Last update - 00:00 20/10/2006
Victims of their own success
By Tom Segev
"Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe" by Robert S. Wistrich, forthcoming in May, 2007, University of Nebraska Press, 416 pages, $55
In one of the main squares of Vienna there is a large lump of metal which belongs to the Memorial Against War and Fascism. The words on the monument were chosen carefully, and state that the country of Austria considers itself a victim of the Nazi occupation. For many years, like East Germany, it avoided acknowledging its own culpability.
The main part of the memorial, created by the famous and controversial sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka, looks like an enormous pile of dead bodies. Viewed up close, the mass of metal resembles a large, crouching dog with the face of a biblical prophet. This figure is supposed to recreate one of the most famous scenes in the history of Nazi despotism: the image of Viennese Jews scouring the sidewalk with brushes to remove anti-Nazi slogans. Although the memorial did not come into being without a lengthy dispute, it is nevertheless hard to grasp that in 1988, Austria decided to place such a debasing, anti-Semitic image of a Jew in the heart of its capital city.
The photograph that inspired the sculpture appears on the cover of Robert Wistrich's upcoming "Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe" (already published in a Hebrew translation by Carmel Press). The dominant figures are not the Jews that are forced to scrub the sidewalk, rather the crowd of Viennese passersby surrounding them, including children. There is no trace of these people in Hrdlicka's sculpture. Pedestrians walking past the metal figure of the Jew who is crouching like a dog used to sit on its back, resting from their daily toils. This was too much: The municipality decided to surround the sculpture with barbed wire. Now the square displays a Jewish dog enclosed by barbed wire, which can only be observed from a standing position. Not far from here, there is an avenue named after Vienna's anti-Semitic mayor (1897-1910), Karl Lueger.
During a recent visit to Vienna I noticed that everyone, even the announcers on the subway's loud-speaker system, referred to him as "Dr. Karl Lueger," his academic title apparently becoming part of his name. A church and a square have been erected in his honor, as befits a mayor who did much to develop his city. Wistrich describes him as a charismatic, charming fellow, whose hatred of the Jews was a source of inspiration for the young Adolf Hitler. One of Wistrich's goals in his book, by his own account, was to show the Austrian roots of Hitler's anti-Semitism, since the Austrians, as the famous saying goes, have managed to convince themselves that Hitler was German and that Beethoven was Austrian. From the time it annexed Austria in early 1938, Wistrich writes, Germany looked up to its neighbor as a model of persecution, harassment, deportation and exile of Jews.
Focus on persecution
Like many historians, Wistrich tends to make the persecution of the Austrian and German Jews the center of their story, and he believes that their successes in non-Jewish society led to the Holocaust. This point of departure immediately precludes the possibility that the book will share the fate of Amos Elon's book, "The Pity of it All," about the flowering of German Jewry, and become a best-seller among secular Jewish Israelis. But in order to write like Elon, one has to be Elon. Wistrich writes mainly about the hatred of the Jews; luckily, however, this is not just another Zionist book about anti-Semitism, but also a series of visits to interesting figures in Vienna - Theodor Herzl, Sigmund Freud - and somewhat surprisingly, and disappointingly, Hitler as well.
Wistrich describes the Jews as being simultaneously masters and victims: The closer they grew in status to the non-Jews, the more they found their way to positions of influence; the more influence they had, the more they were hated. In the final years of Habsburgian rule, he claims, the Jews of Austro-Hungary reached the peak of success, a success that, Wistrich writes, contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.
This might serve as a basis for claiming that the Jews were responsible for what happened to them. Wistrich does not say that, but some of the first Zionists he describes wrote about the Jews in an almost anti-Semitic language. One of them was Max Nordau, father of the nostalgia for a more muscular form of Judaism. Wistrich is cautious: He writes that although Nordau placed a "German" emphasis on masculinity and physical sturdiness, his "new Jew" was still part of a liberal framework, not a national-tribal one and certainly not a proto-fascist one, although the differences between them, as the author concedes, could easily become blurred. Nordau, he believes, would probably have been partly receptive to the anti-Semites' diagnosis of the Jewish condition. In fact, it might be added here, Nordau was quite the nationalist, and rather anti-Semitic himself.
Nordau emerges from Wistrich's account as an insufferable man, but his works are useful for Israel's public discourse, because they demonstrate how deeply Zionism was rooted in European culture. In fact, one cannot understand the history of either Zionism or the State of Israel without seeing it as part of European history. Nationalism, nationalist chauvinism, liberalism, socialism - all these came to Eretz Israel from Europe. This would be the place for a sharp, even bold debate of the interrelationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism, but such a debate is conspicuously absent from the book. Equally lacking is a discussion of how Zionism's pioneering thinkers regarded the Palestinians. Most of the people Wistrich describes, with the exception of Herzl himself, tended to ignore this issue, and Wistrich ignores the fact that they ignored it.
I found it interesting to be introduced to Nathan Birnbaum, the founder of Zionism in Austria; no, it wasn't Herzl. This is a fascinating story, whose highlight is Birnbaum's decision to sever himself from his own Zionism - probably because he and Herzl squabbled over money, fame and ego. Wistrich portrays Herzl as a cultural icon with the soul of a dictator and rather dubious Zionist credentials: Indeed, he once proposed to solve the problem of the Austrian Jews by converting them to Catholicism. Once again, however, one cannot help but think that Amos Elon has already written this, and with more charm and wit.
Wistrich claims that Herzl suffered from "self-hatred" because he loathed the effects of the ghetto; the same is said of the satirist Karl Kraus. This is a very ideological concept, which is supposed to explain everything, but actually explains nothing. It enfolds within it the tendency to impose a shared identity on all Jews, and it denies the possibility that Jews might associate themselves with a different Jewish identity than the one they attack, perhaps even with hatred, but not necessarily out of "self-hatred."
Wistrich makes many such psychologizing moves. The attempt to explain Hitler in the process as well is not satisfactory. Certain of the claims the author makes do not help matters any: For example, he argues that Hitler probably became a zealous and complete anti-Semite somewhere between November 9, 1918, and May 1919. The former date, that of the revolution in Munich, became, Wistrich argues, an obsession of Hitler's, a day that he would compulsively mention on many later occasions. It was, the author claims, Hitler's formative experience, his own 9/11. Oh, what people would do to a writer who is not a professor, had he dared to include such a sentence in his book! Which brings us to Sigmund Freud.
It was interesting to read what Wistrich has to say about Freud's attitude toward Zionism and about the beginnings of the war over Eretz Israel. Freud was not a Zionist in the political sense, although he was glad when the British conquered Jerusalem. He was proud of the Hebrew University, but the 1929 wave of terrorism convinced him that the Jewish state had no real future in Eretz Israel.
Although they lived in the same city, two famous and controversial Jews, it seems that Freud and Herzl never met. Freud sent a copy of his book "The Interpretation of Dreams" to Herzl, including an analysis of a dream he himself had after seeing one of Herzl's plays at the theater. I would have stopped there; Wistrich apparently cannot help himself, and he suggests that we should understand Freud's attitude toward his Judaism as an expression of his Oedipal complex.