by Michael Haas
Despite the importance of these wars in the formation of a single German identity within a unified state, it is the conflict over entitlement to rule this state that concerns us here. It was being fought not just on the battlefield, but also on philosophical and psychological fronts. It had become clear even after the debacle of the Paulskirche Assembly that a unified Germany could have no room for multi-national Austria, and the only philosophical matter to ponder was that posed by Robert Blum, a prominent republican member of the National Assembly in Frankfurt, who became the Revolution's most famous political martyr. Before his execution by the Austrians, Blum asked a fundamental question concerning Germany's European destiny: would Prussia ultimately dissolve into a united Germany or would a united Germany dissolve into Prussia?
Fifteen years later, in a letter from 24 December 1863 to Count Robert von der Goltz, Otto von Bismarck bracingly explained that he clearly held the latter view:
Chasing after popularity among the German states has cost us dearly over the last 40 years, both among the German states and Europe. … One reads in the press and hears in public debates, signs of developments that may help us in pursuit of hegemony; I think of all those things as radical nonsense: our policies are not made by the press and such talking-shops, but by the weaponry that comes with being a World Power. … Events will inform us as to when and how we separate from Austria.13
More significant was Bismarck's speech made a year earlier to the Prussian Parliament:
It is not to Prussia's Liberalism that [the Kingdoms of] Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden look, but to its power. They may choose to indulge the Liberal movement, but Prussia must gather its strength and prepare for its most propitious opportunity – something that has already been missed on countless occasions: Prussia's borders following the Viennese agreements are not compatible with its survival as a state. It will not be speeches or royal decrees that address the great questions of the day – that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849 – rather, these questions will be answered by blood and iron.
Königgrätz
The Austrian defeat at Königgrätz was a conveniently concocted conflict over the administration of the North German province of Holstein which allowed Bismarck to rid the German Federation of Austria's presence for good. Defeat was guaranteed not only by superior Prussian weaponry, but also by an alliance with Italy that split Austrian forces on two fronts. This single battle changed the face of Europe and determined the direction of history for the next century. However, the Habsburgs had centuries of perfecting the art of survival and self-reinvention; within a year Vienna had finalised an arrangement with Austria's least reliable ally and neighbour, Hungary. By exchanging its former power-base within German-Europe for a dual monarchy with Hungary, Austria had by 1867 turned disaster into opportunity, but at the cost of isolating and further frustrating its minority German-speaking subjects.
This arrangement was called the ‘Ausgleich’, meaning an equalisation of ruling status between Austria and Hungary. It gave the Magyars, historically inclined to sympathise with Austria's enemies, partnership in a new multi-cultural Empire. Just as the Germans were a minority in Austria's half of the Empire, so the Magyars were a minority in Hungary's. The German-Austrians and Magyars were thus united by the mutual suspicion of those over whom they ruled.14 The alternative was breaking Austria's remaining possessions into a loose federation that would have allowed Slavs to dominate – something that neither the German nationalists of Austria nor the equally nationalistic Magyars wanted.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 was the most important of Bismarck's opportunistically organised conflicts. This one was over perceived slights to the house of Hohenzollern concerning the future king of Spain. By this point, Napoleon III had reached such a state of narcissistic delusion that Bismarck hardly needed encouragement. Defeat of the French ended with Napoleon III's exile, several months of the Paris Commune's workers’ revolution, and the country's eventual return to a republic. It also left a festering diplomatic sore with Alsace-Lorraine conceded to Germany.
By 1871, these conflicts had redrawn the map of Europe. Prussian victories had directly led to the unification of Germany, the re-formation of the House of Habsburg as the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, the restoration of the French Republic, and the unification of Italy. Bismarck's united Germany was proclaimed an ‘empire’ in 1871. The Prussian King, Wilhelm I, became German Emperor and was now on a par with the Austrian Emperor who reigned over an impressive land-mass stretching through central Europe, along the Danube and into the Ukraine. Both Austria-Hungary and the newly united German states had similar populations of around 40 million.
