From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (26 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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cal about the Ostjuden, especially the party's leader in the early 1920s and simultaneously the head of its "Workers' Union" (Arbeiterverein), Leopold Kunschak. Although he was more extreme in his antiSemitism than most other members of his party, the other party leaders gladly tolerated the expression of his views. On countless occasions in 1919 and 1920 Kunschak demanded that the Jewish refugees either be deported or, if that proved impossible, placed in concentration camps. To the objection that such imprisonment would be impossibly expensive, Kunschak replied that the taxpayers would willingly pay the cost. In a debate in the Vienna provincial assembly (Landtag) in January 1921 Kunschak demanded that the Jewish refugees be expelled because they were profiteers and because they were a threat to law and order. The Socialist mayor, Jakob Reumann, responded that he was opposed to all profiteers, not just those who were Jewish. The Zionist councilman, Dr. Leopold Plaschkes, added that in the name of culture, humanity, and the honor of the city of Vienna the expulsion of Jewish refugees could not be carried out.

43

Even Kunschak moderated his tone after his Christian Social Party assumed the leading role in the federal government in 1920. He now argued that the expulsion of the Ostjuden was not the responsibility of the federal government but of the Socialist mayor of Vienna. The federal chancellor and the minister of interior, both also members of the Christian Social Party, maintained that an energetic deportation of the Ostjuden would cause great international difficulties, especially with the Poles, and have the worst possible consequences for Austria.
44
The Option Question
To many Austrian antiSemites the most promising way to expel the unwanted Eastern Jews appeared to lie in article 80 of the Treaty of St. Germain, which stipulated that "persons who live in a former territory of the AustroHungarian Monarchy and are differentiated there from the majority of the local population by race and language may within six months of the enforcement of the state treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, that is, including 15 January 1921, opt for Austrian citizenship if they according to their race and speech, belong to the German majority of the people of Austria."
45
When the Treaty of St. Germain began to be enforced in August 1920, the Austrian government at first considered Germanspeaking Jews who sought Austrian citizenship to be "Germans" because Jews had not been regarded as

 

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a distinct race or nationality in the Dual Monarchy. To prove one's nationality it was only necessary to show one's conscription or demobilization papers, workbook, or marriage certificate. Some lowerlevel officials, however, would accept only proof of having had a German-language education. AntiSemites like Kunschak claimed that Ostjuden forged documents to make false claims about having attended a German school.

46

AntiSemites appeared to have won a great victory when an Austrian administrative court ruled on 9 June 1921 that the word
race
could be interpreted in a völkisch or biological sense rather than as nationality in a cultural sense. Thereafter the minister of the interior and member of the Greater German People's Party, Dr. Leopold Waber, began to reject citizenship petitions even from Jews who had been born in Vienna or some other Germanspeaking city. This new policy meant that sometimes members of the same family were treated as belonging to different "races."
47
Domestic and foreign pressure eventually forced Waber and the Austrian government as a whole to retreat from their anti-Jewish position on the option question. As early as March 1921 the Council of the League of Nations, with British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour leading the discussions with the Austrian government, decided it was permissible for Austria to expel foreigners. However, this concession was hedged with so many exceptionsold and sick people, those whose towns were destroyed in the war and were not yet rebuilt, people who had been working for a long time on projects for the common good, and certain categories of studentsthat the
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung
, at the time an organ of the Greater German People's Party, complained that the league's decision would make the expulsion of Ostjuden a legal impossibility.
48
In August 1921 the Union of German-Austrian Jews made an urgent appeal to the Viennese representatives of the signatory powers of the Treaty of St. Germain to request their governments to give an authoritative interpretation of article 80. At the same time the union urged its friends in London, Paris, and Rome to support this step through direct representations at their foreign ministries.
49
Pressure on the Austrian government to change its policy on the option question also came from international Jewish organizations. Armed with information provided him by the Union of German-Austrian Jews, Lucien Wolf, the general secretary of the Joint Foreign Committee of the Jewish Board of Deputies in London, together with the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, remonstrated in September 1921 to the league about the Austrian government's interpretation of article 80. When the league secretariat asked the Austrian government for its response, Minister of Interior Waber replied dis-

 

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ingenuously that the condition of "the Jews in Austria was, as is well known, favorable both economically and socially and that the treatment of the 190,000 people seeking citizenship was being handled in a liberal spirit."

50

The option question was finally laid to rest in April 1922 when an Austrian administrative court repealed an earlier decision by saying that the usual legal definition of race in Austria was merely "nationality" and not a biological or cultural community as interpreted by the Ministry of the Interior. Thereafter, Austrian antiSemites were deprived of any legal grounds for protesting the naturalization of Ostjuden and the issue finally faded away as it did in Germany about the same time.
51
The demagogic nature of the whole debate over the option question is revealed in the fact that, even with the favorable interpretation (from the Jewish point of view) of article 80, only 20,360 Jews opted to become Austrian citizens between 1920 and 1925, or less than one-ninth the number claimed by Leopold Waber in his reply to the League of Nations.

 

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7
Academic AntiSemitism in the Early Postwar Years
Jewish Enrollment at Austrian Universities and Middle Schools

One important area in which Ostjuden caused real and not just imaginary overcrowding, albeit only temporarily, was in Vienna's institutions of higher learning or Hochschulen, especially at the University of Vienna and at the College for International Trade (Hochschule für Welthandel). A high percentage of Eastern European Jews had attended Austrian universities even before the outbreak of the First World War. For example, during the summer semester of 1913, 24 percent of the medical students at the University of Vienna were from Galicia and Bukovina, of whom the majority was Jewish. The same was true of 16 percent of the law students and 12 percent of the arts and sciences students.

