Viennese Jews Research Articles

The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust by Elizabeth Anthony (review)

The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews After the Holocaust by Elizabeth Anthony (review)

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

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...

The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the HolocaustAnthonyElizabethThe Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the HolocaustWayne State University PressDetroit MI, 2021, 288, $36.99ISBN 978-0-81434-838-3

The Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the HolocaustAnthonyElizabethThe Compromise of Return: Viennese Jews after the HolocaustWayne State University PressDetroit MI, 2021, 288, $36.99ISBN 978-0-81434-838-3

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

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

THE COMPROMISE OF RETURN: VIENNESE JEWS AFTER THE HOLOCAUST. By ElizabethAnthony. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 271; photographs. Paper, $34.99.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 48, Issue 2 p. 279-280 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Judaism (Modern) THE COMPROMISE OF RETURN: VIENNESE JEWS AFTER THE HOLOCAUST Elizabeth Anthony. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 271; photographs. Paper, $34.99. First published: 10 June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15922Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume48, Issue2June 2022Pages 279-280 RelatedInformation

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

Few Jewish survivors of Nazi terror returned to Germany or Austria after 1945. Several factors weighed against return, including the absence of loved ones and memories of the indifferent, opportunistic, or brutal behavior of neighbors, acquaintances, and coworkers. Elizabeth Anthony’s examination of Viennese Jews who did re-emigrate considers the range of motivations that led them to come back. Her book, particularly commendable for its sensitivity to survivors’ voices, takes into account pre-Anschluss Jewish life in Vienna, hardships under the Nazis, emigration, deportation, and returnees’ experiences after the war. Anthony’s presentation unfolds via four main chapters linked by the notion of return and the draw of Heimat (homeland). These central components are bookended by an introductory section establishing historical context from approximately 1848 to 1945, and a final chapter examining the impact of postwar political developments on everyday Viennese Jewish life and Jewish organizations, as well as the influence of the...

Memories of Terror: Essays on Recent Histories

<i>Memories of Terror: Essays on Recent Histories</i>

Freud and the Émigré: Austrian Émigrés, Exiles, and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1930S-1970S ed. by Elana Shapira and Daniela Finzi

Reviewed by: Freud and the Émigré: Austrian Émigrés, Exiles, and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1930S-1970S ed. by Elana Shapira and Daniela Finzi Steven Beller Elana Shapira and Daniela Finzi, eds., Freud and the Émigré: Austrian Émigrés, Exiles, and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1930S-1970S. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 277 pp. Émigrés from Austria were one of the most influential groups in shaping modern British society and culture. Wherever you turn, you find an Austrian émigré: Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Hayek, George Weidenfeld, Rudolf Bing, Ernst Gombrich, and Peter Pulzer, to name just a few. If you expand it to the second generation and include descendants of "old" Austrians, then you get another fascinating list of hugely influential figures with some émigré background: Marianne Faithfull, an icon of the 1960s, was the granddaughter of a Sacher-Masoch; Stephen Fry, Ben Elton, Richard Curtis, and perhaps most influential of all, Tom Stoppard all have "Austrian" [End Page 139] Jewish émigré backgrounds. Modern British popular culture would just not have been the same without the Austrian émigrés. And then there is also Sigmund Freud, along with his descendants and followers. The immense achievement of émigrés in Britain has been well catalogued by Daniel Snowman in Hitler's Émigrés (2002), and the Freudian emigration has also been covered by such works as Freud in Exile (1988; edited by Edward Timms and Naomi Segal). The volume under review carries this research further, with many valuable contributions delineating the interaction of the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition with British wartime and postwar culture. Some of the larger claims made by Elana Shapira in her introduction are open to discussion, as I am not quite sure Freud and psychoanalysis were quite as dominant in framing the Austrian émigré identity and culture, the "Viennese community," as she appears to suggest. Nonetheless there is much material of great interest here for anyone looking for how "Austria" survived post-1938 elsewhere. The first topic, aptly, covers the relationship of the master, Sigmund Freud, with England, starting from his childhood. The initial connections were through family, his two half-brothers in Manchester, whom he visited as a teenager, but Freud developed a lifelong admiration of England as the land of freedom and, as Liliane Weissberg relates, even claimed to H. G. Wells in 1939 that since his teenage visit it had been "an intense wish phantasy" of his to become an Englishman. In this Anglophilia, Freud was like many other Viennese Jews, Theodor Herzl included, who loved the sense of liberty that the image of English parliamentary politics, among other factors, projected. Weissberg develops an interesting discussion of how Freud's love of England as the new promised land entwined with his increasing identification with Moses, as made evident by his famous, or notorious, last major work, Moses and Monotheism. Volker Welter provides a chapter on how Ernst Freud, the son of Sigmund who became an architect, attempted to provide homes for psychoanalysis in its new English home just as he had in Berlin, with the psychoanalyst's consulting room, couch included, attached to the psychoanalyst's home. Another Viennese, who never felt as much at home in England as Freud but who took up Freud's psychoanalytical approach in spirit if not in detail, was Stefan Zweig. As Werner Michler shows in his analysis of Beware of Pity, Zweig played fast and loose with psychoanalytic theory, sticking primarily to his own psychological insights. Nonetheless, Zweig, who greatly admired [End Page 140] Freud, was deeply honored to give a eulogy at Freud's funeral in Golders Green. The elaborateness of the eulogy perhaps gives an insight into why Zweig felt uncomfortable in England. As Michler dryly relates, Ernest Jones, the Welsh leader of psychoanalysis in Britain, had claimed in his own speech that Freud was "being buried to-day in the atmosphere he would have wished, one of stark truth and realism; in sheer simplicity, without a note of pomp or ceremony"; Zweig's Roman oration was completely at variance with this. There follow chapters on two more émigrés who traded in the psychological culture associated with Freud. Laura Marcus...

