The beginning of the end?

The names of prominent Jews active during those years include such remarkable personalities as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Zweig, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, and Theodor Herzl, among many others. If one adds politics to the mix, the roster of Jewish names would be equally prominent in the ranks of both the liberal and Marxist political parties of the time.

But fin-de-siecle Austria and Germany also included Wilhelm Marr, the German Reichstag deputy who coined the term “anti-Semitism"; Georg von Schoenerer, the Austrian anti-Semitic leader of the Pan-German movement; and the charismatic Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, whose political demagoguery made a lasting impression on a young Adolf Hitler, who arrived in the imperial capital in 1907.

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