From Protests to the Ban: Demonstrations against the ‘Jewish’ Films in Interwar Vienna and Bratislava

On 2 November 1930, The Chicago Sunday Tribune published an article about disturbances arising from sound films in several European countries, and also in the Middle East and Japan. The author saw these incidents primarily as attacks on the American way of life:

All in all, it looks as if the movies are going to have to give up any idea of turning the world into a big brotherhood of Hollywood talking converts, all speaking English and all wearing American pants or dresses. ¹

This statement may at first sight be surprising; the protesters in 1930 did indeed protest against the fact that cinema-goers had to listen to a foreign language, but in most cases it was not American English. For example, in Prague the Czech fascists and their supporters protested against German-language films, ² while in Tel Aviv protesters threw ink and stink bombs at the screen during a showing of the US movie My Jewish Mother in Yiddish. In the latter case, there was a concern that the British could withdraw their support for the Zionist project if there was some kind of language plurality in Palestine. ³ Although these protests were obviously not inspired by a spirit of anti-Americanism, they echoed the worries expressed in the Chicago Sunday Tribune article, which, while couched in irony, objected to the globalization of nationalism through the new medium of the sound film. This article pays attention to a closely related yet under-researched phenomenon: protests against allegedly ‘Jewish’ movies. At least with regard to the Prague demonstrations, recent research puts a greater emphasis on their anti-Jewish nature, which manifested itself, among other things, in anti-US slogans. ⁴ Taking the example of anti-film protests and the support they received from politicians and journalists in interwar Austria and Slovakia, I aim to show that this aspect was neither accidental nor unimportant.

The author of the article in the Chicago Sunday Tribune could not have known that just a few weeks after the publication of his piece, another Hollywood film shown in Germany would trigger protests that, in both their extent and intensity, would overshadow the earlier ones. On 10 December 1930, the premiere of the American film All Quiet on the Western Front, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel about a volunteer soldier’s devastating experience in the trenches of the First World War, took place. Encouraged by their success in the September parliamentary elections, the Berlin Nazis, led by Joseph Goebbels, decided to stymie the screening of this ‘Jewish’ film. Conservative and radical nationalist circles in Germany had previously attacked the novel as ‘Jewish’, mainly because it was published by Ullstein publishing house. ⁵ As I will show, in the case of the film, Nazi propaganda focused on the German-Jewish background of the producer Carl Laemmle. But was the Jewish origin of the publisher and the producer the only reason why the riots acquired an antisemitic character? And if not, what were the other reasons?

The historian Ben Urwand has claimed that Hitler saw the film adaptation of a famous anti-war novel as a personal challenge, since the subject was very much against the essence of what the future dictator considered his life’s mission: to win over the masses to his racist worldview with his own oratory ‘art’. And that is precisely what All Quiet on the Western Front contests, revealing the hypocrisy of nationalist agitators and warmongers, and mass death as a fatal consequence of it. And it does all this through the new medium of film, which fascinated Hitler. ⁶ Neither Urwand nor other historians, however, consider the role of antisemitism in this matter. ⁷

One explanation for this could lie in the fact that there are no Jews in the film All Quiet on the Western Front and no explicitly Jewish themes. It is usually seen to have provoked protests due to its pacifism. However, in her book about Jews in interwar Austria, historian Lisa Silverman has shown that the attributes ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ were not necessarily restricted solely to persons who were considered to be of Jewish descent, or who could be considered Jews based on their religion. Instead, they indicated a difference analogous to the category of gender, which is, similar to nationality or race, a cultural construct. In the context of interwar Austria, shrunken to provinces with an exclusively German-speaking population, ‘Jew’ thus became an abstract code of ‘Othering’ par excellence, not restricted solely to the explicit antisemitic discourse and milieu. ⁸ On the other hand, the whole process seems to have deepened the already deep-rooted popular antisemitism, in particular in Vienna. ⁹

To answer the question of why protests with nationalist and militaristic undertones against the screening of the film All Quiet on the Western Front acquired an antisemitic character, even though there are no Jews in it, we have to supplement Silverman’s thesis with the theory of ‘national antisemitism’ promoted by sociologist Klaus Holz. He claims that the semantics of modern antisemitism is structured through oppositions between the national group of antisemites and the allegedly non-national, or rather anti-national category of ‘Jew’. ¹⁰ This alleged ‘Jewish’ anti-nationalism, hiding behind cosmopolitanism and internationality, may, depending on the context, manifest itself as capitalist exploitation or communist anarchy, but also as the immorality of modern art, which destroys supposedly traditional values, though in fact these are values associated with a modern nation, such as devotion, loyalty and honour. This means that the Nazis could have branded the film All Quiet on the Western Front as ‘Jewish’, since the ‘Jews’ in their eyes embodied the element of ‘decay’, allegedly defiling the memory of German soldiers who had fought and fallen in the First World War. ¹¹

While the screening of All Quiet on the Western Front led to organized protests in Austria in 1931, nothing comparable occurred at that time in neighbouring Czechoslovakia. On the contrary, after the film had been banned in their own country, Austrians went to see it in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia which lay only 40 miles away from Vienna. Nevertheless, Bratislava witnessed similar demonstrations a few years later, during the premiere of the film Le Golem in 1936. In both cases, I will be interested in the protests from positions of both moderate and radical nationalism, while focusing on the dynamic development from violent protests to state interventionism in the form of efforts to ban screenings or the introduction of censorship. I do not, of course, suggest that conditions in interwar Austria and Slovakia were completely comparable – differences arising from political radicalization were manifest mainly in the position and influence of fascism or fascistization in the political culture of both countries. This, however, should not be an obstacle when comparing historical trends in a transnational context. ¹² The same applies in the case of antisemitism, which in interwar Austria influenced the entire political spectrum and with which even many Jews identified through abstract codes such as ‘Jewishness’. ¹³ There are several reasons for this: probably most important are the legitimization of political antisemitism on the part of the Christian Socials and the contamination of German nationalism by racism in late nineteenth-century Austria, which resulted in the permanent threat of anti-Jewish violence after the First World War. ¹⁴ By contrast, Slovakia was part of the democratic Czechoslovak Republic, where open antisemitism allegedly did not occur within the official political culture, particularly in the 1920s. ¹⁵ However, this widespread view has recently been revised in studies that point to the impact of antisemitism during the early years of the Czechoslovak Republic in the aftermath of the First World War and its resurgence after the collapse of the parliamentary system in the autumn of 1938. ¹⁶

