Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites: A study of the Christian Social movement

By Michael Carter-Sinclair

Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites offers a radical challenge to conventional accounts of one of the darkest periods in the city’s history: the rise of organised, politically directed antisemitism between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Drawing on original research into the Christian Social movement, the book analyses how issues such as nationalism, mass poverty and social unrest enabled the gestation in ‘respectable’ society of antisemitism, an ideology that seemed to be dying in the 1860s, but which was given new strength from the 1880s. It delivers a riposte to portrayals of the lower clergy as a marginalised group that was driven to defend itself from liberal attacks by turning to anti-liberal, antisemitic action, as well as exposing the nurturing role played by senior clergy. As the book reveals, the Church in Vienna as a whole was determined to counter liberalism, to the point of welcoming any authoritarian regime that would do so.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526144881

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Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites

Vienna’s ‘respectable’ antisemites

A study of the Christian Social movement

MICHAELCARTER - SINCLAIR

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Michael Carter-Sinclair 2021

The right of Michael Carter-Sinclair to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4486 7 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Wilhelm Gause, Ball der Stadt Wien, 1904. Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien / Wikipedia. Public domain.

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Contents

   Acknowledgements

   Some general notes

   Archival sources and abbreviations

   Introduction

  1 Before the rise of the antisemites

  2 Antisemites begin to organise, 1873–89

  3 To the brink of power, 1889–95

  4 A Christian, socially engaged movement? 1896–1914

  5 A German movement? 1896–1914

  6 War and the end of empire, 1914–18

  7 An unloved republic? 1919–26

  8 The right asserts itself, 1927–33

  9 Building a Christian and German Austria? 1934–8

10 An end to Austria?

11 Principal conclusions and further questions

    Appendix: Elections in Vienna, 1932

    Bibliography

    Index

Acknowledgements

I have received so much valuable assistance and guidance while attempting to produce this work that it is impossible to thank everyone in the available space. I therefore apologise to anyone I may have missed. Special gratitude is due to the following people for the extensive help they have provided.

I am thankful for the assistance of Dr Johann Weißensteiner and his colleagues in the Archive of the Archdiocese of Vienna, as I am for the willing support of Herr Michael Winter and Herr Bruno Splichl at the Federal Police Archive, Vienna. Similarly, Frau Birgit Hoffmann and Frau Martha El Hadidi and their colleagues at the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus were constantly cheerful and helpful to me, as were numerous staff at the Austrian National Library and the British Library book and newspaper collections.

A number of academics in the field gave me thoughtful advice, sometimes face to face, sometimes by e-mail, always encouragingly. These have included Professor Lothar Höbelt, Professor Wolfgang Maderthaner, Dr Winfried Garscha and Dr Susanne Schedtler and her colleagues. I am grateful to Professor R.J.W. Evans and Professor David Rechter, who gave me the opportunity to share some of my thoughts at their seminar in Oxford, and to other academics who invited me to speak at their colleges. The two peer reviewers who read an early version of part of this script gave me excellent new ideas on how to approach the work.

At King’s College, London, Dr Jim Bjork, Professor Stephen Lovell and Professor Richard Vinen helped me in many different ways. The Department of History gave me invaluable support by extending my association there. Dr Michael Rowe has been exceptional, both as the academic supervisor for my PhD, then when I undertook this work as post-doctoral research. I am grateful to him on many counts: for his advice, encouragement, his good humour, insistence on intellectual rigour and patience. Emma Brennan and Alun Richards at Manchester University Press made this final stage of producing a book as smooth as I could have wished.

Finally, none of this would have happened without the constant and loving support of my wife, Christine. She encouraged me to make the leap back into the study of history, knowing how much history in general, and this study of Vienna in particular, meant to me. This work has taken a number of years, and Christine has never lost faith that it would be completed and be worthwhile. For this, and for all the other things, I am so much more than grateful to her.

Any errors are, of course, my own.

