Adolf Hitler received his first schooling in anti-Semitism in the fair city of Gemuetlichkeit on the Danube. He has told the story in his strange autobiography, where he conceals more than he tells and misleads the reader with magnificent frankness.
The realization that Jews are an international conspiracy came to young Adolf as he wandered hungrily through Vienna streets in one prophetic flash which later flashes confirmed and deepened. In less mystic terms it means, no doubt, that the future Fuehrer, with his peculiar genius for reaching down to the very narrow of mass prejudice, made the pervasive anti-Semitism of Vienna his very own. He absorbed it, distilled its quintessence and injected that poison in the veins of Germany.
No self-respecting Jew in Vienna is unaware that the anti-Jewish scourge of Germany is to a large extent Austrian in its origin. It was the first comment of every politically-minded Jew here whom I questioned about the situation. Non-Jews were no less conscious of it.
ENCOURAGEMENT UNNECESSARY
For the 300,000 Jews in Austria, about 220,000 of them in the capital, it is a fact surcharged with evil omens. Persecution of Jews in Austria, once it is given free reign, will need even less demagogical encouragement than in Germany.
The economic pressures that provided the real motive power for anti-Jewish propaganda in Germany are not only operative, but operative in much larger measure, in Austria. Here the economic crisis is sharper, the hunger for the jobs and trade held by the Jews more desperate. Being a larger proportion of the nation’s total population — over ten percent in the capital — Jews are naturally more in evidence. The circumstances that so many of the names by which modern Vienna is best known to the outside world
Dr. Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Dr. Steinach, Molnar, etc.–are Jewish names adds fuel to the fires of racial resentment.
At the same time the prominence of Jews in the leadership of the Social-Democratic Party just extinguished in blood is even more striking in Austria than in Germany. When the government, after the suppression of the socialists, proceeded to cover the sculptured heads of certain public monuments with white cloth carrying the Fascist symbol, it was trying to humiliate not only Social-Democratic but Jewish heads.
Viktor Adler, to the Christian Socials, was not only a Marxist but a Jew. And Dr. Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch, who led the hopeless one-sided battle in the communal homes, are to the mass of gun-toting Heimwehr men not only socialists but Jews. The fact that the great Social-Democratic movement in Vienna has always been overwhelming non-Jewish is brushed aside, like all facts which do not fit into the Fascist mood.
ADVANCE LIST OF VICTIMS
Certain colleagues among the foreign correspondents in Vienna have told me in all seriousness that the Austrian Nazis, in anticipation of power, have drawn up a long list of Jews who will be the first victims of anti-Semitism terror when the time comes. The list is supposed to contain the names of over a thousand men and women eminent in cultural, business and political life.
I cannot vouch for the existence of such a list. Very likely it is imaginary. Yet the rumor of such preparations is significant as an indication of what the city expects.
A prominent roreign journalist here was good enough to let me see a private letter which he wrote to his editor. Since it was not for publication, he was able to express himself without the restraint imposed by political or other considerations. The concluding sentence in that letter was approximately this:
“If the Nazis come to power in Austria, we will witness a St. Bartholomew’s Night of anti-Semitism terror that will make the recent German events look like child’s play.”
A SHATTERING DISASTER
That, too, may be exaggeration. But it also attests the strong current belief that Austrian Jewry is menaced by a shattering disaster. One begins to understand the deep unease, the sense of evil foreboding, manifest in the everyday life of Jews here. Not only among the humble and the lowly, but perhaps even more clearly among Jews with money, position and reputations.
Not patriotism but desperation drives so many of them to support the Catholic hierarchy of Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss or the Fascist aspirations of Major Emil Fey’s armed band. There is no genuine conviction in that support: it is an acceptance of the lesser evil.
The only real dependence of Austrian Jews in this difficult period is upon the St. Germain treaty and upon the world opinion which may oblige the League to invoke the treaty in their defense. It is felt here that Austria, as long as it is not an intrinsic part of Hitler’s Third Reich, will be more sensible to foreign criticism than Germany.
A CITY OF GLOOM
To an outsider, remembering Vienna in its relatively quiet days of four or five years ago, steeped in the Vienna of litcrary and musical tradition, the city today is a place of gloom and depression. Its whole history and tradition seem smothered under bayonets and smeared with blood.
The Prussian capital, stolid and regimented at all times, seems a more natural background for Fascist methods than the capital of Austria. The curve of Vienna’s streets and its rivers, the breadth and easy charm of the Ring and the homelike intimacy of the narrow winding alleys, the restful cafes and beer-halls–all of it is pathetically out or harmony with the machine-guns and sudden arrests and haunting fears.
I am not merely growing sentimental. I am trying to grasp what this moment of chaos and terror must mean to a Viennese. If the transformation can touch an outsider thus, how heavily must it weigh on the spirits of those whose very lives are woven into the fabric of Vienna???.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
