XXX
UNION FOR RESISTANCE TO ANTI-SEMITISM
A. G. von Suttner, Count Hoyos, Baron Leitenberger, and Professor Nothnagel found the Union · Article in the Neue Freie Presse
Before I write of the congress in Rome I want to go back a bit. In the spring of 1891—consequently before the founding of the Interparliamentary Group and the Peace Association in Vienna—my husband had also brought into existence an association of which I wish to tell.
We were still in the Caucasus when, at the beginning of the eighties, we were informed of the Anti-Semitic movement started in Prussia, and propagated by Court Chaplain Stöcker. This phenomenon, I need hardly say, aroused lively disgust in us. We set forth the arguments against this reversion to the Middle Ages in various articles written for the Vienna papers on which we were regular collaborators, but the articles were returned to us on the ground that in Austria there was no Anti-Semitism, and if any of it should spread from Prussia to us the only proper attitude toward it would be contemptuous silence. Later events showed that this attitude was not the proper one. Wrong must be withstood if it is recognized as such; there is no other way. In such cases silence, though professing to express contempt, is itself contemptible. Not only must the victims react against it, it is also for those who are not personally concerned to antagonize a wrong wherever they see it. Their silence is complicity, and generally springs from the same motives as the silence of the victims,—that is, from timidity. Only not to come into any collision, only not to subject one’s self to annoyances,—that is the motive at bottom, even if it does outwardly bear itself as genteel reserve.
After we came home the Anti-Semitic movement in Vienna had taken on especially brutal forms. In the year 1891 it had even gone as far as violence. The indignation which my husband felt boiled over.
“Something must be done!” was his decision.
And he sat down and wrote a constitution and a plan of action and an appeal. And now what he had to do was to find some prominent men who would go hand in hand with him. That same evening—we were just then in Vienna—he went to look up Count Hoyos in his residence on the Kolowratring. “The gentleman is not in,” said the servant; “he is downstairs in the club.” My husband immediately betook himself to the lower floor, where the clubrooms were situated, and sent for the count, who was sitting at a whist table.
“What is it, dear Suttner, anything very urgent?”
“Yes, justice for the persecuted—”
“Out with it!”
Count Hoyos took hold of the matter enthusiastically, and proposed to invite his whist partner, Baron Leitenberger, the well-known Liberal manufacturer, to join the provisory committee. So he also was called out, and a few moments later the formation of the league was a settled thing among these three. The next day Professor Nothnagel, so highly regarded both as a man and as a savant, came in with them; and a short time afterwards the constituting assembly met, with these four men at the speakers’ table. After the appeal had been printed in the papers, several hundred, including personages prominent in Viennese society and politics, had joined. On the day after the first meeting the Neue Freie Presse published the following article, which will give the best explanation of the author’s ideas and purposes:
THE UNION FOR RESISTANCE TO ANTI-SEMITISM
BY A. GUNDACCAR VON SUTTNER
Vienna, July 21
Yesterday our Union came into existence as a legally recognized society, to begin action against that hostile movement which is aimed directly against a portion of our fellow-citizens. This is the object stated in section 2 of the constitution: in plain terms, to combat the Anti-Semitic movement, and to do this by public lectures, the dissemination of informatory literature, discussions, and, if necessary, the founding of an organ to represent the Union.
Politics is excluded: primarily because our Union is not political, and in the next place because the matter in question is social in the strict sense of the word and has nothing to do with the conduct of state business. The proof of this lies in the fact that we reckon among our members persons of every shade of belief, that we welcome without exception every one who is in full enjoyment of his civic rights.
A certain order of opponents who are never at a loss for false and mendacious allegations have already made the attempt to represent our Union as one that purposes to take the field against Christianity in favor of the Jews. Hostile attacks of this kind carry their own condemnation. As a proof of the falsity of their assertions stands the fact that we already number among our members priests of the two chief Christian denominations, and that we announce the distinct expectation of gradually enlisting all those who are first and foremost called to preach the word of peace, of love to our neighbors, of humanity.
In a time when men are founding societies to protect dumb animals from cruelty—and that with absolute justification—it is, I think, only logical that we should at last take a stand also against cruelty to our fellow-men, all the more as the attacks have not been confined to assaults upon honor, but have taken the form of acts of violence which have given our Jewish fellow-citizens every reason to fear for the safety of their existence. I will mention only those suburban heroes who smashed the windows of Jewish women and shouted threats of murder at them; those soldiers who struck down an old man on the street; that schoolboy who thrust a knife into the eye of one of his Semitic comrades. These are individual cases out of many; a single one would have been enough to stir all right-thinking men to a great cry of indignation.
The party against which we are arraying ourselves seems to have contemplated nothing less than to decree for Austria a sort of moral state of siege, and thereby to bring a pressure to bear on the timorous souls of whom there are more than enough, whereby many of these will allow themselves to be enrolled in order not to call down upon their heads the wrath of that association, which is always ready with the appellative Judenknecht. Special laws directed against the Jews, like those that have reached such a magnificent development in Russia, would naturally not have been long in making their appearance, and ultimately, as a logical consequence, special laws against all who do not think as do those gentlemen of the persecuting party.
Well, to-day, by good fortune, it appears that there are still Austrians who will not submit to such a reign of terror, and who answer such demands with the cry, “Browbeating won’t work.”
In the bosom of the opposing party, on the other hand, the reign of terror has broken out; every one who there believes himself called to be a leader takes the proverb “Bend or break” to heart; every one collects his troops around him and forms a detachment which snarls at every other. Skirmishes also have already been fought, with fists and words, and the lawsuits growing out of them show us clearly and distinctly what is going on behind the scenes of that stage. This ought to open the eyes of many an objective observer who has supposed that he was falling in with the demands of the times if he joined that troop.
