By Claudia Moscovici

Although Bruno Kreisky and Simon Wiesenthal were political rivals, I deliberately chose the title “Kreisky and Wiesenthal” for this article to highlight two very different ways of being Jewish in Austria right before and after WWII. As is well known, there couldn’t be two people of more different political and personal dispositions than Bruno Kreisky, the Socialist Chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983, and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter. Daniel Aschheim’s new book Kreisky, Israel and Jewish Identity (University of New Orleans Press, 2022) draws upon a wealth of primary documents as well as his own interviews with those who knew or worked with these famous men to shed new light upon their infamous feuds as well as upon Bruno Kreisky’s politics in general. This subject is right up Aschheim’s alley, who has been Deputy Consul General of Israel to the Midwest since 2020 and holds a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a B.A. in Government, Diplomacy and Strategy from Reichman University (IDC Herzliya). His book examines Kreisky’s luminary yet at times controversial political career as well as his well-publicized feud with Wiesenthal in order to probe deeper questions about the nature of Jewish identity (or identities), the role of post-war Zionism in the survival of the Jewish people, and the best way to preserve and honor the memory of the Holocaust. While sympathetic to Kreisky’s many achievements, Aschheim’s fair and even-handed analyses reveal that there’s not one normative way to be Jewish. As Kreisky’s and Wiesenthal’s own divergent responses to the post-war era indicate, Jewishness, particularly for Diaspora Jews, is deeply rooted in one’s unique personal and cultural experiences. In so far as one takes a given Jewish identity (and, by extension, course of action) as normative, one is bound to have the kind of tension and disagreements that Kreisky and Wiesenthal (in)famously had.

In many respects, Bruno Kreisky represents the epitome of the “acculturated” Jew. He was born in 1911 in Vienna in a family of middle-class non-observant Jews. At the young age of 15, Kreisky joined the Socialist Party of Austria.  When the Socialist and Communist parties were banned by Engelbert Dollfuss, the right-wing Chancellor of Austria from 1932 to 1933 and its Dictator from 1933 to 1934, Kreisky continued participating in the Socialist underground until he was arrested in January 1935 (to be subsequently released in 1936). He served time in jail along with Nazi party members who were also political prisoners and, strangely enough, forged an unlikely camaraderie with some of them. Although numerous members of Kreisky’s own family perished during the Holocaust, he managed to escape by immigrating to Sweden, where he remained until the end of WWII. When he returned to Austria in 1946, he reintegrated smoothly into politics and rose in popularity. A decade later, in 1956, he was elected to the Austrian Parliament as a representative of the Socialist Party and became its chairman in 1967. In 1970, Kreisky became the first Socialist as well as the first Jewish chancellor of Austria: two remarkable achievements, particularly coming on the heels of the Holocaust in a country where anti-Semitism was still quite prevalent and many former Nazi leaders and sympathizers reintegrated into the Austrian bureaucracy and political scene.

As Aschheim’s book reveals, Kreisky was able to thrive for a record 13-year chancellorship—eponymously known as the “Kreisky era”—by being true to his cosmopolitan background and forging sometimes controversial political alliances with conservatives to retain power. As is well known, for Socialists class issues are far more important than religious or ethnic allegiances. Kreisky considered being “Jewish” largely a religious identity. Of course, given that he was agnostic since adolescence and still regarded himself as Jewish throughout his life, his definition of Jewish identity was in actuality broader and more fluid than he often professed. His loyalty to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel was similarly complex and in some respects even contradictory.  While at times supportive of Israel, he had rather tense diplomatic relations with Golda Meir, the country’s Prime Minister, over Zionism in general as well as his decision in 1973 to negotiate with Palestinian terrorists in exchange for liberating hostages and changing the location of the Austrian transit camp for Jewish immigration to Israel from the Schoenau castle to another location. For him, the fate of Israel was not a priority and the existence of a Jewish state was not a necessity. Regarding himself as a Socialist Austrian first and foremost, Kreisky focused primarily on enacting a series of much-needed post-war progressive economic and social reforms in his country: including the expansion of employee benefits; cutting the work week to 40 hours; instituting a four-week vacation; and issuing legislation in support of women’s rights and equality. These measures were extremely popular and have a lot to do with the longevity of the Kreisky era.

