And as I reached the country's border,
I felt an inner tremble growing
It moved within my deepest breast
And wet with tears my eyes were glowing
Yet when I heard the German tongue
A strange mood overtook my soul
It seemed as if my very heart
Though bleeding, filled with joy, was whole
Heinrich Heine, A Winter's Tale, Caput 1
Isak Schrečker, the Jewish father of the composer Franz Schreker, had been court photographer in Budapest to Franz Joseph, King of Hungary and Emperor of Austria, as well as to his son and heir Crown Prince Rudolf, since obtaining the royal seal of approval in 1871. In 1874, he divorced his Jewish wife, converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Ignácz Ferenz Schrecker before placing an advertisement in the paper in search of a new, presumably non-Jewish, wife. The success of this venture must have startled even him: with his marriage to the penniless god-daughter of Princess Eleonore Maria Windisch-Graetz, his new wife, Eleonore von Clossmann, was related to the families Thurn und Taxis, Fürstenberg, Lobkowitz and Waldstein, Austria's most blue-blooded aristocrats. Only a decade earlier, such a union would have been unthinkable, and seen in the context of the time, the marriage demonstrated the speed and degree of acceptance of Jewish assimilation.
Isak had been born in 1834 in Bohemia, which at the time was Austrian. Typical of Jews during these early days of Liberalism, he had become an early adopter of new technologies and by the late 1860s had based himself in Budapest where, in addition to royalty, he accumulated an impressive list of celebrity clients.
Equally characteristic of this new age of social emancipation was the fact that in 1912 Wilhelm Pickl von Witkenberg, the son of Eleonore von Clossmann's older sister, would compile a notorious directory of aristocratic families who had intermarried with Jews: Weimarer historisch-genealogen Taschenbuch des gesamten Adels jehudäischen Ursprungs – or simply known as the Semigotha.
As we shall see later, Franz Schreker,1 born to Eleonore and Ignácz in 1878 during a family sojourn in Monaco, would be the object of virulent anti-Semitic attacks in the immediate lead-up to Hitler. Schreker, whose works are only today returning to opera houses and concert halls, was a central figure in pre-Nazi musical life; the number of performances of his operas came close to those of Richard Strauss and, in the early 1920s, frequently overtook them. He was thus one of Germany's most performed living composers in addition to being a highly regarded conductor who had given the premieres of many important works, including Schoenberg's Gurrelieder in 1913. He was accorded the ultimate German accolade when in 1919 one of Frankfurt's most influential critics, Paul Bekker, announced that Schreker – among a number of other prestigious German opera composers including Richard Strauss – was the only credible successor to Richard Wagner. In 1920 Schreker left Vienna to take up the directorship of Berlin's Music Academy. In 1932, he joined his friend and colleague Arnold Schoenberg at the Prussian Academy of Arts, where he held a composition master class. The names of Schreker's pupils, both in Vienna and Berlin, represent a roll-call of central European musical life during the 1920s and 1930s. He was unquestionably one of Germany's cultural giants.
Schreker had nevertheless been the object of frequent anti-Semitic vilification even before the Nazi dictatorship of 1933, forcing his move from Berlin's Music Academy to the Prussian Academy of Arts. With Hitler's arrival, there followed a ban on Schreker as conductor and teacher along with a performance ban on his works. His complete removal from public life, his inability to emigrate and a vindictive cancellation of his promised pension resulted in a stroke that proved fatal only a few days short of his 56th birthday in 1934. He thus became Hitler's first high-profile musical victim.
Schreker, whose father Ignácz had died when Franz was still a boy of nine, most likely never set foot in a synagogue. With a Christian mother, he was by Jewish law not even a Jew. His musical education had been paid for by Princess Windisch-Graetz, and as a young man he had played the organ in his local parish church in Vienna. When in 1933 he stood accused of ‘racially’ being a Jew under Nazi law, his admittedly feeble defence was that his cousin had written the Semigotha. Yet when he completed his most popular opera, Der Schatzgräber,2 on 12 November 1918, the day that Austria, now bereft of its former empire, proclaimed itself a republic, he scribbled on the bottom of the final page of his manuscript that his most fervent hope was that his homeland would soon be annexed by Germany. It was a hope that would be fulfilled with tragic consequences only 20 years later.
