The Compromise of Return

Viennese Jews after the Holocaust

Elizabeth Anthony

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814348130
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust explores the motivations and expectations that inspired Viennese Jews to reestablish lives in their hometown after the devastation and trauma of the Holocaust. Elizabeth Anthony investigates their personal, political, and professional endeavors, revealing the contours of their experiences of returning to a post-Nazi society, with full awareness that most of their fellow Austrians had embraced the Nazi takeover and their country's unification with Germany—clinging to a collective national identity myth as "first victim" of the Nazis. Anthony weaves together archival documentation with oral histories, interviews, memoirs, and personal correspondence to craft a multilayered, multivoiced narrative of return focused on the immediate postwar years. The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 begins with setting the historical scene and political context to elucidate the backdrop for the role and position of Jews in Austrian and Viennese society. Chapter 2 begins just before the Soviet conquest of Vienna in April 1945 and with the story of the last Jews murdered in Vienna. Chapter 3 deals with the second group of returning Jews—concentration camp survivors—and outlines their varied processes and journeys, as they also followed their impulse to go to their familial home. Chapter 4 presents how their parties shaped their motivations and expectations of home while they lived abroad after fleeing from the Nazis. Chapter 5 illuminates the return and rerooting of Austrian Jewish professionals, including their struggles and successes. Chapter 6 expounds common challenges encountered by all groups of returnees while relaunching their lives in Vienna, with a focus on developing postwar identity concepts—both Viennese Jewish identity and Austrian national identity. The Compromise of Return is the first such social history to depict how survivors—individually and collectively—navigated postwar Vienna's political and social setting. This book will be of special interest to scholars, students, and readers of Holocaust and European studies.

1

Historical Context

Prelude to the Holocaust in Austria

The first section of the book Wie wir gelebt haben1 (How we lived) looks and feels like a handsome family album or scrapbook. These first hundred pages are full of beautiful photographs with personal captions, nostalgic anecdotes, and happy memories. Leafing through without knowledge of the title, one might consider the faces and families to be a typical cross-section of the general population of early twentieth-century Austria-Hungary. Photos from those years show families from places across the empire and many rooted for generations in the imperial capital. World War I soldiers pose for group photos, school classes smile for cameras, and families enjoy the outdoors. Shopkeepers stand in front of their stores, little boys sport lederhosen, and young women wear the fashionable hairstyles of the 1920s.

Little in the pictures reveals that the subjects are Jews. A few shots of children and young adults in costume indicate Purim celebrations, but otherwise these are simply frozen images of families in the first decades of the twentieth century. With a more careful read of the captions and stories, however, particulars of the Jewish experience in Austria-Hungary come to light. A portrait of young Gizela Brück is positioned alongside a later photo of her with her young husband, Josef Kocsiss. Their daughter, Gisela Eva, provided family background for the publication and explained that her mother had been only twelve years old when she and her family fled the Russians during World War I. Like many other Galician Jews, they sought refuge in Vienna and never returned to Poland. The caption of the second photo indicates that Josef was a gentile; like many Viennese Jews, Gizela had intermarried.2

On another page, Edith Landesmann’s parents pose in Brünn (a city in Moravia, now called Brno), passengers of the ubiquitous cartoon airplane of early twentieth-century studio photography. The caption explains that they first met at the Maccabi sports club.3 Pages later, Gerda Feldsberg’s grandfather Josef Stadler gives the camera a puzzled look as he stands in front of his shop window. He and his wife, Emilie, ran a store in Vienna’s second district while they lived in the ninth.4 As was the pattern of Viennese Jewry, home and business focused on the Leopoldstadt—the traditionally Jewish second district—and, once a level of financial success had been achieved, the newly prosperous moved their residence to the ninth to live among many other middle- and upper-middle-class Viennese Jews.

The book contains the family photos of Austrian Jews who returned to or stayed in Vienna after the Holocaust and includes their memories as gathered in the Jewish historical institute Centropa’s extensive interview collection. Contributors shared pictures and told stories to help editors portray their families’ experiences. The collection clearly depicts the variety of origins from which so many Jews living in Vienna came. At the start of the 1900s, Jews from across the empire migrated to the capital city, where their families may have lived for decades. Some came to pursue a university education and gain professional training; others fled antisemitic Russian troops during World War I. Their diverse backgrounds combined to reflect the multiethnic and multinational tapestry of the greater population of the Habsburg Empire.

In many ways, Austrian Jews were—and had been—typically Austrian. Joseph Samuel Bloch, rabbi, member of the Imperial Parliament, and publisher of the Jewish newspaper Österreichische Wochenschrift (Austrian weekly), had argued as early as 1886 that Jews were the most loyal citizens of the monarchy and represented the ideal Austrians in a multiethnic society facing a rise of nationalism. “If one could construct a specifically Austrian nationality, then the Jews would constitute its foundation,”5 Bloch observed just nineteen years after Jews were accorded full emancipation and citizenship rights.