While winning the approval of most Austrians, Kreisky’s views, as the Chancellor’s long-lasting feud with Simon Wiesenthal would reveal, proved to have some limitations not only when it came to foreign policy towards the state of Israel, but also when it came to remembering and honoring the Holocaust. Born in 1908 in Buczacz, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that subsequently became part of Poland, Simon Wiesenthal belongs to the same generation as Bruno Kreisky. But his trying life experiences shaped a radically different worldview and, above all, a much stronger sense of Jewish identity. When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Wiesenthal was living with his family in Lvov.  Along with other Jewish men, he was sent to forced labor. As historian Tom Segev elaborates in his monumental biography Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends (New York: Doubleday, 2010), Wiesenthal and his wife Cyla were subsequently transferred to the Janowska concentration camp and assigned forced labor at the Eastern Railway Repair Works.  Simon Wiesenthal used this role to secretly collaborate with the Polish Underground, Armia Krajowa, and share information about the German railway transports with them. In a roundup in the Lvov Ghetto, Wiesenthal’s mother was selected, transported to and killed at the Belzec concentration camp. By the end of the war, Simon Wiesenthal and his wife counted 89 of their family members who had perished in the Holocaust.

Wiesenthal himself miraculously survived several concentration and labor camps, including Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen, sometimes literally crawling on all fours from the pile of corpses back to the realm of the living. By the time American soldiers liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945, Wiesenthal was barely alive, weighing only 90 pounds and surviving on 200 calories a day. He would be haunted the rest of his life by his nightmarish memories of the Holocaust, describing in interviews gruesome scenes he had witnessed, such as Nazi soldiers throwing emaciated Jews off the cliff quarry at Mauthausen. Upon liberation, weak and emaciated as he was, he offered to help the American Counterintelligence Corps by compiling a list of Nazi war criminals as well as attempting to reunite what remained of the families of Jewish victims. Thus began his extraordinary career as the most famous Nazi hunter, whose information, persistence and constant presence in the media played a big role in the eventual captures of notable war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann (the organizer of the death transportation and deportation of millions of Jews), Franz Stangl (the Commander of Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps), and Hermine Braunsteiner (the sadistic guard at Majdanek and Ravensbruck, dubbed the “Stomping Mare”, who trampled to death women and children in the camps).

While their life experiences led these two notable Austrian Jews to divergent paths that didn’t necessarily have to lead to conflict, a feud between Wiesenthal and Kreisky was sparked in 1970. Wiesenthal claimed that four members of Kreisky’s cabinet had been former members of the Nazi party. Kreisky countered that Wiesenthal’s Documentation Center of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime was little more than a private, Mafia-like spy ring accusing people of being Nazis without offering sufficient compelling evidence. More egregiously, Kreisky accused Wiesenthal, who as mentioned had suffered and almost perished in several concentration camps, of being an agent for the Gestapo. For this, Wiesenthal sued him for defamation, a lawsuit that he eventually won in 1989, nine months after Kreisky’s death. The victory was mostly in principle, however, since the former Chancellor’s heirs refused to pay the fine. The viciousness of the heated disagreements between Kreisky and Wiesenthal, the most famous Austrian Jews at the time, as well as the rancor behind their mutual recriminations, shows what can happen when one becomes intolerant and normative about what constitutes the right “Jewish identity.” There shouldn’t be—and there can’t in fact be–one correct way of being Jewish. Kreisky couldn’t have achieved what he did—essentially rebuilding and regenerating Austria after the war—without his Austrian-focused Socialist program. He wouldn’t have even been elected had he not presented himself as an Austrian Jew rather than, like Wiesenthal, as a Jewish Austrian. And without Wiesenthal’s promise to himself—and, more importantly, to the memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust—never to forget their suffering and to bring their murderers to justice, many more Nazi perpetrators would have gotten away with mass murder. Worse yet, the Holocaust might have been absorbed into “acts of war” or “war crimes” rather than remembered as the Jewish catastrophe that we continue to commemorate today. Daniel Aschheim’s thorough, thought-provoking and well-researched book highlights the complexities and multiplicity of post-war Jewish identities in Austria as well as the contradictions of Bruno Kreisky’s own controversial yet very successful political leadership.