Against a backdrop of literature rendering the story of the fin-de-siècle muse and salonieré in rose-colored hues, the new biografiA series, one of many feminist oriented interdisciplinary publications arising from an initiative launched by Vienna's Institut für Wissenschaft und Kunst in 1998, offers a much more nuanced, and at times troubling, mosaic of Austrian women's experiences in the first half of the turbulent twentieth century. Themes of exile, emigration, and re-emigration in the wake of the Austro-Fascist and National Socialist regimes drive the narrative connecting the diverse historical, literary, and biographical essays in this series. Targeted to stimulate discussion among generalists and specialists alike, these four volumes—respectively probing the intellectual worlds of Helene Scheu-Riesz, publisher, translator, and women's rights activist; the multifaceted question of a Jewish female identity; socialist youth literature author Alex Wedding; and the fate of Austrian women-intellectuals in the wake of the Anschluss—are meant to “offer a forum for independent approaches, connections, and reflections from diverse areas of research and specialization” (1:8). Although the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods have been receiving rising scholarly attention in terms of gender, the lens of biography is employed most originally here to trace elements of continuity and change throughout these eras.

For instance, although the post-Schorske dialogue has tended to bookend Viennese Modernism at 1914/1918, a more flexible chronology animates these essays, revealing how the same women whose salons were feeding ground for the fin-de-siècle intelligentsia were profoundly impacted through social and professional persecution and physical and intellectual displacement by National Socialism. Although some Austrian women-academics escaped and attempted to recreate their pre-1938 intellectual milieu abroad, many pioneers in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and psychology perished under the National Socialists, burying their research along with them. Moreover, the shaky political foundations and uprooted university culture of the early Second Republic prevented many emigres from returning, let alone from finding academic positions. It is the primary intention of these volumes, as well as the greater biografiA project (which includes forthcoming biographical lexicons by field, as well as an online databank), to shed light on these largely forgotten but significant female intellectuals. As the scope and breadth of each volume and individual article vary too much to allow sweeping generalizations, the strengths and weaknesses of each volume will be sketched below.

Reflecting the series's fluidity between disciplines and the popular and scholarly divide, Helene Scheu-Riesz (1880–1970): Eine Frau zwischen den Welten offers pieces of varying scholarly rigor recreating the intellectual milieu of the journalist, publisher of children's books, feminist, and salon hostess. Daughter of a provincial Jewish wine merchant, Riesz attended the Gymnasiale Mädchenschule of the Verein für erweiterte Frauenbildung in Vienna, becoming active in the women's movement and writing articles and feuilletons for the Viennese dailies. Riesz married Social Democratic politician Gustav Scheu in 1904 and, true to the tradition of Jewish ladies' salons, established their household as meeting place for artists, politicians, and thinkers. Although the salons of Alma Mahler and Adele Bloch-Bauer have become familiar to the public through popular literature and restitution cases, Scheu-Riesz's lively salon, as well as the story of how her Loosian Hietzing villa came back into the family after exile in America and England, have been largely overlooked, as Edith Stumpf-Fischer points out in her helpful biographical sketch. Aside from notable Stammgäste Alban Berg, Oskar Kokoschka, and Adolf Loos (the architect and intimate friend who designed their terraced Hietzing villa), and an impressive list of literary and political luminaries, the Scheu House welcomed excursions from the progressive Schwarzwald'sche Schule and members of the Association of Austrian Women Artists (Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs), as Scheu-Riesz's guestbook, now in the collection of the Wien Museum, attests.

While not employing the scholarly apparatus that one might have wished, Veronika Scheu-Kothbauer's recollections of her grandmother offer clues to Scheu-Riesz's elusive personality; specifically, that “Helene” (as she was known to her grandchildren upon her 1954 re-emigration to Austria) curiously had little interest in children or pediatric development despite her career as a publisher of children's literature. Stumpf-Fischer quoted another Scheu grandchild, the architect and American emigré Elisabeth Scheu-Close: “She [Helene] often spoke of her interest in children, but the only occasion when she showed this was when I was sick or through her interest in literature” (1:23). Yet the compelling question of why a decidedly nonmotherly type abandoned her earlier pursuits in journalism for a career in children's publishing remains largely unexamined in this volume; issues of Scheu's Jewish heritage and religiosity are likewise handled in a cursory manner.