Originally, when Herr Stöcker was still having his day, Anti-Semitism attempted to put itself on the ground of Christianity, and of threatened Christianity at that, and to conjure up a religious question. This plan was a lamentable failure, for there were enough honorable religious teachers who opposed it. Then the attempt was made to lay emphasis on race differences and to make these the basis of up-to-date persecution. Here also the results were meager, and so they ultimately hit upon the method of rousing human passion, of heating up the hatred and envy of all those, bringing all those to the burning-point, who had little or nothing to lose but hoped to gain much. Of course the matter could not be allowed to pass as mere commercial or competitive jealousy; a scientific whitewash had to be applied to the whole thing, and so they got footing on the social question: accumulated capital is the destroyer of the little man; the Jew has accumulated capital in his hands, therefore the Jew is the destroyer of the little man. That there are among the Jews themselves whole masses of little men who have scarcely a crust to nibble was entirely lost from sight—such a thing simply does not count with logicians of that stamp; they have in sight only the Christian little man and the Jewish big man.
It is a recognized fact that you can fool the heedless masses with certain catchwords as much as you please. It is the children’s game, Schneider, leih’ mir die Scher (“Puss in the Corner”), arranged for the use of grown-up people: the one who tries to find a place knows perfectly well that the place to which the other directs him is not empty, but he runs toward it obediently, and meanwhile the wily fox swaps his place for a better and snaps his finger laughingly at the one dispossessed. This is the game played by those men who sin at the phrase “social question”: “The Jew has an empty place”—and the dupe makes for the Jew. Since he knows incidentally that his “friends” are not well disposed toward the Jew, he means at least to get this much advantage from the game, that he will vent his temper on the man; he can do this without any expenditure of great courage and without peril, for he has behind him a superior power which springs to his aid—if the aid costs nothing more than a few fisticuffs.
As far as this dragging in of the social question is concerned, these florid speakers only commit the trifling error of adopting for their science absolutely faulty premises, so that their whole edifice is shaky at its foundation. No social reformer, no economist of the present time will look for the evil in accumulated capital as such. The man who should keep his millions locked up in his strong box in the form of packages of bank notes—for so the common throng imagines it—would ultimately perish of starvation, for it is a law of nature that what is not renewed is at last used up. Accumulated capital, then, is not in itself the cause but only the result. The evil has its roots elsewhere; and if once these roots are radically extirpated, then capital will of necessity circulate in such a way as to pass through all hands.
A few representatives of the people have already indicated the solution of the social enigma—if I am not mistaken, Dr. Menger recently. It is not our affair, however, to go into this in detail here, for our aim is simply to bring out the fact that the Anti-Semitic movement on the basis of social science stands on feet of clay, and that the men who to bolster their cause trespass on this ground have only an utterly superficial acquaintance with the question, most of them none at all. But the average man allows himself to be persuaded easily, for he has learned a deal at school—but not logical thinking. Now if he sees that another is (or rather seems to be) doing this business for him, then so much the better; then he gladly lets the other take the trouble and believes that he has done his part when he joins in the hue and cry.
A few days ago an Anti-Semitic member of the Reichsrat took the floor with an interpellation; it related to our Union and to the accession of a man whose name is spoken with reverence and gratitude throughout all Austria. The speech may receive a suitable rejoinder in a proper place; I wish only to mention here that the said deputy used words to this effect: that it appeared by our appeal that the Union intended to wage battle in a “hostile,” extremely “acrimonious,” and “unscrupulous” manner against the Anti-Semitic party as such and also against all those citizens who cherish an Anti-Semitic spirit.
Hostile? Acrimonious? Unscrupulous? I should hope not! Those who think that they have to see in Anti-Semitism a movement serviceable to the general good we pity because they are on the wrong track, and we hope that we shall be able by convincing proofs to bring them back to the right path. Those that have found in Anti-Semitism personal means for personal ends we despise, as every honorably-thinking man despises him who uses unfair means to promote his own interests. Hostility and acrimony, therefore, are not the right words. And as for unscrupulousness, it depends on what the word is taken to mean. If our opponents expect that we are going to take the tone that they are pleased to use,—in which, for instance, they give their readers in the Unverfälschte Deutsche Worte the news about the formation of our Union,—they, are mistaken. Such co-workers we would never accept into our membership, for decency is above all things to be preserved in our camp. We are of the opinion that no cause can ever be helped toward good repute by abusive words. Some hundreds of years ago they would indeed have had their effect, for then behind such strong expressions came knock-down arguments with the fist, and the stronger fist prevailed. But really to-day the great majority is better bred, and rowdy attack with word and deed is not to the taste of the cultured inhabitants of Austria.
Among our objects is also that of stirring our fellow-citizens to independent thinking. We do not wish to dictate, we wish to lead and to point out the way which it would be wise to take. Our two weapons are to be reason and the sense of justice; with these, we are fit to meet all attacks. We cannot be put down with pseudo-science, with juggled statistics, with distortion of truth and justice, and other such approved weapons; for we have in our ranks men who are preeminently qualified to annihilate such arguments with strictly scientific and expert methods, and to floor their antagonists coram publico. In a word, we feel that we are strong, we feel that we are equal to the work which we have undertaken.
Their opponents proved to be stronger. I shall have occasion hereafter to tell something of the course that matters subsequently took. But now I will return to the point where I broke off—to the Peace Congress at Rome.