Jews on a Journey
In the preface to the 1937 edition of his 1927 essay Juden auf Wanderschaft,3 the writer Joseph Roth, living in Paris, could conceivably have had both Isak Schrečker and Franz Schreker in mind while writing his attack on assimilated and inter-married German Jews – an attack that underlined the delusionary aspects of what they believed to be fulfilled aspirations:
The German Jew is absolutely not an Eastern European Jew. He's forgotten how to suffer, pray and up-root himself. He's only good at working – and even this is now denied him. … In any event, these émigré German Jews [in reference to the influx of German Jews in Paris after 1933] constitute a new nation: they've forgotten how to be Jews and must laboriously re-learn Jewishness. On the other hand, they're equally incapable of forgetting that they're German and cannot escape their fundamental Germanness. They're like snails cursed to carry two shells on their backs. They can't deny either their Germanness or their Jewishness since they can't lie. Ghastly how the outside-world thinks in lazy worn-out pigeonholes and stereotypes! It demands to know where the traveller is moving from rather than where he's moving to. However, for the traveller himself, the goal is far more important than the point of departure.4
The main body of this essay, originally written in 1927, dealt with Roth's view of what he saw as the unwholesome eagerness with which Jews acquired ‘Germanness’ and its ensuing delusions: ‘When Jews finally arrive, they do not, as they are so often accused, assimilate too slowly, but sadly, rather too quickly. … They become diplomats and journalists, mayors, nobles, police detectives, and bank directors, and other assorted pillars of a solid and decent society. Only very few become revolutionaries.‘5 And again, ‘The impoverished Jew is the most conservative of all impoverished creatures. He is a guarantor for the safeguarding of social order. The Jews by and large form a class of solid citizens albeit with their own racial, national and religious idiosyncrasies.‘6
The misapprehension of being considered totally German despite having a single Jewish parent, as was the case with Schreker, is anticipated by the music critic Eduard Hanslick 40 years earlier in his memoirs from 1894. Hanslick would be the object of some of Wagner's most unpleasant anti-Semitic attacks. He faces them head on:
That Wagner managed to smuggle me into his pamphlet Jewishness in Music disturbed me less. Wagner didn't like Jews and therefore assumed everyone who didn't like him must logically be Jewish. I would have felt myself flattered to be burned at the stake alongside the likes of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn by Pater Arbuez Wagner;7 sadly this privilege would have to remain denied to me as my father and all of his ancestors, at least as far back as I can trace them, were the sons of staunch Catholic farmers. In addition, they came from an area where the only Jews they would have encountered would have been tinkers plying their trade door-to-door.8
These comments demand more clarification. Hanslick specifically mentions his father but not his mother, Karoline Kisch, who was the daughter of wealthy Jewish merchants. Under Jewish law, this would have actually made him Jewish, should he have wished to count himself as such
As Heinrich Heine and Felix Mendelssohn demonstrated, the choice facing German-speaking Jews at the beginning of the nineteenth century appeared to be one between full participation in German cultural life or continued religious adherence and exclusion. Wagner was only the first to articulate his paranoia that with conversions, assimilation and inter-marriage, Jews had masterminded an insidious deceit of racial camouflage that would eventually undermine German identity and its innate moral character.
German
How Jews in German-speaking Europe would become such enthusiastic chauvinists in the cause of German culture, particularly when seen through the prism of the Holocaust, demands a good deal of explanation. Jews would only achieve social and political emancipation with the creation of Europe's two German-speaking States: the German Reich (Empire), headed by the Prussian King in 1871, and the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, headed by the Austrian Emperor in 1867. Emancipation was a result of guarantees made by the freshly drawn-up constitutions of both. It corresponded to the prevalent mood that Europe's many diverse people, with their various languages and religious confessions, were allowed self-determination within the structures of a uniquely individual nation state, such as the newly created German Reich. In Austria-Hungary, rights were accorded so that no cultural or ethnic community within the multi-cultural dual monarchy could gain an advantage over any of the others. Thus the German Reich along with Austria-Hungary guaranteed the rights of confessional diversity, and their new constitutions meant that Jews, long denied the rights accorded to other German-speakers, could finally become fully active participants in the culture, language and music of the German-speaking people. To Jews, who had lived among Germans for two thousand years, it was the long-awaited entry into the most élite, educated and cultivated ‘club’ on earth. Membership was an honour bestowed on only a few; after millennia of being kept outside, they embraced their new identity with an enthusiasm that frequently resulted in an exuberant rejection of their Jewishness. To sceptical anti-Semites, such exuberance appeared not only vulgar but potentially oppressive. Reactionary forces, along with the Roman Catholic Church, meant that rights guaranteed by the constitution would still need to be fought through the Austrian Parliament individually. For example, a Parliamentary rejection of an imposed concordat between Rome and Vienna in 1868 allowed Jews access to education and access to teaching positions, while the intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in Austria was not made legal until 1869.9 Yet Parliament and the Habsburgs stood firm in their support, and once these essential rights were won, there were no theoretical barriers to Jews integrating into every part of Austrian society.
Why ‘German’ does not mean ‘from Germany’
In the English-speaking, post-Hitler world, we see what we assume to be a clearly defined state called Germany populated by a collection of Europeans calling themselves ‘Germans’. We speak of ‘the Germans’ as we speak of ‘the French’ or ‘the English’ and never assume that the confluence of state, culture and people should ever have been a subject of debate or misunderstanding. In today's transient and global society, we shrug our shoulders and assume that if one is born within the geographical borders of a country called Germany or France and speaks the language reflected in the name of the country, then one is obviously German or French. But ‘Germany’ as a place and, more importantly, ‘German’ as an adjective were different, and it was the insecurity surrounding what it was to be German that culminated in many of the horrors of the twentieth century. Only after the defeat of Hitler in 1945 has ‘German’ come to mean ‘from Germany’.
What's more, when we speak or write of ‘German’ achievement, it is usually assumed that it took place somewhere within the regions of today's Germany. It probably never occurs to us that disparate German thinkers, musicians, writers, adventurers, politicians and artists should come from anywhere else. That such ‘German’ cultural and intellectual icons as Immanuel Kant and E. T. A. Hoffmann should hail from present-day Russia, or Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler from the Czech Republic; Arthur Schopenhauer, Günter Grass or the physicist Max Born from Poland; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, from Hungary or Walter von der Vogelweide from Italy, seems contradictory – or even contrary. Why would such prominent individuals call themselves ‘German’ when all of them quite obviously hail from countries with very impressive cultural legacies of their own?
The Germany we know today is a very different country from the Germany of the nineteenth century and bears little resemblance to the Germany of earlier times. Today, it is a neatly defined country that covers the bit of central Europe occupied by those German speakers not in Switzerland and Austria. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, Germanic Europe was not a single unified country but a network of independent fiefdoms, principalities, bishoprics and kingdoms, often reaching far into neighbouring regions. Nor was Austria the tidy German-speaking Alpine Republic of today, but a sprawling empire consisting of Slavs, Italians and Hungarians ruled by the German-speaking House of Habsburg. Austria's German-speakers were a volatile minority; German was the official language throughout most of the Empire and Austria's Germans, known as German-Austrians, saw themselves as being part of the greater German nation. Most of Austria's assimilated Jews, whether living in Hungary or in the Slavic regions, spoke German as a first language.
