AUSTRIANS AND JEWS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Also by Robert S. Wistrich

ANTISEMITISM: The Longest Hatred ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD (editor) BETWEEN REDEMPTION AND PERDmON HITLER'S APOCALYPSE THE JEWS OF IN THE AGE OF FRANZ JOSEPH THE LEFf AGAINST ZION: Israel, Communism and the Middle East (editor) REVOLUTIONARY JEWS FROM MARX TO TROTSKY SOCIALISM AND THE JEWS: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary TROTSKY: Fate of a Revolutionary WHO'S WHO IN NAZI GERMANY Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century

From Franz Joseph to Waldheim

Edited by Robert S. Wistrich

M St. Martin's Press Selection, editorial matter, Introduction and Chapter 14 ©Robert S. Wistrich 1992 Chapters 1-13, 15 © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover lst edition 1992

AII rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions ofthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any Iicence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1992 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS andLondon Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-349-22380-0 ISBN 978-1-349-22378-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22378-7

First published in the United States of America 1992 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-08106-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Austrians and Jews in the twentieth century: from Franz Joseph to Waldheim 1edited by Robert S. Wistrich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-08106-5 1. Jews-Austria-History-20th century. 2. Antisemitism• -Austria--History-20th century. 3. Austria--Ethnic relations. 1. Wistrich, Robert S., 1945-. DSI35.A9A84 1992 943.6'004924-dc20 92-4693 CIP Contents

Notes on the Contributors vii Introduction x 1 The Jews of Germany and Austria: A Comparative Perspective 1 Marsha L. Rozenblit 2 Jews, Czechs and Germans in Bohemia before 1914 19 Hillel J. Kieval 3 Herzl's Tannhiiuser: The Redemption of the Artist as Politician 38 Steven Beller 4 Jewish Assimilation in Austria: , and Joseph Roth on the Catastrophe of 1914-19 58 William O. McCagg 5 'Jewish Self-Hatred'? The Cases of Schnitzler and Cannetti 82 Ritchie Robertson 6 David Vogel: A Hebrew Novelist in Vienna 97 Gershon Shaked 7 Albert Ehrenstein and the Tragedy of Exile 112 Hanni Mittelmann 8 The Pagan Freud 124 Peter Loewenberg 9 Judaic Motifs in Wittgenstein 142 Ranjit Chatterjee 10 Arnold Schoenberg: Language, Modernism and Jewish Identity 162 Leon Botstein 11 The Kraus-Bekessy Controversy in Interwar Vienna 184 Edward Timms 12 The Dynamics of Persecution in Austria, 1938-45 199 Gerhard Botz

v vi Contents

13 'Neutrality', not Sympathy: Jews in Post-War Austria 220 Robert Knight 14 The Kreisky Phenomenon: A Reassessment 234 Robert S. Wistrich 15 Reflections on the 'Waldheim Affair' 252 Richard Mitten Index 275 Notes on the Contributors

Steven Beller was fonnerly a fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, and now lives in New York. He is the author of Vienna and the Jews: 1867- 1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989) and Herzl (London, 1991).

Leon Botstein is President of Bard College in the USA and author of Judentum und Modernitiit, Essays zur Rolle der Juden in der deutschen und osterreichischen Kultur 1848 his 1938 (Vienna, 1991). He is currently working on a social history of music in nineteenth-century Vienna.

Gerhard Botz is Professor of Modem Austrian and Contemporary History at the University of Salzburg. Since 1982 he has also served as Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Social Sciences. His publications in­ clude Gewalt in der Politik (2nd edn, Munich, 1983), Krisenzonen einer Demokratie (Frankfurt, 1987) and Die Eingliederung Osterreichs in das Deutsche Reich (3rd edn, Vienna, 1988).

Ranjit Chatterjee is an instructor in the Department of English, DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois. He has also taught at the National University of Singapore, the Maurice Spertus College of Judaica, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published various papers on Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Rossi-Landi, Whorf and Nietzsche.

Hillel J. Kieval is Associate Professor of Modem Jewish History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of The Making ofCzech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918 (New York and Oxford, 1988) and is currently working on a comparative study of ritual murder trials in modem European history.