Bismarck's ‘blood and iron’ unification had achieved what the short-lived, democratically elected Paulskirche National Assembly had attempted without losing a single drop of blood. History suggests that this was a Prussian precedent that would inform Germany's European relations for the next 75 years. Bismarck's achievements resulted in a national and political monoculture. Königgrätz's ultimate legacy was less a unification of the German peoples than a fusion of ‘German’ and ‘Prussian’. It was a development that the Austrian composer and prominent Schreker pupil Ernst Krenek later referred to in his memoirs as the ‘ultimate Austrian tragedy’. Indeed, he also saw it as a German, and thus a European tragedy.15
Conclusions and Constitutions
Today, Prussia as a political state doesn't exist at all, having been removed from the European map in 1947, and Austria has been reduced to a small Alpine republic with only its spectacular imperial capital, once the sixth largest city in the world, as a reminder of its former importance in global affairs. Between the Congress of Vienna and today's Germany and Austria lay 130 years of wars, battles and diplomatic jostling. The result was not only to destroy the known European order and leave millions dead, but inevitably to have a profound impact on music, art and literature.
For a variety of complex, interconnecting reasons, the way in which the arts in general, and music in particular, changed has a relevance to what the Third Reich would do to music 70 years later. Language is the first and most obvious element that identifies a nation, followed by its religion and culture. Within the broader topic of ‘culture’, hardly any discipline defines a nation more innately than its music. The distant dream of German unification had finally come to pass, but excluded the passionately chauvinistic German-Austrians, who had decidedly mixed feelings about being left out of the newly formed German nation state, while being fobbed off with what many perceived to be the less desirable multi-cultural dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Where was German cultural identity to be found if not in a common German state? To many of these German-Austrians, exclusion made absolutely no sense. The more the Habsburgs tried to gloss over the differences of its ‘many nations’, the more the ‘nations’ themselves began to accentuate them, first by seeing themselves as different peoples, and later by referring to themselves as different ‘races’.
The German-Austrians would become the political shuttlecock between politicians of both left and right, and between those who saw as inevitable the incorporation of Austria's German-speakers into the new Germany, and those who saw Austrians as a totally different and independent nation. These patriotic, largely aristocratic and haut-bourgeois Austrians held nostalgically to their own particularity as representatives of a predominantly Catholic German nation. For them, Austria was divinely chartered, whereas the pragmatic unification of German states was created by lowly Prussian Protestants. Returning to the turbulent years of 1867–71, during which a reorganised Austria-Hungary and a united Germany sought to establish new national visions, it became necessary to yield to an unavoidable act of social liberalism: a modest extension of enfranchisement coupled with the granting of civil rights to nearly all male citizens, including previously disenfranchised Jews. In Catholic Austria, Jews were recognised as a European people and offered what Franz Joseph needed most in his multinational, multi-confessional state: an
other recognised nation to add to the many others so that none should prevail. If unity was achievable, it was through the sort of diversity that kept each of the individual ethnic groups in check. For that, diversity needed to be recognised, accepted and even promoted.16 Jews, who for years had been persecuted by German Christian churches, were finally recognised as equal, albeit exotic, Austrians, often referred to as ‘Orientals’ or even ‘Israelis’. Jews were allowed to live and travel where they liked, vote within the limitations of the constitution, study, and in the following years with the parliamentary rejection of the Catholic concordat in questions of education and marriage, marry whom they wished and teach at universities.17
This act of Liberal emancipation took place in Austria and Hungary with the so-called Constitution of 21 December 1867.18 Similar acts soon followed in the North German Federation in 1869 and finally throughout the German Empire in 1871.
