JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

238 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 3:225
learn anything of the importance of race, or of the spiritual and intellectual
forces that are determined by this factor. The cultural uniqueness and level
of a people is irrevocably linked to its racial composition. It is never made
clear to them that they are Germans and that as Germans they must feel that
they are a vital part of the race and that they must order their lives in a
manner appropriate to the intellectual, moral and cultural imperatives of
their racial origins.” 34
Hartner-Hnizdo made the state responsible for Bettauer’s murder. He
had been allowed to publish his pornography, to undermine public order
and decency, and to attack those who were determined to preserve all that
was best in German culture. In such a situation, violence was justified as the
last resort. At this point, one might well ask why the murder of a hack
writer of dubious integrity by a psychologically disturbed fanatic and justified
in a 252-page rant by a racist crank should be worthy of attention. First
of all, Erotik und Rasse was lent to Heinrich Himmler in 1927 by Walter
Buch, the man responsible for purges in the Nazi party and a prominent
racial ideologue. 35 The prudish Himmler, who was still at the age of 27
inexperienced in matters sexual, was enormously impressed by this tirade
against the unrestrained sexuality of the times encouraged by highly spiced
Jewish literary products. In his judgment, the book was “a collection of
appalling products of literature, terrible to read. It is, however, a necessary
collection of evidence and therefore valuable.” 36 The book certainly served
further to confirm Himmler’s already obsessive antisemitism and
homophobia.
But this alone is hardly enough. Far more important is the light it
shines on the appalling degree of antisemitism in interwar Austria. Chancellor
Ignaz Seipel’s Christian Social Party was founded by the prominent
antisemite Karl Lueger and its program bore a close resemblance to that of
the National Socialists, but Seipel was alarmed at the socialist elements
within National Socialism and appalled at the movement’s rejection of
Christianity. Seipel was what was known at the time as a “theological
antisemite,” one who rejected the racial antisemitism of the Nazis. His
world view was based on the Catholic social teaching of Leo XIII’s encyclical
Rerum Novarum of 1891 on the rights and duties of capital and labor
that was reaffirmed and extended in 1931 by Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno
on the reconstruction of the social order. It was a reactionary, authoritarian
34. Erotik und Rasse, 237.
35. The “Röhm Putsch” of 1934 was among the Säuberungsaktionen (purges) in
which Buch played a prominent role.
36. Geoffrey J. Giles, Why Worry About Homosexuals? Homophobia and Sexual
Politics in Nazi Germany, Washington, D.C. 2001, 6.