The book is at its best in Susanne Blumesberger's “Helene Scheu-Riesz und die Vision einer modernen Bibliothek,” which details Scheu-Riesz's founding of the Sesam-Verlag, designed upon the Ruskinian model to bring the classics of world literature to children in an attractive yet affordable illustrated format, and Ernst Seibert's piece on Scheu-Riesz's 1934 epistolary Bildungsroman Gretchen Discovers America: young Gretchen's forty-odd letters to a Viennese acquaintance describing her Atlantic passage and impressions of America. Departing from standard interpretations of the novel as exile literature or a coming-of-age novel for girls, Seibert situates Gretchen in the tradition of nineteenth-century German idealism, teasing out parallels and contrasts to Goethe's Werther. According to Seibert, Gretchen has more to do with Scheu's own intellectual discovery and prior travels through America than the circumstances of her eventual emigration to New York, and Gretchen should be read as a work for adults as much as children. Equally interesting is the essay by Ilse Korotin, Director of the biografiA project, on the Social Democratic youth movement: theories on the development, sexuality, and psychology of proletarian children in Red Vienna. However—an observation equally applicable to all four volumes—the esoteric nature of certain articles strikes a contrast to the general pieces and the series' biographical focus. This dissonance could have been mellowed by a bit of editorial tailoring within the individual texts or the foreword.

Probing pre- and post-1938 generational attitudes toward Zionism, religion, and national and cultural identity of Jewish women within Austria's historical boundaries, Luftfrauen: Der Mythos einer jüdischen Frauenidentität presents a fascinating, yet in some ways problematic, collage of the lives and memories of twentieth-century Jewish women. The book, whose title references Max Nordau's concept of Jews' geographical and intellectual rootlessness, consists of eighteen transcribed interviews conducted by editor Charlotte Kohn with acquaintances born before and after the Holocaust. Kohn raises the question of to what extent the problem of individual identity remains bound with Jewish heritage and the self-definition of other Jewish women in her introduction (2:8). Central to this question are the comparative attitudes of those born before and after the Holocaust; that is, how “the experience of societal exclusion and the potential danger of extermination” have shaped attitudes toward religion, family, as well as national and cultural identity vis-à-vis Israel and country of birth (2:9). Kohn finds that the Holocaust brought many women who had approached Judaism as a loose ethical code rather than a strict set of religious practices closer to Jewish traditions, religious practices, and lifestyle; likewise did selection of Jews as marital partners multiply in importance after the Shoah. Kohn holds that this very experience of persecution—“interpreting their survival as victory over an unjust system”—made unraveling the problem of self-identity easier for those born before the Holocaust than after (2:16).

It is not so much Kohn's arguments that are themselves problematic but, more so, the manner in which the book was constructed. Kohn writes of conducting interviews with over one hundred Jewish women, beginning with friends and acquaintances; yet nowhere does a systematized description of selection criteria or questioning methodology appear. Readers are not only left to wonder to what extent the eighteen interviews printed in this book are indicative of greater trends in Jewish self-identity, but also how much these eighteen represent the rest of the pool. Although Kohn declares “polling Jewish women of different nationalities” with regard to such attitudes to be a main thrust of her study, this is not approached in a scientific manner. Additionally, the altered names/places of subjects renders these otherwise gripping and highly moving stories of persecution, migration, and survival of limited use to historians keen on such specifics. Although the biographical interviews including tableaus of assimilated Viennese Jewish families, their paths of emigration through Europe, America, and Africa, and the question of Jewish “chosenness” regarding national and ethnic identity are most relevant to biografiA's mission, a lack of contextualization leaves these Luftfrauen fluttering in the wind.

