Entangled Memories: Jewish and non-Jewish War Remembrance in interwar Austria

ABSTRACT

Discourses of striving for equality versus the preservation of Jewish difference are reflected in the Jewish and non-Jewish struggles for an appropriate remembrance of the fallen during and after the First World War. They find their expression in the spatial localization of Jewish war memory. This paper deals with the polyphonic memory discourses and spatial positions of Jewish war memory in interplay with non-Jewish war memory in Austria during the Second World War. The focus is on the establishment of war cemeteries and specific signs of remembrance in Jewish and non-Jewish spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• World War I
• memory
• Austria
• League of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers
• antisemitism

Since the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Age of Emancipation, European Jewish communities have been confronted with fundamental questions about their cultural and political positioning within the societies and states in which they lived. Debates focused on concepts of tolerance, equality and difference, homogeneity and heterogeneity, as well as majority and minority. At issue was the relationship of Jews as individuals and as a group to their surrounding non-Jewish society and the state.¹ These questions received increased attention with the collapse of the multiethnic empires during and after the First World War and the subsequent advance of the nation-state principle in Europe. Whereas the former empires had followed the principle of heterogeneity, the nation-states that emerged after 1918/19 were based on the principle of homogeneity. A presumably homogeneous majority was suddenly confronted with a clearly differentiated minority whose status and place were to be defined in minority rights.² For Austria’s Jewish population, this transition from empire to nation-state meant having to engage in debates about inclusion and exclusion as well as cultural and political positioning in the new state. As with the entire process of emancipation, this involved questions of Jewish equality and difference.³ These questions did not only become relevant in 1918, but had already emerged during the war and were primarily reflected in Jewish and non-Jewish debates about the appropriate joint or separate commemoration of the fallen Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers of the Habsburg empire. As will be shown in the following sections, war remembrance, and thus the question of where and how to commemorate the fallen Jewish soldiers, were central to negotiations about the social and political participation of Jews in Austria.⁴

The struggle for political and social equality, while simultaneously recognizing Jewish difference, was also reflected in the debates about the memory of the war after 1914, which, since the age of emancipation, have always found their equivalent in questions of representation in the public sphere and in bourgeois society. In the 1820s, for example, the Jewish community in Vienna received permission to build a synagogue. However, in accordance with the Edict of Tolerance issued by Emperor Joseph II, the synagogue, built in 1825/6 by the famous Viennese architect Joseph Kornhäusl in what is now Seitenstettengasse, was not allowed to be visible to the public. Rather, it was hidden in the inner courtyard behind the facades of houses.⁵ Thus, Judaism was not allowed to disturb the homogeneous Christian urban space. With the 1867 Constitution and civil equality, such restrictions on urban representation were lifted, and the Jewish communities in Austria built numerous representative synagogues that were visible in the urban landscape, as well as other Jewish spaces where Jews could come together. Associations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were of particular importance. They were the spaces where Jews could live their Judaism amongst themselves, as well as meeting zones between Jews and non-Jews. According to Till van Rahden, they were sites of ‘situational ethnicity’ and thus of both equality and difference.⁶

Emancipation of 1867 in Habsburg Austria brought legal equality and created the basis for the formation of diverse Jewish spaces in bourgeois society. But legal equality did not equate to social equality and the simultaneous recognition of Jewish difference. As a result, with the rise of political antisemitism from the 1880s onward and the increasing nationalization of politics and society, the pressure to homogenize on the one hand and the tendencies to exclude Jews from society and the public sphere on the other increased. The First World War was a catalyst for these developments of homogenization and exclusion, which is particularly evident in the question of where and how to commemorate the fallen Jewish soldiers.⁷

War remembrance: inclusion and exclusion

For many Jews, the “Burgfrieden” (party truce) proclaimed in 1914 was initially the fulfillment of the long-awaited social recognition of Jewish equality and integration into society. Many Jews saw military service as an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the state and their patriotism, as well as to underpin their claim to equal political and social rights and participation.⁸ The basis for this was the promise of Emperor Joseph II, the policy of tolerance, and the introduction of mandatory military service for Jews, which ensured their integration into state and nation in return for their willingness to fight and die for the fatherland.⁹ In this respect, the willingness of the “citizen-soldier” ¹⁰ to suffer a “heroic death” was the ultimate proof of his unbreakable loyalty to the state, which in turn granted him political and social participation and equality.¹¹ The idea was that in fighting and dying for the fatherland everyone was equal and should be remembered as such.

Yet ultimately, the Great War only brought the illusion of participation. The economic, social, and political crises caused by the war fueled antisemitism, which became increasingly violent toward the end of the military conflict, culminating in pogroms in various places from 1918 onwards. As a result of the war and its aftermath, the place of Jews within the European republics, which saw themselves as nation-states, became increasingly precarious.

These processes of inclusion (war service) and exclusion (antisemitism and nationalism) were particularly obvious in the field of the political commemoration of war victims, the fallen soldiers. During the First World War and the interwar period, the political cult of the dead became a central field of negotiation in the formation of the state community.¹² According to George L. Mosse, the cult of heroes and the cult of the fallen also formed the core of the myth of the war experience and provided the symbols to reconcile the memory of the war.¹³ This cult of heroes served to “make sense of the senseless”¹⁴ and thus help the survivors overcome their trauma and the bereaved their loss.¹⁵

Symbolic and spatial expressions of the cult of the fallen were commemorative plaques, war memorials, and Heldenfriedhöfe (war cemeteries, literally “cemeteries for our heroes”).¹⁶ In their design, commemorative plaques, war memorials, and war cemeteries were as much a reflection of mass death as they were of the nationally charged meaning created by the state. Thus, in an act of democratization and homogenization, all fallen soldiers were to be remembered in lists on the monuments/plaques or in uniformly designed individual graves in the cemeteries. Moreover, the inscriptions were not intended to give any indication of the social background of the fallen.¹⁷ The names on monuments/memorial plaques and gravestones, arranged in rows, were an expression of the uniformity and equality of all fallen.¹⁸ This commemorative design was thus an idealized expression of the overcoming of all political, social, and religious differences, and thus ultimately an expression of the homogeneity of the nation and the idealized war experience in the trenches.