1
Jews from all geographic locations made up over 27 percent of the total enrollment at the University of Vienna during the last five semesters preceding the assassination at Sarajevo.
2

The high proportion of Jewish students, even though it had been declining since the 1880s, produced a keen competition for jobs and helped create an academic antiSemitism that was even worse than in Germany. But like Germany no other group in Austria was so racially, passionately, and violently anti-Semitic as students of university age. Jewish students were frequently attacked and antiSemitism was so common that it was almost taken for granted.
3
This antiSemitism was tolerated both by sympathetic administrators and, until the 1930s, by the tradition of academic freedom or autonomy, dating back to the Middle Ages, which allowed Central European universities to police themselves.
4

 

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During the early part of the First World War both the percentage and the absolute number of Ostjuden in Viennese Hochschulen rose rapidly, reaching a peak in 191718 when 46 percent of all the students were Jewishexactly half of the 92 percent claimed by one postwar anti-Semitic pamphlet. It was still slightly over 42 percent in 192021, but thereafter the percentage rapidly declined so that by 192526 it was below 25 percent.

5

AntiSemites claimed that the high percentage of Ostjuden in Vienna's colleges and institutes during the war was the result of the Jews' desire to evade military service. The reality was considerably more mundane. The overall enrollment at the University of Vienna dropped precipitously from a prewar high of 10,424 students just before the outbreak of the war to 3,942 during the summer semester of 1916 and to just 2,500 a year later. With most of the male students now in the AustroHungarian armed forces the percentage of the female students rose dramatically, from 7 percent in early 1914 to 36 percent in 191718. Nearly all of these coeds were Jewish: most westernized Jews encouraged higher education for women whereas panGermans regarded such education as undesirable at best. The upsurge of Jewish enrollment also resulted from the Russian invasion of the monarchy's northeastern provinces in the fall of 1914, which forced the closing of several universities that had large numbers of Jewish students. Many of these students, especially young women, then transferred to schools in militarily secure Vienna.
6
An attempt was made already during the war to place a limit on the number of Galician students. The student fraternities, in fact, wanted to have a numerus clausus for all Jewish students, not just Ostjuden.
7
The issue of the Galician students became more critical again just after the war when the virtual exclusion of Jews from numerous Eastern European universities, particularly in Poland, caused many Jewish students to seek entry into the somewhat less anti-Semitic universities of Central Europe. Unfortunately, this new wave of students coincided with the return of Austrian war veterans to create a shortage of space and an increase in anti-Jewish sentiments.
8
The students, often the offspring of government officials, military officers, and small businessmen, were the people who were most likely to feel declassed by the military defeat and the breakup of the AustroHungarian empire. Their prospects were bleak at best in the shrunken territory of the Austrian republic with its huge surplus of civil servants and soldiers. This situation was greatly aggravated by Austria having by far the highest percentage of students in all of Europe. As late as 1933 there were still 38.3 students per 10,000 population in Austria or almost twice as many as that of the next country, France, which had only 20.9.
9

 

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The oversupply of students and the undersupply of jobs only worsened in 1922 when in the so-called Geneva Protocols the British, French, Italian, and Czechoslovakian governments insisted that the Austrian government enact an austerity program that resulted in the dismissal of thousands of civil servants as the quid pro quo for a guaranteed twenty-year loan equal to $126 million.

10
The hopes students harbored of moving into the free professionsmedicine, law, journalism, and the artsalso appeared slim to nonexistent because they were already dominated in Vienna by Jews.

The shortage of space at Vienna's colleges and institutes in the early postwar years was very real although far from being exclusively the result of the enrollment of foreign Jews. In March 1919 the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
described the facilities at the University of Vienna as being ''obviously overcrowded." In one of the anatomy institutes there were 1, 308 students in an area designed to accommodate 360 to 400 students. At the Institute for Medical Chemistry 1,286 students were trying to make do with space intended for 464 students. The Surgical Clinic had 557 students working where there should have been only 120 to 150 trainees. At the Ear Clinic there were 232 students instead of 50, and so on.
11
The lack of space combined with the student and professorial antiSemitism persuaded authorities at the University of Vienna and the Agricultural College to cap enrollment in 1919. Preference was given to native applicants, thus in effect discriminating against Jews who constituted the majority of the foreign students. Even so, two years later there were still 4,000 foreign students among the 10,851 students at the University of Vienna. These foreign students, however, paid a higher tuition than natives, were not eligible for any public welfare, and through their purchases contributed in a minor way to improving the economy of Vienna.
12
The high percentage of Jews at Austrian and especially Viennese institutions of higher learning was not caused solely by a large number of foreign Jews. A basic cause, of course, was the venerable and well-known Jewish love of and respect for education and scholarship, especially in medicine and the law. These two professions were also attractive to Jews because they could be self-employed and not dependent on employment by Christians. The medical and teaching professions were especially advantageous because they could be practiced anywhere in the world if antiSemitism became too extreme. Jewish parents evidently also realized more than most Christians the importance of an education. Certainly, poor Jewish immigrants were far more likely to send their children to Vienna's elite
Gymnasien
the prerequisite for entry into universitiesthan was true of gentiles from comparable social positions.

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