The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 1938-1945: Rescue and Destruction, Ilana Fritz

Reviewed by: The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945: Rescue and Destruction by Ilana Fritz Offenberger Evan B. Bukey The Jews of Nazi Vienna, 1938–1945: Rescue and Destruction. By Ilana Fritz Offenberger. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 321 pages. $29.99 (paper). This meticulously researched book explores the daily lives of Viennese Jews between Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938 until the collapse of his murderous regime in 1945. Unlike other studies of the Holocaust, it focuses on what the author calls the [End Page 207] “pre-genocidal” years between 1938 and 1942. This is not to deny that recent scholarship, particularly by the Historiker Kommission, has explored the despoliation, humiliation, and violence perpetrated by the Nazis on Vienna’s Jewish population in the months following the Anschluβ. Nevertheless, relatively little attention has been paid to the responses of individuals and families. Relying on letters, interviews, and archival documents in Austria, Germany, Israel, Poland, and the United States, Ilana Offenberger seeks to address this question in gripping detail. The author divides her study into nine chapters, six of which discuss the plight of Vienna’s Jews prior to the mass deportations to the killing fields in 1941–1942. Here she defends the much-criticized decisions of the Jewish Religious Community (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, IKG), under the leadership of Dr. Josef Löwenherz and Benjamin Murmelstein, to cooperate with Adolf Eichmann to manage Jewish affairs and facilitate the forced emigration of Austrian Jews. Through scrupulous examination of multiarchival evidence and postwar testimony, Offenberger demonstrates that there was no other choice. In May 1938, the ambitious Eichmann had re-opened the IKG, compelling its officials to assume the responsibility of making the Danubian city Judenrein. After establishing the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in August, he and other Nazi officials raised funds from confiscated assets and encouraged sporadic waves of mob violence that included numerous beatings, “scrubbing squads,” and even young women lifting their skirts to urinate on prostrate victims. During the Anschluβ pogrom, orchestrated in part by Hitler himself, over 500 Jews committed suicide, over 1,000 were deported to Dachau, and countless others imprisoned or brutalized in public. Some Jews, such as Ruth Klüger’s family, decided to stay in Vienna, while others remained in denial. The overall effect, however, was to persuade a majority of Vienna’s fissiparous Jewish community that emigration was their only key to survival. This collective realization thus enabled the IKG to move quickly in establishing priorities, registering assets, obtaining passports, arranging [End Page 208] exit visas, and collecting various Nazi-imposed taxes. Unlike their coreligionists in the Altreich prior to 1938, the author shows that Austrian Jews were motivated by shock, anxiety and hope, and not least by the IKG’s success in saving lives. While losing their homes, possessions, and even family members tragically left behind, between 1938 and 1941 some 136,000 Viennese Jews, two thirds of the Jewish community, found refuge abroad largely due to the efforts of the IKG and foreign aid. On the other hand, once deportations to the East began in October 1941 the cooperative relationship between the IKG and the Nazi authorities led unwittingly to the murder of Vienna’s 44,000 surviving Jews. The introduction of the Star Decree in September 1941, for example, did not come as a life-changing event, primarily because Jewish officials and residents had been desensitized. Everyone had become involved in such a “vicious cycle,” that even Löwenherz and Murmelstein believed that those packed off in freight cars to Opole, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz were destined to labor in the German war effort. Throughout this excellent book Offenberger skillfully intersperses personal recollections, letters, diaries, IKG records, German documents, and diplomatic reports of American consular officials to reconstruct the impact of the Nazi era on the lives of Jewish men, women, and children during the Anschluβ years. Her account of the difficulties in securing American affidavits according to stipulated quotas is balanced, fair-minded, and, in places, stomach churning. In one tragic case, Mrs. Harriet Portman in Waltham, Massachusetts spent two years seeking financial assistance to obtain an affidavit for a Viennese attorney...