Robert Knight studied history at Cambridge and Wtirzburg, Gennany, and completed his PhD thesis on 'British Policy towards Occupied Austria 1945-1950' at the London School of Economics in 1986. He has published several articles on post-war Austria and a collection of documents on Austrian restitution policy. At present he teaches European Studies at Loughborough and is working on a study of Carinthian Slovenes in the Cold War.

Vll viii Notes on the Contributors Peter Loewenberg is Professor of Modem European history and Political Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the faculty of the Southern California. Psychoanalytic Institute. He is author of Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (New York, 1983; Berkeley, 1985).

William O. McCagg is Professor of Modem European History at Michigan State University (East Lansing). Among other books, he is author of A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918 (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).

Hanni Mittelmann is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of German Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of numerous articles on early German Zionist literature, expressionism and nineteenth-century German literature. She is currently preparing a complete edition of Albert Ehrenstein's works.

Richard Mitten is a historian living in Vienna. He was a researcher for the Thames Television/Home Box Office production, 'Kurt Waldheim. A Commission of Inquiry', and is the author of The Politics of Anti­ semitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria (Boulder, Col., 1992) and co-author of 'Wir sind aile unschuldige Tater!' Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus (Frankfurt, 1990).

Ritchie Robertson is a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, where he is University Lecturer in German Literature.

Marsha L. Rozenblit is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, Washington, DC. She is the author of The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and 1dentity (Albany, NY, 1983) and is presently working on a study of Austrian Jewry during the First World War.

Gershon Shaked is Professor of Modem Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Edward Timms is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and (from January 1992) Professor of German at the University of Sussex. His publications include Karl Kraus - Apocalyptic Satirist (1986) and Freud in Exile (1988; co-edited with Naomi Segal), both published by Yale. Notes on the Contributors ix

Robert S. Wistrich, a graduate of Cambridge and London universities, has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 1980. In October 1991 he officially became the fIrst Jewish Chronicle Professor of Jewish Studies at University College, London. He is the author of many books and articles including more recently The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford, 1989) which won the Viznitzer Prize and Antisemitism: The Long­ est Hatred (London, 1991) based on a Thames Television documentary series. Introduction

This book is about the role of Jews in Austrian society, culture and politics from the tum of the century (when the Emperor Franz Joseph still ruled at the Hotburg) to the present. It covers in an interdisciplinary manner the encounter between Jews and Austrians in literature, music, theatre, psy­ choanalysis, nationality politics, Zionism, antisemitism, Nazism and Austro­ Marxism. This encounter produced an extraordinarily creative synthesis, it proved to be a cradle of modernism and post-modernism in the arts and sciences, yet it was also - from a Jewish viewpoint - a tragic symbiosis, a one-sided, unrequited love affair. The fact that in the versunkene Welt (sunken world) of 1900 most of high culture was 'Jewish' did not prevent the emergence of a crude, atavistic, tribal nationalism which would eventu­ ally culminate in the Anschluss less than four decades later and the destruc­ tion of Austrian Jewry. Indeed, the brilliance of the Jewish achievement in fin-de-siecle Vienna - many of whose ambiguities are explored in this book - was undoubtedly a contributing factor to the tragic end. This in itself is a sobering thought, somewhat obscured by the vogue of celebratory exhibi­ tions, films, symposia, concerts and even by some of the scholarship which has poured out in recent years on Vienna. Indeed, a cynic might say that it is only once' they were safely expelled or massacred, that the Jews of Vienna could have become an object of cultural glorification. But around 1900, the prospects for Austrian Jews still seemed promising despite Karl Lueger's mildly antisemitic Christian social administration of the city of Vienna and the unresolved nationality conflicts which were sapping the foundations of the Monarchy. The Habsburgs had lasted for over 600 years and Franz Joseph had just celebrated more than 50 years on the throne as Emperor of Austria (which also included Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galicia, Bukovina, etc.) and Apostolic King of Hungary. Though the Imperial family had its troubles - Crown Prince Rudolf had committed suicide in 1889 and his mother the Empress Eliza­ beth had been stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist - the Habsburgs still represented a force for stability and order in Central Europe. This was particularly appreciated by Austro-Hungarian Jews whose emancipation dated back to 1867. In Vienna, especially, the Jews were flourishing - their numbers having risen to 147 000 (9 percent of the population) by 1900. Most city lawyers and physicians were Jewish. Jews also dominated the journalistic profession and were disproportionately represented in banking, commerce and entrepreneurial capitalism.

