From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (68 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 November Pogrom, shown at the Museum for the History of the City of Vienna in the winter of 198889, was unrelenting in unmasking the brutality of that event. The Federal Press Service of Austria also published a pamphlet in English in 1988 called
Resistance and Persecution in Austria
, 19381945 in which it was openly admitted that it was Austrian Nazis who were primarily responsible for the excesses committed against Jews after the Anschluss and that too many Austrians were silent onlookers during that persecution.

35
Unfortunately, these conferences, exhibits, and publications received little attention outside Austria. On the contrary, at least one American news magazine portrayed the Austrians as still deliberately ignoring their Nazi past.
36

Although the conferences and special exhibitions represented a promising development in enlightening the public about the history and surviving remnants of Austrian antiSemitism, much remained to be done. The Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna published a collection of documents in 1988 about Jews and antiSemitism in Austria between 1918 and 1938.
37
In May of the same year an Institute for Austrian-Jewish History opened in the restored synagogue of St. Pölten in Lower Austria. However, Minister of Education Dr. Hilde Hawlicek stated the opinion that Austrian school texts needed to deal more explicitly with the problems of antiSemitism, racism, violence, and inequality. In fact, Austrian schools are not mandated to deal with either Nazism or the Holocaust. Moreover, there is considerable evidence, albeit strictly anecdotal, that many Austrian teachers and principals at the secondary level actually avoid these embarrassing and controversial subjects.
38
Educating the Austrian public about antiSemitism would not be easy because over half of all Austrians said they did not change their attitudes as a result of the commemorative activities of 1988; fully 65 percent, moreover, did not want to hear any more about the persecution of Jews. This attitude may have been the temporary result of "overexposure" in the commemorative year of 1988, however.
39
Looking to the Future
Despite the checkered record of the Austrian government toward antiSemitism since the founding of the Second Republic and the persistence of latent and not so latent antiSemitism in the general population, the relatively low incidence of antiSemitism among the young and the intellectuals at the beginning of the 1990s was just one reason to hope that Austrian antiSemitism was likely to resume its decline in the future. At any rate, it is extremely improbable that

 

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Poster attached to a Catholic church in Vienna, which reads,
''Jesus was a Jew." Photograph by the author, 1987.
Austria will ever experience again the passionate, violent, and nearly universal antiSemitism that existed between 1914 and 1945.

Almost none of the conditions that made antiSemitism so virulent in the First Republic still exists today. Contemporary Austria is a far more secular country than it was a half century ago. Secular trends in art, literature, and popular entertainment that were regarded as shocking to conservatives in the First Republic and which were habitually associated with Jews are now taken for granted. The Roman Catholic church took the lead before and after the First World War in denouncing these trends and blaming them on Jews; it also continued to propagate the doctrine that Jews were collectively responsible for the "murder of God." However, in 1967 Franz Cardinal König of Vienna announced that the Austrian church was trying to implement the Ecumenical Council Vatican II by absolving the Jews of deicide by purging all references to the Jews being responsible for the crucifixion.

40
The prohibition by the Austrian church against taking an active role in politics is likely to eliminate another source of conflict that poisoned the political atmosphere of the First Republic. Furthermore, the church has played a leading role in the Second Republic in educating the faithful about the evils of antiSemitism.

Another great molder of public opinion and a leading element in the cam-

 

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paign against antiSemitism have been the intellectuals, although cynics might say it is because today such intellectuals no longer face any competition from Jews. Whatever the cause, the fact is that today academicians are relatively free of antiSemitism, in sharp contrast with the situation in the First Republic, when they were among its staunchest proponents. On the other hand, antiSemitism is today most prevalent among people over forty, and especially the downwardly mobile and rural people.

41

Although antiSemitism can survive even in places where no Jews live, there is no doubt that antiSemitism was strong in interwar Vienna in part because of the large Jewish population, which had grown still larger during the First World War. At a time when food, fuel, and housing were in desperately short supply for everyone, and the intelligentsia competed with large numbers of Jews for a small number of professional positions, the size of the Jewish population did make a difference, even though it was never as large as rabid antiSemites imagined.
Today, Austria's Jewish population is only about 3 or 4 percent of its former size, and any drastic change in the future is virtually impossible. The large Jewish population of interwar Vienna was solely the result of the city being the capital of a great empire with over 1.3 million Jews living in the Austrian half of the monarchy alone. Now that pool of potential immigrants has disappeared. The only sizable Jewish population in Europe is in the Soviet Union. Even though tens of thousands of Russian Jews have passed through Austria on their way to the United States or Israel, only a few thousand have remained in Austria or are likely to remain in the future.
Therefore most of the foundations of Austrian antiSemitism have been undermined. Secularism has largely eliminated religious and cultural antiSemitism, and the decimation of the Jewish population has removed the cause of economic antiSemitism. Racial antiSemitism has been discredited by its close association with Nazi atrocities. What remains in Austria are old stereotypes, especially those concerning alleged Jewish financial power and control over the mass media. Even here, however, there is reason to hope that with time and education these views will gradually disappear, although the process is likely to be a lengthy one.

