Viennese Jews

Ludwig's parents could rely on a closely-knit network of relatives that greatly helped their integration in Vienna. In particular, Arthur and Adele could build on blood ties with the local members of the Mises and Landau clans, as well as with the Nirensteins and Kallirs. Ludwig and Richard would have lifelong friendships with the young Nirensteins and Kallirs. On weekends Ludwig often saw his maternal grandfather, Fischer Landau, whom he admired very much (his paternal grandfather had died before he entered the gymnasium). Summer vacations were spent in the countryside with the Nirensteins and other cousins.

Social contacts outside the network of Jewish families must have been rare. The old Viennese establishment remained closed to newcomers, and even the noble pedigree of the Mises family was too recent to be taken seriously by them. Ludwig would see the day when titles no longer counted (officially at least). After the destruction of the monarchy in November 1918, the new republican government abolished all titles and banned their use in print. Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises became Ludwig Mises according to Austrian law. Outside the country, however, he would continue to use the title that his great-grandfather had earned for his family.

The liberal era in Austria had reached its peak in the 1870s. While the following decades would see its decline, it remained strong enough to accommodate the Galician and Moravian Jewish migration to Vienna. All great metropolitan cities of the world derive their dynamics through the influx of new blood from rural provinces. Ambitious young people bring with them innovations in art, science, and business.¹² In the case of Austria-Hungary, the eagerness of the provincial newcomer was compounded by the motivation of the Jewish upstart who for the first time ever had the opportunity to integrate himself into a cosmopolitan society. Art and science offered opportunities for social mobility that Jews enjoyed in no other area. Business, the press, literature and theater, music and opera, and the sciences became the great vehicles for the integration of secular Jews.¹³

By the 1890s, the Jewish impact on Viennese culture could not be overlooked. William Johnston remarks that at the turn of the century, when the Jewish population represented less than 9 percent of Vienna, it was responsible for almost half of the overall artistic and scientific achievement. This overwhelming success was due in part to the absence of a ghetto mentality among the new immigrants. The Jews from Moravia, Bohemia, and Galicia had been living for centuries under an oppressive rabbinical order, but they had not yet experienced any similar constraints in their dealings with gentiles.¹⁴

In contrast to German cities like Frankfurt and Berlin, which had long had a Jewish settlement, Vienna first attracted Jews in large numbers after 1848. They came from small villages in Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia, where Jewish culture had been preserved in relative isolation for hundreds of years. These were Jews who had lived in the countryside. In Bohemia, some of them had been farmers, and few had been touched by city life. They had been small merchants, often trading between towns or providing financial services to gentile landowners. Anti-Semitism had been rare in these regions because the Jews provided services that the gentile lords and peasants wanted but would not perform themselves. The economic complementarity of the countryside had guaranteed the Jews security and modest prosperity.¹⁵

The Jewish families who moved to Vienna from the eastern provinces formed the nucleus of a new, progressive and liberal society. Vienna offered them the best schools in the world and equally unique cultural facilities. And the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the country's largest city offered progressive Jews the prospect of escaping the narrow confines of a life directed by the traditional precepts of their religion. The leading organ of this liberal Jewish immigrant community was the Neue Freie Presse, which relied on the financial backing of the Credit-Anstalt bank, the Austrian flagship of the house of Rothschild.¹⁶

Although the Miseses were more conservative than most other Jewish families in Vienna (Arthur was a board member of the Vienna Jewish Cultural Community, and Adele was very religious¹⁷) Ludwig grew up in an atmosphere that tended to equate progress and secularization, where prophets and saints were increasingly replaced by the inventors of engines and the heroes of philosophy, art, and science.¹⁸

For young Mises, the transformation of Vienna through the exploits of science and technology was a continual process of never-ending improvements. When he arrived in the city as a young boy, the liberal governments had already put their stamp on the streets and architecture. Everything was new; everything breathed the spirit of the time. As a young man, Ludwig saw gas lamps replaced by electric lighting, horse and carriage by motorized vehicles, the daily excursion to the public water fountain by new plumbing systems. He saw telephone lines installed throughout the city, and eventually saw airplanes taking off and landing in Vienna. The famous writer Stefan Zweig, one of Mises's contemporaries, claimed that the same progress seemed to manifest itself in social and political matters, for example, in the extension of suffrage and in pro-labor legislation. The new urban middle class came to believe that all social and political problems would disappear in due course. Conflicts between ethnic and religious groups would vanish and mankind would eventually reach the state of universal brotherhood.¹⁹

It was no accident that the overwhelming majority of the Jewish immigrants to Vienna were liberals. Happy to have escaped the religious and moral constraints of their rural hometowns, they tended to oppose the limitations of their new environment as well. This concerned not only the political order, which officially privileged Catholics of German ethnicity, but also the social role of the Catholic Church, whose prominence painfully reminded them of the rabbinical order at home.

Two issues united Jewish and gentile liberals: opposition to the Church, and the fight against censorship. The latter had survived from the times of Franz I, who after the Napoleonic wars had turned Austria, and Vienna in particular, into a police state that sought to monitor all the intellectual activities of its citizens. Police spies infiltrated the cafés and theaters, and concierges acted as informers. Foreign books had to be approved before they could be released on the Austrian market, and many foreign authors were prohibited. Newspapers were monitored as a matter of course and even theatrical productions needed the authorities' prior approval.²⁰ When the Mises family moved to Vienna in the 1880s, the stringency of the censorship laws had already faded under the impact of the liberal 1848 revolution, but the effects of the old laws on the Viennese mentality remained. Traditional city dwellers were reluctant to pursue what were possibly unbecoming innovations in business, science, or art. They were educated men and women of good taste and manners, but they lacked the initiative and drive necessary to realize projects against the resistance of a conformist environment. The entrepreneurial spirit came with the “impatient eastern Jew”²¹ from Galicia.²² These men cared far less about social disapproval than the old Viennese. Their rugged individualism transformed Vienna and western culture in the course of a few glorious decades.

Mises at about age 15