Alison Rose's intriguing book tells the story of Tamara Hervay von Kirchberg and her troubled life. This well-researched and engaging study takes a new look at the societal discourses around gender and antisemitism as well as the legal system in Austria at the turn of the century.
Tamara von Hervay's travel report from Africa, published in a Viennese newspaper, is the starting point of Rose's introduction. Rose then attempts to reconstruct the details surrounding the “Hervay affair” and provide insight into social developments in rural Austria in the first decade of the twentieth century. Placing particular focus on the press and related discourses, Rose presents the extraordinary confluence of events that led to the Hervay affair, when Tamara von Hervay, wife of Mürzzuschlag district commissioner Franz Hervay von Kirchberg, was arrested and placed on trial for bigamy. He was her fifth husband, and it was alleged that she had not divorced her previous husband. Moreover, she was not the daughter of a Russian duke, as she had claimed, but the daughter of a Jewish magician. Rose reaches the conclusion that the affair became such an enormous and internationally infamous scandal because Tamara von Hervay did not behave according to the social gender norms of her time. Her unconventional life, her many marriages, and her heritage, in combination with the dominant sociopolitical antisemitic power discourses of the early twentieth century, brought about the events that would come to be known as the Hervay affair.
This case study sets the stage for Rose's discussion of gender stereotypes as well as antisemitism on various levels within Austrian society, most notably in the rural areas of the Habsburg monarchy. As she proposes in her introduction, the affair “lends itself to examining a whole host of issues that surfaced in turn-of-the-century Austria, including local politics, religion, education, gender stereotypes, marriage law, the role of the press, and psychology and medicine” (3). She provides a short historical background as well as a summary of Austrian demographics of the turn of the century and presents insight into Jewish settlements since the Middle Ages, in addition to everyday Jewish life in rural Austrian areas, such as the establishment of cemeteries as part of religious culture. Rose goes to great lengths to outline the history of antisemitism in Austria in general, describing, for example, the formation of various Burschenschaften (fraternities) at universities and touching on the increasingly antisemitic conflicts in the expanding turn-of-the-century tourism sector. At the same time, she explores the role of the Christian Social women's political movement and its influence on everyday life, which has, until recently, received far too little academic recognition.
Rose considers the Hervay affair as if it were a play; she discusses the main characters and describes individual scenes. This form of presentation is interesting, as it continues and addresses performance within the wider sociopolitical power discourse. The book provides a well-written summary of the time before, during, and after the trial, focusing on the prejudice against women who lived beyond the norm and did not adhere to societal restrictions. In her analysis, Rose questions the press discourse that made the Hervay affair an affair. The detailed synopsis of the exaggerated press coverage provides new insight into the role of the press at that time, focusing on the coverage of this specific incident, as well as the thirst for scandal in general.
Rose outlines the close relationship between the newspaper coverage and political discourses and even focuses on further literary interpretations of the affair. The last chapter, “Legal and Literary Interpretations,” ends with Tamara von Hervay's memoirs and her interpretation of the events. From a discourse-analytical point of view, Tamara von Hervay's reclamation of space and power within the societal discourse is rather fascinating. Nonetheless, it would have been interesting to read not only a descriptive summary of von Hervay's memoir, but also a deeper analysis of her perspective and position within the wider social discourse of the Hervay affair. While the memoir is presented as one element and substring of the discourse, as Tamara von Hervay's self-authored narrative and personally constructed discourse element, it would have been interesting to see it linked more closely to the study's analysis, especially since Rose mentions critical discourse analysis in the introduction and refers to Clifford Geertz and the methodological approach of “thick description” in the conclusion. A broader and more detailed analysis of these entangled and interwoven elements could have shed more light on the relationship of the various discourse levels of the affair, with a focus on the communicating groups and discourse production. Nevertheless, as Rose points out, the “complexities of the legal case, and the influence of local relationships, religious tensions, and politics in shaping the events and outcomes” provides a fascinating case study of the societal developments and communication discourses in Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century (76).
Alison Rose has written a compelling, well-researched, and well-written book that will grab your attention, even if you are not an expert in the fields of Jewish studies or a researcher of gender or antisemitism. It is a vital read for future researchers examining the intersection of historical anthropology, everyday life, and individual experience in rural Austria at the turn of the twentieth century. The book's detailed description of the central elements of the sociopolitical power discourse underlines the quality of this study. It will leave readers with a great deal to think about and will hopefully encourage future studies on this important topic.
