BOOK REVIEWS

SINCE 1918

Gehler, Michael. Studenten und Po-litik. Der Kampf urn die Vorherrschaftan der Universitat Innsbruck 1918-f1938. Innsbrucker Forschungen zurZeitgeschichte, vol. 6. Innsbruck:Haymon-Verlag, 1990. Pp. 591, il-lus.Zoitl, Helge. "Student kommt von Stu-dieren!" Zur Geschichte der Sozialde-mokratischen Studentenbewegung in

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Wien. Materialien zur Arbeiterbe-wegung, vol. 62. Vienna and Zurich:Ludwig Boltzmann Institut fur Ge-schichte der Arbeiterbewegung/Eu-ropaverlag, 1992. Pp. 504, illus.

One of the most encouraging aspects ofthe historical profession in contempo-rary Austria, its energetic probing of thenature and origins of antidemocratic andanti-Semitic thoughts and actions, hasproduced a growing number of booksand articles. In recent years a significantseries of monographic studies, almostexclusively written by younger scholars,has provided us with detailed investi-gations of the First Republic and the eraof DollfuB-Schuschnigg Austrofascismthat should serve in the near future tostimulate the writing of grand synthesesplacing Austrian contemporary historyin the context of post-1914 Europeanand global developments. The booksunder review bring us closer to the pointwhere microcosmic studies end and syn-thetic works should be possible, for ineach case a detailed case study providesthe reader with a massive amount of his-torical detail—a surfeit of rkhes thatforces one to ask the question, "Whatlarger problems do these facts point to?"In both volumes, the heart of the prob-lem is Austria's agonizingly difficultpost-1918 adjustment to postimperialstatus, particularly for its most vulner-able social strata, the new state's Biir-gertum.

The social group long noted for its ex-treme susceptibility to right-radicaltendencies, students, only began to bestudied from a critical perspective in the1970s, largely as a result of Erika Wein-zierl's 1968 University of Salzburg in-augural lecture, which called for seriousinvestigation of the virulently antidem-ocratic traditions of Austrian institutionsof higher learning (Hochschulen). By thelate 1980s, a number of scholars, in-cluding Gernot Heifi, Brigitte Licht-

enberger-Fenz, Sebastian Meissl, OliverRathkolb, Willi Weinert, and HelgeZoitl, had written insightful articles anda few books tracing the growth of themilitantly antidemocratic spirit thatdominated Austrian higher educationfor the better part of a century. Thus itwas hardly a surprise for morally sen-sitive Austrians when, largely due tothe Waldheim affair of 1986 and theAnschlufi commemorations of 1988, thelong-suppressed issue of their nation'scomplicity in the crimes of the NationalSocialist era burst in their midst. Asteady stream of studies of the twistsand turns of academic politics nowserves to provide us with keys to un-derstanding the culture of intolerancethat made Nazism palatable among sig-nificant numbers of the educated elite ofpost-Habsburg republican Austria.

Begun as a massive dissertation twodecades ago at the University of Salz-burg, the Zoitl book is a study of the So-cial Democratic student movement inVienna from its foundation in the early1890s to the mid-1920s, when it had be-come an established part of the studentlandscape, particularly at the Universityof Vienna. Of particular interest in theauthor's detailed study of the early yearsof Social Democratic student organiza-tions are the instances of often intensefaculty hostility toward the numericallyinsignificant groupings of idealisticyoung men and women. The fact that asignificant percentage^yery likely themajority at any one time—of "red"students were of Jewish origins onlystrengthened the resolve of some seniorfaculty members and their Burschenschaftallies to destroy such an "un-German"body on Viennese academic soil. So-cialist students at the University of Vi-enna, whose organization was born in1889 with the name OsterreichischerStudentenverein (changed in 1893 toFreie Vereinigung), remained a tiny mi-nority numbering at most a few dozenmilitants supported by several hundred

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sympathizers. Their weakness was re-vealed by the Badeni crisis of 1897,when they attempted to both preach andpractice national conciliation but foundthemselves utterly swamped by a brutaleruption of deutschnational chauvinism.Not only were they ignored by the greatmajority of students, the Rektor of theUniversity banned their posters and pro-hibited their meetings.

