Trudy Gold
Racial Madness in Vienna

Trudy Gold - Racial Madness in Vienna

- Good evening everyone from Cornwall and of course, having looked at the economic role of the Jew, the extraordinary role of the Jew in every aspect of Viennese society, bearing in mind that by the time you get to the 1880s, Vienna as a city has exploded, and exploded numerically, and Jews make up nearly 10%. And we’ve also spent a bit of time looking at the soft underbelly of Vienna. We’ve looked at the poverty, we’ve looked also at the discontented lower middle classes and into that seething cauldron of after all what was still an authoritarian state, we’re now going to look at the growth of what I’ve called Racial Madness in Vienna. And I’m going to give you a quote, first of all, from one of the leading scholars of Vienna, Carl Schorske. And this is what he had to say, Bearing in mind that William talked about the failed 1848 revolution, and by the 1870s liberalism never de delivered for the people of Vienna. So I’m now coming on to Carl Schorske. “Austrian liberalism failed to bring the masses into the state. This led to the rise of revolutionary parties offering radical solutions. These movements were Pan-Germanism, Christian socialism, and in answer to both of these Zionism.” Don’t forget that Vienna is the seedbed of Zionism. And my next session I’m going to be talking about how Zionism took over amongst many of the students at the University of Vienna. As against the dry rationalism, political liberalism, the powerful leaders of these movements developed what became known as the sharper key. Political behaviour at once more abrasive, more creative, and more satisfying to the like of feeling than in a deliberate style of the liberals.

These are going to be characters who know how to be crowd pleasers, they have huge charisma and they know how to work the mob. And of course, if you want echoes of the 21st century, this is Vienna’s rise of populism. Two leading virtuoso of the new key, Georg von Schonerer and Karl Lueger, who I’m going to talk about today, of the Pan-German People’s Party and the Christian socialist tapped into all these seething unrest they found in sects of Vienna. They became the inspires and political model for Adolf Hitler, The third Theodor Herzl, pioneered, now listen to this very carefully, it’s terribly important, pioneered the most powerful political response yet devised to counter what Schorske called the Gentile Reign of Terror. Thus, even before Vienna’s intellectuals blazed trails into the culture of the 20th century, three of its sons pioneered its post-rational politics. Now, this is what we’re going to be talking about. We’re going to be talking about post-rational politics. So in this huge melee, how did it all come together? We’ve already talked about the dichotomy between, on one level, the incredible gaiety of Vienna, the extraordinary arts, culture, music, every aspect, and underneath that other level. And also in Catholic Austria, it’s very important to remember. And there were so many people who were dispossessed in Catholic Vienna and Catholic Austria, and who did they look to? Look, it’s the easiest thing in the world. You look for the scapegoat. And 13 different nationalities within the empire, and also of course the rise of race theory. So let’s talk a little bit about race theory. Can we have the first slide, please, Judi?

This is a very suave Englishman called Houston Stewart Chamberlain. I’m going to leave his picture on the screen while I talk a little bit about the rise of race theory and then his rather sinister and evil contribution to it. Now really from the times of Napoleon onwards, you begin to see writers in France, in Germany, in the Habsburg Empire, playing around with different solutions for the ills of society. After Darwin publishes his extraordinary origin of the species, you have pseudo philosophers taking Darwin’s ideas of the survival of the fittest and applying it to racial groups. There’s a lot of talk about the growth of nationalism. William’s done this brilliantly, but what happens to nationalism when it’s taken to its ultimate conclusion? When does it topple into racism? So by the 1870s, particularly after the stock market crashed, when you have this incredibly reactionary pope in the Catholic world, Pius IX, Vienna, Catholic Austria. So you have the forces of conservatism, Catholicism, Franz Joseph himself, although he was never a racist and never an anti-Semite. On one level you have all the avant-garde on the other, you have excessive capitalism and you have socialism. And into this mix, you have the suffering of a lot of people. Now what if it’s not your fault? What if it’s not your fault that you can’t make your way in the world? After all, by blood, you are a German. Why is it that these Slavs, these under people, are now taking your place in the world?

And these are the kind of characters that we begin to see writing. It begins with a man called Gobineau, his essay on the inequality of the races. But now I want to turn to Houston Stewart Chamberlain because he’s going to be incredibly influential. He was actually born in Hampshire in England. He’d loathed Britain. He’d loathed what he later called the liberalism of Britain. He loathed the aggressive capitalism of Britain. His particular hatred was, believe it or not, aimed at my particular hero, Benjamin Disraeli. He came from a very wealthy elitist family. He has a German tutor. He goes to a school in Portsmouth because his family came from the military caste, or they were either naval people or they were in the army, very upper middle class. He spends time with his grandmother in Paris, but then he has a German tutor and he falls madly in love with German culture. And because he’s a wealthy young man, they go travelling. And in his travels he develops his theories. He loathes, particularly in Germany, he falls in love with Germany. He falls in love with what he sees as the romanticism of Germany, the art, the literal. He’s playing around with religion. He’s actually anti-Catholic, but he looks to the past when people ran free. It’s this romantic idea of the Volk, and he’s looking for some sort of truth, he’s very clever. You know, never forget that brains are no bar to appalling behaviour and appalling racial behaviour. I think this is one of the problems that those of us who were brought up in the Enlightenment, we really did believe that if you educate people to a certain level, then they would automatically become enlightened. Tragically, history does not bear that out. He seems to have found his truth in the myths and legends of Germany.

