The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust by Elizabeth Anthony

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust by Elizabeth Anthony Bettina Brandt Elizabeth Anthony. The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the Holocaust. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. 271 pp. For many Jewish survivors, returning to their prewar homes was never a viable option. The Compromise of Return asks why those few thousand who did go back to the Austrian capital after having been stripped of their citizenship, forced into emigration, or surviving the camps, chose to do so. Elizabeth Anthony’s award-winning, beautifully written, and meticulously researched monograph stresses the social hardships and uphill legal battles these returnees faced in Vienna in the months and years following the end of World War II. Her book makes clear how challenging it was for Jewish survivors to return to a country with such a long history of antisemitism that for decades after the war would place responsibility [End Page 202] for all war crimes on Germany alone. At the same time, Anthony shows how and why these returnees were nevertheless able to continue to conceive of Vienna as their home and rebuild their lives there. Postwar Austria opportunistically positioned itself as Hitler’s first victim, a myth with ties to the 1943 Moscow Declaration and one the Allies mostly supported. It persisted on the government level and in the public eye until at least the mid-1980s. The Compromise of Return shows how wide-ranging the implications were of this myth, and how it affected Holocaust survivors returning to Vienna following the end of World War II. As Anthony explains, the victim myth made it possible for postwar Austria to sidestep any reflection on its own accountability. The country quickly adopted a policy of silence about its Fascist past, and did little to tackle ongoing antisemitism: during the de-Nazification processes most former Nazis were exculpated and quickly put back in (political) business, while the responsibility to fulfill Jewish claims for restitution and compensation was first dodged and then inadequately handled. As Anthony explains, the postwar Austrian government refused to “differentiate between any subgroup of victims” (202), thereby, de facto, providing aid to all (including to those who had been in the Wehrmacht) except for the Jewish survivors. The politicians saw no advantage in addressing the urgent needs and claims of the Jewish minority, which once had been 10 but now constituted less than 1 percent of the city’s population. Very few claims were successful, and many did not even try to get their “Aryanized” houses or businesses back, given the odds and the costs involved in these legal battles. Jewish returnees, as Anthony explains, also received no “significant monetary support” (65) until 1949, and even then, only those who were living in Austria and once again held Austrian citizenship were eligible for this particular money. For survivors, the implications of the victim myth—which quickly became one of the essential ingredients of postwar Austrian identity—were manifold. Those who had returned to Vienna from different parts of the globe (about 2,000 returned from exile) or after having survived the camps (approximately 1,727), in the hopes of calling post-Nazi Austria home again, had to develop, as Anthony explains, a range of coping mechanism with which to confront both ongoing and renewed antisemitism. These included having to learn “which battles to take on and which to ignore,” while living “under a government and among people that had never intended their return” (82). It also meant having to contribute to the general postwar Austrian silence about the Holocaust. Based on personal interviews with survivors, memoirs, and significant archival materials, The Compromise of Return fills an important gap in Holocaust scholarship by giving voice to distinct groups of survivors, each with different wartime experiences, who returned to Vienna for different reasons, and at slightly different times after the end of the war. Interacting with both the most recent and earlier scholarship on the topic, the book consists of six main chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The opening chapter stresses the complexity of Jewish Austrian Viennese identity after the end of World War I and discusses the historical context leading up to the Anschluss...