From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (38 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 146
Title page from
Jewry and Social Democracy
by Karl Paumgarten.

 

Page 147

change the shape of their skulls. Jews simply could not understand the material and spiritual way of life of the German people. Whereas the Germans were essentially idealistic and creative, the Jews were materialistic and were good only for accumulating goods.

32

It was these racially alien Jews who had taken over the Social Democratic Party, according to Paumgarten. Jews like Karl Marx and Kurt Eisner (the leader of the Communist revolution in Bavaria in 191819) had dropped their Jewish names and adopted German ones in order to make themselves more acceptable to German workers. Socialism, like liberalism, was merely a means for attaining Jewish world domination. The power of Jewry was greater now than ever before. The German workers had not been working for themselves but for Jews. Workers ought to be red with shame that they had been siding with the mortal enemy of the German people against their blood brothers.
33
Other anti-Semitic pamphlets charged that Jewish Socialists held the most important positions in the federal government after the war. The Jewish domination of the Social Democratic Party was even greater after the war than before. During the war the Jews had allegedly occupied all the free professions so these positions were not available to returning veterans, thus forcing thousands of German Austrians to emigrate to other countries. Otto Bauer had presumably aggravated the problem by preventing the Jewish refugees from being expelled. The SDAP was delighted with the immigration of the Ostjuden because it gave the party new voters.
34
The idea that the Social Democratic Party was led, or misled, by "alien" Jews was not confined entirely to nonparty members. Such allegations were also leveled from within the party itself. This was especially true after the collapse of the brief uprising in February 1934 when Socialist workers in Linz, reacting to the tightening dictatorship of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, initiated a desperate revolt which quickly spread to Vienna. After just three days, however, it was suppressed by the government with excessive brutality and the party was outlawed. Some of the party's rank-and-file members could not resist the temptation to accuse the party's "Jewish" leadership, including Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch, the leader of the party's paramilitary Schutzbund, of first preaching revolution and then deserting the party and fleeing to Czechoslovakia once that revolution took place.
35
Any latent antiSemitism that existed within the SDAP was exploited by both the Austrian government and the, by now, illegal Austrian Nazi Party. Both groups, but especially the Nazis, tried to foster the idea that the workers had been seduced, misled, and then abandoned by Jewish "word slingers" and "cafe revolutionaries." The Nazis' hopes of winning over at least half of the

 

Page 148
Cartoon from
Jewry and Social Democracy
by Karl Paumgarten
showing an "Aryan" worker attacking an "Aryan" capitalist.
The supratitle reads, "Kill him! He is your brother!"

 

Page 149

Socialists' membership were never fully realized, however.

36
By June 1934 a German observer in Austria noted that Socialist conversions had lasted for "only a short time" after the February revolt. A more important long-term effect, however, was a reluctance by the party's membership to invite its former Jewish leadership to return to the country after 1945.
37

Thrown on the defensive by anti-Semitic charges about the close connection between Judaism and Socialism, the Socialists felt obliged to strike back. Instead of simply denouncing antiSemitism, however, they often preferred to respond with what bordered on anti-Semitic charges of their own and implied that their opposition to "Jewish capitalism" made them superior to their anti-Semitic opponents.
38
Although they did not formally espouse antiSemitism in a party platform, they were no more willing than the other political parties of Austria to be Judenschutztruppen. As in Germany, the espousal of the Jewish cause could hurt the party attempting it more than it would help the Jews. And Jewish support in both Austria and Germany was regarded as more of a liability than an asset.
39
At most the Austrian Socialists were willing to provide spiritual and material support for poor and lower-class Jews while attacking Jewish capitalists with the same rhetoric used later by the Nazis. But such attacks were not motivated by racial or religious antagonism. For them the world was not divided between Jews and Christians but between capitalists and the proletariat.
40

 

 

Page 150
11
The Roman Catholics
For Austrian Marxists the Jewish bourgeoisie represented a conservative social force that blocked the Socialists' goals of nationalizing industries by upholding the social and economic status quo. Ironically, Austrian Catholics saw them in exactly the opposite light. For them, Jews were revolutionaries or at least extreme modernists who were determined to secularize society by undermining the Catholic faith and traditional Christian values.

Roman Catholic antiSemitism was also far more diffuse than the Marxist variety. Marxists limited their attacks to Jewish capitalists and, to a much smaller extent, the Zionists. Catholics sometimes also attacked "Jewish capitalism" as well as "Jewish materialism" and, in theory at least, agreed with Socialists in rejecting racial antiSemitism. But by far their greatest wrath was reserved for the Jewish intellectuals, especially those in the Social Democratic Party. The secularism and modernity of these Jewish savants were in direct conflict with the religious traditionalism of Catholics. In premodern times practicing Jews had been the chief objects of Christian antiSemitism; however, after the mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic church, not only in Austria but also in Poland and other European countries, saw "freethinkers"whether or not they still belonged to the Jewish community, had nominally converted to Christianity, or had renounced religion altogetheras by far its greatest threat. Such Jews were held responsible for all the trends of modern society that Catholics abhorred: atheism, Bolshevism, revolution, liberalism, capitalism, and pornography. On the other hand, as we already saw with the Zionist Congress of 1925, Austrian Catholics assumed a fairly benevolent attitude toward Zionism. Likewise, Catholics did not object to Orthodox Judaism, no doubt because Orthodox Jews, even more than Zionists, tended to live in a world of their own and posed no threat to the Catholic religion or to traditional Christian values.