Some general notes

Translations

All translations from the original languages, unless taken from a work already translated into English, are mine. Any mistakes or misunderstandings are therefore mine.

Place Names

In the multilingual Habsburg Empire, the language used for place names formed a source of much conflict. In this work, where a commonly accepted English version of a place name is available, it is used. Since the vast majority of references to other place names that came from the archives were in German, the German name is generally used in these instances. Where necessary, an indication is given of the name of a place as it would appear in current English usage.

Archival sources and abbreviations

ARCHIVES AND MATERIALS CONSULTED

PARISH NEWSLETTERS

NEWSPAPERS WHOSE ABBREVIATIONS APPEAR IN THE FOOTNOTES

MISCELLANEOUS

Introduction

Christian Social antisemitism: violence in many forms

Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, parts of Europe, to varying degrees, were subject to outbreaks of antisemitism. These outbreaks might be spontaneous or organised. They might take the form of damage to, or the destruction of, Jewish religious buildings. They might be state-organised pogroms, or boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses; but they all marked Jews as ‘outsiders.’ Images of brown-shirted Nazi thugs, abusing Jews in the street or burning books or manuscripts by those considered to be Jewish writers or composers, are prominent in modern popular remembrances of such events. Regardless of the form they took, they all had profound effects on feelings of security and belonging for Jews, and they are all reminders of the consequences that antisemitism – and any other prejudice – can bring when it is not confronted.¹

Yet, proponents of antisemitic viewpoints did not need extreme shows of violence to be sure that their messages pleased those with similar views, reached potential supporters or intimidated Jews. Some antisemites found means that were less overtly violent, and they attempted to shroud them in at least the appearance of respectability. These antisemites conformed to bourgeois dress codes. They addressed their audiences using the politest of conventions. They met in ‘respectable’ locations. But they showed no hesitation in using the most hateful language when referring to Jews, and their actions were as damaging and violating to Jews in the long term as any physical assaults or book burnings.

This antisemitism was propagated largely, but not only, by bourgeois politicians and activists. It was dressed up in the language of bourgeois values and described as ‘common sense,’ not prejudice. The antisemites who spread this prejudice may not always have wished for the brutal and boundless antisemitic violence that erupted in German-speaking Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, but they prepared the way for its arrival, and nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the city of Vienna, which witnessed a major eruption of antisemitic savagery in the spring of 1938. This was one consequence of decades of anti-Jewish prejudice, directed against the large Jewish minority of the city, that had been openly espoused by a major political and social force in Vienna – the Christian Social movement.²

At first glance, the responsibility of the movement for widespread antisemitism might appear unlikely, since many of its principles matched those of centre-right or even liberal groups. Its key figures praised the outlook and work ethic of its base of lower bourgeois supporters. They promoted self-reliance and the creation of charitable and mutual associations, rather than state intervention, as means of economic and social progress. They moved among what was termed ‘good society.’³ They called for a prominent place in everyday life for what would normally be called bourgeois morality, even if their version was based on Christian values. Bourgeois agitators were joined by members of the lower clergy of the Catholic Church, who were prominent activists, even leaders, in the movement. But the Christian Socials had a dark side which set them firmly against liberal values of inclusivity, as they proudly expressed the core philosophy of their movement to be antisemitism; and antisemitism, often heavily tinged with an Austrian variant on German nationalism, was a strong force that bound its members together.

Christian Socials claimed that this antisemitism was a necessary stance as part of a defence against changes that were sweeping over Vienna and Austria from the middle of the nineteenth century. These changes were economic, as capitalism brought factories and large-scale production which created a new, wealthy capitalist class, at the same time as it threatened the guild systems that were dominated by the lower bourgeoisie. Political changes brought liberal administrations, which created modernising constitutions, through which voting rights were extended and equality before the law was guaranteed to all, without distinction. Jews were emancipated from laws that restricted their movements and property rights. Policies on secularisation loosened the monopolistic grip that the Catholic Church enjoyed over education, marriage and family life. All churches were to be treated equally, none privileged over the other.⁴

