Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (review)

Abstract

Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press, February 2004. Modernity is a notoriously plastic concept, susceptible to multiple definitions, a number of them seemingly perfectly valid. For Matti Bunzl, appears to be a relatively late phenomenon, and it is identified primarily with the bureaucratic regimes of moral and bodily control that accompanied the fashioning of the liberal European nation-state. Bunzl sees, and argues rigorously for, striking if not perfect parallels between the production, abjection and celebration of Jewish and queer minorities in the twentieth-century Austrian state, and the city of Vienna in particular. The perspective carries into the realm of ethnography a vital and tormented debate about the modernity of the Holocaust. Bunzl tells us in his Preface: Following Zygmunt Bauman, I read the Holocaust... as a quintessentially modern event, taking the exclusionary principles of German nation-building to its catastrophic conclusion. The nation had been imagined in constitutive opposition to Jews and queers; the Holocaust was designed to effect their complete eradication from the German (and Austrian) public sphere. For both Jews and queers, according to Bunzl, the dominant Austrian national narrative after World War II, which cast all Austria as a victim of Nazi aggression, fostered repression-effective privatization and silencing of the Jewish community, pathologization and criminalization of homosexuality-fundamentally continuous with the pre-World War II decades. However, in recent decades the situation of both these symptomatic Viennese minorities has changed considerably. Bunzl attributes the positive changes in part to an assumption of collective agency on the part of the Jewish community (strengthened by recent Soviet immigrants, and spearheaded by a generation born and raised after World War II), and to a newfound queer assertiveness modeled on the Gay Pride movement of the United States and other liberal democracies. At the same time, he stresses that these efforts from within the two respective minority communities coincided with a newly available public symbolic space, and with new reasons of for Austria to recast itself as a tolerant and diverse nation, fully ready and able to adjust its national identity in order to participate in the expanded and invigorated broader European community. Accordingly, Bunzl's ethnography stands, at least implicitly, within a long tradition of meditations on the tension between agency and structure, between conjuncture and function, in social analysis. Bunzl's ethnography comprises three parts, leading the reader to suggest at least a hint of a Hegelian sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Each part contains two chapters, one focusing on Jews and one on queers. In Part 1, Subordination, Bunzl effectively and sensitively portrays the quandaries of these two communities of difference in the postwar years. He notes, for example, that any possibility of an autonomous and collective Jewish voice was precluded by the way Austria's victim narrative equated the Jewish experience of racial genocide with the state's political disenfranchisement (38) while at the same time specifically Jewish commemorations were seen as interference with national identification. Here as well, Bunzl lucidly maps, and describes the workings of, various spheres of authority that constituted and reinforced the postwar Austrian body politic, including the church, the learned professions (especially medicine and law), public opinion, and the machinery of the state itself (61). In Part II, Resistance, Bunzl documents the coming out of Jews and queers into fin-de-twentieth-siecle Vienna. …