Books by Tim Corbett
Vienna's Jewish cemeteries are among the only surviving sites in the city's cultural topography t... more Vienna's Jewish cemeteries are among the only surviving sites in the city's cultural topography that testify to its profound 800-year Jewish history. These urban spaces are material archives of this history, their over 100,000 preserved gravestones constituting unique artefacts of Jewish life in the city over the centuries. Together with their inscriptions, they thus constitute historical sources of immeasurable value. The vagarious position of Vienna's Jewish cemeteries in sociopolitical discourses, including the occasional destructions they suffered, offer a consistent insight into contemporary understandings of culture, society, and belonging in the City of Vienna and of the mutable conceptions of Austrianness as they unfolded over the centuries. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the development of Vienna's Jewish sepulchral culture from the Middle Ages into the present, which simultaneously sheds a new light on the Jewish history of the city.
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Edited Volumes by Tim Corbett
Pardes: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany , 2024
Edited by Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel, and Mirjam Thulin.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ... more Edited by Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel, and Mirjam Thulin.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.
The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
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Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023
This special volume of the Journal of Austrian Studies — the second of two volumes originally con... more This special volume of the Journal of Austrian Studies — the second of two volumes originally conceived to showcase “New Directions in Austrian Studies” — is dedicated to two complex issues, namely sociological
diversity and its investigation in interdisciplinary scholarship. The authors who participated in this volume locate themselves in a variety of fields, including history, musicology, literature studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. Their articles cover topics as varied as dis/ability, fascism, film music, travel literature, environmental history, gender, war, kinship, and racism, which are explored through manifold theoretical lenses and methodological approaches including discourse analysis, the history of emotions, gender theory, (post-)migration, and oral history. In short, these articles showcase the profound diversity that
has shaped modern Austria — and the equally profound diversity that has become so characteristic of the field of Austrian studies. The full volume can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51598
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Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023
Globalisation, migration, transnationalism, empire/imperialism, (post-)colonialism/decolonisation... more Globalisation, migration, transnationalism, empire/imperialism, (post-)colonialism/decolonisation, heterogeneity, diversity, interculturality, cosmopolitanism: These are some of the most influential concepts that have shaped not only academic research but also public and political discourses across the globe in recent years. The field of Austrian studies has already been engaging innovatively and productively with these issues for quite some time now. This special issue of the Journal of Austrian Studies, the first of two volumes broadly dedicated to “New Directions in Austrian Studies”, showcases numerous disciplinary and methodological approaches to the issue of empire and (post-)colonialism in Austrian Studies.
The full volume can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/50465/print
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Articles by Tim Corbett
Pardes: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany, 2024
By Omar T. Nasr and Tim Corbett
Jews and Muslims have lived in the territory of modern-day Austr... more By Omar T. Nasr and Tim Corbett
Jews and Muslims have lived in the territory of modern-day Austria for centuries untold, yet often continue to be construed as the essential “other.” This essay explores a selection of sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent historical experiences amongst these two broad population groups, focusing specifically on demographic diversity, community-building, discrimination and persecution, and the post-war situation. The ultimate aim is to illuminate paradigmatically through the Austrian case study the complex multicultural mosaic of historical Central Europe, the understanding of which, so our contention, sheds a critical light on the often divisive present-day debates concerning immigration and diversity in Austria and Central Europe more broadly. It furthermore opens up a hitherto understudied field of historical research, namely the entangled history of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe.
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Pardes: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany, 2024
By Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel, and Mirjam Thulin.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensibl... more By Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel, and Mirjam Thulin.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.
The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
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Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023
Article available under: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/914868
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Austrian Studies, 2023
Article available under: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/895779
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Dialog – Du Siach , 2023
This article explores the bourgeois sepulchral culture of the Feuerhalle, the crematorium in Vien... more This article explores the bourgeois sepulchral culture of the Feuerhalle, the crematorium in Vienna, beyond the dichotomous perspective of 'Jewish difference'.
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Dialog – Du Siach, 2022
This article explores the bourgeois sepulchral culture of the modern suburban cemeteries on the o... more This article explores the bourgeois sepulchral culture of the modern suburban cemeteries on the outskirts of Vienna beyond the dichotomous perspective of 'Jewish difference'.
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Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, 2022
This article offers a snapshot of the many fates of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries
during the Holoca... more This article offers a snapshot of the many fates of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries
during the Holocaust, with a particular focus on the diverse array of agents
involved in efforts to preserve, expropriate, and/or destroy Vienna’s Jewish
cemeteries and their material artifacts during this period. The article
therefore also elucidates the diverse array of motivations underpinning
these actions and the longer-term continuities of the various practices
implemented under Nazi rule.