Bearing in mind, Germany’s not unified ‘til 1871, and it’s at that time that it’s brought together by aggressive nationalism of Bismarck. And of course, when was Germany once great before that? When it actually destroyed the Roman empire. It was the forces of the Han remember, and go back to the old tribal stories. He also became very interested in Hindu myth and legend. He taught himself Sanskrit, he was a very good linguist. And he was very interested in those legends. He was also interested in the caste system. And as he developed his thinking, he began to think that in fact, the Indo-European peoples who are, if you like, came from India, they are in fact Aryan. So he mixes this up with all sorts of strange philosophies that are becoming, if you like, current in Europe as the century progresses. The great love of his life was actually Wagner. When he first became involved in Wagner’s music he said, “It plunged heart and soul into the depths of the master.” And he of course swallows all Wagner’s views of race and thought. And from the 1880s, it’s racism that really dominates his idea. In June, 1888, it’s known, 1888 in Germany is the Year of the Three Emperors. Wilhelm I dies age 90, to succeed by Frederick III, who was married to Princess Victoria of England, the eldest daughter of Victoria. They were liberals as a sort of panacea against anti-Semitism. They actually visited the synagogue, but he only reigned for a short time because he had throat cancer. And when he died, Houston Stewart Chamberlain writes a letter saying how, “I’m drinking a toast to the death of the great Jew lover, Emperor Frederick III.”

He meets Cosima, a great friendship develops, and later on he’s going to marry her daughter, Ava von Bulow and really become part of the Bayreuth Circle. He writes a biography of Wagner, and then in 1889, he moves to Vienna and it’s here that his ideas really take shape. He becomes involved in the Wagner Society, he meets many of the aristocrats of Vienna. He also meets the ambassador, the German ambassador to Vienna, who is Eulenburg, who is a very, very close friend of the Kaiser, Kaiser Wilhelm II. He, in his racial, this is what he wrote about the Jews, “Redemptive anti-Semitism…”, he believed, this is the phrase he used, “Redemptive anti-Semitism.” He believed that you could explain the whole of the problems of the world in relation to the Jew. “The Jew is everywhere.” Now, in September, 1891, he visited Bosnia Herzegovina as a journalist. And he said, “What matters in society is to have an absolute monarch because that’s when the people can be free.” He loved the, he said it’s back a hundred years. He loved the fact that it was horse and cart, that women were wandering around in their traditional costumes. And he said, Austrians, he said, the fact that the Austrians have taken power there, they have an undemocratic rule. Parliamentary democracy is a total shambles. And he loved the fact that modernity did not exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And his time in Vienna, bearing in mind it’s 10% Jewish, it really shapes his Pan-Germanism and his anti-Semitism. And when he finally moved to by Bayreuth, he had total contempt for what he called the multi-ethnic empire. And he visited a spa and there are so many quotes of his that are so violently anti-Semitic. He goes to a fashionable spa in 1894, while he is still in Vienna.

And he says, “Like everything else, it has fallen into the hands of the Jews. Two consequences, every individual is bled to the utmost and there is no order and no cleanliness.” He supported the Boer War against the English, the Anglo Jewish aggression, that’s how he saw the British against the German Africans. Remember, he was born in England. And it was in 1889 that he publishes his most famous work. And of course it’s “The Origins of the 19th Century”, it’s two volumes, and basically it talks about the death struggle between the various races. The master race is of course, the Aryan race, anyone that he liked was an Aryan. The Greeks and the Romans were Aryans. He claimed all the great European writers as Aryans from Homer through Dante, through Leonardo da Vinci and the great figures of the Renaissance, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, they’re all Aryans. Now, what are the Jews responsible for? Irresponsible capitalism as against the Teutonic romantic society. Marxism, as opposed to ethical socialism, what would help the people. All society is manipulated by Jews. It is, if you like, almost a forerunner of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. And he said this, I mean, please don’t think about any kind of logic when I’m talking to you about these kind of horrific individuals and their writings, logic does not exist for them.

He said, “Jewish women are encouraged to marry gentiles, but the male line must be spotless.” You see, there was a lot of intermarriage in both ways. Men, Jewish men, marrying Gentile women. Jewish women marry Gentile men. As far as he’s concerned, though, he’s twisted it. It’s all for Jewish women to marry Gentiles because that just spoils the race. Male Jews must be spotless. And he says this, “There would in Europe be only a single people of pure race, the Jew. the rest of everyone else is a half breed. They will degenerate physically, mentally, and morally. He also maintained that the Jews had actually founded the Catholic church, which preached Judah-ized Christianity, nothing to do with the Christianity of the Aryan Christ, because of course Jesus has to be an Aryan. So it’s, what can I tell you? Unfortunately "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is still read by hundreds of thousands of people. You can still buy it all over the world. And so, and as we know from conspiracy theories about COVID, that when society’s fractured, people want to believe in magic and hidden forces. And Houston Stewart Chamberlain in Vienna, and later in by Bayreuth, he’s pushing it all together. He actually said Democracy is actually a Jewish device to destroy. And he said, “The end will be the Jews and the Germans locked into a war of survival.”

He also said, “Conversion is another Jewish plot.” Because you see, he defines the Jews by race. This is the great change in the 19th century. The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1878, by German journalist, Wilhelm Marr. But the point is, the idea is actually predated. And what it means is, it’s very important that everyone takes this on. It doesn’t matter whether you convert to Christianity, it doesn’t matter whether you are a Marxist or a great rabbi, it’s about Jewish blood. It’s about bloodline now. This is nationalism, to racism, to bloodline. The Jew is a separate racial group. So the Jews are using everything, in his rather diseased mind, the Jews are using everything to take over the world. And he actually wrote, he doesn’t advocate what later was advocated by the monster that followed. He said, “His readers will know how to solve the Jewish problem.” He, of course, was very influential. He sent his copies of his book through Eulenburg, to Wilhelm II, and Wilhelm II actually said, “God has sent you to me and Germany.” So it’s important to remember, yes, it’s at the highest level of the aristocracy. And many of those who feel that the Jews have usurped them. I mean, at my last session, I talked about the correspondent of the London Times talking about how Vienna seems such a Jewish city. And this is, if you like, the backlash. And can we now go on, and what I’m looking at with you today, I’m looking at the main figures that are going to really make Vienna a very, very problematic place for Jews. And it’s no accident, of course, that out of Vienna will come, what?

