The Jewish Response to Antisemitism in Austria Prior to the Anschluss

Abstract

In Austria, during the period of the monarchy as well as in the First Republic, from the late nineteenth century till 1933, antisemitism was not only part of the silent consensus but was loudly expressed by the bourgeois parties. Both Christian Socialists, the major conservative political faction, and German Nationalists, the movement which sought the creation of a Greater Germany, along with the implementation of antisemitic and anti-clerical policies, competed in their hatred of Jews. Even the Social Democrats were not immune to the enemy image of the Jud (Jew) and used anti-Jewish caricatures in their propaganda.1 In 1897 Karl Lueger, who launched the first antisemitic mass movement in the capital, won the mayoralty of Vienna on a radically anti-Jewish platform. His concept of success became Hitler’s populist model. It was in Austria that Hitler’s worldview had been shaped. He turned elements of two political trends of the middle class into his theory and practice: racial German nationalism found in the all-German movement of Georg Ritter von Schönerer and charismatic leadership of the masses and antisemitic populism, inspired by Karl Lueger.2 In order to understand Jewish responses to antisemitism, let us offer some details about the Jews in Austria at the time: Vienna was the German-speaking city with the largest portion of Jews in its population. In the bureaucratic and dynastic center of the reactionary Catholic Habsburg monarchy, the “Jew” was perceived as the leading representative of social change, a symbol of modern times as well as of old monotheism. In Vienna, the residential capital of a multinational state, Jews, who lived in a hub of various nationalisms and coerced assimilation, became the target of all prejudice.