From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (17 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 39

parliamentary faction between 1867 and 1879, the German Liberals, were an upper-middle-class party that drew inspiration from the French Enlightenment of the previous century and the Viennese Revolution of 1848. The party was definitely supported by Austrian Jews but was by no means dominated by them. On the contrary, the party was careful not to allow any Jew to hold a high government office.

47

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Count Karl Auersperg restricted clerical influence wherever it could. Impetus to do so had been given by papal criticism of the constitution of 1867 with its articles on religious toleration and freedom of the press. One by one, clerical prerogatives were eliminated: civil marriage was legalized and divorce proceedings were transferred from church to secular courts. The new legislation prompted Catholic prelates to walk out of the "infidel" upper chamber of the Parliament but created general rejoicing among the Viennese population and high praise from the city's press, much of which was owned and edited by Jews. Another law passed by the Reichsrat in 1869 nationalized all Austrian schools. From then on religious institutions were only responsible for religious education. Pope Pius denounced the new laws as "truly unholy," "destructive, abominable, and damnable," and "absolutely null and void.'' Some clerical leaders even defied the laws and encouraged the faithful to do likewise.
48
The civil influence of the Roman Catholic church was diminished still further in 1870 when the concordat made in 1855 between Austria and the Vatican was canceled at the urging of the Liberal Party. Among other things the concordat had given the Catholic church the right to approve all instruction given to Catholic children both in public and private schools; the church had also been given the right to designate a book as objectionable on religious or moral grounds and the state was then obligated to prevent its circulation. The concordat had, furthermore, restored the jurisdiction of the church on all questions relating to marriage laws.
49
Rather than attacking modern trends directly, Catholic spokesmen often found it more politically expedient to identify them first with Jews and then hold the Jews responsible for them. This is not to suggest that antiSemites were always insincere, but their technique of disguising their true aims by hiding them behind an anti-Semitic smoke screen became a favorite ploy of antiSemites of all types and descriptions in the late nineteenth century and during the years between the world wars of the twentieth century.
An early clerical antiSemite in Austria was Prelate Sebastian Brunner who published the
Wiener Kirchenzeitung
. Catholics in Paris knew him as the "Father of Austrian antiSemitism." He was succeeded as editor by another

 

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Catholic theologian, Albert Wiesinger, who has been described as a "devoted fanatic of hate." These men were actually only two of the many priestjournalists who spoke at anti-Semitic public rallies, authored numerous anti-Jewish tracts, and tried to compete with the antiSemitism of Georg von Schönerer and his German nationalist followers.

50

Brunner and Wiesinger and their
Kirchenzeitung
were the immediate forerunners of the far more influential Catholic politician, Baron Karl von Vogelsang and his newspaper,
Vaterland
, which he edited from 1875 to his death in 1890. Vogelsang, a Catholic convert who moved to Vienna from Mecklenburg in 1859, was the first to synthesize the disparate elements of early Austrian political antiSemitism into a coherent critique of the liberal-capitalist order. He identified the Jews with all the evils of modern society, especially liberalism, materialism, and atheism. He also regarded capitalism as a Jewish invention and advocated the restoration of a medieval Christian economic order. Without this reform, artisans, peasants, and industrial workers would be ruined by Jewish capitalism just as the moral fabric of society would disintegrate because of the "Jewish press." Only in a completely re-Christianized society in which Jewish emancipation was rescinded would people be safe from "Jewish domination." On the other hand, Vogelsang, like most Catholics, was not a racial antiSemite and did not attack the Hebrew religion; instead he called on Jews to convert to Roman Catholicism. His wrath was directed only against secularized Jews.
51
The man who inherited these ideas and was the first to exploit them to their full political potential was Karl Lueger. Born in 1844, two years after Schönerer, Lueger entered politics in 1875 as a Liberal member of Vienna's city council; a decade later he was elected to the Reichsrat, although municipal politics continued to interest him more than national politics. Even though he espoused no anti-Semitic views during his early political career, in 1887 he was one of the nineteen parliamentary deputies to vote in favor of Georg von Schönerer's bill to restrict the immigration of Russian and Rumanian Jews. Like Schönerer he used antiSemitism to appeal to the same unstable elements of the population: artisans and university students. And like Schönerer, Lueger favored political platforms that denounced the emancipation of Jews. However, that is where the similarities ended. Lueger, in sharp contrast to Schönerer, was pro-Catholic and pro-Habsburg. He hoped to unite all Christians and all the nationalities of the monarchy against a common Jewish enemy. Moreover, Lueger's antiSemitism lacked the bitterness, consistency, and above all the conviction of the knight of Rosenau. Whereas Schönerer was a racial antiSemite and, at least after about 1885, uncompromising in

