In Europe (11 page)

In his early years, Schönerer had been a progressive landowner, the founder of schools and libraries, a father to his subordinates. He had worked closely with Victor Adler and other progressive liberals. Later, however, like many liberals, he became obsessed with the idea that ‘his’ superior Germans were being besieged within the Habsburg Empire by a circle of Slavic peoples. The only real liberals, he felt, were German liberals; only they were the bearers of the true cultural heritage. He had the words
Heil, Bismarck!
chiselled in huge runes on boulders at his estate.

In anti-Semitism, too, he was exceptionally fanatical. He demanded that Jews be expelled from most professions, institutions of learning and the newspapers – yea, from the German people as a whole: ‘
Durch Reinheit zur Einheit
’. On 18 February, 1884, at a party meeting, he became the first political leader in Europe to have posted a sign saying ‘
JUDEN
IST DER EINTRITT VERBOTEN
’. Hundreds of clubs – gymnastics, music, mountaineering, cycling, student, walking and book clubs – followed his example.

In the long run, Schönerer's movement developed into a kind of pseudo-Germanic cult with symbols and rituals of its own: runes, ‘
heil
’ salutes, solstice celebrations, bonfires, battle songs, all under the leadership of a single führer. Before being allowed to marry, his followers first had to prove their Aryan descent and ‘biological’ health. Anyone not wishing to contribute to the ‘
Reinheit des deutschen Blutes
’ was a ‘traitor to the German people’ and a ‘
Judenknecht
’.

In the end, Schönerer went too far in his singularly un-Viennese fervour. In 1888, he and a few political associates barged into the editorial offices of the
Neue Wiener Tageblatt
, destroyed the presses of ‘this Jewish rag’ and beat up the editors. In liberal Vienna this could not go unpunished. Schönerer was sentenced to prison and lost his right to vote or hold office for five years; after that, he spent his time primarily in agitating on the margins of political life. But his influence remained considerable: anti-Semitism as a political goal, mass nationalism, blood, soil and German mysticism, the concept of
völkische
art, even the
Führerprinzip
– Central Europe was infected for good.

The third Viennese figure to play a formative role in Europe was the Christian Democrat populist Karl Lüger, a caretaker's son. He had a perfect ear for the sentiments of the average German-Viennese citizen, the common man, the shopkeeper afraid of industrialisation and whatever else the modern age brought with it. As the city's mayor, he was also an early pioneer of urban socialism. He had a great many new schools built, he set up a municipal gas, water and electric company and an excellent tram network, he organised a food programme for undernourished children and was far ahead of his time when it came to public housing and urban renewal.

Karl Lüger was a master of public relations; a term which, had it only existed in that day, would have fit him to a tee. He kept himself unsullied by the corruption within Vienna's administrative machinery; even his most fervent opponents had to admit that his behaviour was unimpeachable. In everything he did it was clear that he loved the role
of the good-hearted, jovial city father who showed up at countless birthday celebrations and jubilees wearing his chain of office, a mayor so concerned with ‘the little man’ that, in his own words, he wished he ‘could place a hansom cab at the disposal of every citizen who has had a few drinks too many’.

In his populism, Lüger went further than most Christian Democrat politicians. After Schönerer's fall, he immediately adopted the slogans that had brought Schönerer such success: Aryan purity, the nationalisation of big companies that had ‘fallen into Jewish hands’, the struggle against capitalism, down with the ‘Jewish press’ and modern art. In this regard, Lüger's vitriol was legendary. In 1894 he shouted to the national assembly that ‘anti-Semitism will only meet its demise when the last Jew has met his’. And when confronted with his own statement that he ‘could not care less whether Jews were shot or hanged’, Lüger corrected his critic immediately: ‘Shot or beheaded! That's what I said!’

In part, such popular opinions shared common roots with those in Berlin: the stock market crash of 1873, jealousy of more successful Jewish rivals, the longing for a scapegoat, an aversion to the flood of immigrants, and a fear of the modern age, seemingly personified by the Jews. In conservative, Catholic Vienna, Jewishness was synonymous with a particular mindset: freethinking, internationally oriented, nonconformist, without ties to church or nation – everything, in other words, the Viennese lower-middle class despised.