Will come Zionism. I think it’s no accident because that is going to be the great reaction. Okay, Georg von Schonerer, his dates are 1842 to 1921. I should mention that Houston Stewart Chamberlain did actually meet Hitler. And Hitler of course came to his funeral. Remember he’s a member of the Bayreuth Circle. And Hitler swallowed him whole, and he of course attended the funeral. Now, Georg von Schonerer, who was born in Vienna, his father Matthias, was one of the most important railway pioneers in Austria. He actually worked for the Austrian Rothschilds. He completed the first railroad, on what were the Rothschild’s backing. They were paying for them, the first railway, on the northbound railway on continental Europe. And also he was responsible for the construction of the first Austrian railway tunnel. He’s elevated to the nobility for his services to the state. And it’s very important to remember he works for the Rothschild’s. Now, his wife, so this is Schonerer’s mother, ironically, she was a great-granddaughter of a rabbi. She had a younger sister who became a theatre director. So he has got Jewish blood. He studied agronomy at both Austria and the University of Vienna and in Budapest. And after graduating, he worked on his father’s estate in lower Austria. He was very much a generous patriarch. He was loved by the local peasantry. He loved the local peasantry, he loved the quaint ways. He’s also getting much into the old world. After Austria, this is the problem, the Austrian defeat in 1866. Remember Prussia is united by three wars, war with Denmark, war with Austria, and war with France. You have the dissolution of the German Confederation and then the founding of the German Empire. He becomes a huge admirer of Otto von Bismarck.

He wrote admiring letters to Bismarck. He rejected Austro-German nationalism, and he didn’t want Pan-Germanism to jeopardise the Jew alliance, but he admires Bismarck. Remember, Bismarck didn’t want union with the Austrian Empire because of all the Slavic elements. He knew he’d have a terrible problem. Now, after the stock market collapse of 1873, which is the death knell of liberalism, he becomes part of the Imperial Council. At first he’s quite liberal, but he becomes more and more extreme. He emerges as a brilliant orator. He’s just got it. He agitated and as he realised he becomes more and more involved in the underbelly of Vienna. And he agitated against Jewish capitalism. He was anti-clerical, that’s what’s so interesting about him, he’s anti-clerical. He’s also anti the House of Habsburg. He thinks it’s holding this dissolute empire together. And he was totally against the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He said, “It’s a betrayal of ethnic German interests. We do not want these people. If only we already belong to the German Reich.” He’s changing his mind. “And finally get rid of Bosnia.” He really appealed to the lower middle classes. And those who were disappointed by the 1848 Revolution, who had dreamt of a single nation state. So he’s got different constituents, and tensions rose even further in 1879 when Eduard Taaffe became Prime Minister. He was an Austrian Noble and a Catholic, a monarchist, but he was also pro-minority. William talked about him. He’s accused by Schonerer of being anti-German. However, in 1882, working with Victor Adler and Heinrich Friedjung, who were both Jews by the way, and I’ll be talking about Adler later on in another session.

They create the Linz programme, what they want, he’s moving from liberalism, he’s moving from clericalism. He wants the Austro-German national movement. So that’s what he’s moving towards now. Get rid of the Slavic elements in the Empire. Let’s take the Austrian, the German Austrian, and two of the five people who created it, two Jews are involved. The Germanization of the Austrian state, “Let’s get rid of the Slavic peoples, we just don’t want them in our world.” So he wants a German dominated state. He proposed seeding Galicia way, seeding Bukovina, Dalmatia, to Hungary, giving them political autonomy. He just doesn’t want them involved with the Germans. And he wanted ties with Hungary, which he regarded as a Slav state, only to be the personal crown. Germany must become the official language, German is the official language of Austria, and he wanted a customs union. Taaffe the prime minister, for example, he wanted, if you were involved in Bohemia in the civil service, you should speak Czech. And that’s meaning that a lot of German speakers aren’t getting the jobs they want. He’s totally against this. And he said, “We protest against all attempts to convert Austria into a Slavic state. We should continue to agitate for the maintenance of German as the official language and to approve the extension of federalism. We are stead for supporters of the Empire’s alliance with Germany.” But he begins more and more to see the Jew as the problem.

And in 1885, he added a clause to the Linz Programme, the Aryan Clause, no Jew can become part of his dream. And also there’s an anti-Catholic clause. He wants a break with Rome. He considered, as he develops, he decides that this fight for Austro-Germany is a fight against the Jews. He develops this insane racial opposition to the Jews. His campaign becomes even more vocal because Jewish refugees are escaping from the Russian pogroms, flooding into the capital. And not that many, frankly a lot of the Jewish establishment aren’t happy about it either. This is what he said, this is another quote of his, “Our anti-Semitism is not directed against the religion, but against the racial traits of the Jews, which have not been changed either by earlier pressure or through the freedom that they now have.” So, and I’m just giving you a few examples of the kind of rhetoric. Unfortunately, he’s going to get a lot of support from the various student unions. And this is a Pan-German flyer. “The battle amongst the peoples is an issue of not…”, this is from a university, “Is an issue not of right, but of might. From the German point of view, only German concerns are valid and not those of other people. No man can serve two masters who have been enemies for centuries and must need be natural enemies, we are enmeshed in battle.” Now, this is the Austrian Student Convention. This is interesting and I’ll be coming back to this when I talk about what’s going on with Jewish students at the University of Vienna. This is the Austrian Student Convention, it’s tied up with German speaking universities. “In full appreciation of the fact that, there is so deep a moral and physical difference between Aryan and Jew, and that our special character has suffered so much from Jewish trickery.

