Page - 307 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Michael Laurence Miller From White Terror to Red Vienna Hungarian Jewish Students in Interwar Austria In 1922, the young Arthur Koestler inquired about the admissions procedure at Vi- enna’s Technische Hochschule, where he hoped to pursue his studies in engineering. As he informed his parents, he was “told in confidence that it is very difficult as a Hungarian and even more as a Jew to be accepted.” Arthur Koestler was eventu- ally admitted to the Technische Hochschule, joining the thousands of Hungarians and the hundreds of Hungarian Jews who were enrolled at Vienna’s institutions of higher learning in the 1920s, particularly at the Technische Hochschule. Vienna’s acclaimed universities had attracted many Hungarian students in the decades before World War I, but the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918, the collapse of the Hungarian Commune in 1919, and the official dismemberment of pre-war Hungary in 1920 led many Hungarian students to Vienna in the post-war period. Hungary’s generally antisemitic climate from 1919 onward, and Hungary’s numerus clausus law of September 1920 in particular, increased the likelihood that these Hungarian students were of Jewish faith (or ancestry). Overcrowding, Antisemitism and the Numerus Clausus In Hungary, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was followed by a quick succession of governments : first, the People’s Republic of Hungary under Count Mihály Károlyi (October 1918-March 1919) ; then, the Soviet Republic of Hungary under Commissar Belá Kun (March-August 1919) ; and finally, the reconsti- tuted Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1944) under the regency of Admiral Miklós Hor- thy (1920–1944). The Hungarian Soviet Republic was often denigrated as the “Ju- deo-Bolshevik Commune,” due to the preponderance of Jews among its leadership, Letter from Arthur Koestler to his parents ; quoted in David Caesarini, Arthur Koestler : The Homeless Mind, London 1998, p. 30.