Antisemitism in interwar Slovakia differed from its Austrian counterpart in as much as there were no openly racist factions within the country’s Right. The Slovak national movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose representatives formed the new Czechoslovak establishment after the First World War, had been characterized by what can most accurately be described as ‘populist antisemitism’. This term seems appropriate to describe the positions of Christian Socials, agrarians and non-dominant nationalists throughout East Central Europe, who distinguished themselves from radical or ‘racial’ antisemitism, but still wanted to decrease the alleged influence of ‘Jews’ in the economics and culture of their respective countries on behalf of a people defined in terms of ethnicity, religion or socio-economics. ¹⁷ In the case of interwar Slovakia, all three categories were merged into each other by practically all political subjects, although the impact of populist antisemitism varied depending on the degree of their integration into the Czechoslovak political system. Understood in this way, the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ played the most prominent role within or on the margins of the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party (HSLS), but in some contexts it was repeatedly exploited by almost every political group – from fascists to communists. ¹⁸

Nevertheless, by ‘comparing the incomparable’ ¹⁹ of interwar Austria and Slovakia we can overcome categorical divisions into ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ modes of antisemitism and Jewish assimilation. In this sense, according to Ezra Mendelsohn, Slovak nationalists were antisemites, while their Czech compatriots were not, because of the different social-economic structures and national preferences of the gentile population and local Jewry in both parts of the Czechoslovak Republic, which for centuries had belonged to Austria and Hungary respectively. ²⁰ In contrast to this, what I intend here is a dynamical comparison in terms of Holz’s ‘national antisemitism’, of which Slovak populist antisemitism is a subcategory, rather than an inauguration of new classifications and typologies of antisemitism. In this view, ‘Jew’ would be the enemy of all ‘authentic’ nations (peoples, races). Reducing the impact of ‘Jews’ on national politics, the economy and, last but not least, culture was therefore tantamount to national (r)evolution. Protests against and the banning of the ‘Jewish’ films were part of this antisemitic project carried out within the borders of the new nation states of interwar East Central and Central Europe. These processes must be then considered the resolute application of ‘inter-national nationalism’, which Klaus Holz views as the key semantic feature of ‘national antisemitism’. ²¹

While earlier historical-comparative research was based largely on certain structural features of the compared quantities, from which similarities and differences were then deduced, newer methods such as historical transfer or Histoire croisée highlight dynamic moments of interaction and the transfer of knowledge and information. ²² In this study, I will seek a synthesis of these procedures. Structural comparison is especially useful in the case of political Catholicism, which maintained a dominant position in both countries. Both Austrian Christian Socials and representatives of HSLS used antisemitism in their campaigns. In addition, discourse that veered towards political radicalism and even fascism developed in an environment of students, intellectuals and columnists, or on its margins. In Austria this was true particularly in relation to the Red Vienna, which was to both the Christian Socials and Fascists a symbol of liberalism and socialism, ²³ while in Slovakia, which before 1918 had been part of the Hungarian part of the Habsburg monarchy, the regime of the liberal and secular Czechoslovak State and its representatives were seen to represent similar tendencies. ²⁴

The methods of historical transfer or Histoire croisée, which emphasize the interaction of national contexts and the transfer of knowledge, not only at the local, but even at the global level, ²⁵ will be at the centre of the analysis of antisemitic demonstrations against the films All Quiet on the Western Front and Le Golem in Austria and Czechoslovakia, and also the support they received and reactions they caused. In the first section, I will analyse protests against the screening of the film All Quiet on the Western Front in Austria, especially in Vienna, focusing on the blending of antisemitic activism and anti-war campaigns, which culminated in a demand to ban and the subsequent banning of the film, as in Germany. In the second section I will outline the discourse that developed in connection to the screening of All Quiet on the Western Front in interwar Czechoslovakia. I will analyse the impact of the ban, which resulted in the demonstrative travels of the Viennese Social Democrats, who promoted the film in Austria, to the screenings in Bratislava – also as in Germany. Of particular interest here is the awareness of their Czechoslovak comrades of the ideological struggle in Austria and the role antisemitism played in it. I will then try to answer the question of what provoked or dampened the political radicalization manifesting itself at the same time in Austria in anti-film protests, and to what degree. Was it a different degree of nationalization of a German-speaking population or a liberal political culture? The third section will be devoted to protests by students associated with the HSLS against another ‘Jewish’ film, Le Golem, which took place in Bratislava in the spring of 1936. In this case the main focus of the analysis will also be the problem of radicalization expressed first in anti-Jewish demonstrations and subsequently in a call for the film to be banned, just like in neighbouring Austria, where the state regime introduced film censorship. Did this also herald the end of antisemitic campaigns in the cinema setting? Applying the theory of Histoire croisée allows for a change of historical perspective: in the conclusion I will ask whether, and to what extent, the state-controlled film policies of the ‘Austrofascist’ regime offered a space for these changes.

On 16 February 1921 a crowd organized by Christian Socials and other Catholic activists violently disrupted the theatre performance of Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen (La Ronde) in Vienna because of its alleged ‘obscenity’ and ‘offending of the honour’ of ‘German women’: ‘the audience was attacked and forced onto the stage, chairs were thrown down from the balcony into the lower seats, the actors retreated, and the police used water cannons to disperse the crowd.’ ²⁶ What was the reason for these tumults? Schnitzler’s play consists of 10 dialogues of couples representing all social classes, who have a highly hypocritical attitude to their own sexuality and morality. This parable of contemporary society, and, within it, of gender roles, provoked a surge of indignation, which had a strong political dimension from the outset. By demanding that the play be banned, its critics were eager ‘to unburden deep-seated resentments towards modern life in general and the institutions of the new Austrian republic in particular’. ²⁷ This new republic was equated with an alleged decline of values due to the Social Democratic policy of eliminating religion from schools and public life. Felix W. Tweraser summarizes the effect of ‘the Austrian republic’s first flirtation with civil war’ as follows:

