The summer silence has come to an end, and today’s contribution is less about music and more about where we find ourselves. I was struck today by a comment piece by Matthew Parris in the UK Times. He was writing about the abuse being handed out to the new British Minister of Defence simply because he was gay. Parris starts the article with the lines: “But there remains an undercurrent, and our defence secretary’s experience points to its strength. Already I can half-hear a fair few of my readers this week bridling at having homosexuality ‘thrust down our throats again’ when ‘nobody cares, anyway’.” And Parris was right. The indignation in the below line comments was jarring, but mostly along the lines of ‘it’s not because he’s gay, it’s because he’s unqualified’. We can never know if the same accusations would have been made by the same people had the individual in question not been gay. The tone of the comments, however, suggested a presumed lack of qualification might provide a degree of justification to an already rock-solid prejudice.
It was reminiscent of the recent hounding of the Cambridge professor Jayson Arday, forced out of his position by what still remain unproven claims of plagiarism. That he was a fantasist who made up his life-story, may, or may not be a compelling reason for denouncing his academic qualifications. It all came down to a scurrilous accusation written by another academic, an American named Nathan Cofnas, who wrote that “In a true meritocracy, Black people would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”
Parris goes on to write that in the UK, at least, legislation has gone as far as possible in removing discrimination against homosexuality. Same-sex couples have all the protections of everyone else, can marry, and have children, can adopt etc. There are no restrictions to entering the military, the civil service the police or indeed, any profession. And of course, it’s also a similar situation regarding race. But I beg to differ: the undercurrent of doubt, prejudice and downright hate remains. And more recently, it has even started to become acceptable in polite society – Salonfähig – as the German expression goes.
And so, it’s worth looking at what history might teach us. I return to those remarkable ‘Liberal’ constitutions of 1871 in the German Reich and 1867 in the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. Both, in theory guaranteed equality for all citizens, regardless of religious confession. Different states within the German Federation that preceded the creation of the Reich in 1871 had different laws with some being very liberal and already granting full equality to all citizens. Prussia, however, was not one of the progressive states, most of which were in Southwest Germany.
The two constitutions were written in the wake of newly founded entities: the German Reich replacing the Federation of German States in 1871, and the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary replaced the Habsburg realm in 1867. A number of the newly accorded rights were only reached after legislation, and many changes that were guaranteed under the two constitutions were not brought about at all. For example, Jews and non-Jews could marry legally in Germany as early as 1869. In other words, two years before the constitution of 1871. And yet, in Habsburg Austria-Hungary, the only way a Jew and a non-Jew could marry was via a civil-marriage with one spouse officially designated ‘without religious affiliation’. This would have meant a deliberate departure from whichever religious confession had previously been registered. In both the German Reich and Austria-Hungary, religious confession, or the lack of religious confession, was a legally significant concept and included on all official documents.
Though Jews could study at universities, often against huge barriers erected by other students and antisemitic faculty, becoming a professor, or holding a chair, was a far more difficult right to obtain. It was a right that universities bestowed according to their own traditions and not subject to law. This meant that even if Jews were allowed to become professors, they only advanced to the stage of ‘Privatdozent’ – an irregular professorial position. However, if a Jew converted, he (always a ‘he’ back then) could be appointed to full professorship/chair status. The same applied to the German army. In contrast, it was easier for Jews to rise to the top of the civil service or to the highest ranks within the military under the Habsburgs. As with the universities, the German Reich held the advancement of Jews within these positions to be determined by individual institutions and not legislated. It was a handy way of maintaining a degree of apartheid without breaking any laws. There were no regulations that said a certain number of minorities had to be included. Indeed, if anything, there were numerus clausus policies that limited the number of minorities.
Despite these hurdles, by 1900, Jews had become part of the fabric of daily life in the German Reich and the Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Certain professions were overwhelmingly Jewish, such as medicine, journalism and law. There was a large Jewish middle class and professional class of bourgeoisie. Vulgar antisemitism was seen as ‘off-message’, ignorant and declassé. There remained a certain degree of social antisemitism, but the nastier, more malevolent aspects were definitely seen as unacceptable. Read Alma Mahler or Ernst Krenek for examples of what I mean. Both made disparaging generalisations, while continuing to marry one ‘non-Aryan’ (to use the Nazi jargon) after another.
There is a story about Alma Mahler’s return to Vienna: when asked by an individual at a reception, how it was that a young woman from such a good family could have married a Jew, she refused to answer, left the reception and the city, never to return. Krenek’s antisemitism, was more of the observational: he remarked of Karol Rathaus that his spoken German was better than those who had grown up with the language. He also commented on how extremely well-dressed he always was. He put these two characteristics down to Rathaus’s over-compensation for being Jewish. Was it negative? Was it antisemitic? Hard to say. When pressed by a member of the Austrian clerical government on how it was that Jews were writing difficult new music that only other Jews could appreciate, Krenek pointed out that the only Jew he could think of who wrote the sort of music being referred to was Arnold Schoenberg. Most of the Jewish composers he could think of composed hit songs and operettas.
What one senses in these interactions is the presence of what Parris called the ‘undercurrent’. In 1897, the year that Mahler converted to Christianity and was appointed director of the Imperial Opera, the antisemite Karl Lueger was finally sworn in as mayor of Vienna. The Emperor Franz Joseph had refused to acknowledge his previous electoral victories because of Lueger’s virulent antisemitism. And yet, Lueger was one of the many who said it was he who decided who was a Jew and who wasn’t. His campaign, based on stoking Viennese working-class antisemitism was aided by Ignaz Mandl, himself a member of a wealthy Jewish family.
