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...Aus Halb-Asien (1876) and Die Juden von Barnow (1877), which he provided many German-speakers with their introduction to Galicia. An analysis of the depiction of the province and its peoples in these widely read books thus offers important insight into the way many Austro-Germans (and Germans beyond the Habsburg Monarchy) came to view this region and its peoples. Furthermore, a study of Franzos helps broaden our understanding of how German-acculturated Habsburg Jews negotiated issues of assimilation and identity by examining an individual born and raised in Galicia rather than Vienna, Bohemia, or western Hungary, from where most of these Jews hailed.
Karl-Emil Franzos was born on October 25, 1848, and raised in Czortkow, a small East Galician village not far from the Russian border. Franzos's father expressed a strong German cultural and national identity and rejected traditional Jewish religious beliefs and cultural practices. Franzos admired his father, and largely adopted his world view. The younger Franzos held to his faith in Germandom until very late in his life. However, by the 1890's, antisemitic sentiments had become so widespread and so virulent among Germans that it finally shook his faith in German assimilation as the solution for Jews. Nevertheless, Franzos never made those doubts public, and in fact spoke out against Jewish nationalism and Zionism in his last years. (2)
Throughout much of the 19th century, German nationalism and liberalism went hand in hand in Central Europe. The young Franzos learned that German culture and liberalism were the highest ideals for which a person could strive. Franzos's father once told him, "you are a German son and you will live in Germany." (3) According to Franzos, his father's German nationalism aroused the ire of the local Poles, who opposed his vision of a liberal, centralized, Germanized Austria united with Greater Germany. Dr. Franzos also sympathized with the plight of the poverty-stricken Ukrainians and so treated their medical needs free of charge. His son, Karl-Emil, wrote positively about the Galician Ukrainians' fight against a Polish nobility that had historically exercised political and economic domination over them.
Franzos's conviction that German culture represented the highest expression of humanity helped shape his representation of village life in Galicia. Despite his affiliation with German culture and lack of religious observance, he remained proud of his Jewish identity, expressing what we might now recognize as a Stature or ethnic consciousness as a Jew. He learned from his father to value the history and ethical values of the Jewish people, although interestingly he had little interaction with other Jews in the village. (4) Franzos noted, "I synthesized Germandom and Jewry into one single whole, of both I heard only, the most honorable, that which could enflame my enthusiasm." (5) However, Franzos denounced the religious and cultural practices of Orthodox Jews as backward and superstitious, instead advocating that they modernize and, as his family had done, embrace the culture of the German Enlightenment. It is worth noting that he mentioned hearing only honorable things about 'Jewry' rather than 'Judaism,' as he separated the religion from the people. For him, remaining a Jew was a matter of duty to his fellow Jews, as his father had emphasized, "[they] are still seen in an unfavorable light, are in need of good and educated men who ennoble and defend them." (6) His father's paternalism comes through clearly in Franzos's own writings about traditional Jews. Finally, he was a archetypal Jewish-German liberal assimilationist, who viewed national identity as a matter of choice and cultural affiliation, not birth. (7)
Like many other Germans (defined in this instance culturally) influenced by the Enlightenment, he equated the spread of German culture and Bildung with progress, modernity, and civilization. These Germans by and large considered themselves liberals. (8) Judson's work has made clear that their liberalism was intertwined with their German cultural chauvinism. In this article I will examine Franzos's attitudes about German culture and his views of East Europeans in light of Judson's argument.
Those seeking to spread German Enlightenment culture usually faced stiff resistance from those East Europeans they sought to 'civilize.' Franzos, however, differed from most who sought to do so because of his background. Not only was he Jewish (Jews were a tiny minority overall among self-identified Germans, although Jews were certainly visible among the ranks of these liberal Germans), but he was himself born in Eastern rather than Central Europe, in an area where German-speakers were a quite small minority.
