Background
He was born in Liegnitz in the Silesia Province of Prussia (present-day Legnica, Poland), studied jurisprudence at Bonn, Rostock and Berlin, and settled at his family"s estate Alternate-Guthendorf near Marlow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
He was born in Liegnitz in the Silesia Province of Prussia (present-day Legnica, Poland), studied jurisprudence at Bonn, Rostock and Berlin, and settled at his family"s estate Alternate-Guthendorf near Marlow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
Vogelsang then worked as a journalist in Catholic Southern Germany and spent several years in Munich, where he wrote for periodical publications established by the circles around Guido Görres. From 1859 he accompanied Prince Johann II of Liechtenstein on his voyages throughout Europe. Vogelsang finally settled in Austria in 1864.
In 1875, he became editor of the Catholic newspaper Das Vaterland ("The Native Country") edited by Leo von Thun-Hohenstein.
This conservative publication was highly influential on Catholic social teaching, helping to establish the 40-hour work week and national health insurance for workers under the government of Minister-President Eduard Taaffe. Vogelsang died at Vienna in 1890, aged 72.
Many of his thoughts found entrance into the 1891 Rerum novarum encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII. As a social reformer, he was later seen as a precursor by the Austrofascist authoritarian state of the 1930s. He was quoted in the regime"s propaganda by its leader, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.
Vogelsang was the initiator of the rising Christian people"s movement in Austria and in some neighboring countries.
However, some of Vogelsang"s pronouncedly disfavourable remarks about Jews related to his anti-liberal and anti-capitalist views were included by his admirer, the once Austrofascist and later European federalist who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, Eugen Kogon, in a volume entitled "Catholic-Conservative Heritage" which called for the establishment of a Catholic Third Reich and was edited by the Benedictine abbot of Maria Laach, Ildefons Herwegen, in 1934, to be distributed to a large share of Catholic households in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by the Herder publishing house.
Since some former members of the antisemitic people"s movement of Georg Ritter von Schönerer (for example the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger) joined Vogelsang, some authors call Vogelsang an antisemite too.