In order to underscore their message and significance for the creation of identity and meaning, these memorial sites were usually erected at central and representative locations in cities or villages and kept in the public consciousness through recurring commemorative rituals. In Austria-Hungary, for example, the Expert Advisory Council for War Graves (Komitee für Kriegsgräberfürsorge in Österreich) published corresponding guidelines for the erection of such memorial sites. Accordingly, “general principles of simplicity of layout, integration with nature, simple form of grave markers [are to be considered]. Anything overdone and sensation-seeking is to be avoided at all costs!” In addition, “friend and foe should be buried with equal dignity.” With the exception of local cemeteries, the grounds should be fenced in as much as possible, and as a “monument, the high cemetery cross, which is characteristic of all cemeteries, is usually sufficient.”¹⁹ According to the guidelines of the Expert Advisory Council, all fallen should be buried equally, but ultimately under the sign of the cross and thus of Christianity. A fact that caused difficulties, not least for the Jewish communities, when the construction of war cemeteries was finally planned.

War cemeteries – spaces of equality and difference

In order to implement the new concept of war remembrance, state commissions were set up in all belligerent countries at the beginning of the war to collect the names of the fallen and to prepare or implement the establishment of interfaith war cemeteries and other commemoration sites for all fallen soldiers.²⁰ But the issue of interfaith war cemeteries led to debates within Jewish communities and in the Jewish press, because it threatened Jewish difference and visibility. Although the plain memorial crosses common in military cemeteries were replaced by Stars of David on the graves of fallen Jews, the design of the cemeteries basically followed Christian imagery.²¹ This linked the heroic death of the individual for the nation, the fatherland, with the Christian concept of resurrection. In this narrative, the mass death on the battlefield stood at the beginning of the resurrection of the nation. The death and resurrection of Christ were paralleled with the death of the soldier and the resurrection of the nation, thus making the incomprehensibility of death comprehensible and enabling many individuals to process their traumas in terms of popular piety.²² Accordingly, most war cemeteries were designed in the style of a cross and enriched with other Christian symbols.²³ Thus, when non-Christian (Jews and Muslims) fallen soldiers were buried in these cemeteries, they were incorporated into, or subordinated to, a Christian practice of mourning and a Christian political narrative. If they insisted on their Jewish or Muslim difference, they faced symbolic and political exclusion from the community of remembrance and, subsequently, from the national community. This effectively meant that Jewish and Muslim fallen soldiers were either buried in the cemetery of the nearest Jewish community, or in separate Muslim cemeteries, or not in the center of the common war cemeteries where a cross or chapel stood, but on the outskirts or outside the war cemeteries in their own separate areas.²⁴

The first Jewish reaction in Austria to the new practice of commemorating fallen soldiers and establishing interfaith war cemeteries was an article in the Viennese German-Jewish newspaper Blochs Wochenschrift in October 1914. The article reported on a proposal by the Karlsruhe city council to establish a common place of honor in the city cemetery for all fallen soldiers from Karlsruhe.²⁵ Although the city council assured the Jewish community that the Jewish graves would remain untouched for all eternity, the Supreme Council of the Israelites in Karlsruhe, which was consulted on the matter, ultimately decided against this course of action. Interesting and pioneering for Austria is the explanation given in the article for the separation of the Jewish martyrs from the non-Jewish fallen. According to the author, on the one hand, it was the wish of the majority of Jews to be buried “next to the graves of their fathers”. On the other hand, a separate burial site would make it easier for the Christian population to keep the war cemeteries as Christian cemeteries without this being interpreted as intolerance towards the Jewish population. In addition, the article argued, the Jewish fallen would not be noticed in interfaith cemeteries, which were mostly Christian, and thus Jewish heroic monuments and heroic cemeteries would also be missing in the future, although they were necessary as visible, spatial evidence of Jewish heroism and willingness to make patriotic sacrifices. Religious concerns thus went hand in hand with more general symbolic considerations, as expressed in another text in Blochs Wochenschrift from January 1915:

[…] It is certainly to be greatly appreciated that the City of Vienna does not wish to make any distinction between the heroes who sacrificed their lives for the Fatherland and wishes to honor them all equally. Nevertheless, I would like to take the liberty of suggesting that a number of Jewish martyrs be buried in the Jewish section of the cemetery, if possible in a group, if only to enable us to honor the Jewish section of the cemetery in quiet times with a war memorial, so that the lack of such a memorial will not be unpleasantly noticed by the next and the next generation, and so that a later boy will not have to ask his father: “Didn’t the Jews fight in 1914 because there is no war memorial in the Jewish cemetery?!”²⁶

The initial topic of this letter to the editor was the idea of the City of Vienna in September 1914 to establish a common cemetery for all fallen soldiers at the Vienna Central Cemetery. Initially, the Jewish community supported the idea in principle,²⁷ but wanted to ensure that burials as well as ritual preparations would be carried out according to Jewish religious law and by rabbis or officials of the Jewish community. In addition, if headstones contained religious symbols alongside the names, the customary closing blessing (“May his soul be bound in the bond of eternal life”, a paraphrase of 1 Sam 25:29)²⁸ should be added to Jewish headstones. Finally, the family’s wishes should be respected if they decided to bury the loved one in a Jewish cemetery.²⁹