The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph would be seen by his Jewish subjects as being actively philo-Semitic, a view borne out when some thirty years later he distanced himself from any association with Vienna's devoutly Roman Catholic, anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger.19 The German Emperor, Wilhelm I, managed a contained tolerance towards Jews; his eventual successor, Wilhelm II, was happy to accept invitations from the Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin to use his many ships and yachts, while at the same time remaining enthralled by the paranoid anti-Semitic writings of Richard Wagner's English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
The ambivalent positions held by the Austrian and German Emperors were reflected throughout society. The assimilation of Jews was a development that would cause great social and cultural changes in the coming decades. Cosima Wagner, Richard Wagner's wife and daughter of Franz Liszt, wrote the following in her diary on 22 November 1878: ‘R. said yesterday: if I were to write again about the Jews [in reference to his anti-Semitic tract Judenthum in der Musik] I would write that I haven't anything against them, only that they have become Germans far too early. We simply aren't sturdy enough to take in such elements.‘20
A few days later, on 1 December, she goes on to relate that Wagner believes that Jews are about 50 years too early in their attempts to ‘amalgamate’. He believed that Germany needed time to find its own identity following unification before allowing such ‘foreign’ influences free rein. ‘Now, the damage done is terrible’, she recounts him as saying.21 Indeed, Wagner's view – not that different from issues Karl Marx was grappling with – was that Jews were avaricious capitalists and that giving them the same rights as Germans would not allow the new state to develop into the anti-capitalist society he envisaged, and for which he had fought on the Dresden barricades in 1848. As Cosima writes again on 17 June 1879, ‘the ultimate results of the emancipation of the Jews was explained to the children today as ending with the subjugation of the middle- and the corruption of the lower-classes. The Revolution may have broken feudalism, but it has now been replaced by Mammonism [capitalism].‘22
The effect emancipation would have on musical life would soon become obvious. Gustav Mahler was born in 1860, as was the music critic Julius Korngold, soon to be Mahler's principal cheerleader in the press, and father to the prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Mahler's childhood friend Guido Adler, the father of modern musicology, was born in 1855. The musicologist, Robert Hirschfeld, Julius Korngold's fellow critic and bête noir, was born in 1857; Alexander Zemlinsky was born in 1871 and his future brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg, in 1874. Together, they represented the first generation of prominent Jewish musicians to come of age during Austria's so-called years of ‘Liberalism’.
Assimilation
Ideas and ideals circulating during the period of European Enlightenment in the late 18th century were adapted by a number of Jewish Ashkenazi leaders seeking to promote secular studies and the speaking of German as a means of gaining greater political and social mobility within wider non-Jewish communities. This movement is generally referred to as the Haskalah. To enlightened Jews, the Ghetto was something to escape from, not something to be cultivated as a refuge against an unfriendly Christian world. Such ideas had been mooted as early as the seventeenth century when the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza promoted the idea of secular identities for Jews. A hundred years following the death of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn (the grandfather of composers Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn) was seen as the father of a movement of Jewish Enlightenment that ideally would unite Jews to the world around them by building linguistic bridges between the liturgical language of Hebrew and the secular language of German, while marginalising Yiddish, the common language spoken by most German Jews at the time. Ideally, it was seen as a movement that ultimately would result in Jews entering the wider community as fellow citizens while allowing them to maintain their religious traditions. It thus demanded tolerance and acceptance from the surrounding non-Jewish environment, yet recognised that acceptance could only be achieved with a demystification of Jewish identity. This process could only be initiated from the Jewish communities themselves, who needed to reach out and master the local vernacular rather than hide away in Yiddish enclaves. In other words, if Jews started to build bridges towards the outside world, the outside world would respond positively with its own acts of bridge-building.