In full appreciation of the many truths which the Jewish student has provided for his lack of honour and character and since he’s any case, wholly devoid of honour, according to our German concepts, today’s conference of German students, fencing corporations, resolves no Jew is to be given any satisfaction.” Can you go on? I think I’ve got a quote for you of his, haven’t I? Yes. That’s one. Yes, I’ve read that to you. And can you go on, Judi? I hope I’ve got another one, no go back, sorry. Can you go back? Go back please to, yeah. This is another one. “The Jews are the enemy of Christian culture and of nations of Aryan descent. Not only of the Germans, but of other Austrian nations as well. Considering that as a result of the continuous Jewish increase of the Jewish element, Jews are obtaining more and more monopoly positions in important branches of business. The Jewish owned press fosters corruption, so as to develop public order.” Now, I’ll be talking about the Jewish response to all of this in another session. Suffice to say, many of the establishment figures, they didn’t really see it coming and they gave, they still believe they, afterward, Franz Joseph was not an anti-Semite, they still believed in progress. So unfortunately his model really spreads throughout the young student world. You know, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? Students are quite often at the vanguard of totalitarianism. Never forget that when they burnt the books in Germany in 1933, May the 10th, 1933, it was the students who threw the books into the flames.

And of course, the first book they throw in was the work of Sigmund Freud. Now, the Austrian government have actually forbade the Pan-German symbols. He asks that the German Austrians to wear the cornflower, which was the most favoured flower of Kaiser Wilhelm, along with the cockade of German national colours, red, yellow, and blue. So the point is, at the university now, there are those who want German Austria. There are those who want Germany and Austria, who want Austria, German, but not tied to Germany. And there are lots of duels, now one of the reasons the duelling societies decided not, that Jews had no honour, was ironically, there’s a lot of Jews who are now becoming very expert fencers. But what was interesting about the students, and as I said, I’m going to delve into that next, no not next time, the time after, most of the Jewish students who joined the Zionist organisations were not Viennese, they were actually from the outlying parts of the empire. They were the outsiders who saw it. So, okay. In his party, his party becomes more and more important. And he says, “No Jew or Slav is allowed to join and know if you have a friend or a distant relative who is a Jew by marriage, you can’t join. Any member who wishes to marry has to prove Aryan descent.” And of course, he becomes referred to by many of his followers as Fuhrer, and the followers would meet… You see, he hates Catholicism, outwardly he’s a Lutheran, but his followers meet during solstices and they celebrated the rhythm of German history, the German battle sagas. They go, the groups go into the forests.

They have all sorts of rituals in the forests. And they are going back to a time in German history when they believe Germany was great. They want to throw off the shackles of modernity. They also want to throw off the shackles of conventional morality. And he said, “If we don’t…”, this is a very important speech he made in 1884. “If we don’t expel the Jews, we Germans will be expelled.” He asked for the nationalisation of all the Rothschild owned railways. In 1888. He was actually imprisoned because he had gone with his followers and attacked the offices of a liberal Jewish newspaper and assaulted the employees. And because what had happened was, they had prematurely reported the imminent death of the Kaiser, the first Kaiser, Wilhelm I. So they attack and imprisoned, though he loses a lot of support to his main rival, but he did have his mandate in parliament. He’s reelected, I should have mentioned, he’s already in the Austrian parliament. He’s not reelected till 1897, because he was in prison, and that rather means that Karl Lueger, who is his rival, is going to usurp him. As I said, officially, he became a Lutheran, but he really is a pagan. He staged mass protests, mass rallies. He disrupted parliamentary proceedings until it led to Franz Joseph dismissing his prime minister. By 1907, there were 21 members of this anti-Semitic party in parliament. He died in 1921, he’d arranged to be buried near Bismarck’s mausoleum. So a lot of the ideas I’m giving you, you will not be new to you because obviously they are going to be swallowed later on by the Nazis.

Remember, Hitler is going to come to the city in 1907, I think one of, also in 1897, he had introduced a bill to restrict Jewish emancipation. 37,000 people signed. The preamble, “The Jew is the enemy of everything in our empire. Jew is a blood sucking vampire.” He also, he went as far as to try and resurrect the old Germanic names for the months of the year. He was completely against the mixing of the blood as far as he’s concerned, a Jew is a Jew, is a Jew by blood, and therefore the enemy of everything Aryan. Can we now see Karl Lueger, who until quite recently had a large section of the Ringstrasse named for him. Now, what was his background? He was born in Vienna. His father worked as an usher at the Vienna Polytechnic. Now he, you may remember, and this was something William was talking about, that if you were a gifted student, this is going back to the time of Maria Theresa, she established the Theresian Academy, and he was one, that was back in 1746. And Jesuits were running these schools. Now he wins a place and it’s very important because it gives him a brilliant education. And it was under the direction quote, “Of order of the poor clerics regular.” The whole purpose was private education for the poor. In fact, Pius IX, had previously taught at one of their schools. Now Karl Lueger is a devout Catholic, as opposed to von Schonerer, who was outwardly a Lutheran, but far more of a pagan.

Very, very smart, as I said, poor boy having a brilliant education, a Catholic education. He studied law at the University of Vienna. He got his doctorate in 1870. What extraordinary alma mater the University of Vienna is, not just the brilliant but also the evil. And after 1874, the year after the crash, when so many ordinary folk were wiped out, he opened his own lawyer’s office. And at that time though, he had a close relationship with a popular Jewish doctor called Ignaz Mandel, who was called God of the little people. He was a brilliant Jewish doctor working in the slums of Vienna. Because the reality of the Jewish world, yes, Jews were capitalists, yes, Jews were artists, Jews were doctors, Jews were lawyers, and Jews were socialists. Like any other group, within any group, you have all sorts of different kind of, all sorts of different kinds of jobs, different kinds of beliefs. But the problem was with anti-Semites, they thought that all Jews were working together for one aim. That’s why it doesn’t matter if you are a communist or a capitalist, you must still be working together because you have Jewish blood. Anyway, he had this close relationship, but gradually he’s going to turn to anti-Semitism. He had a real feeling for the poor. It’s important to say that, he was incredibly popular. He was also very good looking. He never married. Although after his death, it was found out that he had a mistress, and there’s a big scandal there, but nevertheless, he gave himself to his people. He develops as a politician. He’s elected to the Vienna City Council. Initially as a liberal and apart from a two year break, he would serve there until his death. He was totally against corruption. He is very much the champion of those who can’t speak out. He was a brilliant politician.

