German Studies Review

Hillary Hope Herzog’s engaging, nuanced, and original monograph traces a tradition of Jewish writing in and about Vienna from the turn of the century to the present. Situating her work in the tradition of scholars who reacted to Carl Schorske’s groundbreaking synthesis of political and aesthetic analysis—represented for instance by Steven Beller, Paul Reitter, and Abigail Gilman—she looks more closely at the specific contributions of Jews to this seminal outpouring of human creativity. Herzog’s approach is admirable and inclusive, looking at Jewish identity not just as self-fashioning, constructed, and contradictory, which it surely is, but also as something whose terms were imposed by an often inscrutable and malign dominant culture and subject to an ongoing negotiation between autonomous individuals and broader social and cultural constructions of identity, and there was no shortage of these (Weininger, Freud, Nordau) in Vienna’s turn of the century. By focusing on writing in its various fictional and nonfictional modes, Herzog is attentive to different patterns of discourse and achieves an impressive breadth in her investigation. She argues that the social contract that bound Jewish writers to Vienna was both vexing and complex, though the terms of this relationship were inevitably ruptured by the Holocaust and Austrians’ complicity in annihilating Jewish life and culture: “From Arthur Schnitzler to Doron Rabinovici and Ruth Beckermann, numerous Jewish intellectuals have expressed the feeling that life in Vienna is untenable, while acknowledging that for them life anywhere else is unimaginable” (5). Plumbing this inherent contradiction animates Herzog’s study, and by taking an inclusive approach with respect to the authors who engaged with it, she is able to treat many who may not have received much critical attention while bringing new insights into those who have been more extensively treated in the secondary literature. Herzog usefully draws out many distinctions among the authors she treats, for instance, those who looked searchingly at antisemitism and its roots (Schnitzler, Bettauer, Mayreder), but who had a more ambivalent relationship to Judaism, and those who turned to a more in-depth and affirmative investigation of the religion itself and its attendant rituals (Herzl, Roth, Beer-Hofmann).

Herzog organizes each of the four main chapters—one each on the turn of the century, the interwar period, the Second Republic up to the Waldheim affair of 1986, and from then to the present day—by contextualizing the terms of artistic creativity, political conditions, and critical audience. Each chapter begins with a concise overview of political developments and social currents, the freedom of movement and expression and level of political antisemitism experienced by Vienna’s Jewish population, and the terms of publication and dissemination of the various authors’ work. While [End Page 437] treating some of the leading lights of this tradition—Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Kraus, Beer-Hofmann, et al.—Herzog includes as well original analyses of many authors who are relatively neglected in scholarship, such as Alfred Dessauer, Friedrich Torberg, Veza Canetti, Ilse Aichinger, and Hilde Spiel.

One area that is curious for its omission is the collaboration of Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in creating the Salzburg Festival. Hofmannsthal’s engagement with the Catholic-Jewish symbiosis in Austrian culture has been the subject of many and nuanced reflections (e.g., Michael Steinberg), and as an attempt to institutionalize this creative synthesis, represented an important attempt to bridge what was soon to become unbridgeable. By leaving out a discussion of not just the Salzburg festival’s conception, but also Hofmannsthal’s broader reflections, one senses a missed opportunity, perhaps.

A real strength of the work is Herzog’s conceptualization of physical space and freedom of movement as key interpretive concepts in discussing creative work: “Vienna is both a place and a concept for these writers. The city is both a setting for and, in important ways, an object of their intellectual engagement...