February 21, 2008
Christopher Hitchens on anti-Semitism and pre-WWII Austria
In the March issue of The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens reviews Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, a newly reissued 1979 novel. Hitchens, who seemed to like the book, talked about how the irrationality of anti-Semitism took root in pre-WWII Austro-Hungary and put an end to one of the great periods of literary history.
Here's more:
If there was ever a time and place where all these ancient insecurities and uncertainties were allowed their very fullest scope, it was the terrain of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1918 and the Anschluss, or abolition of Austria by its assimilation into Greater Germany, in 1938. The figures of Marx and Einstein and of course Freud were very much imbricated in the numerous interlocking Vienna and Budapest circles, but it’s the imaginative literature and literary journalism of that epoch and that space that still make one catch one’s breath. Here is the world, now as lost to us as Atlantis, of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March; of Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity and Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. Here, also, are some of the most arresting polemics and feuilletons ever written, by such masters of the genre as Ernst Fischer (whose memoir, An Opposing Man, I would propose as one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century) and Karl Kraus. The main reason for the utter erasure and obliteration of this historic territory was precisely the madness of anti-Semitism, which grew to a point where it eclipsed all culture and civilization and became self-destructive and suicidal. Yet it is interesting and sometimes touching to note how many Jews manifested a sympathy with, and even a nostalgia for, the old Austro-Hungarian dispensation. It had had at least a respect for pluralism and for minorities, and Joseph Roth, for one, preferred it to the stark and brutal Teutonic efficiency that aimed to replace it. Karl Kraus (like Roth, a cosmopolitan refugee from Judaism) became famous for saying loftily, when asked why he never wrote anything about Hitler, that nothing occurred to him when he heard the name.