Jews in Vienna: Was Young Hitler an Anti-Semite?

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Was Young Hitler an Anti-Semite?

There can be no doubt that while in Vienna, young Hitler studied anti-Semitism, among other matters. The four politicians who may be called his political models -Schönerer, Lueger, Wolf, and Stein- were radical anti-Semites. Many newspapers which Hitler read in Vienna, and many pamphlets he perused for his self-education, were anti-Semitic. Even when he was already Reich chancellor, Hitler's way of expressing himself had a Viennese ring to it when he elaborated on "the Jews." This proves that he mastered the anti-Semitic vocabulary of his Vienna period with all its characteristic cliches perfectly. Therefore many later observers, such as Albert Speer, initially took Hitler's anti-Semitism "for a somewhat vulgar byproduct, a relic from his days in Vienna ...and only God knows why he couldn't shed it."

Thus it seems to be clear that Hitler's anti-Semitism developed in a straightforward line, especially if one reads Hitler's description in Mein Kampf of how he had become an anti-Semite in Vienna: For me this was a time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak~kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti~Semite. Vienna, he said, had significantly contributed to his becoming anti-Semitic: At the time of this bitter struggle between spiritual education and cold reason, the visual instruction of the Vienna streets had performed invaluable services.

As the decisive event of his transformation into an anti-Semite, Hitler mentions-in 1924, to be sure, in Mein Kampf- an encounter with an Eastern Jew. The apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks merely made him wonder: Is this a Jew? was my first thought. And : Is this a German? Once again, he says, this experience caused him to read up on the subject: For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. What happened then, he continues, was what may be called a radical anti-Semite's typical obsession : Since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews , and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. The upshot of this dramatic development, Hitler claims, was the realization regarding Social Democracy's Jewish character: When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.

Of course, Mein Kampf must not be read as an autobiography in the sense of its author dealing with his own past, or as a confession in which he worked through his experiences. The book is clearly a work of political propaganda, in which a power-hungry politician on the rise buttresses his political slogans and builds them up through a fitting life story to form a weltanschauung. In Mein Kampf Hitler created an organically grown anti-Semitic career for himself with politically convenient anti-Semitic images in its key scenes. Thus the book must also be read as the developmental history of a Germanic leader who found the right when he was young.

However, reality, as it emerges from the reports of Viennese eye witnesses, has little to do with the myths Mein Kampf purports. Apart from the special case of August Kubizek, no anti-Semitic remark by the young Hitler has been documented.

Reinhold Hanisch, clearly an anti-Semite, was incredulous when he heard that Hitler, of all people, was an extreme, anti-Semitic politician in the thirties. After all, Hanisch and Hitler had their falling out in the men's hostel in 1910 because Hitler turned entirely to his Jewish friends Josef Neumann and Siegfried Löffner. In the thirties, in his anger Hanisch revealed Hitler's youth as anything but anti-Semitic in order to discredit Hitler as a politician.

Hanisch is by no means alone in his assertions. Anonymous from Brünn also wrote, in 1912 : "Hitler got along extremely well with Jews. He once said they were an intelligent people that stuck together more than the Germans." Rudolf Häusler, the colleague in the men's hostel, was at a loss when his daughter questioned him about the anti-Semitism of his then twenty-three- to twenty-four-year-old friend Adolf. Häusler told her that he had not noticed anything of the kind in Vienna. Yet he knew that in Munich, Hitler had thought he had been cheated by a Jewish junk dealer, which might have been a reason for Hitler's subsequent anti-Semitism-surely no conclusive proof.

The Viennese eyewitnesses remembered unanimously that Hitler's dealings with Jews had been quite natural. For example, Jakob Wasserberg from Galicia, who ran a small brandy store at 20 Webgasse, close to Stumpergasse, related that the young man had frequently had breakfast with him: "Mr. Wasserberg, a tea and a Laberl." (A Laberl is a cookie.)

