Ernst Haeckel
XXX
UNION FOR RESISTANCE TO ANTI-SEMITISM
A. G. von Suttner, Count Hoyos, Baron Leitenberger, and Professor Nothnagel found the Union · Article in the Neue Freie Presse
Before I write of the congress in Rome I want to go back a bit. In the spring of 1891—consequently before the founding of the Interparliamentary Group and the Peace Association in Vienna—my husband had also brought into existence an association of which I wish to tell.
We were still in the Caucasus when, at the beginning of the eighties, we were informed of the Anti-Semitic movement started in Prussia, and propagated by Court Chaplain Stöcker. This phenomenon, I need hardly say, aroused lively disgust in us. We set forth the arguments against this reversion to the Middle Ages in various articles written for the Vienna papers on which we were regular collaborators, but the articles were returned to us on the ground that in Austria there was no Anti-Semitism, and if any of it should spread from Prussia to us the only proper attitude toward it would be contemptuous silence. Later events showed that this attitude was not the proper one. Wrong must be withstood if it is recognized as such; there is no other way. In such cases silence, though professing to express contempt, is itself contemptible. Not only must the victims react against it, it is also for those who are not personally concerned to antagonize a wrong wherever they see it. Their silence is complicity, and generally springs from the same motives as the silence of the victims,—that is, from timidity. Only not to come into any collision, only not to subject one’s self to annoyances,—that is the motive at bottom, even if it does outwardly bear itself as genteel reserve.
After we came home the Anti-Semitic movement in Vienna had taken on especially brutal forms. In the year 1891 it had even gone as far as violence. The indignation which my husband felt boiled over.
“Something must be done!” was his decision.
And he sat down and wrote a constitution and a plan of action and an appeal. And now what he had to do was to find some prominent men who would go hand in hand with him. That same evening—we were just then in Vienna—he went to look up Count Hoyos in his residence on the Kolowratring. “The gentleman is not in,” said the servant; “he is downstairs in the club.” My husband immediately betook himself to the lower floor, where the clubrooms were situated, and sent for the count, who was sitting at a whist table.
“What is it, dear Suttner, anything very urgent?”
“Yes, justice for the persecuted—”
“Out with it!”