From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (16 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Europe, #Austria & Hungary, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #test

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Page 34

of fencing skills by Jewish students, which thus deprived nationalistic students of activity in which they had previously demonstrated a clear superiority over their Jewish classmates.)

28

The Austrian Burschenschaften wanted the Deutsche Burschenschaften, which included chapters in Germany as well as in Germanspeaking parts of Austria, to forbid all members from giving satisfaction to any Jew or person of Jewish origins. However, these attempts to persuade German universities to adopt the Waidhofner Principle enjoyed only limited success prior to the First World War. Although the more nationalistic fraternities refused to give satisfaction to Jews, they did not officially adopt the Waidhofner Principle.
29
Even in Vienna the implementation of the Waidhofner Principle was not without its difficulties. The government of Vienna tried to dissolve every corporation that adopted the principle even though dueling itself was actually illegal in Austria! Government opposition was overcome, however, by the organizations simply changing their names so that eventually the government gave up its opposition. More serious, however, was the refusal of the AustroHungarian army to accept the idea. Students who were also reserve officers were therefore faced with the choice of either dropping out of their fraternity or losing their commission.
30
The Waidhofner Principle also enjoyed little success in Prague where, as noted previously, student antiSemitism never achieved the same intensity as in Vienna. Pro-Jewish students continued to dominate the "Lesehalle" so that German nationalist students seceded to form their own anti-Semitic "Germania" organization in 1892. A turnaround in favor of anti-Semitic students in Prague, which also intensified student antiSemitism in Vienna, came in the latter part of the decade during the political fire storm caused by the illfated language laws of Prime Minister Count Casimir Badeni; these proposed laws would have put the Czech language on an equal footing with German in the Bohemian crownlands.
31
Despite their setbacks, student antiSemites at Austrian universities had, by the turn of the century, succeeded in making antiSemitism intellectually "respectable" among the very people who were most likely to reject it as archaic a quarter century earlier.
32
Nevertheless, it is possible to exaggerate this prewar academic Jew-hatred. The world-renowned Jewish-Austrian author, Stefan Zweig, who was born in 1881 and was a student at the University of Vienna at the beginning of the new century, wrote in his memoirs that "neither in school nor at the University, nor in the world of literature, have I ever experienced the slightest suppression or indignity as a Jew."
33

 

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Georg von Schönerer and Racial AntiSemitism

Although academic antiSemitism in Austria had its own origins and developed for the most part independently, it was encouraged and certainly supported by some politicians, above all by Georg von Schönerer, a man who Hitler later both praised and criticized in
Mein Kampf
. Described by his most recent biographer as the ''most prominent propagandist and symbol" of antiSemitism in his day, Schönerer believed that race ought to be the criterion for all civic rights.

34
Ironically, Schönerer's father had been ennobled in 1860 for his work as one of the monarchy's leading civil engineers and for being the chief executive of the giant railroad lines that had been founded by the Rothschilds. The younger Schönerer, who was born in 1842, would one day assail the same Jewish capital that had made possible his father's fortune.
35
It was perhaps not a mere coincidence that he was elected to the lower house of the Austrian Reichsrat (Parliament) from the very district, Waidhofen-Zwettl, from which the movement to ban dueling between Aryans and Jews had originated.

Although Schönerer made contact with fraternities in Vienna as early as 1876, for several years their common interest was primarily panGermanism rather than antiSemitism. As a left-wing Liberal deputy he helped to draft the famous Linz Program of 1882, which demanded an extension of the franchise and the protection of the Germanspeaking people of Austria by making German the official language in predominantly German areas.
36
AntiSemitism was not originally even part of this program, as was demonstrated by the fact that Schönerer's chief collaborators on the document, the historian Heinrich Friedjung and the later Socialist leader, Viktor Adler, were both of Jewish origin. Schönerer was simply against a "preponderance" of Jewish political influence in 1882 and wanted Jews to be no more than the foot soldiers of panGermanism rather than the officers. Three years later, however, he added a twelfth point to the Linz declaration, stating that "the removal of Jewish influence from all sections of public life is indispensable for carrying out the reforms aimed at."
37
Why did Schönerer suddenly develop so strong an aversion to Jews between 1882 and 1885? The answer may lie in the broadening of the franchise in 1882 that Schönerer himself promoted. Until then voting laws had favored the aristocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie, which together made up only about 3 percent of the population. Neither of these classes had been particularly anti-Semitic. Indeed, the latter included a good many Jews. The electoral reform gave the vote to all men over twenty-four who paid at least five florins

 

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a year in direct taxes. Overnight the electorate in Vienna tripled from 15,385 to 45,695. (A few years later it nearly doubled again to 78,387 when the city's boundaries extended to include several lower-middle-class suburbs.) The primary beneficiaries were anticapitalistic artisans who saw in big business and mass production a threat to their economic well-being. On the other hand, the industrial working class, which depended on industrialization and which later proved to be relatively immune to antiSemitism, was still denied the right to vote.

