by Michael Haas
The writer goes on to despair of the League of Nations, oblivious to the vulnerability of Austria which was being placed under intolerable financial pressure as a result of restrictions imposed by Nazi Germany. He ends after brief excursions into global economic and political matters, expressing hope in Dollfuß and his plans for a hybrid state of democracy and corporatism. And in a plea that must have been uttered for the first time since the end of the First World War, he implores all to show charity towards the many refugees who now live amongst them.
Exit from Chaos: Dictatorship
It is worth remembering how fragile democracy was in the turbulent interwar years: even Britain, at the time of entering the First World War, had less enfranchisement than the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The new democracies that emerged at the end of the First World War fell again just as quickly: Hungary was turned into a monarchy from 1920 by the brutal Miklós Horthy, who made himself ‘regent’ in place of a king. His secret police terrorised and tortured Socialists, Communists and any other ‘ungodly’ political opposition. Bulgaria never really had a chance to try democracy as it moved to the dictatorship of Tsar Boris III. Italy went fascist in 1922, Lithuania and Poland in 1926, and as the 1930s progressed, Latvia, Estonia, Spain and Portugal also fell to various forms of dictatorships. In March 1933, only a month after Hitler's assumption of absolute power in Germany, Austria suspended parliament and joined Italy in its very specific form of ‘corporatist’ non-democratic government.
To speak of fascists as a single block is misleading. The corporatist Mussolini and the National Socialist Hitler loathed each other until circumstances and national greed pushed them together (as would also be the case with Hitler and Stalin in 1939). Up to this point, Italian and even Austrian Jews who feared Hitler saw Mussolini as a bulwark against the racist National Socialism of Germany.
On 20 January 1927, Winston Churchill made a statement in Rome praising Mussolini's brand of Fascism.8 ‘I will, however, say a word on the international aspect of Fascismo. Externally, your movement has rendered a service to the whole world.‘9 Reading what was reported in Austria's still free press offers an independent view from Germany's nearest neighbour: according to the Neue Freie Presse, Churchill praised fascism's ability to order the state's finances. The paper goes on to report that Churchill seemed to enjoy siding with Italy to score points against France – by calling for sensible expectations on the question of war reparations. He admired Mussolini's ability to galvanise his country in the fight against Bolshevism and believed that this authority also taught Italians the responsibilities of citizenship, demonstrating how honourable it was to defend themselves ‘against the social sores that were festering all around’.10
In reporting Churchill's statement, the Neue Freie Presse is just as fascinated that Churchill was the first British statesman of his time to comment in public on another country's form of government. In fact, this is far more significant to the Austrian observers than Churchill's admiration for Mussolini. The paper also expresses surprise at Churchill's endorsement of fascist policies as an ‘antidote to the virus coming from Russia’. The article ends with the observation ‘that no democrat can truly share Churchill's views, interesting though they are’.11
The Manchester Guardian was also circumspect in its coverage of Churchill and Mussolini. It informs us that the Corriere d'Italia had praised Churchill as having a better understanding of fascism than most fascists. It quotes much of the statement, including the parts described by the Austrian journalist:
If I had been an Italian I am sure I should have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. […] It has been said that a continual movement to the Left, a kind of fatal landslide towards the abyss, has been the character of all revolutions. Italy has shown that there is a way to combat subversive forces. This way can recall the mass of the people to co-operation that is loyal to the honour and interests of the State. Italy has demonstrated that the great mass of the people, when it is well led, appreciates and is ready to defend the honour and stability of civil society. It provides the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Henceforth no nation will be able to imagine that it is deprived of a last measure of protection against malignant tumours and every Socialist leader in each country ought to feel more confident in resisting rash and levelling doctrines.12
Austria itself represented one of the more intriguing models of these varieties of fascism. A technicality in Austria's parliamentary voting system led to the chambers being suspended in March 1933 by its Christian Social Party Chancellor, the 40-year-old Engelbert Dollfuß. His assumption of absolute power was intended to combat encroaching National Socialism. He saw in Hitler's methods little difference from the other great European dictator of the day, Joseph Stalin, conjuring up the spectre of godless Russian Bolshevism. Mussolini agreed with him and treaties were made between the two states in which Italy guaranteed Austria's sovereignty. Dollfuß initially banned the Austrian Nazi Party and soon followed this with bans on Communist and Socialist parties as well. The state took Italy as its model, with an even greater role accorded to Austria's Roman Catholic Church. Conservative and centralist parties were merged into the single Fatherland Front, with a symbolic rump of the disenfranchised Social Democratic Party being side-lined as the only potential voice of opposition. In his memoirs, Ernst Krenek reluctantly welcomed the new government as it confirmed each Austrian's place within the body of the state, with the Catholic Church's central position being the aspect that appealed to him most.13 This centrality of the church offered Krenek some compensation for the suspension of democracy, which he had most certainly not welcomed.14 Egon Wellesz was only slightly more circumspect and admits in his own memoirs that he joined ‘the general Catholic renewal movements taking place in Austria at the time’.15