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Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, 2022
Le présent article propose un aperçu des avatars des cimetières juifs de
Vienne pendant la Shoah,... more Le présent article propose un aperçu des avatars des cimetières juifs de
Vienne pendant la Shoah, en s’attachant plus particulièrement à toute la
gamme de facteurs qui contribuèrent à préserver, exproprier et/ou détruire
les cimetières juifs de Vienne, ainsi qu’à ce qui les constituait à cette époque. Il explique donc également l’éventail des diverses motivations sous-tendant ces actions, ainsi que les différentes mesures de plus long terme mises en œuvre les unes après les autres sous le régime nazi.
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Colloquia Germanica, 2022
Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Austrians – defined first in the broader, Habsburg sense of “Aust... more Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Austrians – defined first in the broader, Habsburg sense of “Austria” and later in the narrower, republican sense – migrated abroad in the first half of the twentieth century, 130,000 alone fleeing Vienna under National Socialism. This diverse collective, often with roots all over Central Europe and with extremely eclectic religious, economic, cultural, linguistic, educational, professional, and other backgrounds, were nevertheless united through the common experience of having once been Austrians, many having been driven violently from their homes to settle across the world. Thousands of these individuals recorded their experiences and the memories of their Austrian past in a wide array of “memory texts,” including hundreds of memoirs, published and unpublished. This paper outlines this eclectic corpus of Jewish Austrian memory texts, focusing predominantly on the Austrian Heritage Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and the broader Jewish Austrian experience of cultural genesis, genocide, survival, and rebirth in the twentieth century recounted therein. It closes with a range of new questions that allow for the parameters in which scholarship has conceived of Jewish Austrian history and culture to date to be substantially augmented or even revised.
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Journal of Austrian Studies, 2021
Article available through Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/784599
The following article pre... more Article available through Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/784599
The following article presents a collection of synopses of recent research trends and innovative concepts from the fields of Jewish, cultural, and migration studies that help to broaden our understanding not only of Jewish history but also of contemporary debates on migration in Austria and beyond. Tim Corbett opens with a brief critique of the assimilation paradigm in Jewish historiography and a survey of the current state of the field. Caroline Kita continues with a discussion of the concept of Jewish difference and how constructed cultural differences are instrumentalized in the field of art and literature. Following this, Susanne Korbel discusses the concepts of indifference and similarity to show how scholarship is delving beyond hegemonic discourses of constructed difference. Klaus Hödl continues with a discussion on interaction and meaningful contacts, fleshing out the widespread impact of everyday encounters that have largely been missed in historiography to date. Finally, Dirk Rupnow closes with a discussion of migration and integration in the context of postwar Austria, thereby highlighting contemporary political discourses that continue to resonate with the Jewish past. It is our hope that this discussion will contribute to a more critical engagement with the interplay between Jewish history and general European history as well as between the European past with regard to cultural inclusion and exclusion and present European discourses on migration and "integration."
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Journal of Austrian-American History, 2020
This article offers a comparative analysis of a selection of memoirs of Jewish Austrians who fled... more This article offers a comparative analysis of a selection of memoirs of Jewish Austrians who fled to the United States under National Socialism, drawing primarily on unpublished memoirs from the Austrian Heritage Collection held at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. The article applies an intersectional approach to demonstrate how these memoirs can contribute to a more nuanced historiographical reconstruction of the complex processes of memory and identity formation that accompanied persecution, flight, exile, and survival abroad than have often been undertaken hitherto. Intergenerational discourse is of particular interest here, as is the intersection of age and generation with other analytical categories such as religious and/or cultural identity within the family, gender, schooling, friendships and social networks, class and political orientation, as well as practical issues surrounding integration in the United States during and after the 1940s such as language and the consequent transculturality of the Jewish Austrian exile community. The article demonstrates that each life story constitutes its own idiosyncratically “jumbled mosaic” – a compelling epithet used by one of the memoirists that captures perfectly both the unique subjectivity but also intracategorical complexity of the individual life stories.
