THE END OF THE MULTICULTURAL STATE

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , ,

Synagogue, Krakov

During the 1920s and 1930s Austrian intellectual life was still dominated by men who had grown up under the empire. Many of them deemed the Habsburg Empire a lost paradise, whose lustre brightened as time passed. In 1938 the last vestiges of cosmopolitanism perished from Vienna and much of the Danube basin as Jews were decimated, saddling their successors with a corrosive guilt. After 1938 for a long time no other forum for debate has emerged to replace what Hitler had destroyed. The demise of intellectual Vienna is a major reason why post-1945 Central and Eastern Europe has produced so few innovative thinkers.

 

With the Treaty of Paris of 1919, i.e. the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon and Sèvres, the disintegration process of the whole Danube region, which during the Habsburg Empire had constituted a homogenous economic free-trade area with a well-working division of production and provision of services, was speeded up in a disastrous way. After the break-down of so many regimes, the collapse of the Russian, German, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the map of Central and Eastern Europe was redrawn along nationalistic lines. The main aim was the creation of ethnic-linguistic nation states according to the belief of the US President Wilson that nations had the “right to self-determination”, a belief that was easily held by those far from the ethnic and linguistic realities of the regions which were to be divided into neat nation states. The whole attempt was a disaster and triggered the national conflicts that have torn the continent apart in the 20th century. The Balkans wars of the 1990s and the Ukrainian conflict can be seen as the latest “legacies of Versailles”. …

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EASTERN JEWS

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jewish cementery, Krakov

Joseph Roth, born to a Jewish family, grew up in Brody near Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv in Eastern Galicia, the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Brody had one of the biggest Jewish populations in Europe and Jewish cultural life played an important role there. He began his studies in Lemberg and then went on to study philosophy and German literature in Vienna in 1914. In 1916 he quit university and volunteered in the Austro-Hungarian Army. The collapse of the empire had a lasting and detrimental effect on him, as on many other Jewish intellectuals. “My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary.” In 1927 he wrote his famous essay “The Wandering Jews” about the minority of Eastern Jews and their plight. “The Eastern Jew does not know anything about the social injustice of the West; nothing about the reign of prejudice, that governs the paths, actions, customs and ways of life of the average Western European,….nothing of the hate which is already so strong that it is cherished like a life-giving (but life-killing) eternal fire that warms the egotism of every man and every country…. For the Eastern Jew the West means freedom, the possibility to work and to develop his talents, justice and autonomous rule of the mind. Western Europe sends engineers, automobiles, books and poems to the East. It sends propaganda soaps and hygiene, the useful and the sublime….For the Eastern Jew Germany for example is still the country of Goethe and Schiller, of the German poets, who every ambitious young Jew knows better than a swastika-loving grammar school pupil.” They started migrating from the borderlands to the Russian Empire, where “every year there is a war and every week a pogrom”. Some returned, many more continued their journey. “The Eastern Jews have nowhere a fatherland, but graves in every cemetery…. Most give to the West at least as much as the West takes from them. Some give more to the West than the West gives to them. They all have the right to live in the West who sacrifice themselves, in that they venture to the West.” …

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JEWISH INTELLECTUAL BOOST IN THE HABSBURG CITIES

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Palais Morpurgo, Jewish industrialists and bankers in Trieste

Any study of intellectual life in the Habsburg Empire must single out the Jews for special attention. No other ethnic group produced so many thinkers of transcendent originality, i.e. theorists like Freud, Husserl, Kelsen, Wittgenstein, Mahler, authors like Schnitzler, Kraus, Broch, Roth. In addition to these creative geniuses, a disproportionate number of productive thinkers in every field were Jewish. In some fields like psychoanalysis and Austro-Marxism, Jews constituted an overwhelming preponderance. The Jewish middle class provided a unique forum for discussion and dissemination of new ideas. Newspapers like the “Neue Freie Presse” and “Wiener Tagblatt”, Karl Kraus’ journal “Die Fackel” were mainly Jewish.…

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JEWS IN THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN MONARCHY

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Synagogue Pecs, Hungary

The first mentioning of Jews on the territory of Austria proper goes back to the “Raffelstettner Customs Regulation” which was formulated between 903 and 906. The first Jews came as travelling merchants who traded between the Carolingian Empire, where they were already mentioned in the 8th century, and the Slav territories in the East. At that time several Jewish merchants had already settled on the territory of the duchy of Bavaria, of which Austria was a part. The Jews were expelled from the duchy of Austria several times. After the battle of Mohacs 1526 and the expansion of the Habsburg Empire into the Danube basin including now Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary many Jews who lived in the kingdom of Bohemia moved to Vienna and the surrounding lands, but they fled again to Bohemia after another pogrom of Viennese Jews between 1669 and 1671 because bigger Jewish communities had already existed there in the 16th century. In Moravia the Jews were expelled from the cities already in the 15th century and mostly lived on noble estates on the countryside. Also in Hungary bigger Jewish communities were established on the estates of the Hungarian nobility after they had been driven out of the cities. But most of the Jews in the Eastern Danube basin in the 17th century lived on the territory that was still part of the Osman Empire because the more tolerant attitude of the Osmans towards Jews guaranteed them relatively more legal security.…

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VIENNA, THE MELTING POT OF CENTRAL EUROPE

