JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

2011] THE MURDER OF HUGO BETTAUER 237
average German petit bourgeois. By contrast, the crooks in his novels are
almost all exemplary Aryans.
This was all too much for Hartner-Hnizdo. As a passionate antisemite,
convinced that Jews posed a deadly threat to Aryan civilization, he was
outraged that “the swastika people,” by whom Bettauer means all those who
have anti-Jewish sentiments, are without exception portrayed in his novels
as “utterly inferior, measly and mean-spirited creatures.” Bettauer’s agenda
was obvious to him: “He clearly shows us where the whole movement is
intended to end: in the total dissolution of existing conditions, with the Jew
as the only consciously active and effective element, while the German having
been deprived of all intellectual and moral footholds will sink into the
mud.” 32 At the root of the problem, in Hartner-Hnizdo’s troubled mind, was
the belief that intellectual and instinctual drives differed radically according
to race. Unbridled sexuality is, according to this theory, at the basis of the
Jewish worldview. All that stays in the way of pure animal lust—marriage,
the family, the sense of spiritual and intellectual belonging, even the state—
is rejected out of hand. The Jew initially sees in a woman an object of
sexual desire. He is incapable of appreciating beauty without being overcome
by lust. The Aryan, by contrast, looks first for spiritual and intellectual
qualities in the other sex. Marriage is at the very heart of the racial idea,
for it is through marriage that the race is strengthened, purified, and preserved.
It is for this precise reason that Jews attack the institution, while
making sure that marriage within their own community is kept free from
extraneous racial material. Quotations from Ezra and Nehemiah did not act
as a very successful smokescreen with which to hide the fact that the
already high degree of exogamy in the Jewish community was on the rise,
much to the alarm of the antisemites. 33 Hartner-Hnizdo worked himself up
into a frenzy over this issue: “The racial idea alone can save our young men
from gaining knowledge of life and intellectual sustenance from a foreign
or poisoned source; but women also can only be protected from sinking into
an inferior race and becoming the objects of desire of sensually perverse
humans or sexual adventurers by a strong spiritual affinity with their racial
species. This racial consciousness, which is represented in the Old Testament
in an often repulsive form, was made into one of God’s most sacred
commandments by the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah, so that the Jews, even
in the Diaspora, were saved from dissolution among the neighbouring peoples
. . . Who teaches our children to have a German sense of race and
identity, that will guide their lives and save them from being destroyed by a
foreign culture and way of life? Neither at home nor in the schools do they
32. Erotik und Rasse, 212.
33. The relevant passages are in Ezra 10 and Ezekiel 10:31 and 13: 23-31.