Free From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism by Bruce F. Pauley Page B

was categorically opposed to antiSemitism, the Deutscher Allgemeiner Burschenbund (German General League of Fraternities). However, German university students were the largest single supporters of a nationwide petition in 1881 calling for the end of Jewish immigration. By 1890 German Burschenschaften no longer accepted practicing Jews; in contrast to Austria, however, they did admit baptized Jews. Even in the heyday of student antiSemitism in the 1880s and 1890s, therefore, German academic antiSemitism was somewhat less extreme than in Austria, much to the frustration of Austrian university students. 27
These differences became readily apparent in the matter of dueling between Jews and "Aryans." As early as 1881 Libertas had forbidden its members to duel with Jews. Then in 1896 the "Waidhofner Principle" was adopted by the Waidhofner Verband, an umbrella organization of panGerman dueling fraternities that had been established in 1890. This doctrine, named for a town in eastern Austria, stated that there were deep moral and psychic differences between Jews and Aryans; Jews had no honor or character in the sense that Germans (including German-Austrians) defined these terms. Therefore, students accepting this principle swore to refuse to give Jews the "satisfaction" of fighting duels with them. The practical effect of this policy was to enable anti-Semitic and nationalistic students to insult and assault Jews without the unpleasant prospect of having to fight a duel with them as a consequence. (The prohibition may have been induced in part by the rapid improvement
     

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of fencing skills by Jewish students, which thus deprived nationalistic students of activity in which they had previously demonstrated a clear superiority over their Jewish classmates.)
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The Austrian Burschenschaften wanted the Deutsche Burschenschaften, which included chapters in Germany as well as in Germanspeaking parts of Austria, to forbid all members from giving satisfaction to any Jew or person of Jewish origins. However, these attempts to persuade German universities to adopt the Waidhofner Principle enjoyed only limited success prior to the First World War. Although the more nationalistic fraternities refused to give satisfaction to Jews, they did not officially adopt the Waidhofner Principle. 29
Even in Vienna the implementation of the Waidhofner Principle was not without its difficulties. The government of Vienna tried to dissolve every corporation that adopted the principle even though dueling itself was actually illegal in Austria! Government opposition was overcome, however, by the organizations simply changing their names so that eventually the government gave up its opposition. More serious, however, was the refusal of the AustroHungarian army to accept the idea. Students who were also reserve officers were therefore faced with the choice of either dropping out of their fraternity or losing their commission. 30
The Waidhofner Principle also enjoyed little success in Prague where, as noted previously, student antiSemitism never achieved the same intensity as in Vienna. Pro-Jewish students continued to dominate the "Lesehalle" so that German nationalist students seceded to form their own anti-Semitic "Germania" organization in 1892. A turnaround in favor of anti-Semitic students in Prague, which also intensified student antiSemitism in Vienna, came in the latter part of the decade during the political fire storm caused by the illfated language laws of Prime Minister Count Casimir Badeni; these proposed laws would have put the Czech language on an equal footing with German in the Bohemian crownlands. 31
Despite their setbacks, student antiSemites at Austrian universities had, by the turn of the century, succeeded in making antiSemitism intellectually "respectable" among the very people who were most likely to reject it as archaic a quarter century earlier. 32 Nevertheless, it is possible to exaggerate this prewar academic Jew-hatred. The