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

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...

The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918 by Steven Beller

Reviewed by: The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918 by Steven Beller Ian Reifowitz Steven Beller. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 326, 5 maps, 25 b/w illus. Paper $29.99. ISBN 9781107464742. You might be wondering why a book on this topic, one whose title does not contain the word Jew or Jewish, is being reviewed in this journal. A fair question. It is not enough to answer by saying that Jews were pivotal players in this period of Austrian history, although they certainly were. The primary reason is that the author, Steven Beller, is a highly regarded scholar both of Austrian history overall as well as its Jews. This volume not [End Page 213] only pays more attention to Habsburg Jews than most surveys of Austria, but its author also reflects on interpretive aspects of their history, and fits them into his larger argument about the Monarchy. Beller’s first book was Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Beforehand, analyses of the explosion of modernist culture in Vienna and Habsburg Austria—a culture that helped shape the twentieth-century West—de-emphasized the disproportionate role played by Jews and those of Jewish descent. Beller countered that argument in 1989, and he distills his findings in this book, here placing them directly in the context of political and social developments in the Habsburg Monarchy. The most important elements of that culture, the author argued, “were developed against the national and establishment grain.” Jewish participation in this cultural milieu grew out of the “existential crisis” they faced after the victory of antisemitism and nationalism over liberalism in the Austrian political arena. (216) In his first book, and again here, Beller describes how Viennese Jews by 1900 came to be overrepresented in entrepreneurial fields and finance, having been excluded from owning land in the old system, and thus became the primary patrons of the arts. Their children became the majority in the highest levels of the educational system. In addition to their socioeconomic status, the Jews of the capital were placed in an “endangered and adversarial position” by political developments. The Habsburg Jewish elite were thus “cultural insiders and social and political outsiders,” and this gave the culture they produced “its ironic, and critical, edge.” (219) Beller connected this phenomenon to his broader argument about Habsburg history, in which he pushes back at the once revisionist, now largely dominant, argument that views the Monarchy more positively, as a home where, before 1914, its peoples co-existed reasonably peacefully. The Jewish experience highlights the reality that “nationalism and modernization [in Austria] . . . had losers too, including non-nationalized minorities such as acculturated Habsburg Jewry.” (219) Beyond this argument, which brings together what Beller has to say about both Habsburg Austria and its Jews, he recounts the major events in their entwined history. He also examines Hungary’s Jews, who, after the 1867 Compromise that essentially gave Hungary autonomy within the Monarchy, benefited from an arrangement in which those Jews who had previously adopted German culture instead acculturated as Magyars and identified as members of the Magyar nation. However, the author notes that post-1918 Hungary, shorn of two-thirds of its territory and all its linguistic minorities, no longer needed the support of its Jews. That Hungary enacted the first law in Central Europe capping the percentage of Jews in institutions of higher learning. Further examining the effects of the Monarchy’s demise on its Jews, Beller notes that in Austria, the postwar courts determined that Galician Jews living in Vienna at the end of the war were, despite their Habsburg citizenship, [End Page 214] not eligible for citizenship in the Republic of Austria because they were not German. Drawing parallels to policies that emerged before 1914, the author explained: “The racial definition of Jews in the interwar period was thus a development of Habsburg jurisprudence.” (281) Ultimately, argues Beller, the Habsburg Monarchy failed—and fell—because it could not embrace the so-called “Austrian Idea” . . . a sense of Austria having a special character, and indeed mission, of containing great diversity within unity.” (18) Many of those who urged it to embrace...

