front-page article celebrating ‘60 years of Liberalism’. In it, we find not only a concise and lucid exposition of the historic and political processes that resulted in one of the most inclusive and wide-ranging European constitutions of the age, we also sense, as with Roth's essay, the reactionary powersgathering steam in the years running up to National Socialism. Juden auf Wanderschaft tries to come to terms with what Roth saw as an inevitable development; the leader-writers of the Neue Freie Presse may have even sensed the same with their salute to 60 years of Liberalism aimed at a still undeclared but clearly present enemy. 25 This was hardly surprising since the paper had been founded in 1864 by the Jewish journalists Max Friedländer and Adolf Werthner, and was published and edited from 1879 by two other Jews, Eduard Bacher and Moritz Benedikt. Benedikt was the only journalist whom the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph would meet. The Neue Freie Presse became the primary German-language paper offering a secular and politically liberal perspective and, with its flotation on the Viennese stock exchange in 1871, it was established as one of the leading papers published in the German language. The founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was its cultural editor, and Richard Wagner's favourite ‘Jewish’ hate-figure, Eduard Hanslick, Professor of Aesthetics at Vienna's University, was its principal music critic. With regular articles and features by Peter Altenberg, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Nordau, Felix Salten, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and even Karl Marx, it was the paper of the liberal, educated bourgeoisie, a demographic in which Jews were becoming ever more prominent. Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday sums it up nicely by referring to the paper as ‘a Temple of Progress’ and goes on to write, ‘With its distinguished exposition on events, its cultural authority and its political prestige, it came to represent for the entire Austro-Hungarian monarchy the same as The Times for the English speaking world.‘ 26
Though life had become progressively better for Jews since the 1848 Revolution and the emancipation of 1867, the rise of Jewish scholars and intellectuals to the top of the professional classes – and even to the nobility – took place in less than a generation. Such rapid progress would not go without resentment. The ideals of the Austro-Hungarian Constitution of 1867 and Germany's Constitution of 1871 were directly responsible for creating the dynamic cultural environments in both German states prior to the rise of Nazism. It could be argued, as the 1927 article in the Neue Freie Presse makes clear, that the wide-ranging liberalism of these constitutions also allowed the emergence of a pan-German, exclusionist nationalism. 27 To try to understand the dysfunctional relationship between Jews and non-Jews, we need to turn to Wagner, in many ways the father of German anti-Semitism based on ‘race’ rather than religious adherence, and as a composer, a central figure within this story.
Epilogue
In the introduction to this book, I write that it would chalk up a cultural victory to the Nazis to accept the belief that the pre-Hitler contributions made by Jewish composers to German music were delusional; however, I end the book paradoxically with Korngold's sobering encounter with this very same delusion upon his return to post-war Vienna. The 2003 Viennese and New York exhibition on Jews and German musical identity, ‘Quasi una fantasia’, maintained the default setting since the end of the Third Reich that Jewish contributions to German music were never recognised, acknowledged or valued by the societies so valued, acknowledged and recognised by Jewish composers and musicians. Their children and grandchildren inherited this sense of rejection and as generations passed on, estates were handed over to local universities and libraries in the belief that returning them to former homelands would
Though life had become progressively better for Jews since the 1848 Revolution and the emancipation of 1867, the rise of Jewish scholars and intellectuals to the top of the professional classes – and even to the nobility – took place in less than a generation. Such rapid progress would not go without resentment. The ideals of the Austro-Hungarian Constitution of 1867 and Germany's Constitution of 1871 were directly responsible for creating the dynamic cultural environments in both German states prior to the rise of Nazism. It could be argued, as the 1927 article in the Neue Freie Presse makes clear, that the wide-ranging liberalism of these constitutions also allowed the emergence of a pan-German, exclusionist nationalism. 27 To try to understand the dysfunctional relationship between Jews and non-Jews, we need to turn to Wagner, in many ways the father of German anti-Semitism based on ‘race’ rather than religious adherence, and as a composer, a central figure within this story.
Epilogue
In the introduction to this book, I write that it would chalk up a cultural victory to the Nazis to accept the belief that the pre-Hitler contributions made by Jewish composers to German music were delusional; however, I end the book paradoxically with Korngold's sobering encounter with this very same delusion upon his return to post-war Vienna. The 2003 Viennese and New York exhibition on Jews and German musical identity, ‘Quasi una fantasia’, maintained the default setting since the end of the Third Reich that Jewish contributions to German music were never recognised, acknowledged or valued by the societies so valued, acknowledged and recognised by Jewish composers and musicians. Their children and grandchildren inherited this sense of rejection and as generations passed on, estates were handed over to local universities and libraries in the belief that returning them to former homelands would
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