The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [53]
Vienna University was a particular hotbed of nationalism and anti-Semitism, with the Burschenschaften or student fraternities leading the way with their avowal of kicking the Jews out of the university. This is one of the reasons why many Jewish students considered it necessary to become exceptionally expert and dangerous fencers. In alarm, these fraternities instituted the Waidhofen principle, which meant there could be no duelling with Jews, that Jews had no honour and should not be expected to live as if they did: ‘It is impossible to insult a Jew; a Jew cannot therefore demand satisfaction for any suffered insult.’ You could still beat them up, of course.
It was Dr Karl Lueger, the founder of the Christian Social Party, with his amiability and Viennese patois, his followers with their white carnations in their buttonholes, who seemed even more dangerous. His anti-Semitism seemed more carefully considered, less overtly rabble-rousing. Lueger made his play as an anti-Semite by necessity rather than conviction: ‘wolves, panthers, and tigers are human compared to these beasts of prey in human form . . . We object to the old Christian Austrian Empire being replaced by a new Jewish Empire. It is not hatred for the individual, not hatred for the poor, the small Jew. No gentlemen, we do not hate anything but the oppressive big capital which is in the hands of the Jews.’ It was Bankjuden – the Rothschilds and Ephrussi – who had to be put in their place.
Lueger gained huge popularity and was finally appointed Mayor in 1897, noting with some satisfaction that ‘Jew-baiting is an excellent means of propaganda and getting ahead in politics’. Lueger then reached an accommodation with those Jews he had assailed in his rise to power, remarking smugly that ‘Who is a Jew is something I determine.’ There was still considerable Jewish anxiety: ‘Can it be considered appropriate for the good name and interests that Vienna be the only great city in the world administered by an anti-semitic agitator?’ Though there was no anti-Semitic legislation, the penalty of Lueger’s twenty years of rhetoric was a legitimisation of bias.
In 1899, the year that the netsuke arrived in Vienna, it was possible for a Deputy in the Reichsrat to make speeches calling for Schussgeld – bounties – for shooting Jews. In Vienna the most outrageous statements were met with a feeling from the assimilated Jews that it was probably best not to make too much fuss.
It looks as if I am going to spend another winter reading about anti-Semitism.
It was the Emperor who held out against this agitation. ‘I will tolerate no Judenhetze in my Empire,’ he said. ‘I am fully persuaded of the fidelity and loyalty of the Israelites and they can always count on my protection.’ Adolf Jellinek, the most famous Jewish preacher of the time, pronounced that ‘The Jews are thoroughly dynastical, loyalist, Austrian. The Double Eagle is for them a symbol of redemption and the Austrian colours adorn the banners of their freedom.’
Young Jewish men in their cafés had a slightly different view. They were living in Austria, part of a dynastic empire, part of a stifling bureaucracy where every decision was endlessly deferred, where everything aspired to be ‘Kaiserlich-königlich’, k & k, imperial and royal. You could not move in Vienna without seeing the double-headed Hapsburg eagle or the portraits of the Emperor Franz Josef, with his moustaches and sideburns and his chest of medals, and his grandpaternal eyes following you from the window of the shop where you bought your cigars, over the little desk of the maître d’ in the restaurant. You could not move in Vienna if you were young, wealthy and Jewish, without being observed by a member of your extended dynastic family. Anything you did might end up in a satirical magazine. Vienna was full of gossips, caricaturists