For centuries, the view was maintained that as long as the principal European nation states (France, the tsarist Russian Empire and Britain) could keep the Germans in their checkerboard of competing microstates, the status quo of a thousand years was maintained and the European balance of power was forever guaranteed. It meant that the largest single linguistic unit on the continent could join together or break apart as the situations and interests of the major nation states demanded. As an arrangement, it suited nearly everybody except the vast majority of German-speaking Europeans. Urgency was added to the need for German unification following the Napoleonic wars and a perception that only by living together in a single country could Germans provide a reliable defence against future foreign incursions. Despite a bewildering array of competing interests, Prince von Bismarck completed a partial unification in 1871 placing most, but not all, of Europe's German states under the Prussian king. For reasons that are explained later, it excluded the German-speaking holdings of the Austrian emperor.
Bismarck's Prussian Germany nonetheless provided more than a bulwark against future marauding French. Indeed, the realisation that the new country would be condemned to defend borders on nearly all sides began to add a degree of paranoia which itself turned aggressive. By 1914, it seemed to be aching for a fight so that it could confirm its geopolitical position as the most important country in Europe. With enormous wealth and a population that was the same as the United States, there was no reason to suppose that Germany couldn't become the leading country in the world.
After the First World War, the French understandably saw great advantages in trying to return to the pre-Bismarck network of competing German states. France had little enthusiasm for its robust neighbour that had been cobbled into a single political unit within the living memory of most of France's ruling élite. By the end of the war in 1918, the German-speaking people of Europe were still divided between the two principal states of Austria and Germany. The French intended that the occupied Rhineland would break away and become yet another separate German-speaking republic. With Austria's empire wiped off the map, there was concern about what might happen should its remaining rump of German speakers be folded into its much larger neighbour to the north. That such moves towards unification were thwarted by the French and Americans was deplored not only by the composer Franz Schreker, but also by millions of Austrians like him – Jews and non-Jews alike. To many Europeans, it was illogical to support national self-determination, while not merging these two unequal German republics. Indeed, it was seen by German speakers as vengeful, ‘victors’ justice’ imposed through the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war with Germany, and Saint-Germain, a separate treaty settled with Austria. The conditions of these treaties were harsh and harboured the unspoken French desire that inflation and economic chaos would result in many of the constituent parts of Bismarck's project splitting up. They nearly did.
Twenty years later, most Europeans, non-Germans and Germans alike, were resigned to the view that Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938 was simply fulfilling an inevitable cultural and national destiny. Within a decade after the Anschluß Austria and a large chunk of Eastern Germany under Soviet control returned to the status quo of separate German states. In the case of Austria, its much longed-for fusion with Germany had proved a disastrous union that only underlined the degree to which history had fundamentally determined separate European destinies for these two very different German-speaking nations. After 1918, however, many Austrians seeking German cultural identity within a distinctively German nation state felt betrayed by history and insurmountable political forces. It created a sense of being German that often exceeded anything found in Germany itself. One of the most obvious exponents of this malaise among disaffected Austrians was Adolf Hitler – but quite a few others were the children and grandchildren of recently assimilated Jews.
The Congress of Vienna
The beginnings of this complex story go back a century, and bring us to the years following the final defeat of Napoleon. In 1814, Prince von Metternich, Austria's Foreign Minister, invited representatives from all of Europe's 200 sovereign States to convene at what became known as the Congress of Vienna. Despite the large numbers represented, the only significant negotiators at the Congress remained the principal European powers: Austria, Prussia, Russia, Great Britain and the restored monarchy of France. The Congress, which met over a period of two years, did not so much attempt to re-establish the pre-Napoleonic status quo as to divide the post-Napoleonic spoils of war.
In 1806, Napoleon had created or changed the status of a number of German states along France's eastern frontier by joining several of them together to form new kingdoms or duchies. Each new state was accorded a higher status than previously held so that their new rulers would become dependable allies against the Habsburgs. This so-called ‘Rhine Federation’ was not just a military alliance, but also brought with it the ‘Code Napoleon’, which resulted in a remodelling and liberalisation of both social and legal systems. Thus, the expectations of these states at the Congress of Vienna were high. The advantages they had gained could not simply be declared null and void. For the aristocratic old order, however, the aim was a return to the near-feudal system of pre-Napoleon times.
In order to understand how Europe organised itself, it is important to register the difference between a ‘state’ and a ‘nation’: a ‘nation’ is what in German is called ‘Volk’ or a people. A nation is perceived as homogenous and normally shares a common language from which springs a common culture and, often, a common religious faith. A ‘state’ is the political structure that is mounted on top of either a single nation or group of nations. It is the political unit we call today ‘a country’. A ‘nation state’ is the convergence of a single nation into its dedicated state. European leaders at the time of Prince Metternich's Vienna Congress saw no apparent contradiction in political states being imposed upon any number of diverse nations. For this reason, Metternich and his fellow reactionary aristocratic rulers opposed the dreams of single-nation statehood which was growing more attractive as an idea among the many smaller nations spread throughout various historic, pre-existing states. In Metternich's view, a Europe of numerous nation states could not guarantee any meaningful balance of power. It may have been historically inevitable for France, tsarist Russia and England to be nation states, but it was an arrangement that was felt could never work for German-speaking central Europe.
