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World War. 10 To all who suffered from the inroads of capitalism it was tempting to believe that capitalism was nothing more than a Jewish invention.
    The cultural and economic prominence of Austro-Hungarian Jews made anti-Semitism even more virulent in the Dual Monarchy than in Germany. And nowhere was the strength of anti-Semitism more apparent than in the Austrian universities. Indeed, it was the Austrian universities that helped to make anti-Semitism respectable throughout the country. 11
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    Georg von Schdnerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism
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    Students at the universities of Vienna and Graz were among the first Austrians to adopt both racial anti-Semitism and pan-Germanism as the bases for a modem rightist movement fanatically opposed to liberalism and laissez faire capitalism. After 1859 nationalistic social fraternities called Burschenschaften began to spread from Germany into Austria to form the earliest focal points of pan-German activity. Pan-Germanism no doubt seemed relevant to the German-speaking students at these institutions, because tkeir schools registered thousands of Slavic- and Italian-speaking students from the monarchy’s crownlands. So zealous were these young hotheads that when they could not convert fellow students to their ideal of an all-German Reich dominated by Prussia, they used less peaceful means to try to destroy all other student organizations. Their trademark was the saber scar. “Vienna and Graz were the earliest and always remained the chief centers of pan-Germanism.” 12 At the heart of the students’ political ideology was the assumption that German national unity was of supreme importance in every political question. After Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866, and Prussia’s victory over France in 1870, it became clear that German unity could best be achieved by Bismarck’s new Reich. What now stood in the way of this goal was the existence of Imperial Austria. All political activity therefore was directed toward Austria’s destruction. The pan-German students developed a veritable cult of Prussia, which led to speeches and pamphlets in the 1870s glorifying service to the German state. They worshiped force, had contempt for humanitarian law and justice, and criticized parliamentary government and capitalism as selfish, “individualistic,” and antinational. In keeping with their idolization of all things “German,” the pan-German students also sought to purify university life by eliminating all “foreign influence,” which in practice often meant the expulsion of religious and ethnic Jews, as well as Slavs, from their nationalistic societies.
    About 1876, contact was made between the pan-German fraternities of Vienna and Georg Ritter von Schdnerer (1842-1921), at that time a left-wing Liberal deputy in the Austrian Parliament. Schdnerer, who in many respects might be called the “father,” or at least the “grandfather,” of National Socialism, was already well-known in Austria for his bellicose German nationalism and soon made a powerful impact on the pan-German students. He taught them the importance of the social question for the political struggle and revealed how they could persuade the “masses” to defend German culture. 13
    The spiritual leader of the German national movement in Austria since the time of his election to the Lower House of Parliament in 1873, Schonerer was an extreme example of the reaction by German-speaking Austrians to the even-handed treatment Prime Minister Eduard Taaffe tried to mete out to the Slavs of the Austrian Empire during his ministry between 1879 and 1893- Taaffe’s extension of political representation and language rights to the Austro- Slavs was interpreted by German-Austrian nationalists as a menace to their superior economic and political position or even to their national existence. Schonerer himself reacted by founding the nationalistic German People’s party (Deutsche Volkspartei) in 1881. Elsewhere in Austria, especially