The authorities’ ominous capitulation before the dictates of well-organized pressure groups would become a characteristic of political life during the First Republic. Increasingly, cultural issues became the battleground for political argument; antidemocratic forces tended to stress the need of art to be affirming and non-threatening, that is, to protect individuals from upheavals of modern life …. ²⁸

Going beyond the question of everyday politics, these confrontations over cultural issues encouraged the revival of antisemitism in the aftermath of the First World War, as the alleged decay of values was usually distorted as ‘Jewish’. Cinemas and films had already been a target of antisemitic propaganda in Austria before the War, especially by the Christian Social press. ²⁹ After the War, in an atmosphere of general radicalization, protests against the so-called Kinojuden, that is persons of Jewish origin involved in the film industry, were organized. ³⁰ Extensive anti-film riots were instigated by the Nazis in 1924, though the Christian Social press and politicians also showed support. This unrest was connected to the controversy surrounding the film City Without Jews, based on Hugo Bettauer’s novel Die Stadt ohne Juden, which was a sort of anti-utopia situated in Vienna after the expulsion of its Jewish inhabitants. In October 1924, a showing of the film in Wiener Neustadt resulted in riots accompanied by shouting and the throwing of stink bombs. Bettauer was assassinated by a young Nazi soon after. ³¹

These practices tested during protests against City Without Jews – disrupting of the screening by throwing stink bombs – were used again in the autumn of 1930, when the German version of the British sound film Two Worlds directed by Ewald André Dupont was shown in Vienna. The story of an unhappy love affair between an officer and a Jewish girl from Galicia during the First World War provoked disturbances not because of being in a foreign language, but due to the alleged mockery of the officer corps. After the Nazis in Thuringia, in solidarity with their ‘blood brothers in the neighbouring country’, tried in vain to have the film banned, their Viennese comrades expressed their displeasure using tried and tested methods: by disrupting the screening in the Opernkino using ‘not only strong expressions such as “a Jewish pig” [Saujud], but also by throwing stink bombs and sprinkling sneezing powder’. ³² According to the police report, the protesters comprised about a hundred ‘mostly pro-Nazi students’ and although some of them were arrested, they were released immediately. The screenings of Two Worlds in two other Viennese cinemas were also disrupted by people shouting ‘boo and throwing stink bombs’. ³³

As recent research has shown, violent demonstrations against ‘Jewish’ films in Weimar Germany were both a spontaneous and well-organized ‘form of politics’ that survived the Nazi ‘struggle for power’. Paradoxically, after 1933 the Nazi establishment headed by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, once the driving force behind the riots against All Quiet on the Western Front, had to take steps to dampen the enthusiasm of its own comrades – by introducing film censorship and controlling film journalism. ³⁴ It is not surprising, then, that the Viennese Nazis, who since 1930 had been intensifying their efforts at discipline under the leadership of the new Gauleiter Alfred Eduard Frauenfeld, continued to be inspired by the German model, although they were not as successful as their German comrades in the following parliamentary elections. ³⁵ When less than a month after the campaign against Two Worlds the Berlin Nazis organized extensive protests against All Quiet on the Western Front, their Viennese colleagues sensed their chance. During December 1930 they threatened in their press that if the ‘Jewish’ film was not withdrawn from Austrian cinemas they would initiate large-scale protests. ³⁶ Their request was supported by all the right-wing, anti-socialist forces. Conversely, the Social Democrat press and politicians appreciated the screenings of All Quiet on the Western Front for both ideological and pragmatic reasons. Journalists like Fritz Rosenfeld and in particular Paul Deutsch wrote emphatically on the issue in the newspapers Arbeiterzeitung and Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, believing firmly that Austrians, unlike Germans, would not ‘hide the image of war from the eyes of a war generation’. ³⁷ Mayor Karl Seitz, who was responsible for film screenings in Vienna, even defended the film vis-a-vis the federal government, stressing the economic importance of the industrialized capital for the agrarian rest of the country. ³⁸

The background to this conflict is rooted in a debate on the introduction of film censorship, which was considered by its opponents to have been cancelled by a decision of the Legislative Assembly in 1918 but provoked raging controversy during the 1920s. ³⁹ Since the banning of a film due to a disturbance of public order and security was within the competence of the Länder, the Council of Ministers, dominated by the Christian Socials, recommended ‘postponing’ the screening of the film. ⁴⁰ As expected, the Viennese Social Democrats ignored the recommendation, thus demonstrating their ‘non-Austrian spirit’, as suggested by their ideological opponents. What exactly it meant was clearly indicated by the editorial board of the pro-government newspaper Reichspost; although avoiding open antisemitism, they commented on the decision of the Viennese Social Democrats to allow the film in the capital using the latently antisemitic, anti-capitalist and anti-Bolshevik rhetoric of conspiracy, which readers probably had no trouble deciphering. They described the Vienna provincial government as a ‘foreign element’, as an ‘erratic bloc blown in to Austria from Western plutocracy and the Russian-Marxist world’. According to the Reichspost, such attitudes must have far-reaching consequences. ⁴¹

These threats would soon come true. The very first screenings of All Quiet on the Western Front were accompanied by riots instigated by the Nazis and the paramilitary fascist organization Heimwehr, and, at least in the case of the Nazis, these riots developed an openly antisemitic character. During a rally of 3000 or so people on the occasion of the screening of All Quiet on the Western Front for invited guests on 3 January 1931, Walter Riehl, the most notorious antisemite among the Viennese Nazis, ⁴² as well as Gauleiter Alfred Eduard Frauenfeld, attacked this ‘Jewish reject’ and the Social Democrats in a manner consistent with the semantics of ‘national antisemitism’:

Jews and Freemasons started the war based on materialistic motives and caused the current enslavement of the German people. Now they even want to take away the honour of the German people, and for this purpose they have made this insulting film which defames the German soldier in the lowest way and with him the German nation also. The Social Democrats are trying to use this film for their subversive political activity against the nation. ⁴³