At this time, Vienna was also undergoing enormous physical changes, as migration to the city swelled the population. Speculative and often poor building projects created new or expanded suburbs, while the centre of the city saw the springing up of villas and apartments for the newly rich, all part of the phenomena of urbanisation and industrialisation that were sweeping across the continent. Antisemites did not see these changes in this way. Instead, driven by a combination of envy, bitterness, resentment, even anger, antisemites concocted elaborate conspiracy theories, myths that treated all of these changes as part of a plot by Jews, as ‘evidenced’ by the presence of numbers of newly arrived Jews in the population of the city as a whole and as prominent figures in the liberal party, even though Jews remained a minority in both. They painted liberalism as ‘Jewish liberalism,’ and it was to be opposed through antisemitic action.

For nearly five decades, Christian Socials, most visibly through their political wing, the Christian Social Party, formed by far the largest antisemitic element in Vienna, then in Austria generally. They included in their ranks people with power and influence. They outlived the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, in which they originated, and survived wars and revolution.⁵ They persisted in their activities, first against the liberals of Vienna, then against the larger Social Democratic movement that rose in the city. They made the profession of antisemitic viewpoints a regular part of daily life in certain circles. They achieved their objective of antisemitism becoming a commonplace. For these reasons, and others, the Christian Socials have rightly been described as the ‘most successful modern political movement based on antisemitism to emerge anywhere in nineteenth-century Europe.’⁶

But, by the late 1930s, their position was under challenge from the biggest threat they would face. Changes in the international political, diplomatic and military climates meant that Adolf Hitler felt free to attempt the annexation of Austria, under the pretext of being on a humanitarian and peacekeeping mission for an Austria that had been impoverished by war and economic catastrophes. After all, Hitler said, Austrians were German speakers, and shared much history and culture with Germans. So, in March 1938, German troops crossed into Austria. They brought food and fuel which they distributed to Austrians who greeted them. But many antisemites also seized the bigger chance that these troops represented. Austrian antisemites had called for ‘action’ against Jews for decades. Now, the effective takeover of Austria by the Nazis opened the floodgates, and years of pent-up hatred were released.

Violence filled the streets of Vienna as large numbers of antisemites attacked their Jewish fellow citizens. Jews were beaten and abused, their homes ransacked and their synagogues attacked. The immediate trigger for these outbursts came from international events, but the long-term responsibility for making them possible rested with antisemites in the city, who had worked to make the expression of antisemitic views part of daily life through repeated antisemitic statements. As Bruce Pauley states,

Even though it is impossible to prove in any empirical way, it is also highly probable that six decades of anti-Semitic propaganda had left Austrian Jews so isolated socially, that few Christians were willing to help them in their hour of mortal danger. To argue otherwise is to suggest that propaganda has absolutely no influence on the public no matter how often it is repeated over no matter how long a time.⁷

Yet, the violence of March 1938 was so extreme that even some of these antisemites shunned the excesses of that month, but they had long inflicted antisemitism on their victims through words, through deeds and through the creation of a climate that made life difficult – at times unbearable – for Jewish Austrians. They carried out violence in many forms.

The purposes of this work

This work has a number of interconnected purposes. The first is to present, in a broadly chronological manner, a history of the Christian Social movement, using the results of research undertaken in a number of archives, libraries and similar institutions. This research has covered the fifty or so years of the existence of the movement, from the late 1880s to the mid-1930s, when changes in political circumstances meant that many of the component parts of the movement were either subsumed into other organisations or disbanded. However, since Christian Socials frequently justified the existence, and the antisemitism, of their movement by the use of a narrative that claimed that they were resisting changes that had been introduced to Vienna and which had undermined a better society, this work examines such claims by beginning towards the mid-nineteenth century. The work also continues until just after the Second World War, since individuals who had previously belonged to the movement continued to propagate aspects of a Christian Social mindset even after the 1930s.

