Political Considerations of Vienna Period
The Jew, however, soon became so accustomed to this sort of anti-Semitism that he would surely have missed it more if absent than he was hampered by its presence.
If the State of nationalities had already demanded one great sacrifice, the upholding of Germanity as such demanded a greater.
The party could not be “nationalistic” if they were to avoid losing the ground under their feet in Vienna itself. By gentle evasion of this question they hoped still to save the Hapsburg State, and the very attempt drove it to ruin. At the same time the movement lost the great source of strength which alone in the long run can fill a political party with inner driving force. The Christian Socialist movement thus became a party like any other.
I followed both movements with the greatest attention, one from the urging of my own heart-beat, the other because I was carried away by admiration for the rare man who even then seemed to me a bitter symbol of all Austrian Germanity.
When the tremendous funeral procession carried the dead Mayor from the City Hall out toward the Ringstrasse, I too was among the many hundreds of thousands who watched the tragic spectacle. My feelings, deeply stirred, told me that even this man’s work must be in vain because of the dire fate which was leading the State inevitably to its doom. If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people; that he had worked in this impossible State was his misfortune and that of his work.
When he died, the flames in the Balkans were already greedily flickering higher from month to month, so that Fate had mercifully spared him from seeing what he had still believed he could prevent.
I tried to discover the causes behind the failure of the one movement and the misdirection of the other, and came to the definite conclusion that (quite aside from the impossibility of fortifying the State in old Austria) the mistakes of the two parties were the following:
The Pan-German movement was right enough in principle in its views on the goal of a German revival, but unhappy in
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