Although in 1914 Vienna’s Jewish community had agreed in principle to the request of the City of Vienna to establish an interfaith war cemetery, further developments showed that many relatives continued to prefer the burial of the fallen within the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery. The Jewish community reacted to this by establishing a separate burial ground reserved for war victims in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery, without, however, setting precise specifications for the design of the gravestones in accordance with the new war memorial culture.³⁰

Similar developments can be found in numerous other Jewish communities, such as in Graz, where the Jewish community also decided in 1915 to establish a separate burial ground for its fallen soldiers,³¹ and in Brody (Galicia), which, unlike the cities located in the later Republic of Austria, was directly affected by the war events, and where a separate section for fallen Jewish soldiers was established in the cemetery of the local Jewish community.³² In the same way, in 1916, the Association for the Solution of the Eastern Jewish Question (“Verband zur Lösung der ostjüdischen Frage”), founded by rabbis and Orthodox Jews in Vienna, appealed to the Jewish communities in Galicia and Bukovina to bury the fallen soldiers there according to Jewish ritual and to give them a place in the Jewish cemeteries.³³

As can be seen from these examples, many Jewish communities decided to bury fallen Jewish soldiers from their area of responsibility not in the interfaith military cemeteries, but in specially created burial grounds within the community-owned Jewish cemeteries. The reasons for this were religious observance, as well as the desire for a clear visibility of the Jewish war sacrifice in the form of separate military cemeteries.

However, not all communities followed this procedure, and many Jewish soldiers were buried in non-Jewish cemeteries. The reasons for this were both pragmatic, such as the lack of Jewish cemeteries in the immediate vicinity, and more fundamental, in that the idea of civic equality of all the fallen was preferred to adherence to Jewish religious observance and the emphasis on Jewish difference.³⁴ In 1915, for example, Field Rabbi Albert Schweiger reported in Blochs Wochenschrift on the establishment of an Imperial and Royal military cemetery:

The religious differences, however, only manifested themselves during the inauguration of the cemetery, as, in general, there are differences among the clergy only during a religious celebration; otherwise we live together in a close and fraternal way. Without distinction of religion, the Christian clergy visit, comfort, and feed the Jewish sick and wounded, and vice versa.³⁵

The very different burial practices during the First World War ultimately reveal the uncertainty of the Jewish communities and the Jewish public. On the one hand, many saw joint burials with non-Jewish soldiers in interfaith war cemeteries as an affirmation of civic and social equality. On the other hand, however, there were fundamental religious and, especially at the end of the war, political objections to burying the fallen Jewish soldiers in separate Jewish cemeteries. Jewish communities had always been concerned with defending themselves against antisemitic attacks by making their own war victims spatially visible. For them, the fallen Jewish soldier was the most convincing argument in this defense against antisemitism. Following this line of thinking, special “heroes’ sections” were established in Jewish cemeteries during the war, and in the postwar period these sites of remembrance, along with synagogues, were the places where Jewish war memory was spatially manifested in the form of monuments and commemorative plaques.

Spaces of remembrance in the interwar period

In interwar Austria, military cemeteries built during the war and newly erected war memorials were places of honoring the dead and of ritualized mourning for the families. At the same time, they were places where political negotiations about war guilt, the interpretation of the war experience, and the inclusion and exclusion from the newly reinvented Austrian nation in contrast to the Habsburg empire took place. Thus, over the course of the First Republic and the period of Austrofascism, the erection of memorials became “increasingly political rituals and manifestations of the festive culture of the homecoming and comradeship associations, the Austrian army, and then the paramilitary associations of the Heimwehr and Heimatschutz movements.”³⁶ Consequently, the erection of the memorials, as well as the publicly staged remembrance in publications and other immaterial manifestations – as opposed to familial and individual memories – were part of the public negotiation of collective and particular identities. Various communities of remembrance attempted to use the war experience to further their political and social agendas. For example, the Frontkämpfervereinigung Deutsch-Österreichs (German-Austrian Front Fighters Association) was founded in 1920. It was dedicated to “representing the moral interests of the former front-line fighters,” “honoring the fallen comrades and heroes of the front,” “promoting love for the homeland and the German people,” and “eliminating class antagonisms in the German nation.”³⁷ Only “former front-line fighters of German-Aryan descent” were accepted as true members.³⁸ In the Social Democratic camp, too, there was a political debate about the war, but it was rather along the lines of the “no more war” movement and as a reckoning with the Habsburg warmongers.³⁹

In addition to these politically oriented veteran organizations, other associations were formed after 1918 that primarily focused on the social concerns of the survivors and war invalids. Their emphasis was on dealing with the physical and psychological consequences of the war suffered by the survivors. In Vienna, for example, the Association of Jewish War Invalids, Widows, and Orphans (Verband der jüdischen Kriegsbeschädigten, Invaliden, Witwen und Waisen)⁴⁰ was formed in 1919. Its main goal was to provide work opportunities for war invalids in its own workshops and to organize general social support,⁴¹ while it was not involved in active remembrance work. Commemoration and remembrance were carried out in the families or by the Jewish communities themselves, as well as by the funeral societies in charge of the cemeteries, for example the Chevra Kadisha. During the first years after the war, non-Jewish organizations in particular used war remembrance to spread their anti-democratic, nationalist, and antisemitic political messages. During this period, both the Austrian state and the Jewish communities were primarily concerned with social issues related to the treatment of disabled veterans and war invalids.⁴² Questions of an active culture of remembrance initially played a minor role, partly because the new state did not find an appropriate way of coming to terms with the Habsburg past.