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Contemporary Austrian Studies, 2020
This article traces the origins and developments of “Jewish” historiography in Vienna from the 18... more This article traces the origins and developments of “Jewish” historiography in Vienna from the 1840s into the 1930s. While this corpus of works laid the foundations for the field that later generations of historians would continue to build on, these seminal works have been largely lost from sight or dismissed outright in post-Holocaust historiography, partly because their findings became outdated, but also because their “master narratives” conflicted with the ideological needs and hypotheses of more recent scholarship, or even because they were simply forgotten. Through an analysis of the genealogy of pre-Holocaust historiography, this article addresses the question of “general” versus “Jewish” historiographies and argues that a "Quellenauffrischung" of Jewish Viennese historiography opens up space for a more integrative approach to Vienna’s social and cultural history and that the “mythistory” of Jewish particularism—of a “diasporic,” alien people living in shunned social and cultural isolation in foreign lands, as expressed most tenaciously in the assimilationist model of Jewish history—perhaps no longer suits our present uses of the past.
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S:I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, 2019
This essay recounts a jouney of scholarly discovery in a brief and freely anecdotal form relating... more This essay recounts a jouney of scholarly discovery in a brief and freely anecdotal form relating to a unique but hitherto almost completely unnoticed Holocaust memorial at Vienna’s Central Cemetery – a rabbinical gravehouse that is covered in 'petitions' by Viennese Jews from the period of the Shoah. The essay aims thereby not least of all to showcase the largely neglected and sometimes extremely difficult study of gravestones as historiographic sources. It offers a brief excursion into the Chassidic practice of leaving written petitions at rabbinical graves as an attempt to account for the origins of the 'graffiti' at this particular gravehouse, aiming finally thereby to garner greater public attention for this unique Holocaust memorial as well as for the largely still unrealised potential of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries to serve as cultural and sociohistorical archives.
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Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 2018
Article available through OUP: https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/63/1/299/509830... more Article available through OUP: https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/63/1/299/5098307?login=false
‘The old Jewish cemetery has recently been enjoying increasing interest as a historical source of eminent significance.’ These are the opening words of the booklet Der jüdische Friedhof: Seine geschichtliche und kulturgeschichtliche Entwicklung, published in 1930 by the community rabbi of Leipzig, Gustav Cohn (1881-1943). This observation of the growing interest in Europe’s Jewish cemeteries was as true in Cohn’s day as it is in ours, with Jewish cemeteries figuring in works of scholarship, literature, and the fine arts since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. What is often lacking in the ever-growing body of literature, however, is an appreciation for the complex historical development of the Jewish cemetery as a cultural space, a communal institution, and a physical place in the landscape. Gustav Cohn’s Der jüdische Friedhof, although it consists of only 52 pages, offers an interesting - and itself historic - starting point for considerations in this direction. Through the intellectual context of its creation and the issues inherent in its brevity and orientation, it is also metatextually a cultural history of the values of Cohn’s own time and place: the now vanished world of German Jewry, destroyed under National Socialism. Der jüdische Friedhof is thus a memorial, both to Gustav Cohn and to the world to which he belonged. This paper offers an abridged and annotated translation of this key work along with an introduction to its place in the historiography of the Jewish cemetery.
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Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 2018
Article available through Taylor & Francis: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23256249.... more Article available through Taylor & Francis: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23256249.2018.1514769?journalCode=rdap20
This paper examines the postwar politics of restitution and the
related discourses of historical memory and responsibility
surrounding a small Jewish cemetery in Vienna, in the eighteenth
city district of Währing. A well-tended space and uniquely one of
the only surviving Biedermeier-era cemeteries in the city prior to
the Holocaust, today it is dangerously dilapidated following
extensive desecration and destruction during the Holocaust.
Despite its physical neglect and secretive location, this cemetery
has become one of the most contested Jewish sites in the
present-day Austrian landscape, the focus of intense conflicts over
Austrian restitution in the face of its historical responsibility for
the crimes of National Socialism. This paper examines the origins
of the Währing cemetery’s central place in Austrian memory
discourses in the first twenty years after the Holocaust, in the
context of the re-establishment both of the Austrian Republic and
its Jewish community. It thereby explicates the complex
relationship emerging between Austrian Jewry and the Austrian
state on the one hand, as well as the relationship of both Austrian
Jewry and the state to Austria’s profound, but largely destroyed
Jewish heritage on the other. This paper thus contributes to an
understanding of the conflicted ambivalences of both the
Austrian state and its Jewish community in the present day by
way of examining the reprehensible politics of restitution and
memory at this site in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues, 2018
Article available through Jstor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.32.1.07?refreqid=exc... more Article available through Jstor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.32.1.07?refreqid=excelsior%3Aba8944faf2b7d96b95e5f9320ec007aa
Cemeteries are profound memorial sites for the life of a community, reflecting manifestations of individual, familial, and communal self-understandings in a range of contexts: religiosity, economy, class, gender, profession, education, and other markers. This paper utilizes a novel approach to reading the sepulchral epigraphy of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries for an analysis of diachronic developments in gender constructions and the commemoration of women in the longue durée of Vienna’s Jewish history from the late Middle Ages into the present day. While demonstrating both the consistent subordination of women in the memorial canon of the Jewish community but also the increasing contestation of gendered and other commemorative codes going into the modern period, this paper demonstrates, through the explication of these cemeteries as communal archives, that a proper understanding of Vienna’s complex Jewish history is impossible without regard to the intersecting discourses of gender, religiosity, class, and Jewishness.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
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Books by Tim Corbett
Edited Volumes by Tim Corbett
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.
