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tion, the wartime ups and downs of Austria must have polarized, or
at least upset, the capital including its very considerable population
of assimilated and professional Jews. In his volume
a
clef
Austria and
After
(1938),
Borkenau notes thatJews, and especially Vienna Jews,
were not an element of social radicalism, as had been contended.
"After the war a considerable part of the Jewish youth in Austria be–
came socialist because the majority of the young generation was
socialist. "
When Franz was sixteen his father decided, with an eye on the
military draft, that a common name such as Pollak might not be an
advantage. So a distant maternal relative adopted him in
1917.
Franz Borkenau-Pollak, called up for military service, took a pre–
mature final examination at the gymnasium and passed with distinc–
tion in March
1918 .
But the war was over before the year was out,
and neither the experience of the trenches nor the officer's ethos ever
became part of Borkenau.
Even before enrolling at Leipzig University, Borkenau had
broken with Catholicism and his parental upbringing . At the uni–
versity he started out a socialist but then joined the Communist
Party in
1921.
Now the socialists in Germany mattered little; they were, in
1923 , on the downward trend . But the nationalists mattered. So
Radek, on a solemn occasion, launched an appeal to them from
Moscow, suggesting a common front between communists and
revolutionary nationalists . One of the latter, A.
L.
Schlageter,
had attempted to blow up a railway line under French control in
the Ruhr, had been caught, court-martialled, and shot. ... On
the basis of this speech by Radek the Communist Party started a
so-called Schlageter campaign . . . . (whose) political effect was
small. . .. (and in which) the author ... actively participated ...
and was struck by the self-assured feeling of the young university
students of various nationalist organizations, who did not doubt
that they were infinitely stronger than the communists; which
was only the truth.
So Borkenau recounts the episode in
World Communism.
Also
about this time, a fellow student noted that Borkenau gave a mysti–
fying impression of involvement in covert activity . Perhaps some
emphasis of Uncle Bernhard's on things political and covert was be–
ing applied dialectically.
