THE RISE OF FASCISM

(IN AUSTRIA AND BOHEMIA)

By F. L. Carsten

The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was a much weaker state than the German Empire...Above all, only the political aspirations of the Hungarians were satisfied...while those of the many Slav nationalities remained unfulfilled. In the course of the nineteenth century the Czechs, the Poles, the Slovenes acquired their own middle and educated classes, hence their demands for political concessions became louder. But such concessions would have threatened the positions of the Germans who were the leading nationality in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, especially in areas with a mixed population, such as Bohemia. The population of Vienna, Prague and other towns were growing apace--by 1920 Vienna had more than 2,000, 000 inhabitants--but the middle and lower classes felt far from secure. Apart from the rising demands of the rising non-German nationalities, there was the growing concentration which deprived many a small man of his livelihood. In the thirty years following upon the abolition of guild privileges in 1859 in Vienna alone the enterprises of 35,000 artisans were seized for default.

THERE WAS ANOTHER THREAT, much more real than in Germany. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the Jewish population of Vienna had been very small, but in 1910 175,000 inhabitants of the capital were classified s Jews, more than eight percent of the population. JEWS WERE NOT ONLY EXTREMELY PROMINENT IN BANKING, BUT ALSO IN OTHER BRANCHES OF ECONOMIC LIFE; "IT IS SAFE TO SAY THAT BY 1914 THE INDUSTRY AND TRADE OF VIENNA WERE TO AN OVERWHELMING EXTENT IN JEWISH HANDS." Many Jews entered the professions, journalism and civil service. In the University of Vienna in 1880, 38.6 per cent of the medical students were Jewish, and 22.3 per cent of the students reading law--at a time when the Jewish percentage of the population in general was percent five per cent. In 1890 the figure for the whole university was 33.6 per cent. IN LITERATURE, THE THEATRE, AND IN INTELLECTUAL AFFAIRS IN GENERAL, JEWS SOON OCCUPIED LEADING POSITIONS. If Jews were politically active they were Liberals, hence any anti-liberal tendency might easily turn into anti-Semitism.

Moreover, in addition, many of the Jews living in Vienna and other towns had but recently COME FROM GALICIA or another eastern province of the monarchy. They differed strongly from the other inhabitants in their language, their clothing, their whole way of life, and aroused wide-spread anti-Semitic feeling. Growing competition by Jewish traders and craftsmen had the same result. Anti-Semitism equally appealed to the students and the members of the professions in which many Jews were to be found. Open and organized anti-Semitic propaganda resulted from the financial crash of 1873 which affected large numbers of the Viennese. Popular passions were aroused by it and remained strong thereafter. LARGE NUMBERS HELD THE JEWS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CRASH WHICH WAS CAUSED BY THE FAILURE OF A LEADING BANK AND THE COLLAPSE OF MANY COMPANIES IN ITS WAKE.

Anti-Semitism became particularly strong among the students. The Viennese Burschenschaft 'Libertas' expelled its Jewish members in 1878, and soon after forbade its members to accept Jews as partners in a duel. (?) The Prague 'Teutonia' excluded Jews in 1879; ten years later all the Austrian Burschenschaften decided to accept only Aryans as members...this went parallel with Pan-German sentiments which--in Austria--meant a desire to join the new German Reich, preferring the Hohenzollern to the Hapsburg Empire...In the same year the Austrian flag and national anthem were insulted openly in the same city at a congress of scientists....

It seems that Schonerer's anti-Semitism also derived from these circles. At first it was fired by economic motives, DISLIKE OF THE EFFECTS OF JEWISH CAPITALISM, THE JEWISH PRESS, AND THE JEWISH LIBERAL PROPAGANDA. At an artisans' meeting in 1882 he exclaimed against "THE UBIQUITOUS AND DUMBFOUNDING RISE TO PROSPERITY OF THE JEWS," WHO HAD RISEN TO ALMOST A HEGEMONY IN THE ECONOMIC SPHERE...A SYMPTOM OF THE GENERAL ECONOMIC DISEASE. But it soon developed into racial anti-Semitism. In 1883 he wrote..."We shall never be willing to recognize a Jew as a German because he speaks German or even behaves in a German national way, or to aim at a mixture of Germans and Jews, or to consent to it...

...Adopting the "brutal racial point of view" we must on the contrary declare that we consider much more feasible a mixture, or in certain circumstances an alliance, with the Slavs and Latins than any intimate connection with the Jews.. For the former are Aryans and related to us, while the latter are completely alien to us by descent....If one or the other Jew voluntarily joins our German ranks, he may work with us in God's name, but only as a common soldier and not in a leading position..."