Student protesters sympathetic with the Nazis tried in vain to break through the police cordon in front of the Apollo Cinema, so they settled for smashing shop windows and trying to stop cars whose passengers they ‘thought to be Jews’, or insulting random passers-by for the same reason. ⁴⁴ There is no evidence, however, that Party leaders Riehl and Frauenfeld fomented the mobs to attack the Apollo Cinema, since the demonstrators went there individually and in groups. Only Riehl is reported as promising demonstrators to ‘strive [to make certain] that Vienna would not become a Jewish cesspool (Kloake)’. ⁴⁵ On 5 January, two rallies were held in pubs for 1000 people or so. Here all speakers railed against the ‘infamous Jewish film’. The Nazi grass-roots activist Raimund Kusicka typically blamed the ‘Jewish producer’ for having mocked the ‘German honour’ of fallen soldiers. Kusicka attacked in particular the journalist Paul Deutsch because of his articles in the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, calling him a ‘defamer and villain’ and threatening him with ‘punishment with the dogwhip’. Kusicka’s party comrade Viktor Blahut criticized a state of affairs where the Austrian Social Democratic Party ‘is committed to the goals of Jewish film magnates’ and blamed it for the ‘betrayal of workers’ interests’. Blahut threatened the ‘Jewish capitalists’ with a visit ‘to the stock exchange’ in order to ‘nip them in the bud’. However, the police reported no incidents that day. ⁴⁶

The situation changed dramatically on 7 January, when four young Nazis – among them a soldier – were caught preparing a bombing after the Nazi Party had instructed its followers to stop the premiere of All Quiet on the Western Front in the Schwedenkino, where the film was due to be screened for members and supporters of the Social Democratic Party. The Schwedenkino was significantly placed in the heart of the ‘Jewish town’, in Tabor Street in the Leopoldstadt district. Aware of this, the Nazis wanted to ‘strengthen the anti-culture terror by antisemitic terror’, as Paul Deutsch put it. ⁴⁷ Since the protesters did not obey the police instructions and, with ‘shouts and screams of an antisemitic nature’ (according to the Social Democrat newspaper Das Kleine Blatt, they insulted the policemen as the ‘guardians of the Jews’ ⁴⁸ ), attempted to break through the police cordon, they were dispersed by force. ⁴⁹ Despite the alleged ‘protection’ by the police, Nazi rioters insulted ‘Jews’ on the streets. In Obere Donau Street, 17-year-old trainee mechanic Leopold Köhler, armed with a knuckleduster, struck a blow to the head of 70-year-old businessman Mendel Pineles, who was returning from a visit to his daughter and accompanied by his son. After his arrest, Köhler claimed that on the occasion of the demonstrations against All Quiet on the Western Front he had been told: ‘The first Jew who you come across must be put to death.’ ⁵⁰

On the same day the Heimwehr, another Austrian, non-Nazi but fascist organization that had been vying with the socialist paramilitary Schutzbund since the 1920s, ⁵¹ held a rally in the ‘Jewish’ Leopoldstadt against the showing of All Quiet on the Western Front. Although the Viennese Landesführer, Major Emil Fey, ‘who was Austrian nationalist, clerical, and intensely militaristic’, ⁵² ordered his 800 or so followers to protest ‘calmly’, they became violent, shouting at the police and smashing windows in several buildings and cafés. The troublemakers almost provoked a diplomatic incident when they attacked an empty car belonging to the Czechoslovak ambassador, and it was only with great effort that the police prevented them from completely destroying it. ⁵³ (This diplomatic incident might have contributed to the warm welcome Viennese Social Democrats were given in Bratislava soon after the banning of the film in Austria.) On 9 January, the federal government, composed mainly of Christian Socials, finally decided to prohibit the marketing of the film, possibly alarmed by the protests of both Nazis and the – at least in Vienna – much more moderate Heimwehr. ⁵⁴ But unlike in Germany, the film was not even shown in its censored version in Austria. This at least indirectly unconstitutional decision should be regarded as an important precedent for the introduction of film censorship in Austria after the coup of 1934. The Austrian Nazis were also considered the winners because of this, as the protests against All Quiet on the Western Front marked the beginning of their political ascent: while membership of the Viennese Nazi party trebled from 1045 to 3302 between January 1930 and January 1931, in the short period from January to April 1931 it grew by another 25 per cent to 4200. Henceforth, Vienna witnessed a veritable struggle between the dominating Social Democrats and the increasingly ambitious Nazis. ⁵⁵ Celebrating their ‘victory’ in the campaign against All Quiet on the Western Front on the same day it was banned, Nazi leaders once more made clear against whom their protest had been directed and on whose behalf they claimed to speak: Now that the Nazis were in power, ‘Jews’ should finally stop violating the ‘national feelings of the German people’. ⁵⁶

In the following weeks and months, Viennese Social Democrats tried to compensate for their partial loss by organizing special trains and buses to bring their supporters to screenings of All Quiet on the Western Front in nearby Bratislava – this was inspired by their comrades from the German border areas who had undertaken similar trips to France, Switzerland and the Netherlands after the film was prohibited in Germany. ⁵⁷ Czechoslovak authorities deemed it politically convenient. According to an Austrian border official’s report, their Czechoslovak colleagues literally welcomed guests from Vienna, tolerating even incomplete travel documents. For this reason, the Federal Police Directorate claimed that ‘harsh derogatory remarks about Austria occurred repeatedly during these screenings’. ⁵⁸

However, the welcome extended by the Czechoslovaks to their guests was not only politically motivated: the visitors also brought significant profits. The film was a box-office hit. Even before the special trains from Vienna started to flow to Bratislava, 50,000 viewers (the city had fewer than 124,000 inhabitants in 1930) saw the film within the first three weeks after its release. At the end of January 1931, the first special train brought ‘more than 600 war invalids’ from Vienna to Bratislava, and another five trains were scheduled to transport about 2500 visitors from Vienna to Bratislava over the first weekend in February. On 15 February, 1200 members of the Association of Workers and Sales Staff in Vienna were expected to make the trip to Bratislava. ⁵⁹ The screenings for Austrian guests took place over weekends, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. in two cinemas: Lux and Tatra. The transport was well organized: every visitor obtained a ‘participator ticket’ issued by the Viennese Social Democratic ‘art office’ (Kunststelle der sozialistischen Arbeiterzentrale), an organization responsible for the block-booking of tickets for cultural events, for which he or she was charged a fee of 9.50 Schilling. ⁶⁰ Czechoslovak authorities were initially concerned about possible unrest, as evidenced by the increased police presence at the screenings of All Quiet on the Western Front. There were, however, no public-order disturbances. The response to the film was largely positive, both from the German-speaking community and Czechoslovak audiences.

