Contemporary Jewish Writing: Austria After Waldheim by Andrea Reiter (review)

Andrea Reiter has devoted much of her career to the study of literature about the Shoah and Jewish writing and culture, especially in Austria and Germany. The recent publication of Contemporary Jewish Writing: Austria After Waldheim confirms the caliber of Reiter as a scholar of exceptional knowledge and insight. The book is a path-breaking analysis of the second phase in post-Shoah Austrian cultural production or, so to speak, the second chapter of a historical narrative that began among the ruins of the Vienna captured in Carol Reed’s iconic film The Third Man. The first phase of the reemerging Austrian, or more accurately, Viennese Jewish culture is associated with the names of Hans Weigel, Friedrich Torberg, Hilde Spiel, and other returning exiles and survivors such as Ilse Aichinger, with Jonny Moser and John Bunzl voicing specifically Jewish concerns. The works of these somewhat younger intellectuals reveal that changes in attitude regarding Jewish history and identity had begun prior to the 1986 Waldheim affair—just to mention Nadja Seelich and Lukas Stepanek’s film Kieselsteine, which examined the continued impact of the Nazi legacy among descendants of survivors and in the Austrian and German perpetrator collective. But Reiter is right to treat 1986 as the starting point for a new Jewish self-awareness in Austria, expressed in a greatly prolific and critical body of literature and films despite the small number of Jewish artists and intellectuals in 1980s Austria. The concept of a “virtual Jewish culture” comes to mind, and it is, indeed, mentioned in conjunction with Reiter’s discussion of Robert Menasse (5).

As a political/media event of international proportions, the scandal involving former un Secretary Kurt Waldheim and his service in the Nazi military during the Second World War represented a turning point, as Reiter correctly argues, in terms of Austria’s international image, Austrian internal debates about the Nazi past, and the formation of a new Jewish intellectual culture predominantly in Vienna whose representatives for the most part were members of the Second post-Shoah generation. In part linking up with the interwar tradition of “Red Vienna” or the memory of the destroyed Jewish civilization of Eastern Europe, Reiter explores the evolution of complex new networks among authors born in the 1940s and 1950s as well as their ideas. Particularly fascinating are the interplay of continuity and the awareness of the radical historical break caused by the Shoah, a new confidence in being Jewish in Austria in the present and the memorialization of the Jewish past through a new Jewish museum and memorial culture.

Reiter is thoroughly in command of her subject matter, which is evident from the wide range of texts and materials she introduces. Likewise, her familiarity with the relevant organizations, the authors contributing to post-Waldheim Austrian Jewish culture, and the elements and topics that constitute the contemporary Jewish cultural production in Austria is impressive. Drawing on texts and authors of different backgrounds and orientations, Reiter provides a survey of the different initiatives and movements that make up the expanding and maturing Austrian Jewish cultural panorama.

Few cities have preoccupied the imagination and memory of writers and critics as powerfully as Vienna. In the post-Waldheim era, this seems as true for Austrian-born authors as it does for others, such as Nadja Seelich, Doron Rabinovici, and Vladimir Vertlib, who came from other parts of the world. Similar to authors whose native city is Vienna (for example, Ruth Becker-mann and Eva Menasse), they also use Vienna as the setting for some of their works and share a similar, Vienna-centered sense of identity and geography. Reiter’s discussion of “Jewish Places” (43–98) transcends the realm of the imaginary and also addresses concrete spatial (re)anchoring of Jewish life in the Viennese cityscape through Jewish institutions and events such as the Jewish city festival, which make Vienna again into a Jewish site. Everywhere the concepts of virtuality and performance loom large—the continuity that the appropriation of spaces that...