Memorial sites

As we have already seen, the first reflections on the erection of memorials, monuments, and commemorative plaques took place in Austria as early as during the war. However, most of them were erected years after the end of the war, and in almost every village a war memorial was erected in the cemetery or in the immediate vicinity of the church or in some other public and central place. And even though the designs varied, they all shared similarities, at least in the comprehensive naming of all the fallen of the place.⁴³

But to what extent these general monuments in the villages, towns, and cities were also places of Jewish remembrance and memory cannot be answered in general terms. Rather, this must be examined on a case-by-case basis, place by place, monument by monument. It is, however, certain that in all cities with Jewish communities, initiatives for Jewish war memorials emerged already during the war, even if mainly at its end. These memorials were erected during the First Republic and the Austrofascist period, either in the heroes’ sections of Jewish cemeteries or in synagogues. It is important to note that they were never erected in public places, such as the main square or other places in the villages and towns marked as mainly non-Jewish. These were the places where the non-Jewish monuments stood.

The initiators of the Jewish monuments and war memorials were mostly the local funeral brotherhoods, the Jewish communities, sometimes but seldom private initiatives or, from 1932 onward, the Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs (League of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers of Austria).⁴⁴

For example, in October 1919, the Chevra Kadisha Linz published an appeal for donations for the erection of a Jewish war memorial at the Jewish cemetery.⁴⁵ This appeal also addressed the motives for the erection of the memorial. It was intended not only to honour the memory of the fallen and create a place of remembrance for their families but also to “show the rest of the world that their claim that our fellow Jews had allegedly shied away from the firing line and had been hiding in the hinterland, is based on falsehood and that we Jews had to make exactly the same blood sacrifices as warriors of other faiths.”⁴⁶

However, contrary to this claim of a visible representation of Jewish victims, the monument was finally erected in 1920, on the inside of the enclosed wall of the Jewish cemetery and thus almost invisible to the non-Jewish population. What is also remarkable about the Linz example is that no sources for an inauguration ceremony can be found. Neither the general newspapers in Linz nor the Linz Jewish newspaper reported on the inauguration. Once again, this can be read as an indication that the Jewish communities in this time of multiple crises were primarily concerned with existential problems. But even if symbolic remembrance and public grief were of little importance, it was necessary to create separate, specific spaces for the Jewish community, the bereaved, and the mourners.

As in Linz, which was the first to do so, Jewish cemeteries in Hohenems, Graz, Klagenfurt, Vienna, and Innsbruck erected war memorials in the following years. Even if important sites of Jewish and private mourning were thus established, these sites also expressed a spatial and social separation of Jewish and non-Jewish war remembrance. This was particularly evident in the construction of the Jewish war memorial in Innsbruck in 1925. Even in the small Jewish community of Innsbruck, the idea of erecting a Jewish war memorial had already been discussed during the war.⁴⁷ It was not until May 1925, however, that it was formally inaugurated as part of a nationwide commemoration of Italy’s entry into the war in 1915.⁴⁸ The inauguration of the Jewish memorial coincided with the general commemoration ceremonies of the state of Tyrol. However, only a few and, above all, rather insignificant representatives of political and other non-Jewish organizations attended the inauguration ceremony in the Jewish section of the municipal Western Cemetery. Instead, the leaders of Tyrolean society joined the public celebrations in the centre of Innsbruck, which were dominated by the antisemitic front fighters’ associations. The inauguration of the Jewish monument itself was reported both in the Tyrolean newspaper Innsbrucker Nachrichten and, a bit later, in the German-Jewish weekly Die Wahrheit. Deutschösterreichische Wochenschrift für jüdische Interessen in Vienna. Accordingly, Rabbi Link’s inauguration speech emphasized “that the Jews fought shoulder to shoulder with their comrades, shared their suffering and joy, to prove that they not only want to be equal, but are equal.”⁴⁹ In addition to Rabbi Link, the president of the “Chevra Kadisha”, a representative of the “old Austrian army,” and the initiator of the memorial spoke. Wreaths were laid by the Austrian Army and the Imperial and Royal Traditional Association. The monument itself was erected among numerous soldiers’ graves and the inscription contains the names of 63 fallen soldiers and the dedication: “Dedicated to the fallen in the Great War 1914–1918. The Chevra Kadisha”s Association for Pious and Charitable Works of the Jewish Community of Innsbruck.’ A marble obelisk flanked by two plaques stands in the centre. All three parts of the monument are decorated with the Star of David, and at the top of the obelisk there is a Hebrew dedication in memory of the fallen heroes.

The spatial separation of the memorial in the Jewish cemetery as well as the exclusive inauguration ceremony made the exclusion of Jews from Tyrolean society obvious. On the other hand, the design language of the monument followed the patriotic architecture of non-Jewish war memorials of the time, and it becomes clear that Jewish and non-Jewish memory discourses were intertwined in terms of symbols and narratives.

