From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (34 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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The demonstrations led to the closing of the university, the Technical College, the College of Veterinary Medicine, and the Agricultural College for the remainder of the academic year for all students except those taking final examinations. After the fighting died down, the rectors of the Viennese Hochschulen expressed their "disapproval" of the fighting but also assured the Deutsche Studentenschaft of their support for its continued existence. Likewise the Academic Senate of the University of Vienna in November 1931 expressed its approval of the goals and methods of the Deutsche Studentenschaft.

24

Even though the
Reichspost
, which was usually sympathetic to the demands of völkisch students, said that the decision of the constitutional court was final and had to be respected, Nazi demonstrations against the announcement continued.
25
In fact, even the issue of the student nations was not quite over. In April 1931 the minister of education and member of the Christian Social Party, Emmerich Czermak, tried unsuccessfully to get the Austrian Parliament to approve a new student order similar to the one that had been disallowed by the constitutional court in the previous year.
26
An End to Academic Violence?: Jewish and American Protests
The attempt partially to segregate Jewish students at the University of Vienna thus ended in failure. Jews, however, had little reason to be optimistic about the future. Official Jewish complaints to the Ministry of Education about the abuse of students received polite assurances that the government would make every effort to treat all citizens, including Jewish students, equally. However, no concrete measures were ever taken prior to 1932 to implement the reassuring words. Numerous interventions with the governor and mayor of Vienna and with the police president about Nazi outrages at the colleges and institutes in Vienna also proved to be equally ineffective. In October 1930 the former police president and then chancellor of Austria and member of the Greater German People's Party, Johannes Schober, told the director of the international Jewish Telegraph Agency, Jakob Landau, that Austrian antiSemitism did not have any manifestations that required government intervention. There had been some noisy incidents, but they had not affected the equal rights of Jews. The occasional Nazi student demonstrations did not deserve the attention they had received abroad. They were not as bad as those that took place when he (Schober) was a student thirty-six years earlier.
27
The violent Nazi demonstration that accompanied the decision of the constitutional court of Austria to disallow the regulation regarding student

 

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nations induced the board of directors of the Kultusgemeinde to send a sharp protest to the federal chancellor in which it denounced the highest academic authorities even more strongly than the "misguided" students. By not denouncing the outrages and not providing protection for the Jewish students, the authorities had encouraged the illegal and violent attacks of the German nationalist students. The same demonstrations caused Jewish students to hold a massive but peaceful demonstration of their own on 27 June 1931; "Radical Zionists" held another demonstration in late November to protest Nazi activities at the University of Vienna.

28

The protest of the Jewish students received reinforcement from a surprising quarter. The violence that accompanied the decision of the constitutional court of Austria to disallow the "student nations" prompted the executive committee of the American League for the Protection of Foreign Students in Vienna, which consisted of prominent members of the American Medical Association, to issue a sharp note of protest; copies were sent to the Austrian government, the rector and College of Professors of the University of Vienna, the American minister to Austria (American envoys did not yet have the title of ambassador), President Herbert Hoover, and all newspapers in the United States having large circulations. The letter denounced the "cowardly, inhuman and unsportsmanlike" conduct of the bands of Nazi students. The note also objected to the absence of protection provided the victims by the rector of the university. The American minister, Gilchrist Baker Stockton, also made an informal complaint to Foreign Minister Johannes Schober at this time, which apparently was instrumental in preventing serious disturbances for the next year.
29
The American government had monitored Austrian antiSemitism during the First Republic because of the relatively large numbers of Americans who were studying in Vienna at the time, the great majority of whom were Jewish medical students. Vienna had long been a mecca for such scholars. Between 1870 and 1914 two-thirds of the two to three hundred Americans who annually came to Central Europe to study medicine in the decade before the outbreak of the World War came to Vienna, a number that if anything increased in the interwar period. No doubt some of the students were simply following in the footsteps of their fathers. Others, however, were there because of increasingly restrictive quotas against Jews at American medical colleges where Jewish enrollment fell from 16.4 percent in 1918 to 12.7 percent in 1946.
30
By the time the next major round of anti-Semitic violence at the University of Vienna occurred in October 1932, the American legation in Vienna was prepared to take an even firmer stance to protect American students. A Nazi

 

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attack with steel rods, whips, brass knuckles, and knives on Jewish students at Professor Tandler's Anatomy Institute resulted in fifteen being injured, three of them Americans. Following the attack, twenty American students called on Minister Stockton to demand the protection of the American government.