x Introduction xi The key to their cultural prominence lay in the high proportion of Jewish students at the Gymnasia, Vienna's elite secondary schools, from which they emerged as an enlightened, modem, liberal and bourgeois core ele­ ment in Austrian society. In 1900, Gustav Mahler was the leading conduc­ tor and composer in the city, Karl Kraus its high priest of satire, Arthur Schnitzler its outstanding playwright, Adolf von Sonnenthal its greatest actor. The founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Victor Adler, was a 'Protestant' Jew and many of his leading associates were middle­ class Jewish intellectuals. Sigmund Freud had just published his epoch­ making Interpretation ofDreams and psychoanalysis was about to be born. Waiting in the wings were such central figures oftwentieth-century culture as Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka, not to mention writers like Joseph Roth, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, and Peter Altenberg - all of them of Jewish origin. At the same time, it must be remembered that Austrian Jewry included more traditional, Yiddish-speaking, Hassidic and Ostjuden than any other Jewish community in Western or Central Europe. It was much more differ­ entiated in regional, class and cultural terms and by 1900 was modernizing under the Habsburg aegis into Hungarian, Czech and Polish as well as German culture. The Austrian Jews of 1900 were Austrian above all in the sense of loyalty to a supra-national dynasty rather than identification with a 'national' community as in Germany or Western European countries. Moreover, the rise of racial antisemitism in German Austria and the Bohe­ mian lands (especially among ethnic Germans) explicitly challenged their membership of the German Vofk or nation. Hence their Austrian identity in the Empire-wide sense of the term was reinforced (as a bulwark against racism and national chauvinism) and marked them off from most other national groups in Austria-Hungary. On the other hand, as Marsha Rozenblit emphasises in her article, Austrian Jews by 1900 had a stronger ethnic-religious identity, a sharper definition in terms of Jewish peoplehood, than could be found anywhere west of the Monarchy. This was due not only to the multinational structure of the Habsburg Empire, but also to the size of the traditionalist Jewish communities (with orthodox strongholds in Hungary and Galicia), the slower pace of modernization and economic development and the greater density of the Jewish population. Antisemitism was even stronger than in Germany and political liberalism much weaker than in Western Europe. Moreover, the nationality conflict, as Hillel Kieval shows, itself engendered Jewish national feeling since the assertion of Jewish identity was one way out of entanglements in the Czech-German quarrels that plagued Bohemia Xll Introduction and Moravia. Indeed around 1900 the struggle to achieve official recogni­ tion of the Jewish 'nationality' began in earnest, especially in Galicia and Bukovina, but also in Vienna and to a lesser extent in Prague. By 1907 there was already a Jewish National Club in the Austrian Parliament, where Jewish deputies represented explicitly Jewish interests - the kind of separatist Jewish politics which did not exist anywhere in the western world. But then, as Rozenblit rightly points out, in Austria one could be both a supranational and a Jewish Jew without contradiction, there was far less pressure than in Germany to denationalize Judaism in order to disprove charges of dual loyalities and Jews did not have to declare alle­ giance to a single, exclusive nationality. Only after 1918 did this situation change for the worse, with racist, volkisch ideology and xenophobia taking hold after the collapse of the Empire, the influx of Galician Jewish refugees into Vienna and with a similar cycle of inflation, depression and antisemitism as occurred in Weimar Germany. Austria would now develop an Ostjudenfrage (East European Jewish Question) no less acute than in Ger­ many, with the Galician Jews officially defined as 'foreigners' for the first time. In Prague, at the turn of the century, there was no Ostjuden problem but Jews were trapped more than anywhere else in the Monarchy between warring national communities, in this case Czechs and Germans. The illib­ eral tide threatened them from both directions - a militantly Czech nation­ alist current which produced