He got the people, he’s a brilliant speaker. He’s a demagogue. He’s got charisma. And he manages to unite the German nationalists on the council with the Christian socialist faction, Christian socialism and German nationalists. For this deeply Catholic man, he’s bringing them all together. I’m going to read now a description of Karl Lueger. I got it from the “Catholic Encyclopaedia”, and I thought it was rather interesting for you to read how he is reported in the “Catholic Encyclopaedia”, “In 1872, having decided on a political career, he joined an independent political organisation, the Citizens Club of one of the wards of Vienna. Liberalism, which had guided Austria from aristocracy to democracy in government. It was at this period that one political creed that offered any prospect of success in politics, but liberalism had come to mean economic advancement for the capitalist at the cost of the small tradesmen, the capitalist being usually the Jew. The result was an appalling moral degradation and a regime of political corruption with a population sunk in lazy indifference, political, economic, and religious. The Jewish liberalism ruled supreme in the city. Country, public opinion was moulded by a press almost entirely Jewish and anti-clerical. Catholic dogmas and practises were ridiculed, priests and religious assaulted in the streets. In 1875, Karl Lueger, he was elected to the Vienna City Council for one year, reelected in 1876 for a term of three years, he resigned his seat in consequence of the exposure of corruption in the administration.

Having now become leader of the anti-corruption party, he was again elected in 1878 as an independent candidate. He threw himself heart and soul into the battle for purity of government.” Okay. By the 1890s, the Christian Socialist, his party, won 2/3s of the seats and they elected Karl Lueger Mayor. Now, by this time, he has become one big demagogue. He’s using anti-Semitism. It’s very interesting, was he actually an anti-Semite or did he use it? This is what he said, “Yes in Vienna, the Jews are as numerous as grains of sand on the shore. Wherever you go, nothing but Jews. If you go to the theatre, nothing but Jews. If you walk on the Ring Boulevard, nothing but Jews. If you go to a concert, nothing but Jews. If you attend a ball, nothing but Jews. If you go on campus again, nothing but Jews.” Can we see the next quote, please, Judi? Yeah, leave it on the underbelly of Vienna for a minute, because this is where he’s going to get a lot of support. Franz Joseph refuses to ratify him because by this time, he is really using anti-Semitism as the yeast to bind together all the elements. He’s elected mayor for the fifth time in 1897, and after personal intercession by the Pope, Leo XIII, Pius IX is dead, his election was finally sanctioned. He wants to capture the university for the church. He wanted neither, he said, “I want neither social Democrats, Pan-Germans, nor Jews in the municipal established administration.” Now he’s going for Clericalism. And he said, “I want to make Vienna the most beautiful city in the world. I want to get rid of the slums.” He extended the public water supply to provide tap water to a large part of the city. He took on the municipalization of the gas and electric works. He established a public transport system.

He introduced trams, he established social welfare, he built parks, he built gardens, he built hospitals, he built schools, they called him the beautiful Karl. And in his time Vienna becomes, you know, a rather beautiful city. There’s no doubt about it, he is a man who’s incredibly popular. He manages to attract an incredible amount of support from some class elements of the working class, the petty bourgeoisie who blamed the Jews for their precarious position. And he really understood now whether he understood that anti-Semitism would be his yeast. And from 1890, he’s a member of the Landtag for Lower Austrian parliament. And as I said, women found him incredibly attractive. So he was the mayor of Vienna when Adolph Hitler came to the city. I’m going to read what a couple of historians said about him. This is Amos Elon, “Lueger’s anti-Semitism was of a home spun flexible variety. Asked to explain that many of his friends were Jews. He famously replied, 'I decide who is a Jew.’” Even the great Stefan Zweig, “His city administration was perfectly just and even typically democratic.” This is from William Shirer, “His opponents, including the Jews, readily conceited that at heart, he was a decent, chivalrous, generous and tolerant man.” This is Leon Poliakov, “It soon became apparent in Vienna that any politician that wanted to appeal to the artisans had no chance of success without an anti-Semitic platform.” It was at this time that a well-known phrase was coined in Vienna. Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools. However, the enthusiastic tribute to him paid by Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf” does not seem justified as Jews did not suffer under his administration.

You know, I personally don’t agree with any of those historians because the point was he used anti-Semitism. Whether he really believed it or not is irrelevant because he allowed it to run riot. And now I’m going to turn so that you also get an idea of the racial madness of Vienna. I want to turn to a couple of other characters whose stories seem almost like out of a, some crazy, I dunno, some crazy esoteric book. So can we have a look at, Guido Karl Anton von List, please? Yeah. Okay. He’s born in Vienna, prosperous middle class family, very Catholic, he later claimed that he abandoned Roman Catholicism in his childhood. He becomes, he said, I have become a disciple of Wotan. He was a dreamy kind of kid, and he spent most of his time in visiting the countryside, rowing, hiking, sketching, he loved the outside, he loved landscapes. He developed a passion for pre-Christian history. And he came to believe that the shrines of the pagans were hidden in the catacombs under St. Stephen’s Cathedral. And he said that he made a visit when he was 14 to the cathedral, and he promised to construct a temple to Wotan. He wanted to be an artist, but he had to enter the family leather business. He was a member of the Viennese Rowing Club. He was secretary of the Austrian Alpine Association. And on one of these trips, he spent midsummer night on top of the Geiselberg Fort, and he and four friends had rode down the Danube, and in the middle of the night, they drunk a lot, at this Fort Carnuntum. And it was to commemorate a battle when the Germanic tribes defeated the Romans, they celebrated, and they buried the wine in the shape of a swastika beneath the pagan fort.

