Learning and Suffering in Vienna
I did not yet dream of the existence of any planned opposition to Jews.
Then I came to Vienna. Burdened by a wealth of new impressions in architecture, oppressed by the difficulty of my own lot, I had at first no eye for the real stratification of the people in the vast city. Although at that time Vienna already had among her two millions nearly two hundred thousand Jews, I did not see them. My eyes and mind were not equal to the rush of so many values and ideas in the first few weeks. Only when calm was gradually restored and I began to see the teeming scene more plainly did I look more closely at my new world, and thus encounter the Jewish question.
I cannot say that the way I made its acquaintance was particularly agreeable. I still saw in the Jew his religious confession alone, and for reasons of human tolerance, therefore, even in this case I maintained my opposition to religious antagonism. The note struck particularly by the Viennese anti-Semitic press seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great people. I was oppressed by the memory of certain happenings in the Middle Ages which I hoped not to see repeated. As the newspapers in question were not generally considered outstanding—I did not then know exactly why—I thought them the product of angry envy rather than the result of a principle, even if a wrong one.
My belief was strengthened by what I considered the infinitely more dignified way in which the really great newspapers answered those attacks, or—this I thought even more laudable—did not even mention them, but greeted them with dead silence.
Eagerly I read the so-called world press (the Neue Freie Presse, the Wiener Tagblatt, etc.), and I was astonished both at the extent of what they offered the reader and at the objectivity of their treatment in detail. I admired their dignified tone; only their high-flown style sometimes did not quite satisfy me, or even displeased me. But I thought this might be implicit in the rush of the cosmopolitan city.
Since at that time I considered Vienna such a city, I thought
63
