From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (18 page)

Read From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism Online

Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Europe, #Austria & Hungary, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #test

 

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more on [the Liberal Party's] success than any other group in the monarchy, they felt its failure most keenly."

63
The disappearance of Liberalism left the Austrian Jewsor at least those who belonged to the bourgeoisiepolitically homeless; never again would they find a political party with which they were so completely compatible.

 

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4
Austria's Jews on the Eve of the Great War
The Apparent Decline in Austrian AntiSemitism, 18971914
The appointment of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna in 1897 had an astonishing short-term outcome. Far from marking the beginning of the end for the city's Jews, it marked the beginning of a new if all-too-brief golden age, not only economically but also in their contributions to the arts and sciences as well as to sociology, psychology, law, architecture, and philosophy.

Austrian Jewsor at any rate those in the middle and upper classesprospered as never before or since. Between 1900 and 1910 they made up 71 percent of Vienna's financiers, 63 percent of its industrialists, 65 percent of its lawyers, 59 percent of its physicians, and over half of its journalists.

1
A well-known German-Jewish writer, Jakob Wassermann, who visited the city in 1898 remarked that "all public life was dominated by the Jews. The banks, the press, the theatre, literature, social organizations, all lay in the hands of Jews. The explanation was easy to find. The aristocracy would have nothing to do with such things."
2
What Wassermann and above all antiSemites failed to note, however, was that Jews were also very underrepresented in certain other aspects of Austrian society. For example, there were only 10 Jews among the 512 representatives in the lower house of the Parliament.
3

Unfortunately, the combination of Lueger's unfulfilled anti-Semitic threats together with the Jews' prewar economic and cultural successes led Vienna's Jews to reach unwarranted conclusions about the true nature of antiSemitism, which would have catastrophic consequences forty years later: the threats and ravings of anti-Semitic demagogues could be safely ignored because they would never be carried out.
The character of Lueger's thirteen-year administration was revealed in his inaugural speech when he ignored the "Jewish question" completely and in-

 

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stead discussed what proved to be the hallmarks of his rule, the improvement of the city's public services, especially mass transit, parks, and schools. These achievements were so impressive that his bitter rival, the Social Democratic Party, tolerated the erection of a statue in his honor in 1926 in a square that still bears the mayor's name.

4

As the years passed, it became more and more apparent that, to quote Lueger himself, antiSemitism was simply "an excellent means of getting ahead in politics, but after one [had] arrived, one [could not] use it any longer; it [was] the sport of the rabble."
5
It may also be that with Franz Joseph looking over his shoulder, the mayor felt constrained to keep his anti-Semitic proclivities in check. That explanation alone, however, would not account for the many favors Lueger was willing to do for his Jewish friends. More revealing is the connection between Austria's improving economy and the decline in antiSemitism. By 1897 the "Great Depression" had definitely ended and by 1903 the economy of western Austria was booming. It was keeping pace with Germany's and partially catching up with those of Britain, France, and Belgium.
6
During the Lueger years Jews were faced with no mass violence and little physical abuse. The mayor even paid them the left-handed compliment of saying that they were not as bad as the Hungarian Jews and that Vienna could not get along without them because they were the only people who were always active. Lueger also avoided antagonizing influential Jews by not insisting on the segregation of Jewish school children. On the other hand, Jews had difficulty getting contracts from the municipal government and few Jews were hired or promoted in the municipal service, although the practices of the preceding Liberal government had not been much better in this regard. Worst of all, Lueger's legacy made antiSemitism seem normal and respectable.
7
The improving Austrian economy also helps explain why the Jewish population of Vienna grew more slowly between 1900 and 1910. As noted earlier, the city's overall population grew by 21.2 percent in this decade, whereas the Jewish population grew by only 19.3 percent.
8
In particular it was the decline in the immigration of Galician Jews to Vienna, and their emigration instead to America, that helps account for this diminution.
In the Alpine provinces of Austria the growth rate of the small Jewish population was similar to that of Vienna. In Graz, Linz, Salzburg, and Innsbruck the number of Jews reached an all-time high in the last decade before the Great War, but the Jewish communities were not growing rapidly, and their absolute numbers were still very small. Graz, for example, had the second-largest Jewish population of Inner Austria, with only about two thousand souls. Linz was second in size with just one thousand members in its community. Salzburg

 

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counted barely two hundred Jews in 1901. Despite their prosperity, provincial Jews were far from being completely integrated into the surrounding Christian society, in part because of their historic isolation and in part because of continued antiSemitism. Instead, they formed their own little communities with their own organizations, and met in certain coffee houses.

9

The decline in Austrian antiSemitism following Lueger's takeover of power in Vienna can be illustrated by numerous electoral results. In the Reichsrat elections of 1907 Lueger's Christian Social Party increased its representation in the lower house from 23 seats to 67. The Social Democrats, however, benefited far more from a new franchise law in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy that established universal manhood suffrage in 1907. Consequently, their representation leaped from 10 to 87.
10
Far more serious for the Christian Social Party were the Viennese municipal elections of 1911, the year following Lueger's death, when they suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Socialists.
11
On the surface, then, antiSemitism appeared to be in full retreat in Vienna and the Germanspeaking parts of the Austrian Empire on the eve of the First World War. No anti-Semitic legislation had been passed since the introduction of equal civil rights for Jews, and the monarchy's most successful political party, the Christian Social Party, was both declining in size and downplaying its earlier anti-Jewish rhetoric. On the other hand, as Peter Pulzer has made clear, antiSemitism was still very much alive in Austrian "social life, semi-political organizations, and ideological and economic pressure groups."
12
Nowhere, perhaps, was the apparent decline of Austrian antiSemitism more obvious than in the lack of popularity and the financial failures of overtly anti-Semitic newspapers. One of the earliest of these papers was Georg von Schönerer's own mouthpiece, the
Unverfälschte deutsche Worte
, which he founded in 1883. Even at the height of its success two years later it had fewer than seventeen hundred subscribers.
13
A somewhat more successful anti-Semitic newspaper was the
Deutsches Volksblatt
edited by Ernst Vergani. It was regarded by Jews as the "peak of audacity in the insulting of Jews,"
14
and even its defenders admitted that anti-Jewish diatribes were an unavoidable way for the paper to maintain the interest of its readers. To maintain the readers' "fighting spirit" and their subscriptions, stories about alleged Jewish ritual murders and swindles appeared from time to time.
15
During the 1890s the paper managed to satisfy both Schönerer's and Lueger's followers by serving its readers a diet of sex crimes and prostitution in which Jews were involved, a format its readers seemed to appreciate despite the paper's numerous typographical errors.
16
It also anticipated the contents of postwar Nazi newspapers. Adolf Hitler him-

