Book Reviews 46.5

Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History, Steven Beller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) x + 271 pp., E27.50/$34.50.

Der Tod der K.U.K. Weltordnung in Wien, Endre Kiss (Vienna: Hermann Bohlaus, 1986),

292 pp., n.p.

Stephen Beller takes issue with Carl Schorske’s contention that the relatively high number of Jews among Vienna’s bourgeoisie at the turn of the century was irrelevant regarding the structure and quality of that city’s bourgeois civilisation. Indeed, the circumstance in Beller’s view was quite the opposite: it was the high proportion of Jews in Vienna’s ‘second’ society that gave both quality and definition to the bourgeois civilisation in the old imperial capital. Beller’s views on this issue, it might be added, are similar to those of William McCagg who, in his A History ofHubsburgJews: 1670-1918, describes Vienna’s late nineteenth century bourgeois civilisation as the creation of her Jewish inhabitants. Differences over the question are important in the author’s view because within the problem one may find the key to explaining (but certainly not affirming) the horrendous fate that overtook Europe’s Jews (and thereby European civilisation) during the period of the Third German Reich. And it is with questions surrounding this issue in mind that the author analyses the factors that brought the Jews to Vienna and the means, once settled in the Capital, by which they were assimilated into her socio-economic currents. There follows an informative discussion of their expectations from assimilation and the reasons why actual achievement fell far short of

them. Beller’s analyses are those of an historian pursuing his scholarly craft and stand up well

because of the skill with which the author has culled the sources and put together his story. But the discussion of failed expectations, as the author is the first to point out, is sometimes based on informed conjecture and hence, unlike the first half of the work devoted to analyses, invites the reader to argue with the author’s hypotheses. The chief point in Beller’s view is thatfin de sikcle Vienna was on the verge of becoming a modern civilisation looking, not to the past, but to the future-to the creation of a variegated, multi-faceted and egalitarian culture compatible with the industrialised twentieth century. But it didn’t come about. The unintentional experiment unintentionally failed. The end result both was unlooked for and unforeseen. Instead of producing a higher stage of socio-cultural development, circumstances in Vienna soured and spawned those deleterious preconditions leading to the Holocaust.

Beller sheds light on the question as to specifically why Jews came to Vienna in the first instance. Beyond the much discussed fact that nineteenth century Vienna offered the outsider opportunity to partake in and profit from that capitalistic development taking place under the press of industrialisation, the author stresses that the Jews came to Vienna to become Germans; that is, to integrate into German culture. The end result was the creation, or at least nearly so, of a sparkling world of ideas founded on German Bildung. But fin-de-sitcle Viennese culture possessed a qualitative difference from that of north Germany, a difference on which much has been written. Most recently the topic has been covered by Endre Kiss who presents the sum total of the world of Habsburg Vienna in lugubrious tones in his Der Tod der K.U.K. Weltordnung in Wien. That the Jews were admirably positioned to pursue Deurschtums has to do in, Beller’s view, with the emphasis of Jewish religious education on ‘reading the text’, on a training which conditioned Jewish society to both love and pursue the world of ideas as revealed through the written word. But Jews came to the Austrian capital to pursue the world as revealed by Lessing, Schiller and Goethe and hence, they failed to note that the German culture of the real Vienna was in fact a far cry from the idealised one promised in the works of the German literary Gods belonging to the Aufkkirung. Indeed, Vienna was not really German. Further, Vienna

466 Book Reviews

failed to develop fully as a great center of capitalistic enterprise. Worse, her Jews failed to take note of this reality and hence, almost unawares, become isolated within a hostile society. And SO too were the preconditions set whereby the logic of waxing anti-Semitism would work, and to the enduring shame of European civilisation, to its ghastly conclusion.

It is at the point of the reasons explaining the failure of the unintentional experiment that Stephen Belier’s Vienna and theJews: 1867-1938, complements well with Endre Kiss’ Der Tod der K. U.K. Weltordnung in Wien. Kiss’ work, which is a survey of the intellectual history that unfolded within the Habsburg Austrian capital beginning with the period of the Counter Reformation, working through Josephinism, and ending up with a summary of ideas evolved during the twentieth century, does not approach the Jewish question or even attempt to discuss figures like Freud or Wittgenstein as other than ‘Viennese’. But, like Beller, Endre Kiss sees in the sweep of Vienna’s intellectual development the near emergence of a modern ‘Weltordnung’ only to witness the destruction of the potential of this same development through a bizarre interplay of those same forces (at the near end of that progression) that almost brought this modernity into being. Also Kiss, and again similar to Stephen Beller, sees both the source and Achilles heel to this progression in the interplay between Vienna and the variegated Habsburg realm that surrounded it and the symbiotic relationship between the two within the given institutions which described and otherwise structured the realm of the Habsburgs.

Some of the conjecture in fathoming the reasons for the ultimate failure of a cohesive civilisation to emerge in Vienna is troubling. For example can the description ofvienna by ‘a North German Jew, Jacob Wassermann’ as presented by Beller really serve as an explanation for this failure? In his,MyLifeasa German, Wassermann described Vienna as a combination of ‘hollow superficiality, indiscipline, frivolity and a sense of conscious inadequacy with an undeniable charm in its culture and scenery’. And so it is that Beller points out that [this] kind ofvienna.. must have come as quite a shock to Jewish families coming to Vienna as a seat of German culture’. That is to say was not-is not-Vienna everything Wassermann observed and more? Can one man’s observation really capture and otherwise encapsulate the essence of a metropolis of two million souls-two million souls so to speak of all color and stripe? Is not the evolution of things-all things-far more random and complex than the sort of structuring (carried out by Beller) as the relationship between someone’s observation and the actual outcome of later events implies? It would seem to this reader that such causal-event relationships, ones which perhaps are all too prevalent in analysis associated with contemporary journalism, might better be left out in serious history. So too does Endre Kiss perhaps imply too much between cause and event, in this instance in the demise of a new world order in Vienna, when, by implication, he sets Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words on the impossibility of constructing (Konstituierung) a world against Josephinism and Franz Brentano’s ideas of Austrian universalism. But these are small caveats. And moreover, they are of the sort which the authors themselves invite their reader to posit. Thereby too the author becomes writer and the reader creator. And better yet, History remains that exciting arena drawing in the thoughtful and perhaps in the process fabricating a defense for civilisation against those who, like supporters of the infamous Third Reich, would destroy it.

George Strong

College of William & Mary. U.S.A.