Focusing on the 1938 occupation of Austria by the Nazis, World War II, and the postwar periods, Tanzer’s book skillfully explores the convergences between anti- and philosemitism in Viennese culture to analyze the 1938 and wartime erasure and postwar reinscription of Jewish presence in Vienna. The author sees these three distinct periods as part of a continuum that helps explain the reconstruction of Viennese culture from one that before 1938 was actively shaped by the artistic, scientific, and intellectual contributions of the city’s Jewish population to one that after the war nostalgically reconnected itself to the cosmopolitan culture of fin-de-siècle and interwar Vienna, albeit without reintegrating Austrian Jews into it. This process is explored in five chapters: the first two of which examine the erasure of Jewish presence in Vienna’s cultural life and, respectively, the forced emigration of Vienna’s Jews and their life in exile, while the last three explore the efforts of postwar Austrian officials to readopt Vienna’s modernist culture and restore a sense of cosmopolitan identity through art exhibitions and popular cultural institutions such as the cabaret without enabling a Jewish return en masse and without compensating Jews willing to return for their physical sufferings and loss of property.

To chart the mechanisms of Vienna’s pre to postwar transformation, Tanzer focuses especially on two groups: Austrian officials, both at home and in exile, who after 1945 instrumentalized the dynamic of Jewish absence/presence to reimagine the city’s postwar culture, and Jewish popular performers involved before 1938 in the city’s coffeehouse culture and the world of Viennese cabaret, variety theater, and revue—many of whom returned after the war and were initially met with great acclaim by postwar Viennese audiences.

Among the Austrian officials who played an important role in shaping cultural policies after the war, there were people like art historian Fritz Novotny, Klimt’s biographer Emil Pirchan, and local historian Gustav Gugitz, who after 1938 and during World War II, unlike their ideological brethren in Nazi Germany, embraced the Secession movement in art, the coffeehouse, and the cabaret as key components of Vienna’s turn-of-the-century culture, while striving to aryanize their meaning by connecting them to Vienna’s non-Jewish cultural traditions. After the war, cultural administrators like Viktor Matejka (a Catholic former political prisoner at Dachau, who after his release joined the Austrian Communist Party and was appointed to Vienna’s City Senate), Ernst Fischer (a former Austrian communist who returned from Soviet exile after 1945 and became minister of information in the first postwar Austrian government), and art historians Alfred Stix and Otto Benesch also strongly pushed Viennese modernism (through local and international art exhibitions of works by Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka) and the re-embrace of Vienna’s interwar cabaret culture as key to rebuilding the city’s postwar cultural identity.

Reintegration efforts did not always immediately bear fruit: some prominent Viennese modernist artists in exile, such as Kokoschka, refused invitations to remigrate, and Matejka’s effort to bring back modernist musician Arnold Schönberg was initially resisted in an antisemitic vein because of his music’s alleged incomprehensibility and Jewishness. In the long run, however, these efforts were successful, aided by the return (either from exile abroad or from the camps) of Jewish cabaret artists Armin Berg, Karl Farkas, Stella Kadmon, Georg Kreisler, Hermann Leopoldi, and Hugo Wiener, among others.

The return of these performers, however, was not followed by the return of the Jewish art collectors, gallery owners, and cabaret audiences who supported both Viennese modernism and a thriving popular culture during the interwar period. In fact, a general return of Jews to Austria was seen as unwelcome not just by former Nazis but even by philosemites, who, according to Tanzer, in their efforts to reconstruct postwar Viennese culture, professed only a desire for Jews’ “symbolic inclusion,” which they expressed “in the form of philosemitism without the Jews” (142). As a result, many of the returned cabaret artists, who kept alive the tradition of the interwar Viennese cabaret in their exile, felt inadequate in the new cultural atmosphere and had difficulty reestablishing their careers in the city.

Instead of providing these artists with an opportunity to use their satire and critical spirit on contemporary topics, as it did during the interwar years, the postwar cabaret “functioned primarily as a space of memory and nostalgia” (145). With the cabaret being turned during the postwar decades into an important component of Vienna’s heritage culture and being looked at nostalgically from the perspective of the past, the edge of their humor felt blunt. Faced with this, and not being able to resurrect Jewish jokes from the 1930s because of a lack of Jewish audiences and a reluctance to feed antisemitic stereotypes, Berg, Farkas, Leopoldi, and Kadmon, dropped the Yiddish jargon from their stage appearances and focused instead on “performances [featuring] discussions of exile, antisemitism, Jewish and non-Jewish relations, and Jewish presence in Viennese culture” that were “themes and issues important to Jews as they had been before the Anschluss and in exile” (154).

This absence/presence of Jews and Jewish themes during the postwar decades was symptomatic of a major shift in the understanding of prewar Viennese culture. Instead of being reborn through the return and reintegration of the city’s Jewish population, Jewish themes became musealized and turned into a marketing instrument for the city’s cultural identity as a cosmopolitan center in Europe and the world. Well researched, readable, and highly perspicacious, Tanzer’s book shows how a combined investigation of elite and popular culture facilitates an understanding of the continuities, motivations, hidden desires, and paradoxes involved in the construction of a reimagined Viennese culture in mid-twentieth-century Austria. It would work well as a reading in courses on urban, post-Holocaust, and Central European cultural history.