Another aspect of Austrian Jewish war remembrance becomes visible in the memorial plaque erected by the Jewish community in the Jewish cemetery in Klagenfurt in 1926.⁵⁰ Here, too, the two aspects of loyalty to the fatherland and dignified remembrance of the fallen were highlighted in the speeches, as Rabbi Ignaz Hauser stated in his consecration address:

And now be consecrated, you monuments of stone, as witnesses of a great time for a generation to come after us; be consecrated as sacred landmarks of our place; be consecrated for eternity in the name of Jewish honour, Jewish law, and Jewish loyalty to the fatherland.⁵¹

Jewish war memorials, and memorial signs in general, thus aimed in two different directions. According to Rabbi Hauser, they were directed at the surrounding non-Jewish society, demanding the recognition of Jewish loyalty to the fatherland and social equality. At the same time, however, in a time of increasing antisemitic attacks, they were also a signal to the Jewish community, emphasizing Jewish strength and Jewish identity. Referring to Sarah Panter, they were an expression of Jewish loyalty to the state as well as of Jewish solidarity.⁵²

In this context, the largest Jewish monument to the fallen soldiers erected in Austria during the interwar period, the monument of the Jewish Community of Vienna (IKG) in the Jewish section of the Vienna Central Cemetery, should also be considered.⁵³ As early as January 1919, the Jewish Community (IKG), through its cemetery department, began to discuss how this part of the Jewish section, which was almost entirely occupied by the graves of the war dead, should be “decorated artistically,” and initiated a competition of ideas among Vienna’s Jewish architects.⁵⁴ However, as in other places, economic problems prevented the immediate implementation of this project. The idea was finally revived in 1926 and a competition was held.⁵⁵ In the fall of the same year, the jury, headed by Clemens Holzmeister, chose the project by Viennese architect Leopold Ponzen entitled ‘Drawn Star of David in a Circle between Two Horizontal Lines,’ from among 25 submitted proposals. The project was realized in the following years and inaugurated on 13 October 1929, together with another for Russian Jewish prisoners of war buried in the Jewish section of the Vienna Central Cemetery. In addition to officials of the Jewish community, an honorary company from the 3rd Infantry Regiment, Austrian Chancellor Johann Schober, a representative of the Vice-Chancellor, representatives of the Ministries of Education and Social Welfare, a representative of the Hungarian and Polish envoys, Major General Jaspar Kundt on behalf of Germany, the Old Catholic Bishop, representatives of the Police Headquarters, and the Association of German Masters (Deutschmeister) were present at the inauguration.⁵⁶

Although the memorial was placed in the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery and thus in an exclusively Jewish space as a result of the decisions made by the Viennese Jewish community in 1915, the inauguration ceremony in Vienna is also an example of the intertwining of Jewish and non-Jewish war remembrance. In this particular case, it corresponded to the practice of war remembrance in the city of Vienna. This intertwining of remembrance practices was certainly also facilitated by the fact that the narrative of the Jewish war memorial coincided with that of “Red Vienna,” that is, Vienna governed by Social Democrats, in contrast to the Christian Social majorities in the rest of Austria.

In line with the Social Democratic position that the Habsburgs were responsible for the war and that war in general should be condemned, in 1925 the City of Vienna erected a new monument dedicated to pacifism at the Vienna heroes cemetery (Heldenfriedhof) built in 1915, in place of the wooden cross that had stood there until then.⁵⁷ This monument was designed by the Austrian sculptor Anton Hanak and depicts a mourning mother at its centre. It thus stood in contrast to the hegemonic bellicose and martial design imagery of most war memorials and the hegemonic Christian, nationalist, and bellicist commemoration practices in Austria.⁵⁸ Even the Jewish hero monument, located in the immediate vicinity of the monument of the City of Vienna, stood in the context of international understanding and peace, which was also expressed in the dedication inscription, which reads: ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn.’ (Isaiah, 2:4).⁵⁹

The memorial thus stands for peace and, by including the Russian Jewish prisoners of war who died in Vienna, also for the overcoming of national borders in the spirit of Jewish solidarity.

The struggle for the public sphere – the League of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers

Monuments and memorial plaques permanently marked both Jewish and non-Jewish spaces of remembrance. They were an expression of separate Jewish remembrance and the specifically Jewish creation of meaning, as well as the interweaving of Jewish and non-Jewish discourses of memory.

At the same time, however, discourses of memory and thus of identity manifested themselves not only in the erection of monuments. They were also negotiated in media spaces (newspapers and magazines), political spaces (parliament and local councils), and public spaces (streets). On the Jewish side, the protagonists of Jewish war remembrance were primarily rabbis and editors who propagated specific Jewish discourses of memory in Jewish newspapers.⁶⁰ In addition, the Jewish communities themselves as well as individual Jewish associations, such as the Chevra Kadisha, participated in these discourses. However, a specific Jewish veterans’ association, such as the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten⁶¹ (Reich League of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers), founded in Germany in 1919, was not established in Austria for a long time. The first associations, such as the Association of Jewish Disabled Veterans, Invalids, Widows, and Orphans, founded in Vienna in 1919, were primarily interested in caring for the survivors rather than commemorating the dead.⁶²

With the growing antisemitism in the early 1930s and the rise of the National Socialists, the Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten Österreichs (BJF, League of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers of Austria) was founded in Vienna in 1932. It combined the remembrance of Jewish soldiers with questions of defense against antisemitism and the strengthening of Jewish self-confidence.⁶³ Its founders were former Jewish soldiers of the Habsburg army, who originally intended it to be a purely defensive organization dedicated to the preservation of military traditions. Over the years, however, the BJF developed more and more into a Jewish umbrella organization that claimed to speak for the entire Jewish population of Austria, to negotiate the position of the Jewish population in the state and society, and to offer Austrian Jews an identity. For example, it demanded that the Austrian Jews conclude a ‘Burgfrieden’ (party truce). This meant that, in the face of the antisemitic menace, the various political and religious Jewish groups should unite under the leadership of the BJF in order to fight, united and strengthened, on the basis of the ideals of comradeship⁶⁴ and the fulfilment of duty, against the antisemites and for a strong Austrian Jewry with equal rights as citizens.