The German-language newspaper Neues Preßburger Tagblatt reported extensively on the Vienna riots and even remarked on their anti-Jewish tendency. ⁶¹ In later issues, however, the editors published several critical responses to the film by readers. In addition, they granted a prominent position to the words of the famous German pacifist Friedrich Wilhelm Förster, who, however, proved to be a cultural traditionalist when he deemed the film All Quiet on the Western Front as proof of ‘Western materialism’:

I understand the protests of the Nazis and I side with them. This is not a German, but an American film. It’s not Remarque’s fault. A sense of anxiety and weakness is highlighted, and we see nothing of the unique perseverance of the German character. The film is an insult to the German army. It’s sentimental and tearful pacifism. Opposition to the war does not come from the moral depths of human nature, but from the nervous system, from the stomach, from the need to sleep and other centres of physical man. ⁶²

In this case the pacifist Förster surprisingly favoured the Nazi position, which is why German and Austrian Catholic radicals connected to the magazine Schönere Zukunft quoted him as well. ⁶³ Another German-language newspaper in Bratislava, Grenzbote, also covered the film. In one commentary about the screening of All Quiet on the Western Front in Bratislava, the paper tried to explain why it had not been met by an outcry similar to that in nearby Vienna: ‘Because here the hakenkrajclers [colloquial for Nazi supporter] do not dare to create a rumpus, or they do not wish to be one hundred per cent, true, real hakenkrajclers’. ⁶⁴

Unlike in Bratislava, where the German-speaking population only gradually developed nationalistic sentiments and Nazism only began to take hold towards the end of 1930s, ⁶⁵ the upcoming screening of All Quiet on the Western Front in cinemas near the German–Czech border stirred up a commotion comparable to that in Austria. Sudeten German Nazis and Social Democrats argued about the film primarily on the pages of newspapers at the time of its screening in Germany and Austria. The Sudeten German Nazi newspaper Der Tag closely followed the Berlin protests, and reported on them using antisemitic headlines such as ‘German Frontline Soldiers against Perverse Jews’. ⁶⁶ Following the disclosure that the Prague premiere of All Quiet on the Western Front was to be held under the auspices of the supposedly ‘Jewish’ League for Human Rights, one author of an editorial threatened that ‘they [the Nazis] will make sure’ that the film ‘is not shown in any of the Sudeten German cinemas’. ⁶⁷ It seems that some Sudeten German Nazis took such assurances to heart. They also drew inspiration from a terrorist plot by their Viennese comrades to set fire to the Schwedenkino. ⁶⁸ Shortly after the discovery and publication of this plot, the proprietor of the Elite Cinema in Carlsbad, who wanted to show All Quiet on the Western Front at the end of January 1931, received an anonymous letter containing threats that the ‘cinema will be visited by twenty-four enthusiastic men armed with flasks, each filled with two litres of gasoline, who will pour out this flammable substance during the screening’. ⁶⁹

After this incident, the leaders of the German National-Socialist Workers’ Party of Bohemia (Landesleitung Böhmen der Deutschen Nationalsozialistischen Arbeiterpartei) cautioned their supporters who were gearing up to protest against the screening of All Quiet on the Western Front ‘not to organise demonstrations, etc.’ ⁷⁰ (Here fears of the possible banning of the Party played a major role. These fears were justified, as would become evident in the autumn of 1933 when the Sudeten Nazi Party was indeed prohibited. ⁷¹ ) Although the film was not shown officially in the Czech–German border region until a censored version had been issued, the proprietor of the Carlsbad Elitekino organized a screening of All Quiet on the Western Front in early April, specifically for the representatives of the press and other invited guests who were to vote on its admissibility. ⁷² However, there were screenings of the uncensored version of All Quiet on the Western Front on the Czech–Austrian border. Here, too, the film attracted great attention. During the showings in the border town of České Velenice, 150 members of the fascist Heimwehr – ‘of which a third was equipped with steel helmets’ – marched in Austrian Gmünd just across the border. Thereupon they blocked the road and thus forced everyone who was going to cross the border to ‘look them in the eye’. This coercion notwithstanding, ‘all cinema seats were occupied exclusively by Austrian citizens’. ⁷³ In another border town, Břeclav (Lundenburg), negative reactions to All Quiet on the Western Front were reported from even the Czech population, who objected to the film’s pacifist message. Here, however, Austrians were well represented in cinema audiences as well. ⁷⁴

Not only Sudeten German, but also Bratislava’s Social Democrats were anxious to show solidarity with their Austrian comrades. They invited the Czechoslovak Minister for Social Welfare to a screening in Bratislava on 8 February 1931, and beforehand the Czechoslovak and Austrian Social Democrats were to make speeches as part of a demonstration for peace. ⁷⁵ Bratislava’s Slovak-language Robotnícke noviny (Workers’ News), however, did not mention the anti-Jewish character of the Viennese protests against All Quiet on the Western Front at all. This could be explained by the fact that, similar to the Social Democratic Press in Austria, Robotnícke noviny occasionally equated capitalism with ‘Jews’. ⁷⁶ As we have seen, the editor of the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Paul Deutsch, did not fail to identify Nazi antisemitism as the true motive behind the demonstrations against All Quiet on the Western Front. Nevertheless, he also sensed ‘secret financial links to patrons of an alien race [rassenfremden Mäzenen]’, ⁷⁷ that is Jews, behind Nazi activity. According to Deutsch, the Nazis in Vienna would suffer the same fate as they had after the 1927 election, when their founding father, the lawyer Walter Riehl, was allowed to stand for election on the Unity List against the Social Democrats. Riehl, of course, failed in his bid to get elected, and his only achievement had been the removal of ‘all democratic elements from the clerical-fascist block’ represented by the Christian Socials and the Heimwehr. ⁷⁸

