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The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Despite much study of Viennese culture and Judaism between 1890 and 1914, little research has been done to examine the role of Jewish women in this milieu. Rescuing a lost legacy,Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Viennaexplores the myriad ways in which Jewish women contributed to the development of Viennese culture and participated widely in politics and cultural spheres. Areas of exploration include the education and family lives of Viennese Jewish girls and varying degrees of involvement of Jewish women in philanthropy and prayer, university life, Zionism, psychoanalysis and medicine, literature, and culture. Incorporating general studies of Austrian women during this period, Alison Rose also presents significant findings regarding stereotypes of Jewish gender and sexuality and the politics of anti-Semitism, as well as the impact of German culture, feminist dialogues, and bourgeois self-images. As members of two minority groups, Viennese Jewish women nonetheless used their involvement in various movements to come to terms with their dual identity during this period of profound social turmoil. Breaking new ground in the study of perceptions and realities within a pivotal segment of the Viennese population,Jewish Women in Fin de Siècle Viennaapplies the lens of gender in important new ways.

Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna's \"female Secession\" created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between \"art\" and \"craft,\" \"decorative\" and \"profound,\" and \"masculine\" and \"feminine\" in art. Tracing the history of the women's art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women's Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women's art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria's women's art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group's ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel. Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as \"works from women's hands.\" It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.

Interwar Vienna was considered a bastion of radical socialist thought, and its reputation as \"Red Vienna\" has loomed large in both the popular imagination and the historiography of Central Europe. However, as Janek Wasserman shows in this book, a \"Black Vienna\" existed as well; its members voiced critiques of the postwar democratic order, Jewish inclusion, and Enlightenment values, providing a theoretical foundation for Austrian and Central European fascist movements. Looking at the complex interplay between intellectuals, the public, and the state, he argues that seemingly apolitical Viennese intellectuals, especially conservative ones, dramatically affected the course of Austrian history. While Red Viennese intellectuals mounted an impressive challenge in cultural and intellectual forums throughout the city, radical conservatism carried the day. Black Viennese intellectuals hastened the destruction of the First Republic, facilitating the establishment of the Austrofascist state and paving the way forAnschlusswith Nazi Germany. Closely observing the works and actions of Viennese reformers, journalists, philosophers, and scientists, Wasserman traces intellectual, social, and political developments in the Austrian First Republic while highlighting intellectuals' participation in the growing worldwide conflict between socialism, conservatism, and fascism. Vienna was a microcosm of larger developments in Europe-the rise of the radical right and the struggle between competing ideological visions. By focusing on the evolution of Austrian conservatism, Wasserman complicates post-World War II narratives about Austrian anti-fascism and Austrian victimhood.

Based on published primary and secondary materials and oral interviews with some eighty communal and organizational leaders, experts and scholars, this book provides a comparative account of the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in both Germany and in Austria (where 98% live in the capital, Vienna) after 1945. The author explains the process of reconstruction over the next six decades, and its results in each country.The monograph focuses on the variety of prevailing perceptions about topics such as: the state of Israel, one's relationship to the country of residence, the Jewish religion, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the influx of post-soviet immigrants. Cohen-Weisz examines the changes in Jewish group identity and its impact on the development of communities. The study analyzes the similarities and differences in regard to the political, social, institutional and identity developments within the two countries, and their changing attitudes and relationships with surrounding societies; it seeks to show the evolution of these two country's Jewish communities in diverse national political circumstances and varying post-war governmental policies.

Providing a multitude of new insights into the origins of the ideological conflicts that have marked the 20th century, Wistrich here describes the \"Golden Age\" of Viennese Jewry that coincided with the 1848-1916 reign of the Emperor Franz Joseph. Based on meticulous research, the book analyzes the demographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and political factors that favored both the ascent of Viennese Jewry and the simultaneous increase in antisemitic movements.

In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers.Symptoms of Modernitytraces this development in the context of Central European history. Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity. In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. AsSymptoms of Modernityshows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals. Not until the 1970s did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination-a resistance that, by the 1990s, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers.Symptoms of Modernitygives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.

A Stage for Debate presents a detailed analysis of the repertoire of the leading German-language stage of the nineteenth century, Vienna’s Burgtheater. The book explores the extent to which the Burgtheater repertoire contributed to important political and cultural debates on individual liberty, the role of women in society, and the understanding of national and regional identity. The relevance of the Burgtheater as a forum for political debate is assessed not by the degree to which the performed plays transgressed established norms, but by the range of positions that were voiced on a given topic. Martin Wagner investigates the roughly 1,000 plays from across Europe that were introduced to the Burgtheater’s repertoire between 1814 and 1867 by combining a general overview with detailed interpretations of especially successful plays. Wagner reveals that the Burgtheater was significantly more involved in contemporary debates than the stereotype of this stage as an artistically refined but apolitical institution suggests. Drawing from theatre studies and German and Austrian studies more broadly, A Stage for Debate revises the history of one of Europe’s leading theatres.

The Austrian Empire was not a colonial power in the sense that fellow actors like 19th-century England and France were. It nevertheless oversaw a multinational federation where the capital of Vienna was unmistakably linked with its eastern periphery in a quasi-colonial arrangement that inevitably shaped the cultural and intellectual life of the Habsburg Empire. This was particularly evident in the era's colonial utopian writing, and Tropics of Vienna blends literary criticism, cultural theory, and historical analysis to illuminate this curious genre. By analyzing the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, and other representative Austrian writers, it reveals a shared longing for alternative social and spatial configurations beyond the concept of the \"nation-state\" prevalent at the time.

Vienna's unique intellectual, political, and religious traditions had a powerful impact on the transformation of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century. Whereas turn-of-the-century sexology, as practiced in Vienna as a medical science, sought to classify and heal individuals, during the interwar years, sexual knowledge was employed by a variety of actors to heal the social body: the truncated, diseased, and impoverished population of the newly created Republic of Austria. Based on rich source material, this book charts cultural changes that are hallmarks of the modern era, such as the rise of the companionate marriage, the role of expert advice in intimate matters, and the body as a source of pleasure and anxiety. These changes are evidence of a dramatic shift in attitudes from a form of scientific inquiry largely practiced by medical specialists to a social reform movement led by and intended for a wider audience that included workers, women, and children.