58
PARTISAN REVIEW
as well as threatened by the ignorance of the unenlightened masses. The
French proletariat, in Herzl's eyes, resembled a "great beast beginning to
stretch its limbs," still only half-conscious of its power. The
Volk,
he
would add in 1896, is everywhere a "great child," inherently irrational,
suggestible, amorphous, and fickle . It was a description with which
Freud or Schnitzler might well have agreed and which regularly echoed
in so much of
fin-de-siecle
bourgeois social thought. On the other hand,
Herzl also believed that positive social action was vitally necessary to
forestall the coming revolt of the masses, of which anti-Semitism was
such a crucial and revealing symptom.
This conviction eventually brought Herzl to Zionism at the very
moment in May of 1895 when he witnessed the cry of the Parisian mob
against Dreyfus in the Ecole Militaire
(A
mort,
cl
mort, les Juifs.0
and
heard of Karl Lueger's first victory in the Viennese city council elections.
Against what he held to be the ineradicable anti-Semitism of the masses,
Herzl would pit a reconstituted Jewish
Volk,
created by the power of
fantasy and a dynamic politics whose emotional core was a return to the
Promised Land. By activating the latent dreams of the Jewish masses and
leading them out of Europe as soon as possible, Herzl hoped to calm or
at least to divert the anger of Gentile anti-Semites, about whose irra–
tional fears and hatreds he had no illusions. The old condescension and
even contempt toward the masses - so characteristic of Austro-liberalism,
as it also was of conservative social thought in general - was now mixed
with elements of understanding and even sympathy, especially for the
Jewish masses in the Eastern ghettoes. Observing the Jewish workers in
London's East End, Herzl observed that "the people are sentimental; the
masses do not see clearly." Yet Herzl's legend grew on the foundation of
his perception of the masses as being childish and simple. To adapt
Schorske's striking and heavily Freudian phrase, the Jewish masses became
for Herzl in his last years his lover and his mirror.
Potentially even more attractive to
fin-de-siecle
Viennese intellectuals,
alienated from their class, religion, and culture, was the most powerful of
all the mass movements to emerge in the long run from the matrix of a
disintegrating liberal Vienna - the socialist workers' movement. Founded
in 1889, the same year as its great rival the Christian-Social Party,
Austrian social democracy adopted early the Marxist ideology of the class
struggle, emphasizing the social deprivation of the urban masses
(consistently ignored by classical liberalism) and the rigorous exclusion of
the working classes from the political system. For all its demonstrative
hostility to the liberals, Austrian social democracy inherited much of
their universalist vision, their rationalist worldview, militant anticlerical–
ism, and emphasis on
Bildung.
At the same time, its leader, Victor Adler,