Czechoslovak Social Democrats were aware of the struggle of their Austrian comrades, particularly since 1927. Several months before the July Revolt against the acquittal of three right-wing murderers, during which 89 workers were shot by the police, Robotnícke noviny had paid tribute to the victory of the Social Democrats in the Viennese elections. This solidarity can be explained by the opposition of Czechoslovak Social Democrats to the government coalition of the Czechoslovak Right, which in Slovakia was represented by the Slovak People’s Party (HSLS). Robotnícke noviny accused ‘clericals’ of complicity with ‘Jews’, thereby imitating and even surpassing the antisemitism of their Austrian comrades. In the issue of 27 November 1927, Robotnícke noviny reprinted a caricature of the Austrian prime minister, the Catholic prelate Ignaz Seipel, which had originally been published in the Viennese satirical magazine Die Muskete (The Musket). ⁷⁹ While in the German version Seipel and his fellow priest are comparing themselves with the ‘people of Israel’, because after the electoral defeat they too must ‘cross the Red Sea’, Robotnícke noviny replaced the ‘people of Israel’ with the ‘Jews, our friends’, suggesting a conspiracy between ‘clericals’ and ‘Jews’ to exploit both the Austrian and Czechoslovak working classes. ⁸⁰

Despite the omnipresence of populist antisemitism in Slovak political discourse, before the mid-1930s there was no genuine antisemitic milieu in Slovakia, and even the propagandists of the HSLS toned down their anti-Jewish statements when it seemed opportune. This was probably the case at the time of the so-called Tuka affair in 1929, when the leading HSLS politician Vojtech (Béla) Tuka was accused of high treason. ⁸¹ The party, which had been claiming autonomy for Slovakia since the early 1920s, became more isolated and therefore seemingly more moderate than ever before. In this situation, the reception of the film All Quiet on the Western Front was surprisingly positive in Catholic HSLS circles, even though the novel on which the film is based had previously sparked ambivalence and partly antisemitic reactions. One of the reviewers, Ladislav Hanus, then a student of theology in Innsbruck and later a well-known professor of moral theology, agreed that the book was ‘a monument to the Unknown Soldier, written by the fallen ones’. Nevertheless, he reminded readers that the book had been published by the Propyläen publishing house in Berlin,

whose owners are Jews Ullsteins who rely on the appetites and tastes of the European audience and did good ‘Treffer’ [business] with this book. They pursue the morbid base excitement of the mass subconscious, the gluttony for novelty, ever new stimuli, counting on erotic effects. Remarque – the human beast! – and the shadow of death, this is what the European audience wants. It likes to play with death, so let it be entertained. ⁸²

Despite this antisemitic criticism, Hanus approved of All Quiet on the Western Front as a war memorial. He viewed it not only as an expression of Western materialism that appealed to the lowest instincts – as Friedrich Wilhelm Förster had – but also reproached the ‘Jews’ for profiting from this moral ‘decay’. Things become even more confusing when we recall that All Quiet on the Western Front was reviewed in the HSLS newspaper Slovák along with a film about the infamous affair of Captain Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish origin unjustly accused of espionage for Germany, since the two films were shown in Bratislava cinemas at the same time. The reviewer admits that:

the film Dreyfus was shot by a German film company with a certain anti-French bias …. But it’s so right. When a person is robbed of honour and status because of bias, his story cannot be told without bias. It’s not that Dreyfus was a Jew. Even the Jew must have the same right to life and honour as any other citizen of whatever faith. ⁸³

It was precisely the ‘Jewish bias’ that bothered a Slovák reviewer four years later when writing about another film with a Jewish theme, the Hollywood production of The House of Rothshild (1934). Although the reviewer acknowledged the high artistic and technical quality of the film, he took offence at its largely positive portrayal of the famous Jewish dynasty: ‘After all, Jewish bias on this scale is a little bit disgusting.’ ⁸⁴ These words would become deeds when the French–Czechoslovak co-production of Le Golem was shown in Bratislava one year later. Populist antisemitism was about to become radical and violent. On behalf of the ‘Slovak people’ it ushered in radical-right politics on the eve of the Second World War.

From the mid-1930s on, antisemitism gradually gained prominence within the HSLS propaganda. One of the reasons for this was that the HSLS, while it had repeatedly won the most votes in elections in Slovakia, had virtually no influence at the central level of the Czechoslovak state. This led to a rise in the prominence of younger representatives of the HSLS who made no secret of their admiration for authoritarian regimes. Karol Sidor, the editor of Slovák and a protégé of ‘leader’ Andrej Hlinka, was prominent among young radicals. In April 1936 he unleashed a campaign against so-called ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ that lasted two years. Sidor used antisemitism to attack the Communists and the Czechoslovak establishment. As a pretext for aggressive opposition politics he used the 1935 military agreement between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. When, in the spring of 1936, the author of an editorial in the Slovak communist press threatened the ‘leader’ Hlinka with death in the context of the Spanish Civil War, Sidor responded with an editorial in Slovák in which he accused ‘Jews’ of simultaneously promoting Bolshevism and capitalism. He claimed that the Jews would in this way provoke a reaction from the oppressed ‘Slovak people’, who would make them accountable for their suffering. Yet he did not specify how this would happen. The issue of Slovák with the aforementioned editorial was confiscated by the censor, so Sidor read the text at the interpellation of the Interior Minister in the Prague Parliament. ⁸⁵

A little later, Catholic students in Bratislava organized demonstrations against the ‘Jewish’ film Le Golem, which paralyzed life in the city for several days. The authoritarian, or rather fascist, activism of young radicals drawn from HSLS members who gathered around the magazine Nástup mladej l'udáckej generácie (Deployment of the Young Populist Generation) found an outlet in protests against this epic film by the French director Julien Duvivier. ⁸⁶ In its modern interpretation of the legend of the Golem, the clay figure is a homunculus, a symbol of the reaction towards the antisemitic policies of Nazi Germany. As Maya Barzilai points out in her recent book on the Golem motif in modern Western culture, it was, since the Great War, closely linked to the experience of war. The German filmmaker Paul Wegener, who like his contemporary Erich Maria Remarque had experienced the destructive character of modern warfare in the trenches of the First World War, was genuinely obsessed with the symbol of clay, of which, according to the narrator of Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, soldiers’ bodies are made. ⁸⁷ In Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem. Wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How he Came into the World), not just the Golem, but also the architecture of the Jewish ghetto is made of clay, thus evoking ‘an anthropomorphized form of the trenches – both sheltering and threatening’. ⁸⁸ Unlike his predecessor, Duvivier ‘insists on the victimization of the Jews and their determination to fight back by the use of a messianic robot. … The viewer leaving Duvivier’s film emerges demanding justice for the Jews and punishment of the oppressors.’ ⁸⁹