For Metternich and the old order, it was far better to continue having subjects rallying around something inclusive, such as an emperor, rather than citizens rallying around something as exclusive as a state. After all, the French Revolution had shown how badly things could go when the nation gained control of the state.
Prussia, Austria and the Rhine Federation
By the end of the Congress of Vienna, German-ruled Europe had settled into three fundamental geopolitical units: Prussia and Austria constituted two of these and stretched respectively from the Slavic north-east and south-east towards the third unit which consisted of the cluster of states that previously formed Napoleon's Rhine-Federation. From 1815, they all regrouped as the German Federation with its proto-parliament called the Bundestag, a two-house assembly in Frankfurt which met at the palace of Thurn and Taxis. In truth it was hardly more than a talking shop of querulous fiefdoms and mini-states all pushing and shoving for advantage with the biggest players, Austria and Prussia, in the upper ‘Presidium’ making the major decisions.
The Bundestag representatives weren't elected and it was very far from being ‘democratic’ in the modern sense. As unlikely as it may seem today, these various states, including Prussia, muddled along under the respected but distant Austrian emperor who historically had been the inclusive figurehead of all the German-speaking people of Europe. Napoleon's defeat of the Austrian Emperor Franz II and the dissolution of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire in 1806 still left the Austrian Emperor with an historic entitlement unmatched by other German rulers. The Holy Roman Empire had existed since 962 and had maintained its seat in Vienna since the sixteenth century, though it had long ceased to be either ‘holy’ or ‘Roman’. Even by 1806, it was an anachronism.
One bit of diplomatic horse-trading to come out of the Congress of Vienna was a foretaste of what a unification of the German mini-states under Prussia might become: it was agreed to hand the Rhineland to Prussia as a sop for agreeing to let Russia take Warsaw. Significantly, this included the Ruhrgebiet, an area rich in mining and industry that guaranteed Prussia great wealth and allowed it in the coming decades to rise above rival German states. The result of this decision, added to the other regions that already made up the patchwork of Prussia, was the near encirclement of the independent states of the northern and central German Federation. As a purely German State, Prussia, despite its smaller share of Slavic holdings in the north-east, now far exceeded Austria, whose realm reached into Italy, Hungary, and deep into the Slavic East.
Biedermeier Life and the Revolution of 1848
The years 1815 to March 1848 are often referred to as the ‘Biedermeier Age’, portrayed usually as a period of comfortable bourgeois self-satisfaction. Indeed, the very name of ‘Biedermeier’ was concocted by the satirist Ludwig Eichrodt as a composite of two smug figures named ‘Biedermann’ and ‘Bummelmeier’ (‘Bieder’ in German means ‘conventional and stuffy’). Nevertheless, the Biedermeier years were anything but stolid and comfortable. The period immediately following the Congress of Vienna often evokes cosy images of ‘Hausmusik’ and intimate performances of Schubert Lieder and chamber works; yet Hausmusik, or musical evenings in private homes, were about the largest assemblies allowed by Metternich's secret police. Schubert himself was not as innocuous as one might believe. He occasionally used coded metaphors to spice up the texts of some of his best-known Lieder.10 Eduard Hanslick, Wagner's subsequent bête noir, moved to Vienna from Prague in 1846 and recalled the two years before the revolution of March 1848 as offering only a diet of empty virtuoso recitals; intellectual and artistic life had stagnated. The secret police made political discussion impossible and censorship of all publications became obsessive. Metternich's suppression of national ambitions by keeping all debate under tight surveillance was a wilful misunderstanding of the aspirations of the growing middle classes and it inflamed rather than controlled the national mood. Yet powerful voices were being heard. The genteel age, peopled by genteel ‘Biedermeier-Burgers’ who were themselves mindful of recent revolutions in France and the Netherlands, were heading inevitably towards a very un-genteel revolution.
As revolutions go, the Revolution of 1848 was a peculiar affair. Though bloody and by appearances initially successful, it was ultimately unable to achieve its primary objectives of liberalising either society or the economy. It also largely failed in its most important ambition, which was the unification of the German Federation into a single German state, under a constitutional monarch. At its conclusion, exhausted revolutionaries managed at least the abdication of the feeble-minded Emperor Ferdinand I, Metternich's pawn for the past dozen years, and had him replaced by his 18-year-old nephew, ‘Franzl’. Metternich fled to London, though three years later, with most of the important revolutionary leaders executed or imprisoned and the others compliantly subsumed within various local assemblies, he returned to Vienna as advisor to Austria's fresh-faced 21-year-old Emperor, now known as Franz Joseph I.
A short-lived but important achievement to grow out of the revolution was the freely-elected National Assembly or Nationalversammlung that met from March 1848 until its dissolution in May/June 1849. Like the ‘Bundestag’, it also met in Frankfurt, but at the Paulskirche (St Paul's Church). It was an elected assembly of lawyers, professors, intellectuals and idealists, and provided a forum in which the shape and nature of a united German State could be debated.