The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
diversity and its investigation in interdisciplinary scholarship. The authors who participated in this volume locate themselves in a variety of fields, including history, musicology, literature studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. Their articles cover topics as varied as dis/ability, fascism, film music, travel literature, environmental history, gender, war, kinship, and racism, which are explored through manifold theoretical lenses and methodological approaches including discourse analysis, the history of emotions, gender theory, (post-)migration, and oral history. In short, these articles showcase the profound diversity that
has shaped modern Austria — and the equally profound diversity that has become so characteristic of the field of Austrian studies. The full volume can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51598
The full volume can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/50465/print
Articles by Tim Corbett
Jews and Muslims have lived in the territory of modern-day Austria for centuries untold, yet often continue to be construed as the essential “other.” This essay explores a selection of sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent historical experiences amongst these two broad population groups, focusing specifically on demographic diversity, community-building, discrimination and persecution, and the post-war situation. The ultimate aim is to illuminate paradigmatically through the Austrian case study the complex multicultural mosaic of historical Central Europe, the understanding of which, so our contention, sheds a critical light on the often divisive present-day debates concerning immigration and diversity in Austria and Central Europe more broadly. It furthermore opens up a hitherto understudied field of historical research, namely the entangled history of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.
The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
during the Holocaust, with a particular focus on the diverse array of agents
involved in efforts to preserve, expropriate, and/or destroy Vienna’s Jewish
cemeteries and their material artifacts during this period. The article
therefore also elucidates the diverse array of motivations underpinning
these actions and the longer-term continuities of the various practices
implemented under Nazi rule.
Vienne pendant la Shoah, en s’attachant plus particulièrement à toute la
gamme de facteurs qui contribuèrent à préserver, exproprier et/ou détruire
les cimetières juifs de Vienne, ainsi qu’à ce qui les constituait à cette époque. Il explique donc également l’éventail des diverses motivations sous-tendant ces actions, ainsi que les différentes mesures de plus long terme mises en œuvre les unes après les autres sous le régime nazi.
The following article presents a collection of synopses of recent research trends and innovative concepts from the fields of Jewish, cultural, and migration studies that help to broaden our understanding not only of Jewish history but also of contemporary debates on migration in Austria and beyond. Tim Corbett opens with a brief critique of the assimilation paradigm in Jewish historiography and a survey of the current state of the field. Caroline Kita continues with a discussion of the concept of Jewish difference and how constructed cultural differences are instrumentalized in the field of art and literature. Following this, Susanne Korbel discusses the concepts of indifference and similarity to show how scholarship is delving beyond hegemonic discourses of constructed difference. Klaus Hödl continues with a discussion on interaction and meaningful contacts, fleshing out the widespread impact of everyday encounters that have largely been missed in historiography to date. Finally, Dirk Rupnow closes with a discussion of migration and integration in the context of postwar Austria, thereby highlighting contemporary political discourses that continue to resonate with the Jewish past. It is our hope that this discussion will contribute to a more critical engagement with the interplay between Jewish history and general European history as well as between the European past with regard to cultural inclusion and exclusion and present European discourses on migration and "integration."
