Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City

By Frances Tanzer

In Vanishing Vienna historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna.

Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna’s history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution—the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s. As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined “Jewish” culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism—instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction.

In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust—a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: May 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9781512825350

Book preview

Vanishing Vienna

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

Series Editors:

Beth Berkowitz, Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Vanishing Vienna

Modernism, Philosemitism, and

Jews in a Postwar City

Frances Tanzer

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2534-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2535-0

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

For my grandpa, who was always waiting,

Irving Tanzer (1926–2017)

Contents

Prelude

Introduction

ACT I. THE NAZI EPOCH: ERASURE AND DISPERSAL

Chapter 1. Vienna Without the Jews

Chapter 2. Emigrating Vienna

ACT II. REMIGRATION IN POSTWAR AUSTRIA

Chapter 3. The Problem of Jewish Return: Antisemitism and Cultural Reconstruction

Chapter 4. Redemptive Modernism and Philosemitism Without Jews

Chapter 5. Humor Returns

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Prelude

German troops crossed the Austrian border the morning of March 12, 1938. Instead of encountering resistance from the local population, enthusiastic crowds rushed to greet them. Most Austrians saw the arrival of German soldiers as the realization of the long-sought ideal of Anschluss, an intellectual and political tradition that proposed the dissolution of boundaries between Germany and Austria.¹ In contrast to the carefully cultivated postwar narrative of Austrian victimization at the hands of the National Socialists, popular support for Anschluss could be seen immediately after Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg announced that German troops would reach Austria within an hour and would be met with no resistance.

The Austrians who subsequently took to the streets hardly saw the events of March 12 as the occupation of Austria by a foreign power. From the perspective of these enthusiastic crowds, the Anschluss was a popular rising and an internal transfer of power from the Austrofascists, led by Schuschnigg, to the Austrian Nazis, who had been banned since June 1933.² Despite the pervasiveness of antisemitism and the Anschluss concept, the widespread enthusiasm for National Socialism in 1938 surprised many Viennese Jews. The cabaret performer Georg Kreisler, who was sixteen at the time of the Anschluss, explained the suddenness of the political transformation: From one day to the next, the city was filled with swastika flags. Naturally there was antisemitism before, but it was a private affair. If someone was an antisemite, that was the end of it. With Hitler it came suddenly from the State. As a Jew, one could no longer go to the cinema and could be arrested or beaten on any street.³

Revelations of the Nazi affiliations of friends, colleagues, and neighbors punctuated the Jewish experience of the Anschluss. From his window, George Clare saw an Austrian policeman, a swastika brassard already over his dark green uniform sleeve, his truncheon in his fist, lashing out with berserk fury at a man writhing at his feet. Instantly, Clare recognized the policeman: I had known him all my life. I had seen him on traffic duty at the nearby crossroads, had chatted with him when we occasionally met in the shops around the corner, had seen him give father a polite salute in the street. Within minutes of Schuschnigg’s farewell that policeman, yesterday’s protector, had been transformed into tomorrow’s persecutor and tormenter.⁴

Similarly, the transformation of a long-term employee into a National Socialist—seemingly overnight—left the antifascist cabaret director and performer Stella Kadmon reeling. When her theater’s handyman offered to walk her and her mother home from the theater on the first day after the Anschluss, they happily accepted the offer knowing the danger of walking alone as two Jewish women associated with antifascist politics. On the walk from the theater to their apartment, the handyman informed the Kadmon women that he had been an illegal member of the National Socialist party since 1928. He knew that they opposed National Socialism as Jews and anti-fascists. Still, he wanted to make sure that they understood that he believed the political upheaval would be good for all Austrians.⁵

Artists were not immune to such transformations. Cabaret performer and writer Rudolf Weys registered his shock that the members of the cabaret, especially those of socialist and antifascist persuasion, did not present a unified front in the face of the Anschluss and Aryanization. When his supposedly antifascist and social democratic cabaret troupe Literatur am Naschmarkt held a meeting in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, Weys noted that some of the so-called leftist cabaret performers arrived in the SS uniform or sporting the swastika.⁶

It was not the case that Viennese Jews were naive or delusional in the face of the rising threats of the Nazi epoch. Updates from Germany were current and persistent: in addition to its close proximity to the unfolding consequences of National Socialism in power, Vienna had served as one of the first places of refuge for German Jews fleeing National Socialism after 1933. Even against this backdrop of National Socialism in Germany and far-right violence at home, Viennese Jews had good reason to trust many of their non-Jewish friends, colleagues, and neighbors. The recent upheavals rested atop experiences of intimate collaboration, cohabitation, and coexistence in the city.

