[Historical
Background]
[Eastern
Jews' Mass Migration]
[Parliamentary
Debates - Western & eastern Jews]
[The
Specter of Jewish World Rule]
[Was
Young hitler Anti-semite?]
[Two
examples]
[Transports
(of Porges) from Vienna to KZ Camps]
Hitler's
Vienna
A dictator's apprencticeship
by Brigitte Hamann
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Parliamentary Debates
The
few Jewish delegates in Parliament fought for the realization of
"the natural, inalienable right of every people to full, truly
equal rights, and to absolute equality before the law" for
the Jews. Yet considering what German Radical representative Eduard
von Stransky shouted full of satisfaction in June 1908, they had
hardly any chance: "Thank God, the majority of this House is
anti-Semitic!"
Zionist
representative Dr. Benno Straucher from Bukovina, an advocate and
director of the Jewish community in Czernowitz, complained: "Of
all the parties in this House, which are all brimming with freedom,
liberty, progress, equal rights, and justice-for themselves: none
offers any protection for the Jews; when it comes to Jews, all witnesses
become silent, the open and the clandestine anti-Semites have done
their job well and planned their tactics carefully. No one supports
us out of a sense of liberty and justice, no one wants to be called
a Jew lackey, a mercenary of the Jews." Tired of the Christian
Socials' constant interjections, he said: "With you, one doesn't
need to prove anything, know anything, have learned anything; it
is enough simply to say 'Jew,' that's proof enough for anything."
In
1908, when young Hitler frequented Parliament, the Christian Socials
proposed a law to limit the number of Jewish university and high
school students. Only a number of Jewish students corresponding
to the Jews' share of the population should be admitted.
In
the course of the heated debate Straucher cautioned against such
a step, which would ultimately be harmful to the German-Austrians.
After all, German students had such a high percentage partly because
"so far, a large part of Jewish students has made a pledge
to Germandom and registered as Germans." For example, without
the Jews, the Germans would not constitute 47.1 percent at Austria's
technical universities, but only 31.05 percent, and at Realschulen,
not 48.61 but only 37.07 per- cent-which would make them even
weaker against the Slavs. Stransky interjected, "If we have
to perish without the Jews, we'd rather perish than exist with the
Jews!" Straucher replied, "Other Germans say that the
German-speaking area should be increased, but you want to shrink
the German-speaking area." He also reminded the representatives
of the fact that the taxes the Jews paid were always counted as
part of the Germans' taxes in order to derive claims against the
Slavs. He said: "Only if we add the Jewish tax contribution
do the Germans in Prague and Bohemia pay half of all taxes."
"But did the Jews get anywhere a parliamentary seat from the
Germans in return for that?" And: "I would particularly
like to remind the German parties' anti-Semitic groups that we Jews
have allied ourselves most faithfully with the German people for
centuries; this earned us the other nations' hatred and animosity.
...The Germans' enmity and their incessant attempts to disenfranchise
us has disappointed us most painfully and bitterly. We certainly
haven't deserved this in regard to Germandom."
Christian
Social Julius Prochazka argued: "Christians are not accepted
into schools because Jews have taken their seats!" And: "We
don't want any preference for the Jews!" (In comparison, Hitler
wrote in 1929: Thousands, even tens of thousands of our people's
sons who are blessed with talent, can no longer go to
school. ...You are raising an alien people at our universities,
at the expense of numerous Christian fellow citizens!)
Straucher:
"In what respect are the Jews given preference? Do we keep
anyone else from going to school? Enlighten your young people
so that more of them attend school!"
Prochazka:
"Build your own schools!"
Straucher:
"Really ? And what do we pay our taxes for and assume all
the other obligations just like all other citizens?"