It is worthy of note that among all the stories of his sufferings in Vienna, Hitler never mentioned a bad experience with a Jew. let us briefly recapitulate young Hitler's encounters with Jews in Linz and Vienna: Even when he was Reich chancellor, Hitler expressed his gratitude to his Jewish family doctor in Linz, Dr. Eduard Bloch, who attended to his mother until she died. In his American exile Dr. Bloch clearly stressed that young Hitler had certainly not been an anti-Semite in Linz: "He had not yet begun to hate the Jews." The theory that Hitler's anti-Semitism goes back to a Jewish professor who had flunked him at the academy exam is as untenable as the sensational story about Hitler's getting infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute in Leopoldstadt. When in 1908 anti-Semitic smear campaigns at the Vienna Opera were raging against former director Gustav Mahler, Hitler continued to admire Mahler as a Wagner interpreter. Accompanied by Kubizek, nineteen-year-old Hitler witnessed the family life and culture of an educated Jewish middle-class family during music making in the house of the Jahodas ; he was deeply impressed and did not utter the slightest anti-Semitic remark.

Furthermore, he had every reason to be grateful to Jewish benefactors. When he was homeless in 1909 -and probably earlier and later as well-he profited from Jewish social institutions in many ways, from public Warmestuben to soup kitchens and Jewish citizens' donations to the homeless shelter in Meidling and the men's hostel in Brigittenau.

In the men's hostel, Hitler had mainly Jewish friends, which made Hanisch very angry. His best friend, the religious Jew Neumann, a trained copper polisher, gave him a coat when he had nothing to wear and lent him money. Hitler disappeared with him from the men's hostel for a week. Hanisch's comment: "Neumann was a goodhearted man who liked Hitler very much and whom Hitler of course highly esteemed." Hitler also discussed issues concerning anti-Semitism and Zionism with Neumann -by no means contemptuously as he did with the Social Democratic colleagues in the men's hostel, but jokingly, in a friendly way. He even went so far as to defend Heine, who was under anti-Semitic attack, to quote Lessing's "Parable of the Ring," and to acknowledge the achievements of Jewish composers, such as Mendelssohn and Offenbach.

Siegfried Löffner from Moravia, a Jewish colleague at the men's hostel, even dragged Hitler's archenemy, Hanisch, to the police to report him for defrauding Hitler. The Jewish locksmith Simon Robinson from Galicia, who received a small invalid's pension, helped Hitler out financially.

Karl Honisch mentions an additional Jewish acquaintance in the men's hostel in 1913, Rudolf Redlich from Moravia. It would be erroneous to assume that a particularly large percentage of men at the hostel had been Jewish. According to statistics, 8 to 10 percent were Jewish-which corresponded to the median Jewish population in Vienna. From Hitler's later remark on his Vienna years we may conclude that Hanisch was not the only anti-Semite there: "Many workers with whom he had associated, he said, had been decidedly anti-Semitic."

Hitler sold his paintings almost exclusively to Jewish dealers: Morgenstern, landsberger, and Altenberg. Hanisch writes: "The Christian dealers. ..didn't pay any better than the Jews. Besides, they only bought more material when they had disposed of the first shipment, while the Jewish dealers continued to buy whether they had sold anything or not."

When the NSDAP archive searched for early Hitler paintings in 1938, they still found unsold pieces both in Morgenstern's and Altenberg's stores, after more than twenty-five years. Hanisch writes: "Hitler often said that it was only with the Jews that one could do business, because only they were willing to take chances." Frame manufacturer Jakob Altenberg from Galicia could not remember any anti-Semitic statements by Hitler. Hitler had close personal contact with Samuel Morgenstern, who procured private customers for the young man, for example, Jewish lawyer Dr. Josef Feingold, who in turn sponsored Hitler.

Young Hitler's exceptional contacts with Jews may also be an indication that he considered the Jews to be "something better." As Kubizek reports, in the Opera's standing room he had the opportunity to observe the Jews' particularly great cultural interest. Hitler was familiar with the different figures for Christian and Jewish students at the universities, as well as the popular jokes about the "intelligent," "intellectual" Jews who easily got the better of the "nice" Christians.

