Most World War I belligerents, including Austria-Hungary and Germany, experienced severe copper shortages because of insufficient domestic ore deposits and the extensive use of the copper alloys, brass and bronze, in the munitions industry. Both Germany and the Dual Monarchy, their foreign sources of copper limited because of the British blockade, were forced to use substitute metals and to curtail the use of copper even in the armaments industry. In 1913 Austria-Hungary's domestic production amounted to only 4,052 tons of pure copper. Austrian industrial demands were met only with the importation of 36,500 tons of the metal. Consequently, when the Allied blockade cut off most of her copper imports at the same time that military needs sharply increased demand, Austria-Hungary faced a dilemma. Moreover, before Austria-Hungary was able to develop substitutes for copper, brass, and bronze, domestic supplies had been seriously reduced.

European historians and statesmen of the postwar period have little inclination to admire the statesmen of the period between the two world wars. In history books one reads again and again of the mediocrity, if not inadequacy, of those who presided over European affairs at that time. This judgment may apply to most of the statesmen of Great Britain and France and also to the majority of those in the Weimar Republic and its sister republic, Austria. When Hermann Bahr prepared the young priest, Ignaz Seipel, for a political career, he warned him of the “shortage” of “literate politicians” in Austria. And yet one should not too quickly generalize this phenomenon of mediocrity.

The Austrian scholar and social theorist Othmar Spann (1878–1950) was a major figure in the “conservative revolution” that fired the imagination of many Central European intellectuals after World War I. Born in the Habsburg monarchy as it was disintegrating under the pressures of nationalism and industrialization, Spann seemed destined for a conventional academic career until war, revolution, and economic collapse destroyed the social and ideological foundations of the old order in 1918. A series of lectures delivered at the University of Vienna soon after the war quickly made Spann a major spokesman for the “war generation”—young men whose roughhewn idealism found few outlets in the grim world of postwar Central Europe.

Until recently students of fascism have paid relatively little attention to Austria. This neglect is unfortunate since the country's geographic position exposed it to the crosscurrents of both Italian and German forms of fascism and made Austria a kind of microcosm of European fascism. The struggle between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy for control of the small Alpine Republic was reflected in Austria in the conflict between the pro-Italian Heimwehr and the pro-German Austrian National Socialist Party.