31

Consequently, Stockton had a series of three meetings with the Austrian chancellor, Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss, to protest the Nazi violence. During the first meeting the chancellor was visibly irritated by the "gross stupidity of the National Socialist students" and promised to do everything he could to prevent a recurrence. Nevertheless, the disturbances continued, causing Stockton to seek a second audience in which he "expressed the opinion that if the university authorities were unable to extend protection the state should intervene." Stockton sought still another meeting with the chancellor after four more American students were injured in a new incident. This time Dollfuss was defensive, blaming the unruly spirit of the students on their lack of discipline which in turn, he claimed, was the result of Austria not having compulsory military service. Stockton was not impressed with this argument and replied that university officials in the United States managed to maintain law and order despite a similar absence of compulsory military service. The meeting ended with Stockton again saying that it was the duty of the Austrian state to intervene if the authorities at the University of Vienna could not extend adequate protection to students.
32
The formal demarche of the American minister along with similar protests from the envoys of Poland, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Romania to the federal chancellery was widely publicized both in Austria and abroad. The recently elected völkisch rector of the University of Vienna, Professor Othenio Abel, was forced to make a formal and public apology to the American envoy. Abel also issued a proclamation at the University of Vienna urging students not to precipitate further disorders, threatening to expel students who disturbed the academic peace and even having them prosecuted criminally. No one would be allowed on academic premises without an identity card. The recent excesses had been injurious to the prestige of the university and had placed in jeopardy its special centuries-old privileges, Abel concluded.
33
The pro-Nazi
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung
called Abel's apology a "humiliation" and warned ominously that "the time in which such things are impossible is just around the corner." It went on to allege that, based on their surnames, at least 74 percent of the American students were Jewish and therefore not really Americans. ''The Jew belongs to a nation with special characteristics like no other people. It is therefore irrelevant where he happens to live, he still remains a Jew."
34

 

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Shortly after the American protest, the Austrian minister of education, Anton Rintelen, assured the president and vice-presidents of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde of Vienna that the government disapproved the recent regrettable incident. He had discussed necessary security measures with the rector of the university, who had assured him that the guilty would be punished to the fullest extent of the university's rules and receive whatever civil punishment might be appropriate. Further discussions regarding security measures would take place during the next few days between the rector's office and the Ministry of Education.

35

By the end of 1932 violence at the University of Vienna had subsided. However, Austrian Jews could hardly have been encouraged by other events that had occurred during the year. In April Nazis won nearly 17 percent of the vote in local elections throughout Austria, including over 200,000 votes in Vienna alone, up from 27, 500 in November 1930. Then in July the National Socialists won over 37 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections in Germany. Austrian Jews, who were being subjected to increasing social segregation and violence in the early 1930s, now faced the imminent prospect of a Nazi takeover in neighboring Germany. Would Austria be next?

 

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PART III
THE VARIETIES OF AUSTRIAN ANTISEMITISM
It is far easier to describe the many anti-Semitic incidents that occurred during the democratic years of the First Austrian Republic than it is to analyze the political forces that produced them. Obviously, many different groups disliked Jews for one reason or another: university students, practicing Roman Catholics, small shopkeepers, industrial workers, panGerman nationalists, and others. All of them feared that their political goals and ways of life were threatened by political and economic developments, especially in the early postwar years and again after the start of the Great Depression.
AntiSemitism in Austria (and most other European countries, for that matter) can best be understood if it is divided into categories and if those categories are associated with various political parties and movements. The categories in interwar Austria remained the same as they had been in the late nineteenth century: religious, economic, social, and racial. Any reader expecting to find airtight divisions between these types will be both disappointed and confused, however. Economic and social motivations could be found in every form of Austrian antiSemitism. Religious antiSemitism was naturally most closely associated with the Catholics in their Christian Social Party, but was by no means eschewed by the country's other bourgeois parties. Even the Social Democrats might be accused of religious antiSemitism, except in their case they distrusted all religion, not just Judaism. Racial antiSemitism was most frequently found in the panGerman parties; but some of the more extreme Catholics came close to accepting it by refusing to accept baptized Jews as full-fledged Christians for up to three generations.
To make the incredibly complex task of categorizing Austrian antiSemitism as simple as possible this survey will begin at the political "left" with Marxist antiSemitism, the most moderate and the most "verbal" of the various types; the Social Democrats and Communists were also the only people who had

 

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no specifically anti-Semitic program and who directed their wrath exclusively against capitalists, especially Jewish capitalists; the latter could be salvaged by abandoning their exploiting ways. To their credit, the Marxists also occasionally opposed antiSemitism as an antileftist snare.
Traditional Catholic antiSemitism will be considered the "middle-of-theroad" variety although it encompassed both moderate and extreme forms of antiSemitism. Catholics usually "limited" their demands to the reduction of Jewish ''influence" though some favored the expulsion of Jewish newcomers. Catholics also considered Jews redeemable if only they converted to Catholicism.
The analysis will conclude with the most violent and modern form of antiSemitism, that which was espoused by the Austrian Nazis and other ultraright-wing groups. For them, Jewish salvation was impossible because their evil characteristics were racially inherited. Even the racists disagreed, however, as to how many Jewish ancestors made one hopelessly corrupt and how the "Jewish problem" was to be solved. In practice, most joined the traditionalists in favoring the limitation of Jewish influence or at most the expulsion of the Ostjuden.
This organization has the added advantage of conforming roughly with chronological developments. The Marxists were strongest in the early postwar years when they gained control of the Vienna municipal government in May 1919 (holding it until February 1934) and shared control of the federal government from November 1918 until October 1920. The Christian Socials took sole command of the federal government and were usually in control until the end of the democratic era in 1933 as well as during the authoritarian regime that followed. It was also during the democratic era, especially between 1927 and 1932 that the paramilitary Austrian Heimwehr enjoyed its heyday. Thereafter the Austrian Nazi Party figured ever larger in the politics of the country until, with the help of the German invasion of March 1938, it gained control, or at least partial control, of the annexed state.

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