In the case of Mandl and Lueger, the opportunistic antisemitism was based on stoking grievances in the working class. It was also largely a confessional antisemitism and not racist, as it was with the Nazi party. To Lueger, if someone converted, they were no longer a Jew, hence Lueger’s flippant view of who was and who wasn’t. Nevertheless, the vulgar antisemitism of Lueger was absolutely not Salonfähig and loathed not just by the Emperor, but by the educated class of Viennese, furious that the ‘unwashed’ masses could out-vote them.
It would take an English gentleman amateur named Houston Stewart Chamberlain to write a book called The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, written and published as two volumes in German as Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, to thrust racist antisemitism out of the gutter and catapult it into bourgeois discourse. The book was much admired by Kaiser Wilhelm and equally disparaged by hosts of other academics and specialists. Chamberlain would answer all criticism with a wave of his hand and a reply that he was merely an ‘informed amateur only offering a personal view’. More fundamentally, with the publication of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, the visceral, declassé antisemitism of Lueger suddenly acquired a ‘scientific’ basis. To hate Jews was natural, because they were different, indeed, they were a different ‘race’. To dislike those who were different was natural. During those days and really up to the defeat of Nazism, the view also existed that Europe too was made up of different ‘races’. Culture was a representation of race. Accordingly, the Latin, Slavic and Nordic cultures were all products of their respective races. The visceral antisemitism that many among the educated middle-classes had always felt, but never been able to explain or dare express, suddenly found its justification. With that, started the roll back of all the rights and responsibilities Jews had achieved over the previous forty years. Where this development ultimately led needs no explanation. Chamberlain who married Wagner’s daughter Eva admired Hitler, and Hitler admired Chamberlain. His writing had freed antisemites to hate Jews without having to apologise.
And back to today, we find ourselves in a situation where visceral feelings of prejudice searches for legitimate justification and finds it lurking in such corners of society as Diversity, Equality and Inclusion. Minorities and women are accused of being promoted at the expense of the better qualified. Newspaper comment-writers, and serious politicians have started to replace the bar-room ranters. Academics write studies and people, such as the afore mentioned Nathan Cofnas can spew out opinion as fact and then claim it was only an observation. It’s the Chamberlain argument of merely being an ‘informed amateur offering a personal view’. However, the likes of Dr Cofnas no longer makes the modest claim of merely being an ‘informed amateur’.
If Chamberlain can be congratulated for anything, I’m guessing it’s his view that people will always feel uncomfortable around difference – every difference, however, was something he put down to race. For him, ‘race’ was the silver bullet that addressed all the ills of the world. But it may be worth recognising that there is some truth in the gut-feeling and dislike many feel when confronted with difference. An acceptance of this fact may be the first steps towards removing prejudice. Yes, a homogenous English village may look suspiciously at a newly arrived family of Afro-Caribbeans. They may truthfully say that having them in the village makes them feel ‘uncomfortable’. Somehow, it never occurs to such people that a family of Afro-Caribbeans moving into an all-white English village probably feels even more uncomfortable.
And now we come to the personal. For everyone who says something along the lines of “You know, I don’t mind gay people, but they DO make me feel uncomfortable…” I can answer back with the observation, that as a gay man, entering any new social environment, the overwhelming presence and assumption of heterosexuality has always been equally uncomfortable. This was particularly true when I was in my teens. twenties and thirties in the less accepting decades of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The assumption of heterosexuality led to two outcomes: having to out myself right away, or having to deflect until outing myself became the only option. Do you think men who think other men are ogling them makes them more uncomfortable than gay men finding themselves being pursued by women? And of course, the same has to be said for gay women, who probably have more to deal with on that front than gay men.
And so, the undercurrent flows and can drag people out to dangerous regions. The dislike of difference will continue to look for legitimisation. We see the anti-gay movements developing already. Some can say it’s the result of gays and trans issues being lumped together, thereby de-legitimising both. It’s very easy to feel safe and even secure enough to form coalitions with groups that represent the very opposite of affirmation. Social media seems to be full of such provocateurs, such as Milo Yionnopoulos, a homosexual who is perfectly happy to liaise with groups who couldn’t be more anti-gay, or like the previously mentioned Ignaz Mandl and his advice to Lueger to run for mayor of Vienna on a policy of antisemitism.
It’s also worth recognising that tolerance always resides on islands that are smaller than we think. They’re surrounded by an ocean of intolerance. Europe has largely anti-gay Africa to its south, and an anti-gay bloc consisting of Russia and various Muslim countries to the East, not to mention the increasingly anti-gay movements that are developing in the United States. And gays may only be the canary in the coalmine. Women and minorities with darker skin are also being caught in the ‘undercurrents’ of the surrounding ocean. In the end, there is only one interest that counts, and that’s legitimacy. Second-generation immigrants who liaise with anti-immigrant parties are, in my view, throwing their own legitimacy into question. The same goes for gay men and women who throw their lot in with Christian nationalists or other orthodox religious or hyper-nationalist groups. Broader questions of what the individual is free to do or not do, earn or not earn, pay in tax or not pay in tax, contribute to society or not contribute to society must be secondary when one’s legitimacy is potentially called into question. It only takes a future Houston Stewart Chamberlain to find a justification for prejudice and the legitimacy of the minority individual dies.