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

Deutsche mosaischer Konfession, sondern Juden deutscher Umgangssprache sind.”49

Most Viennese Jews were not Zionists. They had rather liked the opportunity Habsburg Austria had accorded them to be Austrian by political loyalty, German by culture, and Jewish in an ethnic sense. German-Austria now required them to be Germans, not just Austrians, but they could not bring themselves to adopt a German national identity. They had no trouble declaring loyalty to the new state, and they confidently asserted their attachment to German culture, but they found it hard to accept the fact that cultural affiliation would no longer be enough. In the months that followed the end of World War I, therefore, the ordinary Jews of Vienna faced the most complicated identity crisis of all the former Habsburg Jews.

That identity crisis was complicated by the threat of antisemitism and the challenge of Zionism. No pogroms erupted in German-Austria, but antisemitic agitation in a population exhausted by the war nevertheless made the Jews very nervous. Moreover, Austrian antisémites insisted that the Jews were no Germans, a charge that made adopting a new German-Austrian identity difficult. At the same time, the relative success of Zionism forced Jews to come to grips with the nature of Jewish identity in the nation-state.

Vienna’s non-Zionist Jewish majority responded to the crisis by engaging in a serious debate about Jewish identity. An endless stream of articles in the liberal and orthodox press reflected the turmoil and conflict that accompanied the Jewish quest to reconstruct an identity that would fit changed political realities. Insisting that the Jews did not form a nation at all, Jewish spokesmen nevertheless declared that the Jews were not Germans either, at least not in the way that German nationalists understood the term. Instead, the Jews were Jews, members of the Jewish people and not just adherents of the Jewish faith. Jews could be loyal citizens of German- Austria, and committed to German culture, but also proud Jews. Thus, like the Zionists, whom they detested, liberal and Orthodox Jewish leaders hoped that the new nation-state would allow them the luxury of separating their political, cultural and national identities, of being simultaneously Austrians and Jews. Although they eschewed Jewish nationalism, they too retreated to the comfort of Jewish ethnic identity, hopeful that despite antisemitism the new state would tolerate their inability to become part of the German Volk although they embraced German culture.

In the same article in late October 1918, in which he had lamented the demise of Habsburg Austria, Heinrich Schreiber sensitively described the dilemma faced by most Jews. Rejecting the notion that Jews formed a nation, he insisted that Jews should feel and think themselves Jewish and should want to be known as Jews. At the same time, Jews were loyal citizens of the political communities “in denen

49 Weiss, Robert: Was will die jüdische Jugend, ln: OW (30 May 1919), pp. 330-31; idem: Was wir wollen, ln: Jüdische Jugendblätter 2, no 1 (1 March 1919), pp. 1113.

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