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Hermann Bahr was living in this Viennese building when his book Der Antisemitismus was published in Berlin in 1894; today we are proud to finally present this vitally important work in its first English translation.
Incidentally, the building – on Salesianergasse to the south-east of Vienna’s old town – was also the birthplace of Austrian writer and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
When it came to designing our next book, Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr (originally published in 1894), finding an appropriate image proved challenging. How best to depict this utterly ground-breaking set of interviews concerning anti-Jewish sentiment of the 1890s that encompassed much of western Europe in its scope? One alternative might have been to explore the grotesque antisemitic caricatures that appeared in a number of publications of the time, particularly in Germany and France. Parisian newspaper La Libre Parole, for instance, popularised the kind of imagery seen in the worst antisemitic propaganda to this day – big-nosed Jews grasping, pulling strings, bleeding nations dry.
But rather than perpetuating these images, wouldn’t it be better to put the focus on those who were actually peddling these tropes? French writer Édouard Drumont, for instance. Born in 1844, he was perhaps the most prominent antisemite of his time in Europe. In fact it was he who founded La Libre Parole, in 1892. This followed the ‘Antisemitic League’ which he established in 1889, and his most lasting contribution to the cause, the extensive and popular book La France Juive (Jewish France), which appeared in 1886. One of his numerous targets in that book was the French-Jewish journalist and newspaper proprietor Arthur Meyer – one of Bahr’s interviewees – who challenged him to a duel.
Drumont was instrumental in arousing public outrage during the Panama Scandal that followed the first, failed attempt to build a canal through Panama in which France lost huge amounts of money, sometimes in deals of questionable legality. Drumont believed that Jewish conspirators were behind the whole affair, recklessly accusing public figures of underhand dealings for which he received a three-month prison sentence in 1892. The story was still dragging on as Bahr conducted his interviews, and while Drumont himself wasn’t among the 38 respondents, he was frequently cited by those who were, including French journalist Francis Magnard:
Antisemitism is an invention of Mr Édouard Drumont – by which I mean, of course there has always been anti-Jewish sentiment, prejudice and hatred, but it was only ever a purely personal matter. You liked the Jews, or you did not, as you saw fit – it had nothing to do with politics. It was Drumont who first created, discovered political antisemitism, and it was only with La France Juive that it came to life. Drumont turned his individual antipathy into a general principle …
But elsewhere Magnard describes Drumont as ‘passionate, immoderate, yet gallant and honourable’, consistent with others who found admirable qualities in him even while deploring his monomaniacal hatred of Jews. They included another interviewee, French journalist Séverine, who described him as ‘brave, passionate, strong and chivalrous’.
So: back to the cover. We wanted the artwork to match our previous books, for which the imagery was largely drawn from postcards of the era (incidentally today marks 150 years since the first postcard was sent, in Bahr’s native Austria). And then we stumbled upon an extraordinary, deceptively playful postcard that depicts Drumont, which we presume to have been produced around 1890. The illustrator is Philippe Norwins, of whom little information survives, except that he worked for a number of journals around the beginning of the 20th century and seemed to specialise in caricatures of prominent French figures of the day.
The caption for his image of the French writer reads ‘Drumont anéantit ses mites’, a play on ‘Drumont, un antisémite’ which literally translates as ‘Drumont annihilates his moths’. We see the writer with an outsized pen in one hand, dripping black ink, and in the other an implement with which he sprays what we can presume is a deadly chemical agent, targeted at conspicuously big-nosed insects, one of whom has fallen dead at his feet. The victims are depicted as dehumanised, as vermin, and decades before the gas chambers this single illustration takes us from word to deed, from the polemics of hatred to the obscenity of genocide. And it is this image of shocking if accidental prescience that now adorns our translation of Antisemitism, designed by Svenja Prigge (like the cover for our recent edition of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad by Else Lasker-Schüler).
The Dreyfus Affair erupted in 1894, just as Bahr’s 1893 interviews were being published in book form. It was a scandal tailor-made for Drumont, and in fact it was his Libre Parole that broke the original story which would come to engulf French society in a bitterly rancorous dispute for years. Drumont was the most vocal and fanatical of the numerous French public figures decrying Jewish ‘treachery’ following the (false) accusations against Captain Dreyfus. Drumont was later elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a representative of Algiers, and tried (unsuccessfully) to repeal the law that had conferred French citizenship on Jewish Algerians. Failing to be re-elected in 1902 Drumont returned to his writing, and narrowly missed out on a seat on the august Académie française.
Édouard Drumont died in 1917; among the mourners at his funeral was Arthur Meyer.
Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr, originally published in German in 1894, is appearing in English for the first time on 21 October 2019 (translated by James J. Conway), Rixdorf Editions
One of the most famous of Hermann Bahr’s considerable contributions to early modernism is the 1891 essay ‘Die Überwindung des Naturalismus’ (Overcoming Naturalism), in which the Austrian writer and critic proposed ways in which European literature could advance beyond what was then its dominant movement. But Bahr never lost sight of wider society beyond the cultural sphere, maintaining a keen interest in politics, although his views underwent substantial transformation, especially in his early adult years.
As the Afterword to our forthcoming translation of his 1894 book Antisemitism reveals, the young Bahr was given to rowdy student provocations, including antisemitic insults. Within a decade he was a spokesman for the ‘Young Vienna’ group of writers and its numerous Jewish members, and would soon marry a Jewish actress. This unusual trajectory gave him a highly valuable insight into the rise of a new, virulent, politicised form of racial antisemitism whipped up by extremists both elected and unelected who together present a prototype for today’s breed of populism.
This extract from the Afterword takes us through the stages in Bahr’s early life that led up to the landmark study. In it we discover not only a key figure of European modernism who deserves far greater recognition in the English-speaking world, but also someone who was ideally suited to produce a pan-European study of the most contentious issue of his time.
