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

Marsha L. Rozenblit

Like many other Jews, she went off to Vienna to study.27 Prague Zionist Hans Kohn, a prisoner of war in Siberia, expressed his disappointment with Czechoslovakia when he returned in the spring of 1920. He thought that the new government “was building on faulty foundations. It identified the new state with a single ethnic, linguistic group, at the expense of the other groups living in what was now the new Czech state”.28 Max Brod was so busy with his Zionist activity at the time that he barely noticed the end of Habsburg Austria. Later, however, from the perspective of hindsight, he remarked that “ja heute ... betrachte ich es als ein europäisches Mißgeschick, daß man Österreich hat zugrunde gehen lassen.”29 The whole world, he insisted, would have been better off if Austria had been reorganized as a federation of free peoples, which would have served as a bulwark against both Russian and German aggression.30

Despite Brod’s later misgivings, the Zionists in fact greeted Czechoslovakia with great enthusiasm, recognizing immediately the potential opportunities for Jewish national rights that the new state afforded. Although they worried about Czech antisemitism, they had faith that the new state would respect the national rights of its Germans, Slovaks, Magyars, Ruthenians, and Jews and would become a true multinational state that would grant Jews autonomy. In the heady days of late 1918 and early 1919, the Zionists could imagine Czechoslovakia as an improved version of Austria, a state that allowed its nations, including the Jews, to control their own destinies. This state had wise leaders able to guarantee such toleration, and it even incorporated a hinterland in the east with large numbers of traditional Jews who could be tapped for the Zionist cause. Thus the Zionists of Czechoslovakia had an easier time adjusting to the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy than any other Jewish group in old Austria. Despite their long history of loyalty to the Habsburg Monarchy, the Zionists barely noticed that the war had ended and the monarchy had collapsed, so eager were they to become players in the new order.

Whatever their initial feelings, most Jews in Czechoslovakia developed a positive attitude toward the new state. In particular, they revered President Thomas Mas- aryk and credited him with ensuring that Czechoslovakia did not oppress any of its national groups. Masaryk had long enjoyed Jewish esteem. In the late 1890s he had defended Leopold Hilsner, who had been charged with ritual murder in the infamous Polna Affair.31 Jews placed a great deal of faith in Masaryk and expected that

27 Landre, Bertha: Durch's Sieb der Zeit gefallen. Jedes Menschenleben ist ein Roman, unpublished memoir. Leo Baeck Institute, pp. 231-32, 267-68.

28 Kohn, Hans: Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History. New York 1964, pp. 1 19, 121-22.

29 B ro d , Max: Streitbares Leben, 1884-1968, rev. ed. Munich 1969, p. 88.

30 I b i d e m , pp. 98-99.

!1 Kieval, Hillel: Masaryk and Czech Jewry: The Ambiguities of Friendship. In: T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937), vol. I: Thinker and Politician, ed. by Stanley B. Winters. New York 1990, pp. 30248