A little comment on this diagram called the "Vienna Circles: the Field of Cultural Production".
It was recently posted on Twitter:
A brilliant map of intellectual Vienna in the times of Karl Kraus, Arnold Schoenberg and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
https://twitter.com/NikolaiBlaumer/status/1074491558081159168
There are terrible problems with this in that it seems to impute that, being Jewish, Arnold Schoenberg and Sigmund Freud, therefore, mingled in the same circles as the Communist International (Kommunistische International), an intellectual sphere diametrically opposed to the "Deutsch Völkische-Bewegung" (German Völkisch Movement) of the far-right. Although created quite innocently, a diagram similar to this could just as plausibly have graced the pages of National Socialist propaganda publications e.g. Der Angriff, Der Stürmer, or Der Völkische Beobachter. There are those, surprisingly even on the Left, who seem to want to naively believe this kind of thing.
The problem with this diagram is that it falls afoul of actually taking seriously the idea that all Jews are Communists, and that all Communists are Jews or their co-conspirators in the Communist International. The persecution of the Jews cames from the idea that left-wing thought is inherently part of a "Jewish-Bolshevik international conspiracy" that needed to be ruthlessly annihilated lest it took over the world. There is also a false Manichean dichotomy that paints people in black-and-white as either Nazis or Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries with far too little place given for the endless nuances in between.
Schoenberg has this to say:
Are all Jews communists? You know as well as I do that that isn't so. I'm not one because I know there aren't enough of the things everyone wants to be shared out all round, but scarcely for a tenth. ...
The anti-Semites are, after all, world-reforming busybodies with no more perspicacity and with just as little insight as the communists.
Letter to Wassily Kandinsky 4th of May, 1923.
Joseph Auner. A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (Kindle Locations Kindle Locations 2759-2760 and 2780-2781). Kindle Edition.
During the McCarthy era he wrote to his lawyer:
You know I am anti-communism. I was never a communist and hate to be suspected of any wrong action in this respect.
Letter to his lawyer Milton Koblitz, 9th August, 1950.
Joseph Auner. A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (Kindle Locations 5141-5142). Kindle Edition.
Elsewhere Schoenberg says that not only had he never been a Communist but that he had been a monarchist in Austria:
When the First World War began, I was proud to be called to arms and as a soldier I did my whole duty enthusiastically as a true believer in the house of Habsburg, in its wisdom of 800 years in the art of government and in the consistency of a monarch's lifetime, as compared with the short lifetime of every republic. In other words, I became a monarchist. Also at this time and after the unfortunate ending of the war and for many years thereafter, I considered myself as a monarchist, but also then did not participate in any action. I was then and thereafter only a quiet believer in this form of government, though the chance for a restoration were at zero.
Evidently when I came to America such considerations were superfluous. My viewpoint since then has been one of gratitude for having found a refuge. And I decided that I, as only a naturalized citizen, had no right to participate in the politics of the natives. In other words, I had to stand by and to be still. This, I have always considered to be the rule of my life. But I was never a communist.
February 16 1950
Schoenberg: Style and Idea, p.505. Edited by Leonard Stein, translated by Leo Black. University of California Press, 1975. (Not to be confused with the Dika Newlin edited version of Style and Idea from Philosophical Library/Open Road).
Likewise, Freud, who was politically also a conservative, said:
I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communistic system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is advantageous and expedient. But I am able to recognize that psychologically it is grounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty...
From comments to Civilisation and its Discontents
Some people will insist that fighting fascist ideas about a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion involves merrily celebrating Jews for being all natural born-Communists, before going on to cite Schoenberg or Freud as incontrovertible evidence of this. This crudely tips the idea on its head that Jews are to be hated for all being Communists by countering that Jews are instead to be admired for all being born-Communists! The trouble is that nobody is a born-Communist. Jews are like every single other social group, deeply torn by political polarisation between the Left and Right. Long before Benjamin Netanyahu and Jared Kushner today, there had always been right-wing Jews e.g. the Tory British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, here seen walking arm-in-arm with Queen Victoria:
Amongst German examples, there is Walter Jellinek, about whom Sir Richard J Evans tells us:
...the conservative, pro-Nazi jurist Walter Jellinek in Heidelberg ... suddenly disappeared from their correspondence: it turned out that he was Jewish and he therefore lost his job.
Evans, Richard J: The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation (Kindle Locations 8333-8335). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.
We also have the example of the musicologist, Heinrich Schenker, who would also have been classified as Jewish under National Socialist laws (as his mother was Jewish):
The historical achievement of Hitler, the extermination of Marxism, will be celebrated by posterity (including the French, the English, and all exploiters of crimes against Germany) no less gratefully than the great deeds of the greatest Germans. If only a man were born to music, who would finally exterminate the musical Marxists: for this it would be necessary for the masses to become better acquainted with this inherently elusive art—but this is, and must remain, a contradiction in terms. 'Art' and the masses have never belonged together: so where would one ever find the quantity of musical 'brownshirts' necessary to chase away the musical Marxists? I have already provided the weapons; but the music, the true German music of the great [composers], is in no way understood by the masses who are supposed to bear the weapons.
Schenker, letter 14th May 1933 quoted in The Schenker Project
What this goes to show is that the notion that Jews are natural born-Communists is abject nonsense. The propagandist view, that Jews are all Judeo-Bolshevik conspirators, is just as ludicrous as the notion that "authentic" Germans are supposedly born dyed-in-the-wool Nazis, as eternally written in German "blood and soil". Such views represent fascist attempts to denounce all Germans on the Left (Social Democrats and Communists alike) as Jews or their un-German puppets. It is an attempt to claim that liberalism is innately alien to the pure-blooded "true German" and that liberalism is unnatural to the pure German Mind. It would be akin to a Republican calling all Democrats un-American alien puppets of a conspiracy by Blacks and Jews to take over the world—a plot to alienate true Americans from their true right-wing identity, as written in American blood and soil. This type of innatism is nonsense of the most appalling kind and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
This is not to deny that certain social groups can at certain times have a statistical trend towards being somewhat more liberal or more conservative. It is just not a result of them being born that way, as eternally written in "blood and soil". It results instead from the social and historical circumstance that these social groups find themselves in. Nor is this to deny that progressive conservatives like Schoenberg (or even Freud) had ideas that might appeal to liberals too, but it is simply not permissible to assume they could only possibly be naturally born-Communists based on little more than the fact that they were Jews.
It is a common mistake to assume that anti-fascism simply involves taking fascist propagandist drivel and naively tipping it on its head, since this merely ends up validating fascist ideas and their implicit assumptions, rather than challenging them as they rightly should be challenged. Sadly, there is a whole literature that likes to pretend it is "anti-Nazi" while pushing such crude inversions of fascist ideology when it actually represents an albeit inadvertent "craven surrender to Nazi propaganda". However well-intentioned such emotively seductive proclamations might be that assert that 'em bloody Krauts are all the same—they're all born Nazis, always 'ave been always bloody will be, this sort of bloody-minded outburst curiously ends up validating the ideas found in National Socialist propaganda. Sweeping assumptions fêting Jews for all being our natural born Judeo-Bolshevik revolutionary comrades, as written in Hebraic "blood and soil", are just as preposterous.
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