Authors: Michael Haas
Schreker had nevertheless been the object of frequent anti-Semitic vilification even before the Nazi dictatorship of 1933, forcing his move from Berlin's Music Academy to the Prussian Academy of Arts. With Hitler's arrival, there followed a ban on Schreker as conductor and teacher along with a performance ban on his works. His complete removal from public life, his inability to emigrate and a vindictive cancellation of his promised pension resulted in a stroke that proved fatal only a few days short of his 56th birthday in 1934. He thus became Hitler's first high-profile musical victim.
Schreker, whose father Ignácz had died when Franz was still a boy of nine, most likely never set foot in a synagogue. With a Christian mother, he was by Jewish law not even a Jew. His musical education had been paid for by Princess Windisch-Graetz, and as a young man he had played the organ in his local parish church in Vienna. When in 1933 he stood accused of ‘racially’
being a Jew under Nazi law, his admittedly feeble defence was that his cousin had written the
Semigotha
. Yet when he completed his most popular opera,
Der Schatzgräber
,
2
on 12 November 1918, the day that Austria, now bereft of its former empire, proclaimed itself a republic, he scribbled on the bottom of the final page of his manuscript that his most fervent hope was that his homeland would soon be annexed by Germany. It was a hope that would be fulfilled with tragic consequences only 20 years later.
Jews on a Journey
In the preface to the 1937 edition of his 1927 essay
Juden auf Wanderschaft
,
3
the writer Joseph Roth, living in Paris, could conceivably have had both Isak Schrečker and Franz Schreker in mind while writing his attack on assimilated and inter-married German Jews – an attack that underlined the delusionary aspects of what they believed to be fulfilled aspirations:
The German Jew is absolutely not an Eastern European Jew. He's forgotten how to suffer, pray and up-root himself. He's only good at working – and even this is now denied him. … In any event, these émigré German Jews [in reference to the influx of German Jews in Paris after 1933] constitute a new nation: they've forgotten how to be Jews and must laboriously re-learn Jewishness. On the other hand, they're equally incapable of forgetting that they're German and cannot escape their fundamental Germanness. They're like snails cursed to carry two shells on their backs. They can't deny either their Germanness or their Jewishness since they can't lie. Ghastly how the outside-world thinks in lazy worn-out pigeonholes and stereotypes! It demands to know where the traveller is moving
from
rather than where he's moving
to
. However, for the traveller himself, the goal is far more important than the point of departure.
4
The main body of this essay, originally written in 1927, dealt with Roth's view of what he saw as the unwholesome eagerness with which Jews acquired ‘Germanness’ and its ensuing delusions: ‘When Jews finally arrive, they do not, as they are so often accused, assimilate too slowly, but sadly, rather too quickly. … They become diplomats and journalists, mayors, nobles, police detectives, and bank directors, and other assorted pillars of a solid and decent society. Only very few become revolutionaries.‘
5
And again, ‘The impoverished Jew is the most conservative of all impoverished creatures. He is a guarantor for the safeguarding of social order. The Jews by and large form a class of solid citizens albeit with their own racial, national and religious idiosyncrasies.‘
6
The misapprehension of being considered totally German despite having a single Jewish parent, as was the case with Schreker, is anticipated by the music critic Eduard Hanslick 40 years earlier in his memoirs from 1894. Hanslick would be the object of some of Wagner's most unpleasant anti-Semitic attacks. He faces them head on:
That Wagner managed to smuggle me into his pamphlet
Jewishness in Music
disturbed me less. Wagner didn't like Jews and therefore assumed everyone who didn't like him must logically be Jewish. I would have felt myself flattered to be burned at the stake alongside the likes of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn by Pater Arbuez Wagner;
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sadly this privilege would have to remain denied to me as my father and all of his ancestors, at least as far back as I can trace them, were the sons of staunch Catholic farmers. In addition, they came from an area where the only Jews they would have encountered would have been tinkers plying their trade door-to-door.
