ROBERT S. WISTRICH
361
The prodigal son, Adolf Hitler, returning to his Austrian
Heimat,
had
grimly set out after I938 to destroy any residual Austrian national traits
or separateness-in sharp contrast to his great Prussian predecessor Otto
von Bismarck. Although he had expelled Austria from the affairs of the
German nation in I866, the Iron Chancellor nonetheless sought to pre–
serve its territorial integrity and status as a Great Power. On the other
hand, Hitler's work of destruction would produce the opposite effect,
encouraging the gradual rebirth of Austrian patriotism after seven years
of German Nazi rule. By I945 there was a widespread feeling among
postwar Austrians that they were indeed Austrians and not Germans.
The seven dark years after I938 would provide a macabre consumma–
tion of Karl Kraus's prophecy that Austria was fated to be "a proving–
ground for world destruction"
(Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs).
But "Old Austria" was more than simply one of the gates to Hell. It
was also a remarkable hothouse for modernist cultural trends and inno–
vative movements ranging from the
Sezession,
literary and visual expres–
sionism, atonal music, psychoanalysis, and linguistic positivism to the
economics of marginal utility or Austro-Marxism as well as autonomism
and political Zionism. In particular, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was
an unrivaled laboratory for the theory and practice of nationality strug–
gles. However, while Magyars, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbo-Croats,
or Slovenes crystallized new forms of national consciousness and culti–
vated their national languages as symbols of collective identity, no coher–
ent Austrian (as opposed to German national) consciousness was
consolidated in the Empire before I9I4 . Most German Austrians con–
tinued to identify with the Habsburg Imperial State as representing the
existing framework of authority (especially the supra-national Army and
the revered person of the Emperor). But in contrast to Hungary or Ger–
many there was no consensus around a civic Austrian identity which
could unite all the citizens of Austria into one political nation.
One of the most striking examples of a politician and publicist who
tried to overcome this paralysis and develop a supra-ethnic Austrian
identity was Rabbi Dr. Joseph Samuel Bloch, editor of the Jewish news–
paper
Osterreichische Wochenschrift.
Between I884 and I920, Bloch's
weekly passionately argued for a common civic patriotism that would
effectively unify all ethnic groups of Austria into citizens of a pluralis–
tic, tolerant, multi-national state. Bloch was a Galician rabbi who had
first come to prominence in the early I880s for his courageous fight
against the blood libel directed at Talmudic Jews, an accusation which
had been revived by a German Catholic professor of Semitic languages
at the University of Prague, August Rohling. In I886 Bloch co-founded