The actions of the BJF were always legitimized by war service and war experience. In the years leading up to 1938, the BJF pursued its goals by founding numerous local branches and publishing its own magazine, Jüdische Front (Jewish Front).⁶⁵ Organized hierarchically like the military, the BJF had its own uniforms, regularly organized parades, and heroic commemorations, and was involved in guarding events. However, the BJF was also largely responsible for the initiation of other commemorative signs.⁶⁶

In addition to the erection of monuments and the visualization of Jewish war victims, the BJF was also involved in the occupation of the public space. Parades and marches in uniform through the towns and cities were held regularly. As a veterans’ organization, the BJF also sought to participate in general state commemorations. In November 1934, for example, a delegation of the BJF attended the inauguration of the Austrian Heroes’ Monument at the Outer Castle Gate in Vienna in November 1934, thus joining the commemorative projects of the Austrofascist state.⁶⁷ On the one hand, this is understandable, given that the Austrian dictatorship positioned itself against the National Socialist threat. On the other hand, however, it must also be noted that the Federal State of Austria, which existed between 1934 and 1938 (Ständestaat), strengthened the Catholic hegemony and positioned the Jews as a religious minority on the fringes of society and the state.⁶⁸ This became abundantly clear with the Austrian Heroes’ Monument, which depicts the “Unknown Soldier,” a Catholic. A separate memorial space was set up for non-Catholic groups.⁶⁹

Conclusion

The ambivalence of striving for equality versus the preservation of Jewish difference, as well as the question of inclusion or exclusion from state and society as characteristics of the age of emancipation, are also reflected in Jewish discourses of war remembrance during and after the First World War. They ultimately find their expression in the spatial localization of Jewish war memory, according to which in all Austrian Jewish communities after the war, monuments and memorial plaques for the fallen Jewish soldiers were erected in synagogues and in Jewish cemeteries as explicitly Jewish spaces. As a rule, the fallen Jewish soldiers were not represented in the non-Jewish public war memorials of the communities and cities, although delegations of the Jewish communities and, from 1932 onwards, of the BJF took part in general commemorative ceremonies, as did individual non-Jewish veterans’ organizations in the celebrations of the Jewish communities. In this respect, Jewish and non-Jewish discourses of war remembrance overlapped and influenced each other, but they also mutually excluded each other, since war remembrance also served to negotiate inclusion and exclusion from the nation and to create identity for certain social groups. And for particular groups, the remembrance of the war was explicitly linked to anti-democratic, nationalist, and antisemitic ideas.

This was the case throughout the whole of Austria, with the sole exception of Burgenland, which became part of Austria in 1921 after the separation from Hungary. In Deutschkreutz, Rechnitz, and Eisenstadt, the fallen Jewish soldiers were commemorated together with the Christian (Catholic and Protestant) soldiers on the municipal war memorials in the city centres.⁷⁰ The integration of the Jewish fallen soldiers and thus of the Jews into the imagined urban community was, however, also accompanied by an independent Jewish memorial in the synagogue or in the cemetery, on the initiative of the Jewish community or the League of Jewish Front-Line Soldiers. For them, Jewish war memorials and commemorative signs were symbols of Jewish self-assurance, Jewish identity, and Jewish loyalty to the fatherland, and they were also necessary in times of antisemitic threats.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gerald Lamprecht

Gerald Lamprecht is a professor for Jewish History and Contemporary History and head of the Center for Jewish Studies of the University of Graz. Since January 2024 he is also the coordinator of the antisemitism research group at the Institute of Culture Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His main research interests are Jewish history in the 19th and 20th century, history of National Socialism, Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies, and the history of antisemitism.

Notes

1. Till van Rahden, “Minderheit und Mehrheit: Vom Ideal demokratischer Gleichheit zum Traum nationaler Reinheit,” in Vielheit: Jüdische Geschichte und die Ambivalenzen des Universalismus, ed. Till van Rahden (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2022), 21–46.

2. Van Rahden, “Minderheit und Mehrheit,” 37.

3. On the concept of Jewish difference see Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture Between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6–8; and Lisa Silverman, “Beyond Antisemitism: A Critical Approach to German Jewish Cultural History,” Nexus. Essays in German Jewish Studies 1 (2011): 27–45.

4. The centennial of the beginning of the First World War led to an increase in publications dealing with Jewish soldiers and the Jewish population during the war, as well as the remembrance of the war. The following should be mentioned here, especially for Germany: Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion. Jewish Experience of the First World War in Central Europe, ed. Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady and Julia Barbara Köhne (New York-Oxford: Berghahn, 2019); Tim Grady, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011); Tim Grady, A Deadly Legacy. German Jews and the Great War (New Haven-London: Yale University Press 2017); and Michael Geheran, Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 2020).

5. On the city temple see Max Eisler, “Der Seitenstetten Tempel,” Menorah 4, no. 3 (1926): 149–57.

6. Till van Rahden, “Weder Milieu noch Konfession: Die situative Ethnizität der deutschen Juden im Kaiserreich in vergleichender Perspektive,“ in Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus – Mentalitäten – Krisen, ed. Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), 409–34.

7. Gerald Lamprecht, “Juden in Zentraleuropa und die Transformationen des Antisemitismus im und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,“ Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 24 (2015): 63–88.

8. Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 39–58; and David Rechter, The Jews of Vienna and the First World War (Oxford/Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008).

9. On the connection between emancipation and military service, see Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 29–32. From a transnational perspective, Derek Penslar argues that the events of the war and the steady rise of antisemitism from 1914 to 1918 led to a shift in the Jewish experience from high expectations at the beginning of the war to despair and terror in the final revolutionary and transformative phase. Derek Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 155.

10. Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001).

11. Nikolaus Buschmann, “Vom “Untertanensoldaten” zum “Bürgersoldaten”? Zur Transformation militärischer Loyalitätsvorstellungen um 1800,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 12 (2013): 105.

12. The commemoration of ‘heroes’ was strongly male-dominated and mostly took place in public spaces. However, during the war and also in the post-war period, private mourning stood alongside this. The space for this was mostly the family. It was the area in which the mothers, wives and sisters of the fallen soldiers could mourn their loss. Cf: Christa Hämmerle, Heimat/Front: Geschlechtergeschichte/n des Ersten Weltkriegs in Österreich-Ungarn (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau 2014).

13. George L. Mosse, Gefallen für das Vaterland: Nationales Heldentum und namenloses Sterben (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1993), 133.

14. Thomas Rohrkrämer, “Ideenkrieg: Sinnstiftungen des Sinnlosen,” in Erster Weltkrieg: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, ed. Niels Werber, Stefan Kaufmann and Lars Koch (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2014), 385–409.

15. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

16. Reinhart Koselleck, Introduction to Der politische Totenkult: Kriegerdenkmale der Moderne, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Michael Jeismann (Munich: Bild und Text, 1994), 9.

17. Mosse, Gefallen für das Vaterland, 101–16.

18. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 152.

19. These guidelines also indicated that the establishment of cemeteries should be postponed to a later date. Komitee für Kriegsgräberfürsorge in Österreich, Allgemeine Kriegsgräberausstellung (Graz: no publ., 1918), 6.

20. Thomas Reichl, “Das Kriegsgräberwesen Österreich-Ungarns im Weltkrieg und die Obsorge in der Republik Österreich: Das Wirken des Österreichischen Schwarzen Kreuzes in der Zwischenkriegszeit” (PhD diss., Vienna University, 2007).

21. Jay Winter, “Commemorating War, 1914–1945,” in The Cambridge History of War. Vol. IV: War and the Modern World, ed. Roger Chickering et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 311.

22. Mosse, Gefallen für das Vaterland, 94–8.

23. Even if cemetery designs differed in various countries, they all shared Christian symbolism.

24. The military cemetery in Bruneck in South Tyrol is a prime example for this.

25. “Gemeinsames Ehrengrab oder Ehrengrab auf dem israelitischen Friedhof,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, October 16, 1914, 703–4.

26. Hermann Stern, “Ein jüdisches Kriegerdenkmal,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, January 8, 1915, 24–5 (translation by the author).

27. In September 1914, a request by the cemetery office of the IKG to establish a separate burial ground for soldiers within the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery was rejected with reference to the intentions of the magistrate. Vertretersitzung, 22.9.1914. Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1477.

28. IKG Wien an Bürgermeister Weisskirchner, September 13, 1914. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien. A/W 1477.

29. Protokoll der Vertreter-Sitzung, 15.9.1914. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1477.

30. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176.

31. For example: Protokoll der Vorstandsitzung der Chewra Kadischa Graz, February 12, 1915. Russian State Military Archive (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvenni Voennyi Arkhiv – RGVA, 709-1-7).

32. “Ehrung gefallener jüdischer Helden!,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, December 24, 1915, 941.

33. “Aufruf!,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, January 7, 1916, 29.

34. Although some of the fallen were initially buried in interfaith cemeteries near the battlefields, during and after the war there were numerous exhumations and transfers of bodies to the cemeteries of the home communities or to Jewish cemeteries. However, during the war there was still a demand to wait until the time of peace before exhuming the bodies. “Das Leichenbegängnis des Leutnants Alfred Baderle,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, November 26, 1915, 866; and “Exhumierungen und Heimbeförderungen Gefallener und auf dem Kriegsschauplatz Gestorbener,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, July 23, 1915, 554.

35. Field Rabbi Albert Schweiger, “Die Einweihung eines k. u. k. Militärfriedhofes,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, September 10, 1915, 687.

36. Stefan Riesenfellner, “Todeszeichen: Zeitgeschichtliche Denkmalkultur am Beispiel von Kriegerdenkmälern in Graz und in der Steiermark von 1867–1934,” in Todeszeichen. Zeitgeschichtliche Denkmalkultur, ed. Stefan Riesenfellner and Heidemarie Uhl (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1994), 32.

37. §2 of the statutes of 1920. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (WStLA), 1.3.2.119.A321922.5442/1922. See in general Ingeborg Messerer, “Die Frontkämpfervereinigung Deutsch-Österreichs: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wehrverbände in der Republik Österreich” (PhD diss, Vienna University, 1963).

38. §5 of the statutes of 1920 WStLA, 1.3.2.119.A321922.5442/1922.

39. One example is the erection of the monument in Donawitz, Styria, in 1932. Riesenfellner, Todeszeichen, 65–8.

40. On the association, WStLA, A32-1807/1929.

41. For example: “Schutzwehr“der jüdischen Kriegsopfer. Offizielles Organ des ‘Verbandes der jüdischen Kriegsbeschädigten, Invaliden, Witwen und Waisen’ (only a few issues were published in 1926).

