Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century from Franz Joseph To

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 VIENNA 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: Karl Kraus, Franz Werfel 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.

Load more