The shock of Viennese Jews regarding the local responses to the Anschluss is a testament to their radically and instantaneously transformed position within their city. The Jewish population of Vienna was dramatically and swiftly reduced following the Anschluss.⁷ Many Jews sought paths out of Nazi Europe and by the fall of 1941 deportations of Jews to concentration camps and killing centers had accelerated. While many non-Jewish Austrians collaborated on the effort to create a Vienna without Jews, Jewish artists, popular performers, and cultural workers were stripped of the right to shape and participate in Viennese culture. Immediately after the Anschluss, Karl Farkas was forced to abandon his theatrical engagements at the Wiener Burgtheater, the Wiener Stadttheater, and the Kabarett Simpl. He fled to Brünn, eventually making his way to the United States through the so-called Spanish Route. In the moments before he boarded a ship from Portugal to the United States, Farkas penned a bitter farewell:

Once you gave me acclaim

Let me perform, published me—

Today your old reputation is sick . . .

You spat me into the sea . . .

I am stepping into a new life

Over the gangways . . .

In wisps of fog the coast dies⁸

Farkas described his departure from Europe as nothing less than a death. It was not only the death of the continent but also of his professional and cultural status as a celebrated popular performer.

Similarly, his colleague piano humorist Hermann Leopoldi was made keenly aware of the transfer of power underway when he attempted to escape across the Czechoslovak border with his musical and romantic partner, Betja Milskaja just after the Anschluss. The Czech border patrol stopped them, promptly seized their passports, and forced the couple to exit the train. When Leopoldi and Milskaja returned to Vienna’s Nordbahnhof, they were arrested and set free only when they were able to prove that the reason for their travel was not to escape but rather to perform at an engagement in Brünn. As Leopoldi left the train station, he said to Milskaja that it would be the last time that his name would be of service.⁹ The privileges associated with his celebrity bore little weight in the new order. For Leopoldi, forced removal from Central Europe commenced with professional and social isolation that he experienced before fleeing the continent. Leopoldi’s experience reframes displacement as a process that begins before an individual ever crosses a border with dispossession, transformed status, and the reduction of rights. The examples given above draw us into an important fact of Viennese history: as elsewhere, the Holocaust not only devastated Vienna’s Jewish community. It also altered the lives of those non-Jewish Viennese who remained in the city.

*  *  *

By the conclusion of World War II, Viennese Jews were but a fraction of the robust community that had formed 10 percent of the city and numbered about 170,000 before 1938, plus an additional 80,000 of individuals with a mixed Jewish and Christian background. By 1947, the number of Jews in Austria numbered about 45,000, but 35,000 of them resided in displaced persons (DP) camps and were searching for paths out of Europe. By the end of the 1960s, the number of Jews registered as members of the Jewish Community of Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) hovered between 6,000 and 8,000—about 5 percent of the pre-Nazi Jewish population of the city.¹⁰ The demographic transformation is all the more startling when we take into account the significance of European Jews for the pre-Nazi social reality, cultural life, and symbolic landscape in a city like Vienna.¹¹

The Holocaust destroyed a network of intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews together with the culture produced from that complex interweaving of lives and fates. If Jews and non-Jews had cocreated their identities and urban culture before 1938, then genocide, deportation, and forced migration of the Jewish population required a fundamental revision of Viennese culture and identity for Jews and non-Jews. Under National Socialism, Vienna underwent a brutal self-amputation. This book tells the story of the aftermath in which the amputated limb was at once foundational, constantly thematized—even sometimes romanticized—and the result of the mostly unacknowledged complicity of the Austrian population. The Viennese were left haunted by this phantom limb but unwilling to directly confront its absence or their responsibility for its removal.¹²

Meanwhile, March 12, 1938, created two Viennas: the first belonged to refugees in their far-flung exile; the second developed without Jews in the Ostmark. The postwar story of Viennese urban culture is a tale about an often-invisible confrontation between these two worlds, their synthesis, and the cultural universe they produced. In other words, Jewish and non-Jewish relations, if you can speak of them after 1945, continued to shape Viennese culture in a moment defined by Jewish absence.