42. Ke-Chin Hsia, Victims’ State. War and Welfare in Austria 1868–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

43. Riesenfellner, Todeszeichen, 1–75.

44. The following description and analysis of Jewish monuments of fallen soldiers does not claim to be complete. Rather, it represents a selection.

45. “Ein jüdisches Kriegerdenkmal in Linz,” Jüdische Nachrichten für die deutschösterreichische Provinz, October 24, 1919, 8.

46. “Ein jüdisches Kriegerdenkmal in Linz,” Jüdische Nachrichten für die deutschösterreichische Provinz, October 24, 1919, 8.

47. “Generalversammlung der Chewra Kadischa Innsbruck,” Österreichische Wochenschrift, December 3, 1915, 886.

48. Martin Achrainer, “Die jüdische Abteilung am städtischen Friedhof in Innsbruck 1864–1945,” in Judenbichl: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Innsbruck, ed. Thomas Albrich (Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag, 2010), 108–14; and Sabine Albrich-Falch, “Jüdisches Leben in Nord- und Südtirol von Herbst 1918 bis Frühjahr 1938,” in Jüdisches Leben im historischen Tirol vol. 3: Von der Teilung Tirols 1918 bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Thomas Albrich (Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag, 2013), 77–84, here 78–82.

49. “Kriegerdenkmal-Einweihung der Innsbrucker Kultusgemeinde,” Die Wahrheit, June 26, 1925, 12.

50. Like the other inaugurations, the one in Klagenfurt was a public event attended by representatives of the provincial government, the City of Klagenfurt, the district administration, the police administration, other surrounding communities, and the League of Reich Germans (Bund der Reichsdeutschen). “Klagenfurt,” Die Wahrheit, September 17, 1926, 12.

51. ‘Klagenfurt,’ Die Wahrheit, September 17, 1926, 12.

52. Sarah Panter, Jüdische Erfahrungen und Loyalitätskonflikte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

53. Tim Corbett, “Once “the Only True Austrians”: Mobilising Jewish Memory of the First World War for Belonging in the New Austrian Nation, 1929–1938,” in The Jewish Experience of the First World War, ed. Edward Madigan and Gideon Reuveni (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 255–76.

54. IKG Wien, Referatsbogen vom 15.1.1919. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176.

55. Sitzung des Komitees zur Errichtung eines Denkmals am Zentralfriedhof für die jüdischen Krieger, April 18, 1926. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176.

56. “Enthüllung der Kriegerdenkmäler für jüdische Soldaten,” Neue Freie Presse, October 14, 1929, 4.

57. Heidemarie Uhl, “Kriegsallerseelen 1914–1918,” in Im Epizentrum des Zusammenbruchs: Wien im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Alfred Pfoser and Andreas Weigl (Vienna: Metroverlag, 2013), 120–1.

58. Oswald Überegger, Erinnerungskriege: Der Erste Weltkrieg, Österreich und die Tiroler Kriegserinnerung in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag Wagner, 2011).

59. Sitzung des Komitees zur Errichtung eines Denkmales am Zentralfriedhof, April 18, 1926; Programm der Ausschreibung, August 1926. CAHJP, Archiv der IKG Wien, A/W 1176 a-d.

60. In addition to the general Jewish press, the Jewish War Memorial published from 1914 by Moritz Frühling, and the Jewish Archive, launched and published from May 1915 by the Jewish War Archive Committee, which had close ties to Zionist ideas, should be mentioned here.

61. Michael Berger, Eisernes Kreuz – Doppeladler – Davidstern: Juden in deutschen und österreichischen Armeen. Der Militärdienst jüdischer Soldaten durch zwei Jahrhunderte (Berlin: trafo, 2010), 123–50; Ulrich Dunkler, Der Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten 1919–1938: Geschichte eines jüdischen Abwehrvereins (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977).

62. On the association see WStLA, A32-1807/1929.

63. Gerald Lamprecht, “Geteilte Erinnerung? Der Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” in Zonen der Begrenzung: Aspekte kultureller und räumlicher Grenzen in der Moderne, ed. Gerald Lamprecht et al. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), 87–104.

64. According to Marsha Rozenblit, the highly stylized comradeship was only marginally, if at all, responsible for the motivation to fight. High loss rates as well as linguistic and national differences thus stood in the way of comradely bonds. ‘Most Jews in the army, like the vast majority of Austro-Hungarian Jewry, were deeply religious, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Galicia, Bukovina, or Hungary. In the army, as at home, they could be separated from non-Jews by walls of cultural, linguistic, and religious difference.’ Rozenblit, Reconstructing, 91.

65. The Jewish Front was published in Vienna and ran from December 1932 until February 1938.

66. Gerald Lamprecht, “Kriegserinnerungs- und Identitätsdiskurse am Beispiel des “Bundes jüdischer Frontsoldaten” und der Zeitschrift Jüdische Front 1932–1938,” in Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs, ed. Petra Ernst and Eleonore Lappin-Eppel (Innsbruck/Vienna/Bolzano: Studienverlag, 2016), 167–86.

67. Lamprecht, “Geteilte Erinnerung?” 87–104.

68. Emmerich Tálos, Das austrofaschistische Herrschaftssystem: Österreich 1933–1938 (Wien: Litt Verlag, 2013), 470–90.

69. Peter Stachel, Mythos Heldenplatz: Hauptplatz und Schauplatz der Republik (Wien: Molden, 2028), 154–63.

70. Franziska Schlager, ““Schulter an Schulter für das Vaterland“: Die Erinnerung an den Ersten Weltkrieg in den jüdischen Gemeinden des Burgenlandes” (MA diss., Graz University, 2016), 66–81, 124–32, 153–61.