anti-Jewish riots at the end of the 1890s - and a volkisch racism which permeated student politics at the German Univer­ sity of Prague as well as in the Sudetenland. By 1900 Prague Jews, like their counterparts in Vienna, stood virtually alone as the last representatives of nineteenth-century liberalism as Czechs and Germans battled for hegemony in Bohemia and Moravia. It was in this kind of atmosphere that Zionism could provide a solution to those post-assimilated Jews turning away from the liberal Germanocentric orientation of their parents and looking for a meaningful reaffirmation of their ethnic identity consonant with the cosmo­ politan ethos of ethical humanism. It is often forgotten, as Steven Beller argues in his essay on Herzl, that early Zionism was indeed full of the nineteenth-century German liberal pathos of Menschheit (humanity) and had by no means turned its back on the classical Enlightenment values of the Central European Jewish bour­ geoisie. Herzl can perhaps be better understood as a Messianic disciple of Goethe and Schiller, seeking to transform the Jews into real Menschen (human beings) who might redeem the rest of humanity than as an irra­ tionalist Wagnerian rebel against a disintegrating Austro-liberalism. This is an interesting corrective to Carl Schorske's view of Herzl, though it was Introduction xiii not the way that Herzl's contemporary Jewish opponents understood his project. One of his sharpest critics, Karl Kraus, like many assimilated Jews, saw in Zionism only a reactionary, obscurantist return to the ghetto, an attempt to revive what for them was already an extinct nationality. Kraus's radical denial of his Jewishness is explored in a wide-ranging essay by William McCagg, along with the responses of Joseph Roth and Franz Werfel to the crisis of the First World War and the traumatic dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Each of these writers in his own way made his personal experience of collapse central to Austrian life and the rebuilding of a new Austrian identity after 1918. Roth, who was less Viennese and assimilated than either Kraus or Werfel, created a nostalgic, backward­ looking Habsburg myth in which the mUltiplicity and diversity of old Austria had allowed Jews to achieve an unprecedented degree of integration within their environment. McCagg suggests that for Kraus and Werfel, alienation from their Jewishness became a creative force, enabling them to speak for Austrian society as a whole, which was undergoing cultural dislocation as well as political turmoil and socio-economic deprivation. Kraus, in particular, continued to wage his unremitting war against the corruption of the press, irrespective of reputations, vested interests or any fictive notions of 'Jewish solidarity' . Edward Timms demonstrates how he successfully took on Irnre Bekessy - a powerful Hungarian-Jewish press tycoon who had pioneered a new-style muck-raking journalism in post- 1918 Vienna - eventually driving him out of the city. According to Timms, this campaign was not simply a personal vendetta nor antisemitic in charac­ ter but a struggle for ethical principles in journalism which deconstructed anti-Jewish rhetoric and transmuted its language into a defence of respon­ sible citizenship. The complex cases of Noble Prize winner, Elias Canetti (a Sephardic Jewish writer resident in Vienna during the 1920s) and Arthur Schnitzler, who at times portrayed unsavoury Jewish characters in their novels, show another aspect of Austrian-Jewish ambivalence. Though this was not self­ hatred there can be little doubt that the phenomenon as such was quite widespread. As Ritchie Robertson suggests, one of its most common forms was the desire to purge what were seen as negative Jewish characteristics. This lay behind the vehement denunciations of Judaism by the young Viennese philosopher OUo Weininger, whose seminal work Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) went through many editions and became a kind of locus classicus for the whole pathology of Jewish self-hatred in the German­ speaking world. Such self-negation remained a constant temptation for those intellectuals and artists whose own Jewishness had long ceased to xiv Introduction have any spiritual content or who were consumed with the anguish of rejection by the surrounding Austrian society. Post-19l8 Vienna with its seductive charms, its atomization and its disturbing anomie provided a