From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (23 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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cally synonymous. Anti-Semitic articles in newspapers such as the
Reichspost
were usually not pure inventions, but they gave the very false impression that only Jews were involved in illegal activities.

37
AntiSemites typically used the wrongdoings of individual Jews to generalize about the whole Jewish community. Even Jewish authors admitted that some Jews "speculated in money and indulged in other reprehensible practices to ward off starvation."
38
The great Austrian defender of Jews, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, acknowledged that some Jewish refugees had managed to become rich during the war and had acted in a tasteless way. Jewish businessmen were also charged with making enormous profits in procuring goods for the army. During the war they had supposedly taken over whole branches of industry as well as the grocery business. Central government offices that were set up by the government in order to regulate war industries were allegedly run by Jews who employed their Jewish friends and favored their own private industries.
39

In reality, however, the number of Jews in Vienna who were enriched by the war was tiny in comparison to those impoverished by it. The biggest profits were made in the armaments industries and in agriculture, two areas from which Jews were almost completely excluded. Peasants not only enjoyed a huge demand for their harvests but were also able to pay off their debts with inflated money. And even if by some chance a higher percentage of Jews in Vienna did profit from the war, this could easily be explained by the fact that a far higher percentage of Jews than Christians was engaged in business.
40
Despite press censorship, anti-Semitic articles began appearing in Viennese newspapers as early as 1915, especially in the
Reichspost
. An article in an October issue of this official organ of the Christian Social Party blamed Jews for opposing papal efforts for a peace of understanding without annexations. Four days earlier the
Ostdeutsche Rundschau
complained that Jews were standing in the way of an annexationist peace. Another article in the
Reichspost
in November described allegedly treasonous activities of German-American and German-English Jews against their former homeland without mentioning the activities of Christian immigrants that were directed against the Central Powers. In October 1917 the
Reichspost
claimed that Alexander Kerensky and Vladimir Lenin in Russia, and Lord Northcliffe, the propagandist in Britain, were all Jews. It also maintained that President Woodrow Wilson had fallen completely under Jewish influence. After March 1918 anti-Semitic articles became increasingly common in several Viennese newspapers, with the
Reichspost
still setting the pace.
41
Newspapers were not the only medium for anti-Semitic statements during the last year and a half of the Habsburg Monarchy. In the summer of 1917 a

 

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Christian Social politician named Heinrich Mataja, who represented Lower Leopoldstadt, the most heavily Jewish populated district in Vienna, wrote a memorandum to his party's leader, Prince Alois Liechtenstein, curtly reminding him about the party's anti-Semitic principles and demanding the lifting of the
Burgfrieden
(civil peace) that the mayor of Vienna had proclaimed at the beginning of the war. But whoever had heard Mataja's own public speeches as well as those of two other Christian Social politicians, Anton Jerzabek and Leopold Kunschak, not to mention Georg von Schönerer's old follower, K. H. Wolf, could have no doubt that the Burgfrieden was already a thing of the past. The reopening of the Austrian Parliament at the end of May 1917 provided a new forum for anti-Semitic delegates of the Christian Social Party and various German nationalist parties. In July, Jerzabek told the Reichsrat that Jewish refugees were stealing instead of working. Indeed, in the summer of 1917 the German-Austrian parties in the Reichsrat were making antiSemitism their main program.

42

The failure of Austria-Hungary's last offensive on the Italian front in June 1918 along with the approach of defeat and increasingly desperate food, housing, and fuel conditions in the summer and fall combined to produce a need to find a scapegoat; the Jews, especially the Ostjuden, were the most convenient target. The new wave of antiSemitism expressed itself in public demonstrations, which began in the summer of 1918 and which became ever more massive and sometimes violent until 1923, when improving economic conditions and the settlement of the Galician refugee issue finally dampened, but by no means extinguished, the passions of antiSemites.
This wave of antiSemitism, which was tolerated by both imperial and municipal authorities, reached an early high point in mid-June 1918 with mass demonstrations; they were part of a so-called German People's Assembly (Deutscher Volkstag), which met in the Austrian capital ostensibly to proclaim the unswerving loyalty of the Christian Social and panGerman participants to Kaiser Karl. In fact the demonstrators denounced the Jews as war profiteers and held them responsible for the food shortages. One speaker even called for a pogrom as a way to heal the state.
43
The Jewish response to the renewed agitation was at first tepid. The Austrian-Israelite Union quietly, and for a while successfully, protested anti-Semitic activities to the Ministry of the Interior. However, Vienna's Israelitische Kultusgemeinde for a long time tolerated anti-Semitic pronouncements, hoping that in so doing it was providing a service to the fatherland by observing its part of the Burgfrieden. Not all Jews were satisfied with such passivity, however. One private individual by the name of Sigmund Schönau wrote an open letter to

 

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the president of the organization, Alfred Stern, complaining that a proposal he (Schönau) had made in January 1916 for the formation of a committee to fight antiSemitism had been ignored. Schönau claimed that he had succeeded in getting the pope to forbid priests in Vienna and elsewhere in Austria-Hungary from delivering anti-Semitic sermons. Despite Schönau's efforts, most Viennese Jews started to become alarmed only in the second half of 1918 and even then deluded themselves into thinking that the renewed antiSemitism was only temporary.

