Atdtda29: The sport of the rabble, 807-808

[Paul Nightingale]

[807.25-27] "But--"

"Must I call the police? Judensau. You are all alike."

"Jewish pig? For a minute she was too bewildered to see it."


Cf. Dally's surprise at seeing herself in the mirror on 728.


And then ...


[807.32-34, 36-37] She had had no reason to pay attention till now--it was the air people breathed in this place, reaching a level of abstraction where actual blood was no longer the point. [...] Modern Anti-Semitism really went far beyond feelings, had become a source of energy ... etc.


Hence:

As the years passed, it became more and more apparent that, to quote Lueger himself, anti-Semitism was simply "an excellent means of getting ahead in politics, but after one [had] arrived, one [could not] use it any longer; it [was] the sport of the rabble." It may also be that with Franz Joseph looking over his shoulder, the mayor felt constrained to keep his anti-Semitic proclivities in check. That explanation alone, however, would not account for the many favors Lueger was willing to do for his Jewish friends. More revealing is the connection between Austria's improving economy and the decline in anti-Semitism. By 1897 the "Great Depression" had definitely ended and by 1903 the economy of western Austria was booming. It was keeping pace with Germany's and partially catching up with those of Britain, France, and Belgium. 

During the Lueger years Jews were faced with no mass violence and little physical abuse. The mayor even paid them the left-handed compliment of saying that they were not as bad as the Hungarian Jews and that Vienna could not get along without them because they were the only people who were always active. Lueger also avoided antagonizing influential Jews by not insisting on the segregation of Jewish school children. On the other hand, Jews had difficulty getting contracts from the municipal government and few Jews were hired or promoted in the municipal service, although the practices of the preceding Liberal government had not been much better in this regard. Worst of all, Lueger's legacy made anti-Semitism seem normal and respectable.

[...]

The decline in Austrian anti-Semitism following Lueger's takeover of power in Vienna can be illustrated by numerous electoral results. In the Reichsrat elections of 1907 Lueger's Christian Social Party increased its representation in the lower house from 23 seats to 67. The Social Democrats, however, benefited far more from a new franchise law in the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy that established universal manhood suffrage in 1907. Consequently, their representation leaped from 10 to 87. Far more serious for the Christian Social Party were the Viennese municipal elections of 1911, the year following Lueger's death, when they suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Socialists. 

On the surface, then, anti-Semitism appeared to be in full retreat in Vienna and the German-speaking parts of the Austrian Empire on the eve of the First World War. No anti-Semitic legislation had been passed since the introduction of equal civil rights for Jews, and the monarchy's most successful political party, the Christian Social Party, was both declining in size and downplaying its earlier anti-Jewish rhetoric. On the other hand, as Peter Pulzer has made clear, anti-Semitism was still very much alive in Austrian "social life, semi-political organizations, and ideological and economic pressure groups." 

Nowhere, perhaps, was the apparent decline of at least political anti-Semitism more obvious than in the lack of popularity and the financial failures of overtly anti-Semitic newspapers.

From: Bruce F. Pauley, Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism, University of North Carolina Press, 1992, 46-47.


Elsewhere, in a somewhat ironic discussion of universal manhood suffrage in the Austro-Hungarian Empire:


... the Austrian masses, both workers and peasants, had reached a certain political maturity. In Hungary Francis Joseph would have had to become a 'peasant Emperor; in Austra democracy threatened him only with the company of Karl Lueger and Viktor Adler, both respectable, elderly gentlemen, as Austrian and as Viennese as himself.

From: AJP Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, Peregrine Books, 1964 (first published 1948), 228.


And so to Yashmeen on 808: "Who? Not that kind old gentleman."