Moses Tragicus: Freud, Schoenberg, and the Defeated Moses: Freud Birthday Lecture, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna 6.5.2006 Translated by Pamela Cooper-White

Moses Tragicus: Freud, Schoenberg, and the Defeated MosesFreud Birthday Lecture, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna 6.5.2006 Translated by Pamela Cooper-White Jan Assmann (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Jan Assmann and Michelangelo's Moses [End Page 569] In the early 1930s, in the face of the increasing anti-Semitism and the barbarism that unfolded, there were two assimilated Viennese Jews who—independently and presumably unaware of one another—were founding fathers and lawgivers of their respective disciplines: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Arnold Schoenberg, the father of twelve-tone technique. Each, like the other, began to deal with his Judaism in relation to another paradigmatic founding father and lawgiver: the figure Moses. Schoenberg's opera "Moses and Aron" was written in 1928–32; Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" in 1934–38. Both saw themselves as revolutionaries, embattled professionally, and threatened existentially as Jews, so they saw in Moses a likeness to themselves, besieged and imperiled as they represented him in their works and encountered the lawless and inhumane evil spirits of their own time. Freud's Moses is slain; Schoenberg's Moses doubts his mission and sinks to the ground in despair. And in a certain sense, both the scientist and the composer failed with their Moses works, at least initially. Schoenberg succeeded neither in composing the third act as planned, nor in acknowledging that the existing two acts with the tragic conclusion might stand as completed. Freud admitted to the reader that his form of presentation was "no less inexpedient than it is inartistic [unkünstlerisch]. I myself deplore it unreservedly" (Freud, 1964/1939, p. 103). Readers, despite the brilliance of the text, appear to have agreed with Freud's confession. For over fifty years, the book's content was abandoned as outdated and formally unresolved. However, both works have had a glorious comeback. "Moses und Aron" has now arrived not only in the musical canon, but also in the operatic performance repertory, and Freud's Moses book has now, for about 30 years, been one of the most discussed books of the 20th century. Moses himself already appears in the Bible as an ambivalent figure, alternating between triumph and failure. In Numbers 12:3, we learn, "And the man Moses was very humble, more than all men on earth," while in Exodus 11:3, it is said, "And the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt." Incidentally, as far as I can see, these are the only places where the Bible, like Freud, speaks of the "man Moses." Freud, who had a very good ear for such dualities in the biblical text, went so far as [End Page 570] to split the biblical Moses figure into an Egyptian Moses and a Midianite Moses—one a great lord, popular leader, legislator, and liberator; the other a modest man, a priest and shepherd. Schoenberg also splits the Moses figure, distinguishing between Moses the thinker and Aron the herald. In Freud, it is Moses the Egyptian who is slain; in Schoenberg, it is Moses the thinker who despairs. In both works—in Schoenberg's even more than Freud's—the tragic aspect of the Moses figure and, in close connection with this, the ambivalent, even problematic, character of monotheism is expressed.1 It would be appealing to compare these two Moses works, but since this Sigmund Freud lecture is on Freud's birthday today, I want to emphasize and start with Freud's Moses book. (In the following, I will specify "the biblical Moses"2 when referring to the biblical figure, and then simply "Moses" when referring to the protagonist of Freud's book and Schoenberg's opera.) Freud's book, as I said, was mostly disregarded for fifty years, and then had such a glorious comeback in the late 1980s—one could almost speak of the return of the repressed—that today, after another thirty years, it is scarcely necessary to sketch more than the most general features of its content. Freud had already written about Moses in 1914, publishing this paper anonymously as "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1955/1914). In this essay, he interprets Moses' gaze and gesture from...