Again
someone said, "Jew!" Straucher replied: "You and
the term 'Jew'-I am proud to be a Jew, just as you are proud to
be a Christian. For Jews and Christians possess the same religious
truths." Interjection by Polish provost Leo Pastor: "No,
no, not that!" Another exclamation: "We pay the taxes
and the Jews eat them up. Establish Jew schools!" The Christian
Socials' proposal was voted down; but no less than 162 deputies
voted for it - Christian Socials, German-Nationals, German-Radicals,
Pan-Germans, and splinter groups.
The
Zionist weekly Neue National-Zeitung's response to this debate
was apointed editorial entitled "Away from Germandom!":
"That's the thanks we get for the Jews in the Slavic countries
having their heads beaten to pulp for Germandom. ...That's what
we get for clinging to German culture and standing up for it. This
German culture forms the intellectual life of those men who want
to take away from the Jews any chance to get an education and thus
deny them any part in the intellectual achievements of our time.
A sad culture." The result: "It was high time for a large
part of our people to have disowned Germandom and its culture."
Western
and Eastern Jews
In
the face of devastating anti-Semitism, which was spreading more
and more and was clearly turning into ethnic anti-Semitism, the
old- established, assimilated Viennese Jews felt insecure. They
had done everything they could in order not to be conspicuously
Jewish, to adapt and wholly belong. Many had long since been baptized
and thought they could forget about their Jewish background. Now
that they were suddenly put on the same level as their ragged brothers
in faith from the East, they felt their entire hard-earned existence
was threatened.
The
Eastern Jews were conspicuous in the streets, for they had forelocks
and wore traditional garb as signs of their Orthodox faith. They
communicated in Yiddish, Russian, or Polish. They did not try to
adapt to their environment, and their strange appearance made them
look to some Viennese like a conspiratorial group.
The
Jewish community tried very hard to assimilate the immigrants as
quickly as possible. The "caftan Jews" were given inconspicuous
clothes. Their children were supposed to learn German quickly in
their own schools. The community provided for the immigrants as
much as possible, not letting them become recipients of public welfare.
The rich Jews donated more generously than ever to Wärmestuben,
soup kitchens, and hospitals. There were conferences on the
"evil" of "itinerary begging" to discuss strategies
on advancing assimilation. Yet the more generous the Viennese Jews
were, the more people in need came. And the more Eastern Jews arrived,
the more the fear of even worse anti-Semitism grew.
Furthermore,
it turned out that many poor Eastern Jews didn't appreciate at all
the charitable acts of their rich brothers in the West. They insisted
on their old ways and customs, their traditional clothing and language.
They
were full of pride and self-confidence, and even displayed a sense
of superiority toward the Western Jews: they were conscious of their
"true Jewishness." They had faithfully preserved their
old belief and rites, and adhered to their fathers customs
- thus turning into a personified reproach for the Western Jews
whose faith had lost its firmness, an who were assimilated or even
baptized.
Despite
all attempts at conciliation, Eastern and Western Jews remained
strangers to each other. The German-Jewish writer Wassermann wrote:
"If I saw a Jew from Poland or Galicia, if I talked to him
and tried to probe into him to comprehend his way of thinking and
living, he could definitely touch or surprise me, or move me to
compassion and sadness, but I certainly didn't feel a sense of brotherhood
or even relatedness. In everything he said and breathed, he was
a total stranger to me, and when there was no human-individual symbiosis,
I even found him repulsive."
Wassermann-and
he is only one example, for Elias Canetti made similar remarks-sensed
a gap between "Jewish Jews" and "German Jews":
"Aren't they two kinds of people, two races almost, or at least
[representatives of] two different ways of living?" He, the
German Jew "on an outpost," wanted "merely to bring
to expression myself and my world, and turn it into a bridge. "Doesn't
that ultimately make me more useful than someone who has been sworn
into following a certain direction?" Concerned, he lamented
the assimilated Jews' "terribly uneasy situation": "German
Jew; listen to these two words very carefully. Take them as the
last stage in a long-drawn-out development. His double-love and
his struggle on two fronts have pushed him close to the abyss of
despair."
