From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (37 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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nationalization of factories. On the other hand, Jewish capital had long since recognized the Social Democratic Party to be its mortal enemy. The 16 March 1921 issue of the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
claimed that the Jewish bourgeoisie did not even mind students, officers, and members of the petite bourgeoisie carrying out violent, anti-Semitic demonstrations because the supposedly anti-Semitic parties never passed any anti-Semitic legislation. The Aryans and the big bourgeoisie knew how to stick together on important issues. In September 1922 the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
called Chancellor Seipel a "puppet of the Jews" who wanted to turn Austria over to the enslavement of Jewish international finance capital by signing the Geneva Protocol, which gave Austria a loan of $126 million.

18
Bold headlines of the 12 September 1923 issue of the same newspaper announced that "the Christian Social antiSemites were begging Jewish capitalists" for money for the parliamentary elections scheduled for November. The League of Front Fighters was also accused of accepting money from Jews in the Industriellenverband (Union of Industrialists); a few years later similar charges were leveled against the Nazis.
19

The founding of "Aryan" and "Christian" banks in the provinces during the early 1920s gave the Socialists still more opportunities to attack Jewish capitalists. The banks had presumably been founded to free gentiles from "Jewish" capital. After these banks had gone bankrupt by 1926, a prominent Jewish Socialist in the Austrian Parliament, Robert Danneberg, pointed out how these anti-Semitic banks had lost their money by making poor investments with funds given them by Jewish speculators.
20
Many if not all of these charges were probably true and were not necessarily inspired by antiSemitism. There was indeed considerable capitalist class solidarity in Austria; and one could legitimately argue that it was hypocritical of groups to espouse anti-Semitismoften in blatant formsyet at the same time accept handouts from Jewish capitalists. Nevertheless, the attacks also reinforced the stereotype of Jews being moneygrubbers and manipulators and caused confusion in readers' minds as to whether their real sin was being capitalists or being Jewish.
Socialist publications were also fond of using terms like
Bankjuden, jüdische Borsenpresse
(Jewish stock-market press), and
Borsenjuden
(stock-market Jews) to describe Jewish capitalists. Opponents of the Socialists were often caricatured in cartoons as looking like Jews. In some Socialist publications and posters even Orthodox Jews were ridiculed. Chancellor Seipel was lampooned in 1923 in a Socialist cartoon for making a welcoming speech to the first international congress of the Orthodox Jewish organization called Agudas Jis-

 

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roel (Association of Israel). Political cartoons in the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
and
Das Kleine Blatt
, like Socialist publications in Germany, often showed capitalists with the same ''Jewish" features depicted in strictly anti-Semitic publications.

21

Sometimes the Socialists' satire was part of an attempt to ridicule racial theories in order to show their absurdity. At times, however, the satire was too subtle and not in good taste. For example, in 1923 the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
said, with tongue in cheek, that Seipel's long nose was the product of a secret and presumably Jewish great grandmother or a legitimate or illegitimate great grandfather.
22
The
Arbeiter-Zeitung
was by no means the only Socialist publication to identify rich Jews with capitalism. In 1923, a time when antiSemitism was at its postwar high, a Socialist by the name of Christian Hinteregger published a booklet, with the party's approval, called
Der Judenschwindel
, a pun whose secondary meaning was "the swindle about the Jews." In ninety-six pages the author reiterated all the recent charges that Socialists had made regarding wealthy Jews while at the same time he defended poor Jews. The latter had just as much stake in the November 1918 revolution as poor Christians, but rich Jews and Nazis supported the Seipel government. In a chapter called "The Jewified AntiSemites," Hinteregger said that antiSemitism was a tool for diverting people's attention away from the true cause of their troubles, namely capitalism, and from the class struggle. While making war on Jewish peddlers and trying to close the doors of universities to Jewish students, the antiSemites accepted money from Jewish banks; they built a unity front with Jewish capitalists against workers and employees. Despite its many anti-Semitic tirades, the Christian Social Party named a Jew, Grunberger, to be the minister of food and agriculture in the government it formed in November 1920. A few weeks later they nominated Dr. Kienbock, a half Jew, to be their presidential candidate. After claiming that there were many Eastern European Jews who were unscrupulous money changers and stock-exchange speculators, he charged that the Christian Social government of Chancellor Michael Mayr was doing nothing to stop their activities. And the government of Ignaz Seipel had been dependent on rich Jews from the very beginning, according to Hinteregger.
23
Der Judenschwindel
also defended Jews by pointing out how during the world war Christian Social newspapers supported the war as a great cause willed by God; only after the conflict was over did they blame it on Jews. Likewise, German nationalists tried to hold Jews responsible for the dictated peace treaties when it was really Clemenceau who was to blame. Hinteregger also said that the Social Democratic Party did not object to the idea per se of having a Jew

 

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as a state minister, but thought it was a swindle for the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party to have one. Although Hinteregger's goal was to deflate the impact of antiSemitism, which was being directed against the SDAP, by noting the sharp contrasts between the theories and practices of the antiSemites, like many other Socialists he attacked Jewish capitalists as much for being in collusion with bourgeois anti-Marxists who were also antiSemites as for being capitalists. In the end, the reader is confused as to whether the author objected to antiSemitism itself, or merely to the way that antiSemitism was being used by the enemies of the Socialist Party.

