Arthur Schnitzler's modernist story Lieutnant Gustl (1900) describes the inner monologue of a Viennese officer who attended a concert. He looks around, spotting the pretty girls, and sees one he fancies, then notices her nose and notes, with apparent regret, that half the concert-goers are Jewish. It does not seem to have occurred to interpreters that the Lieutenant is himself Jewish, which is the most natural interpretation of the text. The novella is among Schnitzler's contributions which show in fictional form what anti-Semitism looked like and felt like in fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Frau Ehrenberg seufzte leise. “Es ist eine fixe Idee von ihm”, sagte sie zu Nürnberger. “Überall sieht er Antisemiten, selbst in der eigenen Familie.” Das ist die neueste Nationalkrankheit der Juden", sagte Nürnberger. "Mir selbst ist es bisher erst gelungen, einen einzigen echten Antisemiten kennen zu lernen. Ich kann Ihnen leider nicht verhehlen, lieber Herr Ehrenberg, daß der ein bekannter Zionistenführer war."
Frau Ehreneberg sighed quietly. "He has this fixed idea," she said to Nürnberger. "He sees anti-Semitism everywhere, even in his own family." "It is the latest national disease of the Jews", said Nürnberger. "I have only ever met one real anti-Semite. I can sadly not hide the fact, my dear Herr Ehrenberg, that he was a well-known Zionist leader."
That passage is not from Lieutnant Gustl, but Arthur Schnitzler's The Road into the Open. Edmund Nürnberger was a man of no religion and Jewish appearance. It is well-known that the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl despised Jews who were not inclined to fight for their rights, holding views which many gentile anti-Semites held, but with notable passion and commitment, so it is hard not to think of him here.
Herzl was a keen swordsman. Duelling was a mark of honour, open only to students and military officers, in late nineteenth century Vienna. Herzl had reluctantly resigned from his student society, in effect a duelling club, when they held an anti-Semitic celebration of Wagner. The exact rules of duelling, and of who was entitled to take part, were governed by an unofficial "Ehrenrat" or "Honours Council", and Herzl must have been particularly hurt by the Waidhofener Prinzip (Waidhofen Principle), settled in 1896, which stated that Jews were not entitled to take part in duels. This led to riots between Jewish students who were angry that pan-Germanist students were unwilling to accept challenges to a duel. The events are described in some detail in John W. Boyer, Austria, 1867-1955 (Oxford History of Modern Europe) (Oxford: OUP) 2022 Chapter 5, subsection "Stresses on the Systems of Equity and Access in Higher Education".
The argument was that Jews by birth had no honour to defend, even if they belonged to the class of students or of officers who otherwise had a monopoly on “honour”. According to newspaper reports, Jewish students in Vienna sued for "Beleidigung" (insult) in 1914 over the Waidhofen Principle, and lost. In one of the decisions the ratio decidendi was that duelling was a medieval European tradition which was not part of Jewish tradition, so they could not object to being shut out of it.
One of the most widely-read descriptions of the duelling culture is in Stefan Zweig The World of Yesterday Chapter 5 "Universitas vitae". A key idea was that only an officer or a student could duel because only those categories of men had "Ehre" (honour) to defend, and because only insults from those categories of people--men of honour--should be taken as real affronts. When Lieutnant Gustl feels that his honour has been fatally wounded by the baker's behaviour in the concert hall he considers challenging the baker to a duel, then says,
"ich soll mich ja morgen um vier Uhr schlagen... und ich darfs ja nimmer, ich bin satisfaktionsunfähig..."
"I should fight a duel at four o'clock tomorrow... and I cannot, because I lack the status to give satisfaction"
and a few lines later,
"Ich weiß, daß ich satisfaktionsunfähig bin, und darum muß ich mich totschießen..."
"I know that I lack the status to give satisfaction, so I must shoot myself..."
The often repeated idea (e.g. in German Wikipedia) that it was the baker's tradesman status preventing a duel does not fit what Gustl is saying. He is clearly saying that it is he who is 'Sastifaktionsunfähig' ('unable to give satisfaction') and that this has ruined his life. As an officer, the only way he can be unable to give satisfaction in a duel is if he is a Jew. It is sometimes suggested that gentile officers could also be excluded from duelling if they were not aristocrats, but there is no evidence for that. Evidence that the word always refers to officers or students who were Jewish is plentiful and hardly needs to be collected. In addition to Zweig's description, already noted, Schnitzler himself uses the same word in his autobiography Jugend in Wien:
"...hatten sich viele unter den jüdischen Studenten zu besonders tüchtigen und gefährlichen Fechtern entwickelt..und ihre immer peinlicher zutage tretende Überlegenheit auf der Mensur war gewiß die Hauptursache des famosen Waidhofener Beschlussess, mittels dessen die deutsch-österreichische Studentenschaft die Juden ein für allemal als satisfaktionsunfähig erklärte"
"...many Jewish students had developed into effective and dangerous swordsmen..and the embarrassing emergence of their superiority at duelling was the key reason for the famous Waidhofen decision, by means of which the German-Austrian students declared Jews as irrevocably unable to give satisfaction".
In short, the anti-Semitic Lieutenant Gustl feels his life has been ruined in a moment: the moment when he (mistakenly) thought himself dishonoured yet ineligible to recover his honour in a duel. This must mean he is himself of Jewish extraction. As a dishonoured man he risked losing his position as an officer. It is arguable that the Waidhofen Principle under which he suffered was an early step in formalizing an anti-Semitic impulse which had hitherto been largely a feeling in the air without much in the way of concrete consequences. This kind of formalizing of anti-Semitism, which of course grew after WWI, made the liminal Jewishness of a Herzl or a Schnitzler increasingly difficult to maintain.
Ultimately the context, Theodor Herzl's thinking, and student riots over Jews being excluded from duelling as described in Professor Boyer's "Austria", are about belonging, and about a share of ownership in the dominant culture. These are problems which university authorities again face in 2024, albeit the right to hold duels is no longer the focus. Lieutnant Gustl is a fictional representation of the inner world, of the madness, of a man who fears that through the strange incident in the concert hall and his failure to rescue his honour, he will lose his status as a member of the officer corps, so that life is no longer worth living. It gives in dramatic form one view of the anti-Semitism which gave rise to Herzl's Zionism, which divided Jewish opinion, and which was so much part of the atmosphere and culture of Vienna at that time.