The
Eastern Jew Joseph Roth naturally analyzed the assimilated Jews'
way of thinking more critically: "It is an oft-ignored fact
that Jews can have anti-Semitic inclinations too. One doesn't want
to be reminded of one's grandfather, who was from Posen or Kattowitz,
by some stranger who has just arrived from Lodz. That is the ignoble,
but understandable attitude of an endangered petit bourgeois who
is just about to climb the rather steep ladder to the terrace of
the haute bourgeoisie with its free air and magnificent view. Looking
at a cousin from Lodz, one can easily lose one's balance, and fall."
The Western Jew, he said, had become "haughty. He had lost
the God of his fathers and won an idol, civilizationary patriotism."
Ethnic
anti-Semitism inextricably intertwined religious and orthodox Jews,
no matter how different they might be. Max Nordau said: "No
matter what we do, in the opinion of our enemies, the Jewry of the
whole world is one. ...Our enemies forge an iron clasp of solidarity
around all of us, which we can't break." And: "It will
always be the Jew of low standing who will determine the measure.
...They cannot shake the caftan Jew off the coattails of their elegant
tailcoats!" And: "While the itinerant anti-Semite who
is spitting with impunity and without having to fear repercussions
on the rags of our outlawed, unhappy brother in the East, he thinks
of the Jewish baron, privy councilor, and professor at home."
Not
conversion, nor baptism, nor their German identity, no matter how
fervently they adopted it, saved the assimilants from being inveighed
against as "Jews." All of a sudden all their efforts at
assimilation had come to naught, and the way out of the Jewish community
of fate was blocked. Many were thus led into existential crises
and to desperate, even suicidal self-hatred. How thoroughly and
with how much pleasure the anti-Semites observed this is detectable
in Hitler's writings-for example, when he discusses Otro Weininger
and Arthur Trebitsch.
Wassermann,
who witnessed the hopeless situation of many assimilated, German-conscious
Jews in Vienna, wrote, "I know and knew many who pined away,
full of yearning for the blond and blue-eyed man. They were lying
at his feet, they waved incense barrels in front of him, they believed
his every word, every time he blinked it was an heroic act, and
when he spoke of his soil, when he beat on his breast as an Aryan,
they became hysterical and started to howl triumphantly. They didn't
want to be themselves; they wanted to be the other; if they have
chosen him, they are chosen along with him, it seems to them, or
at least they are forgotten as the flawed and veiled as the inferior
men they are."
Others,
however, who had long since been assimilated, rediscovered their
Jewishness. Arthur Schnitzler fought anti-Semitism in his novel
The Road into the Open and the play Professor Bemhardi.
His compassion for the Eastern Jews led the Neue Freie Presse's
literary critic, Theodor Herzl, a former member of a German
fraternity and an enthusiastic assimilationist, back to his Jewish
roots. In his novel The Jewish State, published in 1896,
he suggested a vision as a way out of the misery: the Promised Land,
Palestine. The novel argues that Palestine could offer the poor
Eastern Jews a haven from oppression that could contain the flood
of immigrants to Western Europe, and thus, one could dare hope,
from anti- Semitism as well. The rich Western Jews were supposed
to finance the acquisition of land and settlement in Palestine,
which was then under Turkish rule.
Zionism,
the Jewish national movement, originated as an act of self- defense.
Roth wrote about the Zionists: "They replaced the lack of their
own 'turf' in Europe with their search for a home in Palestine.
They had always been people in exile. Now they became a nation in
exile." Consequently, Roth maintained: "Modern Zionism
developed in Austria, in Vienna. It was founded by an Austrian journalist.
No one else could have founded it."
Herzl's
friend and combatant Max Nordau, also a former assimilationist,
declared his commitment to the Eastern Jews: "Our brothers
down there are suffering, yelling, 'Help!' We are rushing to their
side. They area chaotic mass. We organize them. They stammer their
complaints in a gibberish incomprehensible to educated people. We
lend them our civilized tongues. They are pushing impetuously, without
direction. We show them the way they have to go. They have an undefined
longing. We put it into words."
