Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna

Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, Gerhard Botz, Ivar Oxaal, Michael Pollak, Gerhard Botz

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000043488
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Theologie & Religion
• Thema: Jüdische Theologie

Originally published in 1987, this book explores the emergence, structure and ultimate fate of the Viennese Jewish community. Thirteen eminent specialists on Viennese social, political and cultural history combine to cover a wide variety of topics, including the social and psychological causes of the highly successful and intellectually creative position held by the Jewish community as a minority within the larger Viennese society. They also analyse the conservative politics of the pre-1914 Jewish community, and their relationship both to Zionism and to Austro-Marxism. The book also traces the continuities with the past in interwar Austria and analyse the stages leading to the expulsion, expropriation and annihilation of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Austria. The book concludes with an examination of post-Holocaust antisemitism in Vienna.

Chapter 1

The Jews of Young Hitler's Vienna:
Historical and Sociological Aspects

Ivar Oxaal

No historical fact about Vienna is more trite, or more devastating in its imputed consequences, than the biographical datum that Adolf Hitler spent the most formative years of his youth in the Habsburg capital. His own version of that period of his life – arriving from his hometown of Linz when he was eighteen in 1907, and departing for Munich in 1913 – has formed the basis of innumerable interpretations of his behaviour as Führer. The most persistent query about the impact of his sojourn in Vienna has centred on whether the Nazi persecution, and eventual mass murder, of European Jewry had as its originating cause the violent antisemitism which the lonely and frustrated architectural student acquired at that time. This has certainly been a widely held conception of Hitler’s personal development, supported by his account of the Vienna years in Mein Kampf. Robert Wistrich has written a penetrating reconstruction of Hitler’s place within that conflictual political ethos, arguing that the architect of the Holocaust – for Hitler was, in his view, nothing less – can be clearly perceived to be acting out the Manichean attitudes and intentions of the young antisemite in Vienna:

Indeed the origins of Nazism would be incomprehensible without taking account of the youthful experiences of its founder in early twentieth-century Vienna, sickened as he was ‘by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelled by the whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom [Spaltpilz] of humanity – Jews and more Jews.’¹

Other historians, however, have questioned the importance of antisemitism as a primary determinant of Hitler’s concerns once in power, and a major debate has developed among scholars over whether the ‘Final Solution’ was an intentional product of long-term Nazi planning, or an emergent consequence of a series of improvisational responses to unforeseen situations arising after the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union. In an attempt to summarize and adjudicate this and other major controversies about the nature of The Nazi Dictatorship, Ian Kershaw concludes that Hitler himself took little part in the overt formulation of anti-Jewish policies either in the 1930s or in the decisions associated with the introduction of the programme of mass extermination: ‘His major role consisted of setting the vicious tone within which the persecution took place and providing the sanction and legitimation of initiatives which came mainly from others.’ But he also states: ‘Without Hitler’s fanatical will to destroy Jewry, which crystallized only by 1941 into a realizable aim to exterminate physically the Jews of Europe, the Holocaust would almost certainly not have come about.’² Thus whatever general explanations may be given for the rise of Nazism – the crisis of capitalism, the threat of Bolshevism, the weakness of democratic institutions and traditions, the existence of widespread antisemitism, or a variety of historical contingencies – the stark fact would remain that the primary, if not sufficient, cause of the Holocaust was, on this reading, the evil fixation of a single powerful individual, facilitated by the enthusiastic commitment, or acquiescence, of the necessary apparatus of henchmen, cadres and implicated populations.