Introduction

An impatient crowd of nearly two hundred gathered at Vienna’s Westbahnhof in 1949 for a special occasion: the Jewish popular performer Armin Berg was returning to Vienna after eleven years of exile in New York. Excitement about his return simmered in the city for several weeks before his arrival thanks, at least in part, to a widely disseminated poster featuring Berg’s crown-bedecked head with the exclamation, the king of comedy returns!¹ Previously no one had seemed terribly bothered by his long absence—since the Anschluss. The prospect of Berg’s return, however, made the crowd at the train station impatient. They demanded that the famous and unforgettable Armin Berg perform for them immediately. I am no train station comedian! Berg quipped, with characteristic wit.² Anyone who wished to see him could purchase a ticket to his premier at Simpl, the cabaret troupe that he intended to reinvigorate. The Viennese heeded his call. When Berg finally appeared on stage for his sold-out premiere, the audience’s standing ovation prevented him from performing for a full five minutes.³ The welcome Berg received in postwar Vienna provides us with a window into a startling zeal for Jewish return in a context better-known for its antisemitism and unwelcoming attitude toward survivors. What, then, was the meaning of this Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) in a context of profound Jewish absence and continued antisemitism?

It is not for nothing that nearly every scholarly account of Jewish remigration focuses on the postwar encounter with intense antisemitism.⁴ Austrians frequently blamed Jews for the war, its disastrous aftermath, and especially the Allied occupation.⁵ Jews who attempted to regain Austrian citizenship after the end of the war encountered an impenetrable bureaucracy and seemingly endless hurdles. Meanwhile, the recovery of looted property was near impossible in the decades immediately following World War II.⁶ Even celebrities like Berg faced challenges reestablishing themselves in their former home: unable to reclaim his pre-Nazi apartment, which had been Aryanized in 1938, Berg resided in a hotel until he finally secured a flat in 1952 with the assistance of the municipal government.⁷ Upon his return, in other words, Berg encountered a Janus-faced city that celebrated him in public but showed no interest in restoring his property and initially did little to encourage the comedic star’s permanent return to the city.

These two faces of Vienna reflect a seeming paradox at the very heart of postwar urban culture: few Austrians wished to return Vienna’s Jewish population as it had been before 1938. Meanwhile, many politicians, officials, and cultural figures hoped to revive the urban and modern version of the city that had been strongly associated with a real and imagined Jewish presence. This latter effort apparently required the selective or temporary presence of Jewish artists, like Berg, or Jewish-coded cultural materials, such as the cabaret or modernism in the visual arts—two areas this book investigates. From this perspective, antisemitic erasure and exclusion and a philosemitic desire to restore a symbolic Jewish presence in Austrian society were not contradictory. As this book demonstrates, the two inclinations were deeply interconnected. The ambivalence toward Jewish presence after 1945 points to a surprising realization: a discourse of Jewish vanishing and reappearance, linked philosemitism and antisemitism, exclusion and inclusion, Jews and Austrians. This interrelation between philosemitism and antisemitism, with its ambiguous atmosphere, helped to redefine Viennese culture in the era of its postwar reconstruction.⁸

Philosemitism and antisemitism had been essential components of European culture since the nineteenth century. In Central Europe, antisemitism and philosemitism formed two sides of a powerful discourse that evaluated urban culture using tropes of Jewish difference and fantasies of Jewish presence and absence. However forceful, such stereotypes had little to do with the actual presence or absence of Jews. While antisemitic antimodernists contrasted Jews, modernism, and urban culture with authentic nationalism, philosemitic promodernists often celebrated a Jewish presence, which they believed facilitated cosmopolitanism and a dynamic cultural sphere.

The Nazi state delegitimized any positive assessment of Jewishness, no matter how stereotypical. But after 1945, philosemitism became a core component of cultural reconstruction and Austrian redemption.⁹ The change was gradual: indeed, first came silence. After 1945, Jews were hardly mentioned in public discussion for fear of raising accusations of antisemitism. They were instead invoked through their absence or the use of stereotypes, now with terms like Jewishness or Jews excised. The paradoxical prominence and invisibility of both antisemitism and philosemitism after 1945 signaled and helped to produce a changed postwar order.¹⁰ Artifacts that were previously deemed racially and culturally inferior, became emblematic of authentic Austrian culture.

In seeking to delimit this aspect of cultural reconstruction, this book focuses especially on Jewish-coded cultural materials, such as the coffeehouse, the cabaret, Viennese modernism, and representations of the city itself. Such relics likewise offered an opportunity to restore an Austrian past allegedly free of German or Nazi association. In contrast to their prior marginal, avant-garde, and outsider status, Austrians transformed the (usually imagined) Jewish attributes of these relics into redemptive signs, and these arenas became evidence of Austria’s democratic, cosmopolitan, and European potential. This philosemitic perspective found expression across Austria’s postwar political spectrum, including the three major postwar parties: Social Democrats, Communists, and especially Christian Democrats. Nevertheless, even with its variety of proponents, the postwar longing for the cosmopolitan past represented a conservative desire: it involved bringing an unruly urban experience and its cultures of criticism into a national project of redemption that resisted criticism, especially of Austrian complicity during the Nazi period.