Various local acts of liberalisation allowed Jews greater opportunities since the Revolution of 1848, but it was the Constitution of 21 December, printed in full in the Neue Freie Presse on 23 December 1867, which finally offered a full guarantee of personal freedom for Jews.23 Articles 14 and 15 of the Second Statute deal with citizenship, religion and personal conviction, and lifted the last remaining restrictions on all Austrian Jews. At no point does the actual word ‘Jew’ appear, but the tenor of the article is so clearly inclusive that it could not be misinterpreted: no beliefs or religious adherence would be a hindrance to securing employment, education or a right of abode. As these had specifically been some of the most repressive measures used against Jews, it was a major act of emancipation and removed the remaining hurdles to assimilation. But as we shall see, full integration would remain for most an unachievable goal.
For many Jews, musical assimilation, as opposed to social assimilation, became a tale of double- or even cross-assimilation, by which the Jewish musician or composer was accepted as a full citizen and, from there, could become an active proponent of German culture. The German nation, however, had split into two States, with the consolidated monoglot country on one side and a polyglot one on the other. Did German culture look inwards or outwards, and what was the effect of enfranchising Jews in Austria while, at the same time, denying all Austrian German speakers, Jews included, the ‘right’ of citizenship in a uniquely German state? A partial answer as to how this issue developed over the next half century can be found in the titles of two books written by the Jewish violin virtuoso from Austria's Polish district of Galicia, Bronislav Huberman, who addressed such dilemmas first in My Path as a Pan-European, published in 1925, and Fatherland Europe, written in 1932, just as the full force of German nationalist terror was to be unleashed.
The word ‘German’ as an adjective remained viable in the dual monarchy, yet there is confusion even to this day as to what constituted ‘Austro-German’ as opposed to the Prussian-tainted ‘Reich-German’. So numerous were the Slav-Austrians, that ‘German-Austrians’ (Deutschösterreicher) became the official definition accorded to all Austrian German speakers. It must also be recalled that German remained the official language of the Austrian half of the monarchy. Austrian Jews from the non-German-speaking eastern regions faced a double process of assimilation: the first was that of becoming Austrians, followed by the process by which they became German-Austrians.
Ernst Krenek refers to this point on several occasions in his memoirs, though in a manner that many have taken, wrongly, to imply a personal distaste for Jews. In fact, Krenek is merely making the point that he found German Jews assimilated to such an extent that it was nearly impossible to tell who was Jewish and
who wasn't, while in Austria he found they were far more redolent of the shtetl (Eastern European Jewish communities). And little wonder: Jews in the Rhineland had lived in the area since Roman times and inter-married with non-Jews, thus looking and sounding totally ‘German’, with no trace of the accent of the East-European closed communities. Czech, Alpine and even Hungarian Jews were also largely German-Austrian in manner, customs and speech. Austria also had more Jews than Germany from its eastern non-German provinces such as the Bukovina and Galicia, not to mention the Balkans and Hungary.
Some of the Yiddish-speaking Galician Jews such as Joseph Roth, Soma Morgenstern, Manès Sperber and Paul Celan from Romanian Bukovina would count themselves among the most elegant of twentieth-century German writers, along with the Bulgarian born Elias Canetti (for whom German was his third, if not fourth, language) and the Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler. Krenek mentions that his fellow Schreker pupil, Karol Rathaus, had been a childhood friend of Roth and Morgenstern, and took his Germanisation with the hyper-perfection typical of Galician Jews who had learned the language at a provincial German Gymnasium and was thus equipped with a command of the language that was far superior to many native speakers.24
The rapid migration to Vienna produced a near hundredfold increase in the city's Jewish population, from 2,617 in 1857 to over 200,000 by 1920. This move from the Empire's provincial ghettos and shtetls was accompanied by a liberating rush of assimilation that saw artists and musicians becoming fully enfranchised participants in Austrian intellectual life and players within the greater German cultural arena. Such rapid assimilation brought with it two extraordinary and seemingly contradictory effects: the first was that it provided the freshness that nearly always comes with the arrival of new blood, and the second was that this new blood arrived with a respect for German culture that had grown out of a near mystic reverence for the past and a profound comprehension of the enlightened values that this past had produced.