ROBERT S. WISTRICH
59
a Jewish-born intellectual who had converted to Protestantism, was no
less successful an orchestrator and organizer of the masses than Herzl, or
the Pan-German Georg von Schoenerer, or, for that matter, Karl Lueger
were. In his youth, Adler had also been a German nationalist, a
revolte
against liberal rationalism, a passionate Wagnerian influenced by the lat–
ter's ideas of achieving a new harmonious community of the
Volk
through the regeneration of art, as well as a dabbler in Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche . On the other hand, Adler, as the socialist leader, con–
sciously rejected the irrational, aesthetic style of politics that dominated
the
Austrianfin-de-siecle,
despite his shrewd sense of the changing moods
of the working masses and his feeling for the imponderables in politics.
In
this respect, he was the antithesis of his leading nationalist and anti–
Semitic rivals, Georg von Schoenerer and Karl Lueger, and the very op–
posite of a fanatic or demagogue .
Adler's political style was very much in the tradition of Austrian lib–
eralism with its concrete empiricism, respect for law, tolerant skepticism,
and search for the conciliatory formula. At the same time, his relentless
logic and devastating irony were viewed by anti-Semitic contemporaries
as distinctively "Jewish," if not to say Talmudic, traits. The faith of
Marxism in enlightenment, science, and reason, aligned with an idealistic
passion for social justice and a messianic belief in the historic role or mis–
sion of the working class, were the decisive elements that brought many
Jewish intellectuals into the working-class movement. Yet far from being
alarmed at the disastrous decline of liberalism and the rise of anti–
Semitism, the Austrian Social Democrats (including the Jews among
them) positively welcomed it as a step toward a greater
democratization
of the inequitable electoral system and a heralding of the inevitable tri–
umph of socialism.
If
the
haute bourgeo isie,
the ennobled aristocracy, and the liberal
Jewish intelligentsia felt increasingly paralyzed by the anti-Semitic suc–
cesses of the 1890s, the socialist movement insisted that this was at best a
temporary, ephemeral phenomenon of disoriented petty-bourgeois masses
- duped and misled by deceptive slogans characteristic of a backward,
semifeudal society where industrial capitalism had not yet sufficiently ad–
vanced. Admittedly, socialist Jewish intellectuals deplored the "clerical"
demagogy of Christian socialism, its vulgarity and endemic
Bildungshass
immortalized by the remark of the Christian Social Deputy,
Bielohlowek, "When I see a book I want to puke."
("Wann
i
a Buachl
sitch, hab i's schon g'fressen.
")
They also mocked the longstanding tradi–
tions of Viennese
Gemutlichkeit,
banality and trivialization, of theatrical–
ity
and sham, so ably and shamelessly exploited by Lueger.
At
the same time these Jewish intellectuaJ.s also saw a certain justifica-
