Wien und die judische Erfahrung, 1900-1938

How can scholars capture the relationship between the history of Vienna’s Jews and the life of the city? The art historian Hans Tietze asked this question in his book, The Jews of Vienna (1933), and historians Frank Stern and Barbara Eichinger adopt the same agenda as the epigraph to this monumental edited volume, Vienna and the Jewish Experience, 1900–1938. For many years, scholars have shown the central role that the city’s Jewish bourgeoisie played, as artists, patrons, and consumers, in the efflorescence of modernist culture in Vienna at the turn of the century. But scholarship has moved far beyond this fundamental insight, as the present volume—the result of a March 2007 conference at the University of Vienna—demonstrates. In their introduction, Stern and Eichinger describe Vienna in a more nuanced way, as a complex space of social interaction in which multiple Jewish milieux connected and collided with each other and with the non-Jewish society around them. Vienna, they argue, ‘could support the development of Jewish Viennese culture but also cripple and destroy it’ (p. xvii)

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