Seite - 222 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Sander L. Gilman While Kraus uses this review to defend Wilde and his drama (with the parodied cry echoing the closing of the play : “Kill that critic !” [“Man erschlage diesen Kritiker…”]) (2), it is his attempt to decouple homosexuality and the Jews which makes up the greater part of his long and detailed examination of Schütz’s review. He observes that “Mr. Friedrich Schütz is not a pederast” (2). The unspoken theme of Schütz’s review, according to Kraus’s reading, being — if in a review of a work by a known homosexual such as Oscar Wilde, I, as a reviewer, do not attack homosexuality, then am I not “one of them.” Kraus’s defense of Wilde is linked to his opposition to the prosecution of homosexuality and his libertarian view that sexuality has no business being under the control of the state. But the central thrust of the first paragraph has little to do with this question, and Kraus himself drops this theme after a long paragraph. His main concern, the center of his review, is also the central theme of the opening paragraph of his review. It is his focus on the role of the Jews, represented for Kraus (but not for Schütz) by their discourse, by the language of the “Pharisees” in the debates before Herod about the divinity of Christ and the mission of John the Baptist. For Schütz, Wilde is merely an antisemite, a “Briten-Goi” who attacks Jews in the basest manner. (Here, the attack on Britain as the source of all evil is redirected into an attack on the victim, Wilde, for being merely one of them, an antisemite.) He quotes Schütz that the Jews are reduced to “a quintet of tottering Jews represented with ugly gestures, which fulfill the deepest sense of subjugation.” The direction of the Volkstheater does even more and “lets these Hebrews mauscheln.” And that has to be inflicted on Mr. Schütz for whom every work of art must have but one law : “There is no Jewish ill- breeding”(9). But even Kraus admits that the use of Gemauschel on the Viennese stage was tasteless : “Indeed the jargon [Jargon] of the group of the Pharisees should have been moderated — at least with an eye toward the audience at the premiere …“(9) For the use of Gemauschel points to the double-bind of Jews such as Karl Kraus writing in German. Kraus, Herzl’s most violent early opponent in Vienna, rejects the call for an orientalization of the European Jews. He sees acculturation, if not as- similation, as the only possible means of overcoming the hostility to the Jews of the world in which he lives. He shares the general assimilationist point of view that the recent political opposition to the Jews, at least in Vienna, is the result of having large numbers of unacculturated Eastern Jews from the provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the capital. With his focus on the Gemauschel of Wilde’s Jews, Kraus points to the incompetence of a specific group of Jews, the Eastern, Yiddish-speaking Jews from the provinces, the Jewish parvenues in Vienna, the object onto whom Viennese See my Jewish Self-Hatred : Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Baltimore 1986, especially pp. 209–260.