 

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21
Final Thoughts
The Exploitation of Political AntiSemitism
It would probably not be an exaggeration to suggest that "Jewish predominance" was the single most pervasive and persistent issue in Austrian politics in the six decades preceding the Anschluss in 1938. No other idea was denounced more frequently and by so many political parties and private organizations over so long a period of time. No political party of any significance entirely ignored the issue for long. AntiSemitism was a political weapon that every political party adapted to its philosophy in order to embarrass its enemies and to integrate its own followers more closely to its organization.
On the other hand, antiSemitism was rarely if ever the single most important question at any given time. Rather, it was an issue that could easily be used, especially by politicians, to obscure other much more important problems. If the real economic problem for small Viennese manufacturers and merchants in the 1880s and 1890s was their backwardness and inefficiency, politicians could blame the competition of big Jewish industrialists, bankers, and department-store owners. If the most dire need in Vienna during the First World War was the shortage of apartments, a legacy of insufficient prewar housing construction, then the Jewish refugees from Galicia were to blame. If the real cause of defeat of the Central Powers in the world war was the American intervention and the ambition of the German government to make territorial gains in both Eastern and Western Europe, anti-Semitic politicians could instead blame the catastrophe on "Jewish revolutionaries" or the "defeatism" of Jewish journalists.
The same kind of scapegoating continued into the First Austrian Republic. If the real reason for the Christian Social Party's loss of power in the Vienna municipal government was the extension of the franchise to the industrial workers, it was much easier to blame their defeat in 1919 on the Ostjuden. If the actual cause of overcrowding in Vienna's Hochschulen in the early post-

 

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war years was the sudden return of war veterans, a ready culprit could be found in the Jewish students from Eastern Europe. If the real reason for the failure of the Marxists to nationalize Austrian industries was the conservatism of the majority of the Austrian people, it was easier to lash out at Jewish bankers and capitalists. If the real reason behind the secularization of Austrian society and the decline in traditional Catholic values was the urbanization and industrialization of Western civilization, it was much easier for Christian Social politicians and Catholic clergymen to blame Jewish Socialists, journalists, book publishers, and owners of cinemas for the unwanted changes. If the real reason for the reluctance of at least two-thirds of the Austrian population to join the Third Reich was Hitler's suppression of Catholic and Socialist institutions, it was much easier for Austrian Nazis to blame it on the supposed lust for world domination of international Jewry.
The potency of antiSemitism in fin-de-siècle and interwar Austria was such that whatever the problem, it could always be made to appear worse by associating it with Jews. If capitalism was bad, Jewish capitalism, in the eyes of Christian Social workers and Social Democrats, was worse. If modern art was objectionable, modern art produced or patronized by Jews was still worse. If socialism was bad, Jewish-led socialism was infinitely more damnable. Politicians in Austria (as well as other Central and Eastern European countries) knew that far more people would respond favorably to such associations than would object to them. In other words, antiSemitism was a kind of political sugar-coating, not entirely unlike the role that anti-Communism has played in American politics especially during the Red Scare of the early postWorld War I years and again during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
Not only were Jews the perfect scapegoats for Austria's many ills in the late nineteenth century and during the interwar years; they were also highly useful as an integrating device for Austria's political parties. This was less true of the Social Democratic Workers' Party and the much smaller Communist Party because there was little direct competition between industrial workers and the Jewish population of Austria. Although the SDAP never espoused or practiced religious or racial antiSemitism, its depiction of many Jews as ultrarich, exploiting industrialists and bankers could only reinforce already existing prejudices. In reality, there were far more impoverished and lower-middleclass Jews in Austria than wealthy ones. However, the stereotype of the fat, swarthy, hooked-nosed, cigar-chewing capitalist was utilized not just by Marxists, but also by Catholic Christian Socials and panGerman racists in the Greater German People's Party, and finally by the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

 

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For Roman Catholics in the Christian Social Party, religious issues were still important, although by no means the only areas of conflict with Jews. To be more exact, however, it was not so much the Jewish religion that bothered Christian Socials, as it was their apparent lack of it. Relations between the Christian Social Party and Orthodox Jews and Zionists remained reasonably "correct," thus encouraging both Jewish groups to imagine that their philosophies of self-defense would save them against all antiSemites in the future.
The indignation of Christian Socials was aimed not at those Jews who wished to withdraw at least partially from the Christian community, but at secularized Jews who wanted to play an active role in Austrian politics and culture, particularly those who had joined the Socialist Party, and most of all the Jewish leaders of the SDAP. The complete separation of church and state, including the removal of most religious influences from public schools, which was advocated by the Austrian Socialists, seemed to threaten the very foundations of Catholicism and the traditional values of the bourgeoisie.
Pan-Germans in the Greater German People's Party, the paramilitary Front Fighters' Association, part of the equally paramilitary Austrian Heimwehr, and the Nazi Party also rejected Jewish secularism. For them, however, the ultimate source of Jewish wickedness lay not in any free-will decision a Jew might make, but in their "racial characteristics." Marxists could easily accept Jews who renounced capitalism. Catholics always claimed to reject racial antiSemitism and in theory would welcome any Jew who converted to Catholicism. But a true-believing racial antiSemite would never accept someone who had so much as a single drop of "Jewish" blood in his veins.
The difference between panGerman nationalists and Catholics on the question of race or even religious, cultural, and economic issues should not be exaggerated, however. It is true that Catholic moderates like Ignaz Seipel and Theodor Cardinal Innitzer, or for that matter a not-so-moderate Catholic like the
Reichspost
editor, Friedrich Funder, had little difficulty accepting Jewish converts into the fold. The same could not be said, however, for hard-core antiSemites like Leopold Kunschak or Anton Orel who would at most tolerate converted Jews only after several generations. On the other hand, moderate nationalists like Johannes Schober had cordial relations with Jews.
As a political weapon antiSemitism had a wide variety of uses. Marxists employed it to point out the hypocrisy of Christian Socials who denounced Jews and demanded anti-Semitic legislation, but accepted baptized Jews into the party and did not enact any anti-Semitic legislation. Christian Socials and panGermans tried to create dissension between Socialist workers and their leadership by saying that the proletariat was being led by alien and unpatriotic

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