For Jews, adaptation to the human or national environment in which they lived was not only a measure taken for their own protection, but also a deeply felt private need. Their desire for a homeland, for peace, repose and security, a place where they would not be strangers, impelled them to form a passionate attachment to the culture around them. And nowhere else, except for Spain in the fifteenth century, were such bonds more happily and productively forged than in Austria. Here the Jews who had been settled in the imperial city for over two hundred years met people who took life lightly and were naturally easygoing, while under that apparently light-hearted surface they shared the deep Jewish instinct for intellectual and aesthetic values. And the two came together all the more easily in Vienna, where they found a personal task waiting for them, because over the last century Austrian art had lost its traditional guardians and protectors: the imperial house and the aristocracy. In the eighteenth century Maria Theresia had had her daughters taught the pleasures of music, Joseph II had discussed Mozart’s operas with him as a connoisseur, Leopold II was a composer himself, but the later emperors Franz II and Ferdinand had no kind of interest in art, and Emperor Franz Joseph, who in his eighty years of life never read or even picked up a book other than the Army List, even felt a decided antipathy to music. Similarly, the great noblemen had abandoned their former position as patrons; gone were the glorious days when the Esterházys gave house-room to Haydn, when the Lobkowitzes and Kinskys and Waldsteins competed for the first performance of a work by Beethoven to be given in their palaces, when Countess Thun went on her knees to that great daemonic figure asking him not to withdraw Fidelio from the Opera. Even Wagner, Brahms, Johann Strauss and Hugo Wolf no longer received the slightest support from them; the citizens of Vienna had to step into the breach to keep up the old high standard of the Philharmonic concerts and enable painters and sculptors to make a living, and it was the particular pride and indeed the ambition of the Jewish bourgeoisie to maintain the reputation of Viennese culture in its old brilliance. They had always loved the city, taking it to their hearts when they settled there, but it was their love of Viennese art that had made them feel entirely at home, genuinely Viennese. In fact they exerted little influence otherwise in public life; the lustre of the imperial house left all private wealth in the shade, high positions in the leadership of the state were in hereditary hands, diplomacy was reserved for the aristocracy, the army and the higher reaches of the civil service for the old-established families, and the Jews did not even try to look so high as to force their way into those privileged circles. They tactfully respected such traditional privileges as something to be taken for granted. I remember, for instance, that my father never in his life ate at Sacher’s, not for reasons of economy—the price difference between Sacher and the other great hotels was ridiculously small—but out of a natural instinct for preserving a distance. He would have felt it embarrassing or unseemly to sit at the table next to one occupied by, say, Prince Schwarzenberg or Prince Lobkowitz. It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights, because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone in the city, and the part played by the Jewish bourgeoisie in Viennese culture, through the aid and patronage it offered, was immeasurable. They were the real public, they filled seats at the theatre and in concert halls, they bought books and pictures, visited exhibitions, championed and encouraged new trends everywhere with minds that were more flexible, less weighed down by tradition. They had built up virtually all the great art collections of the nineteenth century, they had made almost all the artistic experiments of the time possible. Without the constant interest of the Jewish bourgeoisie as stimulation, at a time when the court was indolent and the aristocracy and the Christian millionaires preferred to spend money on racing stables and hunts rather than encouraging art, Vienna would have lagged as far behind Berlin artistically as Austria did behind the German Reich in politics. Anyone wishing to introduce a novelty to Vienna, anyone from outside seeking understanding and an audience there, had to rely on the Jewish bourgeoisie. When a single attempt was made in the anti-Semitic period[3] to found a so-called National Theatre, there were no playwrights or actors or audiences available; after a few months the ‘National Theatre’ failed miserably, and that example first made it clear that nine-tenths of what the world of the nineteenth century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.
For in recent years the Viennese Jews—like those of Spain before their similarly tragic downfall—had been artistically creative, not in any specifically Jewish style but, with miraculous empathy, giving especially intense expression to all that was Austrian and Viennese. As composers, Goldmark, Gustav Mahler and Schönberg were figures of international stature; Oscar Straus, Leo Fall and Kálmán brought the traditional waltz and operetta to new heights; Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Beer-Hofmann and Peter Altenberg gave Viennese literature new status in Europe, a rank that it had never before reached even at the time of Grillparzer and Stifter. Sonnenthal and Max Reinhardt revived the international reputation of Vienna as a city of the theatre; Freud and the great scientific experts attracted attention to the famous and ancient university—everywhere, as scholars, virtuoso musicians, painters, directors, architects, journalists, they claimed high and sometimes the highest positions in the intellectual life of Vienna. Through their passionate love of the city and their adaptability they had become entirely assimilated, and were happy to serve the reputation of Austria; they felt that the assertion of their Austrian identity was their vocation. In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it was when an attempt was made to force Vienna—a place combining the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders—into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart.
3
The National Socialist regime, dating from Hitler’s accession to power as Chancellor in 1933.