A second purpose is to use the results of this research to engage with some of the key propositions that have been put forward in works that have been written about the Christian Social movement. For instance, this work supports conclusions that early antisemitic activists in Vienna and areas around the city used social organisations, rather than overtly political groups, as a means to spread propaganda and to build a base of support among the lower bourgeoisie.⁸ This work goes on to demonstrate the importance of these groups in Vienna beyond the early days of the movement. It adds to knowledge of how and where activists operated and shows that these social groups presented other characteristics of Christian Socials that were important to them, such as their attachment to German culture and the idea of the extended German nation.

However, with regard to two other points, this work stands at a distance from, and even goes against the grain of, what has become an accepted narrative of the history of the movement. The first of these points has to do with the motivations that have been said to have driven priests to participate in early anti-liberal, antisemitic campaigning. One reason that has been proposed for their participation is that it was a response to their treatment by the liberal state that emerged in Austria in the 1860s. In summary, it has been suggested that liberals and the liberal state persecuted and derided priests, making them outcasts in society, virtual ‘martyrs,’ in the 1860s and early 1870s. On top of that, their incomes, long fixed by the state without revision, were being eroded by inflation, so they were being left behind economically by their bourgeois equivalents. As a group, they have been said to have therefore suffered ‘occupational anxiety’ that they were becoming socially irrelevant.⁹

It has therefore been claimed that the clergy who took to activism in the 1870s and 1880s were taking advantage of an opportunity to make a ‘return to society’ alongside the predominantly lower bourgeois anti-liberal groups that had started to appear in the city.¹⁰ Priests were said to have been able to find common ground with these groups when they offered their services as agitators, propagandists and organisers. In this way, by demonstrating their usefulness and importance for the cause, they improved their status among the lower bourgeoisie and in wider society.

Research for this work has unearthed a quite different picture of the 1860s as far as the lower clergy is concerned. Evidence here shows considerable interaction between clergy and state, in different ways, with priests forming, for instance, an essential part of ceremonies where local lay dignitaries were present. Some priests even took advantage of the provisions of the constitutional state in order to further their own aims. The notion of unrelenting liberal press attacks on the clergy is also shown here to be an exaggeration, at the very least. These are crucial points, since the alleged persecution of the Church became part of a founding myth that was repeatedly used by lay and clerical members of the Christian Social movement.

This is not to turn a blind eye to disputes that did occur between the Church and liberals, especially when it came to a concordat that regulated Church–state relationships in Austria, but a black-and-white picture of a struggle to the death, with the lower clergy as defenceless victims, is not an accurate representation of the period. While some liberals did attack priests, seeing them as representatives of a backward-looking religion that blocked progress, other liberals valued the contributions that priests made to social order in helping to set standards of morality and behaviour.

Among other explanations that have been advanced as motivating factors in the antisemitism of the lower clergy, and which are examined in later chapters, attention is drawn for now to a deep-seated rejection of some of the ideas that came to be of influence in the shaping of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This clerical position can be summed up as anti-modernism, since modernist thinking brought the creation of secular states, with freedom of conscience in belief and equality for all religions. The modern world brought the emancipation of Jews, and it also, eventually, brought democracy. It undermined an old world where religion was used to justify differences in social rank, and where religious belief conferred status on the Church and its agents. Members of the Church in Vienna produced tirades against liberalism before any liberal administrations existed, and before any alleged liberal persecutions of the clergy could take place.¹¹

The second part of what has become a near-standard narrative on the early days of the Christian Socials, and which is contradicted by the research presented here, also concerns the Church. This is the portrayal of the politically active lower clergy as rebels against the senior clergy, members of the upper hierarchy having been said to have placed barriers in the way of the participation of the lower clergy in Christian Social politics. Instead, the picture that emerges from research here is that of activist clergy who encountered little resistance from senior Church figures and who found approval and reward for their efforts, with extensive Church facilities available for their propaganda work. Within the Church, the lower clergy is shown here to have formed a body of well-connected, well-regarded priests.