backdrop for a whole range of identity crises for Jewish and non-Jewish Austrians alike. This is palpable even in the work of a largely forgotten and little-known Hebrew writer, David Vogel, who set his novel Married Life in early 1920s Vienna. This bitter tale of self-alienation, sado-masochistic sexual relationships and the via dolorosa of urban man, is analysed here by Gershon Shaked, himself born in Vienna and one of the leading Israeli specialists in modem Hebrew literature. As Shaked notes, the Jewish content of the novel is peripheral but the sense of isolation, rootlessness and of being an outsider does mirror what was to be a pervasive experience for growing numbers of Austrian Jews during the next decade. This feeling of spiritual exile can also be found throughout the writings of Albert Ehrenstein, an Austrian expressionist poet and writer, whose life and work called into question the Austrian-Jewish 'symbiosis' well before the Anschluss. Ehrenstein was a secular humanist and socialist, who unlike most of the' Young Vienna' circle did not ignore the suffering and poverty of the working classes or of marginal social groups in Austrian society. He was highly critical of bourgeois moral hypocrisy, crass materialism, milita­ rism and any form of national chauvinism (which also included Zionism). For Ehrenstein, it was the responsibility ofthe artist to be not only an avant­ garde innovator and rebel, but also the social conscience of mankind in the Hebrew prophetic tradition. Although alienated from any religious or na­ tional definition of his Jewishness, Ehrenstein, like Stefan Zweig, did have a secular universalist vision of the ethical mission of the Jews as a scattered, diaspora people. In his eyes, they incarnated spirituality in an increasingly corrupt, materialistic world. By the 1930s with rising nationalist, religious and economic antisemitism in Austria, Ehrenstein had become completely deracinated and ended up in total isolation in his American exile. A much more elusive case of troubled Jewish identity is explored in Ranjit Chatterjee's essay on Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher - son of one of the wealthiest families in the Austro--Hungarian Monarchy. Raised in the Catholic faith (though his industrialist father had converted to Protestant­ ism) and sometimes regarded as a Christian mystic existentialist (a la Kierkegaard or Doestoevsky) when he is not being treated as the agnostic founder of twentieth-century linguistic philosophy, Wittgenstein in the 1930s appears to have become conscious of a 'Jewish' side to his person­ ality and thought. Influenced by Otto Weininger and by Oswald Spengler's historiosophical reflections on Judaism, Wittgenstein could sound rather self-deprecating about his 'Jewish mind', which could only think Introduction xv reproductively. But the case can also be made that there was a positive Jewish aspect to Wittgenstein's ethical imperatives, the concreteness of his thought and his radical use of philosophy as an instrument against the philosophers. With Arnold Schoenberg, no such ingenuity is required, despite his early conversion to Protestantism in 1898. The Viennese composer, who aban­ doned tonality and embarked on a radical restructuring of music, shared however with Wittgenstein a common scepticism about the Enlightenment and the progress of science. If Wittgenstein felt that science, logic and language were inadequate to expressing 'what is higher' (ethics/values, the meaning of life, etc.) Schoenberg wrestled with a parallel anguish about the possibility of music communicating his vision of the Divine, sharing, as he did, a similarly mystical streak and sense of the inexpressible. But unlike Wittgenstein, Schoenberg from the early 1920s was committed to an un­ compromising Hebraic monotheism through which he sought to legitimize his modernist experiment in musical expression. The Mosaic aversion to idolatry, to visible symbols and mystery, as well as the Judaic call for the triumph of rational consciousness, are harnessed by Schoenberg to the cause of twentieth-century modernist expressionism. It is this connection between Schoenberg's musical agenda, his Jewish identity and the commit­ ment to a Jewish national renewal (by returning to the essence of ancient Judaism) which is analysed in Leon Botstein's essay. Sigmund Freud, without ever developing an abstract theology of Judaism or looking for a Mosaic