Cylinders

Fighting all the way, the government of square-jawed little Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss continued to oppose the relentless growth of Hitlerism in Austria last week. Fortnight ago came that decree so familiar to the last years of republican Germany: a ban on the wearing of political uniforms. Austrian Nazis promptly rushed to second-hand clothing shops and bought up all the old silk hats in sight, on the assumption that there could be no law against the wearing of a Cylinder, emblem of bourgeois respectability. For a few happy hours Viennese Nazis flaunted battered toppers above their sport suits until green-coated police pounced on them.

"There is no law against silk hats!" shrilled the Nazis.

"Ach, so?" said the police and marched them off.

Next move was to reshuffle the cabinet. Little Chancellor Dollfuss traded Ministers around the better to fight Naziism, the better to court a much-needed loan from France. Most important cabinet shift was the appointment as Minister of Public Safety of Major Emil Fey. who has command over all Austria's defense forces. An ardent Royalist, a personal friend of Benito Mussolini, he fights the idea of anschluss (political union) with Germany as reducing Austria to the status of a minor German province.

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