The Jews’ non-national character gave rise to bad blood as well. They took no part in the sophisticated power plays between nationalities; they were really the only ones who had no nationality at all. Nor were they anxious for such a status, for they had no need of it. As Hannah Arendt rightly noted, the Jews in Austria were the darlings of the state par excellence: ‘Thus a perfect harmony of interests was established between the powerful Jews and the state.’ And in his celebrated
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
, Carl Schorske wrote: ‘The emperor and the liberal system offered the Jews a status without desiring from them a nationality; they became the supranational people of a multinational state, the only ones to follow in the footsteps of the old aristocracy.’ Nationalists such as Lüger and Schönerer wanted to see a 180-degree change: they hated the multinational state, and above all they hated the state's multinational darlings.

The undertone of Lüger's anti-Semitism, however, was different from Schönerer's. Despite its vociferous nature, it was more opportunistic than doctrinaire, more social than racial. Lüger remained the cordial Viennese who enjoyed sitting around the table with the same Jewish capitalists he hounded in the city council. ‘I decide who's a Jew and who isn't.’ That was Lüger.

In 1922, a decade after Lüger's death, the Viennese journalist Hugo Bettauer published
Die Stadt ohne Juden: ein Roman von übermorgen
(The City Without Jews: a Novel for the Day After Tomorrow), a satire of antiSemitism. Bettauer described a Vienna from which the Jews had suddenly disappeared. There would be no more bankers to advise non-Jews on their speculations, non-Jewish women would lose all interest in fashion because they no longer needed to compete with Jewish women, prostitutes with drunken pimps could no longer be comforted with presents from their soft-hearted Jewish admirers. Three years later, Bettauer, a friend of Karl Kraus, was shot and killed by a student, then forgotten.

The response to all this – Zionism – was, predictably enough, invented in Vienna as well. Why should the Jews continue to refuse national status? Would they not be much better off actually pursuing such a status? This was the theory developed by the liberal Jewish leader Theodor Herzl around the turn of the century: the time had come to set up a new Jewish state. At the same time, Herzl hoped this would be the salvation of liberalism: his new Jewish state would be, above all, a liberal one.

Herzl came from a wealthy, enlightened family in which religion amounted to little more than a ‘pious family memory’. In his younger years he considered himself a citizen of Vienna like any other, and during his student days even joined an outspokenly nationalistic
Burschenschaft
. When his fraternity club began gravitating towards anti-Semitism, he offered his resignation on the basis of his Jewish background, and his ‘love of freedom’. But he was deeply offended when his ‘brothers’ dropped him with no further ado. As a correspondent for the
Neue Freie Presse
in Paris, where he reported on the Dreyfus affair, he heard the modern, cultured French shouting ‘
À mort! À mort les juifs!
’, and realised that assimilation itself could not safeguard Jewish dignity. Herzl decided to turn things around. In the past, the Jews had always sought solutions in the outside world. Now they had to understand that the promised land was
in them
, in their own minds, their own wills. ‘The promised land lies there where we will bear it,’ he wrote. ‘The Jews who desire it will have their own state, and will deserve it as well.’

In 1896 he wrote his most important piece of work,
Der Judenstaat
–
An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question
. Support began pouring in from such major Jewish philanthropists as the German baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Rothschilds, while his speeches also drew an unparalleled enthusiastic response from the Jews in the ghettos. ‘This is no longer the elegant Dr Herzl from Vienna, this is a royal heir to King David, risen from the grave,’ crowed the writer Ben Ami after the first Zionist congress in 1897.

