How does a community, even a vanished one, come to define the culture of a city? Frances Tanzer’s Vanishing Vienna explores this question, asking how Jews, both real and imagined, shaped Viennese culture from the Nazi period to the 1960s. Although the book covers a roughly four-decade period of dramatic ruptures and global mobilities, it fundamentally tells a story of continuity in which Jewish presence and absence played an essential role in defining Viennese art and culture. In pursuing these questions, the book carefully peels back several layers and uncovers many deceptions. As the title suggests, Vienna is never what it appears to be. The city experienced multiple disappearances, yet never truly vanished: its Nazi past receded only to re-emerge unofficially, and its Jewish population was forced to vanish only to be summoned to reappear.

The book explores these paradoxical processes and Vienna’s many facades in two chronological sections, comprising two chapters (covering 1938 to the immediate postwar period) and three chapters (with the longer postwar story) respectively. Chapters one and two delve into Vienna’s Nazi era, its global expulsion of the city’s Jewish refugees, and attempts to overcome its Nazi past in the immediate postwar. Some of research unearthed in the book is truly revelatory. We learn that modernism, long associated with Jewish culture and loathed by official Nazidom as “degenerate art,” found something of a safe haven in Vienna. This did not imply a different policy toward Jews but rather a Viennese effort to salvage modernism from its perceived Jewishness. Under the Nazi cultural directorship of Baldur von Schirach, the city held the largest ever Klimt exhibition that carefully edited out all references to Klimt’s Jewish subjects and patrons. Other forms of Jewish-inflected entertainment, like cabaret acts, nominally continued. Yet without Jewish performers, these acts lost their defining critical–satirical spirit. While Jews were stamped out of public life in Austria, their forced emigration led to the reestablishment of Jewish Viennese culture across the globe. Viennese coffee houses, plays, and cabaret troupes could be found from Bogota to Tel Aviv. As Tanzer shows, these spaces and performances allowed refugees to craft an expression of nostalgia that would one day return to, and define Vienna. Locals from South America to Palestine largely embraced this culture because it evoked a sense of authentic Europeanness. Nowhere was it revered for its Jewishness.

When the war was over, the city yearned for a lost vitality, one which the Viennese associated with the many vanished Jewish artists and performers. This, as Tanzer’s third chapter explains, was a form of life imitating art. In fact, Hugo Bettauer’s famous 1922 novel (and then 1924 film) Die Stadt ohne Juden, had prophesized a fictional world in which Vienna kicked out its Jews only to beg for them to return. Yet actually reintegrating Jews in the real postwar city was contentious and largely unsuccessful. When the politician Viktor Matejka issued an invitation for émigrés to return to the city—an offering only ever intended to cover some elites—his proposal was met with both antisemitic and philosemitic discourses that evaluated individuals and their cultural material based on a perceived Jewishness. It was on these terms that musician Arnold Schönberg, a Jew, and painter Oskar Kokoschka, a non-Jew whose work was disparaged in antisemitic language, were initially thwarted from returning to the city. At the same time, the composer Gustav Mahler, who had been denigrated by the Nazis as Jewish and degenerate, was finally embraced as Austrian. It certainly helped that, as Tanzer notes, Mahler had not only achieved mainstream success but was also long dead.

As chapters four and five detail, the scene shifted radically in the mid-1950s when modernism became championed as quintessentially Viennese—and even Austrian. This evolution permitted a symbolic Jewish return, celebrating the culture but not the people. It was, in fact, Austrian (and Jewish) émigrés abroad who had largely made modernist art popular, which Vienna then opportunistically embraced as its own. This required several distortions and deceptions. For example, the city championed the work of Schiele, Kokoschka, and Klimt, falsely claiming their work had been shunned by Nazi Vienna. In doing so, it embraced Jewish-coded material without the actual Jews, in order to launder its reputation and demonstrate a postwar redemption. All the while—and as is well known to those who study this area—Austria successfully outmaneuvered most attempts of restituting stolen property from its Nazi period.

Throughout, Tanzer reveals the slipperiness of some terms deployed by cultural critics and officials. “Cosmopolitanism,” which had long been an insulting and antisemitic epithet, became central to the vocabulary of a Vienna and Austria which sold themselves as harmonious members of a peaceful, European community. As Tanzer sums it up: “Austrians desired the selective return of Jewish performers as bearers of Vienna's cosmopolitan and European past but understood Jews as outside of the boundaries of Austrian culture and society.” When Jews did return and perform in the city, their performances centered on elegiac Jewish themes of what once was, while the Viennese public failed to grasp (or willfully misunderstood) these meanings.

In these ways, Vanishing Vienna adds great depth to a burgeoning literature on Jewish visibility while managing to historicize the question of how contemporary Viennese culture came to be stuck in a perpetual celebration of an early-twentieth-century modernism that it plainly did not accept at the time. The historical literature has so often focused on fin-de-siècle Viennese culture. This paradigm was initiated by Carl Schorske’s 1979 book, which argued for inter-connected Viennese modernism but famously did not address the Jewishness surrounding it. Tanzer’s work reveals the dynamics by which Schorske’s interpretation became touted as officially Viennese, to the point, as Tanzer notes, that he was made an honorary citizen of the city. Vanishing Vienna masterfully draws out all these apparent contradictions, demonstrating how they have come to make and define the city.