Already he’s come, and it’s obvious why I’m introducing him to the story because many of his ideas are later going to be taken up by the Nazi high command, particularly Himmler. And I think it’s important that you understand that they don’t, that these kind of what I would consider to be completely crazy irrational ideas, they have a progression. In 1877, his father died, left him money. So he was able to devote himself to writing. And he begins to write for a nationalist magazine called New World. And he also writes for Alpine Magazines. He’s very into Germanic, Volkish kind of ideas. His first novel is “Carnuntum” again its tribal conflicts. But it establishes him as a recognised figure within Austria’s Pan-German community. You see have a look at the younger man, he’s a pretty good looking character. He also believed in the uniting of all the Germans together, and he believed that he was one of those who wanted unification with Germany. It also brought him to the attention of a man called Friedrich Wannieck, who was a wealthy industrialist and who was chairman of the German House Association. He was a nationalist, and he was a very important man. And what was important about him is he had a lot of money. And he begins, he has a publishing house, and he begins to publish Guido List’s work. And he writes about German nationalism, German history, German literature.

He began to write for something called the East German Review, which had been established in 1890 by Pan-German delegates to the Austrian parliament. He wrote all the time on Volkish topics. He begins lecturing in 1893 to the German History Association on the ancient priesthood of Wotan. A play of his was organised by the German League, no Jew was allowed to attend. He becomes an important literary figure in Vienna. He joined the German Gymnastic League, again, strongly nationalistic. He founded something called the Danube Literary Society to encourage German romanticism, German nationalism, and pure German literature in Vienna against the spurious Jewish literature of characters, of course, who I’ll be talking about later on in the course. You know some of the great figures of German literature who unfortunately people like Schnitzler, who unfortunately were born Jewish. Another very important book he wrote, the story of a young Teuton in the 5th century who had been converted to Christianity forcibly, but returns back to the cult of the sun. It’s important to remember this man becomes a real celebrity and they even name an evening for him. And the club held a List festival for him. And where his works are shown, there’s winter solstice, paganism. He completely divorces himself from any conventional religion, despite the growing popularism of Lutheranism. And he devoted himself purely to drama, to the summer solstice idea, the solstice fire magic.

He called for the reconstruction of the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Carnuntum. He wanted an open air stage to promote Wotanism. He becomes more and more interested in the occult. And this is after he had a cataract operation, which left him blind for 11 months. And he produced a manuscript, which he claimed was a prototype of the original Germanic language of the Aryan race. He adopted a von in 1903, but used it permanently. And he claimed he was the descendants of a long line of aristocrats. Societies are developed around his work, all funded by his patron. And in midsummer 1911, he founded a group that went on pilgrimages to various pagan sites and he adopted the title of Grand Master. He had huge support until he died in 1919. Now he believed that the world he lived in was one of total degeneration. He compared it to the decline of Roman Byzantium. He bemoaned the decline of the peasantry. So all these Volkish ideas that are going to be so important to the Nazis. He opposed any kind of democracy. He was influenced by von Schonerer. He’s violently anti-Semitic. He believed that there was a secret Jewish organisation that controlled the world. And he believed though that in the battle of the blood, in the end, the Aryan would in fact overcome. There were offshoots of his beliefs all over Germany and German, Austria. The Munich offshoot was the Thule Society. And it had an incredible importance with the fledgling Nazi party and Himmler. And it very much, as I said before, take this on, because it’s going to influence the symbolism and rituals of the SS. Now, so one more thing to say about him, the kind of books that he wrote, “the Gods are imploring the Aryans to regain power after 2,000 years of twilight.” He wrote this as an introduction to a book on German tribal law. “Mankind is divided into two groups, the Aryan masters, the chosen initiates. Pure blood has to be regained by de-mixing the blood. Aryans are destined to rule the world. The real danger to the world, were the nomads, the Jews.

Only Aryans have any rights.” And he also, in many of his books, he talked out about the longed for leader, “The strange one from above, who will reign as a god man without being subjected to law. He’s always right because he’s in harmony with nature.” Now, his disciple was a man called Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, let’s have a look at him. He very much set up a Templar Order. He had a magazine called Ostara and evidently Hitler read it a lot. I’m running out of time, so all you need to know, List is by far the most important. He fell out of favour with the Nazis, this particular one. But it brings the whole legend of the Templars into this terrible mix. Can we see the last slide, please, Judi? Yeah. In 1907, Adolph Hitler comes to Vienna and he’s going to live on the edge of society, because he is rejected by the art school and he’s going to live on the edge of society until 1913. When you find him in Munich, and of course he joins, not the Austrian army, but the German army. He loathed Vienna. Vienna was the seedbed of many of his ideas. So, a lot of what I’ve talked about tonight is completely irrational. So I beg you don’t look for rationality. What I’m trying to show you is where all these crazy ideas come from, and I think we all realise living in a pandemic world, we know so many people have adopted crazy theories and unfortunately the internet is making it even worse. So I think we can take on that people aren’t rational. That they don’t necessarily go from A to B, you know, is it the death knell of the enlightenment? On that Very happy note, shall we have a look at some of the questions?

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, we’ve got some nice weather. Joan is waving. I’ll see soon in America. Yes, Adrian’s saying we do anything for our kids and grandchildren. Adrian, come and visit and look after the guinea pigs.

This is from Michael, “Interesting that this racial lecture comes just following and apologies from Whoopi Goldberg, it’s never occurred to me that ‘Shoah’ was race related. But the point was I now realise the Nazis and others regarded the Jews as a race an inferior race.” Michael, be careful, they didn’t actually regard the Jews as an inferior race. We were the only group capable of destroying the Arya, as Marsha said, degenerate.

