ABSTRACT
Karl Lueger enriched political science by a great discovery: he transformed democracy, a political orientation that was dying of boredom, into modern demagogy, into the art of fobbing people off with the appearance instead of the reality of the situation.’ Adolf Hitler, the aspiring mass politician, stressed the shrewdness, practicality, and flair for propaganda of Lueger and his lieutenants - ‘they were veritable virtuosos in working up the spiritual instincts of the broad masses of their adherents’ - the tactical sense for possibilities, and ‘the true genius of a great reformer’. The Scheinantisemitismus of Lueger was undoubtedly part of the theatricality, the attitudinizing, and the oratorical flair for mass politics which he had brought to his role. Both social Catholicism and antisemitism had emerged in the 1880s as the ideological articulation and political vehicles for these endangered strata in the Austro-German Burgertum to express their protest against liberal political parties which had sacrificed them to the ‘Maloch of capitalism’.