In the men's hostel he expressed his approval of Jewish tradition, which had managed to preserve the purity of the "Jewish race" for thousands of years. It should be remembered that in the work of list and Lanz von Liebenfels it is not the alien race that is dangerous and ruinous, but only the mixing of races, which decreases the value of the Aryan "noble people" and therefore should be avoided at all cost. As late as 1930 Hitler talked extensively about the Jews' ability to preserve their race by way of religion and strict rules, among them, the prohibition of marriages with non-Jews. Hitler directly continued list's theories when he told Wagner: Through Moses the Jewish people received a rule for life and living one's life that was elevated to a religion which was entirely tailored toward the essence of one's race, and simply and clearly, without dogmas and dubious rules of faith, soberly and absolutely realistically contains what served the future and self-preservation of the children of Israel. Everything is geared toward the well being of one's own people, nothing toward consideration of others. After further explanations, Hitler arrived at the conclusion that we. ..no doubt have to recognize with admiration this incredible strength of the Jews' preservation of their race.

Hitler adopted Jewish "purity of race" as nothing less than a model for his own weltanschauung regarding the necessity of the racial purity of Aryans.

It was only as a politician that Hitler portrayed the Jews as "parasites" who robbed Aryans of their strength through their intellectual impact, democracy, Social Democracy, the press, capital, parliamentarianism, modern art, pornography, pacifism, and much more. Around 1930 Hitler said to Wagner: This is precisely the parasitic instinct, which non parasitic plants don't have. A special talent! A sixth sense! A business sense-of sadistic origin, to be sure, but the superiority of parasites! If the "host people" didn't put up a sufficient defense, Hitler said, the Jews would survive as the fittest: And the last ones, alas , who will still practice usury when the end has come for mankind, will be the Jews, despite everything. And: Was it possible that the earth had been promised as a reward to that people? In Hitler the politician, who liked to present himself as the savior of the German people, all the theories of a duel between races about "to be or not to be," which he had read and took for the truth, became an anti-Semitic syndrome.

Only in his Spandau diaries does Speer reach the conclusion that "the hatred of the Jews was Hitler's motor and core," "sometimes it now even seems to me as if everything else had only been garnish for this, the actual driving force." One argument for this theory would be that toward the end of the war, Hitler "was ready even to risk his plans of conquest for the sake of his extermination mania."

How much all of Hitler's thinking circled around "the Jews," is revealed in his "Political Testament," dictated on April 29, 1945, at 4:00 A.M., shortly before his suicide. It ends with the order to painstakingly follow the racial laws and to mercilessly resist the global poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.

However, the crucial question as to when anti-Semitism became Hitler's central issue and core of his weltanschauung cannot be answered by looking at his years in Linz and Vienna. This development took place in later years. At any rate, when Hitler became a politician and started addressing the public in Munich in 1919, he already employed aggressive anti-Semitic slogans.

Thus this great turning point must have occurred during the years of the World War, and particularly in the years of upheaval, in 1918-19, when Hitler decided to become a politician.

That time was especially susceptible to those theories with which Hitler had become intimately familiar in Vienna. Again the cliché about a "Jewish world revolution" as the beginning of a forthcoming "Jewish world rule," which was set off in Russia, was bandied about. This time, however -in contrast to 1905- the Russian Revolution was victorious: in 1917 the Bolsheviks toppled the czar from his throne and usurped power. One year later the revolution broke out in Germany and Austro-Hungary. The Hohenzollerns as well as the Hapsburgs lost their power. The Social Democrats, the "November criminals," took over the government. This was followed by the "disgraceful victory of Versailles," forced upon the losers of World War I by "international powers"-which, ac- cording to anti-Semitic propaganda, was the work of "the Jews" and humiliated Germany. Hunger and despair, rootlessness and lack of orientation ruled. In addition, legions of immigrants and refugees arrived, among them, many Eastern Jews.