Volume 3 immerses readers in the works of Salzburg-born writer Margarete Bernheim (whose nom du plume “Alex Wedding” referenced Berlin's working-class centers Roter Wedding and Alexanderplatz), the important yet largely forgotten trailblazer of the Socialist Youth Literature movement. Bernheim, finding Salzburg intellectually confining from an early age, became active in the workers' movement and joined the German Communist Party in 1925. Like many biografiA subjects, Bernheim was an emigré many times over: to Berlin, Prague, Paris, and the United States, before turning her sights to Communism in China and Africa after resettling in the German Democratic Republic in 1953. Blumesberger's introductory essay familiarizes readers with the general contours of Wedding's works, including her most famous children's novel Ede und Unku (1930), which traced a young worker boy and Sinti girl's heroic efforts to keep the boy's father from strikebreaking. Rüdiger Steinlein's piece on images of class struggle and revolution in Wedding's historical children's novels reveals how she framed historical conflicts as class struggles belonging to the present-day clash between Fascism and anti-Fascism: the abusive feudal lords of her fictionalized account of Germany's sixteenth-century peasant wars are little more than thinly veiled caricatures of Nazi thugs. Yet, despite similar parabolic styles and use of non-Western folktales, Wedding's realism distinguished her from other anti-Fascist writers like Brecht and Kästner, as Peter Malina's comparative analysis reveals. Moreover, the post-Dadaist photomontages used to illustrate her covers and pages typified her heroic realism.

Like the other volumes, however, this book belies an unbalanced treatment of biografiA's driving themes; for instance, the issue of Bernheim's Jewishness receives only superficial treatment. More effective would have been an integrated discussion of such themes of persecution, exile, and emigration throughout all four titles. Because Wedding's works enjoyed a revival in East Germany, becoming a staple of DDR school literature (and even filmed) after being banned in 1933, the field can hope that recent commemorations and symposia in Salzburg are a sign of rising interest in the grande dame of Socialist Youth Literature from Austrian historians.

The series' fourth and final volume, Österreichische Bibliothekarinnen auf der Flucht: Verfolgt, verdrängt, vergessen?, profiles Austrian female academics/librarians mostly, but not exclusively, of Jewish descent who were persecuted, forced into exile, or executed during the National Socialist era. Drawing from an impressive source-base including the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, the Österreichische Staatsarchiv, and personnel files of the Archiv der Nationalbibliothek and the Universitätsarchiv, as well as various private manuscripts and oral histories, this volume examines why careers in library, book-conservation, and information science went from being a purely male to an overwhelmingly female domain during the first half of the twentieth century. As Edith Stumpf-Fischer argues in tracing five Austrian women's careers in libraries, “higher education and training finally [around 1900] stood open to women, but the careers in which they could apply this or pursue purely academic inclinations remained very limited, particularly those in institutes of higher learning” (4:37–8). Yet the biographies in the volume stand as tribute that “the academic library was one of the few places where their special knowledge was appreciated” (4:11).

Particularly intriguing is Christina Köstner's “Budgetposten ‘Bleistift und Papier’” on the history of women in the Austrian State Library. Although the Nationalbibliothek first began to employ women for administrative tasks shortly before 1900, it was not until 1922 that the first woman—Romance Language Scholar Christine Rohr von Denta, who later rescued the Nachlass of her teacher Elise Richter for posterity—was taken into academic service. Nevertheless, beyond the thirteen high-level women-academics employed at Palatina am Josefsplatz by 1930, it was only the waves of unpaid “pencil and paper” volunteer-posts in the 1920/30s that turned the gender tide. The wartime shortage of male labor tipped the scale, once and for all, of the ÖNB's library-methods Ausbildungskurs toward female; even so, the library union's preference for employing celibate women-workers remained in place long after the policy's formal abolition in 1922.

Like Luftfrauen, these stories of women-academics in exile, many of whom were involved in the Social Democratic Worker Education and Youth Movements, put a human face on the cruelties of this inhumane era and underline the fact that, for many political dissidents, persecution commenced not in 1938 but in 1934. Moreover, the latter two pieces remind us that not only Jews, but Social Democrats, Communists, and Roma were interned in the camps. Overall, however, this volume's shortage of general synthesis of its diverse biographical data leaves something to be desired, especially if this book is to be assigned in the classroom. More sweeping generalizations like Ilse Korotin's conclusions on the women intellectuals under examination in her article as hailing from upper-bourgeoisie, assimilatory backgrounds would be invaluable to advanced undergraduates sorting the complex biographical information presented here. Likewise, comparisons to women's presence in other areas of public service, education, and art would make these stories more relevant to the macro-historical narrative, as would greater attention to certain currents in gender history (such as performativity and masculinity) sharpen its theoretical edge.

The biografiA series, though not without its share of incongruities, is an essential addition to any institutional library and can only inspire greater interest from young scholars in the emerging field of Austro-German exile research. With so many exiles having settled in American urban centers, a trove of unturned sources on the other side of the Atlantic awaits discovery.