The complexities of the debate should not be underestimated. The notion that disparate German states and far-flung German enclaves in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and other corners of Europe could somehow join together to become a single state was fraught with conflict. Though the rise of France under Napoleon had made it obvious to everyone except the delegates at the Congress of Vienna that a united German state was a necessary survival tactic, the diplomacy needed to create this was more than even the bien-pensant members of the Paulskirche Assembly could achieve. Germany was simply not the tidy country then that it appears today. In the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘German’ was quite literally everywhere in Europe that wasn't Slavic or Latinate. The English king was represented in the German Bundestag by the House of Hanover, as were countless other non-German holdings which historically had ended up under the rule of various German heads. This extremely wide concept of ‘German’ extended beyond Britain and into the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
Unification debates in the Paulskirche led to discussion of the pros and cons of a ‘Greater’ or ‘Lesser’ German solution. The ‘Greater’ solution included Austria and its many non-German holdings; the ‘Lesser’ solution excluded Austria altogether, which meant losing Vienna, the seat of the Habsburg Emperor and until then, the figurehead of all that was German. Defenders of the ‘Greater’ solution, who simply could not envisage a unified German state without such central players as Bohemia and Austria, toyed with the idea of subsuming non-German Austrian and Prussian holdings as satellites of a Greater Germany. Ultimately, however, it was clear that only with Austria excluded could the resulting enterprise be purely German. The price to pay would be high, so another solution was put forward to hive off Austria's German holdings, and allow them to join the united German state while excluding the non-German holdings altogether. This was not an arrangement that the Habsburgs were prepared to accept.
Thus the Lesser German Solution eventually won through, and with Austria excluded from the newly mapped out German State, the National Assembly offered the Imperial German crown to the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in April 1849. He refused, since he did not see it as a gift that was the people's to give. He would only accept the title if offered by other ruling families within the German Federation. As he is apocryphally reported to have put it, the offer ‘should come from God rather than the gutter’.
With the king's refusal and plans for a unified Germany in disarray, the Paulskirche National Assembly, without an army to enforce its will, was powerless. Friedrich Wilhelm unilaterally called a Prussian Parliament into being (backed by the Prussian army), and the National Assembly was dissolved in late spring of 1849.
In 1848, the playwright Franz Grillparzer, a patriotic Austrian, wrote the following verses: ‘Oh God, please come and see / That the Germans are set free / That their bellyaching ceases to be.‘11 More chilling was his rhyming prediction that ‘The path our latest lessons shows that Humanity / Moves along towards Nationality / Into bestiality.‘12 This may have been seen at the time as a reactionary and typically Austrian point of view, but Grillparzer nonetheless identified that nationalism had the ugly tendency to define itself not so much by who could be part of a nation, but more crucially, by who would need to be left out.
The Legacy of the Revolution
Metternich's return to Vienna in 1851 only underlines how wrong it would be to assume that the Emperor Franz Joseph was in any way more sympathetic to the idea of self-determination expressed by the many nations under Habsburg control. The nominal head of the German-speaking people of Europe was also ruler over numerous Slavs, Hungarians and Italians, as well as Jews, who were perceived as just another nation which, though living in Europe, was not considered fully European. The concept of any state, even Austria, as a unified body was not an idea that Franz Joseph would even begin to entertain. Indeed, whenever he could, he removed the word Austria from official documents and replaced it with his own name. In his view, and that of Metternich, it was easier to rally support around a ruler supposedly appointed by God rather than around a mere man-made state. In addition, too many Germans were Protestant for Franz Joseph's liking. Austria thus represented a Catholic German Universalism that had little room for the secular nation state in the modern sense.
A German Showdown between Austria and Prussia
The third quarter of the nineteenth century is riddled with wars and tensions that were meant to establish a meaningful balance within Europe's powerful dynasties. The only tangible achievement of the 1848 Revolution was a number of liberalising concessions that allowed the greater German economy to boom, thus further expanding the influence of the middle-classes. At the same time, German-speaking Europe spent the ensuing 20 years fighting a number of extremely illiberal wars involving a dizzying combination of various alliances and enemies.
The ‘Holy Alliance’ between Austria, Prussia and Russia which had once defeated Napoleon was maintained after the Congress of Vienna. Until the Crimean War of 1853, Russia's absolutist influences within Austria and Prussia were not only a guarantor of Europe's feudal order – helping to restore the forces of reaction following the revolution – but also a staying hand on Prussian expansionism.
Austria joined the French and British in the Crimean War ostensibly to defend the decrepit Ottoman Empire against Russian expansionism, but in reality it was to remove Russian influence from Western Europe.
Another war in 1859 between Austria and France provided the basis for Italian unification with Austria's loss of Lombardy. Italian unification, which served as a model for German unification a few years later, was completed when the Italians sided with Prussia in the Seven Week War ending in Königgrätz in 1866. Austria (referred to by Italian freedom fighters as ‘German rulers’) was thus ejected from the rest of the peninsula apart from the port of Trieste.
Despite the importance of these wars in the formation of a single German identity within a unified state, it is the conflict over entitlement to rule this state that concerns us here. It was being fought not just on the battlefield, but also on philosophical and psychological fronts. It had become clear even after the debacle of the Paulskirche Assembly that a unified Germany could have no room for multi-national Austria, and the only philosophical matter to ponder was that posed by Robert Blum, a prominent republican member of the National Assembly in Frankfurt, who became the Revolution's most famous political martyr. Before his execution by the Austrians, Blum asked a fundamental question concerning Germany's European destiny: would Prussia ultimately dissolve into a united Germany or would a united Germany dissolve into Prussia?
Fifteen years later, in a letter from 24 December 1863 to Count Robert von der Goltz, Otto von Bismarck bracingly explained that he clearly held the latter view:
Chasing after popularity among the German states has cost us dearly over the last 40 years, both among the German states and Europe. … One reads in the press and hears in public debates, signs of developments that may help us in pursuit of hegemony; I think of all those things as radical nonsense: our policies are not made by the press and such talking-shops, but by the weaponry that comes with being a World Power. … Events will inform us as to when and how we separate from Austria.13
More significant was Bismarck's speech made a year earlier to the Prussian Parliament:
It is not to Prussia's Liberalism that [the Kingdoms of] Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden look, but to its power. They may choose to indulge the Liberal movement, but Prussia must gather its strength and prepare for its most propitious opportunity – something that has already been missed on countless occasions: Prussia's borders following the Viennese agreements are not compatible with its survival as a state. It will not be speeches or royal decrees that address the great questions of the day – that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849 – rather, these questions will be answered by blood and iron.
