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Empire, Socialism and Jews: Writing the Monarchy Back Into Austrian History*

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Empire, Socialism and Jews: Writing the Monarchy Back Into Austrian History* Empire, Socialism and Jews: Writing the Monarchy Back into Austrian History* On August 3, 1914, Victor Adler, leader of the Austrian Socialists, took Leon Trotsky, sojourning since 1907 in Vienna, to an audience with Imperial Security Service chief, Edmund von Gayer. They were concerned about prospective government action against the Russian exiles, in view of the war just declared. Leave Vienna, advised Gayer. Tomorrow? asked Trotsky. No, today, now, was the answer. Trotsky was on the train for Switzerland that afternoon. Shortly after, the police arrested all Russian subjects. The peculiar Austrian coalescence of Empire and Socialism shaped, once again, the course of history. It is difficult to imagine the leader of the Russian Mensheviks approaching the Tsar’s security service, soliciting information about action against foreigners. The Tsar and the socialists – all socialists – were sworn enemies. The relationship between the Austrian Monarchy and the Socialists was more ambivalent. The imperial elites dreaded the class struggle but the socialists had given abundant evidence by 1914 that they were open to negotiation. Their support of the World War I effort showed that their commitment to the Empire (and German nationalism) trumped their internationalism, especially when oppressive imperial Russia was the enemy. Enlightened public servants, as Ernest von Koerber, had recognized already at the turn of the century that the socialists, at the time still multinational in their membership, were an integrative imperial force. They were the single party whose structure replicated that of the Austrian Empire. Universal male suffrage, introduced in 1907 in Austria in a tacit deal between the Emperor and Victor Adler, made the Socialists a foundation of the Empire.• By 1914, the Austrian Socialists were imbedded in the Empire, more of it than against it, and teasingly called an “imperial and royal Social Democracy” (k. u. k. Sozialdemokratie). Still, the Socialists did not fully recognize their stake in the Empire, and they still do not recognize it today. They found it difficult to say anything nice about the Emperor then, and they find it difficult to say anything good about the Monarchy now. Granted, a history of oppression of socialism, especially in Austrian Socialism’s early years, darkens the Monarchy’s memory but the Socialists have come to terms since then with enemies worse than the Old Emperor. Conservatives claim exclusive ownership of the imperial legacy and are happy to leave the Socialists out. Truly, conservatives have not yet found ways of absorbing the Empire into Austrian history, either. Even in the 1950s, when memories of the Empire were still alive, and Baroque and Pietas Austriaca ideals flourished, Catholics did not have a persuasive national narrative to bring together the Monarchy and Second Republic. Asked about the Monarchy’s significance in his youth, former Vice-Chancellor Erhard Busek (b. 1941), who revived in the mid-1980s the idea of Mitteleuropa, responded: “none.” * A shorten German version of this essay was published as: “Das Kaiserreich, die Sozialdemokratie und die Juden,” Info Europa 1:2014, “1914-2014 – Monarchie als Integrationsmodell?” Wiener Journal Beilage (12 March 2014): 12-13. • I owe the details of the 1907 Imperial-Socialist deal against the unruly Parliament to Dr. Wolfgang Maderthaner, Generaldirektor of the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv. The burden of Austrian national identity is the root of Austrians’ inability to come to terms with their imperial past. Post-World-War II Austrian national identity was constructed as a joint Socialist-Catholic project against the National Socialist past and The Third Reich. The project was splendidly successful in vindicating Austria as a nation state, and, after the Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980s, a nation that has made strides in confronting Austrian collusion in the Holocaust. Yet, precisely the triumph of Austrian national identity made coming to terms with the imperial past difficult. Parents and teachers today can relate to kids the history of the Habsburgs, but how can they make it relevant to the Republic of Austria? Austrian children grow up nowadays in a country with a strong national identity that has a pitifully short history, beginning, at the earliest, with the First Republic in 1918. Comrades, what is to be done? Paradoxically, precisely because the Austrian Socialists were predisposed to German nationalism and the nation state, they are essential to reclaiming the imperial past. To be sure, Catholic cosmopolitanism tallies better with imperial Austria than socialist internationalism, but it speaks less effectively to postnational Europe. Precisely