LOS VON ROM
(Via da Roma). -
The L. V. R. was an anti-Roman political, cultural, and religious movement that arose in Vienna in 1897 under the pretext that Catholicism was the principal impediment to achieving the union of all peoples of Germanic race. After 1870, as a result of liberalism—the new form of the old Josephinism—prevailing in Austrian political circles, the Catholic Church was subjected in Austria to numerous restrictions, both in the cultural sphere and in the strictly religious sphere; and, although it did not experience a Kulturkampf of its own (v.), the Austrian Church underwent years of struggle. As a result of this state of affairs, the L. V. R. movement arose. It was conceived, prepared, led, and supported by representative figures of secular Germanic culture, who sought, through this religious separation from Rome, to reunite all Germans so that they could proceed together toward the conquest of every branch of modern knowledge. German Protestantism strongly supported this movement with the aim of imposing upon the Austro-Hungarian countries the union with the German Reich under the Hohenzollern Empire.
The movement’s first declaration took place in Vienna on 12 December 1897, through the action of several students who staged a demonstration in front of the headquarters of the Popular Party, shouting L. V. R. The leaders of the movement were G. V. Schönerer, V. Eisenkolb, and F. Meyer, one of the leaders of the committee for the coordination of the evangelical movement in Austria. Its principal center was Innsbruck, where the Ulrich-Hutten League (Ulrich-Hutten-Bund) was founded, along with the newspapers Der Scherer, Pfeile aus der Ebernburg, and Mitteilungen an die deutsche Tagespresse zur Forderung der L.