Königgrätz
The Austrian defeat at Königgrätz was a conveniently concocted conflict over the administration of the North German province of Holstein which allowed Bismarck to rid the German Federation of Austria's presence for good. Defeat was guaranteed not only by superior Prussian weaponry, but also by an alliance with Italy that split Austrian forces on two fronts. This single battle changed the face of Europe and determined the direction of history for the next century. However, the Habsburgs had centuries of perfecting the art of survival and self-reinvention; within a year Vienna had finalised an arrangement with Austria's least reliable ally and neighbour, Hungary. By exchanging its former power-base within German-Europe for a dual monarchy with Hungary, Austria had by 1867 turned disaster into opportunity, but at the cost of isolating and further frustrating its minority German-speaking subjects.
This arrangement was called the ‘Ausgleich’, meaning an equalisation of ruling status between Austria and Hungary. It gave the Magyars, historically inclined to sympathise with Austria's enemies, partnership in a new multi-cultural Empire. Just as the Germans were a minority in Austria's half of the Empire, so the Magyars were a minority in Hungary's. The German-Austrians and Magyars were thus united by the mutual suspicion of those over whom they ruled.14 The alternative was breaking Austria's remaining possessions into a loose federation that would have allowed Slavs to dominate – something that neither the German nationalists of Austria nor the equally nationalistic Magyars wanted.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 was the most important of Bismarck's opportunistically organised conflicts. This one was over perceived slights to the house of Hohenzollern concerning the future king of Spain. By this point, Napoleon III had reached such a state of narcissistic delusion that Bismarck hardly needed encouragement. Defeat of the French ended with Napoleon III's exile, several months of the Paris Commune's workers’ revolution, and the country's eventual return to a republic. It also left a festering diplomatic sore with Alsace-Lorraine conceded to Germany.
By 1871, these conflicts had redrawn the map of Europe. Prussian victories had directly led to the unification of Germany, the re-formation of the House of Habsburg as the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, the restoration of the French Republic, and the unification of Italy. Bismarck's united Germany was proclaimed an ‘empire’ in 1871. The Prussian King, Wilhelm I, became German Emperor and was now on a par with the Austrian Emperor who reigned over an impressive land-mass stretching through central Europe, along the Danube and into the Ukraine. Both Austria-Hungary and the newly united German states had similar populations of around 40 million.
Bismarck's ‘blood and iron’ unification had achieved what the short-lived, democratically elected Paulskirche National Assembly had attempted without losing a single drop of blood. History suggests that this was a Prussian precedent that would inform Germany's European relations for the next 75 years. Bismarck's achievements resulted in a national and political monoculture. Königgrätz's ultimate legacy was less a unification of the German peoples than a fusion of ‘German’ and ‘Prussian’. It was a development that the Austrian composer and prominent Schreker pupil Ernst Krenek later referred to in his memoirs as the ‘ultimate Austrian tragedy’. Indeed, he also saw it as a German, and thus a European tragedy.15
Conclusions and Constitutions
Today, Prussia as a political state doesn't exist at all, having been removed from the European map in 1947, and Austria has been reduced to a small Alpine republic with only its spectacular imperial capital, once the sixth largest city in the world, as a reminder of its former importance in global affairs. Between the Congress of Vienna and today's Germany and Austria lay 130 years of wars, battles and diplomatic jostling. The result was not only to destroy the known European order and leave millions dead, but inevitably to have a profound impact on music, art and literature.
For a variety of complex, interconnecting reasons, the way in which the arts in general, and music in particular, changed has a relevance to what the Third Reich would do to music 70 years later. Language is the first and most obvious element that identifies a nation, followed by its religion and culture. Within the broader topic of ‘culture’, hardly any discipline defines a nation more innately than its music. The distant dream of German unification had finally come to pass, but excluded the passionately chauvinistic German-Austrians, who had decidedly mixed feelings about being left out of the newly formed German nation state, while being fobbed off with what many perceived to be the less desirable multi-cultural dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Where was German cultural identity to be found if not in a common German state? To many of these German-Austrians, exclusion made absolutely no sense. The more the Habsburgs tried to gloss over the differences of its ‘many nations’, the more the ‘nations’ themselves began to accentuate them, first by seeing themselves as different peoples, and later by referring to themselves as different ‘races’.
The German-Austrians would become the political shuttlecock between politicians of both left and right, and between those who saw as inevitable the incorporation of Austria's German-speakers into the new Germany, and those who saw Austrians as a totally different and independent nation. These patriotic, largely aristocratic and haut-bourgeois Austrians held nostalgically to their own particularity as representatives of a predominantly Catholic German nation. For them, Austria was divinely chartered, whereas the pragmatic unification of German states was created by lowly Prussian Protestants. Returning to the turbulent years of 1867–71, during which a reorganised Austria-Hungary and a united Germany sought to establish new national visions, it became necessary to yield to an unavoidable act of social liberalism: a modest extension of enfranchisement coupled with the granting of civil rights to nearly all male citizens, including previously disenfranchised Jews. In Catholic Austria, Jews were recognised as a European people and offered what Franz Joseph needed most in his multinational, multi-confessional state: another recognised nation to add to the many others so that none should prevail. If unity was achievable, it was through the sort of diversity that kept each of the individual ethnic groups in check. For that, diversity needed to be recognised, accepted and even promoted.16 Jews, who for years had been persecuted by German Christian churches, were finally recognised as equal, albeit exotic, Austrians, often referred to as ‘Orientals’ or even ‘Israelis’. Jews were allowed to live and travel where they liked, vote within the limitations of the constitution, study, and in the following years with the parliamentary rejection of the Catholic concordat in questions of education and marriage, marry whom they wished and teach at universities.17
This act of Liberal emancipation took place in Austria and Hungary with the so-called Constitution of 21 December 1867.18 Similar acts soon followed in the North German Federation in 1869 and finally throughout the German Empire in 1871.
