Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg
Johann Nepomuk Carl Borromäus Josef Maria Freiherr von Zeßner-Spitzenberg-Weinbergen (4 February 1885 – 1 August 1938), better known as Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg, was an Austrian jurist and professor. He was one of the first Austrians to perish in the Dachau concentration camp.
Contents
Biography
Early life and education
Hans Karl von Zeßner-Spitzenberg, the son of a long-established landowner, grew up in a Roman Catholic home in Dobřičany, Bohemia. His parents were the K.K. Kämmerer and domain owner Heinrich Freiherr von Zeßner-Spitzenberg-Weinberger (1839–1922) and Henriette née Countess Nostitz-Rieneck (1846–1928).
He studied law and received his doctorate from Charles University in Prague (1909). From 1910, he studied national economics in Berlin and received his Dr.oec.publ. degree[1] in 1912. He was a member of the K.D.St.V. Teutonia Fribourg in the CV since 1905 and a member of the K.D.St.V. Ferdinandea Prague in the CV since 1908.
He began his professional career as a konzipist (subaltern clerk) at the K.K. Statthalteri in Prague. In the spring of 1913, he was transferred to the Central Statistical Commission in Vienna. From 1914 to May 1918 he was employed at the district administration in Braunau am Inn. In 1918, Zeßner-Spitzenberg was at the Royal Imperial Ministry of Agriculture in Vienna, where he lived to see the end of the war in the fall of 1918.
Career and political commitment
The end of the Habsburg Monarchy, the defeat in World War I and the end of the customary order meant a catastrophe for Zeßner-Spitzenberg. While many of his contemporaries wished for an annexation to Germany, this was never an option for Zeßner-Spitzenberg. As a legitimist, he joined a monarchist grouping around Prince Johannes Liechtenstein, which in 1921 merged with other groups to form the legitimist Reichsbund der Österreicher. In the Reichsbund, Zeßner-Spitzenberg was first secretary and later vice president. In 1923, he initiated an expert opinion to examine whether the Habsburg Law was in harmony with General Civil Code. He also advocated his legitimist positions in the Christian Social Party (CSP), where he was a member of the Viennese provincial leadership. In addition, he was later also head of the League for the Beatification of Emperor Charles I.
The Social Democratic State Chancellor Karl Renner became aware of Zeßner through an article on constitutional law written by him. Although he belonged to the CSP, Renner brought him to the State Chancellery (later the Federal Chancellery) in 1919, where he remained for 12 years. There, Zeßner worked in the constitutional service and, for a time, collaborated with Hans Kelsen and Adolf Julius Merkl under the direction of Ministerial Counsellor Georg Froehlich.
In 1920, he habilitated at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) with the paper Einführung in die Landarbeiterfrage ("Introduction to the Agricultural Workers' Question"), initially as a private lecturer, until he was appointed Upper Austrian professor in 1931. Professor was appointed. He was particularly concerned with implementing modern agricultural labor law and social insurance in Austria's agriculture and propagated his social ideas, which were based on Christian social teaching.
As early as the 1920s, Zeßner-Spitzenberg was concerned with the idea of the Austrian nation. In 1925, for example, he wrote that Austria, in order not to be simply an Ostmark in the oldest sense of a defensive wall, had to cultivate its supranational nature of the Danube monarchy and fulfill a bridging function to the Southeastern European region. Similar views were also held by Ernst Karl Winter, Alfred Missong, August Maria Knoll and Wilhelm Schmidt, who founded the Österreichische Aktion ("Austrian Action") in Zeßner's house in 1926, which dealt with pan-European theories. The Austrian Action soon published an anthology of the same name with lectures by the initiators, in which they formulated an independent Austrian consciousness on a legitimist basis. The five initiators were all corporates in various Catholic fraternities, but were also collectively members of the Vienese Landsmannschaft K.Ö.L. Maximiliana.