Oh, Susan, yes we must meet up. Welcome to Cornwall, as you know, it’s truly beautiful. Yes it is. Michael, “This just distinguishes in my opinion, the artificiality of race as a distinguishing characteristic between human beings.” Yeah, I mean, look of course race theory is completely artificial. I suppose if you’re talking about pure bloodline, you might be able to make a case for a group that would have to be isolated for thousands of years. Maybe the Aborigines, maybe Eskimos. But the whole notion is rather bizarre.

Q: “Was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, part of Joseph Chamberlain’s family?”

A: I’m not sure, I’ll check it. Simon, “I hope Whoopi is logged on.” I doubt it.

Again, “Was Houston Stewart’s family…” I will give you an answer to that next time. Yes, “The word Aryan originates from Indo-European route, from Iran, i.e. non-white people.” Yes, Jackie, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? All this sort of twisted logic. Yes a lot of people want to know about, I don’t think he was, but I’ll check it.

“My ancient Near-East professor”, I hope you mean he was a professor of Ancient Near-East and not ancient, I love it.

“Always had a rage over the use of anti-Semite as a description, he used to say it’s a linguistic term, not a racial or social one.” He might be actually completely correct, but the point is it is used. It is used to mean anti-Semitism, anti-Jew. When we go back to the person who created the term, Wilhelm Marr, he meant Jew.

“I was very confused at organised Jewish reaction to Whoopi Goldberg, as far as I understand, we Jews would not be considered a race and we don’t consider ourselves a race. Hence my confusion with the Jewish reaction.”

Anita is saying, “Hitler saw the Jews as a race, hence the anger of Jews since the Holocaust was all about hatred of the Jews.”

Okay, there’s a wonderful quote by Elias Canetti, “There are no people more difficult to understand than the Jews.” Let me throw some terminology at you. I take away the term race. To me it’s totally spurious, the tragedy was, that the Nazis whose plan was to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth, birth sentence of death. Take that on. To them, it was race. Converts died along with rabbis. You know, there’s that extraordinary story of Edith Stein. Stein, the nun who was murdered at Auschwitz, she wasn’t murdered because she was a nun. She was murdered because she had Jewish parents. Now, may I suggest, at the other end of the Eastern Mediterranean is a group of people who think we are a nation. Every Jew has right of return, that’s a national definition. Those of you who are religious, it’s a religious definition. Those of you who are not religious, who don’t live in Israel. Are we a people? That’s a lovely cop out. So the problem is we could spend hours. Anyway, anyway, that’s your Friday night discussion. Those of you who have Friday night dinners around the table, ask your family to define Jew because it’s complicated. If I was defining Christian, it’s much more easy. It’s a religious belief system. But the word Jew is a really complicated one.

Wilma, “I thought we Jews are a people. Growing up, I learned there were five races. White, brown, black, yellow, and red.” But Wilma, come on, be careful about the term race. No, I don’t think that, comments, no, of course they don’t, no.

“Whoopi Goldberg should hear this lecture.” Yes, I agree. Ignorance is not bliss. It is complicated. You know what I think is happening? I think a lot of victim groups tragically see Jews as perpetrators. It’s complicated. Do you remember Holocaust Memorial Day that quoted Howard Jacobson’s “They can’t forgive us the Holocaust.”

“The Jewish reaction to Whoopi Goldberg was because the whole Naziology was based on Jews being a race. Prior to Nazis anti-Jewishness was based on religion. If Jews converted to Christianity, it was okay.” Yeah. Yes. If you make the case that prior, not before Nazis, before race theory. You see Christianity, if a Jew converted, a Jew could become accepted as part of Christian society. In fact, quite a few Jews who did convert did very well in the church hierarchy. But I’m not going there today. Yeah, let’s not talk about Whoopi Goldberg. “Student union’s playbook for anti-Semitism today.”

“Parallel of too many establishment Jews turning a blind eye and all supporting progressive anti-Zionism. Our so-called leadership is failing us.” You see, that’s the point. Do we have a leadership? The Jewish world is a very interesting one. And a very fractured one. I’m not going to comment on Whoopi Goldberg, you know why? Because I, you see, I still have a little part of me that believes in the Enlightenment and I find it so offensive. I find the stupidity so offensive, so. Some people are saying, my voice is off. Mickey, “Trudy is giving an overview of the development of anti-Semitism.” Yeah, it’s a shame. It’s a shame that I have to spend so much time on this.

Q: This is from Anne, “I see parallels between the way the Jews in Vienna were prepared to ditch the incoming Jews fleeing the pogroms in order to save their own skins and the anti-Israel stance of many elite British Jews, can I comment?”

A: Yeah, obviously, look, 3/4s of what I talk about is about identity, really, if you think about it. Jews felt insecure in Europe, they fell in love with Europe. There’s an extraordinary letter that Rothschild wrote to Jewish Free School in 1898, telling the parents to send their kids to play football, not to go to Cheder to become English gentlemen. When you come along and you’re foreign, how are we going to manage to be seen? We fall in love with England. We’ve fall in love with France. We fall in love with Germany. It’s a problem. I don’t know if we’re ever going to solve the problem of the Jews, but on the other hand, Never forget what Bismarck said about us, “We are the champagne in German society. We gave it the fizz.” It’s not all darkness, remember.

Q: “If they didn’t expel the Jews, they’d be expelled. Did they actually believe that?”

A: Tim, as I said, don’t look for logic. Yes, what’s happening at universities today is extremely worrisome. I agree with you, look, I have one message. I believe passionately in education. The problem is that there are very few places where our own kids can study what I’m teaching you. You know your, I don’t know, a lot of you are going to be parents and grandparents. Let’s try and do something. I think if our kids know the rich heritage they come from, they maybe then will feel a little more secure and be able to counter what’s going on on campus. A lot of it is irrational, but I was in, I was part of ITF, which became IHRA. The definition that some people refuse to sign, I know that Carly at Wendy’s Foundation have been doing a lot with Shine a Light to make American universities sign it. So look, there are things we can do. We’ve got to educate our children, actually. We’ve got to educate them in Jewish history so they understand that they come from a great, proud people. Read the book burnings in German, I thought the SS burnt the book. It was university students who led the parade to burn the books. The SS were in charge of it all, but the students were the people who threw the books into the flames. Yeah, very, a lot of you are worried I can see this.