The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph would be seen by his Jewish subjects as being actively philo-Semitic, a view borne out when some thirty years later he distanced himself from any association with Vienna's devoutly Roman Catholic, anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger.19 The German Emperor, Wilhelm I, managed a contained tolerance towards Jews; his eventual successor, Wilhelm II, was happy to accept invitations from the Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin to use his many ships and yachts, while at the same time remaining enthralled by the paranoid anti-Semitic writings of Richard Wagner's English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
The ambivalent positions held by the Austrian and German Emperors were reflected throughout society. The assimilation of Jews was a development that would cause great social and cultural changes in the coming decades. Cosima Wagner, Richard Wagner's wife and daughter of Franz Liszt, wrote the following in her diary on 22 November 1878: ‘R. said yesterday: if I were to write again about the Jews [in reference to his anti-Semitic tract Judenthum in der Musik] I would write that I haven't anything against them, only that they have become Germans far too early. We simply aren't sturdy enough to take in such elements.‘20
A few days later, on 1 December, she goes on to relate that Wagner believes that Jews are about 50 years too early in their attempts to ‘amalgamate’. He believed that Germany needed time to find its own identity following unification before allowing such ‘foreign’ influences free rein. ‘Now, the damage done is terrible’, she recounts him as saying.21 Indeed, Wagner's view – not that different from issues Karl Marx was grappling with – was that Jews were avaricious capitalists and that giving them the same rights as Germans would not allow the new state to develop into the anti-capitalist society he envisaged, and for which he had fought on the Dresden barricades in 1848. As Cosima writes again on 17 June 1879, ‘the ultimate results of the emancipation of the Jews was explained to the children today as ending with the subjugation of the middle- and the corruption of the lower-classes. The Revolution may have broken feudalism, but it has now been replaced by Mammonism [capitalism].‘22
The effect emancipation would have on musical life would soon become obvious. Gustav Mahler was born in 1860, as was the music critic Julius Korngold, soon to be Mahler's principal cheerleader in the press, and father to the prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Mahler's childhood friend Guido Adler, the father of modern musicology, was born in 1855. The musicologist, Robert Hirschfeld, Julius Korngold's fellow critic and bête noir, was born in 1857; Alexander Zemlinsky was born in 1871 and his future brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg, in 1874. Together, they represented the first generation of prominent Jewish musicians to come of age during Austria's so-called years of ‘Liberalism’.
Assimilation
Ideas and ideals circulating during the period of European Enlightenment in the late 18th century were adapted by a number of Jewish Ashkenazi leaders seeking to promote secular studies and the speaking of German as a means of gaining greater political and social mobility within wider non-Jewish communities. This movement is generally referred to as the Haskalah. To enlightened Jews, the Ghetto was something to escape from, not something to be cultivated as a refuge against an unfriendly Christian world. Such ideas had been mooted as early as the seventeenth century when the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza promoted the idea of secular identities for Jews. A hundred years following the death of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn (the grandfather of composers Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn) was seen as the father of a movement of Jewish Enlightenment that ideally would unite Jews to the world around them by building linguistic bridges between the liturgical language of Hebrew and the secular language of German, while marginalising Yiddish, the common language spoken by most German Jews at the time. Ideally, it was seen as a movement that ultimately would result in Jews entering the wider community as fellow citizens while allowing them to maintain their religious traditions. It thus demanded tolerance and acceptance from the surrounding non-Jewish environment, yet recognised that acceptance could only be achieved with a demystification of Jewish identity. This process could only be initiated from the Jewish communities themselves, who needed to reach out and master the local vernacular rather than hide away in Yiddish enclaves. In other words, if Jews started to build bridges towards the outside world, the outside world would respond positively with its own acts of bridge-building.
Various local acts of liberalisation allowed Jews greater opportunities since the Revolution of 1848, but it was the Constitution of 21 December, printed in full in the Neue Freie Presse on 23 December 1867, which finally offered a full guarantee of personal freedom for Jews.23 Articles 14 and 15 of the Second Statute deal with citizenship, religion and personal conviction, and lifted the last remaining restrictions on all Austrian Jews. At no point does the actual word ‘Jew’ appear, but the tenor of the article is so clearly inclusive that it could not be misinterpreted: no beliefs or religious adherence would be a hindrance to securing employment, education or a right of abode. As these had specifically been some of the most repressive measures used against Jews, it was a major act of emancipation and removed the remaining hurdles to assimilation. But as we shall see, full integration would remain for most an unachievable goal.
For many Jews, musical assimilation, as opposed to social assimilation, became a tale of double- or even cross-assimilation, by which the Jewish musician or composer was accepted as a full citizen and, from there, could become an active proponent of German culture. The German nation, however, had split into two States, with the consolidated monoglot country on one side and a polyglot one on the other. Did German culture look inwards or outwards, and what was the effect of enfranchising Jews in Austria while, at the same time, denying all Austrian German speakers, Jews included, the ‘right’ of citizenship in a uniquely German state? A partial answer as to how this issue developed over the next half century can be found in the titles of two books written by the Jewish violin virtuoso from Austria's Polish district of Galicia, Bronislav Huberman, who addressed such dilemmas first in My Path as a Pan-European, published in 1925, and Fatherland Europe, written in 1932, just as the full force of German nationalist terror was to be unleashed.
