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

unsere Voreltern gelebt und gewirkt haben, in denen sie gestorben sind, an deren Kultur, wirtschaftlicher und politischer Hebung sie mitgearbeitet haben ... fur die wir selbst leben und sterben, oft mit Undank gelöhnt, mit Hass und Verfolgungssucht bedacht.” Loyal to the new state, he could not bring himself to say he was a German in a national sense. Indeed, for him Germanness remained cultural and Jewish identity primary. He concluded:

Wir sind Juden, wir sind Österreicher, und wenn das zu wenig ist, wir sind DeutschÖsterreicher, nach Geburt und Sitte, Bildung und Kultur, Stellung und Gefühl.50

None of the Jews who tried in late 1918 to come to grips with Jewish identity asserted a German national identity. All of them continued to understand their Germanness purely in cultural terms. In early December, a group of Jewish notables, including officers of the Austrian Israelite Union, the Bnai Brith, and Jewish communities outside Vienna, published an appeal in the Österreichische Wochenschrift asserting that Jews were citizens of German-Austria and German “durch Heimat, Sprache, und Erziehung”.51 Although these men feared that antisémites might deprive them of rights if they did not consider themselves German,52 53 they nevertheless did not feel comfortable with a German national identity. Similarly, in an article in the Österreichische Wochenschrift Dr. A. Schwadron insisted that Jews were German not in a völkisch sense but in a cultural one. Jews did not form either a separate nation or even a religious group, since most of them no longer practiced Jewish ritual. Rather, he noted, Jews belonged to the Jewish people and formed a “national-religious” group.55

It appears that the months after the war witnessed an outburst of Jewish ethnicity all over former Habsburg Austria. Jews responded to the collapse of the monarchy and the creation of nation-states not by constructing new national identities but instead by hoping that they could transfer their old identities to the new political situations. Jews in Czechoslovakia and in German-Austria declared their loyalty to the new states, but they did not embrace either a Czech or a German national identity. Instead they persisted in the tri-partite identity they had developed in Habs- burg Austria that allowed them to join the dominant nation only in a cultural sense while they continued to belong to the Jewish people.

Indeed, increased Jewish ethnic feeling was a direct response to the situation in which the Jews found themselves. Unable to join the Czech or German nation in as full a way as Czech or German nationalists demanded, they retreated to the comfort of Jewish ethnicity, joining the Zionist movement in ever larger numbers or simply asserting their Jewishness. Vicious antisemitism - ubiquitious in this period - did

The Crisis of National Identity: Jews and the Collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy

50 O W : (25 October 1918), pp. 673-75, quotations on p. 675.

51 O W : (6 December 1918), pp. 779-80; J Ko r: (5 December 1918), p. 2.

52 OW: (3 January 1919), p. 7.

53 Ibidem, (24 January 1919), pp. 55-56.

55