In Europe

Blutes
’ was a ‘traitor to the German people’ and a ‘
Judenknecht
’.
    In the end, Schönerer went too far in his singularly un-Viennese fervour. In 1888, he and a few political associates barged into the editorial offices of the
Neue Wiener Tageblatt
, destroyed the presses of ‘this Jewish rag’ and beat up the editors. In liberal Vienna this could not go unpunished. Schönerer was sentenced to prison and lost his right to vote or hold office for five years; after that, he spent his time primarily in agitating on the margins of political life. But his influence remained considerable: anti-Semitism as a political goal, mass nationalism, blood, soil and German mysticism, the concept of
völkische
art, even the
Führerprinzip
– Central Europe was infected for good.
    The third Viennese figure to play a formative role in Europe was the Christian Democrat populist Karl Lüger, a caretaker's son. He had a perfect ear for the sentiments of the average German-Viennese citizen, the common man, the shopkeeper afraid of industrialisation and whatever else the modern age brought with it. As the city's mayor, he was also an early pioneer of urban socialism. He had a great many new schools built, he set up a municipal gas, water and electric company and an excellent tram network, he organised a food programme for undernourished children and was far ahead of his time when it came to public housing and urban renewal.
    Karl Lüger was a master of public relations; a term which, had it only existed in that day, would have fit him to a tee. He kept himself unsullied by the corruption within Vienna's administrative machinery; even his most fervent opponents had to admit that his behaviour was unimpeachable. In everything he did it was clear that he loved the roleof the good-hearted, jovial city father who showed up at countless birthday celebrations and jubilees wearing his chain of office, a mayor so concerned with ‘the little man’ that, in his own words, he wished he ‘could place a hansom cab at the disposal of every citizen who has had a few drinks too many’.
    In his populism, Lüger went further than most Christian Democrat politicians. After Schönerer's fall, he immediately adopted the slogans that had brought Schönerer such success: Aryan purity, the nationalisation of big companies that had ‘fallen into Jewish hands’, the struggle against capitalism, down with the ‘Jewish press’ and modern art. In this regard, Lüger's vitriol was legendary. In 1894 he shouted to the national assembly that ‘anti-Semitism will only meet its demise when the last Jew has met his’. And when confronted with his own statement that he ‘could not care less whether Jews were shot or hanged’, Lüger corrected his critic immediately: ‘Shot or beheaded! That's what I said!’
    In part, such popular opinions shared common roots with those in Berlin: the stock market crash of 1873, jealousy of more successful Jewish rivals, the longing for a scapegoat, an aversion to the flood of immigrants, and a fear of the modern age, seemingly personified by the Jews. In conservative, Catholic Vienna, Jewishness was synonymous with a particular mindset: freethinking, internationally oriented, nonconformist, without ties to church or nation – everything, in other words, the Viennese lower-middle class despised.
    The Jews’ non-national character gave rise to bad blood as well. They took no part in the sophisticated power plays between nationalities; they were really the only ones who had no nationality at all. Nor were they anxious for such a status, for they had no need of it. As Hannah Arendt rightly noted, the Jews in Austria were the darlings of the state par excellence: ‘Thus a perfect harmony of interests was established between the powerful Jews and the state.’ And in his celebrated
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
, Carl Schorske wrote: ‘The emperor and the liberal system offered the Jews a status without desiring from them a nationality; they became the supranational people of a multinational state, the only ones to follow in the footsteps of the old aristocracy.’ Nationalists such as Lüger and Schönerer wanted to see a 180-degree change: they hated the multinational state, and above all they hated the state's multinational darlings.
    The undertone of Lüger's anti-Semitism, however, was different from Schönerer's. Despite its vociferous nature, it was more opportunistic than doctrinaire, more social than racial. Lüger