Read The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Online
Authors: Niall Ferguson
Tags: #History, #Modern, #20th Century, #World
In Germany, too, the most politically successful anti-Semites of the late nineteenth century were those like Otto Böckel, the self-styled ‘Peasant King’, who directed their fire at the economic role of the Jews. His pamphlet
The Jews: Kings of Our Time
(1886), which had sold 1.5 million copies by 1909, adapted earlier French arguments to the tastes of the Hessian peasants who were the principal constituents for his Anti-Semitic People’s Party. Böckel himself was a Reichstag deputy from 1887 to 1903; at the movement’s zenith in 1893, he was one of seventeen self-styled Anti-Semites sitting in the Reichstag. By this time, it was not only as financiers that Jews were coming under attack, though it is noteworthy that 31 per cent of the richest families in Germany were Jewish and 22 per cent of all Prussian millionaires. German Jews were also strikingly better represented among professionals than among entrepreneurs or business executives. Jews might account for fewer than one in every hundred Germans; but by the second quarter of the twentieth century one in nine German doctors was a Jew, and one in six lawyers. There were also above-average numbers of Jews working as newspaper editors, journalists, theatre directors and academics. Indeed, they were under-represented
in only one of Germany’s elite occupational groups, and that was the officer corps of the army. Anti-Semitism, then, was sometimes nothing more than the envy of under-achievers. There was, nevertheless, a countervailing influence on the way Jews were perceived in Germany, and that was the growing number of them who migrated from Eastern Europe to Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1914 around a quarter of the Jews in Germany were defined as foreign or Eastern (which included those who originated in the borderland provinces of Upper Silesia and Posen). Relatively poor, Orthodox in their faith, Yiddish in their speech, the so-called
Ostjuden
elicited much the same response among German Jews as among German Gentiles: disquiet, bordering on revulsion.
Jewish professional success was even more conspicuous in Austria-Hungary, where they in any case accounted for a larger share of the urban population. They were more than merely prominent in the Viennese intelligentsia and played a leading role in the Prague business community. The numbers of immigrant
Ostjuden
were also much larger in Vienna than in Berlin. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was therefore primarily on the basis of economic grievances that anti-Semites like the Pan-German Georg Ritter von Schönerer and the Christian Socialist Karl Lueger achieved political success in pre-war Austria-Hungary. It was Lueger who, as mayor of Vienna from 1897 until 1910, most perfectly encapsulated the challenge of practising anti-Semitism in the context of very rapid social assimilation when he declared: ‘I decide who is a Jew.’ When Neville Laski, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, visited Vienna twenty years later, the Minister for Commerce cheerfully explained that Lueger’s anti-Semitism ‘had been scientific because [when] Lueger said “He is a Jew whom I say is a Jew”… he thereby avoided any anti-Semitism against a useful Jew’.
As this suggests, economic anti-Semitism inspired quite different policy responses from racial anti-Semitism. The slogan
Kauft nicht von Juden!
– ‘Don’t buy from Jews!’ – was used by the German Catholic magazine
Germania
as early as 1876. Three years later the clergyman turned anti-Semitic demagogue Adolf Stoecker called for Jews to be excluded from the teaching profession and the judiciary. Such proposals were especially attractive to Gentile small
businessmen, professionals and white-collar employees who felt themselves unable to match the performance of their Jewish contemporaries. The German National Clerical Workers’ Association was among the first German associations expressly to exclude Jews from membership by inserting a so-called ‘Aryan paragraph’ in their rules and regulations. So too did many student fraternities, including some traditionally liberal
Burschenschaften
. When Bernhard Förster and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg circulated a petition calling for Jews to be excluded from certain branches of the German civil service, 4,000 signatures out of the 225,000 they collected were from university students. Significantly, it was an academic – the historian Heinrich von Treitschke – who in 1879 coined the phrase: ‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune!’
