Learning and Suffering in Vienna
it from them to mix into the affairs of the German Empire—no, heaven forfend—, but in laying a friendly finger on these sores they were both doing the duty required by a spirit of mutual alliance and practising journalistic truthfulness, etc. And with that the finger dug deeper into the sore to its heart’s content.
Cases like this made the blood rush to my head. This was what gradually made me begin to regard the great press with more caution.
And I did have to admit that one of the anti-Semitic papers, Das deutsche Volksblatt, behaved with more decency on such an occasion.
Another thing that got on my nerves was the revolting cult of France which the big papers were then propagating. It was enough to make one ashamed of being a German to see the pæans to the “great civilized nation.” More than once this wretched Francophilia made me lay down one of the “world papers.” In fact I began often to turn to the Volksblatt, which I thought much smaller, indeed, but in such matters somewhat cleaner. I disliked the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but I did occasionally read arguments which gave me something to think about.
At any rate such occasions gradually made me acquainted with the man and the movement which then governed Vienna’s destiny—Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist Party.
When I came to Vienna I was hostile to both. In my eyes the man and the movement were “reactionary.” But a sense of common justice forced me to change my opinion by degrees as I had an opportunity to know the man and his work; and gradually my fair estimate grew into unconcealed admiration. Today more than ever I consider the man the greatest German mayor of all times.
But how many of my preconceived views were upset by this change in attitude toward the Christian Socialist movement!
My opinions on anti-Semiticism also slowly succumbed to the whirligig of time, and this was the most difficult change I ever went through. It cost me the severest of all my spiritual
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