Read From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism Online

Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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

From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (57 page)

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Page 252

the world. It acknowledged that the Christian Occident was in mortal danger, but that danger arose from the Nazis, not the Jews.

32
However, the fact that its editor was a converted Jew, Johann Oesterreicher, almost certainly decreased the credibility of the periodical among mainstream Catholics.

These contacts and gestures of goodwill between Catholics and Jews represented a promising beginning for increasing mutual understanding and can perhaps be seen as forerunners of much more active cooperation between the two faiths in postWorld War II Austria. At the time, however, only a small number of Austrian Catholics were willing to collaborate with Jews against antiSemitism.
33
Such contacts as there were, were much too few and too late.
Fortunately, there were some Christians who were willing to go beyond opening a mere dialogue with Jews and who attempted both to analyze the causes of antiSemitism and to fight it. Probably the most famous of these people were the two Austrian noblemen Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi and his son Count Richard, who is best known as the founder and leader of the pacifistic Pan-Europe movement.
34
Their two-part book, translated into English as
AntiSemitism throughout the Ages
, was first published by the elder Coudenhove-Kalergi in Berlin in 1901 and was then edited and brought up to date by the son and republished in Vienna and Zurich in 1935. It was the only major work published in Austria during the interwar period that dealt objectively with antiSemitism. The authors identified several critical features of the phenomenon: its link with antiMarxism; the impact of the bad economic situation in Europe following the First World War; the irrational nature of antiSemitism, which made it almost impossible to combat with rational arguments; and the special fear and hatred antiSemites felt toward secular, assimilated Jews, whose ideas seemed to threaten their traditional ideas and economic status. The Jews,
AntiSemitism throughout the Ages
concluded, were "for the most part what the nations in whose midst they have lived have made them."
35
The Coudenhove-Kalergis were not the first Christian defenders of Jews in Austrian history. The novelist Hermann Bahr, for example, remained a friend of the Jews until his death in 1934. His prediction, however, that Hitler was nothing more than a passing grievance who would soon destroy himself, though shared by many Jews, turned out to be wildly overoptimistic.
36
One of the most outspoken critics of antiSemitism in interwar Austria was Wilhelm Boerner. Some of the arguments that Boerner used in a booklet called
Antisemitismus, Rassenfrage, Menschlichkeit
(
AntiSemitism, Racial Question, Humanity
) resembled those of the Coudenhove-Kalergis. Many negative characteristics of Jews were actually the fault of non-Jews. Anti-

 

Page 253

Semites looked for justifications of their hatred, emotional disturbances, and instincts in religious, economic, or racial explanations. Therefore it was naive to think that antiSemites could be dissuaded by facts. If Jews had a low homicide rate, antiSemites thought it was because they were cowards. When Jewish children did well in school, it was because they were pushy. If they had a quick wit, they were arrogant.

37

Boerner regarded the religious, economic, and racial arguments used against Jews as no better than crude generalizations. He denied that there were any constant Jewish racial characteristics and therefore rejected the idea that there was a real ''Jewish race." Certainly there was no scientific proof that Jews were inferior. He praised the Jewish success in the modern world of cultivating internationalism, but was critical of Zionists for encouraging nationalism, of which, he said, there was too much already. On the other hand, he acknowledged that Zionism was a defensive reaction to antiSemitism. AntiSemitism of any kind or degree was unethical because it was based on generalizations. He could not see how one could be both a good Christian and an antiSemite when one considered that Jesus was a Jew.
38
Incisive as Boerner's ideas were, he was far from being the most prominent critic of antiSemitism in interwar Austria. The most courageous opponent of both antiSemitism and Nazism that Austria, or very likely the whole of Central Europe, produced in the 1930s was a previously unknown and politically inexperienced young woman by the name of Irene Harand. A less likely heroine is difficult to imagine. Born in 1900, for a decade after the world war she lived the life of a conventional middleclass housewife, far removed from the turmoil of Austrian politics. She was, however, profoundly distressed to witness local examples of church-sanctioned intolerance. Slowly, painfully, she began to question two of the most fundamental principles of her upbringing: first, that those in the highest positions of church and state were absolutely clear and correct in their moral judgments; and second, that a woman who had never even attended a university could presume to get involved in politics. And yet, almost by accident, she became very much involved.
39
Irene Harand's ethical awakening resulted from a chance meeting with an attorney in Vienna in the late 1920s. The lawyer was a Jew named Dr. Moritz Zalman, who agreed to assist her in fighting for the estate of a destitute and elderly nobleman. When the question of fees was raised, Zalman told Frau Harand that if she could devote her time to helping a poor old man with no hope of personal compensation, so too could he volunteer his legal services. Years later Harand explained the significance of this minor episode. Unconsciously she had accepted the almost universally held notion in Vienna that

 

Page 254
Irene Harand, leader of the World Organization against Racial Hatred and
Human Need. DÖW. "I fight antiSemitism because it maligns our
Christendom," she declared in the masthead of
Gerechtigkeit
.

