Hillary Hope Herzog's book is a welcome addition to Berghahn's Austrian and Habsburg Studies series in that it is the first time the series has published a single-authored book rather than an edited volume. Herzog's study provides a comprehensive overview of the works of Viennese Jewish writers from 1900 to the present and focuses on how these authors characterize their relationship to both the city of Vienna, as well as their own ever-changing conceptions of Jewishness.
Drawing on the tourist advertising campaign “Wien ist anders” from the 1990s, the title of Herzog's book evokes the image of Vienna as a cultural space that is consistently undergoing dynamic processes of self-fashioning. Herzog illustrates that this shaping of cultural identity has a long and complex history and is inextricably linked to negotiations of Jewishness and the cultural legacy of Jewish writers over time. Her study offers a clear and thorough examination of what she concludes to be a cohesive literary tradition: “Despite the breaks, dislocations, and disruptions experienced by authors over the course of a century, including the unbridgeable gap represented by the Holocaust, this literature does indeed constitute a unified literary tradition” (271). Herzog's book brings this vibrant literary tradition to light.
The book is divided into four sections, organized chronologically, with each chapter providing rich historical contextualization of the time period under analysis: fin-de-siècle Vienna up until World War I, the interwar period, the postwar period up until the election of Kurt Waldheim, and the period since the 1986 Waldheim election. By including a detailed discussion of some of the same writers in the first two chapters (Arthur Schnitzler, Felix Salten, Stefan Zweig, and Karl Kraus), along with several others who appear in one chapter only, Herzog provides an illuminating narrative as to how the authors' Jewish identities and their relationship to Vienna took on new meanings in the political, social, and cultural climate of the First Republic.
The entire book is well organized and exceptionally well researched. One exception is the lack of discussion of Abigail Gillman's book on Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler (University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2009), which is surprising given the similar focus of the first section of Herzog's book.
At first glance, the choice of authors is well conceived, firstly, by including noncanonical writers such as Adolf Dessauer and Hugo Bettauer alongside highly canonical ones and, secondly, by “cast[ing] a wide net” (54) so as to include authors with partial Jewish ancestry or those who may not have considered themselves Jewish (such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hilde Spiel, and Elfriede Jelinek). Yet, the decision of whom to include in the study falls short, in my opinion, in the lack of analysis of women writers in the first half of the book. Of the twelve authors analyzed in the first two sections, only one female author (Veza Canetti) is included. By discussing writers such as Else Jerusalem or Grete Meisel-Hess, for example, the dynamic intersections inherent in the constructions of gender and Jewishness in the early years of the twentieth century could have been more intricately developed.
Just as the first two chapters work well together to show the connections and ruptures in the chosen authors' relationships with Vienna, chapters three and four are also inextricably linked through an investigation of Viennese Jewish writers in the post-Shoah Second Republic. Whereas the third chapter focuses on writers who lived through the years of the Shoah as adults (Ilse Aichinger, Friedrich Torberg, and Hilde Spiel), the fourth chapter examines authors who are children of survivors or emigrés (Ruth Beckermann, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Menasse, Eva Menasse, and Elfriede Jelinek) or born in the final war years (Robert Schindel). Together these chapters highlight the (dis)continuities of Jewish writing in the Second Republic across generations. Interestingly enough, these two final chapters also link back to the first two through the individual authors' referencing of the ways in which they have been influenced by the Viennese Jewish authors who preceded them. I, personally, would have found a more detailed discussion of the specific intertextual references in their works intriguing, but perhaps that is the next book waiting to be written. All in all, Herzog's book is an excellent study of Viennese Jewish writers—one that not only provides an excellent overview for use in the classroom, but that is also a fine piece of scholarship that reveals how “Vienna is different” from other European metropolises in the fascinating ways its contemporary Jewish authors reference the city's vibrant literary tradition and cultural legacy.