1

After the First World War "the Jew" remained for both the Roman Catholic church and its political arm, the Christian Social Party (CSP), almost

 

Page 151

entirely negative in contrast to their own absolutely positive characteristics. The church and the party were Christian, Social, and patriotic. The Jews, on the other hand, were in Catholic eyes the advocates of anticlericalism, anarchical democracy, egalitarianism, irresponsible freedom, rationalism, and doctrinaire individualism.

2

Traditional Catholic Anti-Judaism
Although political, diplomatic, and military history can be divided into separate eras with relative ease, the same cannot be said for social, economic, or intellectual history. In these fields historical epochs do not end all at once. Rather there is a very large amount of untidy overlapping. These generalizations are especially true of the history of antiSemitism in both Austria and Germany. Although Marxist antiSemitism was of far more recent vintage than the Catholic variety, it by no means replaced it. Even though some newly emerging social groups such as the industrial working class and the academically trained bourgeoisieboth of them militantly anticlericalabandoned religious antiSemitism in favor of "progressive" economic or racial antiSemitism, the more traditional form remained surprisingly tenacious, especially among such traditional social groups as the clergy, the peasantry, and the lower middle class.
3
Crucifixes in classrooms and along country paths were reminders of the Catholic belief that Jews were the murderers of God.
4
So widespread was antiSemitism among Austrian Catholics that organizations that carried the name "Christian" in their title could almost be assumed to be hostile toward Jews.
Catholic journals and newspapers in the First Republic were filled with articles denouncing Jews in very traditional terms. Such denunciations could be found in almost every issue of the prestigious new weekly magazine,
Schönere Zukunft
. Founded in 1925, it was far from being considered an extremist publication featuring as it did commentaries on current events by Catholic bishops, professors of theology, and leading Catholic politicians, not only from Austria but from Hungary and Germany as well. The editor of
Schönere Zukunft
, the German-born Josef Eberle, considered the Jewish question to be the most important of all questions and was himself a frequent contributor of anti-Jewish articles, introductions, and editorials.
5
Eberle proved to be one of the primary moving forces of Catholic antiSemitism, and not just because of his work for
Schönere Zukunft
. Already in 1920 he had demanded the restriction of Jewish involvement in all aspects of Austria's cultural and

 

Page 152

economic life to the Jewish percentage of the country's population. Jews, he wrote, ought to be placed under special laws, and the assets of wealthy Jews above a certain point ought to be confiscated for the good of society. In 1926 Eberle was apparently instrumental in making sure that the new program of the Christian Social Party contained an anti-Semitic section. In 1929 he complained in the pages of
Schönere Zukunft
that anti-Semitic efforts of the CSP had been pushed into the background during the previous ten years compared with such efforts in the early history of the party. The Jews, with only 5 percent (
sic
) of the population, played a leading role in the country and formed a kind of state within a state. This was the fault of Christians themselves, however, because they continued to shop at Jewish stores and read Jewish newspapers.

6

Eberle's primary function was advocating the cause of traditional Catholicism, including traditional Catholic antiSemitism. In one of the early issues of
Schönere Zukunft
, Eberle claimed that the Talmud predicted future wealth for Jews. This creed had created a type of person who was dangerous to those tolerating him. The one-sided approval of wealth, property, and power by the Jewish religion gave Jews an advantage over Christians, who sanctioned these things only to a very limited extent. The fight against Jews was not a matter of hatred or of racism, but a fight against the contradiction of the Christian idea. The triumph of Jews in the modern world was God's way of punishing Christians for the Renaissance and Reformation, and for rejecting the ideas and organizations of Christianity. Elsewhere Eberle maintained that the fundamental answer to the threat posed by Jewry was the re-Christianization of society. On other occasions, however, Eberle advanced more secular proposals, such as special laws for Jews. He also published articles calling for boycotts of Jewish department stores.
7
Another contributor to
Schönere Zukunft
was a Catholic theology professor from Salzburg, Dr. Alois Mager, who wrote in 1928 that the radical rejection of Christ and his manifestations had given Jews their special character and attitudes. Jews throughout the centuries had always reacted against anything Christian, and Judaism was still present in all anti-Christian movements. Nothing was so anti-Christian as capitalism, which expressed the essence of Judaism.
8
Another theology professor, Dr. Karl von Balas of Budapest, added that the great goal of the Jews was ruling the world, although they were clever enough to disguise their methods of achieving this aim.
9
Of course,
Schönere Zukunft
was far from being the only outlet for Catholic antiSemitism. An anonymous pamphlet called
Die Juden im Staate Deutsch-Österreich
(
The Jews in the State of German-Austria
) was published in 1920. Modern Jewry, the author claimed, poisoned both economic life and Christian

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