Trieste Reading

My last two blog posts, Trieste and How Trieste Became Secular, have been about the Jews of Trieste, Italy. I was especially seeking information about the secular nature of this community and how it got that way. For this project, I have read several books and articles, such as the beautiful large-format book illustrated at right.

To obtain background material on Trieste at the beginning of the twentieth century, I read the pre-war-written article in my incredible old Brittanica:

Encyclopedia Brittanica, “Trieste” (1921 edition, Volume 17, pp 267-268)

Because Trieste’s Jewish community had such a strong influence on James Joyce, I tried to see what Joyce would have found during his stay there. This question is of interest to Joyce scholars because Joyce transferred much of what he learned about and from the Trieste Jews to his portrayal of the character Leopold Bloom (who of course in the novel Ulysses spends the entire time in Dublin).

Besides Joyce’s most famous friends novelist Italo Svevo and newspaper owner Teodoro Mayer, he encountered a variety of other Jews who were there. I learned for example, that during the early years of his time there, Joyce even rented rooms for a time from a Jewish landlady, who helped out when Nora Barnacle was having her first child (Years of Bloom p. 39). I learned that among many concerts he attended, Joyce once heard a performance of a Mahler symphony conducted by the composer (Years of Bloom p. 124).

Works on this subject:

Maura Hametz, "Zionism, Emigration, and Antisemitism in Trieste: Central Europe's 'Gateway to Zion,' 1896-1943," Jewish  Social Studies, New Series, Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 2007), pp.103-134

Gur Alroey, "Journey to Early-Twentieth-Century Palestine as a Jewish Immigrant Experience" Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 28-64

John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920. University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

John McCourt, James Joyce: A Passionate Exile. Orion Media, 2000.

Peter Hartshorn, James Joyce and Trieste. Greenwood Press, 1997.

For my second post, How Trieste Became Secular, as noted there, I read:

Lois C. Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Adele Bloch-Bauer

Yesterday I mentioned Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose portrait by Gustav Klimt became even more famous in 2005 when her niece recovered it from the Austrians. (They had stolen it in 1938, and successfully refused to return it for the ensuing decades.) The Bloch-Bauer family were wealthy; her father was in banking and railroads and her husband was in manufacturing. Adele had a salon in Vienna.

One thing about the Viennese intelligentsia: they were close-knit group and mixed practitioners and theorists from many disciplines. Adele's salon is an example of this interaction among the arts and political life in Vienna:

"Among the prominent guests in her salon were the composers Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879–1964), the authors Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), artists from the circle of Gustav Klimt, actors from the Burgtheater, and after WWI, the Socialists Karl Renner (1870–1950) and Julius Tandler (1869–1936)." (See this article.)

Note: Klimt painted two portraits of Adele;

the earlier one accompanied my post yesterday,

and the second is above.

Vienna and Antisemitism

In reading about Vienna in the 19th century, I've become aware of the simultaneous development of two groups emerging together. I meant to focus on the secular-Jewish intellectual class, which included some of the wealthy bankers as well as middle-class Jews. But it seems that you can't learn about this fascinating Jewish community without also being aware of a political, populist Austrian-German nationalism with a strong antisemitic bias as well as a bias against many of the non-German nationalities of the Austrian empire.

From the 1890s, anti-liberal leaders assumed a great deal of political power, especially the antisemite Karl Lueger who was elected mayor of Vienna in 1895, and despite the Emperor's efforts to block him from office, became mayor in 1897. Antisemitic theories and actions became widely accepted and influential. After World War I they grew predominant in both Austria and Germany as is very well known. Less well known: their origin in Austrian 19th century policies and politics and the interplay between the conservative and Jew-hating ideas with the earlier liberal thought, Jewish intellectual and commercial success, and conservative antisemitic thought.

One thing I find disturbing is that every Jewish success was spun into a negative stereotype by the antisemites of the time. Jews were blamed for success in owning and running banks (the antisemites founded their own alternative postal savings bank). Jews received opprobrium for being writers or for owning newspapers. Most hated was the liberal and influential Neue Freie Presse, founded in 1864, edited from 1908 to 1920 by Moriz Benedikt, and ultimately put out of business by the Nazis when they took over Vienna in 1938. The antisemites criticized Jewish doctors (who perhaps became doctors because not all professions were open to Jews). Jewish university students were attacked and expelled from fraternities and other organizations that had formerly permitted them; Jews had a hard time rising in academic professions and musical institutions.

