Learning and Suffering in Vienna
me something to think about, I came to grasp and understand.
I now saw the liberal sentiments of this press in a new light; the dignified tone in replying to attacks as well as the silence in answer to them, was now revealed to be a trick as shrewd as it was low. Their enraptured theatrical criticisms always favored a Jewish author, while their disapproval never fell on anyone except a German. The persistence of their quiet sneering at William II showed deliberate method, as did their advocacy of French culture and civilization. The trashy content of the short stories now became an indecency, and in the language I caught sounds of an alien people; but the general sense was so plainly harmful to everything German that it could only be intentional.
But who had an interest in this? Was it all mere chance? Gradually I became uncertain.
My development was speeded by the insights I gained into a series of other matters. This was the general conception of manners and morals which one could see held and openly displayed by a great part of Jewry.
Here again the street offered often truly ugly object-lessons. The relation of Jewry to prostitution and even more to white slavery itself could be studied in Vienna as in probably no other Western European city, with the possible exception of southern French seaport towns. If of an evening one walked the streets and alleys of the Leopoldstadt, at every step one witnessed, willy-nilly, things which remained hidden from the great majority of the German people until the war gave the soldiers on the Eastern front an opportunity, or rather forced them, to see similar happenings.
When I first recognized the Jew as the manager, icily calm and shamelessly businesslike, of this outrageous trade in vice of the offscourings of the metropolis, it sent a chill down my spine.
But then I blazed. Now I no longer evaded discussing the Jewish question—no, now I sought it. But having learned to find the Jew in every quarter of cultural and artistic life in its various expressions, I suddenly encountered him in a spot where I would least have expected him.
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