Franzos's Galician background makes clear that not every Jew who sought to Germanize the Jews of Galicia hailed from the Monarchy's western lands. (9) Herz Homberg represented this archetype of the western Jew coming east to 'enlighten' his co-religionists. Emperor Joseph II sent Homberg to organize German schools in Galicia and spearhead the cultural Germanization of Galician Jewry. (10) His German cultural arrogance immediately alienated Galician Jews (imagine their surprise at seeing, in 1787, a Jew in a wig and culottes), and he stands as a symbol of Vienna's largely failed attempt to impose German culture on them. On the other hand, Franzos, as well as his father and, it appears, his grandfather as well, did aid the cause of spreading German culture in the East from Homberg's time well into the second half of the nineteenth century. Clearly not all Galician Jews rejected German acculturation (although the Franzos's more recent western origins differentiated them from the bulk of Galician Jews, who had come east centuries earlier). Franzos was as eager to culturally Germanize Galicia as were his counterparts born much closer to Vienna and Germany. (11)
The timing of Franzos's advocacy of cultural Germanization for the peoples of the East is also worth examining. He published his stories starting in the 1870's, just after Galicia won de facto autonomy from Vienna in 1868. Prior to that date, a German-speaking bureaucracy that took orders from Vienna largely governed the province. After the attainment of autonomy for Galicia, which included Polish becoming the province's official language, the adoption of German culture by Galician Jews (not to mention by Poles and Ukrainians) made much less sense.
Galician Jews who sought to modernize had adopted German culture from the time of the Enlightenment through 1867. For some Jews after 1867, particularly those in or near Brody where there was a German Gymnasium, a German orientation for assimilating Jews remained somewhat more common, at least for a time. (12) It became even more untenable after 1879, when Emperor Franz Joseph named Galician Count Taaffe to be his Minister President, which allowed the Poles to rule Galicia largely unchecked for the next fourteen years. (13) Thus, after 1867, those Jews who wished to break from their traditional cultural and religious practices and from the Yiddish language began to acculturate and to some degree identify as Poles rather than Germans. By 1900 some of the Jews who embraced modern culture but rejected affiliating with either the Germans or Poles, due to antisemitism from both groups, became Zionists and thus identified nationally as Jews, irrespective of what language they spoke. (14)
Like most other Germanophile Galician Jews, Franzos supported the Ukrainians in their long-running struggle against the Polish nobles who dominated Eastern Galicia's social and economic system. Their German-orientation, with its concomitant liberalism, led these Jews to see the reactionary Polish nobility as the great enemy, and so the Ukrainians appeared as potential natural allies. Franzos adopted this stance not only due to his father's influence, but also that of his nanny, Magdusia. She imbued her charge with a love for Ukrainian culture by singing him folk songs and teaching him to speak the language. In his later writings and essays, such as "Die Literatur der Kleinrussen, Das Volkslied der Kleinrussen," and "Taras Szewchenko," Franzos praised the Ukrainians people as well as their culture and literature. (15)
The political strategy of the Germanophile Jews of Galicia at that time reflected their pro-Ukrainian sympathies. In the parliamentary elections held in 1848 and again in 1873 (the first elections held in Galicia for the new post-Ausgleich federal Parliament) these German-oriented Jews favored parties who supported the transformation of Austria into a democratic and centralized state with German as the predominant state language, and were opposed to autonomy for Galicia under Polish noble domination. The pro-German centralist position found a great deal of support among Galician Jews from 1848 into the early 1870's. (16) These Jews saw the central government as their emancipator, having received legal equality and civil rights with the adoption of the 1867 Austrian constitution, and feared the loss of their newly-won equality under Galician home rule. Ukrainians of the province shared this opposition to autonomy because of their historic opposition to the Polish nobility. Thus, in 1873, Schomer Israel, a German liberal Jewish political organization in Galicia, and Rada Ruska, the Ukrainian nationalist political organization,...
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