Page - 225 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler Imagine the “Jews” ment lies in the ambiguity of Kraus’s use of the term “perversion,” applying it not only to the homosexual but also to the Jewish press. Jews such as Moritz Benedikt are no better than their own image of the homosexual. The image of Oscar Wilde in the public press of the Fin-de-siècle ties together a string of seemingly unrelated qualities : a strong anti-British attitude, a sense of sexual pathology, the image of an author as identical with the image of his work, popular images of the language of deviance. All of these qualities are linked through the as- sociation of accepted stereotypes of the Jews with qualities of difference ascribed to the homosexual. This was during a period of growing concern with the homosexual scandals among the nobility and the upper class in Germany and Austria, such as the Krupp scandal of 1902. It was the very awareness of difference — sexual, cultural, racial — which set the stage for the most notable of these scandals, those concerning Wilhelm II and his friend Philipp Eulenberg, which broke in 1906, shortly after the premiere of Strauss’s Salome. There the association of antisemitism, homosexuality, and the discourse of the Jews (in the role of Kraus’s German alter-ego, Maximilian Harden, who brought these scandals to the surface) illustrates the association of these forces. Strauss was composing during the very period in which Harden’s material was appearing and was forcing the discussion of homoeroticism into the political arena. With the premiere of Strauss’s version of Salome in 1905, the opera became a touchstone of the “modern,” especially to acculturated or assimilated Jews of Vienna. For anti-semites, the Viennese “Jew” Gustav Mahler defined “Jewishness” in the arts, even though he was baptized in 1897. Even Strauss, recording Mahler’s death in his diary for May 18, 1911, refers to him as “der Jude Mahler …” 9 And Mahler, the Jewish composer of the avant-garde, as head of the Vienna Imperial Opera, was one of Strauss’s (and Salome’s) strongest supporters. Mahler, the head of the Viennese Court Opera, submitted Strauss’s opera to Dr. Emil Jettl, the court censor, in order to have it approved for performance, Jettl’s rejection mentioned an objection to the representation of Biblical characters on the stage but, even more important, in light of the opposition and critical reaction to the 1903 Viennese production of Wilde’s play, he saw the drama as a work that represented sexual pathology : “Irrespective that the representation of actions from the New Testament raises considerations for the court On the political background to the homosexual scandals of the day and their close association with images of Jewish discourse (especially the idea of journalism as a form of Jewish discourse) see Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II 1888–1918, Cambridge 1982, pp. 57–145 and James D. Steakley, “Iconography of a Scandal : Political Cartoons and the Eulenberg Affair”, Studies in Visual Communication 9 (1983), pp. 20–51. Cited by Hena Blaukopf, ed., Gustav Mahler-Richard Strauss : Briefwechsel 1888–1911, Munich 1980, p. 211.