The German and Austrian Marxists (1880–1920)

chapter 3 The German and Austrian Marxists (1880–1920)

Unsurprisingly, in Central Europe the Marxist debate on the Jewish Question turned on two major themes: anti-Semitism and Zionism, which were often approached, especially in the theoretical works of Otto Bauer and Karl Kautsky, in the light of a Marxist theory of nation and nationalism. The transformations of Eastern Jewry were usually neglected or limited to a few general articles on the Bund – in most cases written by Russian Jewish émigrés – published by Die Neue Zeit. Zionist socialism, by contrast, was represented in the pages of Sozi- alistische Monatshefte, the journal of the revisionist current of German social democracy led by Joseph Bloch.The most authoritative voice, nevertheless, was that of Karl Kautsky, the ‘Pope’ of the German social democracy, who codified and vulgarised Marxism as the official ideology of the Second International. Adapting it to evolutionism and social Darwinism, he interpreted historical materialism as a ‘positive science’ of society.1 Within this intellectual frame- work, the idea of a natural, necessary, and linear direction of historical develop- ment – a long but unfailing road culminating in socialism – deeply influenced the Marxist attitude toward the Jewish Question. Consequently, the disappear- ance of anti-Semitism and Jewish assimilation were perceived as ineluctable results of the natural evolution of society.

1 Anti-Semitism

At the end of the nineteenth century, Germany and Austria experienced neither the violence of the Russian pogroms nor the street demonstrations that accompanied the Dreyfus affair in France (in 1898), in which crowds cried ‘death to the Jews!’ It is Central Europe at the turn of the century, nevertheless, that gave birth to modern anti-Semitism. It amounted for the first time to a genuine mass movement that obtained a stable political represent- ation in Austria (notably in Vienna, under the social Christian municipality of Karl Lueger) and an ephemeral electoral success in Germany in 1893. Anti- Semitism – this term was coined by a Hamburg journalist, Wilhelm Marr, in a successful pamphlet titled Der Sieg des Judenthums Über das Germanenthum

1 See Hobsbawm 2011, and Andreucci 1979.

(1873) – was first of all a reaction to the process of intensive industrialisation and modernisation that deeply affected the German and Austrian societies. Emancipation had led to a significant economic improvement for the Jews, whereas the old ruling classes (the Junkers) and many traditional professions – artisans, traders, shopkeepers, and peasants – felt threatened and marginalised, as declining groups that had lost their security and social status. In the pop- ular imagination, the Jews represented capitalism and liberalism. They were perceived as the symbol of industrial modernity – the hated Manchestertum – that incarnated the collapse of a golden age and an entire system of values. Anti-Semitic agitation started with the financial scandals that broke out in Ger- many after the crash of the Vienna stock market in 1873, in which some Jewish bankers were involved.2 Anti-Semitism codified in ideological terms the transition from traditional, religious Judeophobia to a new, racist form of hostility against the Jews. The anti-Semitic works of authors as different as Wilhelm Marr, Heinrich von Treit- schke, Eugen Düring or Georg von Schönerer shared a vision of the Jew as unassimilable, a foreigner in the Germanic Volk. Although virulent, the writ- ings of Adolf Stöcker and August Rohling, a German Lutheran predicator and a Catholic theologian at the University of Prague, did not break with the tradition of Christian anti-Judaism, which still allowed the Jews a chance of ‘purification’ through baptism. But very rapidly anti-Semitism slid toward racism. For Treit- schke, the Jews were ‘Orientals’,a foreign body and a danger to German culture. For Georg von Schönerer, the best-known propagandist of pan-Germanism in Vienna, baptism was absolutely useless when ‘the filth is in the race’ (in der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei). The ideas of Düring were well summed up by the title of his 1880 book: The Jewish Question as a Problem of Racial Character and the Damage it Causes to the Existence, the Morality and the Culture of the Peoples.3 The birth of modern anti-Semitism was intimately linked to the develop- ment of racism as an imperialist ideology. In the anti-Semitic mentality, the Jew appeared as a dangerous being, a bearer of terrible diseases. As defended by social Darwinism, racial biology justified the pillage of Africa and Asia and the subjection of the non-European peoples by the great powers. But, unlike the colonised peoples, whose otherness and inferiority were recognised by the law, the Jews were emancipated. If emancipation had given them the status of citizen, if the colour of their skin, their language, or their culture made them

2 See Volkov 2006. 3 On anti-Semitism in Central Europe see Pulzer 1988, and Berding 1988.