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Jews had lived in Austria for centuries. After the Revolution of 1848, the monarchy lifted settlement restrictions, and Jews from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia migrated to the capital with a feeling of safety in a modern Vienna. They finally received full emancipation in Austria following the Ausgleich (the reorganization of the Habsburg Empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) in 1867, and such movement continued and intensified.6 But as the Jewish population of the city increased, antisemitism neither disappeared nor diminished, and the issue of nationality and nationalism grew across the Habsburg lands and among its citizens. Jews were blamed for the May 1873 stock market crash,7 for example, and increasing prejudice gave rise to politicians with particularly antisemitic philosophies. The late nineteenth century saw the rise of Georg Ritter von Schönerer’s Pan-German Party and its platform based on German nationalism, popular antisemitism, and a larger unified German state, of which Austria would be a part through Anschluss with Germany and German-speaking regions of Europe. By blaming Jews for all societal problems, the Pan-German Party helped propel antisemitism into the realm of racism.8 Antisemitism also played a significant role during Dr. Karl Lueger’s term as mayor of Vienna (1897–1910).9 Lueger, a Christian Social Party member, was not a German nationalist, however, but rather an Austrian patriot, loyal to the monarchy.

Austrian sentiment in the years leading up to World War I focused largely on loyalty and a dedication to maintaining the monarchy but included no specifically “Austrian” national feeling. Most identified with a particular Austrian province alongside an allegiance to the empire, and many identified with a German cultural nationality.10 The idea of the political organization of independent German-speaking states, however, had roots that dated back to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. With the 1848–49 German Revolution, these deliberations intensified into the Großdeutsche/Kleindeutsche Debatte. The Habsburg Empire had favored a großdeutsche Lösung (Greater German solution), which would in its understanding include the German states and the entire empire under Habsburg leadership. The kleindeutsche (Lesser German) solution, promoted by Prussia, sought to unify just the northern German states and did not include Austria. Prussia opposed the integration of the non-German portions of the Habsburg Empire, and the kleindeutsche Lösung prevailed.11 Although the concept of Anschluss had this long, popular history, only a small minority hoped to split the empire to unify with Germany at that time. Certainly no one anticipated the post–World War I dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the creation of a separate, small Austrian state.

Despite antisemitic hostility, Jews in Vienna found their way through the challenging environment. According to historian Marsha Rozenblit, Jews’ propensity to work with other Jews and the establishment of their own professional organizations helped protect and insulate them from the discriminatory climate, although it also served to inhibit total assimilation into Viennese society.12 Most lived in the first, second, and ninth districts of Vienna, along with their coreligionists of varying social classes, where they also socialized with and mostly married one another.13 Jews both maintained a separateness and distinction and also contributed to and took on significant roles in Viennese society, culture, and professions through the career and educational opportunities that opened to them in the some sixty years following the Ausgleich and the attainment of equal rights of citizenship. They integrated into society with enthusiasm, and many enjoyed great success, leading to a common misconception of widespread conversion to Catholicism and overall assimilation in that short time.

The pervasive presence of antisemitism notwithstanding, by the turn of the century Vienna’s Jews identified as thoroughly Viennese. Survivor Helen Herz recounted that her family was Jewish by religion only and that “one had nothing to do with the other.”14 Marsha Rozenblit’s theory of Habsburg Jews’ tripartite identity helps explain this phenomenon. Bolstered by the protection and acceptance they felt under Emperor Franz Joseph in the years leading up to and through World War I, Austrian Jews considered themselves to be politically Austrian, culturally German, and ethnically Jewish.15 In addition, Rozenblit explains that in Vienna “Germanization” did not require melding to or with a German Volk, or concept of an ethnic “people,” as the Viennese were less preoccupied with German national identity.16 In addition, I posit that a fourth aspect of identity emerged in the specific case of the Jews of Vienna, one to which Rozenblit alludes: a feeling of being socially and aesthetically Viennese. The possibility for that layering in self-identification was (and is) possible in Vienna in particular. Gentile or Jew could be Austrian and also distinctly—and perhaps more importantly—Viennese, which speaks to the ever-present ambiguities typical of the Viennese mind-set and way of life. One could feel both Austrian and German while remaining a loyal monarchist, while others felt both Austrian and German but favored Anschluss, the joining of Austria and Germany to unite Germans living in different but neighboring lands. With similar intersection and potential contradiction, Jews could be 100 percent Viennese but also Austrian, German, and Jewish at the same time and in different ways.

Jews supported the waging and fighting of World War I, which Rozenblit has characterized as a Jewish holy w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Historical Context: Prelude to the Holocaust in Austria
• 2. The First “Returnees,” 1945
• 3. KZ Rückkehrer: Coming Home from Concentration Camps
• 4. To Reclaim Their Austria
• 5. (Re)establishing Careers in Vienna
• 6. Emerging Identities and Enduring Challenges
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author