Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism/Design Dialog: Juden, Kultur, und Wiener Moderne ed. by Elana Shapira

Abstract

Reviewed by: Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism/Design Dialog: Juden, Kultur, und Wiener Moderne ed. by Elana Shapira Samuel J. Kessler Elana Shapira, ed., Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture, and Viennese Modernism/ Design Dialog: Juden, Kultur, und Wiener Moderne. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 475 pp. In this ambitious and beautiful book, Elana Shapira and a team of scholars, architects, and curators seek to understand the relationship between Jews, Judaism, the city of Vienna, and design in the century before World War II. Divided into five sections ("Narrating Jewish Emancipation," "A Jewish Renaissance—Opening Doors," "Feminist Manifestos—Women Designing Emancipation," "Designed and Un-Designed Identities," and "'In Dialogue'—Cultural Networks"), the essays address a diverse array of topics including public architecture and urban planning; interior design and decoration; schools, teachers, and networks of students and artists; and the newly imagined gendering (that is, the emergence of a feminist discourse) of symbols, spaces, and objects. In twenty-three insightful essays, the volume's contributors engaged with the question of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century Viennese Jews went about fashioning a particular "modern" aesthetic that was unique to their identity and position as both recently emancipated urban migrants and members of an ancient religious/national tradition long [End Page 94] established in Europe but ultimately—perhaps, somewhat, quite a bit, "yes, but"—from "the east." The overarching intellectual project of this volume is argued for clearly and persuasively by Shapira in her introduction: "How can [a history of] design contribute to an understanding of Jews' relationship to their social being and surrounding in Vienna, past and present?" (11). The essays in this volume, Shapira writes, set out to "explore the intricate relationships between buildings, designs, written text and people/networks and how they informed each other in the process of fashioning modern identities with concrete Jewish Viennese identifications" (23). Which, of course, leads to the questions of who are "Jews" and what is "Jewishness" (as this volume understands them) in Viennese modernity? In many ways, the nature of these terms remains somewhat undertheorized throughout these essays, although the through lines among a majority of the authors centers on identity formation in relation to increasing civil emancipation. On the whole, contributors use the terms Jew and Jewish as they please, mostly without problem. Yet as Shapira describes in her introduction, Viennese Jewry in the century before World War II was immensely and continuously self-reflective. It was Jewish "choices regarding which architects and patrons to collaborate with as well as their active coproduction in building, designing, and shaping a new Viennese cultural language that actually defined the Viennese Jews' sense of belonging" (12), she writes. Throughout the volume, one gets the sense (correctly, I believe) that the authors all agree that "being Jewish" was something deeply valuable and genuinely important for almost everyone involved, from patrons to artists to activists. At a moment when it seemed (almost) possible to forsake the particularity of Jewishness for something like cosmopolitanism, many influential Jews in Vienna did no such thing. This volume demonstrates how design (in all its guises) allowed Jews to experiment with new expressions of Jewishness in a uniquely Viennese way. So what, then, is "modernism"? In some cases, it seems to be merely a temporal arbiter (modern denoting from the early nineteenth century through the Anschluss). In other cases, it is philosophical (modern denoting Jewish self-awareness coupled with emancipation). In a different context, such an open-ended definition would pose a problem for the thematic coherence of the various essays, since one does not usually think of the Orientalist fantasy of the Leopoldstadt Temple (essay by Katharina Schoeller, 41–57), designed [End Page 95] by Ludwig Förster, the preeminent architect of the Vormärz, as part of the same "modernism" that motivated the refined simplicity of interiors by Ernst Plischke, one of the leading members of the New Building movement during the interwar period (essay by Eva B. Ottillinger, 413–26). Here, however, the looseness works just fine, for it allows individual authors the historical space to investigate broader themes relating Jewishness to modernism and also makes for some very interesting juxtapositions. For example, a discussion of the color palette employed...