Academics were especially strongly represented among the members of the Pan-German League, whose leader after 1908, Heinrich Class, was one of the most extreme anti-Semites of the Wilhelmine era. In his pseudonymously written book,
If I Were the Kaiser
(1912), Class published a remarkable and ominous list of recommendations to restrict the economic opportunities of Jews:
Significantly, Class regarded these ‘coldly cruel’ measures as a remedy for the consequences not of economic crisis but of economic growth. It was the creation of a German Customs Union in 1834 that had made the ascent of the Jews in Germany possible, because Jews – ‘a people born to trade in money and goods’ – knew better than Germans how to take advantage of the enlarged free market:
As a result of all these factors and a host of other economic circumstances, the opportunities for business rose in an unprecedented way. The generality of Germans adjusted slowly to the new conditions… indeed, one might say that whole classes to this day have not yet come to terms with them – one thinks in particular of the small-town
Mittelstand
and almost the whole of agriculture. The Jews were quite different… [since] their instinct and spiritual orientation is towards business. Their halcyon day had dawned; now they could make the most of their abilities.
Apart from anything else, Class’s account illustrates perfectly that fluctuations in racial prejudice could be caused as much by economic upswings as by crises.
In 1901 the Jewish diaspora was still in the early stages of what promised to be a profound transformation. Over 70 per cent of the world’s 10.6 million Jews were Ashkenazim living in Central and Eastern Europe, of whom more than three million lived in Russian territory. As we shall see, these people had strong incentives to move westwards and, in their hundreds of thousands, they were doing precisely that, forming vibrant new Jewish communities in New York, in the East End of London, in Berlin, Budapest and Vienna. That did not signify the decline of the established Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, however. Demographically, if not in other ways, they continued to thrive. It would be more accurate to say that the Jews, like so much else at the start of the twentieth century, were being
globalized. At the same time, similar processes were transforming another diaspora. In their millions – perhaps as many as five million in all – Germans had migrated across the Atlantic in the course of the nineteenth century, establishing large and proudly Germanic communities in the American Mid-West. Yet an earlier German diaspora was meanwhile struggling to come to terms with the experience of relative decline.
In 1901 there were more than thirteen million Germans living beyond the Reich’s eastern frontier. Around nine million lived in Austria, but around four million lived further east, principally in Hungary, Romania and Russia. There were substantial German communities along the Baltic coast, in Poland, Galicia and Bukovina, as well as in Bohemia and Moravia. There were also Germans to be found in Slovakia, Hungary, Transylvania and Slovenia. Nor were these settlements confined to the Habsburg lands. There were German populations in Russian territory, too, in Volhynia, in Bessarabia and Dobrudja, around the mouths of the rivers Prut and Dniester, and along the southern reaches of the Volga. It is not at all easy to rescue the history of these mostly vanished communities from the exaggerated claims made for them in the 1930s and 1940s by Nazi propagandists. Nevertheless, there is no question that many German settlements could trace their roots back centuries. It had been in the late tenth century, at the behest of King Stephan I, that German settlers had first come to western Hungary. In the twelfth century this process was repeated when the Siebenbürger ‘Saxons’
*
were encouraged to settle in Transylvania, where they founded towns like Klausenberg, Hermannstadt and Bistritz. At around the same time German communities also sprang up in Slovakia, notably Pressburg (now Bratislava), Kaschau (Kosice) and Zips (Spisská), as well as in Slovenia, notably Laibach (now Ljubljana). Often these settlements had a strategic character; their intention was to create fortified settlements along the Eastern Marches of Christendom. This was most clearly the case along the Baltic coast. By 1405 the Teutonic Knights’ realm extended from the River Elbe all the way up to Narva Bay. Thorn (Toruń), Marienburg (Malbork), Mümmelburg (Memel) and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad)
were all founded by the Order. Yet the Germans also put down civilian as well as military roots in Eastern Europe. Numerous towns in Poland, such as Lublin and Lemberg (Lwów), were established in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the basis of German legal models. Though often obliterated by the ravages of twentieth-century war (most completely in Königsberg), the German architectural legacy is still visible today in Toruń – to say nothing of Prague, where the oldest of all German universities was founded by the Emperor Charles IV in 1348.