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , ,

Crest of the Ephrussis, migrated to Vienna from Russia

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution Vienna had the largest multi-ethnic immigration of all European big cities. in 1880 65 % of the population were not born there and in 1910 the share was still 51 %. The famous Ringstrassen buildings can act as a symbol for this multi-ethnic climate. They were built by architects from different nationalities, constructed by workers and craftsmen who had immigrated to Vienna from all parts of the empire and were partly inhabited by first and second generations of immigrated industrialists of the Ringstrassen era. These architects built similar representative buildings in all the big cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and this architectural heritage can still be seen in many cities of the Danube region, restored to new splendour after 1989.…

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IDENTITY CRISES AND ASSIMILATION

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Austro-Hungarian Empire in those days was characterised by ambivalence: on the one hand the multi-lingual international aspect, on the other hand increasing nationalism. This atmosphere formed the basis for the famous cultural climate that produced outstanding artistic, philosophic and scientific results. These cultural and political clashes, multiple identities and this special way of life created lots of contradictions that triggered innovative solutions. This atmosphere also produced the founders of national mass movements of the Jews and the Czechs: Theodor Herzl founded Zionism, Heinrich Füger and Miroslav Tyrs the sports club Sokol, the centre of the Czech national movement.…

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MINORITIES IN THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , ,

Not only the Jewish population but all national minorities had to cope with the pressure from the majority population, mostly the German- or Hungarian-speaking majority. Since the 1880s politics and everyday life were dominated by nationalism and nationalistic conflicts in Central Europe. Yet the multinational dynastic Habsburg Empire continued to exist and to make administrative efforts to protect all peoples and religions. All the bigger minority groups in the cities had developed an infra-structural network. In Vienna there were dozens of Jewish and Czech associations, Jewish newspapers, a Hungarian and a Croatian newspaper and several Czech newspapers. Furthermore there were several national mutual loan societies (Kreditgenossenschaften), a Czech private school system, a Polish school, Jewish Thora schools, many charities to support even small communities of emigrants from small rural regions and villages. These societies, associations, clubs and charities compensated for the dispersed living conditions as the minorities in the crammed 2-million capital could not crowd together in special areas. …

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THE DANUBE REGION UNTIL 1918: MOSAIC OR MELTING POT OF CENTRAL EUROPE

MULTI-ETHNICITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PEOPLES IN THE DANUBE BASIN, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Budapest, market hall

The Canadian historian William Hubbard showed how tightly social, economic and demographic developments in the second half of the 19th century in Cisleithania, the western Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were linked to the migrational processes and the minorities issue. In the seven biggest cities in this area, namely Vienna, Graz, Trieste, Prague, Brno, Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv and Krakow, the share of the population born in these cities was rather small. As in other European and American cities urbanisation was fed by migration from the countryside, not by higher birth rates in the cities. In Vienna you had in 1880 a share of immigrants of 65 %. Especially in Vienna immigration was a hot issue of social and political debate. The dynamisms of migrational processes and the political, economic and social status of minorities in the 19th and 20th century were undoubtedly due to urbanisation and industrialisation processes. Immigration followed the allocation of capital, but also traditional migrational processes continued that added to the numbers of already existing minority groups dispersed across the Danube region. One should not forget that migration was already a central phenomenon of the pre-industrial society here.…

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THE MULTICULTURAL EMPIRE: “KRONPRINZENWERK” published 1885-1902 by the Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolf

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Before the dramatic rise of nationalism, the monarchy officially still celebrated its ethnic and cultural diversity. One important and interesting scientific project had as its patron the crown prince Rudolf. In 1884 he asked the permission of the Emperor to carry out a comprehensive survey of the ethnic diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 17 years (until 1902) all crown lands, peoples and regions of the monarchy were researched and the results were published in 24 German and 21 Hungarian volumes. Subscribers could buy the individual issues at a subsidised price of only 30 Kreuzer per issue very cheaply. The political character of the scientific project was to propagate the pride of the Empire in its ethnic and cultural diversity. Despite this propaganda attempt, the knowledge about the lands of the Habsburg monarchy in the West was marginal. Still in 1938 Neville Chamberlain spoke out against a declaration of war against Hitler by saying British solders should not be sacrificed for a conflict “in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” – meaning Czechoslovakia.…

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“RED VIENNA” 1923-1933: EDUCATIONAL REFORMS

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Vienna Urania, built in 1910 by the architect Max Fabiani as a “Workers’ University”

 

The cultural and educational policy was dedicated to pedagogical experiments. The city of Vienna carried out six model experiments for a general school for all 10- to 14-year olds in order to break up the educational privileges of the well-to-do. The educational policy for primary schools heavily relied on the principle of the then new and revolutionary Montessori concepts: free provision of schoolbooks and equipment, creative and practice-oriented learning. The Pedagogical Institute was founded to train teachers and link teacher training to scientific research. The competing schools of experimental psychology, individual psychology and psychoanalysis were represented there. Vienna developed into the centre for developmental psychology and developmental therapy with the foundation of the Viennese Psychological Institute, where Charlotte and Karl Bühler worked.

 

In the 1920s and early 1930s a gigantic educational and pedagogical movement characterised Vienna which could not be found in any other city in those days. Ellen Kay called Vienna “the capital city of the child”. In this place a variety of educational and pedagogical concepts were developed, public and private initiatives and institutions abounded. All this would not have been possible without the development of Freud’s psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s “psychology of the individual” Education was seen as a complex concept and had the highest priority, not only in the family, schools and day care centres, but also in cultural, sports and leisure clubs and party organisations.…

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