The fact that in these, its cradle years,the Freie Vereinigung included amongits leadership cadre such intellectual lu-minaries as the future Austro-Marxisttheorists Max Adler and Rudolf Hiifer-ding did little to make it popular withthe great majority of Viennese students.While many students were indifferent topolitics, concentrating their energies onearning their degrees and thus gainingqualifications for entrance into the pro-fessions or the bureaucracy, a violence-prone Pan-German minority, almost in-variably supported by the Rektor and thebulk of the faculty, totally dominatedthe university and all of the otherHochschulen in Vienna. Consequently,socialist and liberal students foundthemselves isolated and ostracized, a sit-uation that did not begin to improve un-til November 1918, when the prc :la-mation of the Republic appeared to sig-nal the birth of a new and progressiveage.

Zoitl's book shows in painstaking de-tail how these dreams were only par-tially realized in the first half of the1920s, a traumatic period for the inde-pendent Austrian state and a tumul-tuous time for students whose socialistideals continued to be rejected by theiracademic peers. On many occasions So-cial Democratic student gatherings werebanned on the flimsiest of pretexts,while at the same time deutschnationalrowdies were rarely if ever punished fororganizing bloody riots directed againsttheir Jewish and "Marxist" fellow-stu-dents. A burden added to the unrelent-ing discrimination against leftist stu-

dents was the lukewarm support theyusually received from the leadership ofthe Social Democratic party. Austriansocialism had a long tradition of anti-in-tellectualism, which in practice meantthat the embattled academics couldcount on little support from their parry'spower elite, some of whom remainedsuspicious of young idealistic men andwomen from wealthy bourgeois Jewishhomes who had never worked with theirhands. Superbly researched and clearlyorganized, this monograph still readstoo much like the dissertation it wasbased on, so that its rather flat styletends to drain the blood from the in-herent drama and human interest of thetragic events it has dissected in suchminute detail. Perhaps an imaginativenovelist, playwright, or film director willone day use these data to present a stir-ring dramatization showing how thespirit of youthful idealism was unable tohalt the flood tide of fascism in interwarAustria. Until that time, this book willserve as a warning of how easily rationaland humane ideals can fail in a societydeeply rooted in fear and hatred.

Michael Gehler's study of the politicalclimate at the University of Innsbruckduring the First Austrian Republic is amodel of how a study of provincial his-tory should be written. Never losingsight of the larger picture, Gehler re-mains master of his exhaustively re-searched sources (including fraternityarchives), using them to make a strongcase for the phenomenon of "anti-Sem-itism without Jews" that dominated thepolitical culture of the University ofInnsbruck after 1918. Among the manyviolent protests mounted by reactionaryInnsbruck students during the interwardecades, one of the first and in manyways most significant was the one thattook place in February 1920 to protestthe visit of Vienna's acerbic literary dic-tator, Karl Kraus. Stylistically superior tothe Zoitl study, the Gehler book makesa powerful case for the thesis that Inns-

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bruck's situation as a borderland after1918 greatly contributed to the irrationalspirit that permeated all aspects of ac-ademic life, and facilitated the growth ofthe most extreme ideology of racial ex-clusivity and national revenge, Hitler-ism. We are thus not surprised at a cer-tain point in his study when it is re-vealed that one of the Nazi studentleaders of the early 1930s, IrmfriedEberl, went on in the Third Reich to be-come the first commandant of the hor-rific Treblinka extermination camp.

Gehler's clear account of Karl Kraus'svisit and other similar incidents providestangible evidence of the intensity of ac-ademic anti-Semitism in an environ-ment where Jews were hated not as real,living individuals, but rather as symbolsof all that was destructive and threat-ening in the contemporary world. Heshows in convincing detail how theseraw prejudices evolved in the 1920stoward an aggressive National Socialismthat made the University of Innsbruck averitable fortress of fascism by the early1930s. One looks forward to a study ofsimilar quality that examines anothernotoriously Nazified borderland insti-tution, the University of Graz. This bookmarks an auspicious debut foi a youngAustrian historian who should ->&ve im-portant things to say in the future on thetheme of how an all-pervasive antidem-ocratic Weltanschauung dominated theacademic bourgeoisie of Central Europefrom the 1870s to 1945. Both the Gehlerand Zoitl studies are one more sign thatcontemporary history in Austria has fi-nally come of age.

John HaagUniversity of Georgia