As in all times of hardship, anti-Semitism served public speakers as an effective slogan, as it fell on fertile ground. Radical politicians whose roots were "at the bottom," "with the people," recognized their chance. At that time of confusion, Hitler, who was now thirty years old and had nothing to lose since he didn't have anything, not even a job, grasped his opportunity. Now he could apply all that he had learned in Vienna, the motto being: "The Jews are to blame for everything."

He was encouraged and supported mainly by his "paternal friend," the writer Dietrich Eckart, to whom he erected a remarkable monument at the end of Mein Kampf. Eckart was a link to Hitler's Vienna years in that he was a member of the Thule Society, which in turn was connected with the List Society and List's secret order HAO. The early artificial image of Hitler as Germany's future leader who as a modern-day Messiah faced the public at the age of thirty can probably also be attributed to Eckart. Hitler described his decision dramatically in Mein Kampf: when he was in the military hospital of Pasewalk in Pomerania, almost blind from a gas injury, the news of the November revolution and Emperor William's II abdication arrived. His immediate response was to blame "the Jew": There is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either — or. I, for my part, decided to go into politics.

After having become familiar with Hitler's constant efforts at creating an artificial persona after the fact and his persistent obfuscating of his early biography (where the event in question probably happened much less heroically), I would like to point out this version's great similarity with Guido von List's tale of his awakening. After all, List too could "see" again after having been temporarily blind, and in this state allegedly "received" the revelation of the secret of the runes. As he signaled to "those in the know," the sudden realization, in a state of blindness, that he wanted to become a politician, made Hitler appear to be a "chosen one", a "man of Providence", a "strong one from above".

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Another tower climber

The Specter of Jewish World Rule


During pogroms in Russia in 1903, unfathomable atrocities and massacres were committed against Jews in Kishinev. In mortal fear, hundreds of thousands of people once again fled across the borders.

Money was collected in Western Europe to provide at least temporarily for the hungry and homeless, and also to aid Galicia, which did not have enough resources to deal with the situation. The anti-Semites berated the donors as Jew lackeys. The donations, they charged, were only going to be handed over to the "Russian Revolution" anyway. Therefore the donors were "supporters of the Jewish murderers and revolutionaries."

In all of Western Europe the fear of further floods of immigrants from Russia was fanned systematically. After all, more than five million Jews lived in the czarist empire, more than in all other countries combined. In comparison: there were more than two million Jews in Austro-Hungary -approximately 850,000 in Hungary, another 850,000 in Galicia, more than 100,000 in Bukovina, and some 200,000 in Vienna. There were altogether fewer than 600,000 Jews in the German Reich, 400,000 of them in Prussia. France had only approximately 100,000 Jews, Italy, some 35,000, and Spain, 25,000.

The anti-Semites painted a nightmarish picture of the Russian Revolution of 1905. They accused the Jews of pulling the wires of the revolution and of trying to provoke a revolution in Western Europe as well, with the support of the Social Democrats, in order to establish "Jewish world rule."

A coincidental encounter provided fodder for these theories: in Austria, the news about the czar's manifesto of October 1905 happened to explode like a bomb during the Social Democrats' party convention. Dr.

Wilhelm Ellenbogen was standing at the rostrum, when his fellow party members broke out into shouts of joy, yelling: "Hail to the Russian Revolution! Hail to universal suffrage!" Ellenbogen interrupted his speech and solemnly read the czar's manifesto, which granted freedom of the press and the rights of assembly and of convening the Duma, tying these events to demands he put to the Austrian government: "In Russia, the frightened czar has already gone so far as to grant universal suffrage, and our oh-so comfortable dynasty is supposed to lag behind Russia? ...We no longer want to be the prototype of the black-robed land, the land of tutelage, the land of backwardness, of camarilla. Suffrage is an existential issue to us." He reminded the deputies of the proletariat's weapon, "the paralyzation of all production, of mass strike," and said: "When push comes to shove, the comfortable and prudent proletariat of Austria will be able to speak Russian too." According to the minutes, this prompted "tumultuous applause.