Jewish Modernism

The sticky discourse of Jewish modernism tosses and turns at the center of this account and the paradoxes it attempts to unravel.¹¹ Jews became spectral figures in this discourse, which fantasized and fulminated about their supposed dominance in modern and urban culture. This line of thought was pervasive. Many Central Europeans, including Jews, simply assumed that there was some connection between Jews, modernism, and the city, often without feeling compelled to elaborate.

Jewish modernism proposes that modernism is Jewish, and yet that modernism’s Jewishness is somehow hidden and needs to be revealed.¹² In turn, Central Europeans revealed modern cultural products and urban spaces as Jewish in order to pass judgement on them. For instance, though the modernist painter Gustav Klimt was not Jewish, he was often accused by his detractors of representing a so-called Jewish taste.¹³ In the interwar period, this discourse, as Lisa Silverman makes clear, presented the modern city as a Jewish—and therefore foreign—space, defined in opposition to the authentic Austrian nation.¹⁴

To be sure, a number of Jews really did participate—together with their non-Jewish counterparts—in the evolution of the modern city. Though Viennese Jews comprised a diversity of social classes, linguistic backgrounds, professions, and political perspectives, a prominent subset played a fundamental role in shaping the urban modernity of a city known for its coffeehouses, cabarets, and modernist experimentation in arts and design. In Vienna, Jews made careers as artists and performers, art dealers, curators, and restaurant owners, among other professions. In certain fields, like the cabaret, Jews were overrepresented as performers.¹⁵ Many others patronized coffeehouses, attended plays, and visited art exhibitions. These venues provided spaces for Jews to think through questions that were important to them and their coreligionists.¹⁶ They were also zones of intense, intimate interaction between Jews and non-Jews as they cocreated the modern city and its culture.¹⁷ In short, Jewish and non-Jewish interaction was a characteristic feature of urban culture. Reconstructing urban culture after 1945 would mean encountering the challenges, usually impossibility, of this type of intimacy, as well as the persistence of stereotypes and interpretative frameworks that linked Jewish presence to modern and urban cultures.

The City Without Jews

Berg’s return, in fact, seemed to bring to life his own performance in one of the key texts of this discourse of Jewish modernism: the 1924 film adaptation of Hugo Bettauer’s satirical novel The City Without Jews (1922), in which Berg appeared in the role of Isidor the commissioner.¹⁸ The tale envisioned the realization of the dreams of antisemites to have the city’s large, integrated Jewish minority removed from Vienna. At the time of publication, this was both an unlikely scenario and a counterfactual narrative based on the proposals of the infamously antisemitic mayor Karl Lueger and, more directly, the priest and parliamentary representative Joseph Scheicher, whose book Aus dem Jahre 1920: Ein Traum fantasized about an Austria without Jews.¹⁹

Bettauer’s novella begins with the electoral success of the antisemitic Christian Socialist party. The new chancellor, Dr. Schwerdtfeger, blames Jews for Vienna’s economic decline and announces legislation that would expel all Jews from the city within the year. The legislation passes with overwhelming popular support. The results, however, defy the expectations of Schwerdtfeger and his antisemitic supporters. Rather than improving the economic, social, and cultural life of the city, the absence of the Jewish minority transforms Vienna into a provincial backwater. Financial markets crumble; simple beer halls replace the city’s beloved coffeehouses; apart from the opera, theaters lack innovative performances.

It is the Viennese Jewish protagonist, Leo Strakosch, who is finally able to reverse the legislation. In order to be reunited with his gentile lover, he sneaks into the city disguised as a Frenchman and initiates a campaign to return Jews. The closing scene of the novella resembles the real-life celebration of Berg’s arrival in 1949: the mayor of Vienna greets the first returning Jew with adoration. My beloved Jew! he exclaims, having apparently realized the crucial role that the Jewish minority plays in the city.²⁰ To be sure, the protagonist only achieves the return of Jews to the city by fulfilling the antisemitic stereotypes that the non-Jewish Viennese held of them: foreign, clever, and duplicitous, having temporarily disguised his Jewish identity. Bettauer’s account, then, condemns fantasies of Jewish absence and presence and reveals the cyclical nature of expulsion and return, of antisemitism and philosemitism, which shaped Vienna’s culture and politics.²¹

Die Stadt ohne Juden was a popular success across interwar Central Europe at its time of publication. Bettauer’s satire inspired Hans Breslauer’s 1924 silent film as well as a version set in Berlin.²² The work’s popularity stemmed both from the outrageousness of its premise in a city where Jews made up 10 percent of the population and from Bettauer’s participation in this pervasive central European discourse that assessed modern culture in terms of Jewish presence and absence.

