Jewish medical students in Vienna between two world wars

Abstract

In this chapter, Natalia Aleksiun offers a collective biography of a cluster of Jewish medical students from eastern Europe studying in interwar Vienna, many of whom left Europe altogether in the postwar period. As Aleksiun demonstrates, the Holocaust and the Cold War are two watershed moments that lie, so to speak, between the object of study (students in interwar Vienna) and the memories, localities and narratives of the protagonists. The global language of the medical profession was the madeleine that transposed and connected these former students’ postwar selves with their past. In this way, Aleksiun not only argues that it was the universality of medical knowledge that allowed her protagonists to bridge and translate ruptures of time, such as the Holocaust; she also explores how their memories of the Holocaust and of their pre-Holocaust lives were shaped by their actual locality, thus showing that global processes, such as the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire and the Cold War, were co-constituent of a memory-formation that is often understood solely in relation to the Holocaust.