ABSTRACT
The imperial capital which both fascinated and repelled the 18-year-old Adolf Hitler in 1907 was the centre of a declining European Great Power, increasingly paralysed by the endless conflict between its warring nationalities. Hitler’s antisemitism was probably the most important single outcome of his Vienna years and certainly its most lasting consequence. The sexual component in Hitler’s Judeophobia was perhaps its most obviously Viennese characteristic. The combination of Victorian prudery and furtive obsessions with prostitution and white slavery – associated by many Gentile Austrians with Galician Jews – had left their mark on Viennese antisemitism since the early 1890s. Hitler’s success was further facilitated by the fact that before 1938 most Austrians felt that they were Germans and that there was no such thing as Austrian nationalism. The grossdeutsch tradition was very much alive not only among Nazis and German nationalists in Austria but even in the social democratic and Christian-Social camps.