8
These comments demand more clarification. Hanslick specifically mentions his father but not his mother, Karoline Kisch, who was the daughter of wealthy Jewish merchants. Under Jewish law, this would have actually made him Jewish, should he have wished to count himself as such
As Heinrich Heine and Felix Mendelssohn demonstrated, the choice facing German-speaking Jews at the beginning of the nineteenth century appeared to be one between full participation in German cultural life or continued religious adherence and exclusion. Wagner was only the first to articulate his paranoia that with conversions, assimilation and inter-marriage, Jews had masterminded an insidious deceit of racial camouflage that would eventually undermine German identity and its innate moral character.
German
How Jews in German-speaking Europe would become such enthusiastic chauvinists in the cause of German culture, particularly when seen through the prism of the Holocaust, demands a good deal of explanation. Jews would only achieve social and political emancipation with the creation of Europe's two German-speaking States: the German Reich (Empire), headed by the Prussian King in 1871, and the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, headed by the Austrian Emperor in 1867. Emancipation was a result of guarantees made by the freshly drawn-up constitutions of both. It corresponded to the prevalent mood that Europe's many diverse people, with their various languages
and religious confessions, were allowed self-determination within the structures of a uniquely individual nation state, such as the newly created German Reich. In Austria-Hungary, rights were accorded so that no cultural or ethnic community within the multi-cultural dual monarchy could gain an advantage over any of the others. Thus the German Reich along with Austria-Hungary guaranteed the rights of confessional diversity, and their new constitutions meant that Jews, long denied the rights accorded to other German-speakers, could finally become fully active participants in the culture, language and music of the German-speaking people. To Jews, who had lived among Germans for two thousand years, it was the long-awaited entry into the most élite, educated and cultivated ‘club’ on earth. Membership was an honour bestowed on only a few; after millennia of being kept outside, they embraced their new identity with an enthusiasm that frequently resulted in an exuberant rejection of their Jewishness. To sceptical anti-Semites, such exuberance appeared not only vulgar but potentially oppressive. Reactionary forces, along with the Roman Catholic Church, meant that rights guaranteed by the constitution would still need to be fought through the Austrian Parliament individually. For example, a Parliamentary rejection of an imposed concordat between Rome and Vienna in 1868 allowed Jews access to education and access to teaching positions, while the intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in Austria was not made legal until 1869.
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Yet Parliament and the Habsburgs stood firm in their support, and once these essential rights were won, there were no theoretical barriers to Jews integrating into every part of Austrian society.
Why ‘German’ does not mean ‘from Germany’
In the English-speaking, post-Hitler world, we see what we assume to be a clearly defined state called Germany populated by a collection of Europeans calling themselves ‘Germans’. We speak of ‘the Germans’ as we speak of ‘the French’ or ‘the English’ and never assume that the confluence of state, culture and people should ever have been a subject of debate or misunderstanding. In today's transient and global society, we shrug our shoulders and assume that if one is born within the geographical borders of a country called Germany or France and speaks the language reflected in the name of the country, then one is obviously German or French. But ‘Germany’ as a place and, more importantly, ‘German’ as an adjective
were
different, and it was the insecurity surrounding what it was to
be
German that culminated in many of the horrors of the twentieth century. Only after the defeat of Hitler in 1945 has ‘German’ come to mean ‘from Germany’.
What's more, when we speak or write of ‘German’ achievement, it is usually assumed that it took place somewhere within the regions of today's Germany. It probably never occurs to us that disparate German thinkers, musicians, writers, adventurers, politicians and artists should come from anywhere else. That such ‘German’ cultural and intellectual icons as Immanuel Kant and E. T. A. Hoffmann should hail from present-day Russia, or Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler from the Czech Republic; Arthur Schopenhauer, Günter Grass or the physicist Max Born from Poland; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, from Hungary or Walter von der Vogelweide from Italy, seems contradictory – or even contrary. Why would such prominent individuals call themselves ‘German’ when all of them quite obviously hail from countries with very impressive cultural legacies of their own?