The word ‘German’ as an adjective remained viable in the dual monarchy, yet there is confusion even to this day as to what constituted ‘Austro-German’ as opposed to the Prussian-tainted ‘Reich-German’. So numerous were the Slav-Austrians, that ‘German-Austrians’ (Deutschösterreicher) became the official definition accorded to all Austrian German speakers. It must also be recalled that German remained the official language of the Austrian half of the monarchy. Austrian Jews from the non-German-speaking eastern regions faced a double process of assimilation: the first was that of becoming Austrians, followed by the process by which they became German-Austrians.
Ernst Krenek refers to this point on several occasions in his memoirs, though in a manner that many have taken, wrongly, to imply a personal distaste for Jews. In fact, Krenek is merely making the point that he found German Jews assimilated to such an extent that it was nearly impossible to tell who was Jewish and who wasn't, while in Austria he found they were far more redolent of the shtetl (Eastern European Jewish communities). And little wonder: Jews in the Rhineland had lived in the area since Roman times and inter-married with non-Jews, thus looking and sounding totally ‘German’, with no trace of the accent of the East-European closed communities. Czech, Alpine and even Hungarian Jews were also largely German-Austrian in manner, customs and speech. Austria also had more Jews than Germany from its eastern non-German provinces such as the Bukovina and Galicia, not to mention the Balkans and Hungary.
Some of the Yiddish-speaking Galician Jews such as Joseph Roth, Soma Morgenstern, Manès Sperber and Paul Celan from Romanian Bukovina would count themselves among the most elegant of twentieth-century German writers, along with the Bulgarian born Elias Canetti (for whom German was his third, if not fourth, language) and the Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler. Krenek mentions that his fellow Schreker pupil, Karol Rathaus, had been a childhood friend of Roth and Morgenstern, and took his Germanisation with the hyper-perfection typical of Galician Jews who had learned the language at a provincial German Gymnasium and was thus equipped with a command of the language that was far superior to many native speakers.24
The rapid migration to Vienna produced a near hundredfold increase in the city's Jewish population, from 2,617 in 1857 to over 200,000 by 1920. This move from the Empire's provincial ghettos and shtetls was accompanied by a liberating rush of assimilation that saw artists and musicians becoming fully enfranchised participants in Austrian intellectual life and players within the greater German cultural arena. Such rapid assimilation brought with it two extraordinary and seemingly contradictory effects: the first was that it provided the freshness that nearly always comes with the arrival of new blood, and the second was that this new blood arrived with a respect for German culture that had grown out of a near mystic reverence for the past and a profound comprehension of the enlightened values that this past had produced.
The Language of Assimilation: Die Neue Freie Presse
In his memoirs, Julius Korngold, the music critic of Vienna's leading newspaper, Die Neue Freie Presse, and successor to Eduard Hanslick, mentions his good fortune at being born during the ‘age of Liberalism’. On 20 December 1927, the same year that the writer and journalist Joseph Roth wrote his extended essay entitled Juden auf Wanderschaft, the Neue Freie Presse ran a front-page article celebrating ‘60 years of Liberalism’. In it, we find not only a concise and lucid exposition of the historic and political processes that resulted in one of the most inclusive and wide-ranging European constitutions of the age, we also sense, as with Roth's essay, the reactionary powers gathering steam in the years running up to National Socialism. Juden auf Wanderschaft tries to come to terms with what Roth saw as an inevitable development; the leader-writers of the Neue Freie Presse may have even sensed the same with their salute to 60 years of Liberalism aimed at a still undeclared but clearly present enemy.25 This was hardly surprising since the paper had been founded in 1864 by the Jewish journalists Max Friedländer and Adolf Werthner, and was published and edited from 1879 by two other Jews, Eduard Bacher and Moritz Benedikt. Benedikt was the only journalist whom the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph would meet. The Neue Freie Presse became the primary German-language paper offering a secular and politically liberal perspective and, with its flotation on the Viennese stock exchange in 1871, it was established as one of the leading papers published in the German language. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was its cultural editor, and Richard Wagner's favourite ‘Jewish’ hate-figure, Eduard Hanslick, Professor of Aesthetics at Vienna's University, was its principal music critic. With regular articles and features by Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Nordau, Felix Salten, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and even Karl Marx, it was the paper of the liberal, educated bourgeoisie, a demographic in which Jews were becoming ever more prominent. Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday sums it up nicely by referring to the paper as ‘a Temple of Progress’ and goes on to write, ‘With its distinguished exposition on events, its cultural authority and its political prestige, it came to represent for the entire Austro-Hungarian monarchy the same as The Times for the English speaking world.‘26
Though life had become progressively better for Jews since the 1848 Revolution and the emancipation of 1867, the rise of Jewish scholars and intellectuals to the top of the professional classes – and even to the nobility – took place in less than a generation. Such rapid progress would not go without resentment. The ideals of the Austro-Hungarian Constitution of 1867 and Germany's Constitution of 1871 were directly responsible for creating the dynamic cultural environments in both German states prior to the rise of Nazism. It could be argued, as the 1927 article in the Neue Freie Presse makes clear, that the wide-ranging liberalism of these constitutions also allowed the emergence of a pan-German, exclusionist nationalism.27 To try to understand the dysfunctional relationship between Jews and non-Jews, we need to turn to Wagner, in many ways the father of German anti-Semitism based on ‘race’ rather than religious adherence, and as a composer, a central figure within this story.