Their Contribution to the Cultural and Intellectual History of Vienna – an overview.

Committed to Jewish Tradition

It is sometimes overlooked that numerous personalities lived in Vienna who greatly contributed to Judaism, for instance the first rabbi of the Jewish City in the Untere Werd, the Jewish halakhist (= Jewish jurist) Yomtov Lipman Heller, or the rabbis Sheftel Horowitz and Gershon Uliph Ashkenazi. Of the privileged Court Jews, one should mention Samson Wertheimer, a great financier at the beginning of the eighteenth century who was Chief Rabbi of Hungary. Today, his mansion in Eisenstadt houses the Austrian Jewish Museum (Eisenstadt, Unterbergstrasse 6). Isaac Löw Hofmann, knighted in 1835 as “von Hofmannsthal,” was one of the most important patrons of the Vienna City Temple and an important supporter of traditional rabbinical values. As rabbi of the City Temple, Isaac Noah Mannheimer was able to avert a break between orthodox and reform Jews in Vienna; at the same time, Salomon Sulzer revived synagogue singing. In the second part of the nineteenth century, Adolf Jellinek, a liberal rabbi from the large synagogue in Leopoldstadt, reinvigorated the Vienna Jewish community. After the First World War, Chief Rabbi Zwi Perez Chajes, an idealistic Zionist, contributed greatly to the educational system. He founded the first Jewish High School and the First Jewish Pedagogic Institute. In honor of his achievements, the Jewish high school was named after him at its reopening in 1984.

Political Pioneers

Jewish intellectuals hoped that the Bourgeois Revolution of 1848 would bring about complete equality to Jews – for that reason, they fought in the front ranks of the revolutionaries of 1848. It was the Jewish physician Adolf Fischhof who sparked the outbreak of the revolution in March 1848 with his speech in the courtyard of the Lower Austrian Diet (1st district, Herrengasse). Fischhof was granted an honorary tomb in the old Jewish Section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery (11th district, Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, 1st gate), in the immediate vicinity of the tomb of Salomon Sulzer.

But even the complete emancipation of Viennese Jews did not change the political involvement of numerous intellectuals, even if their ideologies differed. Such personalities included Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Hugo Breitner, Robert Danneberg, Julius Deutsch and Julius Tandler who were deeply committed to the Social Democratic cause and promoted an egalitarian society that would leave anti-Semitic prejudices behind. They were able to realize many of their goals in the “Red Vienna” of the years between World War I and World War II. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, saw in the creation of an independent Jewish state a solution to the problem of anti-Semitism and to the persistent question of Jewish identity in an era of increasing assimilation.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Ignaz Kuranda, the founder of one of the leading anti-Semitic forces of the time between the wars, the German National Party, was himself Jewish.

Achievements in Science and Culture

With emancipation during the nineteenth century came drastic changes in the professional and social structure of Viennese Jewry, together with increased assimilation; many Jewish intellectuals lost their traditional ties to their Jewish roots. Thus, it can be problematic to point out the Jewish origin of many scientists, artists and other intellectuals; one could easily be accused of “reverse racism.” Jewish origins only gain importance as the background to the persecution of all things Jewish by the Nazis – only by the “expulsion of the creative mind” does one become aware of the large role Austrian Jews played in Austrian culture and science during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From this multitude of personalities, only a few of the best-known from different areas of cultural and intellectual life can be named here.

The renown of Vienna’s Medical School is in large part due to the achievements of Jewish physicians: Julius Tandler, Emil Zuckerkandl, Ernst Fuchs, Josef Breuer, Carl Sternberg, Julius Schnitzler, Ludwig W. von Mauthner, Ernst Löwenstein, Robert Bárány, Otto Loewi, David Gruby, Josef Halbans, Adam Politzer, Viktor E. Frankl and Leopold Freund are but a few of the names that made a mark in the realm of science – Bárány (1914) and Loewi (1936) were both awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. Of course, Sigmund Freud opened new avenues for research of the human mind and for the treatment of psychological problems through the development of psychoanalysis; his pupil, Alfred Adler, developed his “Individual Psychology.”

The jurist Hans Kelsen is one of the most important representatives of positivism in law; he wrote the Austrian constitution. In science, Siegfried Marcus (who invented the automobile), the physicists Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli (Nobel Prize 1945) and Felix Ehrenhaft, the biochemist Max F. Perutz (Nobel Prize 1962), the botanist Julius von Wiesner, the chemist Otto von Fürth and the astronomer Samuel Oppenheim as well as Fritz Feigl, Leo Grünhut and Edmund von Lippmann deserve mention.

The contributions of Viennese Jews to music, literature, journalism, sculpture and painting toward the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century are especially noteworthy. Vienna’s entry into modern art was in many ways due to Jewish patrons and supporters as well as to Jewish artists: In the salons of the Jewish bourgeoisie, artists found the appropriate forum for new ideas; designers were encouraged in word and deed to found the “Wiener Werkstätte,” and art nouveau architects obtained many commissions for their works. The idea of the founding and the building of the Vienna “Secession” was born in the salon of Berta Zuckerkandl.

Around the turn of the century, composers such as Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Egon Wellesz, Erich Korngold and Alexander Zemlinsky were influential in classical music, as were Oscar Straus, Emmerich Kalmán, Leo Fall and Edmund Eysler in the realm of operetta. By the way, the Nazis deliberately turned a blind eye to the partial Jewish ancestry of Johann Strauss Son, the Vienna Waltz King.

The list of the literati and prominent journalists of Jewish origin is especially long and constitutes an important part of Austrian literary history of the twentieth century: Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, Jakob Wassermann, Alfred Polgar, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Torberg, Hans Weigel, Elias Canetti, Hugo Bettauer, Fritz Hochwälder, Josef Roth, Felix Salten, Hilde Spiel, Jura Soyfer and Vicki Baum. Each of these names stands for a quite specific example of Austrian literature, Austrian in the sense of the old Habsburg empire: Many of these writers came to Vienna from the different corners of the monarchy; in the capital city, they achieved artistic breakthroughs, before being persecuted and banned by the Nazis.

This is also true for such writers and editors as Egon Friedell, Karl Ausch, Friedrich Austerlitz and Anton Kuh, for philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Martin Buber, Josef Popper-Linkeus, for cabaret artists like Karl Farkas, Fritz Grünbaum, Hermann Leopoldi and Hugo Wiener, for directors such as Max Reinhardt, Fritz Kortner and Leopold Lindtberg. Others were forgotten as a result of the persecution, while some were able – if they survived the Nazi terror – to continue their careers after the Second World War. A few of them had successful careers in foreign countries; Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger became synonymous with popular Hollywood films.

Article by Alfred Stalzer, Vienna Tourist Board