From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (52 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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Austrian Jews. Therefore, they had the most to fear from a Nazi takeover and the least to expect from a move to Palestine, or anywhere else. Their list of thirty-six candidates for the 1936 elections of the IKG reveals, for example, that six were lawyers, two were physicians, three were factory owners, and most of the others were businessmen, head clerks, or people with substantial training and education.

14

The Viennese IKG, like other Jewish communal organizations in Central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, consisted of three parts: a president, an elected Community Council, which in 1932 had thirtyeight men, and affiliated organizations (in Vienna there were an incredible 450 such organizations in the 1930s). All Viennese Jews who had not explicitly renounced their faith automatically belonged to the organization.
15
From at least as early as the turn of the century, a philosophical conflict existed within the IKG between politically conservative Unionists and Orthodox Jews, on the one hand, who wanted to restrict the organization to its original religious and social functions as laid down in the bylaws of 1890, and Zionists, who saw it as a potential means of bringing about major changes in the community. Already at the first Zionist congress in Basel, in 1898, Herzl had made the conquest of Jewish communal organizations a major Zionist goal. Almost certainly, most Viennese Jews were content with the limited role of the IKG because only a small percentage of them even bothered to vote in the communal elections, although prior to 1912 this was in part due to the restriction of the franchise to just the twelve thousand wealthy, dues-paying members. Their apathy ultimately redounded to the benefit of the Zionists, who were anything but apathetic.
16
The influx of Jewish refugees into Vienna not only affected Austrian politics in general, but internal Jewish politics as well. Most of the refugees were poor and came from areas of the monarchy where there was still a strong sense of Jewish national identity. The younger refugees supported Zionism; the older ones often remained Orthodox. The added support for the Viennese Zionists alarmed the assimilated Jews.
17
With their ranks swollen by these newcomers, and with revolutionary enthusiasm spreading all over Central Europe, Zionists in both Austria and Germany thought the time was propitious to rally their fellow Jews to the cause of Jewish nationalism. Assimilationist ideas appeared to be especially vulnerable at a time when everything old was being questioned and when antiSemitism was on the rise.
18
Consequently, in November 1918 the Austrian Zionists (like Zionists in other countries) formed a fifty-member National Council (Nationalrat) and demanded that the government recognize the Jews as a separate

 

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nationality with self-determination in cultural and religious affairs, including all those matters controlled until then by the IKG. It also demanded proportional representation for Jews in the Austrian Parliament and all other legislative bodies. Jewish nationalists hoped that the National Council would gain publicity for their cause. In reality, however, only panGerman and Christian Social antiSemites even paid much attention to the demands of the Nationalrat, and the assimilated Viennese Jews were horrified.

19
The Community Council formally declared in December 1918 that the Jewish National Council had no right to speak for all the Jewish people; Jews had a right to identify with whatever nationality they chose.
20

However, assimilated Jews were disturbed about the growing rift in the Viennese community and, fearing bloodshed, agreed in the same month to the formation of an ''Action Committee" to study the reform of the antiquated and undemocratic franchise of the IKG with a view toward giving Zionists more representation. The minimum tax making one eligible to vote was greatly reduced at the end of 1918, thus nearly doubling the franchise. Another rule reserving one-third of the deputies elected to the parliamentary body of the IKG to those people who paid the highest taxes was also eliminated. The next few years saw further electoral reforms, all of them beneficial to Zionists. In 1924 the citizenship requirement for voting was rescinded, thus raising the IKG electorate, which had been only about 12,000 as late as 1910, to 35,000 in 1924 and 49,000 in 1932. An informal agreement between the Zionists and Unionists concluded in 1920 stipulated that seats on the Community Council, the legislative body of the IKG, would be distributed on the basis of proportional representation.
21
These rule changes helped the Zionists steadily to increase their representation within the Community Council. In the elections of July 1920, the first since the electoral reform of 1918, the number of their mandates rose from eight to thirteen, and they won 39 percent of the vote. The Zionists gained only modestly in the elections of December 1928 at a time of maximum Austrian prosperity; the Unionists won over 9,000 votes whereas the Zionists received just under 6,000.
22
The big breakthrough for the Zionists came in the elections of December 1932, the same year in which the Nazis had won major electoral victories in both Austria and Germany and when Austria was wallowing in the depths of the Great Depression. For the first time anywhere in the world the Zionists gained an absolute majority of the vote in a communal election. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether a majority of the Viennese Jews were actually Zionists or pro-Zionists. Almost half of the eligible voters did not cast ballots, and it can

 

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reasonably be assumed that nearly all of them were non-Zionists.