In the Reichstrat in 1883 Schonerer demanded the dismissal of all Jewish teachers; all true Germans must must oppose THE INTERNATIONAL SPECULATORS WITHOUT A FATHERLAND, whose goal is the corruption of the German race already at the primary school stage. Four years later he demanded special legislation against the immigration of foreign Jews, for "the customs and ways of life of these alien parasites are hostile to the Aryan descent and to the Christian culture of the German nation."...

It was Schonerer's Germanism...which became extreme during these years, his veneration for things Germanic or Prussian (begin to open the pages of the Book of Jeremiah the prophet at this time), his hatred of the Hapsburg monarchy and Catholicism, feelings that were echoed by the German racialists....His paper recommended parents to give to their children truly Germanic names...He tried to revive THE MIDSUMMER AND YULETIDE FESTIVALS, Germanic cults, and the Germanic names of the months...Celebrations were held to commemorate THE BATTLES OF NOREIA , where the Cimbri defeated the Roman legions in 113 BC, and of the Teutonburg forest, where Varus' legions had been slain by the Cherusci in AD 9. In the place of the Christian calendar a Germanic calendar starting in 113 BC was to be introduced; a festival was organized in 1888 to inaugurate the year 2001 STARTING FROM NOREIA...

While we are here in the region of Noreia let us remind ourselves that we are also back at the hidden center of the ancient Hebrew oracles. The Romans, we have learned, came upon a temple dedicated to Noreia (in the 1st century BC), on Fraunberg, "the Woman's Mountain" in Austria. They merged her with Isis and called her Isis-Noreia. Fittingly the early Gnostics wrote much about her. She was the spiritual personification of that place named Beauty (or Tipheret) in the center of Europe. In addition to the following excerpts from A New Translation of The Gnostic Scriptures, by Bentley Layton, please consider the text entitled The Thought of Norea in The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James M. Robinson:

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The Rise of Fascism continued)...Some years later Schonerer launched the "Break with Rome" movement against the anti-German power of Rome, to achieve "the final victory of Germandom over the un-German quarrelsome Roman Church," which had allied with "Slav insolence...in order to annihilate Germandom in this Empire which has been built on German foundations." His followers were enjoined to leave the Catholic Church and to become Protestants, but few did so, Others--to prove their anti-Semitic convictions--were wearing on their watch-chain a pendant showing hanged Jews...

In 1913 a new party programme was adopted which was...outspoken, especially against the teachings of the Socialist Democratic Party Saint Marx. His doctrine of internationalism was pronounced " wrong and of immeasurable damage to the Germandom of central Europe." The poor German-speaking workers, "who with their contributions had made Social Democracy powerful, were in many areas pushed out of their jobs by the Slav comrades whom they had heartily welcomed. The German employer took the cheaper Slav worker; but the red organization refused to give the German party veterans the protection to which they were entitled..." HENCE THE GERMANS BEGAN TO RECOGNIZE "THE PERNICIOUSNESS OF THE INTERNATIONAL DOCTRINES" AND "THE INSINCERITY OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY WHICH IS LED BY JEWS AND CLOSELY ALLIED WITH THE MOBILE BIG CAPITALISTS." What is interesting in this programme is not so much the description of the dangers threatening German workers--which was based on reality--BUT THE CLOSE CONNECTION SEEN BETWEEN JEWS, SOCIAL DEMOCRATS AND BIG CAPITALISTS, which was to figure so prominently in Mein Kampf and in National Socialist propaganda....

These political influences shaped the mind of young Adolf Hitler, who was born at Braunau on the Inn in 1889, as the son of an Austrian customs official. When he came to Vienna as a young man of eighteen his political sympathies were with Schonerer and the Pan-Germans. He was impressed with Schonerer's enthusiasm for...his advocacy of joining the German Reich...Last but not least Hitler encountered in Vienna a fierce anti-Semitism preached there by leaders of both parties..."Disgusting to me was the conglomerate of races which characterized the capital of the Empire, disgusting this whole mixture of peoples, of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats...but between them all as the eternal morbid growth of humanity--Jews and more Jews." In later years there was to be found framed above Hitler's bed Schonerer's slogan "Without Juda, without Rome, let us build Germania's dome."

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT THE YOUNG MAN RECEIVED HIS DECISIVE POLITICAL IMPRESSIONS IN THE VIENNA OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, from the newspapers which he read avidly, and from the heated discussions in which he engaged with his room mates and casual acquaintances. It was a mixture of social and national ideas which he absorbed eagerly, but above all it was the world of Pan-Germans and anti-Semites of the most extreme hues which he entered. The Rise of Fascism, by F. L. Carsten, pp. 32-40.