This conclusion has been reached after examining two key pieces of evidence that have been advanced to demonstrate that opposition was placed before the lower clergy, and then assessing the evidence in the context of the research undertaken here. The first of these pieces of evidence is a mission to Rome that the episcopate in Vienna organised in order to obtain a papal denunciation of the Christian Social movement. The second is a close reading of direct, blanket prohibitions that certain bishops have been said to have placed on political activity by the lower clergy.

When the Rome mission is examined in the context of many other aspects of relationships between senior and lower clergy, and not just as a self-standing picture, it does not add much, if anything, to the case that the lower clergy faced the opposition of their superiors. When certain prohibitions on political activity are examined closely, and again in wider contexts, they are seen to be prohibitions that limited activities in certain areas but left lots of scope for action elsewhere. The bishops may have been disturbed by some of the allies that the lower clergy cultivated, but the upper hierarchy, ultimately, did not stand in the way of the lower clergy and their antisemitism.¹² This conclusion should not be a surprise. In time, senior Church figures became leading Christian Social politicians and were open about what they saw as the ‘need’ for antisemitism in the state.¹³

This pointing to anti-modernism as a root of clerical antisemitism should not obscure the fact that the antisemitism of a number of activists was pure, venomous bigotry, but it was a bigotry that became embedded in certain parts of Viennese society, where it was seen as far from irrational. It became, for some, an acceptable, logical and respectable viewpoint to hold. This did not take long to happen. Much has rightly been made of how it was the lower bourgeoisie, alongside the priests, who took the lead in spreading and organising antisemitism, but it should not be forgotten that both groups received support from well-connected and influential parts of society, since both the lower bourgeoisie and the lower clergy, as shown in many examples in this work, were frequently joined at campaign meetings by wealthy aristocrats.

In the long term, antisemitic, anti-liberal views became part of a Christian Social truth that had to be accepted in its entirety by adherents and followers alike. They created a predominant Christian Social stance that had little or no respect for pluralism, for other points of view, and this stance is shown to have been shared by prominent members of the movement and lay and clerical activists alike. This translated, across the long period examined here, into anti-democratic stances and authoritarian tendencies that culminated in the 1930s in support for a dictatorship that declared Austria to be a Christian and German state, with all that this implied for those who could not fully belong to this Austria.

These attitudes neither originated nor existed in a vacuum, so this work explores some of the contexts of their time. These include nationalist disputes that periodically shook the Habsburg Empire, and which Christian Socials could not avoid. They include calls for unification into a single state of all lands that were culturally and linguistically German, which would have included Austria.

Not least, Christian Socials shaped, and were shaped by, the poverty, economic change and social divisions and tensions that accompanied the period of their existence. At their beginning, the major political and social battles in Vienna seemed to be between representatives of traditional values against those who supported a modernising vision, even if this division was within the bourgeois classes. When mass politics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, the struggle mutated into bourgeois versus non-bourgeois, and Christian Socials became the primary representatives of bourgeois political interests and standpoints in Vienna and Austria – a counterweight to the Marxist-inspired Social Democrats who were growing to considerable strength on the left.

This explains why an important qualifier must be added to these general descriptions of the Christian Socials. It would be wrong to claim that all Christian Socials were inspired by antisemitism. A variety of reasons drove people to join or support the movement and the Christian Social Party. Some would have done so out of a sense that a credible bourgeois, business-oriented opposition to the Social Democrats needed to exist, and the only such opposition came from the Christian Socials. Yet, the single most overwhelming, and publicly presented, characteristic of the movement was its antisemitism. This aspect of its character persisted over the fifty years or so that the Christian Socials formed a coherent movement. For too many, antisemitism was a deeply felt, bitter and nasty prejudice, and a weapon with which to beat their enemies. Followers of a movement founded on myths as to why an antisemitic movement was necessary continued to profess belief in them right to its bitter end.

