ROBERT S. WISTRICH
57
masses was not only a personal trademark of Herzl, the failed dramatist
transfonned into a successful popular tribune.
It
also owed something to
the special atmosphere
offin-de-siede
Vienna.
Such background perhaps helps to explain the tenacious resistance of
so many of Herzl's Jewish intellectual and artistic contemporaries in
Vienna to the Zionist project. In part, this opposition was, of course, a
natural outcome of the "assimilationist" ideology of these Viennese Jews,
their detestation of any form of rationalism and their obsessive fear,
shared by many middle-class Jews, that Zionism might exacerbate rather
than attenuate anti-Semitism. Artists and intellectuals like Freud, Zweig,
and Karl Kraus, Arthur Schnitzler, Otto Weininger, Felix Salten, and
Peter Altenberg inherently distrusted any collective and political solutions
to the "Jewish" question - or for that matter any attempt to mobilize
the masses, even in the name of the most elevated humanist ideologies or
ideals. Indeed, much of their oeuvre can be read as an implicit moral
condemnation of
homo politicus,
of military and political hegemony based
on might or violence and as an expression of elitist contempt for the
opportunistic horse-trading associated with almost any normal political
activity. However skeptical, despairing, or critical of liberal values, they
still clung to a tenacious conviction that the moral autonomy of the
individual transcends any considerations of religion, ideology, nationality,
and politics. Rightly or wrongly, they felt that their belief was as threat–
ened by Herzl's Zionism as it was by other mass movements. The fact
that this Jewish national movement was created by one of their own, by
a figure who had seemed in his own person to represent the model of a
cultivated Viennese liberal and to embody the assimilationist ideal even
smacked to them of
betrayal,
if it did not also signal a total despair of
the future; a majority ofJews in
fin-de-siecle
Vienna were as yet certainly
unwilling to contemplate such despair.
Yet unlike Herzl, most Viennese intellectuals had not been able to
analyze at close range the sociopolitical scene in France in the early
1890s, an experience that played a decisive role in Herzl's own meta–
morphosis from Viennese aesthete to would-be political artist and self–
made expert on mass psychology. This formative experience, chronologi–
cally
parallel to Lueger's growing triumphs back in Vienna, convinced
the
foreign correspondent of the
Neu Freie Presse
that only by adapting
and channeling the new mass politics in the interests ofJewish national–
ism
could a long-term solution for the predicament of the Jews be
found. Essentially, Herzl's
diagnosis
of the masses (formed by the internal
crises of the French Republic) differed little from that of Freud or other
Austrian liberals. Liberal democracy, in its French variant, was no panacea
for
a social order in crisis, racked by anarchy, terrorism, and class conflict,