 

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self read the
Volksblatt
during his Vienna years between 1907 and 1913 and claimed in
Mein Kampf
that he "was not in agreement with the [
Volksblatt's
] sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time [he] read arguments which gave [him] some food for thought."

17

Less successful than the
Deutsches Volksblatt
was the
Ostdeutsche Rundschau
, which was published between 1890 and 1920. Edited by Karl Hermann Wolf, Georg von Schönerer's most talented follower, the paper's writing was of a substantially higher quality than that of the
Volksblatt
. Wolf, however, was hampered by the same intolerance and dogmatism that ruined the career of his mentor, with whom he broke in 1902. Moreover, Wolf's unwillingness or inability to invest sufficient funds into his paper, in addition to his inattention to details, made the paper a financial failure, forcing it to change from daily to weekly editions in 1919, a change that it blamed on the "intellectual jewification" of Vienna. Although Wolf was adept at phrase making, he was more concerned with espousing his personal opinions than meeting the needs of his readers. Consequently, the
Rundschau's
four thousand subscribers were limited to Wolf's German Radical Party.
18
Still another prewar newspaper in Austria that gave ample space to antiSemitism was the
Deutsche Volksruf
. First published in November 1912, it was the Salzburg organ of the German Workers' Party, which had been founded in 1903 in northern Bohemia and which would evolve into the Austrian Nazi Party after the First World War. However, neither the
Volksruf
nor the German Workers' Party in general limited its interest to antiSemitism. Anti-Marxism and panGermanism were far more important, especially in the prewar era.
19
The circulation of these and other anti-Semitic and panGerman newspapers declined from 50,000 in 1900 to 35,000 in 1910, whereas the circulation of the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
, the official organ of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, increased from 24,000 to 54,000 in just the first five years of the new century.
20
Even Hitler had a low opinion of Vienna's anti-Semitic press, calling it "unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great people."
21
The decline of newspapers whose primary appeal was antiSemitism was much less significant than it might at first glance appear. These newspapers were all also panGerman in their ideology and reflected in part the loss of popularity suffered by Georg von Schönerer and his racist followers. Journalistic antiSemitism, however, far from disappearing, simply concentrated more in the Catholic camp. It found a new home in the
Reichspost
, since 1894 the official organ of the Christian Social Party. After a slow beginning its readership increased from 6,000 in 1900 to 25,000 just five years later, thus nearly

 

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compensating for the declining number of readers of panGerman newspapers. Although antiSemitism was an important feature of the paper from the very beginning, it was not an obsession. Moreover, even though the
Reichspost
enjoyed considerable success already before the world war, it could not begin to compete in popularity and still less in the prestige with some of Vienna's great Jewish-owned newspapers, especially the
Neue Freie Presse
, whose reputation extended far beyond the boundaries of the AustroHungarian Monarchy.

22

The Beginnings of Jewish Self-Defense
Austrian Jews were not entirely passive in the face of the growing number of insults they encountered after about 1880. Their response was muted, however, by the firm belief on the part of assimilated Jewswho made up the overwhelming majority of Germanspeaking Jews in the monarchythat antiSemitism was not a serious problem; it was at most a relic of an earlier and benighted age, which was bound to disappear in the near and more enlightened future. Such Jews also tried to ignore the problem. For example, in the 1880s the twelve Jewish members of Vienna's city council took an oath to each other to ignore all but the worst expressions of antiSemitism. Other Jews immersed themselves in scientific or literary studies.
23
On several occasions in the late nineteenth century anti-Semitic attacks on Judaism became so outrageous that rabbis and other Jewish scholars, as well as some political leaders of Jewish origins could no longer remain silent. Such was the case already in 1860 when Ignaz Kuranda successfully defended himself against a libel suit by Sebastian Brunner after accusing Brunner's
Kirchenzeitung
of spreading long disproven lies about the Jewish religion. The
Kirchenzeitung
claimed that Judaism permitted Jews to disregard their oaths and required them to use Christian blood for religious purposes. Brunner's defeat forced him to resign as editor of his Jew-baiting newspaper and helped launch Kuranda's political career in the German Liberal Party, which for twenty years he led. Kuranda also became the president of the Jewish Community of Vienna in 1871. Another example of Jewish self-defense occurred in 1869 when the chief rabbi (Oberrabbiner) of Vienna, Adolf Jellinek, wrote a book entitled
Der jüdische Stamm
, in which he paid an enthusiastic tribute to the Talmud at a time when recent anti-Semitic attacks had made even some Jews ashamed of it. In so doing he also raised Jewish national consciousness.
24
The most celebrated case of Jewish self-defense took place in 1882. A few

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