HSLS propagandists did not fail to notice this effect. On the film’s opening day in Bratislava Slovák published an article in which it was claimed that the suffering and persecution of Jews depicted in Le Golem was a deception. ‘The destitute Slovak people,’ Slovák wrote, have ‘their own unforced common sense’ which need not be steered towards ‘biased films that glorify certain castes’. ⁹⁰ In Nástup mladej l'udáckej generácie radicals went even further and misinterpreted the Golem motif in accordance with the stereotype of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ in the most lurid terms:

The Golem is an apotheosis of all this brute violence which, in order to be applied, is distorting reality in an inflammatory manner, only expressing one side of it and making people fanatical, with the aim of seizing power. The Golem is supposed to represent the rough, incorporated power of the working class, and it is therefore not by chance that in appearance he resembles Lenin. … However, the Golem working class is only a mean instrument that is meant to avenge deeds and cruelties allegedly suffered by Jews. And here the gruesome reality is expressed that is connected with communism, with its implementation. … After the crowd, having already rejected every authority, was led to break every rule, after it took revenge for oppressing Jews, or rather after it had overthrown the social order, it was pushed to one side, and those who incite the crowd against the representatives of existing order will seize power. The Jews will become the masters of the situation. This is what we are witnessing in the Soviet Union today. ⁹¹

This switching of the roles of victim and perpetrator, which is typical of the semantics of modern – and particularly Slovak – antisemitism, ⁹² was accepted unquestioningly by students in Bratislava, who soon let deeds follow words. From the 24 to 27 April 1936 they took to disrupting the film by throwing firecrackers and stink bombs, and demonstrated in favour of a ban while shouting antisemitic slogans and smashing the windows of houses in the Jewish quarter of the city. ⁹³ One of the participants – probably a co-organizer, then a law student and later secretary of the HSLS – was Jozef Kirschbaum. In the Nástup mladej l'udáckej generácie (and later also in a police interview) he argued that the demonstrations were authentic protests, an appropriate response to the ‘Jewish question’ in Slovakia:

The offensive Judeo-Masonic bias of the film, which was hyped for about a whole month, only served as a signal for us to go out into the streets and demonstratively express our protest against Jewish expansion in Slovakia, against the economic destruction and annihilation of the broad masses of our people, against the demoralisation and decay caused by Jewish Bolsheviks, and against all the injustice that Jews in Slovakia had so far inflicted and, through the abuse of democratic rights, still inflict. ⁹⁴

The violent protest was unprecedented, as there had been no violent academic antisemitism in interwar Slovakia until the demonstrations against Le Golem. ⁹⁵ By contrast, Vienna University in interwar period became notorious for its permanent anti-Jewish violence, which resulted in serious injuries and traumas to students and eventually led to the scientific ‘demise’ of the University. ⁹⁶ This difference is clear in photos of the Vienna and Bratislava demonstrations against All Quiet on the Western Front and Le Golem respectively. Figure 1 shows a police cordon blocking what looks like a menacing mass of people from the entrance to the Viennese Apollo Cinema on 3 January 1931, while Figure 2 shows well-mannered and peacefully protesting, smiling students in the courtyard of Bratislava’s Renaissance Old Town Hall. These cheerful students – among them several women – had actually been forced there by the police after protesting against the Jews on 27 April 1936. They had in fact refused their fellow Jewish students access to the Faculty of Medicine lecture hall and distributed leaflets calling on state authorities to respond to alleged ‘bloody Jewish provocations’ by banning Le Golem. ⁹⁷ OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Student protesters sympathetic with the Nazis try to break through the police cordon in front of the Viennese Apollo Cinema, 3 January 1931. Source: Austrian National Library, Pictures (Bildarchiv Austria).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Students forced in the courtyard of Bratislava’s Renaissance Old Town Hall after the protests against the film The Golem, 27 April 1936. Source: Slovak National Archive, General Directorate of the Police Force in Bratislava 1920–1945 (1950), No. 2991, Box 774.

The impression created by the two photos of the Vienna and Bratislava demonstrations, is, however, false. The notion that the difference between both groups – there are no reports on the participation of women in the Viennese riots; however, the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung reported on the ‘fanatical mother’ of one young Nazi who wanted to set the Schwedenkino on fire ⁹⁸ – was only one of degree is confirmed by events that followed two years later. Both organizers of the demonstrations against the film Le Golem, Jozef Kirschbaum and Jozef Faláth, were among the main (and this time uniformed) instigators of deportations in November 1938, when Slovak authorities hauled off several thousand ‘homeless’ Jews from the territory of the then autonomous Slovakia to the new Slovak–Hungarian border region. ⁹⁹

The fact that the protests against Le Golem were an expression of fascist intimidation was noted by the Czech liberal daily Lidové noviny (People’s News), which said that the protesters in Bratislava were emulating the ‘Nazi model’. ¹⁰⁰ Street violence was a precursor to more fundamental measures, as promoted by the autonomist Slovák in line with authoritarian and fascist regimes, in an attempt to push for the banning of the film ‘at least in Slovakia’, as had reportedly happened in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. ¹⁰¹ While Le Golem was not banned at the time, the production company AB Film, after consulting with the police and cinema proprietors, removed the film from cinema listings in Bratislava. In some small towns they did not screen the film at all for fear of riots, and in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, for example, the district chief prohibited the screening by special decree. ¹⁰²

The protests against the talkies at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s were not only an expression of the politicization of mass culture towards fascism and radical nationalism in interwar Europe. As the analysis of disputes and demonstrations against the film All Quiet on the Western Front in Austria and Czechoslovakia reveals, antisemitism played an important part here, as it enhanced the ideological spectrum of conservative Catholics, the fascist Heimwehr and the Nazis, who, through either an open or latent antisemitism in their constructs, saw ‘the Jews’ as international capitalists and socialists, and in this case as artists who were corroding the nation from the inside. The Nazis, as we have seen, were averse neither to terrorism in the form of street violence nor to planned attacks on cinemas in Vienna and Carlsbad.