Q: “Could you relate to the cosmic ice theory of the Nazis, when and by and who did they take cold?”

A: I can’t specifically answer that question, but I know that a lot of these ideas came out of Vienna. It was Himmler even more than Hitler who took a lot of this on. No, they went to Tibet, “Occult Reich” is a very strange book.

Q: This is from Tibal, “Regarding Schonerer’s comment about race, can you give us our take on the reconstruction, obviously? Hence Judaism is not a race, Hitler was not really a racist.”

A: Look, what can I say? I don’t really want to, Tibal, what on earth can I say to crass ignorance and prejudice? Except it’s rather tragic and it means that we’ve got an awful lot of work to do, haven’t we? Maybe… How can I say this without making everybody feel totally depressed? I, you see, my greatest friend was Robert Wistrich, who he headed up the study of anti-Semitism in Jerusalem. He’s written the definitive works on anti-Semitism, unfortunately he died in 2014. And I know how dark it got for him. And he said, “But Trudy, there is a spiritual destiny of the Jewish people. We are the children of destiny.” He wasn’t a religious man, by the way, but he did believe in this destiny of the Jew to try and make the world a better place. And so don’t despair. Please don’t despair. There’s these… “It’s the students in American universities are making life difficult for Jewish students.” Well, we’re not preparing our Jewish students well enough, are we? If they knew their own history, they could counter it.

Q: “Trudy. Are Jews Semites? Who are Semites?”

A: Peter, you’re looking for logic. I’m not going into all of that. I’m only using the term Peter, because that’s the term that was used to describe Jews. I do not believe Jews are a race for the simple reason, I don’t believe in the concept of pure races.

Q: “What percentage of the population of Vienna?”

A: About 20%, and more than that, Joan, a lot of people in Vienna didn’t know where, they were waged, they were what we call wage salaried. So you only had enough money to come from salary to salary. And I also talked about trucking, how some factory workers were actually paid in tokens, so there was huge poverty. You see, that’s the problem. That’s why Karl Kraus talked about the experimental station on the way to the end of the world. On one level, it’s the glitz of the Ringstrasse and the opera and all the extraordinary cultural wonderments that came out of Vienna. But it’s also the dark side and the poverty. Ironically, Victor Adler creates the Socialist Party, a Jew of course. And it really in the main, it was the lower middle classes that flooded to the us extreme right.

Q: “Can I talk about Otto Weininger?”

A: Lawrence, I’m not going to talk about Otto Weininger, but Lawrence, let me assure you that we have a lecture from Professor Ken Gemes. I find Otto Weininger absolutely, well I’m not going to say, wait and see what Ken has to say about him. I know we only give our syllabus out a week in advance. It’s kind of to be titillating, but in fact, we plan it up to two, three months in advance. So as I’ve said to you, the next, at least another six weeks on the Hapsburg Empire, we’ll be going to Hungary, we’ll be going to Prague.

Q: Now, this is, “Trudy how is it, there’s such intense and vocal anti-Semitism in Austrian Germany, not in countries like America and other European country?”

A: Be careful about that, Beverly. I think the point is, if a society is fractured, you’re more likely to need a scapegoat. England at that time, of course, was master of the world.

Yehuda Bauer gave a wonderful comment, I went to a conference and somebody asked that question. And he said, “It’s not that the English are better than anyone else, it’s just that they’ve got rid of their lower middle classes to India and given them five servants.”

“A descendant of Otto Weininger named Otto Weininger died in Toronto approximately 20 years ago. He was a psychologist.” He couldn’t have been a direct descendant, Deborah, because Otto Weininger committed suicide when he was 23. And he didn’t have, in fact, he was gay. He didn’t have children, but maybe it’s the same family.

Q: “What was it about Northern Indie?”

A: It was actually Hinduism, that’s what they liked, the framework there and they liked the caste system. “Wagner ‘Gotterdammerung, Twilight of the Gods’”.

Yes Karen, I’ve talked about this when I talked about Wagner, it all fits together. Don’t you see, you’ve got from great culture like Wagner, through to the esoteric of List and through to the gutter as well. It becomes this sort of racial cocktail. Now, let’s be careful. If it hadn’t been for World War I, I think it could have just dissipated, okay? World War I is the decider.

This is from Marsha again talking about Whoopi Goldberg. “Stephen, why are we giving her so much oxygen?”

Stephen Press, “The word Aryan was probably hijacked, within Sanskrit, it means noble.” Yeah, I mentioned to you that to Houston Stewart Chamberlain spoke Sanskrit, yep.

“Whoopi Goldberg inhumanity man.” yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, you see, look, education doesn’t civilise, but unfortunately, but I think if we can get, oh look, the best we can do is to give our own people enough knowledge so that they feel strong encountering this kind of horror.

This is from Joel, “After receiving the Nobel Prize, Eric Kandel was born in Vienna, denied he was Austrian and said he was Jewish-American. He told the Austrian president, who would acknowledge being Austrian under conditions, including Lueger’s name being taken off the Ringstrasse.”

Yeah, that’s lovely. Okay, I think we better stop here. You know why? Because in 3/4s of an hour, my son-in-law, Philip Rubenstein is making his guest, his very rare guest appearances. And I really want him to have a nice big audience, ‘cause he’s superb, not just 'cause he’s my son-in-law. So anyway, Judi?

• Yes.

• Shall we stop? Shall we stop?

• Yes, thank you Trudy. And we’ll see you all in about 45 minutes.

• God bless.

• Thank you.

• And I’m going to feed the Guinea pigs, bye.

• Bye-Bye.