because Otto Bauer and Karl Renner (the former more than the latter) considered the Empire reactionary and viewed German nationalism as emancipatory and the nation state as the crowning achievement of modernity, they contemplated personal national autonomy as a solution to the Empire’s national question: Let personal cultural affiliation rather than territory determine national membership. This is the very concept of nationality that contemporary Europe professes to hold (and repeatedly violates). As long as the Empire lasted, imperial diversity and anxiety about declining German hegemony pushed Austrian Socialist leaders toward pluralist solutions. They were postnational avant la lettre. We should look, however, beyond the Socialists and Catholics to recover for Austria the imperial legacy. Two generations of Austrian Jewish émigrés from Franz Werfel and Stefan Zweig to Friedrich Torberg and Hilde Spiel already did so with the invention of the concept of “Austrian Literature,” making “Central Europe” a permeable and expandable Literaturraum, enabling German-speaking Austrians to belong without violating national borders. Their Austria reaches wherever Austrians find their legacy – to Brody with Joseph Roth, or to Czernowitz with Paul Celan. Without ever intending such a feat, the émigrés brought together Central Europe’s imperial past and its future. Constructing an Austrian national narrative, the émigrés turned the eternal outsiders, the Jewish intelligentsia, into the embodiment of Europe’s postnational future. We can build on their achievement by bringing Empire, Socialism and Jews together. Volumes have been written, in scholarship and literature, on the Jews’ love for the Austrian Monarchy and Emperor Franz Joseph. Equally famous is Jewish support for the Socialists in Red Vienna, during the interwar years. To be sure, traditional Jews were the greatest imperial patriots, whereas German acculturated Jews were the foremost socialist supporters, but the Jews remain a bridge builder between Austrian Socialism and the Monarchy. A workshop organized in March 2013 at Duke University by the Duke Center for European Studies http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/ces/ and the Verein fuer Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in Vienna http://www.vga.at endeavored to bring Empire and Socialism together through the biographies of Jewish socialist and progressive women as Emma and Kathia Adler, Charlotte Glass, Kaethe Leichter, and Eugenie Schwarzwald. Participants probed whether a feminine, imperial and traditionally Jewish history of Austrian Socialism may emerge, if we focus on socialist Jewish women. Contrast was provided by the masculine, German-Jewish, internationalist history emerging from the biographies of Victor and Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer. The next workshop in Vienna this coming fall at the IFK will extend the imperial Jewish framework back in time to Vormaerz Austria. [This workshop has meanwhile taken place: https://sites.duke.edu/esj3/, and the next one (on the interwar years) as well: https://sites.duke.edu/esj4/. The fifth workshop on the postwar years will take place at the VGA and Wien Museum this coming spring.] The Jewish socialist imperial history we seek may be illustrated by the story of Kathia and Friedrich Adler.• Victor Adler and his children had converted to Protestantism. (Emma, his wife, remained Jewish.) When Friedrich grew up, he declared himself konfessionslos. Studying physics in Zurich, he met Kathia Germaničkaja of a traditional Jewish family in the Russian Pale. Her father insisted, she could only marry him in a traditional Jewish wedding in Russia. Friedrich protested the charade but Victor calmed him down: “A Jewish father’s heart is also a heart,” he said. Friedrich crossed the Russian border as a Protestant to be welcomed as a Jewish bridegroom by Kathia’s family, and married in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony in Lithuania. Returning to Zurich, the couple contemplated a civil marriage in Zurich and a Reform Jewish wedding in Geneva to validate their marriage in Switzerland, and marriage certification in Vienna (where they could marry as konfessionslos and Jew). Kathia’s family helped them financially. They were used to a bourgeois life style but had only limited means. A traditional Russian Jewish family subsidized the first family of Austrian Socialism. Kathia and Friedrich Adler’s story is international and European, Austrian, socialist and Jewish, all at the same time. It demonstrates that, notwithstanding their German nationalist convictions, Austrian socialist leaders were imbedded, like the Empire, in international European networks and in Jewish life. However much Austro-Marxism and socialist practices subdued traditionalism and Jewishness, imperial cultural diversity and a broad range of Jewish identities found their way into Austrian Socialism. As identities
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