Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann, and Schnitzler (review)

Owing to widespread skepticism towards history and other traditional forms of collective memory, European modernists at the turn of the century experimented with new genres that aimed at making the past relevant to their experience of the present as fragmented and mecha- nized. Through these genres artists also grappled with contemporary theories about the processes through which individual memory functions in the psyche. In her beautifully illustrated and carefully researched monograph, Abigail Gillman argues that the search for effective forms of recollection was the main link between European and Viennese Jewish modernist writers. The latter group dealt with questions of commemorating Jewish cultural tradition "as an aesthetic and political problem" (12) and rejected representing it either through heroic figures from scripture or through calls for political change, such as Zionism. Gillman then analyzes texts by Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Beer-Hofmann, and Arthur Schnitzler to support her argument that such modernist writers, who had lost access to Jewish traditions, "sought to invent a Jewish countertradition through aesthetic means" (8). The four Viennese intellectuals, who wrote between 1890 and 1938, were all concerned with memory and with a search for new ways to engage with a Jewish culture and past that seemed to have lost relevance to assimilated, bourgeois Austrian Jews. Gillman traces their efforts to articulate "existential truths about the self, the collective, and the shared past" (9) in her readings of both renowned and less commonly known texts.

Gillman's assertion that Viennese modernism was grounded in Jewish thought and tradition echoes the work of such scholars as Steven Beller, Matti Bunzl, and Marsha Rozenblit. However, rather than focusing on heritage as the major factor in characterizing Jewish modernists, Gillman proposes a dynamic of re-encountering Jewish cultural history through new aesthetic forms as central for understanding Viennese Jewish modernism. In three parts of two chapters each, she traces this dynamic as the reworking of a forgotten past, the creation of hybrid genres to express contemporary Jewish affairs, and the fashioning of counter-memories of the Hebrew Bible.

The emphasis on process over content that drives Gillman's narrative of Viennese Jewish modernism finds expression in the metaphor of the hologram and connects her exploration of modernist history to the holographic Historical Exhibit in the Jewish Museum of Vienna. Just as a hologram looks different each time an observer changes position, the history that it represents challenges the observer to take an active role in retrieving it. This subjective stance towards the past calls into question the stability of memory and beckons the observer to "recombine history and memory in specific ways for specific purposes" (12), as Freud did, for example, in his psychoanalytical retelling of stories about religious and cultural icons in order to reveal their complexities. Likewise, Gillman's analyses of the writings of the four authors demonstrate her claims about the instability of Jewish memory in fin-de-siècle Vienna and the efforts to lend new form to "seeing Jewishness" (12), a concept that seems always in flux. This fractured relation to the past characterizes European modernism in general, as Gillman documents. She sees Viennese modernism, however, as particularly representative of the link between history and experimental form, because its most prominent representatives were driven to create new genres in order to find a way back to Jewish experience.

Key to this search for a way back is Freud's countering of Jewish tradition by retelling the story of Moses and re-evaluating the relationship between art and scholarship in his writings on Moses, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In careful readings Gillmann shows how Freud arrives at his conclusions in ways that reveal his methodology, and that his writing shares with holographic performance an attempt to express the experiential. Freud refutes biographies that fix great historical figures as inaccessible heroes. Yet his counter-scriptural rendering of Moses does not dispense with Jewish tradition. Rather, it contributes to a new genre...