24

Although Socialist antiSemitism was directed primarily against wealthy Jews, other forms of Socialist antiSemitism, or at least ill will toward Jews, did exist. The newly formed Jewish National Council established by Zionists in October 1918, perhaps hoping to win over Jews in the SDAP, complained to the board of directors of the Social Democratic Party in November of the same year about recent articles and advertisements in the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
that the council considered anti-Semitic (but which may have been actually merely anti-Zionist). If continued, they could arouse the general population against the Jews in a dangerous way. The
Arbeiter-Zeitung
did not take kindly to this criticism and replied that now that there was no longer any censorship it would say anything it wanted. If the Jews were a nationality, they could be criticized like Czechs, Hungarians, or any other nationality.
25
We have already noted how Albert Sever, the Social Democratic governor of Lower Austria, which at the time still included Vienna, favored the expulsion of all foreigners who had been harming the economy, including (but not limited to) Ostjuden. The attempt to expel the "army of profiteers," which had the support of the whole Social Democratic Party, failed, ostensibly because of an insufficient number of available trains, but more likely, as we saw in Chapter 6, because of diplomatic protests.
26
Although the Socialists usually opposed antiSemitism in summer resorts, some exceptions did occur, especially in the federal states during the desperately hard early postwar years. For example, a workers' council in Frohnleiten in Styria warned Jews in August 1919 to leave the health resort within twenty-four hours because they were allegedly eating too much food and driving up the prices. During the same summer many people, but especially Jews, were having difficulty receiving permission from a Socialist workers' council even to enter the province of Tyrol to take a summer vacation.
27
The anti-Semitic feelings of individual members of the Social Democratic Party may have also reemerged in August 1925 during the Zionist Congress in Vienna. Although the SDAP did not adopt any official policy toward the

 

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congress (apart from its already negative attitude toward Zionism in general), as we noted in Chapter 8, 29 of the 202 people arrested during the violent anti-Zionist demonstrations were members of the Social Democratic Party.

Occasionally Socialist leaders denounced antiSemitism unequivocally as, for example, when Mayor Seitz assailed anti-Semitic rowdyism at the University of Vienna in August 1924. Such comments were not part of any unified Socialist program, however, and only rarely did Socialists denounce antiSemitism as such instead of simply violence in general.

28

Equivocation toward antiSemitism was also the order of the day for Socialists in Germany. At the heart of their reluctance to take a strong stand against antiSemitism was their inability to take the threat seriously. Racial antiSemitism seemed like nothing more than a pretext for exploitation. It was also difficult for them to feel much sympathy for a group that prior to 1933 and even more so prior to 1914 was less victimized by discrimination than industrial workers. Consequently, there appeared to be no good reason why they should be singled out for special consideration. To the extent that antiSemitism needed to be fought at all, the best way to do so seemed to be by simply fighting Nazism. The German Socialists also resembled their Austrian (and Polish) brethren (as well as all other political parties in Germany) by reducing the number of Jews in their party who were parliamentary deputies.
29
Nevertheless, the Jewish policies of the Austrian and German Socialists were far from identical. There were few instances of antiSemitism among the German Socialists either before or after the First World War. Even though they made no concerted campaign against antiSemitism, they frequently ridiculed it, especially during the years that it was strong, and did not ignore its corrupting influences on German society as a whole. They did not even accept anti-Semitic allegations that Jews used unfair economic practices or were unpatriotic.
30
How does one account for the apparent differences the German and Austrian Socialists had toward the "Jewish question?" Any answer to such a question must, to some extent of course, remain speculative. In all likelihood, however, Austrian Socialists were sensitive of the strength of antiSemitism particularly in Vienna, which was their own stronghold. It required real political courage for any Austrian politician to fly in the face of such a strong popular current. Another likely explanation lies in the leadership of the two parties. Whereas around 80 percent of the leadership of the Austrian SDAP was of Jewish origins, the comparable figure in Germany was only 10 percent. These facts made the Austrian party extremely vulnerable to the charge of being "jewified" and made their leaders all the more anxious to take no action that

 

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would seem to confirm the allegation. Many of them also viewed their Jewish heritage with disdain and did their best to dissociate themselves from their origins.

31

AntiSemites and the Social Democratic Party
Socialist antiSemitism found in a book like Hinteregger's or in many articles published by the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
and other Socialist newspapers cannot be fully understood apart from anti-Semitic attacks made against the Social Democratic Party. This question will be examined in more detail in subsequent chapters dealing with the other political parties of Austria; a few remarks need to be made here, however, as well.
There was in fact a flood of anti-Socialist pamphlets published during the 1920s, most of which had the goal of convincing the readers that the Socialist Party was thoroughly verjudet and that working-class
Volksgenossen
(blood brothers) were being led astray by racial enemies, namely the Jews. These pamphlets, along with countless articles in newspapers making essentially the same arguments, were challenges that the Social Democrats simply could not ignore. Because they could not deny that there were Jews within their party, the simplest counterattack was to point out Jews who were members of other parties or suggest that those anti-Semitic parties were dependent on Jewish capital.
One of the best known and most vicious of the anti-Socialist and anti-Semitic pamphlets was one written by Karl Paumgarten called
Judentum und Sozialdemokratie
(
Jewry and Social Democracy
), published in 1920. Paumgarten began his book with an attack on other antiSemites who did not understand the "essential characteristics" of Jews. Violently anti-Semitic pamphlets that could not explain why Jews were exploiters, arrogant, and greedy for power only made Jewish refutations easy and gave antiSemitism a bad name. Paumgarten's answer to the mystery of Jewish behavior lay in race. The Jews were racially different from "Aryans" and therefore could no more become Aryans than Mongolians could become Negroes or Germans could become American Indians. Races were basically different from each other and not just physically but also spiritually, intellectually, ethically, and aesthetically. Moreover, these psychic characteristics of races remained unchanged from generation to generation. Poor Jews were just as materialistic as wealthy ones. All of them were born to lie, cheat, and swindle; they did not even regard these things as bad. Jews therefore could no more change their racial instincts than they could

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