From Satire to Nostalgia

Whereas Bettauer’s satire functioned at the level of cultural criticism and discourse at the time of its publication, after 1938 it transformed into a nostalgic lamentation and premonition of the real and brutal demographic transformation of Vienna due to expulsion, deportation, and the Holocaust. It was a transformation underscored by Bettauer’s own assassination by the National Socialist dental student Otto Rothstock in 1925.

If satire and the critical modernism of the fin de siècle grew out of the everyday experience of urban life, Viennese nostalgia emerged as the result of displacement.²³ Nostalgia became the dominant aesthetic language for engaging with Viennese culture in exile and for thinking about the question of Jewish presence, which had so long shaped perceptions of the city. Stefan Zweig, the most famous representative of Viennese nostalgia, deemed Jews responsible for the city’s cultural innovation in his posthumously published memoir, Die Welt von Gestern (1943). Viennese Jews, he explained, had become artistically productive although not in a specifically Jewish way; rather, through a ­miracle of understanding, they gave to what was Austrian, and Viennese, its most intensive expression.²⁴ Zweig found the Jewish bourgeoisie so entangled with and essential to the cultural life of the city that when a single attempt was made in the anti-Semitic period to found a so-called National theater, there were no playwrights or actors or audiences available; after a few months the ‘National theater’ failed miserably, and that example first made it clear that nine-tenths of what the world of the nineteenth-century celebrated as Viennese culture was in fact culture promoted and nurtured or even created by the Jews of Vienna.²⁵ Writing in exile and understandably concerned with a tangible absence, Zweig proposed that a Viennese culture without the Jews defied logic and historical reality.

In 1956 the German literary scholar Harry Zohn, writing from the United States, expanded this exile nostalgia to explain his perception of cultural decline and provincialization in the postwar city. He characterized Die Stadt ohne Juden as a sort of inverted utopia describing Vienna without Jews and the subsequent collapse of the economic and cultural life of the city. Zohn explained that Bettauer’s imagined scenario of 1922 had become reality three decades later. Vienna, he lamented, is marked by the provincialism of daily life, the brutalization of taste, [and] the reduction of the cosmopolitanism of the city.²⁶ As in Bettauer’s tale, Zohn attributes this decline to the destruction of the city’s Jewish population. However, Zohn’s narrative traded satire for nostalgia. Postwar observers, like Zohn, then, used and adapted the discourse of Jewish presence and absence to grapple with how Vienna—whose culture they believed had relied so heavily on a Jewish presence—could restore its prestige and connection to the pre-Nazi past in the absence of the Jewish minority. It was a question that would likewise come to shape discussions of cultural reconstruction in postwar Austria, though in a highly mediated and circumscribed form.

It should go without saying that the return of Jews—real and imagined—to Vienna after 1945 was much more complex than Bettauer’s satirical text allowed. In Bettauer’s narrative, the Jewish population returns unchanged and intact to a city that, at least superficially, welcomes them and whose culture and dominant discourses, problematic as they may be, are immediately restored by their return. Bettauer, in other words, was rightly fixated on a cycle that replayed itself again and again. The postwar period, however, was marked by radical transformations even as aspects of the discourse Bettauer criticized continued to shape those transformations. The small number of Jewish remigrants to Vienna after 1945 encountered an uncanny, or unfamiliar, home (unheimliche Heimat).²⁷ On the surface, the city could sometimes resemble the home they had left behind, particularly due to the efforts of cultural administrators and politicians who championed an image of continuity with pre-Nazi Vienna. Beneath those superficial efforts, however, Vienna had been altered beyond recognition: encounters with former Nazis, postwar ruins, the loss of family, friends, and colleagues, continued antisemitism, postwar philosemitism, and the ethnic and linguistic homogenization of the city made that all too clear.