renewal, shared something of Schoenberg's fasci­ nation with the Biblical Moses and his radical, iconoclastic, anti-magical outlook. Like Schoenberg, he too looked to the eventual victory of reason over the instincts and the unconscious drives that threatened mankind with constant regression to the state of nature. But as Peter Loewenberg ob­ serves, there was also a pagan Freud who worshipped the culture of Hel­ lenic-Roman Antiquity and was rather hostile to the Judeo-Christian tradi­ tion of ethics. This side of Freud can be seen not only in his famous collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities but also in his stoic philosophy of life and his sense of Death as a natural, inexorable and unavoidable necessity; in his more tolerant view of sexual perversions; and also in his profound distaste for sacralizing holy sites and sanctifying stones. Freud's ethnic solidarity with Jews as victims of antisemitism and an emotional identification with some aspects of the Zionist experiment did not blind him to the dangers of religious or national fanaticism, particularly in such a historically burdened land as Palestine. Freud's relation to Vienna was no less ambivalent and complex than his Jewish or non-Jewish identity. Indeed, it was only the arrival of the Nazis that finally forced him out of a city where he had lived for nearly 80 years xvi Introduction of his life. In 1938, at the time of the Anschluss, there were still nearly 200 000 Jews in Vienna and in spite of the previous four years of Austro­ fascism they were disproportionately represented in many areas of commer­ cial and industrial life. But Vienna ever since the late 1880s had also been a hotbed of economic and political antisemitism, accentuated during the First World War and in the 1920sby the massive influx of Galician Jewish refugees. By the mid-1930s this popular sentiment, fuelled by the world­ wide depression, by anti-capitalism and anti-Marxism - above all by the endemic status-anxiety of the Viennese 'little man' (Kleine Mann) - was ready to boil over. The trigger proved to be the German invasion, but, as Gerhard Botz stresses, March 1938 was also a popular rising and the internal takeover of power by Austrian Nazis, whose antisemitism was even more radical and intense than that in the Old Reich. In the months following the Anschluss, Austria became a kind of pilot plant or laboratory for perfecting anti-Jewish measures that were carried out distinctly faster than in Nazi Germany itself. Moreover, this anti-Jewish policy which climaxed in the November 1938 pogrom had widespread support and could build on a tradition - both Catholic and nationalist - going back to before 1900. As Botz emphasizes, the economic aspects of the persecution (the so-called 'Aryanisation' of Jewish property, the 'dejudaiziation' of housing, commerce and the liberal professions, etc.) in Vienna were especially important and effectively destroyed Viennese Jewry as a viable community before the mass deportations took place. By 1945 there were only about 5700 Jews left in Vienna, the rest having either been forced to emigrate or been murdered by the Nazis in the Polish death­ camps. Austrians undoubtedly played a disproportionate role in this grue­ some slaughter, supplying a high percentage of all death camp staff and thereby providing a macabre climax to the Austro-Jewish symbiosis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet after 1945, as Robert Knight reveals, antisemitism seemed as en­ trenched as ever in Austria, reinforced by the temporary presence of Jewish refugee survivors from the East, the fear of Jewish claims for restitution and the determination to avoid any conscious, democratic mastering of the Nazi past. There was a general tendency to equate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust with their Nazi persecutors or to treat both evenhandedly; to deny that there was any 'Jewish question' even when expressing antisemitic feelings in private; to treat Jewish survivors with scepticism or indifference; to minimise or dismiss their sufferings and to discourage the resettling of Jews in Austria. Moreover, the presence of a large reservoir of former Nazis who could tip the electoral balance between the Conservative and Socialist blocs favoured a glossing over Austrian involvement in Nazi crimes and the wooing of this unrepentant electorate by the major political parties. Introduction xvii