Born in solidly middle-class, typically Catholic circumstances in Linz in 1863, Hermann Bahr early on exhibited a sharp mind and a rebellious spirit; graduating from secondary school as a star pupil in 1881, he was allowed to address his fellow students and caused a stir by using his talk to champion socialism. At university in Vienna, where he studied classical philology and philosophy, Bahr became an associate member of Albia, a Burschenschaft (a student association comparable to a fraternity) which was aligned with the pan-German movement. It was here that he came into contact with two figures who dramatically exemplified the range of responses to the ‘Jewish question’ at the time. On the one hand there was Theodor Herzl, the first modern Zionist, one of a number of Jews at the time who, with no previous cause to regard themselves as significantly other, responded to anti-Jewish agitation with increased identification with Judaism. On the other was Georg von Schönerer, the early instigator of racial antisemitism who would exert an enormous ideological influence on Nazism. Here, Bahr had personal links with the respective godfathers of modern Israel and the Holocaust.
To Bahr’s later shame, it was Schönerer who loomed largest in his thinking at the time. The passionate young pan-Germanist could see at close quarters those qualities he admired from afar in Otto von Bismarck, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Adopting Schönerer’s views as his own, Bahr saw the Austro- Hungarian Empire as an ‘over-Slavified’ relic of the past. One of Bahr’s first published articles reflected his antisemitic beliefs, which found even cruder expression in slogans that he pasted up around Vienna, leading to his arrest.
In 1883 Bahr aired his outspoken pan-German views at a ceremony to mark the death of Richard Wagner and was dismissed from Vienna University for ‘treasonous activities’; he then moved to Graz, where he was arrested for insulting Jewish patrons in a café. It was an ignominious nadir. The worldly man of letters was yet to emerge, and in the meantime Bahr pursued sociology and economics, a combination of disciplines he regarded as the ‘alchemy of the future’. So when he moved to Berlin in 1884 it was as much the presence of famed economists Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller as his Germanophilia that attracted him. Hermann Bahr arrived in Berlin with a highly quixotic blend of political beliefs, favouring a Hohenzollern monarchy ruling over Germany and Austria (but not the rest of Austria’s empire), free of Jewish influence and somehow also socialist. His admiration for Bismarck led Bahr to join a torchlight procession for the Iron Chancellor’s 70th birthday in 1885. He endeavoured to meet the man himself but was directed instead to an advisor, Franz Johannes von Rottenburg, who inspired an unexpected turning point. Rottenburg managed to convince the committed pan-Germanist of the necessity of Austrian sovereignty; Bahr became an Austrian patriot on the spot – and would remain so for the rest of his life – even as his antisemitic and socialist views receded.
From this transitional phase a writer was emerging. Die neuen Menschen (The New People), from 1887, was emblematic of Bahr’s shifting focus. Thematically it illustrated his gradual alienation from socialism but its form – drama – would increasingly come to preoccupy him as both a critic and a creator. The following year he met the foremost living practitioner of the art, Henrik Ibsen, and moved to Paris where he could satisfy his hunger for new literary forms.
Bahr dwelt among bohemians and came into contact with Decadent literature, with the key text of the movement, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, inspiring his first novel, Die gute Schule (The Good School, 1890). He was one of the first German-speaking writers to regard the radical individualism and recherché perversity of Decadence as a way forward, as reflected in one of his most renowned essays, ‘Die Überwindung des Naturalismus’ (Overcoming Naturalism) in 1891.
As well as travelling to Spain, Morocco and Russia, Bahr returned to Berlin, where he was repelled by the advance of materialism, and in marked contrast to his younger years came to regard Jews as guardians of German culture (although he also complained that Germans were ‘two hundred years behind’ when he worked on the journal Freie Bühne für modernes Leben, or Free Stage for Modern Life). Through his literary criticism Bahr became closely identified in German-speaking Europe with die Moderne and he played a crucial role in the advancement of new forms.
Amid an intense period of publishing activity, Bahr issued a collection of stories entitled Fin de Siècle, helping to popularise a French borrowing that would come to be used as an umbrella term in German-speaking countries for Decadence, Symbolism and other inter-connected literary strains at the close of the 19th century. However, six of the book’s tales were judged obscene by Prussian authorities for depicting ‘abnormal and aberrant gratification of the sex drive’, and Bahr was fined 150 marks.
In 1891 Bahr returned to Vienna, with no little reluctance initially, although he soon became an essential part of the city’s literary life at one of its most exciting periods. Again, Bahr was pivotal, the ringleader of the ‘Young Vienna’ group which included the likes of Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as Karl Kraus, with whom Bahr conducted a long-running feud. In 1892 Bahr met Emil Auspitzer, the Jewish editor of Vienna’s Deutsche Zeitung, a newspaper that went through a number of ideological shifts. Auspitzer took Bahr on with a handsome salary and a generous brief that encompassed theatre as well as wider cultural phenomena, and Bahr made the most of it. In October of that year he ran a series of interviews with notable figures in Vienna’s theatre scene. This was a highly novel concept in German-language letters; the authoritative Duden dictionary locates the first instance of the loan word das Interview in 1887. Toward the end of that year Bahr returned to Paris to cover the Panama Scandal, interviewing Émile Zola among others, and also met up with Theodor Herzl again, who was there covering the same story as the foreign correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, competitor to the Deutsche Zeitung.
In 1893 Bahr marshalled these elements for a far more extensive undertaking – a series of interviews with prominent international figures on the subject of antisemitism.
Antisemitism by Hermann Bahr (tr. James J. Conway) will be published on 21 October 2019. You can find more information here.
