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Introduction Jews and Antisemitism in Central European Culture Albert Einstein once remarked that when the German Jews first began to flock into the universities of Central Europe at the end of the 19th century, it was as if they had spent an entire millennium preparing for the entrance examinations. During the sixty years between the founding of Bismarck’s German Empire and Hitler’s rise to power, German-speaking Jews would leave an indelible mark not only on Central Europe but on 20th-century culture as a whole. How would modernity look today without Einstein, Freud, or Marx; Mahler, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, or Kafka; or a whole galaxy of other outstanding Jewish scientists, poets, playwrights, composers, critics, historians, sociologists, psychoanalysts, jurists, and philosophers?1 Yet the most vibrant period in Central European cultural history—one which peaked first in fin-de-siècle Vienna and then in Weimar Germany (and which owed so much to the contributions of brilliant Jewish minds) ultimately collapsed into the horror and mass murder of the Nazi Holocaust. How was this possible? Was there not some connection between the dazzling achievement and the ferocity of the backlash? Did the Jews not take a tremendous risk in entering the mainstream of Central European life with the dizzying speed that they did? Was the German-Jewish “symbiosis” in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and elsewhere, not a “tragic, one-sided love affair” (Gershom Scholem), based on delusion and ultimately doomed to failure? Was not the lure of ambition and intellectual prominence—which turned Jews into “masters” of Central European culture—a fateful mirage, a deadly trap? German Jews first appeared on the cultural scene at the height of the late 18th century Aufklärung (Enlightenment)—a movement identified with such illustrious names as Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Kant, Hegel, and Fichte. This decisive encounter took place under the civilizing aegis of Bildung (self-cultivation) which presumed to transcend all differences of nationality and religion through encouraging education, self-discipline, aesthetic harmony, and the full development of the individual personality. From Moses Mendelssohn to Leo Baeck and Sigmund Freud, German Robert S. Wistrich 2 humanist ideals became an essential part of the substance of Jewishness but they were predicated on the false assumption that most of the German middle class in Central Europe actually shared them. It was a beautiful dream. But by the eve of World War I there was ample evidence that Imperial Germany was a Machtstaat striving for global hegemony and no paradise for Jews. When Albert Einstein returned to Germany in 1914, he observed: I saw worthy Jews basely caricatured, and the sight made my heart bleed. I saw how schools, comic papers and innumerable other forces of the Gentile majority undermined the confidence even of the best of my fellow Jews.2 An even more dramatic testimony of the breakdown of the assimilationist dream came in a letter of the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg to the painter Wassily Kandinsky, following rumors of growing antisemitism at the Bauhaus Design School in Germany. In this letter, written in April 1923, Schoenberg observes: I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but [that] I am a Jew.3 In a second letter of 4 May 1923, we can see more clearly still the depths of Schoenberg’s religious and national identity crisis—which ten years later (in 1933) would provoke his official return to the Jewish faith and community. He tells Kandinsky: But what is antisemitism to lead to if not to acts of violence? Is it so difficult, to imagine that? You are perhaps satisfied with depriving Jews of their civil rights. Then certainly Einstein, Mahler, I and many others will have been got rid of. But one thing is certain: they will not be able to exterminate those much tougher elements, thanks to whose endurance Jewry has maintained itself for twenty centuries.4 Schoenberg emphasized to Kandinsky that the German nationalist antisemites advocated a view of the world “whose aim is St. Bartholomew’s nights in the darkness of which no one will be able to read the little placard saying that I’m exempt.....” In 1923, the same year that Schoenberg made his grim prediction, the Austrian novelist, Joseph Roth, born...

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