Egon Erwin Kisch in Pola. Kriegsreportagen vom Ende des Krieges by Ulrike Robeck

Reviews 261 the role of design culture in shaping the social condition of Viennese Jews. The volume presents a series of new approaches in historical scholarship and applied fields, such as public education and architecture, to examine the complex cultural negotiations, including aspects of gender and class, that enabled Jewish designers, funders and their clients to play a pioneering role in the creation of Viennese modernism. From the emergence of fin de siècle design culture, the volume traces the repercussions of the traumatic loss of the First World War and the Empire on Austrian architecture and design in its particular Jewish codifications. Divided into five indicatively subheaded sections, the book comprises individual chapters exploring the role of Jewish designers in creating industrial and residential architecture, as well as in designing schools and religious architecture, fashion and textiles to express a distinctly Jewish self-awareness. As one chapter argues, Orientalism, unsurprisingly, played a significant role in this strategy, given the influence of Japonism on art nouveau and the common view of the Viennese secession, contrary to its universalizing tone, as a Jewish phenomenon. Further case studies include an examination of the colour decorations at Freud’s practice at Berggasse, which are read as self-conscious significations of his middle-class affiliation and professional status, and his belief in the therapeutic potential of colour. Elsewhere in the volume, Freud’s theories regarding repetition compulsion are examined in relation to the quasimythical institution of the Viennese coffee house and its standard design, which literary figures such as Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth cast as metonymies for the lost Empire. Literary perspectives are further explored in the chapter on the journalist and Bambi author Felix Salten’s writings on carpets and home design. Albeit tentative in reference to design, another chapter examines Theodor Herzl’s and Egon Bahr’s responses to Viennese antisemitism. Printed on glossy paper, the volume is beautifully accompanied by blackand -white as well as colour reproductions of historical photographs, paintings and architectural sketches. Its content and attractive presentation make it likely to become a gratifying read and collector’s item for scholars, especially of history, architecture, literature and cultural studies more broadly, as well as for general audiences interested in Austrian and European design history. Cathy S. Gelbin Manchester University Egon Erwin Kisch in Pola. Kriegsreportagen vom Ende des Krieges. By Ulrike Robeck. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018. 148 pp. €29.80. ISBN 978–3826063800. This is the fifth in a series of short monograph publications by Ulrike Robeck, each presenting contextual close readings of texts by the Austrian-Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948). As was the case with her previous publications, this latest volume explores the original versions of texts which Reviews 262 are best known through their republication in adapted form in 1924, as part of Kisch’s famously self-stylizing anthology of his reportage, Der rasende Reporter. The trio of reports, which in 1924 were given the titles ‘Erkundungsflug über Venedig’, ‘Fahrt unter Wasser’ and ‘Nachtleben auf dem Polesaner Kai’, had originally been written and published in 1918 in the newspaper Bohemia, when Kisch was working for the Austrian-Hungarian military press office (Kriegspressequartier (KPQ)). In the final summer of the war he spent a short period reporting from the naval base at Pola in Istria (now Pula, Croatia), which, with its location in the northern Adriatic close to Italy, was a strategically important base of operations for the Austrian navy. The three reports respectively cover Kisch’s participation as a photographer in a reconnaissance flight over Venice, his experience of a battle exercise in a submarine and the harbourside nightlife in and around the officers’ mess in Pola. As Robeck notes, together they cover a trinity of elements — air, sea and land — but as they were not originally published side by side, and were not grouped together in Der rasende Reporter, this neat observation does not really offer much interpretative leverage. It is, however, true that Kisch saw these reports as providing interest that extended beyond the immediate wartime context. Indeed, readers of the versions published in Der rasende Reporter might be forgiven for missing this context altogether as they are presented...

Design Dialogue. Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism by Elena Shapira

