Sonderband 3. „wir aber aus unsern vorhero sehr erschöpfften camergeföllen nicht hernemben khönnen…” – Beiträge zur österreichischen Wirtschafts- und Finanzgeschichte vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (1997)

Ronald E. Coons - Carey Goodman: An Audacious Proposal. A Memorandum Attributed to Finance Minister Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Bruck

Ronald E. Coons Carey Goodman

improbable that Bruck, himself a Protestant whose Finance Ministry depended heavily on Protestant and Jewish members of the Austrian and European banking communities for loans, would have accepted the Emperor’s anti-Josephinist ecclesiastical policy with such equanimity. Once again, however, on closer examination Bruck’s record reveals ambiguity. As will be seen shortly, the memorandum was most probably written in the second half of July 1855, when Bruck could scarcely have been unaware that negotiations with Rome for a Concordat were nearing completion and that its terms would be objectionable not only to his coreligionists but also to influential financiers at home and abroad. Nevertheless, when the Concordat was promulgated he conducted himself with remarkable circumspection. The Österreichische Zeitung, with which he enjoyed close relations, did indeed express its opposition29. For his own part, however, Bruck publicly held his peace. As he explained when one of his sons expressed anger over the agreement, Sei ruhig, auch das Konkordat wird verschwinden, wenn die Zolleinigung mit Deutschland erreicht sein wird und deutscher Geist in Österreich dauernd die Führung erhält. Trete ich jetzt zurück, so geht das von mir angestrebte Einvernehmen mit Preußen und hiermit auch die wirtschaftliche Vereinigung in die Brüche. Diese anzubahnen und baldmöglichst herbeizuftihren, betrachte ich jedoch als die Hauptaufgabe meines Lebens30.

These sound like the words not of a valiant defender of his faith but of a realist who recognized that the moment was not propitious for one of the Emperor’s chief ministers to champion the Josephinist cause. Only under altered circumstances in 1859 did Bruck call for a change in ecclesiastical policy in his pamphlet Die Aufgaben Österreichs, and then primarily as a means of gaining sympathy for the Habsburg Monarchy among the Protestants of Germany and the Orthodox peoples of eastern Europe31. In writing a memorandum on administrative reform on the eve of the conclusion of negotiations for the Concordat, the Protestant Finance Minister may well have taken pains to protect his position by conspicuously displaying his loyalty on an issue to which the Emperor attached the greatest importance.

Additional considerations further counteract the problematical features of the manuscript and speak in favor of Bruck’s authorship. The memorandum’s contents suggest an origin within the Finance Ministry, and it is unlikely that anyone other than the minister would have thought to nominate himself for the assignment of demolishing so prominent a feature of Austrian neoabsolutism as the so-called „Bach system“ of administrative centralization. It is also unlikely that Bruck would have kept among his private papers a manuscript with whose contents he fundamentally disagreed or which merely recorded the views of an overly imaginative subordinate. Finally, there is much about the spirit of the manuscript that is consistent with the character of a figure who brought to the two ministries he headed the audacity of a successful entrepreneur. In both posts he energetically advocated a series of imaginaW einzierl- Fis cher, Erika: Die österreichischen Konkordate von 1855 und 1933. Wien 1960, p. 95; on Bruck’s relations with the newspaper see Paupié,Kurt: Handbuch der österreichischen Pressegeschichte 1848-1959. Bd. 1. Wien-Stuttgart 1960, p. 126.

Quoted inCharmatz: Minister Bruck, p. 109.

31 Ibidem,pp. 254-255.

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