With numerous sources-foreign and domestic-of financial, material, and military support, the Heimwehr movement was at the epicenter of anti-Marxism in Europe and waged an ideological war against the Austrian Social Democratic Party. In post-Habsburg Austria, the Heimwehren sought to defend their homeland not from any army, but from an ideology-Marxism. The movement understood itself as the continuity of the centuries-old, volunteer militia tradition and carried on its rituals and adopted many of its values. It was intended to preserve the existing social and political order-that of the hegemonic social groups of the Habsburg Monarchy-against the growing threat of Marxist revolution, embodied by the Social Democratic Party. The paramilitary Heimwehr movement that began in 1920 was the creation of Austria’s conservative provincial governments. As such, its story is a valuable one that shows a society groping with the problem of a complex, multi-faceted identity that was, at the same time, wracked with substantial economic privation and politically polarized. This study of the origins of the Heimwehr (Home Guard) movement offers insight into the conditions under which such groups gained their following.
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