 

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his intolerance of Jews, Lueger's antiSemitism was opportunistic, economic, religious, and cultural. When opponents criticized Lueger for associating with converted Jews, he retorted half jokingly and half cynically that he "determined who a Jew was." It was this very lack of principle that made him much more adept at building coalitions than the doctrinaire Schönerer.

52

By far the most important way in which Lueger differed from Schönerer was in the former's enormous personal and political popularity. Lueger's old-fashioned brand of religious, cultural, and economic antiSemitism remained for half a century the integrating force of political Catholicism because it was far more in accord with Viennese traditions than Schönerer's more modern racial antiSemitism. (As noted already, racism was a rarity in the ethnically mixed capital of the multinational empire and was anathema to the international Roman Catholic church.) The Viennese also loved Lueger's vulgar jokes, Viennese dialect, elegant appearance, humble bourgeois origins, and general
Gemütlichkeit
.
53
Lueger, like other Catholic politicians of his day, realized that Vienna's economic tribulations could not be ascribed to the Jews alone but rather to capitalistic modes of production. However, he cared far less about the validity of anti-Semitic allegations than he did about their effectiveness in taking the wind out of the sails of the Schönerer movement and destroying the Liberal Party. Viennese artisans and tradesmen were struggling to survive in the late nineteenth century against competition from above in the form of far more efficient factories and large retail distributorssuch as the new and frequently Jewish-owned department stores on Mariahilferstrassewhich were mass producing and selling textiles, machines, and furniture. They also feared competition from below by peddlers. Since many of these factories and stores were owned by Jews, and many of the peddlers were recent Jewish immigrants from Galicia, it was tempting to assume that their problems would be solved through anti-Semitic legislation, all the more so because the lower middle class had little understanding of economics. As the historian John Boyer has noted, "nowhere else did artisan antisemitism become the basis for a major successful upheaval in municipal politics."
54
The common enemy of the antiSemites in the 1880s and 1890s, especially in Vienna, was the Liberal Party. The master of both the government of Austria and the municipal government of Vienna in 1879, twenty years later it had been driven from power at both levels and was on the verge of extinction. In large measure its downfall was its own fault. The main beneficiaries of the highly restricted voting system, the Liberals had remained isolated from the common people and had made no effort to resolve the many legitimate griev-

 

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ances of artisans and industrial workers. Nor did they even make use of a new generation of talent.

