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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (27 page)

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Page 92

Even more important, however, was the relatively high percentage of Jews who belonged to the Austrian middle class, the class that was by far the most academically inclined in Europe.

13

Jews, especially Jewish girls, were also found in disproportionately large numbers in Austria's middle schools. Between 1851 and 1903 the number of Christian pupils in these schools in the whole Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy increased from 21,213 to just under 100,000. Jewish attendance, however, increased from 1,251 to nearly 16,ooo in the same period or three times as quickly as the Christian rate. After 1896, however, the percentage of Jewish pupils began to decline although their absolute numbers continued to increase slowly.
14
As for Vienna, the percentage of Jews in middle schools of all types stabilized at 28.8 percent already in 1885 and thereafter declined slightly to 27.6 percent in 1912. The same was true at the more prestigious classics-oriented Gymnasien where Jewish enrollment was 30.9 percent in 1885, reached 35 percent in 1913, and attained an all-time high of just under 37 percent in 1923, making Jews three times more likely to attend these schools than Christians. Thereafter the absolute number of Jewish pupils steadily decreased while the total number of pupils gradually increased.
15
Such figures, however, did not prevent antiSemites from claiming that a fantastic 65 to 70 percent of all middle school students were Jewish in the mid-1920s.
16
Although antiSemites loved to cite enrollment statistics for middle schools as proof that the Jews were "taking over" the city's elite positions, Jewish and gentile students themselves in primary and middle schools appear, for the most part, to have socialized well with each other, in sharp contrast to Vienna's Hochschulen. Numerous memoirs by former Viennese Jews, as well as interviews conducted by the present author, have confirmed this fact. George Clare remembers some mutual exchanges of insults, but on the whole the children "played and worked happily enough together, Jews and Christians, and whenever there was, thanks to Lehrer Schneider's temporary absence, an opportunity of creating havoc in class, the little Jewish and Catholic devils formed a firmly united front."
17
The Deutsche Studentenschaft and Demands for a Numerus Clausus
AntiSemitism itself, of course, was nothing new in Austrian universities after the war. What was new, however, was the cooperation between two former foes, völkisch and Catholic students. In February 1919 traditional völ-

 

Page 93

kisch organizations founded the Deutsche Burschenbund (German Fraternity League), which, in its initial assembly, saw as its "first duty the execution of the fight of the German people in Austria and chiefly against Jewry." The Burschenbund formed an alliance with Catholic students, with whom panGerman students had fought before the waran alliance that lasted until 1933 and was based largely on antiSemitism and partly on a common dislike of Marxism and democracy.

18

The same was true of the Deutsche Studentenschaft (German Student Organization), which was also founded in 1919. The Studentenschaft, which included students from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Danzig as well as Austria, declared in a leaflet published in 1927 that "belonging to one people will no longer be given mere lip service. . . . The intellectual liberation from racially alien assaults" would be the greatest cultural accomplishment since the world war.
19
Consisting at first largely of recently returned veterans from the front, it eventually grew to include the vast majority of students. Professors at colleges and universities in Vienna, Graz, and Leoben (in Upper Styria) were also allied with it.
20
Academic authorities granted the Deutsche Studentenschaft official recognition and financial support, and provided it with space for its meetings. It did the same for numerous other racist and nationalistic organizations that sprang up in Austria in the 1920s, such as the Institute for the Cultivation of German Consciousness, founded in 1924. Ardently promoted by Robert Körber, the leader of the Deutsche Studentenschaft at the College for International Trade, it sponsored sixty-seven lectures during its three-year existence, twenty-four of them by university professors. The most common theme of the lectures was the "scientific" treatment of the "Jewish question"; other topics included attacks on liberalism, democracy, the Weimar constitution, and modernity.
21
One of the Deutsche Studentenschaft's principal demands was the enactment of a numerus clausus in all of Austria's Hochschulen. For example, if the Jews of Vienna made up only 10.8 percent of the city's total population they should comprise no more than 10.8 percent of the students and professors in the city's institutions of higher education. Interestingly enough, when the Studentenschaft and other racist organizations wanted to limit Jewish "influence" to their proportion of the total population of Vienna or Austria, they used statistics based on religion, not their own inflated statistics based on "race," which, if utilized, hardly would have reduced the number of Jewish students and professors at all.
The Deutsche Studentenschaft was far from being the only organization that called for limited enrollment of Jewish students. Similar policies, which

 

Page 94

flouted the minority treaties, had been adopted in Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic states during the 1920s. Austrians were also well aware that private American universities on the East Coast including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton informally restricted Jewish enrollment starting between 1919 and 1923 and lasting into the mid-1940s. For example, Harvard's freshman class which was 27.6 percent Jewish in 1925 was only 15 percent (or less) Jewish a few years later.