The attitudes of Slovak conservative nationalists from within the HSLS, who did not dispute or protest against the screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, but, surprisingly, welcomed the film, can be explained by the seemingly moderate nature of populist antisemitism and the degree of polarization between Right and Left in interwar Czechoslovakia and Austria. Furthermore, in the early 1930s, radical fascist and antisemitic tendencies manifest in the HSLS environment were only expressed sporadically. This changed in the mid-1930s when fascist positions became more prominent in the HSLS. An aggressive campaign against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ resulted in antisemitic demonstrations against the screening of the film Le Golem in Bratislava’s cinemas. These demonstrations, as contemporary observers noted, copied the ‘Nazi model’.

At first glance the differences seem to outweigh the outer similarities – disrupting screenings by throwing firecrackers and stink bombs – especially since the Slovak demonstrators appeared to act less violently than their counterparts in Vienna at the turn of 1930 and 1931. This was due to the particularity of Slovak populist antisemitism, which emphasized the role of Slovaks as victims of the Jews in the context of the early stages of socio-economic modernization in isolated rural areas. By insisting on the victimization of Jews and revenge over their oppressors, Le Golem had allegedly offended the identity of Slovaks as the ‘ultimate victims’ of History, while All Quiet on the Western Front was seen by Nazis and other Austrian and German nationalists to undermine national identity patterns of heroism and sacrifice. Another significant difference relates to reactions to the films in both countries. While in 1931 both Austrian Social Democrats and Jewish organizations still trusted in a state under the rule of law, Slovak Jews joined en masse demonstrations against the right-wing protesters organized by the Communists, whose antifascism was after 1935 legitimized by the Comintern’s Popular Front policy.

Combining the methods of historical comparison and Histoire croisée has proven fruitful for research into the cultural contexts of antisemitism in Europe on the eve of the Second World War in several respects. A diachronic comparison has shown that, as in the case of the Vienna protests against All Quiet on the Western Front, which marked the beginning of the political rise of the Nazis in Austria, demonstrations against the film Le Golem in Bratislava were not an isolated ‘antisemitic moment’ (to paraphrase the historian Pierre Birnbaum, who referred to the Dreyfus’ affair in France at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries using this expression ¹⁰³ ). On the contrary, they should be considered a trigger of the ‘new Jewish question’, which Slovak participants wanted to ‘solve’ in an ever more radical way. ¹⁰⁴ The multi-perspective nature of the Histoire croisée method, on the other hand, suggests that similar trends may have comparable consequences, even in different ‘national’ contexts. Spontaneous protests and demonstrations against the ‘Jewish’ films were in both cases – in Vienna at the turn of 1930–1 and in Bratislava in 1936 – intended as a means of exerting pressure, the goal of which was a ban and state censorship, and the subsequent shift from liberal democracy to an authoritarian or fascist form of government that would accomplish the national antisemitic project of building a state without Jews.

Even the ideologues of the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime, which has been attested a ‘quiet antisemitism’, sought to achieve this aim. ¹⁰⁵ According to this interpretation, the ‘Austrofascist’ regime, built on ideological fragments of political Catholicism, was reluctant to openly discriminate against Jews for fear of being seen like Nazi Germany, while at the same time tolerating the ‘political and economic antisemitism of middle and lower level officials’ or organizations associated with the state party Vaterländische Front. ¹⁰⁶ Evidence of this can be seen in regime’s film policy: whereas Le Golem was among a total of nine films whose screenings had been forbidden by the Viennese censorship committee prior to 1936, ¹⁰⁷ official cultural institutions recommended the screening of another French film with a Jewish theme, the comedy Rothchild (1933) directed by Marco de Gastyne, in which the same actor, Harry Baur, played the leading role. ¹⁰⁸ This ‘splendid satire on high financial circles in Paris’ was commented on in the semi-official daily Reichspost in anti-capitalist and latently antisemitic language. ¹⁰⁹

The Slovak HSLS politicians who came to power in the autumn of 1938 as a result of the Munich Agreement, faced a dilemma similar to that of ‘Austrofascists’ with respect to Nazi Germany, since the Agreement ultimately undermined the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia. One of the first undertakings of the new regime of the autonomous Slovakia was to ban ‘Jewish’ and Soviet films, including Le Golem. ¹¹⁰ Apart from the aforementioned deportations of November 1938, this was essentially the first of a series of anti-Jewish regulations that were justified by a call for ‘lawfulness’. Pressure from Nazi Germany, the protector of the Slovak state established in March 1939, and the willingness of its domestic collaborators, however, meant that this call was soon replaced by legalized lawlessness in the form of systematic looting and depriving the Jewish population of their rights, which culminated in their deportation to the territory of occupied Poland.

To summarize, it can be concluded that antisemitic protests against the films All Quiet on the Western Front in Vienna in 1931 and Le Golem in Bratislava in 1936 aimed at achieving similar goals: producing ‘national’ or ‘racial’ communities without Jews as the embodiment of the ‘Other’. ¹¹¹ Even contemporaries realised that violent street protests would eventually result in the abandonment of the monopoly on the use of force held by the state. These protests fit therefore into the framework of the ‘self-empowerment’ of a ‘people’ or ‘race’ (Volksgemeinschaft) as investigated by Michael Wildt in the case of anti-Jewish violence in provincial Germany during the 1930s. ¹¹² As a consequence, in both Germany and Austria in 1930–1 and in Slovakia in 1938 (and to some extent in Czechoslovakia in 1936) the state sanctioned the ‘terror of the public’ or ‘film censorship of the street’ by banning the respective movies. ¹¹³ In the light of these findings, the varieties of antisemitism (religious, ‘racial’, populist) and their different ‘national’ contexts in East and West have to take a back seat in favour of a dynamic transnational process of antisemitic exclusion throughout authoritarian and fascist Central Europe. Protests against allegedly ‘Jewish’ films during the 1930s must be considered prominent examples of this broader tendency.