Object #33
The community physician   

Refugee Morality, in
Salzburger Volksblatt 47/286 (15 December 1917), p. 6

Austrian National Library, Vienna 

The personnel responsible for driving Schönberg away from Mattsee – via variously weighted cooperation – consisted of
- officials of the local council: mayor Frank Gruber (Mitterhof host) and community secretary Paul Winterreiter (conductor of the abbey choir and the local band)
- functionaries of the tourism association: chairman Michael Neuhofer (master baker), clerk Haidenthaler (merchant), treasurer Franz X. Wildner (manager in retirement of the Lower Austrian Livestock Insurance Institute) and four committee members not known by name
- the management of the local mud bath: Arnold Mannlicher (community physician)

The establishment of a rightist milieu in the locality was owed to its community physician, among others. Born in Vienna, Dr. Arnold Mannlicher came to Mattsee in 1912 and took over the management of the mud bath facility the following year. During the ensuing war years, a German National turnaround occurred in ideologically unremarkable Mattsee due to encounters with Jewish war refugees, xenophobia and crude racial theories. Mannlicher advanced those developments in the media. As early as 1917, he had demanded the expulsion of Jews – “our ‘friends’ from Galicia and Bukovina” – whose “morality could have a toxic effect on our youth if [the Jews] were present for a longer time.”
The Salzburg local chapter of the Antisemite Association was founded in August 1921; the Mattsee chapter followed in 1925. In 1924, Mannlicher published his political biography in the association’s organ, in which he gave 1923 as the year his basic conviction began. 

“Now, because of my insight and conviction of the public danger of Jewry, I consider it my duty to devote the rest of my life […] to the service of combatting these dangerous foes of all peoples […] Dr. Arnold Mannlicher, Mattsee.” (Why I Became a Member of the Antisemite Association, in Der eiserne Besen 5/20, 18 June 1924, p. 3). 

Cf. Therese Muxeneder: Arnold Schönbergs Konfrontationen mit Antisemitismus (III), in: Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 16/2019. Edited by Eike Feß and Therese Muxeneder. Wien 2019, p. 165–254