Abstract
One often uses the lives and work of Jewish intellectuals to illustrate the quality and degree of Jewish assimilation in one country or another. In the following study I seek to suggest the degree of Jewish assimilation in Austria by comparing and contrasting three homogeneous literary works by important Jewish-Austrian authors.2
I am indebted to Gabor Vermes and István Deák for their friendly, but critical comments on early versions of this chapter; and to Robert Wistrich, for having most generously encouraged me to present a rough draft of it at his conference at very short notice.
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Notes
For background see Josef Fraenkel (ed.), The Jews of Austria: Essays on their Life, History and Destruction (London, 1967)
Harry Zohn, Österreichische Juden in der Literatur (Tel Aviv, 1969)
Hugo Gold (ed.), Geschichte der Juden in Osterreich. Ein Gedenkbuch (Tel Aviv, 1971)
Wolfdieter Bihl, ‘Die Juden’, in Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch (eds), Die Habsburger Monarchie (4 vols, Vienna, 1972-), vol. III/2, pp. 927 ff.
Claudio Magris analyses many of these works in his discussion of the ‘Habsburg myth-makers’, Der habsburgischer Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur (Salzburg, 1966).
See Theodor Lessing, Der jüdische Selbsthass (Berlin, 1930)
Kurt Lewin, ‘Self-Hatred among Jews’, republished in his Resolving Social Conflict: Selected Papers on Group Dynamics (New York, 1948)
Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans (New York, 1948)
Gershom Scholem, ‘Zur Sozialpsychologie der Juden in Deutschland’, in Rudolf von Thadden (ed.), Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Welkriegen (Göttingen, 1978)
Hans Dieter Hellige, ‘Generationskonflikt, Selbsthass und die Entstehung antikapitalistischer Positionen im Judentum’, in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 5 (1979), pp. 476–518
Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore, 1986).
The following draws heavily on my History of Habsburg Jews (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), Ch. 12; and my ‘On Habsburg Jewry and Its Disappearance’, in Jonathan Frankel (ed.), Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 4 (1987), pp. 172–96.
See especially Michael Löwy, ‘Messianisme juif et utopies libertaires en Europe, 1905–1923’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, vol. 51, no. 1 (Jan. 1981), pp. 5–47.
Oskar Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, 1961), pp. 170 ff.
See Edward Timms, Karl Kraus. Apocalyptical Satirist. Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, Conn., 1986).
See R. Robertson, ‘The Problem of Jewish Self-Hatred in Herzl, Kraus and Kafka’, in Oxford German Studies, vol. XVI (1985), pp. 92 ff.
For a defence of Kraus, see Hans Weigel, Karl Kraus oder die Macht der Ohnmacht (Vienna, 1968), pp. 95–104
for a condemnation, see R. Wistrich, ‘Karl Kraus: Jewish Prophet or Renegade’, in European Judaism, vol. XI (Summer 1975), pp. 32–8.
For the problem, see especially Ernst Bruckmüller, Nation Österreich. Sozialhistorische Aspekte ihrer Entwicklung (Vienna, 1984).
See Hans Hartmann, ‘Franz Werfel’s Barbara oder die Frömmigkeit und die Revolution in Wien 1918’, in Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur, vol. XV (1971), pp. 469–79
Josef Pfeifer, ‘Franz Werfel und die politischen Umwälzungen des Jahres 1918 in Wien’, in Études Germaniques, vol. XXVI (1971), pp. 194–207.
See Lionel B. Steinman’s analysis and references in Franz Werfel. The Faith of an Exile (Waterloo, Ontario, 1985), pp. 54–5.
Peter Stephan Jungkh, Franz Werfel. Eine Lebensgeschichte (Frankfurt, 1987), p. 181
Lore B. Foltin, Franz Werfel (Materialen — Leben und Werk) (Stuttgart, 1972), chronology.
See Elias Canetti’s remarks in The Torch in My Ear (New York, 1982), pp. 244 ff.
David Bronsen, Roth’s most extensive biographer, makes no mention of either Werfel or Barbara in connection with the genesis of Radetzkymarsch, attributing the idea of the novel to Roth’s own experience of growing up in old Austria. The fact is, however, that this is a novel about pre-war Bohemia. Roth was only 20 when the war broke out; he had grown up only in Galicia, and even during the war he enlarged his ken only to include Vienna. It was Werfel who knew the Bohemian background; and since Barbara was widely read in its day, it seems inescapable that Roth learned from it. This is not to say that Roth did anything illegitimate in borrowing from Werfel’s story; he and Werfel were good friends in Vienna during the 1920s. They published at the same press, and admired each other. One might well guess that Werfel, who grew up far from Galicia, borrowed from Roth’s early stories a good deal of the local colour which figures in the Galician sections of Barbara. But, as suggested in an earlier footnote, Claudio Magris is demonstrably wrong in attributing the model Habsburg Bildungsroman to Roth, not Werfel. See for all of this David Bronsen, Joseph Roth. Eine Biographie (Cologne, 1974), Ch. 16.
Maud Curling spells out the susceptibility of Radetzkymarsch to a Freudian interpretation in Joseph Roth’s ‘Radetzkymarsch.’ Eine psychologische Inter-pretation (Frankfurt, 1981).
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McCagg, W.O. (1992). Jewish Assimilation in Austria: Karl Kraus, Franz Werfel and Joseph Roth on the Catastrophe of 1914–19. In: Wistrich, R.S. (eds) Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22378-7_4
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