Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction by Steven Beller

Author:Steven Beller
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780198724834
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

Karl Lueger and the Viennese model

In Central Europe, scapegoating of Jews was also used as a favourite political device by many politicians, most famously Karl Lueger, founder of the Christian Social Party in Austria, and mayor of Vienna 1897–1910. Much of Lueger’s success was due to his mastery of the new, mass ‘modern’ politics that emerged as a consequence of modernization and the expansion of the franchise in most Western countries in the late 19th century (Figure 5). The new politics followed the change in the character of ‘modernity’, in that it was much more corporatist and collectivist in its approach than the preceding, liberal era of ‘honorary’ politics. Instead of politics being a process decided between individual politicians, it became far more a matter of party machines, with divisions more explicitly along class and ethnic lines. Lueger’s genius was to realize that in Vienna the most effective means to assemble a political coalition to challenge and defeat the Liberal hegemony over Vienna’s municipal politics was to identify ‘them’, the image of the political enemy, not as ‘liberal’ but as ‘Jewish’, in a classic, if hypertrophic, example of the sort of ethnic tactics often used in modern Western urban politics.

Yet Lueger would not have been successful in this tactic were antisemitic hostility not widespread in Vienna, cutting across lines of ideology and interest, and if this had not been combined with the real social and economic situation of Central European Jewry, especially in Vienna. The fact is that Central European Jews had indeed done remarkably well in the modern, capitalist economy, and many of the more successful, and most successful, had settled in Vienna. There were many poor Jews in Vienna, but there was also a coterie of extremely wealthy Jewish banking, commercial, and industrial ‘dynasties’ and alongside this a substantial, prosperous business and professional middle class.

5. ‘Do I look like I would eat Jews? ’ Karl Lueger (1844–1910), Austrian Christian Social leader and mayor of Vienna, was notorious for his cynical opportunism and hypocrisy regarding antisemitism; he was one of Hitler’s role models, together with Georg von Schönerer, in Mein Kampf.

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