Yet many Jews put aside their Jewish identity when they wrote poetry or stories, composed music or plays, conducted, developed philosophic or other academic theories, or patronized a variety of arts. They led a normal, secular life, attempting to work around the forces that excluded them, marginalized them, or attacked them.

Despite the danger of the stereotypes, I am going to mention a few of the famous members of the Viennese intellectual community in its great times, with an extremely brief summary of how antisemitism affected them. I'm not an expert, I'm just beginning to read about this.

Sigmund Freud grew up in the secular-Jewish middle class. His intellectual leadership in developing theories about the human mind is still acknowledged even if the details have been revised or rejected. In reading the chapter on Freud in Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske, I learned how important to Freud was discrimination against Jews, both in terms of his career and his personal development.

Stefan Zweig was a widely-read and very popular author. His autobiography, The World of Yesterday, written when he was in flight from the Nazis and in despair about the loss of everything he had cherished, painted a fascinating nostalgic portrait of the atmosphere of Vienna before the Nazis. He put it in the best possible light, attempting to show, I think, that the Jewish writers and thinkers were able to overcome the forces that attacked them -- at least until the final disaster overtook them. Zweig's works seem to be undergoing a reevaluation: for a long time, he seemed dated, and now people are republishing and reading his novels and stories.

Theodor Herzl, a journalist for the Neue Freie Presse, is now of course mainly known for the invention of political Zionism and his pursuit of support for his dream of a homeland for the Jews. While he was originally rather indifferent to his Jewish identity (according to a number of things I've read), the ascent of Lueger in Vienna and the Dreyfus case, which he covered as the Paris correspondent of the NFP, caused him to rethink what he'd believed. His realization was a fascinating development in the context of the freedom that Jews had thought they possessed. He was ahead of his time in recognizing the force of antisemitism in many parts of Europe. Interestingly, according to Zweig, his newspaper, which had a general following, did not allow him to publish anything about Zionism.

Gustav Mahler, composer and conductor, accepted conversion to Catholicism in 1897 perhaps as the price for advancement in his career as a conductor. In that year, he was appointed as Kappelmeister in Vienna. His enemies continued to attack him, though I think it's fair to say that his music transcends all this.

Gustav Klimt, surely the most famous artist from pre-World War I Vienna, became a victim of antisemites without even being Jewish. According to Schorske, his dramatically original work was at first accepted, but soon became very controversial, and in a fight about murals to be installed at the university, he was the victim of a lot of vicious anti-modern sentiment, including being accused of siding with the Jews.

Klimt's two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer (who belonged to the Jewish community, which often patronized his art work) received a great deal of attention a few years ago when Adele's niece won a judgement that returned several paintings to her that had been among the ill-gotten gains from Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The people I've named are only a few of the famous figures living in Vienna who made important contributions, including many others from the secular-Jewish community. For some, identity was very complex, as there had been intermarriages and conversions for several generations (but antisemites might not have cared) -- examples are Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal.

Lueger, when challenged for having Jewish friends, evidently said that it was up to him to decide who was Jewish. I'm not sure what exactly that meant. All I know is that Hitler thought he was fabulous.

Gustav Mahler (July 7, 1860)

Mahler is a complex figure -- his origins were Jewish but he converted to Catholicism, and much effort has been made to find his Jewish and non-Jewish identity reflected in his music. Here is what I find an interesting quote from an interview with Daniel Barenboim:

"... One only talks about Mahler’s Jewish origins, and the Klezmer music, and the psychoanalysis and all these things, but basically, without Wagner there would have been no Mahler. And the most interesting thing about Mahler is that he really had one foot in the past and one in the future, that he had one foot in Wagner and the other foot in Schönberg, and as such was a great transitional figure. ... So, in effect, the complexity of Mahler, and its greatest appeal to me, is that it is, in a way, the affirmation of three centuries of musical thinking. ...

"There is a very beautiful, very poetic, video document with Leonard Bernstein, called The Little Drummer Boy, where he talks all about the Jewish background, and all that, and that Mahler had this feeling of guilt of having been Jewish. It’s very lovely and it’s very poetic, but it doesn’t help to understand the music one bit, in my view, not one bit."