When at the end of November 1905 the Social Democrats organized a mass rally in Vienna for universal, equal suffrage, the Christian Socials under Lueger held a counter demonstration in the city hall's Volkshalle, whose tenor was: "Down with Jewish terrorism! " The Deutsches Volksblatt wrote: "Who leads Social Democracy? The Jews Adler and Ellenbogen! Who assists them in public? The entire Jewish press! And who provides the money for it? Jewish high finance!-Just as the Jews are the incendiaries and agitators in Russia, so they are here at home."

Before a gathering of constituents, Lueger alluded to the latest Jewish pogroms in southern Russia, which cost several thousands of lives, shouting, "I am warning especially the Jews in Vienna not to go as far as their Russian brethren in faith and not to get too involved with the Social Democratic revolutionaries. I am warning them most emphatically what happened in Russia, might happen here. We in Vienna are anti-Semites, but we certainly weren't made to commit murder and manslaughter. Yet should the Jews threaten our fatherland, we will know no mercy either. I do want to put out a warning of these sad consequences." At this point "demonstrative applause" broke out "which lasted for minutes."

This speech greatly upset the liberals, who responded with a parliamentary interpellation against Lueger's "inflammatory and incendiary political speech," which contained "direct, open, and brutal calls to excesses, violence, pillaging, theft, and murder against citizens who have equal protection under the federal constitution." This speech was all the more dangerous as it originated from the "chief of such a large city," who should really tend to peace among the populace rather than incite the citizens against one another .

Lueger reinforced his opinion during the debate on the interpellation: "When I look at the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, anybody who can distinguish different races must admit that the leaders of Social Democracy are exclusively Jews. (Cheers and applause.) It may be that here and there one of them is baptized, but surely there are bona fide Jews among them too, and the one who is supposedly baptized, Dr. Adler, is recognizable." Lueger then went on to portray himself as a peaceful man, saying he even had "very often protected the Jews against my party's will": "I can only say, you rarely have a party where the most mellow one is the leader." In March 1906 the Christian Socials submitted another petition for restricting the immigration of Russian Jews in order "to protect the native, Christian resident population from such an invasion."

When Hitler arrived in Vienna in 1907, the topic of the Russian Jews was as hot as before, particularly after the publication of a fiercely anti-Semitic book that the Christian Socials promoted vigorously: The Revolution in Russia by Rudolf Vrba. It argued that the pogroms and massacres of Russian Jews were nothing but part of a Christian battle of defense against the Jewish threat: "The Russian with a strong national sense defends

himself desperately against the clutches of the Jewish tentacles." "The 'Mandelstams and Silberfarbs' have thrown the torch of sedition into the Czar's gigantic Empire: therefore the blood that was shed during the revolution is now first and foremost spilled on the heads of the Jews."

This book, which with its many statistics and quotes leaves the impression of being a precise documentary account, equated Jews and Social Democrats and conjured up the dangers of a Jewish world conspiracy. It argued that if the Russian Jews obtained equal civil rights on top of every- thing else, then-"just as in certain constitutional states which we don't have to mention"-the "peoples, upper and lower classes, [would be] exploited and sucked dry, and constitutional governments [would be] forced into total moral and high-financial dependence on them." "For the Jews don't want 'equality' but complete domination."

Vrba wrote that there was no persecution of the Jews, only persecution of Christians, against which Christians had to defend themselves: "One shouldn't confront us with the little anti-Semitism in this world as proof against this assertion. ...If there has perhaps been a minor exception in Kishinev and not only Christians but Jews too became victims, this has been atoned and made up for by decades of prison sentences."

Later on Hitler would use similar arguments when he denied the existence of the persecution of the Jews, saying, for example, in 1923: The Jew strives for absolute power in the country of restrictions against the Jews but not of their persecution, for in the past 200 years there have been no more persecutions of the Jews, only one continuing persecution of Christians !