23
However, in the elections of November 1936 the Zionist majority in the IKG grew when 70 percent of the eligible voters cast their ballots, doubtless reflecting increased Jewish selfconsciousness and fear of antiSemitism since Hitler's takeover of power in Germany. By comparison, only 51 percent had voted in 1932 and 42.3 percent in 1924. The Zionists' vote of 17,466 represented a 5,000-vote increase since 1932. The Unionist vote also increased, but only by 1,412 to a total of just 11,633.
24

All of the IKG elections, especially those of the 1930s, were bitterly fought affairs accompanied by a great deal of mudslinging and name-calling and even physical violencemostly attempts by young Zionists to disrupt Unionist electoral meetings. At first
Die Wahrheit
only gently rebuked the Zionists saying in 1920 that the majority of Viennese Jews were accustomed to mildness and tolerance in their politics. The Zionist Jews, the paper continued, needed to learn that Viennese Jews behaved differently from those in Eastern Europe. They should not adopt the political practices of the Socialists and Karl Lueger. Later, however,
Die Wahrheit
used stronger language. In 1936 it accused the Zionists of using lies, slander, terror, swindles, boycotts, and physical obstruction in the campaign. The politics of the Jewish nationalists had allegedly copied those of the antiSemites. The Unionist organ quoted the
Deutsches Volksblatt
as strongly approving of the Zionists' victory.
Die Wahrheit
also charged that the Zionists had won the election of 1936 because they had received the votes of 12,000 non-Austrian Jews.
25
In reality, the union had won only 45 percent of the vote of Austrian citizens and just 36.5 percent of the total vote.
The Zionist press was equally intemperate in its attacks on the Unionists.
Die Neue Welt
said that the Jewish men and women of Vienna had had to put up with the drumroll of lies, slander, denunciation, and terror slogans. The paper also claimed that no more than 5,330 non-Austrian Jews had voted in the election of 1936. After the election of December 1932, the principal Zionist paper,
Die Stimme
, complained that the Unionists' campaigning had been marked by lies, distortions, hatred, the calling into question of the Zionists' loyalty to the state, and the breakdown of all political decency. A flood of dirt and stupidity had swept over the electoral arena.
26
The more activist policy of the Zionists within the IKG once they had gained a majority embittered the Union of Austrian Jews and caused it temporarily to withdraw its deputies from the IKG parliament in 1936. It complained to the mayor of Vienna that the Zionists made illegal use of the communal organization for their own political purposes by establishing a Zionist elementary

 

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school and by allegedly filling the administration of the IKG exclusively with Zionists. The protest was in vain, however.

27

Apart from the Jewish communal elections, only a single avowed Jew representing Jewish interests, Robert Stricker, was ever elected to the Austrian Parliament. He was elected in 1919 with 7,706 votes. However, a change in the voting rules caused his defeat the following year, even though his vote nearly doubled to 13,358. A Zionist coalition gained nearly 25,000 votes in 1923, but still won no parliamentary seat. After that the Zionist vote in parliamentary elections declined to 10,717 in 1927 and to just 2,135 in 1930, after which no more Zionists ran for office. Jewish nationalists were only slightly more successful in Vienna's city council, gaining three representatives in 1919 but only one in the municipal elections of 1923 under more unfavorable election regulations.
28
In many ways the split in Jewish ranks was a microcosm of divisions in Austrian society as a whole. Just as Jews could not agree on whether they comprised a distinct Volk, gentile Austrians were divided on whether they were Germans or Austrians. Just as the nationalistic Zionists were themselves split into many different factions, so too were panGerman Austrians, at least until the Nazis absorbed most of them after 1932. Religious-secular and capitalist-socialist rivalries could also be found in both gentile and Jewish circles.
If anything, however, fundamental disagreements among Jews were even more profound than among gentiles. Very few Christian Austrians considered leaving their homeland (except, perhaps, to move to neighboring Germany), much less establishing a new language and culture within Austria. Moreover, a far higher percentage of Jews consisted of recent and unassimilated immigrants than was true among gentiles. Even religious differences among Jews were probably more serious than among Christians. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Austrian Jews found it almost impossible to unite against the common anti-Semitic danger.

 

 

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16
The View from the South
The factionalism of the Jewish community in Austria can be easily seen in the way the press organs of the particular Jewish parties viewed current events in both Austria and in the neighboring Third Reich. Every Jewish newspaper of Austriaand here we are speaking only of those newspapers that were written exclusively by and for practicing Jewsinterpreted events through the prism of its own passionately held ideology. And every paper looked for events that would prove that its group's program was the only one that held hope for the salvation of all Jews in the future.

The Jewish newspapers of Austria present a unique perspective on Jewish reactions to anti-Semitic events in the Third Reich. As Germanspeaking Jews living just beyond the boundaries of Nazi Germany, the Jews of Austria were probably better informed about events on the other side of the Inn River than Jews anywhere else in the world. At the same time, because Hitler had made his intentions toward Austria clear on the first page of
Mein Kampf
, it was obvious that Austrian Jews would share the fate of their German brethren if the country were annexed or
gleichgeschaltet
(coordinated). Therefore events in Nazi Germany affecting the Jews dominated the pages of Austria's Jewish newspapers, above all
Die Wahrheit
, at least in 1932 and 1933. Moreover, even though Austrian papers began to be censored in 1933, the censorship was largely confined to reports involving the Austrian government. There is no evidence that it colored reporting on Nazi Germany.

1

Die Wahrheit
, with its optimistic, liberal philosophy, was inclined to put the most hopeful interpretation on the events of the day. For
Die Wahrheit
and the Union of Austrian Jews, the Hitler movement was no more than a temporary phenomenon, a view that allowed the union to retain its liberal, assimilationist Weltanschauung.
2
In surveying articles from
Die Wahrheit
, and a few from other Jewish newspapers, it is easy to conclude that the writers were naive, grossly optimistic, or simply grasping at straws. Before arriving at

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