As noted in Chapter 7, there was endemic anti-Semitism within the Austrian Catholic Church – hence Krenek's shocking conversation regarding Jewish atonal composers with the Church's head of music Josef Lechthaler. However, social and religious tolerance was strongly endorsed by the church as well. On 23 December 1933, only nine months after Dollfuß's suspension of Parliament, the bishops and archbishops of Austria published a lengthy pastoral letter against National Socialism and the ‘Insanity of Racism’. It stated unequivocally that humanity was founded on justice, and the love that bound all to live as a single family.16 It was a fearless attack on National Socialism. It deplored the violence witnessed in Germany and specifically mentioned the racial hygiene laws, such as the ‘Law Preventing Inherited Diseases’ (passed on 14 July 1933) that forced sterilisation on those deemed to be antisocial, congenitally ill or mentally deficient. It was a law that Germany's Catholic clergy had also protested against. The law and the response of the church served as a reminder of the extreme secular nature of National Socialism, reinforcing the view of Austrofascists that there was little difference between Hitler and Stalin. The church deplored nationalism built on hatred and went so far as to denounce the extremism that could lead to a state church, forcing a break with the Catholic centre in Rome.17 This point is made to counter the view of many pan-German Austrians, expressed at the end of the nineteenth century by Ritter von Schönerer, that ‘true Germans’ must free themselves from Rome and convert to Protestantism. Schönerer's movement fell apart precisely because pan-German Austrians would not abandon Catholicism. Austria remained resolutely bound to its Roman confession, with Judaism its second largest denomination.
The Catholic Church went on to maintain a questionable and equivocal stance during the Nazi years; Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, who had drawn up the denunciation against National Socialism, welcomed Hitler in 1938, then told his flock at St Stephen's Cathedral that the only true ‘Führer’ was Jesus Christ, leading to the ransacking of his palace by Nazi youths. The first Nazi resistance movement originated at the Augustinian monastery in Klosterneuburg, led by one of the monks,
Roman Karl Scholz, who was executed in 1944 despite direct pleas to Hitler for clemency from Cardinal Innitzer.
Felix Austria
For Austrian Jews living and working in Germany, a return to Austria was not an ideal solution, but it was preferable to emigration. Max Brand, Hans Gál, Max Reinhardt and Alexander Zemlinsky returned, while Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Toch went to France before emigrating to the USA. Hanns Eisler also returned to Vienna, but left again almost immediately to mobilise the left into a ‘Unity Front’ coalition against fascism. His wife Charlotte and infant son Georg remained to act as secret conduits for communists coming in and out of the country via nearby Bratislava until they were forced to flee persecution by the Austrofascist dictatorship, settling in Moscow until their visas expired in 1938. Their subsequent move to Manchester in England most likely saved them from Stalin's paranoid purge of German and Austrian left-wing refugees.
Contemporary Austrian historians remain unclear on the ultimate legacy of Austrofascism. To some, it was a bulwark against Nazism; to others, it has been judged a ‘Nazi ante-chamber’. In fact, it provided simultaneously both an anti-Nazi safeguard as well as a hot-house where Nazism could flourish as nowhere else. The five years under Austrofascist rule, from 1933 to 1938, were tolerant of other faiths while remaining officially Catholic. Apart from those private organisations and societies in sympathy with the Nazi Germany which enacted their own ‘Aryan Paragraphs’, Austria's Jews enjoyed relative security under the authoritarian regimes of both Dollfuß and his successor, Schusschnigg. With the failed Nazi coup of 1934 leading to a bloody civil war and Dollfuß's assassination, order was restored only with the threat of intervention by Mussolini. Dollfuß's successor, Kurt Schusschnigg, came down even harder on National Socialists until, in 1936, Realpolitik forced him to begin a period of appeasement, leading to Austria's eventual annexation – resisted by Schusschnigg, but by now unstoppable. The Austrofascists’ draconian ban on the Nazi Party, which most certainly would have enjoyed the sympathy, if not outright support, of just under half the population, forced it under ground, meaning that by March 1938 it erupted with explosive ferocity. In a repeat of the pogroms following the fall of the House of Habsburg in 1918, the overthrow of the Austrofascist regime led to anti-Semitic mobs unleashing terror on the streets of Austrian cities and towns. Even in Hitler's Germany such spontaneous public violence against Jews had not been seen. It shocked the world. The ‘bulwark’ against Nazism had unwittingly turned Austria into National Socialism's most fertile breeding ground.
