From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (29 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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BOOK: From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
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Page 102
8
Assassination and Intimidation
Although the higher educational institutions of Austria and particularly Vienna remained the focal point of anti-Semitic violence through the entire period of interwar Austria, they did not have a monopoly on the phenomenon. Never was this more true than in 1925 when two major but unrelated anti-Semitic events occurred: the murder in March of Hugo Bettauer, a popular novelist of Jewish origins; and massive demonstrations organized against the XIVth World Zionist Congress, which was held in Vienna in August.
The Assassination of Hugo Bettauer

Although Hugo Bettauer is almost entirely forgotten today, except by scholars of modern Austrian literature, he was enormously popular during the first half of the 1920s; his many novels sold by the hundreds of thousands. Born in 1872, he converted to the Protestant faith in 1890, an act that later made not the slightest impression on his anti-Semitic enemies. In the 1890s he lived in the United States just long enough to lose his entire inheritance through a bad investment. After returning to Europe in 1899 he became the editor of the
Berliner Morgenpost
, but was expelled from Prussia in 1901 as an undesirable alien after attacking purported police corruption. In 1904 Bettauer returned to the United States, working for several German-language newspapers in New York and writing installment novels about German and Austrian immigrants. In 1908 he returned to Vienna and began to publish novels on topical themes, many of which became motion pictures. Bettauer scandalized conservative Austrians and provided ammunition for antiSemites by coediting in 1921 a journal called
Er und Sie
, which was devoted to sexual questions along with the rights of women and homosexuals.

1

Bettauer is best known for his satiric and prophetic novel,
Die Stadt ohne

 

Page 103

Juden: Ein Roman von Übermorgen
(
The City without Jews: A Novel about the Day after Tomorrow
), one of five books he wrote in 1922. Bettauer was far from being the only Austrian novelist to write about antiSemitism in the 1920sit was perhaps the theme of the decade in Austrian literaturenor was he even the first writer to fantasize about a judenrein Vienna.
The City without Jews
, which sold over 250,000 copies including many in translation, tells how a Christian Social politician, named Dr. Karl Schwertfegermodeled after mayor Karl Luegeris brought to power after an election in which he promises to expel all Jews from Austria because of their ''domination." Although Jews are permitted to sell their homes and businesses and take cash out of the country with them, the financial provisions of the law are designed to take advantage of them. Those who remain underground in Austria are to be punished with death. When the last of the Viennese Jews are hauled away on thirty huge trains using all available rolling stock and locomotives borrowed from neighboring countries, the remaining million Viennese celebrate. Food is cheaper and housing is plentiful. However, it is not long before disillusionment sets in. The city's remaining newspapers are colorless, and the unemployment rate rises. Without Jewish patronage, the opera house closes and the theaters stagnate as do the art salons, the publishing houses, and the libraries. Without Jewish physicians and lawyers the hospitals and law courts become hopelessly congested. Vienna degenerates into a provincial city culturally and economically.

2

Although
The City without Jews
was probably the most powerful attack made on antiSemitism during the First Austrian Republic, it was far from being uncritically philosemitic; nor was it uniformly well received by Austrian Jews. Bettauer used the same stereotypes of Jews as did antiSemites, although his purpose was to encourage mutual tolerance. He mentioned tensions between old Viennese Jewish families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. The sole Zionist member of Parliament in the novel votes in favor of the expulsion because it furthers Zionist goals. And although the book was remarkably prophetic in many respects, in one area it was anything but accurate. In the novel the "Aryan" Viennese realize that they cannot do without Jewish business expertise, money, style, taste, and cosmopolitanism. Chancellor Schwertfeger, seeing his mistake, invites back all those Jews who had settled in the city before 1914. No such invitation was made after 1945 following the real-life deportation of Austrian Jews.
3
By 1925 Bettauer had become a highly controversial figure, even within the Jewish community being both extremely popular and hated. Whereas his supporters considered him to be an apostle of a new morality and a servant of

 

Page 104

enlightenment, his detractors in the Christian Social Party, the Greater German People's Party, and the Nazi Party considered him to be a "Red poet," a "shameless corrupter of youth," and the embodiment of pornography and all that was evil. The Nazis later referred to him as "the father of the erotic revolution.'' During his lifetime his writings were denounced by dozens of women's organizations for their alleged "filth." Even the
Wiener Morgenzeitung
described his work as "pornographic." Attacks made on Bettauer by Anton Orel, a Christian Social member of the Vienna City Council and the editor of a weekly newspaper called
Volkssturm
, were so extreme that the
Reichspost
, certainly no fan of Bettauer, felt compelled to censor them. Even the normally liberal
Neue Freie Presse
said that the public needed to be protected against Bettauer, who appealed to the instincts of the half educated and half grown.

