Text in German. The club minutes of the Christian Socialists and Greater Germans allow a look behind the scenes of politics in the founding phase of the republic. In 1919 the bourgeois parties were clearly on the defensive. They tried to salvage what could be salvaged from the collapse of the old order. Only with the defeat of the Soviet Republic in neighboring Hungary did they regain their self-confidence. Initially, it was the Viennese in particular who advocated giving in to the Social Democrats. Western countries advocated a harder line. Among the Christian Socialists, the opposition between the two priest-politicians Ignaz Seipel and Johan Nepomuk Hauser began to emerge early on – and the special position of the Lower Austrian Farmers' Union. The opposition Greater Germans, on the other hand, were torn between anti-clericalism in the wake of Georg von Schönerer and bourgeois solidarity.