The Germany we know today is a very different country from the Germany of the nineteenth century and bears little resemblance to the Germany of earlier times. Today, it is a neatly defined country that covers the bit of central Europe occupied by those German speakers not in Switzerland and Austria. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, Germanic Europe was not a single unified country but a network of independent fiefdoms, principalities, bishoprics and kingdoms, often reaching far into neighbouring regions. Nor was Austria the tidy German-speaking Alpine Republic of today, but a sprawling empire consisting of Slavs, Italians and Hungarians ruled by the German-speaking House of Habsburg. Austria's German-speakers were a volatile minority; German was the official language throughout most of the Empire and Austria's Germans, known as German-Austrians, saw themselves as being part of the greater German nation. Most of Austria's assimilated Jews, whether living in Hungary or in the Slavic regions, spoke German as a first language.
For centuries, the view was maintained that as long as the principal European nation states (France, the tsarist Russian Empire and Britain) could keep the Germans in their checkerboard of competing microstates, the status quo of a thousand years was maintained and the European balance of power was forever guaranteed. It meant that the largest single linguistic unit on the continent could join together or break apart as the situations and interests of the major nation states demanded. As an arrangement, it suited nearly everybody except the vast majority of German-speaking Europeans. Urgency was added to the need for German unification following the Napoleonic wars and a perception that only by living together in a single country could Germans provide a reliable defence against future foreign incursions. Despite a bewildering array of competing interests, Prince von Bismarck completed a partial unification in 1871 placing most, but not all, of Europe's German states under
the Prussian king. For reasons that are explained later, it excluded the German-speaking holdings of the Austrian emperor.
Bismarck's Prussian Germany nonetheless provided more than a bulwark against future marauding French. Indeed, the realisation that the new country would be condemned to defend borders on nearly all sides began to add a degree of paranoia which itself turned aggressive. By 1914, it seemed to be aching for a fight so that it could confirm its geopolitical position as the most important country in Europe. With enormous wealth and a population that was the same as the United States, there was no reason to suppose that Germany couldn't become the leading country in the world.
After the First World War, the French understandably saw great advantages in trying to return to the pre-Bismarck network of competing German states. France had little enthusiasm for its robust neighbour that had been cobbled into a single political unit within the living memory of most of France's ruling élite. By the end of the war in 1918, the German-speaking people of Europe were still divided between the two principal states of Austria and Germany. The French intended that the occupied Rhineland would break away and become yet another separate German-speaking republic. With Austria's empire wiped off the map, there was concern about what might happen should its remaining rump of German speakers be folded into its much larger neighbour to the north. That such moves towards unification were thwarted by the French and Americans was deplored not only by the composer Franz Schreker, but also by millions of Austrians like him – Jews and non-Jews alike. To many Europeans, it was illogical to support national self-determination, while not merging these two unequal German republics. Indeed, it was seen by German speakers as vengeful, ‘victors’ justice’ imposed through the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war with Germany, and Saint-Germain, a separate treaty settled with Austria. The conditions of these treaties were harsh and harboured the unspoken French desire that inflation and economic chaos would result in many of the constituent parts of Bismarck's project splitting up. They nearly did.
Twenty years later, most Europeans, non-Germans and Germans alike, were resigned to the view that Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938 was simply fulfilling an inevitable cultural and national destiny. Within a decade after the Anschluß Austria and a large chunk of Eastern Germany under Soviet control returned to the status quo of separate German states. In the case of Austria, its much longed-for fusion with Germany had proved a disastrous union that only underlined the degree to which history had fundamentally determined separate European destinies for these two very different German-speaking nations. After 1918, however, many Austrians seeking
German cultural identity within a distinctively German nation state felt betrayed by history and insurmountable political forces. It created a sense of being German that often exceeded anything found in Germany itself. One of the most obvious exponents of this malaise among disaffected Austrians was Adolf Hitler – but quite a few others were the children and grandchildren of recently assimilated Jews.