Object #29
The composer’s baptismal certificate

Neue Freie Presse 20415 (30 June 1921), p. 5

Austrian National Library, Vienna 

“Our correspondent in Graz reports a significant summer event experienced by well-known composer Arnold Schönberg, who had chosen Mattsee bei Salzburg for his summer sojourn. The other day, the local municipal administration called upon him to produce documents proving that he was not a Jew. If he were, he would have to leave Mattsee immediately since, in accordance with a community resolution, Jews were not allowed to sojourn there. Although Schönberg was able to prove that he was a Protestant, he resolved to leave Mattsee. – It is hardly surprising, then, that the artist preferred to avoid further contentions with the municipal committees; still, the question remains as to whether federal laws can be so blithely suspended, precisely in Salzburgian Mattsee.”

Schönberg’s decision to devote himself to Jewish propaganda due to his recent experiences in the Salzkammergut was possibly prompted by a notice in the Neue Freie Presse which appeared directly below the report circulating in his group about his summer misadventure in Mattsee. The editors picked up on news from Berlin about a talk Albert Einstein gave at a Zionist function in the Blüthner-Saal in which he spoke of an initial incident regarding his commitment to the constitution of Palestine. On a journey to America, which served the Zionist movement’s propaganda, he had “seen for the first time in my life Jewish people” and “Jewish masses with undaunted national feelings.” “From his American experiences Einstein derived the absolute necessity for the Jews to become a people again.” Einstein had travelled to America in April 1921 together with Chaim Weizmann, the newly elected president of the World Zionist Organization and later President of Israel, and Menachem Ussishkin, the chairman of the Jewish Agency and, from 1922, chairman of the Jewish National Fund, to recruit supporters for the Zionist movement.
Einstein’s celebrity greatly increased the popular and media interest in the appearances of the Zionist leaders Weizmann and Ussishkin. Many thousands of Jews welcomed the three members of the Zionist delegation upon their arrival in New York’s harbor. The physicist explained to the press agents that his main concern was to give material and moral support in the establishment of a Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

In 1920 he espoused the rights of East European Jews in an article in the Berliner Tageblatt; they were being threatened with deportation or “confinement in concentration camp[s]” by the Berlin Housing Office due to the great housing shortage (Jew-Baiting in Germany, in Wiener Morgenzeitung 2/347, 9 January 1920, p.1, here p. 2). By the time of this open denunciation of political wrongs at the latest, he gravitated into the center of racist hostility; in February 1920, agitations by the German National Student Body were reported, which had disrupted Einstein’s lectures at Berlin University with antisemitic slogans. In August 1920, after persistent discreditations, he even became the victim of public attacks by right-wing radical students, who “surrounded him and shouted at him, ‘Down with this Jew! Jewish pig! Your throat should be cut!’” (The Baiting of the Inventor of the Theory of Relativity, in Tages-Post 56/198, 28 August 1920, p. 7). The attacks were the result of a campaign against Einstein initiated by Nobel prizewinner Philipp Lenard, who dismissed the general theory of relativity as “Jewish fraud.”

Cf. Therese Muxeneder: Arnold Schönbergs Konfrontationen mit Antisemitismus (III), in: Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 16/2019. Edited by Eike Feß and Therese Muxeneder. Wien 2019, p. 165–254