38

It is a sobering fact that the sudden rise of political antiSemitism after 1882 was a result of the partial democratization of Austrian politics. Schönerer was not alone among the politicians who now tried to appeal to the new voters through antielitist, anti-individualistic, and anti-intellectual demagoguery, but he did play an increasingly dominant role.
39
In June 1882 Schönerer founded the Deutschnationaler Verein (League of German Nationalists), whose membership was made up of a few hundred journalists, primary and secondary school teachers, and some successful small businessmen as well as members of student fraternities and ruined artisans. Schönerer hoped these groups would be the nucleus of a national following. He unashamedly declared that he and his Deutschnationalen regarded antiSemitism not as a regrettable symptom or a disgrace, but as the very pillar of German nationalist thought; it was nothing less than "the most important expression of genuine popular consciousness and the greatest national achievement of the century." In contrast to most Austrian antiSemites of his day, Schönerer stressed that their fight ought not to be against the Jewish religion but against the racial characteristics of the Jews. Contradicting the spirit of the Linz Program of 1882, he welcomed the help of Slavic and Romance people. He claimed that his party alone, of all the parties in the Reichsrat, was not
verjudet
(jewified) which led one journalist to ask him if there was anything he did not consider jewified.
40
Throughout the 1880s, as Jewish immigrants continued to settle in Vienna, and at that time when the Austrian economy was in a prolonged depression, "the knight of Rosenau" (as Schönerer was popularly called) introduced one piece of anti-Semitic legislation after another in the Reichsrat. In 1882 he brought petitions signed by 37,068 people living in 2,206 communities demanding that Parliament prevent the settlement of victims of the recent Russian pogrom, which, the petitions alleged, had been provoked by the Jews themselves. The next year Schönerer demanded the dismissal of all Jewish teachers. In 1884 he led a campaign for the nationalization of Austrian railroads to töthem out of Jewish hands.
41

 

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The Reichsrat elections of 1885 as well as the Viennese city council elections of 1886 demonstrated the popularity of antiSemitism and encouraged von Schönerer and five of his parliamentary colleagues to revive his bill restricting Jewish immigration into Austria. This time he made his proposed law a verbatim copy of the Chinese exclusion law that had been approved by the U.S. Congress between 1882 and 1884. The one difference was that the word "Jew" was substituted for the word "Chinese." Jewish immigrants, however, were evidently viewed with less alarm in Austria than Chinese newcomers were in the United States because, once again, Schönerer was defeated when his bill received only 19 votes out of 572.

42

Schönerer's political activities were not confined to proposing new legislation to the Austrian Parliament. In 1880 he founded the Deutscher Schulverein (German School League), which four years later had ninety thousand members. However, he turned into its enemy when it refused his demand to stop supporting Jewish schools and hiring Jewish teachers. Not until 1898 did it go so far as to establish purely Jewish local organizations. Its willingness to accept Jewish members induced Schönerer and his followers to quit the organization in 1885, but not before he made an angry speech in which he said he could no longer belong to an organization that was verjudet; the next year he and his supporters founded the Schulverein für Deutsche (School League for Germans).
43
Although the liberal press in Vienna praised Schönerer for a time in the early 1880s because of his courageous defense of the civil liberties of workers, his demands for far-reaching advances in political and economic democracy, and his denunciations of police censorship and press confiscations, it turned against him when he began to advocate racial antiSemitism. Although this same racism drew fanatical support from Burschenschaften, gymnastic clubs, and some small quasi-political organizations, it never proved attractive to the Austrian masses, most of whom were anything but racially pure. Many other issues also cost Schönerer potential supporters, especially his anti-Catholic "Los von Rom" (Away from Rome) movement which put him on the side of the Liberals and the Marxists in the eyes of religious conservatives. Most unpopular of all was his anti-Habsburg stand and his call for the breakup of the monarchy with the predominantly Germanspeaking areas going to the German Reich. Schönerer's anti-Austrianism, was in fact, closely connected with his antiSemitism because he correctly identified the Jews as the monarchy's preeminent state people, that is, the only people (at least in the 1880s) wholly committed to the empire, with no irredentist desires.
44
Schönerer's career suffered a gigantic setback because of two incidents

 

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toward the end of the 1880s. In 1887 a Viennese newspaper published documentary proof that his wife had a Jewish ancestor. Then in March of the following year Schönerer and a band of his followers broke into the editorial offices of the
Neues Wiener Tagblatt
and attacked the staff with sticks because of an article prematurely announcing the death of Kaiser Wilhelm I. For this assault the knight of Rosenau was sentenced to four months in prison and the loss of his political rights for five years. His patent of nobility was also revoked.

45

Georg von Schönerer returned to political life in the 1890s and even led the agitation against the Badeni language laws. But his Pan-German Party was able to win only forty thousand votes in the parliamentary elections of January 1901. Even if we include those people who admired Schönerer but did not belong to his party, his total support probably never exceeded 3 or 4 percent of the Germanspeaking population of Austria and even this was to decline in the parliamentary elections of 1907, which put a definite end to his career.
46
Schönerer's own lack of personal popularity, however, should not be confused with the overall popularity of antiSemitism within fin-de-siècle Austria.
The Origins of Catholic Political AntiSemitism
Georg von Schönerer and his racist-nationalist followers, who resented the internationalism and pro-Habsburg outlook of most Austrian Jews, represented just one reaction to the mid-nineteenth-century emancipation of AustroHungarian Jewry. Another response came from conservative Roman Catholics, both from the clergy and the laity. Belonging to an international institution par excellence, they could hardly fault the Jews for their cosmopolitanism per se. Nor could they object to their Austrianism, which they shared. Rather it was the secularization and modernization of societydemocracy, Marxism, and capitalism, all of which were entering Austrian life at a breathtaking pace, especially after 1867that Catholics identified with Jews. These new ideologies proved to be the major source of conflict, surpassing even religion, which had previously been the traditional cause of antagonism.
The secularizing and modernizing role of Jews in Austrian society had been especially apparent during the Revolutions of 184849 when the laicization of the state had been one of the primary goals of the revolutionaries (though by no means only Jewish revolutionaries). Far worse, however, in the eyes of Roman Catholic clergymen and the more conservative Catholic laity, was the anticlerical legislation introduced and supported by the German Liberal Party and passed by the Austrian Parliament between 1867 and 1870. The largest

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