Reenactors

The efforts to establish an image of continuity with the pre-Nazi past—however superficially—facilitated and concealed another, interrelated transformation after 1945: politicians and cultural administrators incorporated the modern and Viennese past into Austria’s cultural canon. This represented a fundamental shift in the meaning and place of this heritage in the Austrian mainstream. For one thing, the urban culture at hand was no longer contemporary: Austrians attempted to adopt modern art, the cabaret, and the coffeehouse as Viennese icons when they had been replaced by a new avant-garde, television, and the espresso bar. Rather than serving as symbols of aesthetic and intellectual innovation, the modernist past of the city became a zone of nostalgic reenactment.

The logic of reenactment defies the standard investments of much of the literature on performance: rather than establishing meaning through the ephemeral quality attributed to experiences that seem to evaporate when the curtain closes, reenactors believe that bringing the past to life in the present will ensure that it does not vanish.²⁸ Reenactors create a space to revise the past and make it more suitable for the present. Like other cultural producers, then, and despite appearances, they are always involved in creating something new. Their project diverges from many other types of performance, however, in its recourse to the past: reenactors are in the business of producing heritage. Heritage, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett notes, relies on display to give dying economies and dead sites a second life as exhibitions of themselves.²⁹ In this way, the modernist past of Vienna became a zone of nostalgic reenactment. Jews and non-Jews dragged, to borrow Rebecca Schneider’s phrase, interpretive frameworks and cultural materials from the vanished world, through their divergent experiences of the Nazi period, to its aftermath.³⁰

We usually think of reenactors as a marginal group of devotees to past events. However, in the case of postwar Vienna, reenactment was a mainstream, popular project that involved political elites as well as ordinary ­people. Beyond the politicians and artists noted above, this perspective draws attention to a broader range of participants in cultural reconstruction, such as restaurant and nightclub owners, curators, journalists, and ever-changing audiences. This group renegotiated the boundaries between Jewish and European cultures in their work and everyday lives. The result was the creation of an urban culture that can be understood primarily as a nostalgic reenactment of the past.

It is rather striking that Jewish refugees, Nazis in Vienna, and postwar Austrians were all nostalgic for the same relics from Vienna’s pre-Nazi history. A shared understanding of culture, even seemingly ephemeral experiences, as property undergirded this cultural reconstruction effort but also animated disputes between and within Jewish and Austrian spheres. While Jews in exile and gentiles in the postwar city shared their nostalgia for the city’s modernist past, they disagreed about who owned it. Nostalgia and reenactment, in this sense, were about power and property—and the politics of this reality could swing both toward liberation and a conservative mission.³¹ Hannah Arendt, for instance, posthumously criticized Stefan Zweig for his nostalgia and elitism. For Arendt, nostalgia’s depoliticization created ambivalence and meant potential collaboration with non-Jews who had been involved in the fascist project.³² This was, in fact, exactly what happened after 1945: non-Jewish Austrians built on the cultural work of refugees and employed a selective Jewish presence to help assert their authority over the cosmopolitan and modern heritage of the city. This was in the service of creating an identity that was European but did not interfere with an ethnically homogenous interpretation of Austrian identity. At the same time, for many Viennese Jews, nostalgia for Vienna provided space for them to argue about the right of Jews to shape, own, and produce Austrian culture during and after the Holocaust. Indeed, even after 1945, nostalgia and philosemitism created circumscribed, usually misunderstood spaces for Jewish artists to assert a Jewish presence and defy postwar stereotypes.

The Vanishing Act

I have used the word vanishing to describe Austria’s ambivalent relationship to Jews and its Jewish past after 1945—a relationship that bore at least a metaphorical resemblance to a magician’s vanishing act. The performances of the Vienna reenactors indeed reflected a shared interest in disappearance, resurrection, preservation, and transformation. The vanishing act garners its power not only from the magician’s ability to make an object or person disappear but also from their sleight of hand and the restoration of the missing—now magical—object (and with it order) at the conclusion of their performance. In the eyes of one postwar observer, Armin Berg, for instance, did not return home, he is simply once again here.³³ When the piano humorist Hermann Leopoldi took the stage in Vienna in 1947, another critic exclaimed, A piece of our old days comes back to us.³⁴ This perspective imagines that the vanished performers had suddenly reappeared as heritage objects, with the promise to restore Vienna’s pre-Nazi urban culture through their nightly performances, eliding the reasons for their departure, time in exile, the challenges of return, and the Jewish identities of the performers.

The desire to return what had vanished during the Nazi period was not the opposite of the desire to vanish Jews in the first place; it was an extension of the notion of Jewish expulsion and return, presence and absence that had defined Viennese culture since the