Background
Karl von Stürgkh was born in Graz on October 30, 1859, to a noble landowner from Styria.
Karl von Stürgkh was born in Graz on October 30, 1859, to a noble landowner from Styria.
Stürgkh descended from a Styrian noble family (originally from the Bavarian Upper Palatinate region), which had been elevated to the status of Imperial Counts in 1721. He owned large estates in Halbenrain and was elected a member of the Austrian Imperial Council in 1891. From 1909 until 1911 he served as education minister in the cabinets of Richard von Bienerth-Schmerling and Paul Gautsch von Frankenthurn.
Stiirgkh began a long career in the civil service in 1881 with an appointment to the Austrian Ministry of Education; nine years later he was elected to the Reichsrat as well as to the Styrian provincial parliament as deputy for the United German Left party. In 1908 Stiirgkh served as minister of education in the cabinet of Baron von Bienerth, and in November 1911 replaced Bienerth as Austrian minister-president. A man of limited vision, Stiirgkh overthrew the Bohemian constitution on July 26, 1913, yet never managed to develop a working compromise with moderate Czech leaders. As a bureaucrat of German centralistic tendencies, Stiirgkh despised the noisy filibustering in Parliament by the non-German minorities and the Social Democrats: on March 16, 1914, he prorogued the Reichsrat owing to Czech obstructionist tactics, supported by the Social Democrats. Parliament was converted into a hospital and did not meet again until May 1917. Stiirgkh ruled with the consent of Emperor Francis Joseph by emergency decrees (paragraph 14, or basic statute 141 of 1867) and thereby greatly compounded domestic tensions.
The decision to dissolve parliament (in contrast to Count Istvan Tisza, who kept the assembly in Budapest in session) deprived Austrian politicians of a voice in the events following the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in June 1914. At a Joint Ministerial Council held on July 7, 1914, Stiirgkh favored "such far-reaching demands being made of Serbia as justified the presumption of their rejection, in order to open the path for a radical solution through military intervention," in short, war. The minister-president became the initiator of wartime absolutism in Cisleithanian Austria: unrestricted censorship of the press, prohibition of assemblies, general curtailment of civil rights, and extraconstitutional military courts in political matters. Yet even this did not suffice for the army. In August 1914, General Conrad von Hötzendorf established a special War Supervisory Office to control the schools, purge the state bureaucracy of unreliable elements, and extend the zones under direct military control. Army Supreme Command even attempted to replace Stiirgkh with a stronger man in September 1915, but the aged monarch would not hear of such overt military intervention in the administration.
But Stiirgkh's career was near its end: on October 21, 1916, in the first open act of defiance against the war regime, Friedrich Adler, son of the leader of the Social Democrats, emptied his revolver into Stiirgkh, crying "Down with absolutism! We want peace!" Thus died the man generally regarded as the last influential minister-president of Cisleithanian Austria; his successors were caretakers at best, dilletantes at worst. Stiirgkh's brother Josef (1862-1945) served in the grade of general of infantry and represented the Dual Monarchy's Supreme Command at German army headquarters.