ROBERT S. WISTRICH
359
student milieu and, as in Germany, it conquered the Austrian academic
community well before the
Anschluss.
National Socialism in Austria was
greatly helped not only by anti-Semitism but by the fact that before
I938
most Austrians genuinely felt they were Germans. Indeed they believed
that Austria was little more than a phantom country. Since
I9I8,
there
had been a widespread feeling in the population that a truncated and
independent little "German Austria" had no further
raison d'etre-that
it was neither economically nor politically viable
(lebensfahig).
In all
political parties but especially on the
volkisch
Right and among the
Social Democrats (a lbeit for different reasons), the
grossdeutsch
tradi–
tion of seeking union with the German Reich remained strong. Even the
Christian-Social Party, while more resistant to such notions, did stress
the German character of Austria, and as late as March
I938
its leader,
the last pre-war Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, assured
Hitler's emissary of his unconditional loyalty to the concept of
Volks–
deutschtum.
There were also other factors which eroded the strength of
internal resistance to Nazism. Democratic traditions were singularly
weak in Austria, and middle class obsession with the "red peril"-nour–
ished in turn by Austro-Marxist doctrines of c1ass-war-prevented any
consistent bourgeois collaboration with the Socialists. The polarization
and violence of the inter-war years as well as mass unemployment had
no less of a demoralizing effect. Above all, anti-Semitism attained a new
fever pitch at the end of the
I930S,
offering a crucial integrating device,
an ideological glue not only for the Nazis but
within
the pan-German
and Christian-Social parties and also
between
them.
All the bourgeois parties in Austria as well as the ultra-conservatives
had for more than fifty years associated Jews with such hated ideologies
as
laissez-faire
liberalism, Marxism, pacifism, or internationalism. They
were also blamed for aspects of "decadent" modernism in the visual arts,
music, and literature. Anti-Semites from the Right and Left, whether reli–
gious or national, whether from the
Deutscher Turnerbund
and Alpine
cycling clubs or from associations of Viennese artisans and small busi–
nessmen, continued to regard the Jews as a threat to Germandom: they
were presented as subversive traitors, as cosmopolitan bankers and cap–
italists, as a "parasitic," "usurious," "materialistic," "alien" cancer on
the German (Austrian)
Volk.
Moreover, the high economic and social
status of the
190,000
Jews still living in Austria in
I934 (92
percent of
them in Vienna) provided powerful material incentives for the army of
indigenous anti-Semites who had every reason to believe they would gain
economically from the persecution of the Jewish population. The anti–
Semitic frenzy unleashed after the
Anschluss,
the massively accelerated
