From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (69 page)

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Authors: Bruce F. Pauley

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

BOOK: From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism
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Jews. AntiSemitism was also unsurpassed as an integrating device, not only in Austria but in Germany, Poland, and no doubt other countries as well, for all those groups that were opposed to the Enlightenment and all its modern byproducts.

1
In Austria the need for an ideological glue was particularly important for the Christian Socials and panGermans. For Karl Lueger, Georg von Schönerer, and Adolf Hitler, antiSemitism gave some coherence to their otherwise contradictory anti-Socialist and anticapitalist slogans. Members of the Christian Social Party and the NSDAP in particular came from a wide variety of social and economic backgrounds. Their dislike, envy, and even fear of Jews were among the few things they had in common. However, because these rank-and-file members had very different reasons for disliking Jews, and very different ideas about how the "Jewish problem" ought to be solved, the leadership of the CSP and even the NSDAP avoided making specific proposals that might alienate either their moderate or their more radical followers. The same was true of the Nazi leadership in Germany. The Greater German People's Party was more socially cohesive than the Christian Socials or Nazis, but it was ideologically fragmented except for its antiSemitism and its advocacy of Anschluss with Germany.
2

AntiSemitism was not only an important integrating device
within
the Christian Social and panGerman parties but also
between
them; it even facilitated cooperation at the international level between right-wing elements in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. Ultraconservatives in all the bourgeois parties in Austria, including the Nazis, associated Jews with the hated ideologies of liberalism, Marxism, pacifism, and internationalism and all aspects of modern art, music, and literature. They all found it easier to equate these trends with Jews and the "Jewish spirit" than to criticize them on their own merits. They could all simply be dismissed as "Jewish" or contaminated by Jews. Right-wing antiSemites also used the same terminology to denounce Jews. They all described the Jews as "parasitic," "cancerous," "usurous,'' "disintegrating," "materialistic," and "alien."
AntiSemitism was the most important issue enabling Catholic and nationalistic students to join forces in the Deutsche Studentenschaft. The nationalistic students (and no doubt some Catholic students as well) then became a vital element in the Austrian Nazi Party. Likewise, antiSemitism was the only thing that enabled Catholics and nationalists to cooperate in the umbrella organization known as the Antisemitenbund, not to mention innumerable anti-Semitic demonstrations. AntiSemitism was the perfect vehicle of antidemocrats wishing to embarrass the government because there was always some "Jewish problem" that the government could not possibly solve by demo-

 

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cratic means or whose solution would be unacceptable to the international community.

3

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suggest that any of Austria's political parties was utterly dependent on antiSemitism for its very existence, at least in the interwar period. For Marxists, antiSemitism was primarily a propaganda tool used to defend themselves against the anti-Semitic attacks of other parties, especially the CSP. There is no reason to doubt that the SDAP could have survived without such propaganda, as indeed it has in the Second Republic.
To a lesser extent antiSemitism was also a mere propaganda tool of the CSP, which it used when panGerman antiSemitism threatened to become too popular in the early 1920s and again a decade later. At those times the party was anxious to prove that it had been anti-Semitic long before the panGermans had even thought of the idea. When the competition of panGerman antiSemitism faded in the late 1920s, so too did the antiSemitism of the Christian Socials. And when hostility toward Jews declined as an issue for the Christian Social Party in the middle and late 1920s, there were no dire consequences for the party.
Even most Nazis did not cite antiSemitism as a major reason for their joining the party, at least not in Germany.
4
AntiSemitism had been part of the Austrian Nazi ideology since 1913 and a very important part since 1918; yet it was not until the Great Depression hit Austria, and the NSDAP began enjoying an astonishing series of electoral successes in Germany, that the Austrian NSDAP began its rapid ascent. In explaining the party's success in the local elections in April 1932, Walter Riehl did mention antiSemitism; but he also said it was "above all our anti-Marxist positions" that accounted for the victory.
5
Even more important for the Austrian Nazis was their near monopoly of the Anschluss issue after 1933.
Although political antiSemitism in Austria was primarily a weapon used to attack one's enemies and was not crucial to any party's ideology, this does not mean that it was nothing more than pure demagoguery and was not sincerely believed by its proponents. The minutes of the GDVP's committee of "experts" on the Jewish question provide us with chilling evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the demagogic character of political antiSemitism also meant that there was never a realistic possibility of Jews eliminating antiSemitism or escaping its consequences by changing their professions, political affiliations, religious beliefs, or their desire to integrate with Christians. To a certain extent the postWorld War II phenomenon of "antiSemitism without Jews" already existed before the war. The antiSemites did not require real live Jews to hate; the mythical Jew sufficed, or even the "Jewish spirit."

 

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However, it was also this highly abstract nature of antiSemitism that enabled most Austrian Jewsespecially those who lived outside the heavily Jewish district of Leopoldstadt or who did not attend a universityto lead fairly normal lives during the First Republic, often suffering few if any anti-Semitic insults or physical assaults. AntiSemitism was almost entirely a war of words fought between the antiSemites themselves. Each party wanted to prove that its antiSemitism was superior to all the others. Only rarely did antiSemitism involve direct confrontations between Jews and antiSemites.
None of this is meant to imply that antiSemitism had no practical consequences for Austrian Jews. On the contrary, the six decades of political and private antiSemitism and all the propaganda that accompanied it made the antiSemitism of both the Austrian and German Nazis seem neither novel nor particularly radical. Indeed, the sad fact is that prior to the Anschluss the Austrian Nazis had not proposed, and the Nazi government in Germany had not enacted, any legislation that had not already been demanded by the Antisemitenbund, Leopold Kunschak's "Workers' Association," the Greater German People's Party, and in some cases even the Christian Social Party and the Social Democratic Party. The Austrian Nazis simply combined all the earlier forms of religious, economic, and racial antiSemitism. They could now also legitimately claim that their brethren in Germany had the courage actually to do what Austrian antiSemites merely talked about. In fact, when Austrian Judeophobes commented on Nazi antiSemitism at all, it was mostly to complain about its moderation, not its severity.