The Deutsches Volksblatt in particular, which Hitler read, fanned the fear of the Russian Jews. In 1908, for example, it published an editorial warning, penned by a Romanian university professor from Yassy. The "invasion" of the Russian Jews, the professor wrote, who "ruin peoples and destroy states," had gone so far "that all national property has fallen into Jewish hands." In 1849, he said, 72 percent of the people in Yassy had still been Romanian, 8 percent of various nationalities, and 20 per- cent Jewish; but now only 45.5 percent were Romanian, 4.5 of other nationalities, and 50 percent Jewish. The professor continued: "If we let the Jews destroy the middle class, if we deliver our cities to these alien perpetrators, then we are lost. Therefore a healthy solution to the Jewish

problem is a veritably existential issue for our nation. It is a question of to be or not to be, of defending our life, and of the highest goods of national security and national future. Woe unto the nation that doesn't have the strength to fend off the alien invasion but apathetically watches as legions of cunning Jews penetrate all areas of public life, tear the bread out of the nation's mouth, and economically subjugate it."

Reasoning that the rule of Russian Jews and revolutionaries was a threat first to Romania, but then to Austro-Hungary as well, all anti-Semitic parties called for strict defense measures. The Social Democrats, however continued to express their solidarity with the goals of the Russian Revolution and protested against the 1905 repealing of democratic rights, the dissolution of the Duma, and political tortures and massacres against Jews. In 1911 Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who had escaped from Siberia, appeared as a speaker at the Social Democratic party convention. Between 1907 and 1914 Trotsky lived in Vienna with his wife and children, worked there as a newspaper correspondent, edited the Russian Pravda for workers, and was on friendly terms with Vienna's Social Democrats. In his speech he praised the solidarity of Austria's Social Democracy with the Russian Revolution, saying: "The Russian workers were enthusiastic mainly about two speeches, that of Comrade Adler's powerful indictment in Austria's first parliament of universal suffrage against the sentencing of our second Duma party group, and of Comrade Ellenbogen's glowing speech in the delegation concerning the torture of political prisoners. I recall these two speeches with gratitude." Because Adler, Ellenbogen, and Trotsky were Jewish, the anti-Semites had new "proof" of their assertion regarding the attempted "Jewish world rule" with the help of international Social Democracy and the "Jewish press."

The third supporter on the road to the coming world revolution supposedly were the "money Jews." The Brigittenauer Bezirks~Nachrichten commented on some 300 international economic experts, who had convened according to news reports: "These 300 men are from the tribe of Judah and bequeath their right to rule within their families. They are the 300 kings of our time, who rule in actuality, pushing the old monarchs down to the mere level of sham princes." The German nation, the paper said, was ruined and "denationalized."

The Jews were allegedly planning "the establishment of an international alliance of banks with its seat in Washington" and would soon "publicly dictate its laws to the world": "High finance is destined to become the successor to empires and kingdoms, and with a lot more authority at that, since their authority will rule not only one country but the whole world." The local newspaper, with which Hitler was very familiar, drew this conclusion: "We a11 struggle and get incensed, and even have fights with one another when we get worked up, while the Jew turns the wheel of history, laughing scornfully." Hitler the politician turned the myth about the Jewish revolution into a keystone of his propaganda, usually in connection with the Russian Revolution of 1917 - for instance, in a 1942 speech : We know the theoretical principle and the cruel truth about the aims of this global scourge. It is called rule of the proletariat, and it means dictatorship of the Jews! It implies the extermination of the peoples' national leadership and intelligentsia, and the Jewish international criminals' exclusive domination over the proletariat, which will then be without leaders and thus defenseless through its own fault. What had happened in Russia to such a horrifying extent, the extermination of countless millions of leaders, was supposed to continue in Germany.

At any rate, after 1918 and 1919, the young politician put his finger on the pulse of his time when he announced the fight against the alleged cause of all misery, "the Jew": If the Jew and his Marxist creed are victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will move through the ether devoid of men, as it did thousands of years ago. Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. The Germans, he continued, had to learn to combat poison gas with poison gas. It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to be or not to be.

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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."

http://www.porges.net/JewsInVienna/3Par ... Weste.html