ANTISEMITISM IN VIENNA 1885 -- NOT A JOKING MATTER.

In 1885, Paul Vasili (pseudonym for French feminist Juliette Adam?) published a book on Viennese society. One chapter deals with anti-Semitism, adopting a satirical tone.

The driving force behind anti-Semitism was the politician Georg Schönerer, modestly talented as a speaker, modestly talented as a lawmaker, modestly talented as a politician and economist,…but a man with a raging ambition.

One day he asked himself how he might obtain fame.

He searched and searched…and seized on the first idea he came across, the most extravagant idea anyone could raise in Austria: to make Austria German.

An evil omen of things to come, Schönerer visited all taverns, drank everywhere with students, insinuated himself into their company, held speeches, and everywhere spread the gospel of a union with Germany.

The idea did not appeal to Austrians at the time. His speeches prompted either general amusement or vehement protests…no one in parliament took this nonsense serious.

Then Schönerer was touched by a more beautiful inspiration…he declared himself the leader of Austrian anti-Semitism. The idea was to save the greatly endangered Christian-Germanic society from Judaism and to defend its material interests against the amoral influence of the Jews.

And so Schönerer began his campaign – a well-nourished man, solid, with a broad ruddy face, and a short, thick neck… a man more like a circus-Hercules than a prophet, but incomparable in his zeal, his fire, and his energy. He no longer sleeps, he no longer eats. He doesn’t go to bed any more. Night and day he moves around. Apparently he has given up on the idea of Anschluss -- joining the German-speaking provinces to the German Empire. He focuses all his enthusiasm on the destruction of Israel’s people. He roams the country, and brings the hunt of Moses’ sons to every town, every village, and every hamlet. – I am joking, but it’s not right to joke about it.

(Source: Paul Vasili, Die Wiener Gesellschaft, my trans.)

BEFORE HITLER: ANTISEMITISM IN VIENNA, 1891.

This phenomenon aroused lively disgust in us, Bertha von Suttner wrote in 1891. She wrote a number of articles against this reversion to the Middle Ages. But the Viennese newspapers turned them down on the grounds that the proper attitude toward [anti-Semitism] would be contemptuous silence.

Suttner objected: Wrong must be withstood if it is recognized as such. There is no other way. In such cases silence, though professing to express contempt, is itself contemptible. Not only the victims but their fellow citizens must act. No one should stand by when they see injustice. Silence is complicity.

The antisemitic movement in Vienna had led to brutal attacks, her husband, Artur von Suttner, wrote: I mention only the suburban heroes who smashed the windows of Jewish women and shouted threats of murder, the soldier who struck down an old man in the street, the schoolboy who thrust a knife into the eye of his Jewish fellow pupil.

To combat discrimination, he founded a Union for the Resistance to Anti-semitism. It was officially incorporated in the summer of 1891. The announcement  was published in Die Neue Freie Presse on 22 July 1891:

The purpose of the Union was to take action against that hostile movement which is aimed directly against a segment of our fellow-citizens.The fight against antisemitism would be carried on through public lectures and the dissemination literature, but (rather oddly, in my view) not through political action.

Politics is excluded: primarily because our Union is not political, and secondly because this is a question of social practices in the strict sense of the word and has nothing to do with the business of government (Staatspraxis).

At a time when societies are founded to protect animals from cruelty – and rightly so – it is, I think, only logical that we should at last take a stand also against cruelty to our fellow-men, all the more as the attacks have not been confined to assault on the honour of Jews, but have taken the form of actual assaults, which have given our Jewish fellow-citizens every reason to fear for their lives.

More on the subject in my next blog post on Thursday.

(Source: Bertha von Suttner’s autobiography and Artur von Suttner's article in Neue Freie Presse, 22 July 1891, my translation)