Nordau
was more aggressive than Herzl: "We don't have the ambition
to disarm the anti-Semites through humility and obsequiousness."
And: "Jewry cannot wait until anti-Semitism has dried up and
a rich crop of altruism and justice starts sprouting in its dry
bed." Zionism, he argued, was "the only way the Jews can
be saved, without it they would perish."
Having
a new national identity, the Zionists also strove for legal recognition.
Yet the criterion for establishing a nation, one's colloquial language,
was an obstacle to these plans. For the Jews spoke different languages
and therefore were of different nationalities. In 1909 the advocate
Max Diamant from Czernowitz submitted a complaint in federal court,
requesting that the Jews from Bukovina be recognized as a tribe
proper, with Yiddish as its native tongue. The president of the
federal court, eighty-one-year-old baptized Jew Josef Unger, a liberal,
rejected the complaint, citing the usual reason: that the Jews were
a religious community and not an ethnic people. One could only speak
of a native language if all members of a people mastered it. Yiddish,
he ruled, was only "a sort of [German] dialect" but not
a language.
During
inscription in 1910, Zionist students listed "Jewish"
as their native tongue, which was not on the list of the Dual Monarchy's
languages. On an international level, however, the Zionists were
already discussing the question of whether Hebrew wasn't preferable
to Yiddish as their national language.
The
language debate increased the rift between Western and Eastern Jews
even more. Embittered, the assimilationists argued that with their
goals, the Zionists precisely fulfilled the anti-Semites' wishes:
by no longer regarding themselves as Germans, Czechs, or Hungarians
of the Jewish faith, but as members of their own Jewish nation,
and by striving toward emigration, they were setting themselves
apart, trying to achieve exactly the same as the anti-Semites: a
"Jew-free" Europe.
Nordau
replied sharply that this attitude of the Western Jews expressed
a "naive impertinent egotism": it ultimately implied "that
a minority of approximately one fifth of smug Jews living in comfort
is telling the majority of four fifths, consisting of desperate
Jews who are ready to commit the most extreme acts of self-help,
'How dare you disturb our digestion with your savage appeal to Zion?
Why don't you swallow your suffering? Why don't you starve quietly?
"
Yet
the Dual Monarchy's assimilated Jews did not consider themselves
to be members of a foreign nation. Should they now learn their national
language, Yiddish, that language that in "good houses"
was rejected as a vulgar hodgepodge of antiquated German and Polish,
and that did not allow one to climb the social ladder in Vienna?
Should they renounce their German identity and existence, which
they had worked so hard for, and move to Palestine as Jewish farmers?
Should they now let themselves be robbed of their homeland not only
by the anti-Semites but by the Zionists as well? Couldn't they decide
for themselves what they wanted to be, Jewish or Protestant, or
nondenominational-or Jewish, German, Polish, or Hungarian?
Karl
Kraus made himself the spokesperson of Herzl's opponents, angrily
declaring that he, a baptized Jew, wouldn't pay one "krone
for Zion." The rift between Eastern and Western Jews threatened
to divide the Jewish community in Vienna.
In
this conflict, even Nordau displayed sympathy and even compassion
with the Western Jews. He wrote: "To the German Jew, Germania
is the mother he worships. He knows that he is the Cinderella among
her children, but still, he is her child too; he is part of the
family. ...They will be stabbed straight through their hearts and
the secret wound will make them bleed to death." Even if they
brought themselves to decide to go to Palestine, once there, they
would "think of Germany, even their most distant grandchildren
would, as if of a lost love of their youth."
Hitler
the politician, however, was not prepared to differentiate in this
matter, dismissing even the controversies he personally witnessed
as mock fights: In a short time this apparent struggle between
Zionistic and liberal Jews disgusted me. Whether "German"
Jew or Eastern Jew, as far as he was concerned, all that counted
was "race."
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