55

The first organization to exploit the grievances of artisans through antiSemitism was the so-called Verein zum Schutze des Gewerbestandes (Association for the Protection of Tradesmen), which was constituted in 1881. Even more explicitly anti-Semitic was the Reformverein zur Betreibung der gewerblichen Interessen (Reform Association for the Prosecution of Trade Interests), which was organized the next year and demanded the expulsion of Jews from their political, economic, and social positions. Jewish businesses were to be boycotted and all social contact between Jews and Christians was to be eliminated. Most important of all for the anti-Semitic movement was the Christlichsozialer Verein (Christian Social Association), established in 1887. According to Lueger's contemporary, Richard Charmatz, "in its fifth plenary assembly Dr. Karl Lueger declared himself to be an antiSemite. The new movement found in him a leader with incomparable energy, unscrupulousness and astonishing cleverness."
56
In 1888 the Christian Social Association briefly joined with Georg von Schönerer's German Nationalists to form an alliance called the United Christians. The only common denominator of this motley collection of lowerlevel clerical conservatives, panGerman nationalists, and social reformers was antiSemitism. Their manifesto combined earlier demands by Vogelsang and Schönerer for the exclusion of Jews from such professions as teaching (except for the teaching of Jewish children), medicine, law, retail trade, and the civil and military service. They also wanted restrictions placed on Jewish immigration. Their slogan was "all Jews are capitalists." The solidarity of the United Christians proved to be short-lived. Hardly had the alliance been concluded when Schönerer fell into political disgrace because of his storming of the offices of the
Neues Wiener Tagblatt
. Schönerer's racial antiSemitism also proved to be unacceptable to conservative Catholics in the coalition. Lueger and Schönerer soon went their separate ways, joining forces only occasionally on an ad hoc basis. Schönerer's newspaper,
Unverfälschte deutsche Worte
, did not hesitate to launch periodic attacks against Lueger and the United Christians.
57
As early as 1885 Lueger had become sympathetic to Karl Vogelsang's clerical, aristocratic, conservative program that rejected capitalism, rationalism, and materialism, all of which allegedly threatened the Christian
Weltanschauung
; he then combined these views with the populist anticapitalism of the small artisans to form the Christian Social Party in 1891. The new party stressed the importance of the Jewish question, but declared it to be a social one, rejecting both racial and religious antiSemitism. Although it was adept at

 

Page 43

coining anti-Semitic slogans, it refrained from proposing specific anti-Semitic legislation because it could not even agree on a definition of what constituted a Jew. Its followers did not demand that the party do more than insult Jews. As John Boyer has succinctly put it: "Austrian Christian Socialism was a movement of nineteenth-century social protest, not a protofascist crusade or a total break with nineteenth-century Viennese political values and institutions."

58

Only four years after its creation, the Christian Social Party, with the help of its official daily newspaper, the
Reichspost
(founded in 1894), and its panGerman allies, had won an absolute majority in the Vienna municipal elections of April 1895; wealthy Jews threatened to move to Hungary while other Jews in Vienna lived in a constant state of panic until Franz Joseph assured them that he would protect all his subjects, regardless of their faith or traditions. Four times in the space of two years Lueger won smashing electoral victories and four times the emperor refused to appoint him mayor, vetoes that earned him the title of
der Judenkaiser
among fanatical antiSemites and served only to increase Lueger's popularity. Finally, after a fifth electoral victory, this one in the Reichsrat elections of April 1897, the emperor relented and Lueger became the first mayor in the western half of Europe elected to office on an anti-Semitic platform. He was now the leader of the most successful anti-Semitic movement in nineteenth-century Europe.
59
In that fifth election the Liberal Party gained a scant 10,000 votes in Vienna compared to over 117,000 for the Christian Social Party and other anti-Semitic parties.
60
The Liberals, who had lost control of the Austrian Parliament in 1879, were now finished as an effective party even though they continued to exist as a very minor party during the First Republic. Although the Liberals had been crushed in large measure because they had failed to adjust to the democratic (and demagogic) politics of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, their defeat was also a punishment for being pro-Jewish, or at least for being perceived as pro-Jewish, even though in reality they were by no means free of antiSemitism themselves.
61
Although the Liberals never gave their unqualified support to the political, economic, and legal tenets of classical liberalism, they had been consistent in their endorsement of equality for all citizens during the sixties, seventies, and early eighties.
62
To be sure, they did become somewhat ambivalent toward antiSemites in the mid-eighties; nevertheless, their demise was a major setback from which the more assimilated Viennese Jews perhaps never fully recovered. Gentile and Jewish Liberals had all fought for constitutionalism, administrative centralism, religious tolerance, and private enterprise. As the British historian Peter G. J. Pulzer has so ably put it: "Because Jews had staked

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