Antisemitism On the Danube

...Citing Simon Wiesenthal, Berkley underscores that Austrians may have been responsible for three million Jewish deaths in the Shoah...

...During Kurt Waldheim's successful campaign for the Austrian presidency, charges by the World Jewish Congress of his Nazi past and his role in HiUer's Final Solution led irate Aus-trians to displays of Jew-hatred that stopped short of physical violence but were unchecked in their ugliness...

...The waltz dream was shattered in 1986...

...Though Berkley portrays more than a century of Jewish history in Vienna, his steady reference point is Austria's role in the Shoah...

...But, in the main, Jews have been drawn to Vienna less by its Jewish history, to which the city indeed bears witness, than by a tourist vision of gay Vienna: the Blue Danube, the Vienna Woods, prancing white horses, opera balls and Sacher tortes...

...Shocken, 1986) and Radical Humanism (Indiana, 1984) and author of articles on German-Jewish writers...

...Stephen's Cathedral, will resound with the silence of the Austrian Church when Jews were being hounded, tortured and deported to their deaths in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz...

...And to whose pride may their fame accrue...

...24.95 Reviewed by Sidney Rosenfeld The name Vienna has so charmed the imagination that many Jews who refuse to set foot in post-Hitler Germany have felt no such compunctions about Austria...

...the university will speak to visiting Jews less of past intellectual glories than of the racial hatred and violence against Jewish students that erupted in the late 19th century and reached new peaks as Nazi strength rose in the 1930s...

...Misspellings of names and titles, particularly German ones, hint that in aiming for an exhaustive portrayal Berkley ventured into areas where he did not always feel at home...

...Until recently, Vienna was combined with Prague and Budapest in itineraries aimed particularly at Jewish travelers...

...And if the Austrians had indeed been more fervent antisemites, better Nazis than the Germans, how can former Viennese Jews, once marked for murder, still look back on their native city as a "virtual paradise...

...He rejects the myth of Austria as the "first victim" of Nazism and instead hammers home that while Austrians made up about 8.5 percent of the population of Hitler's Greater Germany, they supplied 14 percent of the SS, the chief perpetrators of the Final Solution...

...Vienna and its Jews is an engrossing, forceful account of a Jewish community that flourished singularly, only to be destroyed in horror...

...Like the compilers of Jewish calendars and biographies, Berkley, too, must contend with the often vexing question of who is a Jew...

...These are the questions that drove Berkley to trace the supremely ironic tale of Jewish love for Vienna...

...Along the famed Ringstrasse, the Town Hall will remind them of the city's most popular mayor, Karl Lueger (18971910), who made political coin of antisemitism...

...In helping to preserve the memory of Vienna's Jews, he— a non-Austrian—appears to have found answers to his own Jewish questions...

...Since sensible people don't go where they feel unwelcome, it appears doubtful that Jewish tourists will easily be enticed to Vienna for a while to come...

...They will experience Vienna less blithely and naively than they otherwise might...

...If, as he duly notes, so many renowned Viennese Jews were baptized Christians, what was the Jewish contribution to German-Austrian culture of those many writers and thinkers whom we label as Jews but to whom their own Jewishness was at best a matter of thorough indifference...

...Given Vienna's long history of antisemitism, which Berkley documents throughout the book, how could its Jews, he asks, not have foreseen the fate that threatened them as Nazism grew in their country...

...He is co-translator with Stella Rosenfeld of Jean Amery's At the Mind's Limits (Indiana, 1980...

...Sidney Rosenfeld is professor of German at Oberlin College...

...the Parliament building will call to mind decades of antisemitic diatribes by the Christian Socials and Pan-German factions on the Right, and the Jew-baiting of the Social Democrats—many of whose leaders were Jewish—on the Left...

...Ordinary city streets will evoke nightmarish scenes from March 1938, when Jews were forced to scrub sidewalks with toothbrushes, do knee-bends until they collapsed, spit on one another or dance on ruined Torah scrolls as non-Jewish Austrians watched and gloated...

...Berkley writes not only with verve and a good eye for historical detail but also with deep personal involvement...

...Those who go nonetheless should take along George Berkley's book, Vienna and its Jews, as their guide...

...The city's prime landmark, St...