Nazi Germany's anti-Semitism had until then been tolerated by the outside world as an unwholesome consequence of the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and the ensuing economic chaos in which Jews, deplorably, had been made the scapegoats. However, once the murderous racism of Austria's Nazis was allowed full rein, a shocked Britain, along with other democracies, including the United States, immediately enacted strict visa requirements and quotas in order to stem the tide of refugees desperate to flee. Austrian Jews knew that it would be sheer folly to assume that things would return to normal once their new masters realised what upstanding citizens they were. This had been a common fallacy among German Jews following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Those who already knew what to expect had secured their tickets and, if necessary, their visas. Hans Gál and his family, for instance, left for England within days of Hitler's arrival in Vienna. Julius Korngold described his family's escape as follows:
I have my oft-ridiculed pessimism to thank for our rescue. It was always my intention, should there be an outbreak of war, to get ourselves and one of Erich's sons, who was left in our care [while Erich, his wife Luzi and their other son were in America], out of Vienna. And I was always thinking about the outbreak of war. What I hadn't anticipated, however, was a conquest of Austria without so much as a single shot in the country's defence being fired. Thus, on the day when German troops marched into Vienna for their ‘friendship visit’ as the lie on the radio would have had us believe, I simply purchased ordinary train tickets and took my wife and grandchild over the border. I discovered later that it was one of the last trains for which this was still possible. I remember that it was a quiet Sunday and a normal train with the only deviation being our unexpected removal from our carriage in Innsbruck. But then, after a lengthy delay, an even more unexpected instruction followed that we could re-board. […] It was ‘a miracle’, we were later told, though at the time we were not in a position to put much value in ‘miracles’. What dangers we endured over the next days I shall pass over. Ultimately, with the rescue of my son's son, I rescued myself [and wife]. From Switzerland, Erich phoned and arranged for us to join them in Hollywood.18
Vienna, once the imperial capital, had been reduced to the provincial seat of Ostmark, a region within greater Germany. Embassies were required to relocate to Berlin as one country after another protested but then recognised the legality of the annexation. The consulates remaining in Vienna were woefully inadequate for dealing with the thousands of ‘Ostmarkers’ desperate for visas. Queues formed around blocks as applications were made and interviews held to determine who would be allowed to emigrate and who would not. Many escaped to Czechoslovakia not realising how temporary that refuge would be. Switzerland, too, would soon start to round up refugees and place them in internment camps for eventual repatriation should visas and affidavits not be forthcoming. In 1938 the Swiss insisted that German officials place a ‘J’ in the passports of Jewish Germans to differentiate between political and ‘racial’ refugees. All countries, including Great Britain and the United States, accorded the former a higher status.
The German Tragedy
In his chillingly realistic novel The Oppermanns, published in 1933, the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger deals with the dashing of the illusions of liberal-minded democrats in Germany as the Nazis seized power. He reminds us that initially it was not racial bigotry that shaped anti-Semitic purges but the far more ‘reasonably’ argued position that Jews, like Socialists and Communists, represented political opposition to the strong economic and political agenda the Nazis felt had been mandated by the German electorate. In Feuchtwanger's narrative we encounter a metaphor for the insidious infiltration of progressive educational institutions by German Nationalists: a new professor of literature arrives at a liberal school for bright boys preparing for university entrance a year before Hitler is made Chancellor. He has been imposed on the school by the local educational board, which has been taken over by members of anti-Semitic nationalist groups. The new teacher comes into his class with a proud and arrogant rejection of every ‘rationalist’ value that the Enlightenment has bequeathed since Immanuel Kant. He declares that actions must be based on feelings and inner instincts, which to him constitute the only moral compass any German needs. The use of ‘reason’ is to be rejected as ‘un-German’. Culturally and politically, this amounted to a denunciation of the unemotional New Objectivity that flourished after the First World War. It confirms Ludwig Stein's view that revolutions were fundamentally ‘Romantic’ in nature and brought periods of sober Classicism to an end.
It is surprising to discover that the violinist Gustav Havemann shared a similar view. As leader of the Havemann Quartet, he had made a name for himself as an exponent of the composers associated with New Objectivity. In 1925, he had joined the radical ‘November Group’,19 which also included such figures as H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Max Butting, Heinz Tiessen, Kurt Weill, Wladimir Vogel, Stefan Wolpe, Hanns Eisler and Jascha Horenstein, along with the artists George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and other prominent cultural figures within the Weimar Republic. At the same time, however, Havemann was a secret supporter of National Socialism and would become a member of the Nazi Action League for German Culture.20 As such, he objected to the half-Jewish Franz Schreker as Director of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Since his appointment in 1920, Schreker had assembled an impressive faculty with illustrious names including Paul
Hindemith, Georg Szell and Heinz Tiessen for composition; Edwin Fischer and Artur Schnabel for piano; Carl Flesch (and Havemann) for violin; and Emanuel Feuermann for cello, along with a host of wind players from the Berlin Philharmonic.