Antisemitism everywhere?

Some works give the impression that antisemitism in Vienna was almost universally shared by the non-Jewish population. If this was true, the case that antisemitic activists, especially the Christian Socials, were the primary cause of, and conduit for, organised antisemitism would be weakened. This work briefly engages with and challenges the notion that antisemitism was everywhere. It looks at the case of a leading Social Democrat accused of admitting her antisemitism; the case of the Catholic priest in a parish in the west of Vienna, wrongly accused of writing antisemitic propaganda in his parish newsletter; and the case made by some that the internationalist Social Democratic Party, many of whose leaders and members were Jewish, was infected to a large extent by antisemitism.¹⁴ The Social Democrats made dreadful mistakes in the use of caricatures in propaganda, but they must be seen in their historical context if they are to be judged for what they were. As Peter Pulzer has written, Social Democrats and antisemites were at ‘opposite poles of the political world,’ despite ‘superficial resemblances.’¹⁵

What this work is not

This work does not concern itself to any great extent with debates about so-called types of antisemitism, and antisemitism is defined here simply as prejudice against Jews for being Jews. This is because, however antisemites in Vienna defined their antisemitism, and the ‘reasons’ for it, whether religious or pseudo-scientific, they aimed to mark Jews as outsiders. Certainly, antisemites in Vienna proposed different ‘reasons’ for their antisemitism, but this work is more concerned with how and why antisemitism, whatever its form, came to be embedded among certain parts of the population, and who set about embedding it.

More important here is that, as argued by Guido Schmid, in his foreword to Judenhass by Eleonore Sterling, antisemites look on the world through the prism of a form of ‘secularised Manicheism.’ In other words, they see two worlds, one of light, and one of darkness.¹⁶ The world of light, in their imagination, is a world free of Jews. The world of darkness is a world with Jews, a world of threat and menace. It is a world where everything that is wrong is the fault of the Jew. It is a world, in essence, that differs little from the sentiments of a popular song of the 1920s, the text of which ridiculed Nazi propaganda and satirised antisemitism and the antisemitic mindset: ‘An allem sind die Juden schuld!’ (‘The Jews are Guilty of Everything!’).¹⁷

This work is also not a comprehensive history of the whole of the Christian Social movement. It would be an enormous task to attempt this, and it would add little to a study that already examines a wide range of the associations that made up the movement. Nor is it a detailed history of the Christian Social Party, although it does at times focus on the party as the political wing of the movement, at key moments. It does so, for instance during the 1920s, when a leading figure in the Viennese Church, Monsignor Ignaz Seipel, was both leader of the Party and Chancellor of Austria. But the party was only one component of the movement.

Finally, although the work considers the emphasis that activists placed on plans to create a ‘Christian’ Vienna and Austria, and how their ‘Christian’ values set them apart from ‘Jewish capitalists,’ no detailed theological analysis of what they meant by the term is encountered here. ‘Christian’ was applied in a way that said ‘not Jewish,’ and that suffices here.

The time frame of this work

While the core narrative of this work runs from 1860 to late 1938, there is no clean end to this history. Old, disproved attitudes on the origins of antisemitism in Vienna persist. For instance, one claim, that Jews brought antisemitism onto themselves, has been repeatedly made, and has repeatedly been shown to be wrong.¹⁸ To consider just one instance, it was not the case that

The strong antisemitism of this period in Christian circles was above all caused by the over-powerful position of Jewish business people and bankers, who had taken a dominant position in the economy and industry. The Christian business people felt themselves forced out of their fields of activity by Jewish manufacturers.¹⁹

These remarks, about ‘over-powerful’ Jews, were not published decades ago, but in 2013, by a professor of Church history at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Given the huge amount of scholarship that has been produced on Viennese antisemitism, it seems that some, even those connected to an institution like the Catholic Church, which played such a significant part in the spread of antisemitism in Vienna, still have much to learn. This need constantly to remember is one reason why it is so difficult to put an