Reviews 260 overwhelming — that the systematic ‘civilizing’ process conducted in BosniaHerzegovina was a ‘quasi-colonialism’ that was to be justified discursively by an ‘Othering of the Other’ (p. 230). As the Occupation exacerbated ethnic divisions, one controversial finding is that it actually prolonged the subjugation of Muslim women under Sharia Law (p. 286). (More generally, its legacy persisted in Yugoslav identity politics, with the stereotyping of Bosnian Muslims.) We are shown how the colonizer’s legitimizing discourse permeates Austrian records of the 1878 Occupation; even a rare dissident account of the ambush of troops at Maglaj is treated with scepticism here, as modulated by an inauthentic translation (p. 242). Others have noted the lack of Ottoman narratives from this era (p. 268). Aware of his own reliance on translations, Ruthner nevertheless searches for the authentic voice in his reading of the ‘first great Bosnian novel’ (p. 247), Edhem Mulabdić’s Zeleno busenje (‘Green Lawn’, 1898), of Milena Preindlsberger-Mrazović’s German-language novella collections that reveal empathy and solidarity particularly with subjugated women (Selam, 1893; Bosnisches Skizzenbuch, 1900), and — as the supreme example of ‘writing back’ (p. 293) — Na Drini ćuprija (‘The Bridge on the Drina’, 1945), Ivo Andrić’s masterly ironic re-telling of Austria’s civilizing mission in the region. Ruthner’s ‘provisional’ conclusion embraces Bernhard Waldenfels’ model of discourse in which the foreign (alien) is an independent partner and not a projection of the self (p. 311), but he ends by questioning whether Anil Bhatti’s concept of ‘likeness’ is the model that can resolve the aporias of hierarchical difference (p. 337). Gilbert Carr Trinity College Dublin Design Dialogue. Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism. Ed. by Elena Shapira. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 475 pp. €35. ISBN 978–3-205–20634–7. Vienna was the intellectual and cultural capital of the European fin de siècle, the nexus of wide-ranging innovations in psychology and philosophy, literature, drama, the fine arts and music, from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis to Arnold Schönberg’s experiments in atonality. Jews eagerly grasped the egalitarian promise the Austrian Empire’s supranationalism held out to its multi-ethnic citizenry, becoming a driving force within the city’s thriving culture. In exile from National Socialism in Brazil, Stefan Zweig would later idealize in his final work, The World of Yesterday, the leading contribution of Jews to Vienna and its cosmopolitan spirit, which in his eyes had transcended even class boundaries and inevitably rendered ‘every citizen [...] supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world’ (London: Cassell, 1944, p. 22). Taking Zweig’s assertions as her starting point, and following on from her own earlier monograph Style and Seduction. Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2016), Elena Shapira’s English–German bilingual anthology examines in broad scope Reviews 261 the role of design culture in shaping the social condition of Viennese Jews. The volume presents a series of new approaches in historical scholarship and applied fields, such as public education and architecture, to examine the complex cultural negotiations, including aspects of gender and class, that enabled Jewish designers, funders and their clients to play a pioneering role in the creation of Viennese modernism. From the emergence of fin de siècle design culture, the volume traces the repercussions of the traumatic loss of the First World War and the Empire on Austrian architecture and design in its particular Jewish codifications. Divided into five indicatively subheaded sections, the book comprises individual chapters exploring the role of Jewish designers in creating industrial and residential architecture, as well as in designing schools and religious architecture, fashion and textiles to express a distinctly Jewish self-awareness. As one chapter argues, Orientalism, unsurprisingly, played a significant role in this strategy, given the influence of Japonism on art nouveau and the common view of the Viennese secession, contrary to its universalizing tone, as a Jewish phenomenon. Further case studies include an examination of the colour decorations at Freud’s practice at Berggasse, which are read as self-conscious significations of his middle-class affiliation and professional status, and his belief in the therapeutic potential of colour. Elsewhere in the volume, Freud’s theories...

Looking and behaving: Sartorial politics and Jewish men in fin-de-siècle Vienna

Abstract The contribution of Viennese Jews to the cultural milieu of the Austrian capital at the fin de siècle is undisputed. Jewish women and men contributed to the social artistic, economic and philosophical centrality of Viennese culture. But what did Jewish urban, middle-class men wear and in what ways was it significant. This article examines the sartorial habits of two Viennese cultural and literary icons, Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and Peter Altenberg (1859–1919), and considers how men’s fashions in Vienna during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both facilitated and negated the assimilatory aspirations of the city’s middle-class Jewish population. A comparison of visual and literary accounts of Jewish acculturation and assimilation will offer a further understanding of the manifestation of visual ‘Jewishness’ and the heterogeneous Jewish identities present in Vienna during the period.

Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. Marjorie Perloff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xi+204.

<i>Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire</i>. Marjorie Perloff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xi+204.

Viennese newspapers and Jewish reading habits around 1900

The article argues that in Vienna around 1900 Jewish newspapers served as a supplement to general media. Although the Jewish press claimed in its programmatic outlines that it covered all the news that helps to promote Jewish life and further Jewish interests in the Habsburg capital, it pragmatically refrained from reporting on incidents the non-Jewish media wrote about. This was due, as I contend, that even orthodox Viennese Jews read non-Jewish newspapers. Three different sources confirming this assertion are provided. This indicates, as I claim, a close Jewish and non-Jewish interconnectedness.

Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945 by Doron Rabinovici (review)

Reviewed by: Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945 by Doron Rabinovici Tim Cole Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945. By Doron Rabinovici. Translated by Nick Somers. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Pp. x + 260. ISBN 978-0745646824. Doron Rabinovici’s study of the role of the Vienna Israelite Community (IKG), first published in German in 2000 and now available in English translation, is fueled by a desire to understand and explain the “cooperation” (199) of Jewish administrative leaders with Nazi authorities in post-Anschluss Vienna. As Rabinovici himself acknowledges, the book is largely “a description of what happened to the Vienna Jewish community between 1938 and 1945 and how it reacted” (147). Here it succeeds in sketching out the story of one of the more neglected Jewish administrative bodies under Nazi occupation. Describing the intricacies of the complex web of varied forms of cooperation, Rabinovici makes a valuable contribution to the field, particularly given that the IKG was “the prototype for a Jewish administration under Nazi control and a precursor of the later Jewish councils” (40). The IKG played a critical role in post-Anschluss Vienna in a wide range of spheres. On the one hand, it was active in organizing large-scale legal emigration, as well as in providing welfare for Jews living under an ever-growing set of measures that had serious economic impact. On the other hand, and more controversially, it was a critical tool in “the administration of extermination” (109). When Jews in the city were required to wear the yellow star, the IKG was made responsible for their manufacture and distribution. Over two days, IKG employees worked “day and night” (111) to make 176,000 stars from the yellow fabric supplied to them, and then sold them to the city’s Jews from morning to night at a cost of 10 pfennig each. As deportations commenced, the IKG played a critical role notifying those scheduled for deportation, as well as in clearing the collection points and providing food to Jews waiting there. Rabinovici’s conclusion—that “although the Central Office could no doubt have killed all of the Viennese Jews without the Jewish administration, the deportations and extermination would not have run smoothly without its collaboration” (119)—is one that echoes studies of other Jewish councils across occupied Europe. Rabinovici does point to differences of opinion within the IKG, as was the case elsewhere. Whereas one employee refused to issue the Jewish stars, another was unhappy—at least initially—about having to draw up lists of individuals exempted [End Page 690] from deportation on the grounds that they were essential employees. This practice signaled one of the more problematic aspects of the “cooperation” offered by the IKG. While the lists of deportees were drawn up by the Nazi authorities, IKG personnel could and did request exemptions for individual employees and others for various reasons, e.g., “imminent emigration, health reasons or the splitting up of the family” (117). In these cases, the IKG had “to find someone to replace these deferred persons” (118) from lists provided by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Such measures invited charges of corruption, and it does seem that some employees sought to save themselves by making donations. More generally it opened up IKG leaders—and especially Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, a controversial figure who played a key role here—to criticism of favoring some at the expense of others. Because of this lobbying for exemptions, Rabinovici places the IKG historiographically somewhere between Hannah Arendt’s damning critique of a collaborationist “Jewish leadership” in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and Dan Michman’s defense of Jewish Council “headship” as Nazi imposed (“‘Judenräte’ und ‘Judenvereinigungen’ unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft: Aufbau und Anwendung eines verwaltungsmäßigen Konzepts,” in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft [1998]: 293–304). As Rabinovici unpicks what the IKG did and did not do during the war, he is careful to note that they were no longer the elected representatives of Vienna’s Jews, or simply taking orders from the Nazi occupiers. Rather, he positions them as “an authority without power” (162), squeezed between fellow victims and the Nazi authorities with limited room for...

The quest for amusement: Jewish leisure activities in Vienna circa 1900

Numerous studies of Viennese Jews of the fin de siècle period depict them as closely connected with ‘high culture’ and science. Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, and other Jewish artists as well as intellectuals are taken as proof of this perspective. A closer look at the emergence of popular/mass culture in Vienna reveals, however, that Jews were prominent among its organizers, producers, and consumers. They built and directed the largest and most important amusement park in Vienna (Venedig in Wien), organized exhibitions of indigineous people (‘Voelkerschauen’), were among so-called folk singers, and ran music halls and theatres.

Suizid und Suizidprävention 1938–1945 in Wien

Beginning with the inception of suicide prevention in interwar Vienna, the paper illustrates how the high number of counselling centres contrasted with a discourse of selection. Despite the fact that suicide rates proved extremely high, suicide prevention declined in importance between 1934 and 1945. Suicide was increasingly attributed to the weak and the inferior. The massive threat to Vienna's Jewish population and the high suicide rates among Viennese Jews are also outlined. The paper concludes with a synopsis of V. E. Frankl's activities in the field of suicide prevention at the Rothschild Hospital as well as the concentration camp in Theresienstadt.