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Narratives of Social Conflict in the Merstallinger Trial, 1883

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2022

Philip Pajakowski
Philip Pajakowski*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Saint Anselm College, Goffstown, New Hampshire, USA
*
Corresponding Author: Philip Pajakowski, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The robbery of Viennese shoe manufacturer Josef Merstallinger on 4 July 1882 led to a political trial of social radicals the following year. When Merstallinger's assailants were arrested, they admitted to the crime and professed to have carried it out to raise funds for the radical socialist movement. In response, the police arrested dozens of radical activists and eventually charged twenty-nine people with crimes including high treason. The authorities, including the chief of the Vienna police and state's attorney, characterized the robbery as part of an international anarchist conspiracy that threatened violent revolution against the basis of Austrian and European civilization. The trial was thus intended to cripple the radical organization and demonstrate the dangers socialist politics posed to the public. A counternarrative for the defendants stressed the relative harmlessness of the radical movement, general harmony of Austrian social relations, and rights of the accused to free speech and to protection from arbitrary treatment by the police. A public jury trial suggested the greater persuasiveness of the latter narrative, as the jury acquitted the defendants of all charges except those directly related to the robbery.

Type
Article
Information
Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 53 , May 2022 , pp. 90 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota

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Footnotes

Research for this article was funded by a Jeanne D. Smith Research Incentive Fund Grant from the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. The author thanks Hugh Dubrulle, Charles Grau, and the members of the German Studies Association Law and Legal Cultures reading group for comments on a previous version of this manuscript.

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