Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City

7. Jewish Memory, Jewish Geography: Vienna before 1938

173 Alles aus Liebe (All for Love), one of the most successful cabarets in 1927 Vienna, was, according to a critic for the Neue Freie Presse, a show intended mainly “for the eyes.”1 Like the other cabarets that year, it featured an entertaining musical score and plenty of talented comedians, including the wellknown Karl Farkas, who also wrote its more than fifty lighthearted sketches. Like much lowbrow entertainment, it poked fun at its audience by humorously reversing traditional gender roles and mocking class distinctions. But this revue also featured something different: a dazzling array of women in extravagant costumes that evoked all things Austrian and Viennese—from culinary favorites like Wiener schnitzel and Sachertorte (chocolate cake), to the castles and gently rolling green hills of the country’s beloved provinces . Appearing toward the end of the first half of the show, this visual display culminated in a set of striking tableaux of women costumed as Vienna’s iconic buildings: the Stephansdom (St. Stephen’s Cathedral), Karlskirche (St. Charles’s Church), Rathaus (city hall), parliament, Schönbrunn (the emperor’s summer palace), and even the city’s Prater district and its famous Ferris wheel. This panoply was not, however, simply a diverting spectacle; like the rest of the show in which it appeared, it too challenged Viennese assumptions about the seemingly self-evident, stable order of things. Though the critic appreciated the eye-catching, humorous costumes, he dismissed them as little more than simple patriotic symbols like one might find in a tourist brochure or children’s book (figure 7.1). But as photographs show, the revue’s unique “Disneyfication” of the city did more than just boil Vienna down to the sum of its best-known parts and present them in an 7. Jewish Memory, Jewish Geography: Vienna before 1938 Lisa Silverman 174 LISA SILVERMAN unexpected way. By unhinging Vienna’s iconic features from their context in the cityscape, and by having actresses perform them, rather than merely showing their images, the sketch disrupted the supposed boundaries that separate people from the places they inhabit. With the kind of irreverent humor characteristic of a cabaret performance, the revue took its audience members on a visual adventure that both celebrated and poked fun at their identification with Vienna. In doing so, it also exposed the question that underlies the mutually constitutive relationship between people and place: do people make place, or does place make people?2 This cabaret sketch provides a perfect entry point to a discussion of how placemaking in Vienna can illuminate the relationship between Jews and the cities in which they lived before World War II.3 That Jews have maintained a special relationship to cities, particularly starting in the nineteenth century, is a scholarly given, as is the especially strong identification of Viennese Jews with their city’s culture. To be sure, a deep attachment to the city one calls home is a universal emotion.4 Nevertheless, the particular circumstances of Vienna’s Jews can illuminate the complexities of social identifications and their relationship to embodied placemaking in urban spaces. Figure 7.1. Scene from Alles aus Liebe (1927), depicting Schönbrunn Palace, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and Parliament. D’Ora-Benda Atelier. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek 204941-D. 175 Jewish Memory, Jewish Geography From the fin de siècle on, Jews played an important role in Vienna’s cultural achievements; identifying with culture, so the story goes, was a crucial part of their assimilation process. Jews could easily reconcile an embrace of the educated German Kulturnation, a patriotic love for the Austrian emperor, and, if they chose, religious Judaism. But the collapse of Austria-Hungary after the end of World War I radically destabilized the lives of all its residents, who found their economic ties severed, their political power greatly reduced, and the terms of their self-definitions as Austrians in turmoil. The relatively stable self-understandings of Austrian Jews as one minority among many in the vast territory of Austria-Hungary was thrown into disarray by a war that left them residents of a state comprised of a residual territory and a reluctant population (figure 7.2). After 1918 Vienna’s once-celebrated status as the cosmopolitan, cultural center of a vast monarchy was reduced to that of an overblown Wasserkopf (hydrocephalic), soon to be overtaken by Berlin as central Europe’s international vanguard. Jews responded to the state of affairs in the reconfigured...