Despite the storms and stresses of the intervening centuries, the position of the Germans in Central and Eastern Europe had often remained privileged, if not dominant. Not only did German dynasties, German soldiers and German officials run two of the great empires of the region. They were also among the principal landowners of the Baltic. They were the officials and professors of Prague and Czernowitz. They farmed some of the best land in Transylvania and worked the mines of Resita and Anina. Yet the migrations that had produced these various communities had not been sustained on a sufficiently large scale to supplant entirely the indigenous peoples. The numbers of German migrants were in any case small, perhaps 2,000 people a year in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Already by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the German influence in Polish towns had been discernibly diluted. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first Sweden and then Russia checked German colonization of the eastern Baltic. The Habsburgs’ efforts to resettle Germans (‘Swabians’) in the Banat, Bukovina and the Balkans during the eighteenth century could only partly compensate for these tendencies. The German colonists attracted to the banks of the Volga and the coast of the Black Sea by the Empress Catherine the Great were as effectively cut off from the culture of their fatherland as if they had crossed the Atlantic. In the second half of the nineteenth century, somewhat higher non-German birth rates further reduced the relative size of this German diaspora. More importantly, large-scale migration of Slav peasants from the countryside into traditionally German towns created an acute sense of ‘population pressure’. The inner city of Prague, for example, went from being 21 per cent German-speaking to just 8 per cent between 1880 and 1900 as a result of an influx of Czechs. The
lignite mining town of Brüx (Most) went from 89 per cent German to 73 per cent. More isolated German communities in places like Trautenau (Trutnov) in north-eastern Bohemia, or Iglau (Jihlava) in Moravia, began to think of themselves as inhabitants of ‘language islands’ (
Sprachinseln
). Such demographic and social shifts help to explain why the Germans outside Germany felt a sense of cultural and political vulnerability. It was German workers in Trautenau who, in 1904, founded the German Workers’ Party. Their principal goal, declared its leader in 1913, was ‘the maintenance and increase of [German] living space’ (
Lebensraum
) against the threat posed by Czech
Halbmenschen
(‘half-humans’). This was in fact a response to the creation of a
Czech
National Socialist Party in 1898.
The easternmost territories of Germany were subject to similar demographic trends. Germans who lived in the Prussian provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Posen and Upper Silesia also felt a sense of unease at, for example, the way the non-German population of the Reich’s periphery was seasonally if not permanently swollen by Polish migrant workers. (It was on this subject that the young Max Weber conducted his first sociological research.) The experience of Memel (East Prussia), Danzig (West Prussia), Bromberg (Posen) and Breslau (Lower Silesia) was not wholly different from that of German communities in the easternmost parts of Austria-Hungary. The crucial point is that many of the eastern regions inhabited by German minorities were also areas of relatively dense Jewish settlement. Ironically, in view of later events, the relationships between Germans and Jews in these borderlands were sometimes close to symbiotic. Both groups were more likely than Slavs to live in towns; they also spoke variations of the German language, since the Yiddish of the East European
shtetl
(literally, ‘wee town’, identical to the German
Städtl
) was essentially a German dialect, no further removed from High German than the language of the Transylvanian Saxons, even if in Galicia Yiddish signs were often written in Hebrew characters. The so-called
Mauschel-deutsch
spoken by Jews in Bohemia and the other western Habsburg lands was closer still to German. In Breslau, Jews were the backbone of the German liberal intelligentsia; fewer than half were observant and many in fact converted to Christianity, ceasing to regard themselves as Jews. In Prague roughly half of all Jews were German-speakers
and considered themselves a part of the German community; indeed, they were in some sense the German community, since German-speaking Jews accounted for just under half of all the Germans in Prague. As one Prague Jew from a notable professional family put it, ‘We would have thought crazy anyone who would have said to us that we were not German.’ In Galicia, too, assimilation often meant Germanization, despite the fact that Germans accounted for only a tiny fraction (0.5 per cent) of the population. Though born in Vienna, the religious philosopher Martin Buber was raised by his grandparents in Galicia and studied first in Lemberg, then in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin and Zurich – a Germanophone intellectual itinerary that led him ultimately to embrace Hassidic Orthodoxy and Zionism. The author Karl Emil Franzos, the son of a Sephardic Jew who had himself studied medicine in Erlangen, was raised in the Galician village of Czortków and studied in Czernowitz, which he eulogized as ‘the courtyard of the German paradise’ and where he was a member of the ‘Teutonia’ student fraternity. To a thoroughly Germanized Jew like Franzos, Galicia and Bukovina could seem like ‘Half-Asia’, the title of his most famous series of stories and sketches. Like so many others, his literary road led him westwards – to Vienna, Graz, Strasbourg and finally Berlin.