Even when the Socialists came to power in 1970 under Austria's first Jewish-born Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, this policy of collective amnesia was continued. As Robert S. Wistrich demonstrates in his article, though Kreisky obviously had no sympathies with Nazism, he bent over backwards to reconcile all Austrians under the banner of forgetting the past. Former Nazis were appointed to his cabinet, a coalition was proposed with the leader of the Freedom Party (who had fought in a Waffen-SS unit on the Eastern Front during the Second World War), the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal was defamed and his Documentation Centre on War Crimes threatened with closure. Moreover, Kreisky made no secret of his ideologi­ cal anti-Zionism, sometimes sliding into vitriolic ad hominem attacks on Israel's political leadership which undoubtedly introduced a new tension into relations between Austria and the world-wide Jewish community. Kreisky vehemently denied that he was a Jewish antisemite and there can be little doubt that his Middle East diplomacy was motivated by political (and to some extent humanitarian) considerations rather than the emotional prejudices which he sometimes exhibited when questioned closely about his Jewish background. His popUlarity with the Austrian public did not, however, mean that antisemitism had disappeared as a political force or that the accompanying problem of Austrian national identity had been definitively resolved. The Waldheim affair, analysed here by Richard Mit­ ten, raised the debris from this blocked-out past once more into the fore­ ground of international and Austrian politics. For the first time since the war, some leading Austrian politicians, embarrassed by revelations about the Nazi past of the Conservative candidate for the Presidency, Kurt Waldheim, began to deliberately attack 'World Jewry' for 'defaming' Aus­ tria and to suggest that the roots of antisemitism lay with the Jews them­ selves. Opinion polls in the last few years confirmed that the relatively high levels of antisemitism manifested in Austria throughout the post -war period had been aggravated by the Waldheim affair. Jews, though barely visible in contemporary Austria, are still often blamed for the ugly face of capitalism, assumed to be very wealthy and powerful, and at least partly responsible for their persecution. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of Austrians be­ lieve the Nazi past should be forgotten. For many of them, it would appear, the myth that Beethoven had been an Austrian and Hitler a German (rather than vice versa) is a reality. Thus while the context of post-war antisemitism in Austria is quite different from what prevailed fifty or even a hundred years ago and some of the motives are new, there is a remarkable continuity in the stereotypes and cliches - religious, racist, economic or political. Towards the end of the twentieth century it was and is still possible for sections of the Austrian political elite, media and public to believe that international Jews control xviii Introduction the world's capitalist monopolies, the press, the banks and political power. Moreover, the successes of the Austrian far right in the 1991 elections, under the leadership of the youthful Jorg Haider, indicate that the Waldheim Affair may only be the tip of the iceberg. Haider's most potent slogan 'Vienna for the Viennese' and his populist, anti-foreigner appeal uncannily recall some features of the rise of Karl Lueger a century ago. Not only nostalgic, elderly Nazi veterans in the provinces but also many young people of all classes are attracted to this modernized, yuppie-style version of Austrian fascism. Haider, whose pedigree is impeccable (his father was an SA man and his mother a Hitler youth leader) currently focuses on the 'swamping' of Austria by foreign immigrants but also knows how to tap into the antisemitic tradition that has never been uprooted or delegitimized in Austria. Thus the prospects for the tiny Jewish community still living in the country - a pale shadow of the once flourishing and immensely creative Austrian Jewry of the past - are not encouraging, despite sincere and well­ meaning efforts by those Austrians seeking a genuine dialogue and bridge to the future. But the existence of such deep shadows from the past makes even more urgent the necessity of seeking a careful and critical reappraisal of twenti­ eth-century Austrian history, especially as it interacts with and relates to Jews, for this can clarify issues, debunk myths, unmask illusions and also help to find common ground for a new beginning. The essays in this volume, all of them original contributions from leading specialists in the field, strikingly illuminate many of the key issues in the historic interaction between Jews and Austrians. About half of the articles were first heard as papers delivered at a recent international symposium on the subject organ­ ized by the editor of this book at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The others were specially commissioned by the editor in order to fill certain gaps and bring the more recent historical debates and political issues up to date. It is perhaps worth noting that many of the contributions are by a new generation of scholars, born after the Second World War, who did not personally experience the most traumatic period in Austrian-Jewish rela­ tions, though they are certainly aware of all its implications. Also of interest is the fact that exactly half of the authors, though not themselves Jewish, have recognized in their articles and elsewhere in their work the importance of the Jewish input in Austrian history and culture and made significant contributions to the subject. This augurs well for future research and schol­ arship in the field which this book will hopefully stimulate.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem! University College, London ROBERT S. WISTRICH