If the emphasis placed on the Führer’s violent, racial antisemitism in the interpretation of the genesis of the Holocaust is essentially correct, then the search for causal explanations leads back to the biographical conundrum of the various psychological traits, personal experiences and environmental influences which somehow combined to induce the young Hitler to conceive of his demoniac mission. The available historical evidence, or lack of same, has permitted a wide range of more or less empirically-grounded interpretation, but two main avenues of explanation, the psychological and cultural, are present in most accounts. The psychological approaches to Hitler’s underlying motivation require no elaboration here: he has been regarded as simply an evil madman whose intervention in world history is ultimately inexplicable or, among the more complex approaches, as a Freudian specimen whose hatred of Jews can be rationally reconstructed according to clinical insights into psychopathology. The psychological dimension, although tending to be highly speculative, is a necessary ‘intervening variable’ in order to construct a full account of the process in question, but psychological analysis by itself cannot account for the targeting of the victims of destructively aggressive feelings and actions. To be socially expressed, or even personally meaningful, the destructive impulse must be channelled and realized within a specific historical-cultural context; in this case, the pre-existing ‘forms of life’ constituting the cultural complex of European antisemitism.

The extremism of Hitler’s personality and the fanaticism of his anti-Habsburg, anti-Jewish utterances, combined with the paranoia and sadistic absurdism with which he expressed his adherence to the metaphysics of race, has suggested to some present-day Viennese, of my acquaintance at least, that the young Hitler was merely a politically and socially marginal psychopath – a wild, isolated and ultimately pathetic figure on the outer fringe of late Habsburg political culture. Had not Viennese antisemitism been pragmatically contained and exploited for constructive ends by the great mayor, Dr Karl Lueger, during Hitler’s stay in the city? Would it not be unjust even to consider Hitler as a product of the city which he came passionately to hate? Such objections are understandable and even valid up to a point, for it is clear that Hitler’s chief preoccupation was not with Vienna itself but with the decadent, multiracial empire of which it was the centre. His was not a parochial, municipal antisemitism but something far more grandiose; the Jewish menace was mainly regarded as an obstacle to that total reconstruction of central Europe which was required in order that the genius of a united German Volk, for centuries frustrated by the selfish dynastic policies of the Habsburgs, could finally achieve historical realization.³ To this might be added the observation that in both the desire to make a contribution to German nationalism, and in the vehemence of his racially-based antisemitism, he was emulating the culture hero of many young Germans, Richard Wagner, who was no Viennese.

It would clearly be artificial and invalid to attempt to view the development of anti-Jewish ideologies in Vienna, and the antisemitic influences impinging on the young Hitler, in total isolation from historical and contemporary developments elsewhere in Austria, the Habsburg empire or all of Europe. Nevertheless, it was in Vienna, ‘the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life’, as he later called it, where Hitler arrived at his life-long Weltanschauung. Without wishing to suggest that he was either a representative or an inevitable product of that environment, it will, I believe, assist in understanding how such an individual became an historical possibility if we look more closely at the specific cultural background, and the contemporary Viennese society, which awaited his arrival. Only the barest historical outline and sociological highlights can be presented here, nor will any comprehensive and definitive results be claimed; but it is hoped that this brief introduction to Hitler’s Vienna will also assist in providing basic landmarks which may be useful as background for some of the subsequent chapters of this colloquium.

Map 1 Nationalities of the Habsburg Empire in 1910: 1.3 million Jews lived in the Austrian portion of the Dual Monarchy (located to the west and north of the broken line from Rijeka to Bukovina). Two-thirds of these Jews, 871,906, were distributed throughout Galicia, chiefly in villages and small market towns, representing 10 per cent of the total population of the province.

The confrontation between the city of Vienna and its Jewish inhabitants has its origins, of course, in that peculiar, widespread feature of European feudalism in which a corporate self-reproducing religious-ethnic minority was excluded from agriculture and charged with the task of fulfilling economic functions – prohibited on theological grounds to Christians – which were at once essential to the conduct of trade, and often to the ambitions, or even survival, of a particular ruler. The inherent instability of this arrangement, and the personal and collective danger in which it frequently placed the religious minority, punctuates the history of many parts of central Europe, not least of all Vienna. The expansion of trade and a money economy in the later middle ages led to the establishment, mainly through migration of Jews from Germany, of a number of Jewish traders and small communities in the towns and villages of the later Austrian crownlands, with permanent settlement by Jews in Vienna taking place during the final decades of the twelfth century. By 1196 they were sufficiently numerous in the city that sixteen of their number could be murdered by Crusaders, including Schlom (Solo...