Körber resigns

In mid-December 1916 the government of the Austrian half of the monarchy fell, a government that the old Emperor Franz Joseph had appointed only six weeks earlier. On 13 December Prime Minister Ernest von Körber tendered the resignation of the whole cabinet to the new Emperor, Karl I, and the monarch accepted it the same day. Until a new government was appointed, the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers was entrusted to Alexander Spitzmüller, a banker and Minister of Commerce in Stürgkh’s cabinet. The official Wiener Zeitung announced this the following day, which is why the British chronicle of the war and some other lists give the date as 14 December. According to some sources Spitzmüller was also to form a new cabinet, but his efforts failed. In the end the new government was formed by the outgoing Minister of Agriculture, Count Heinrich Clam-Martinic.

The old Emperor’s last government

Körber, a liberal official and prime minister in 1900–1904, had become head of government on 28 October, a week after the assassination of Prime Minister Karl Stürgkh. His cabinet had been chosen not with an eye to the national disputes within Austria but to relations with Hungary. Most of the ministers were experts in the affairs of the dual system, because the government’s most important task was to be the negotiations on extending the economic part of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, which was due to expire at the end of 1917. The government achieved little. In November it set up the Office for Public Food Supply, which was meant to get a grip on the ever worse provisioning of the cities. As late as 11 December, two days before his resignation, Körber wrote to the Minister of Commerce that the preventive censorship introduced at the beginning of the war was causing growing discontent, not only in the press, and had to be eased. The minutes of his government’s meetings were almost entirely burnt, so we know relatively little about its work.

Why Körber went

After the death of Franz Joseph on 21 November it was clear that the inherited government would not last long. The young Emperor wanted to rule in his own way and to surround himself with his own people. With Körber, a generation older and used to independence, he differed on fundamental matters. The main dispute concerned the reconvening of the Imperial Council, the Austrian parliament, which had not sat since the spring of 1914. Historians, however, describe the two sides’ positions differently. According to some studies, based on the work of Robert Kann, Körber considered convening parliament at that moment premature, while Karl wanted to present himself as a constitutional ruler as quickly as possible. Others, such as the authors of the Viennese historical portal “Die Welt der Habsburger”, write the opposite: it was Körber who pressed for a return to constitutional government, while the Emperor preferred a “strong hand”. Karl himself later wrote in his personal notes that he had dismissed the Prime Minister because he was a “bungler of the old system” (“ein Wurschtler des alten Systems”).

The second field of conflict was Hungary. The Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza persuaded Karl to hold a swift coronation in Budapest, set for 30 December. The coronation oath, however, bound the King to the Hungarian constitution and entrenched the existing dualist arrangement before a new economic compromise had even been agreed. According to some historians, Körber believed that the Emperor was giving way to the Hungarians too easily, and opposed excessive concessions in the negotiations. Karl, who needed Tisza’s support, did not want to risk a conflict with Hungary.

What came next

Körber’s successor was Clam-Martinic, a Bohemian aristocrat from the circle of the murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Emperor appointed his government on 20 December, and only then formally dismissed the former ministers. Körber withdrew from politics. He died on 5 March 1919 in a sanatorium at Baden near Vienna, a few months after the collapse of the monarchy. His departure opened a series of changes by which Karl I, within a few months, replaced most of his predecessor’s men, from ministers to army commanders.