22

Within Austria a numerus clausus for students and professors at Austrian Hochschulen as well as for public and professional jobs was probably the most common demand made by antiSemites of all types both before and after the First World War. During the war an attempt was made by völkisch fraternities to limit the number of Jews and other minorities in Vienna's colleges and institutes to their percentage in the census of 1910 for the whole of Austria. The demand, which was directed primarily against Jews from Galicia and Bukovina, was expanded after the war by the Burschenbund as well as the Deutsche Studentenschaft and various Catholic student organizations to include Jews of all kinds.
23
These demands became more strident in 1922, the same year in which tuition at Austria's universities rose sharply. Hostility between German nationalist and Jewish students increased rapidly in the fall over a dispute at the College of International Trade. In the summer the European Student Relief, an American charity that for three years had provided needy European students with clothing, shoes, and books, announced the cessation of its activities, but encouraged Austrian students to form a committee to continue the work on their own. Attempts by German nationalist students to control the distribution of the funds led to an exchange of insults between them and Jewish students and ultimately to a demand by the Deutsche Studentenschaft to the rector of the University of Vienna, Karl Diener, that he implement a numerus clausus.
24
Angered by the recent election of a Jew, Professor Samuel Steinberg, as rector of the German University of Prague, the Deutsche Studentenschaft further demanded that no Jew ever be elected rector, dean, or any other academic officer. The memorandum furthermore demanded that the number of Jewish students and professors in Vienna be limited to 10 percent. Diener, who blamed the recent controversy at the College of International Trade on Jewish students, agreed that only Germans should occupy posts of honor at the University of Vienna, but doubted whether a Jew could be elected in any case at that time. As for students, those with Austrian citizenship could not be denied entry on religious or racial grounds, but students from Poland, Rumania, and

 

Page 95

Russia (who were likely to be Jews) could be restricted. He went on to declare that "the large number of Eastern European students at the University represents a downright shocking invasion of racially and organically alien elements, whose culture, upbringing, and morals are far below every native German student; therein lies the true cancerous damage to our academic conditions. The reduction of the Eastern Jews must today take a leading place in the program of every rector and senate of a German Hochschule. The progressive orientalization of Vienna must at least be stopped at the Hochschulen."

25

No restrictions were ever placed on Jewish enrollments at the University of Vienna, perhaps because of promises made by Chancellor Ignaz Seipel in response to protests made by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde that the demands made by the Deutsche Studentenschaft would violate the Austrian constitution.
26
But the idea of a numerus clausus never disappeared from the Austrian academic scene, at least for foreign Jews. Such an idea was raised in January 1923 at a meeting of university students attended not only by nationalist students but by many professors as well and was under the honorary chairmanship of Rector Diener.
27
Finally, in March 1923, the "College of Professors" at the Technical College (Technische Hochschule) in Vienna, where the Jewish enrollment was over 41 percent, unanimously approved of a numerus clausus regulation stipulating that Jewish students from foreign countries could enroll in a particular discipline only if the number of Jewish students already enrolled, both foreign and native, was no more than 10 percent of the total. Although this policy did not violate the Austrian constitution, it marked the first time since the final emancipation of Austrian Jews in the nineteenth century that a distinction was drawn at an Austrian Hochschule between Jews and non-Jews, a distinction that had nothing to do with scholarship or ability.
28
Somewhat surprisingly, the College of Professors at the Agricultural College in Vienna moved in the opposite direction as their colleagues at the Technical College. In October 1924 and March 1925 they removed the restrictions on the enrollment of foreign Jews that had existed since 1919 by declaring "that a rejection in principle of the acceptance of foreign Jews as students at the College of Agriculture is uncalled for." Jewish enrollment, however, was hardly a pressing issue at the college where there was a grand total of only thirteen Jewish students, or 1.61 percent of all those enrolled!
29

 

Page 96
Anti-Semitic Violence at Austrian Universities

Student antiSemites did not content themselves with mere verbal abuse in interwar Austria. Organized beatings of Jewish students, which had been rare before the First World War, became commonplace during the First Republic. This was especially true during the early postwar years when war veterans, accustomed to violence, confronted the large Jewish minority. Ironically, some of the brawling may have been a product of the Waidhofner Principle forbidding members of the Burschenschaften from dueling with Jews. Unwilling meekly to tolerate insults, members of Kadimah and other Jewish fraternities would slap the face of any non-Jewish student who tried to invoke the Waidhofner Principle, thereby often setting off fights and melees between Jews and anti-Semitic students. Such fights were particularly common at beer and wine gardens and at sporting events.

30

In April 1920 between five hundred and one thousand German nationalist students from the Technical College assaulted twenty Zionist students at the dining hall for poor Jewish students and drove the other students out. Some Jews were even forced to show that they had been circumcised, a favorite tactic of Nazis a few years later.
Later in the same day some nationalist students marched on the Anatomy Institute of Dr. Julius Tandler, one of many such episodes directed against the world famous scholar. Tandler's institute became something of a focal point for student anti-Semitic demonstrations during the 1920s even though Tandler had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1899 and even though the professor himself did not scruple to bait Eastern European Jewish students during examinations. Nevertheless, Tandler's institute attracted mostly Jewish and Socialist students because in addition to his Jewish origins he was a major reformer of Vienna's welfare institutions for children, young people, the aged, and the poor in Vienna's Socialist administration. Meanwhile, a second anatomy institute headed by Professor Ferdinand Hochstetter became a magnate for völkisch-nationalist students.
31
On the day following the invasion of Tandler's institute, anti-Semitic students demolished a dining room that had been established a short time before by the American Joint Distribution Committee, a New York consortium of Jewish welfare organizations. Finally, the next day they occupied the main entrance to the University of Vienna in order to prevent Jewish students from entering the building.
32
The attacks provoked a raucous debate in the National Assembly (Nationalversammlung as the Parliament in the Republic of Austria was called). Leopold
BOOK: From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
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