But what did Theodor Herzl really want? In the National Library I ploughed my way through a yellowed copy of
Der Judenstaat
, and several of his other writings. What strikes one is the way in which Herzl tried again and again to make this dream state attractive to poor Eastern European Jews as well. Just as Schönerer, through his stories about German tribes and rites, had used history to drum up a nation, just as Lüger had harkened back to the medieval Catholic order, so too Herzl repeatedly referred to the mighty Israel of King David. And, like his foes, he also linked that past to the modern age. The International Socialists dreamed of an eight hour working day, so Herzl's Jewish state would have a seven hour working day, reflected in the white national flag with its seven golden stars. ‘Humane, well lighted and healthy schools’ would be built everywhere. Much of the work would be done by ‘workers’ brigades’ of young people. Hebrew would not be the main language, for there would be a great many languages. The rabbinate would be respected, but also expected to keep to the temples, as the army to its barracks. Although he recognised their propaganda value, Palestine and Jerusalem were not Herzl's first choice.

The conclusion I arrived at was strange, but almost inevitable: the Promised Land of which Israel's pioneers dreamed was, in its deepest sense, not so much a Jewish Palestine as a liberal Vienna. In Herzl's utopia, there was no Star of David.

And finally we arrive at the anonymous observer to all this: the daydreamer, the homeless pauper, the hopeless painter Adolf Hitler. He spent six years in Vienna, from September 1907 until May 1913, between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-four. Without a doubt, the city made an enormous impression on him. According to his future assistant Albert Speer, decades later Hitler could still draw the Ring with all its great monuments, to scale, by heart.

‘Adolf Hitler, as he was known [to friends and colleagues], did not particularly stand out amid the drab army of Viennese workers and the unemployed, neither by reason of any special talent, nor by reason of any lack of scruples, any criminality or demonic trait.’ This is how the historian Brigitte Haman summarises the conclusions of her impressive search for traces of Adolf Hitler in Vienna. In those days, she says, he could not have been much more than yet another hot-tempered eccentric, talking everyone's ear off and idolising the German people. No one had yet noticed the ‘compelling power’ of his regard. In his Viennese days, little or nothing could be seen of anti-Semitism on his part. For in spite of his avid political interest, he had only one goal: to become an architect.

None of this, however, rules out the fact that many of Hitler's ideas were drawn from the Vienna of that day. In his later views, the
fin de siècle
politics of Vienna are found everywhere. Schönerer's ideology and the cult that surrounded him were transferred almost intact to Hitler's National Socialist movement, up to and including the
Führerprinzip
and the street violence. His histrionic style, too, was probably borrowed almost directly from Schönerer. Years later, he would tell his table companions that he was a true ‘Schönererian’, and that he had come to Vienna as an art student with a great antipathy for Lüger. Only later did that antipathy turn to admiration. The roots of Hitler's radical racism, therefore, are probably best attributed to Schönerer.

What Hitler learned from Lüger, however, was at least as important: the political theatrics, the key role of public relations, and above all the crucial importance of social policies and major public-works projects. Demagoguery alone was never enough: people had to be governed as well. Hitler learned from Lüger, as he admitted in a speech much later, that ‘great works can secure the dominion’ of a movement. ‘If the words no longer reverberate, then the stones must speak.’

Is there anything left in Austria of this young Viennese eccentric? A few hours by train from Vienna lies Leonding, once a small village,
now a suburb of Linz, with a village square and a bakery-cum-bistro where the local ladies spend their mornings in gossip. The American historian John Lukacs heard about the grave right after 1945 – friends of his who had recently been released from Mauthausen had picnicked near it – and he told me it was still there. But when I see the snowy churchyard I can barely imagine it. Almost all the graves are shiny and new, making it look as though an entire generation has died in this village in the last few years. The graves are usually emptied here after ten years, the poster with regulations says, and I almost abandon hope.

I search the graveyard systematically, scanning all the Fritzes, Franzes, Aloises and Theresas lying here. After forty-five minutes of ploughing through the snow, after I have covered almost the entire churchyard, I stumble upon it. The strange thing is that I feel no satisfaction, only a shock. The stone with the big black cross stands a little awry. An enormous pine tree is growing from the grave. The enamel portraits of the deceased are all too familiar. With half-frozen fingers I jot down:
Alois Hitler, k.-u.-k.k. Zollamts Oberoffizial I.P. und Hausbesitzer, gest. 3 Jänner 1903 im 65. Lebensjahr. Dessen Gattin Frau Klara Hitler, gest. Dez. 1907 i. 47 Lebj. RIP
. The stone allows no further inscription for her.