In 1933, Zeßner-Spitzenberg was a co-founder of the Academic Federation of Austrian-Catholic Landsmannschaften (KÖL) and in 1937 a founding member of the K.Ö.L. Ferdinandea at Graz.
At that time, German nationalist and increasingly National Socialist ideas dominated at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, both among the students and the teaching staff. Zeßner-Spitzenberg fought against corresponding agitations, which made him himself a target. After explosive devices were detonated at the BOKU in the spring of 1934, a government commissar was appointed, to whom the rector was subordinated. In this tense atmosphere, Zeßner took over the function of a disciplinary lawyer at the university. Because he opposed the readmission of expelled National Socialist students, he became the explicit enemy of these groups.
In 1933/34, unlike his companion Ernst Winter, he supported the new political regime from the outset. With the beginning of Kurt Schuschnigg's chancellorship, he became one of the contacts between Otto von Habsburg, whom Zeßner knew personally, and the chancellor. In the spring of 1934, he then also belonged to a commission that was to prepare the modalities for the repeal of the Habsburg Law. In November 1934, he was appointed to the Federal Culture Council, a preparatory body for federal legislation established in accordance with the May Constitution, as a representative of parenting and education. He gave the lecture "on ideological and civic education", which had been made compulsory in 1935, not only at the BOKU, but also at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and, from 1937, at the Vienna University of Technology. When in February 1937 the legitimist groupings were to be incorporated into the Fatherland Front via the newly founded "Traditionsreferat," Zeßner-Spitzenberg was entrusted with the leadership of the department.
Arrest and death
Shortly after the Annexation of Austria, he was arrested by the Gestapo on March 18. While in Gestapo custody in Vienna from March to July 15, 1938, he wrote a life report for the Gestapo with the frank confession: "I have always been opposed to National Socialism in Austria..."
On July 15, 1938, Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg was taken to the Dachau concentration camp. Already during the transport there he had been kicked in the abdomen by an SS man. When asked by the Dachau camp commandant if he knew why he was there, Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg replied, "Because I see in faith in God and in a Christian Austria under the leadership of the House of Habsburg the only salvation for the independence and autonomy of my fatherland." As a prisoner of punishment block XV, he had to perform heavy labor with heavy stones in great heat, with severely swollen legs and a high fever, until he collapsed. On July 31, 1938, he was taken to the infirmary, where he died on August 1, 1938.
Personal life
He met his wife Elisabeth on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in 1913. Six children were born of the marriage.
Legacy
- In 1977, Manfried Welan, one of his successors on the chair at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, created the Hans Karl Zessner-Spitzenberg Prize, awarded by the "Austrian Society for Agricultural and Environmental Law", for work in the field of agricultural and environmental law.[2]
- The Zessner-Spitzenberg-Haus, a cooperative housing complex in the 14th district of Vienna, was named after Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg.
- A memorial plaque to him has been mounted on the outside wall of the Kaasgrabenkirche in Vienna since 2005 (previously, a memorial plaque to him had been mounted in the crypt of the Kaasgraben Church, which was converted into a parish hall in 1969).
- On June 17, 2019, the park in front of the Kaasgraben Church was renamed Zeßner-Spitzenberg Park.
Notes
References
- Ildefons Manfred Fux, Für Christus und Österreich. Wien: Vereinigung Perfectae Caritatis (2001).
- Pius Zeßner-Spitzenberg, Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg. Ein Leben aus dem Glauben. Wien: Eigenverlag (2003).
- Manfried Welan, Helmut Wohnout, "Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg – einer der ersten toten Österreicher in Dachau". In: DÖW (ed.), Forschungen zum Nationalsozialismus und dessen Nachwirkungen in Österreich. Festschrift für Brigitte Bailer. Wien (2012), pp. 21–41.
- Manfried Welan, Peter Wiltsche, Hans Karl Zeßner-Spitzenberg. Eine Biographie. Perchtoldsdorf: Plattform Johannes Martinek Verlag (2020).