44

In retrospect it is clear that well before the final collapse of the AustroHungarian Monarchy, the establishment of the First Republic, and the emergence of the Social Democratic Party as the leading political force in Vienna, antiSemitism had reappeared in the Austrian capital and elsewhere in the Dual Monarchy, especially in its Germanspeaking regions. The First World War had proved to be a major turning point in the relations between Jews and Germanspeaking people in both Austria and Germany.
45
Bad as things were in the summer and fall of 1918, however, they were but a foretaste of things to come.

 

 

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PART II
ANTISEMITISM IN THE DEMOCRATIC ERA
The end of the Habsburg Monarchy also brought a temporary end to authoritarian government in Austria. Tragically, from the accession of Joseph II in 1780 to the end of Austrian independence in 1938, Austrian Jews were far better protected by authoritarian regimes than they were when executive powers were weak and democratic institutions were strong. Thus, antiSemitism flared briefly during the democratic Revolutions of 1848 and again after the extension of the franchise in 1882. It was largely suppressed during the first three years of the First World War when the Austrian Parliament never met and the press was censored. It was at least partially quelled once again with the establishment of the authoritarian regime of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1933 who dissolved all the political parties, including his own Christian Social Party, and partially censored the press.
It was during the intervening years, between the fall of the Habsburg Monarchy and the establishment of the "corporative state" by Dollfuss that antiSemitism enjoyed its most luxuriant expressions. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly also meant freedom to shout anti-Semitic slogans and to hold anti-Semitic demonstrations. AntiSemitism, in fact, flourished in all the new democracies of East Central Europe after 1918, with the exception of Czechoslovakia. And it is no mere coincidence that the rebirth of freedom in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s is also being accompanied by a rebirth of anti-Jewish hatred.
At the very moment when Austrians enjoyed almost unlimited freedom of expression, they had an incredible number of newspapers to voice their newfound freedom as well as a large number of ideologically doctrinaire political parties. The bibliography of this book lists no fewer than thirty-two newspapers for Vienna alone. Nearly all of them represented the views of a different political party or faction. The almost completely nonideological pragmatism, which

 

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has generally characterized the politics of the Second Austrian Republic since 1945, was unknown in the First Republic. Extremists in interwar Austria, of which there were many, saw their rivals not as honest, if mistaken men, but as heretics to be eliminated one way or another. AntiSemitism was just one of many deeply entrenched passions of interwar Austria. Anti-Marxism and hatred of the newly autonomous "Red Vienna," anticlericalism, and fascism all had their fanatical devotees. Nor were such passions limited exclusively to non-Jews.
If it is sobering to acknowledge the connection between democracy and antiSemitism, it is downright depressing to note that there was also a parallel between antiSemitism, education, and religiosity. Thus Socialists, with their eighth-grade educations and atheistic philosophy, were far less likely to be anti-Semitic than regular churchgoers and holders of academic degrees.
Still another relationship with antiSemitism, albeit a much less surprising one, was the connection between economic crises and Judeophobia. The new Austrian state was never economically sound in the interwar period. Landlocked and with few natural resources including arable land, it was now cut off from former markets. At no time (in contrast to Germany) did Austria fully recover its prewar prosperity. But it was precisely in the worst of economic times, from 1918 to the end of 1923 and again after 1930 that antiSemitism was at its height. Nevertheless, the connection between unemployment and antiSemitism was never exact. Even during periods of high unemployment a laid-off industrial worker was less likely to be anti-Semitic than a still-employed member of the bourgeoisie.
One final connection should be noted. However much democracy may have made the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments easier, it was not the
cause
of antiSemitism. On the contrary, antiSemites were the enemies of democracy. It is at least encouraging to note that in general Austrians who were the strongest supporters of democracy were the least likely to be anti-Semitic and in some cases were actually philoSemitic. Those people who were the most fanatically anti-Semitic were also the most likely to be archenemies of democracy. By 1933 the antiSemites had helped bring about the premature death of the fledgling Austrian democracy.

 

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6
Revolution and Retribution

The end of the First World War and the establishment of the First Austrian Republic came as mixed blessings for Austria's Jews. They generally regretted the passing of the monarchy in which they had gained complete constitutional equality and considerable prosperity. Its demise represented the triumph of narrow national self-interest, something that most Austrian Jews had rejected.

1
On the other hand, the end of the war at least meant the cessation of the slaughter on the front lines and the promise that the dreadful shortages of food, fuel, and housing would soon be alleviated. However, the war's end and the collapse of the monarchy also left the Jews, along with other Austrians, bitterly divided about their own future.

The Jewish Identity Crisis and Left-Wing Politics
The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy created a severe identity crisis for all Austrians, both Jews and gentiles. Most Austrians, including many Jews, were confronted with the question of whether they were Germans, just like those of the new Weimar Republic, or whether as Austrians they formed a distinct nationality that ought to remain in a separate state. Most Austrians, for the moment at least, preferred the first alternative.
Austrian Jews who were still selfconsciously Jewish faced a second problem: were they primarily Austrians and only secondarily Jews, or did they, as Jews, belong to a distinct nationality? Unlike Austrian gentiles, most Jews, especially in the 1920s and early 1930s, continued to think of themselves as German-Austrians by birth, customs, education, culture, and feeling, and had no wish to be anything else. They asked only for equal treatment in the new republic. In view of the growing antiSemitism late in the war, however, they were apprehensive about this goal being achieved.
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