monarchy's Catholic daily lived to rebuild Catholic journalism in the Second Republic, and to write, in his political-historical book Vom Gestern ins Heute, an account of the passage from empire to republic and the fraught interwar years that remains a primary source for the period.

Die Furche and the Successor Tradition

In December 1945, months after his liberation, Funder founded Die Furche in Vienna, a weekly for society, politics, culture, religion and business with a liberal-Catholic outlook. Die Furche was initially seen as the successor to the Reichspost, and it carried the older paper's tradition, Catholic, intellectual and independent-minded, into the Second Republic. Funder edited it from 1945 to 1954, and it is still published today by the Styria Media Group.

The succession matters for how the Reichspost is remembered. It was not simply a party sheet that vanished with its party in 1938. Through Funder and Die Furche, its journalistic lineage, its personnel and its conviction that a Catholic paper should argue rather than merely proclaim, continued into post-war Austria. Histories of Die Furche routinely begin with the Reichspost, and histories of the Reichspost end with Funder in 1945, starting again.

Archive and Research Value

The Reichspost is digitised in the Austrian National Library's ANNO portal, among the historic Austrian titles available to researchers, and its run is a standard source for the political and religious history of late-imperial and interwar Austria. Scholars use it for Christian Social politics, for Catholic social thought, for the church-state conflicts of the First Republic, and for the Austrofascist regime's public language, for which the paper was a semi-official channel.

Because the paper spoke for a governing movement, its pages also document that movement's assumptions in unguarded form: its social teaching and its prejudices, its Austrian patriotism and its authoritarianism. That combination is precisely what makes a party paper valuable to historians, provided it is read as what it was, the organ of a camp, and not as a neutral chronicle.

Place in Austrian Press History

In Vienna's press landscape, the Reichspost stood at the Catholic-conservative pole, opposite the liberal Neue Freie Presse and Neues Wiener Tagblatt and the Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung. Of the capital's great camp newspapers, it was the one that rose latest, founded only in 1894, and the one most directly tied to a party that actually governed. It displaced Das Vaterland as the leading Catholic daily, held about 30,000 weekday copies in its final years, and closed in 1938 as a closed newspaper with no revival under its name.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are these. The Reichspost was a German-language Catholic-conservative daily published in Vienna from 1 January 1894 to 30 September 1938; it appeared twice daily as a morning and evening paper; it was printed by the Herold publishing house; Friedrich Funder, who joined in 1896 and was editor-in-chief from 1902, made it the leading voice of Christian Social Austria; and after the Anschluss the Nazi regime shut it down, leaving Funder to found its recognised successor, Die Furche, in 1945.