Helga Embacher, Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Hanns Haas, Charlotte Natmessnig (Hrsg.): Sonderband 5. Vom Zerfall der Grossreiche zur Europäischen Union – Integrationsmodelle im 20. Jahrhundert (2000)

Von der alten zur neuen Ordnung - Marsha Rozenblit: The Crisis of National Identity: Jews and the Collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy

THE CRISIS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY:

Jews and the Collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy

by Marsha L. Rozenblit

When World War I ended and the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed, Ema Segal, a young Viennese woman bom in Galicia, was “deeply shocked (tief erschüttert)”. As she remembered, “wir wurden in tiefer Erfurcht für das Kaiserhaus erzogen, wir liebten Österreich und seine Herrscher und nun war alles mit einem Schlage zu Ende! Was nun fragte ich mich

Although her father hoped that the end of the blood-letting might be a blessing for humanity, he feared that disaster would result from the “dismemberment” (Zerstückelung) of Austria.1 2 3 Similarly, Minna Lachs, a school-girl in Vienna whose family had fled there from Galicia in 1914, remembered that she felt a sense of impending catastrophe in October 1918. When her father returned from the army in November, her mother, relieved to have her husband home, assumed that everything would get better, but her husband feared that everything “wird zuerst noch schwerer werden.”2

Both Segal and Lachs expressed the anxieties that many Austrian Jews felt with the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in October/November 1918. While other Austrians - Czechs, Poles, South Slavs - rejoiced in their newly declared national sovereignty and freedom from Habsburg domination, many Jews felt uncertain about the future and what it held for them. Fearful of the anti-Jewish violence that erupted in most of the successor states, and worried about their status in those new states, most Jews sincerely mourned the passing of Austria-Hungary.4

The collapse of Habsburg Austria, and the terrible dilemma in which its Jewish subjects now found themselves, placed in stark relief the problems created by the collapse of a multinational empire, especially for minority groups who benefited from the relative tolerance of a supranational state. The Jews had long venerated

1 Segal, Ema: You Shall Never Forget (text German), unpublished memoir. Leo Baeck Institute,

p. 26.

2 1 b i d e m, pp. 26-27, 30.

3 Lachs, Minna: Warum schaust du zurück. Erinnerungen 1907-1941. Vienna 1986, pp. 89-90.

4 I disagree with McCagg, William O. Jr.: A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670-1918. Bloomington 1989, pp. 219-20, who argues that most Jews easily accepted the collapse of the Monarchy.

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