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bourgeois followers hated everything signified by the modernist avant–
garde of "Vienna
I900."
Karl Lueger was a true pioneer in discerning in
anti-Semitism a new populist key with which to unlock the anti-capital–
ist
ressentiment
of the "little men" and women of Vienna's Kleinbiirger–
tum. With the help of this key he was able to overwhelm the liberal
patriciate of the Imperial capital in the
I890S.
As a result, the more
enlightened, liberal Viennese bourgeoisie, and especially its large Jewish
contingent, was left politically and psychologically impotent in an
increasingly hostile environment. A section of the Jewish middle class and
intelligentsia began to cross over to Austrian Social Democracy in the
I 890S,
providing many prominent cadres of the party and most of its out–
standing leaders, from its founder Victor Adler to Otto Bauer, Max Adler,
Robert Danneberg, Julius Deutsch, and so many others during the First
Republic. However, these assimilated "non-Jewish" Jews in the party
leadership were concerned that Social Democracy would be branded a
Judenschutztruppe
if they publicly defended Jews. They frequently
remained ambivalent in their stance on anti-Semitism. On the other side,
by
I930,
anti-Semitism had clearly become the ideological cement that
held together a broad anti-liberal bourgeois front of Austro-fascism, pan–
Germanism, and indigenous Austrian Nazism, and it had infiltrated a sec–
tion of the industrial working classes and Alpine peasantry.
For Austrian Jews this anti-liberal bloc would be a fateful and tragic
development. However, much of it had been anticipated by the brutal
radicalization of student life in Austrian universities long before World
War
I.
As early as
1878
some Viennese student fraternities had striven to
become
judenrein
by expelling Jewish students. The
Deutschnational
students regularly engaged in riots against Jews, socialists, and some–
times even Catholic students who, they felt, had abandoned Germanness
for ultramontane loyalities. The pan-German students of Austria eagerly
embraced the modern biological racism of "blood and soil" expounded
by Georg von Schoenerer and his fo llowers-a worldview which would
make such a strong impact in the
1900S
on the young Adolf Hitler. The
collapse of the Empire in
19I8
and the creation of the First Republic (in
which the Social Democrats were a powerful force) immediately after
the war with all its tremendous human sacrifices, combined with the
stigma of defeat, economic crisis, and the fear of Marxist revolution,
greatly exacerbated this extremist German nationalism.
More specifically, anti-Semitism became for Vienna's
Deutsche Stu–
dentenschaft,
the heart and soul of student politics in the
1920S.
By
1923
rioting and violence was commonplace in Austrian universities. Not sur–
prisingly, National Socialist radicalism now made great inroads in the