After the Anschluss the Nazis quickly enacted the anti-Semitic legislation that Austrian antiSemites themselves had long demanded. The handful of Jews who held civil service jobs or were the managers of banks and large industries were dismissed in a matter of days. Jewish pupils were segregated into separate schools, and Jewish university students were reduced to their percentage of Austria's population (or less) and finally expelled altogether. Some Austrians were offended by the violence perpetrated against Jews, especially during the November Pogrom, but not enough to make the kinds of united and successful public protest that the Christian wives of some 6,000 Berlin Jews made in February 1943 after their husbands had been arrested and were about to be deported to death camps, or that the Catholic Church made to reinstate crucifixes in public classrooms in Bavaria in October 1944.

6
When the deportation of Austrian Jews began in 1941, it too simply fulfilled a demand that such politicians as Leopold Kunschak and Walter Riehl had made more than twenty years earlier, although neither man probably envisioned the murder of the deportees.

 

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Even though it is impossible to prove in any empirical way, it is also highly probable that six decades of anti-Semitic propaganda had left Austrian Jews so isolated socially that few Christians were willing to help them in their hour of mortal danger. To argue otherwise is to suggest that propaganda has absolutely no influence on the public no matter how often it is repeated over no matter how long a time. This is not a thesis that the advertising industry would readily accept. The stereotype of the greedy, unscrupulous, lustful, and revolutionary Jew had already been firmly implanted in the Austrian mind long before anyone had heard of National Socialism. From an antiSemitism of words it was only one small step to an antiSemitism of deeds.
Should we conclude from all this that the Nazis merely followed in the footsteps of earlier Austrian antiSemites with no qualitative differences? No simple answers to this question are readily available. Certainly the more traditional antiSemites must not have approved of the public humiliations of the Jews that occurred in the first days following the Anschluss. And no doubt many of them did recoil in horror at the deliberate destruction of Jewish religious houses during the November Pogrom. The antiSemitism they advocated was "legal," nonviolent, and "respectable." The
Reichspost
had on numerous occasions denounced anti-Semitic violence at the University of Vienna as being harmful to the anti-Semitic cause. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were undoubtedly framed to appeal to this kind of traditional antiSemitism. And yet the imposition of a numerus clausus on professional positions held by Jews and the elimination or drastic reduction of Jewish "influence" over Austria's cultural and economic life would have resulted in massive unemployment for middleclass and upper-middle-class Jews and their forced emigration. Such an outcome would not have been altogether different from that which actually occurred in Germany after 1933, all the more so since traditional Austrian antiSemites were unwilling to open up the civil service to Jews.
The Eternal Optimists
While the war of words was raging between antiSemites, a curiously parallel verbal battle was taking place among Austrian Jews. If antiSemites vehemently denounced their opponents as being soft on Jews and promoted themselves as the best antiSemites, Austrian Jews likewise accused each other of playing into the hands of antiSemites while they themselves represented the best of Jewry. This is not to imply a kind of moral equivalency between Jews and antiSemites. The Jewish "civil war" was to a large extent a war for survival dictated

 

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by the rise of modern political antiSemitism. Of course, a struggle within the Jewish community in Austria and other countries would have existed in any event over the role of Jews and Judaism in the postemancipation world. However, it is reasonable to assume that it would have been fought at a much lower level of intensity had it not been for the vicious attacks of antiSemites, which called into question whether it was even possible for Jews to survive, let alone assimilate, in a predominantly gentile as well as predominantly secularized modern world.
The Jewish war of words in interwar Austria, like the domestic politics of contemporary Israel, was so intense for the simple reason that it involved absolutely fundamental philosophical issues that might very well determine whether the Jews would survive as an identifiable group. Each Jewish faction was profoundly convinced that in the long runand all Jews were ultimately more concerned about the distant future than the presenttheir philosophy would insure survival. By contrast, the philosophy of their opponents would allegedly guarantee either the end of Jewry as a separate religion or as a separate communitythe argument of the Zionistsor a permanent status of legal and social inferiority, which was the position of the assimilationists organized in the Union of Austrian Jews. More crucial issues can hardly be imagined. Unfortunately, none of the philosophies of the various Jewish factions would have assured the survival of the Austrian Jews. Not only did they badly divide the Jewish community at a time when unity was desperately needed, but they also encouraged illusions about the future and weakened the urge for self-defense.
The assimilationists, clinging to their liberal belief in the goodness and rationality of mankind, were sure that the revival of antiSemitism after 1914 had been caused merely by temporary military, political, and economic circumstances that in time would disappear. In a sense they were correct, but 65,000 Austrian Jews did not live to witness the remission of antiSemitism after the Second World War. In the meantime, the long-held assimilationist desire to blend into the local population contradicted the need to defend themselves as Jews.
The Zionists' belief that antiSemitism was permanent implied that any effort to combat it was essentially futile. Occasional positive comments from Catholics and even panGermans about Zionism encouraged them to feel that Nazis would also leave them alone if only they voluntarily withdrew from the gentile community. Orthodox Jews were convinced that antiSemitism was being inflicted on the Jews, especially assimilationist Jews, by God as punishment for abandoning the traditional faith. The anti-Semitic threat could therefore be overcome simply by returning to Orthodoxy.

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