 

Page 255

Jewish lawyers were greedy and unscrupulous. Before meeting Zalman she had not known about his Jewish origins; this fact, combined with clear evidence that he displayed none of the supposed "Jewish traits," shocked her into the realization that she had been looking at the world through anti-Semitic eyes.

40

This collaboration with Moritz Zalman marked the beginning of Harand's career as an outspoken opponent of antiSemitism. In the next few years both she and Zalman became increasingly alarmed by the growth of antiSemitism and its most aggressive manifestation, National Socialism. Soon after the Nazi electoral victory in Germany in September 1930, Harand appeared at a Catholic political meeting and warned about the growing menace of Nazism. She was rudely rejected by the conservative audience, which dismissed her as having no political experience; they taunted her as a foolish, hysterical womanthe Nazis referred to her as "arme Irre," poor, crazy Irreand booed her off the stage before she could finish her talk. Later she would receive a large number of insulting letters and phone calls. Far from being intimidated, however, she wrote a brochure in March 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, entitled
So oder So? Die Wahrheit über den Antisemitismus
(
Either This or That? The Truth about AntiSemitism
), 50,000 copies of which she had printed and distributed at her own expense. In August of the same year she established her own weekly newspaper,
Gerechtigkeit
(
Justice
), which by December 1936 had twenty thousand readers in thirty-six countries. A year later it was being published in French, Czech, and Hungarian, in addition to German. In 1935 Harand also wrote
Sein Kampf: Antwort an Hitler
(
His Struggle: An Answer to Hitler
), a 347-page rebuttal to the ideas that Hitler had laid out in
Mein Kampf
.
41
In October 1933 Harand and Zalman founded a movement with the ambitious title of the World Organization against Racial Hatred and Human Need, popularly known as the Harand Movement. It eventually grew to nearly forty thousand members, including six thousand outside Austria. Branches of the organization were established in no fewer than twenty-seven countries. To encourage the growth of her movement, Harand traveled all over Austria, other parts of Europe, and even to the United States, giving public speeches, often several a week, against antiSemitism and Nazism.
42
The essence of Harand's commitment to fight antiSemitism was her convictionrepeated at the top of every issue of
Gerechtigkeit
and in all of her other publicationsthat antiSemitism was harmful to Christianity. She was "fighting not so much in behalf of the Jews as to save Christians from becoming beasts." AntiSemitism was an attack on the soul of humanity and a sin against the Savior. Nazism wanted to rob humanity of its reason and every noble feel-

 

Page 256

ing. She also tried to help the Jews because otherwise she would have been ashamed of her own passivity and because she was filled with sympathy for the victims of persecution. She knew that most Christians were not antiSemites, but it was not enough simply to reject it. "One [did] one's duty only when one
actively
took part in defense against it."

43

What was most unusual about Harand's writing and public speeches was that she attacked not only the manifestations of antiSemitism but also their causes, which she saw in the desperate economic conditions of the 1930s. It was no accident that her organization was against
both
racial hatred and human need. It was not hard, she wrote in
Gerechtigkeit
, to implant hatred into people who were suffering. Therefore one of her movement's goals was to raise Austrian exports and increase the number of foreign tourists. Unemployment was the government's biggest problem. But the hundreds of thousands of jobless workers would not be helped one bit if they had only Christian physicians, lawyers, and merchants to serve them, she wrote. Harand's movement did more than lament Austria's dire economic circumstances. From its inception it distributed food and clothing to needy people, paid for by the extremely modest membership fee of twenty groschen a month, and even took poor children from Vienna into the countryside for vacations.
44
Much of Harand's writing was devoted to exposing anti-Semitic myths. In
So oder So?
she asked if it was reasonable to blame all Christians because some of them had become rich capitalists. The Great Depression was the indirect result of the world war, which the Jews had not started. There were no Jews in the German diplomatic corps in 1914 or in the German general staff. Nor were any of the other world leaders Jewish in 1914. Jews, she concluded, were neither better nor worse than other people.
45
In
Gerechtigkeit
, Harand pointed out the absurdity of the statement, frequently made by antiSemites, that they had nothing against "honorable" Jews. No one, including Jews, she said, was going to defend a dishonorable Jew. It was the responsibility of the state to deal with such people. The antiSemites, Harand continued in the same article, saw around them only Jewish bankers and factory owners, not the sixty thousand Jews who were dependent on the charity of the Kultusgemeinde.
46
Harand also praised the virtues of famous Jewish men at a time when Hitler was busy barring Jewish professors from German universities and Jewish physicians and lawyers from practicing their professions. In addition to publicizing outstanding Jewish men in her publications, Harand came up with the novel idea of doing the same thing through a series of propaganda labels in postage stamp format. The well-designed postage seals depicted famous Jewish scientists, artists, writers, and scholars and carried texts in all the major European
BOOK: From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
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