4

Bettauer's notoriety reached a climax in September 1924 when he was charged with sixteen counts of harming "public morality." After three hours of deliberation the jury acquitted the accused of all sixteen counts, usually by a vote of nine to three. Even Bettauer's friends had not expected such a favorable outcome. Instead of ending the controversy surrounding the author, however, the verdict merely added to it, while at the same time it encouraged radicalism and sharpened the political atmosphere.
5
Meanwhile, since the middle of 1924, Kaspar Hellering, a Sudeten-born gymnastics and mathematics middle-school teacher in Vienna and member of the Austrian Nazi Party, began writing a series of articles, pamphlets, and poems in various völkisch newspapers and magazines in which he openly called for "radical self-help" and "lynch justice against all polluters of our people."
6
Hellering's plea was heard by an unemployed twenty-year-old man with a Sudeten German father and a Czech mother named Otto Rothstock. On the morning of 10 March 1925 Rothstock walked into Bettauer's office and shot him several times; Bettauer died of his wounds two weeks later. Newspaper reaction to the shooting was just as mixed as the reviews of his writings had been. The
Neue Freie Presse, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Volkszeitung
, and
Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung
all ascribed it to popular moral indignation. The
Tag, Neues Wiener Journal
, and the Communist
Rote Fahne
all condemned the act. The
Arbeiter-Zeitung
held leaders of the Christian Social Party indirectly responsible for the shooting because they had polemicized so much against Bettauer. The
Wiener Morgenzeitung
, certainly no friend of Bettauer's, said the murder was not directed against Bettauer alone, but against every intellectual who wrote on behalf of a cause.
7
Neither the investigation of the crime nor the trial of the killer showed the

 

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Austrian republic at its best. In fewer than forty-eight hours the police declared that there were no grounds for believing that there was a conspiracy, even though they had not yet collected all the evidence. The public prosecutor actually suppressed important documents, including one that proved that Rothstock had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1920. Nor did the police check out Rothstock's connections with the Nazi Party, despite a report that the murderer had been seen wearing a Hitler shirt and carrying a Nazi flag at a Nazi demonstration just two days before the assassination. The uncertain origin of the murder weapon was never investigated, and Hellering's possible connections to the murder were ignored.

8

The Bettauer murder trial turned out to be one of the most politicized events in interwar Austria. AntiSemites and other right-wing extremists saw it as an opportunity for reversing the results of Bettauer's pornography trial of the previous year by putting Bettauer rather than the murderer on trial. They were enormously aided in this endeavor by the judge and the prosecuting attorney, who were both völkisch.
9
Rothstock, who was defended by the former leader of the Austrian Nazi Party, Dr. Walter Riehl, admitted that he had belonged to the Nazi Party until December 1924 but had resigned his membership in order to avoid implicating the party in his planned assassination. He testified that he knew what he was doing when he shot Bettauer, and had done it because he wanted to "drive Bettauer out of this world and into another one in order to protect his people and cohorts." Christ, he said, had come to earth to lead the fight against Jewish writers and scholars; he, Rothstock, was merely continuing that work and fulfilling a prophecy. He had a right to shoot Bettauer because he was a good Christian and had the blessing of God. Riehl therefore described Rothstock's deed as "gallant" and claimed that he had acted out of religious, not political motives.
10
The sensational trial resulted in the jury voting twelve to nothing that Rothstock had murdered Bettauer, but the vote was evenly divided as to whether Rothstock was insane at the time of the murder. Rothstock's only punishment, therefore, was to spend two and a half years in mental hospitals from which he was released at the end of 1927. Even such a ridiculously light sentence was enough to make Rothstock a "martyr for the German people" in the opinion of the Nazi
Deutsche ArbeiterPresse
. Rothstock rejoined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1932, but was expelled in January 1933 after criticizing the Gauleiter of Vienna, Alfred Frauenfeld. However he joined the SS Standarte 11 in time to take part in the Nazi
Putsch
of July 1934, which resulted in the death of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. After the war he moved to Germany where he was still living in 1976.
11

 

Page 106
Sandwiched between the assassination of Hugo Bettauer and the violence attending the meeting of the XIVth World Zionist Congress was the murder of an entirely unknown twenty-one-year-old man named Josef Mohapl on 1 August 1925. The killing itself by another obscure youth by the name of Josef Seidl was entirely nonpolitical as neither Mohapl nor Seidl was active in politics. Nor did the killing have anything directly to do with antiSemitism as neither the victim nor the murderer was Jewish or particularly anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, as with so much else in the First Austrian Republic, the murder had political consequences and heightened the already tense political atmosphere.

Although Seidl was completely nonpolitical, preferring the company of prostitutes to politicians and enjoying violence for its own sake, his murder of Mohapl ignited a war of words between Vienna's political press organs, a battle of headlines that was a novelty at the time but was to become commonplace in the early 1930s. Right-wing papers claimed that Mohapl had been murdered by Socialists, and his burial became a big show for the entire "Christian population." On the other hand, the
Arbeiter-Zeitung
charged that Mohapl had been chased by five or six Nazis after their party comrades had deliberately provoked a Socialist crowd. The only common goal of the papers was their desire to gain political advantage from the senseless tragedy. And the only satisfactory outcome of the murder was that Seidl received a twelve-year sentence, the only time in the First Republic that a murder that afterward became politicized resulted in a severe sentence.

12

Zionism and the Austrian AntiSemites
As it turned out, the political reactions to the murders of Hugo Bettauer and Josef Mohapl were mere preludes to agitation surrounding the holding of the XIVth World Zionist Congress in Vienna in August 1925. The events were completely unrelated, but once more antiSemites were far less concerned about the actual events involved than they were in gaining as much publicity for themselves as possible. The political reactions to the Zionist Congress were especially hypocritical because prior to the meeting anti-Semitic attitudes toward Zionism were by no means entirely negative, and those people who did oppose Zionism were not always anti-Semitic.
The Christian Social Party usually adopted a favorable stance toward Zionism because, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, they saw the movement as an excellent way of ridding the country of Jews. The
Wiener Stimmen
, which was in most

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