Mourning for Richard Wagner

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The funeral for Richard Wagner was held on March 5, 1883, less than a month after Richard Wagner's death , by the German national student body in Vienna . The anti-Semitic Kommers met with great public and political resonance.

background

Among the supporters of the Pan-Germans , the university students belonged to the proponents of the harshest racist and anti-Semitic orientation and the German national student body of Vienna was extremely hostile to their Jewish fellow students. Since 1878 the fraternities in Vienna began to exclude Jews from membership. Anti-Semitism in the Austrian student associations was also fueled by secular fears of Jewish competition: “At the University of Vienna in 1880, 22.3% of law students and 38.6% of medical students were Jews. In 1889–90 the proportion of Jews in the teaching staff of the medical faculty reached 48%. "

The raised Kommers in memory of the late composer Richard Wagner became a demonstration of the German national movement and Viennese anti-Semitism .

procedure

The Association of German Students of Vienna, founded in 1882, organized a funeral ceremony on March 5, 1883 in honor of Richard Wagner, who had died the month before. 4000 participants in mourning clothes had gathered in the Sofiensaal . The halls were decorated with black, white and red and cornflowers , the symbol of the German national movement; Emblems of the Habsburg monarchy, however, were missing. The Kommers was headed by Franz Dafert von Sensel-Timmer , the chairman of the Vienna VDSt. At the opening the overture to Rienzi and Siegfried's death was heard . Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke had canceled with thanks. The reading of his welcoming letter aroused stormy enthusiasm. The opening speech was given by the deputy chairman, stud. iur. Richard Kaan (Academic Fraternity of Upper Austrian Teutons in Vienna). He praised Wagner as the herald of (anti-Jewish) Germanism . Robert von Pattai's speech was laid out on all the tables . Karl Beurle (Wiener Burschenschaft Libertas, honorary boy of the Leoben Burschenschaft Germania) welcomed two VDSt students from the Silesian Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität as the first representatives of a (German) imperial university. When Aurelius Polzer (Burschenschaft Arminia Vienna) concluded his speech with the warning that there was “only one German people and one Reich”, the supervising police officer only allowed one speaker, whereupon Hermann Bahr (Burschenschaft Albia Vienna) called Wagner “political Führer ”announced.

“The Wagner-Kommers turned out to be a large German rally of such force as Vienna had never experienced before from an academic perspective. The climax was Bahr's speech, in which he sketched Wagner's consciously German character and his rejection of Judaism and, among other things, as far as Germanism in Austria was concerned, spoke of a penitent Kundry who waits for redemption in the vicinity of black and yellow border posts. Bahr's Greater German commitment was followed by the police closing down the Kommers. "

- Karl Becke, historiographer of the Vienna fraternity Albia

Georg von Schönerer celebrated “our Bismarck”. Other incorporated speakers from the Reichsrat were Ernst Bareuther , Engelbert Pernerstorfer , Moritz Weitlof and Adolf Wiesenburg . Of the professors spoke Gustav Demelius , Dean of the juridical faculty, and Ludwig Blume, a teacher at the Vienna Academic Gymnasium .

effect

The rector Friedrich Maassen , Jena fraternity and from Protestantism to Catholicism converted , condemned the Kommersbuch. The organizers protested against this partisanship:

  1. Wr. academy. Fraternity "Albia"
  2. Academ. Fraternity "Alemannia"
  3. Wr. Fraternity "Arminia"
  4. Wr. academy. Fraternity "Bruna" (Brno)
  5. Wr. Fraternity "Campia"
  6. Wr. Fraternity "Cheruscia"
  7. Wr. Fraternity "Germania"
  8. Upper Austrian academy. Association "Germania"
  9. Country team "Iglavia"
  10. Wr. academy. "Libertas" fraternity
  11. Technical academ. "Libertas" fraternity
  12. Country team "Moldavia"
  13. Academ. "Oppavia" Association
  14. Academ. "Rabenstein" association
  15. Wr. Fraternity "Silesia"
  16. Wr. Student club
  17. Wr. academy. Fraternity "Teutonia"
  18. Country team "Thaya"
  19. Wr. Fraternity "Thuringia"
  20. Association of German Students from Bohemia

Under Maassen's chairmanship, the academic senate of the University of Vienna punished Dafert and Bahr with relegation . Dafert went to Bonn, Bahr (for one semester) to Graz. When Maassen stepped in front of the students on April 16, he was greeted with hurricane-like noise. It was the prelude to decades of riot and riot at the universities of Austria.

Theodor Herzl left the Albia fraternity. The Eduard Taaffe government considered dissolving all national ties, but left it with heightened surveillance. Government representatives were present at larger student events. Speeches and songs were pre-censored by the authorities.

See also

literature

  • Oskar Scheuer : The historical development of the German student body in Austria with special consideration of the University of Vienna from its foundation to the present . Vienna 1910.
  • Alexander Graf: "Los von Rom" and "Heim ins Reich" - The German national academic milieu at the Cisleithan universities of the Habsburg Monarchy . Diss. Phil. Fac. Graz 2014.
  • Harald Seewann : The Richard Wagner funeral. Vienna, March 5, 1883. A documentation (134 pages). Self-published, Graz 2016.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Robert S. Wistrich : The Jews of Vienna in the age of Emperor Franz Joseph . Translated from English (1989) by Marie-Therese Pitner and Susanne Grabmayr. Böhlau, Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-205-98342-4 , p. 179.
  2. ↑ Harald Seewann: The Richard Wagner Funeral Comes on March 5, 1883. A documentation . 2016.
  3. ↑ Baron Erich von Schramm and Littmann came from Breslau. Schramm was a committed advocate of the idea of ​​connecting German Austria to the German Empire. He later emigrated to the United States, returned to Germany seriously ill and died in 1897.
  4. ^ A b Michael Wladika: Hitler's generation of fathers: the origins of National Socialism in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy . Böhlau, Vienna Cologne Weimar 2005.
  5. ↑ Blume was a member of the Vienna academic fraternity of Silesia.
  6. ↑ Seewann (2016), pp. 50–51.
  7. ↑ Dafert (ÖBL)
  8. ↑ Harald Seewann: Theodor Herzl and the academic youth. A collection of sources on Herzl's connections to corporate students . Graz 1998.
  9. ↑ Paul Molisch: The German universities in Austria and the political-national development after 1848. With special consideration of the Viennese universities mostly presented according to documentary sources . Munich 1922, pp. 38-39.