‘The old Jewish cemetery has recently been enjoying increasing interest as a historical source of eminent significance.’ These are the opening words of the booklet Der jüdische Friedhof: Seine geschichtliche und kulturgeschichtliche Entwicklung, published in 1930 by the community rabbi of Leipzig, Gustav Cohn (1881-1943). This observation of the growing interest in Europe’s Jewish cemeteries was as true in Cohn’s day as it is in ours, with Jewish cemeteries figuring in works of scholarship, literature, and the fine arts since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. What is often lacking in the ever-growing body of literature, however, is an appreciation for the complex historical development of the Jewish cemetery as a cultural space, a communal institution, and a physical place in the landscape. Gustav Cohn’s Der jüdische Friedhof, although it consists of only 52 pages, offers an interesting - and itself historic - starting point for considerations in this direction. Through the intellectual context of its creation and the issues inherent in its brevity and orientation, it is also metatextually a cultural history of the values of Cohn’s own time and place: the now vanished world of German Jewry, destroyed under National Socialism. Der jüdische Friedhof is thus a memorial, both to Gustav Cohn and to the world to which he belonged. This paper offers an abridged and annotated translation of this key work along with an introduction to its place in the historiography of the Jewish cemetery.
This paper examines the postwar politics of restitution and the
related discourses of historical memory and responsibility
surrounding a small Jewish cemetery in Vienna, in the eighteenth
city district of Währing. A well-tended space and uniquely one of
the only surviving Biedermeier-era cemeteries in the city prior to
the Holocaust, today it is dangerously dilapidated following
extensive desecration and destruction during the Holocaust.
Despite its physical neglect and secretive location, this cemetery
has become one of the most contested Jewish sites in the
present-day Austrian landscape, the focus of intense conflicts over
Austrian restitution in the face of its historical responsibility for
the crimes of National Socialism. This paper examines the origins
of the Währing cemetery’s central place in Austrian memory
discourses in the first twenty years after the Holocaust, in the
context of the re-establishment both of the Austrian Republic and
its Jewish community. It thereby explicates the complex
relationship emerging between Austrian Jewry and the Austrian
state on the one hand, as well as the relationship of both Austrian
Jewry and the state to Austria’s profound, but largely destroyed
Jewish heritage on the other. This paper thus contributes to an
understanding of the conflicted ambivalences of both the
Austrian state and its Jewish community in the present day by
way of examining the reprehensible politics of restitution and
memory at this site in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.
Cemeteries are profound memorial sites for the life of a community, reflecting manifestations of individual, familial, and communal self-understandings in a range of contexts: religiosity, economy, class, gender, profession, education, and other markers. This paper utilizes a novel approach to reading the sepulchral epigraphy of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries for an analysis of diachronic developments in gender constructions and the commemoration of women in the longue durée of Vienna’s Jewish history from the late Middle Ages into the present day. While demonstrating both the consistent subordination of women in the memorial canon of the Jewish community but also the increasing contestation of gendered and other commemorative codes going into the modern period, this paper demonstrates, through the explication of these cemeteries as communal archives, that a proper understanding of Vienna’s complex Jewish history is impossible without regard to the intersecting discourses of gender, religiosity, class, and Jewishness.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.
The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
diversity and its investigation in interdisciplinary scholarship. The authors who participated in this volume locate themselves in a variety of fields, including history, musicology, literature studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. Their articles cover topics as varied as dis/ability, fascism, film music, travel literature, environmental history, gender, war, kinship, and racism, which are explored through manifold theoretical lenses and methodological approaches including discourse analysis, the history of emotions, gender theory, (post-)migration, and oral history. In short, these articles showcase the profound diversity that
has shaped modern Austria — and the equally profound diversity that has become so characteristic of the field of Austrian studies. The full volume can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51598
The full volume can be accessed here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/50465/print
Jews and Muslims have lived in the territory of modern-day Austria for centuries untold, yet often continue to be construed as the essential “other.” This essay explores a selection of sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent historical experiences amongst these two broad population groups, focusing specifically on demographic diversity, community-building, discrimination and persecution, and the post-war situation. The ultimate aim is to illuminate paradigmatically through the Austrian case study the complex multicultural mosaic of historical Central Europe, the understanding of which, so our contention, sheds a critical light on the often divisive present-day debates concerning immigration and diversity in Austria and Central Europe more broadly. It furthermore opens up a hitherto understudied field of historical research, namely the entangled history of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.
The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
during the Holocaust, with a particular focus on the diverse array of agents
involved in efforts to preserve, expropriate, and/or destroy Vienna’s Jewish
cemeteries and their material artifacts during this period. The article
therefore also elucidates the diverse array of motivations underpinning
these actions and the longer-term continuities of the various practices
implemented under Nazi rule.
Vienne pendant la Shoah, en s’attachant plus particulièrement à toute la
gamme de facteurs qui contribuèrent à préserver, exproprier et/ou détruire
les cimetières juifs de Vienne, ainsi qu’à ce qui les constituait à cette époque. Il explique donc également l’éventail des diverses motivations sous-tendant ces actions, ainsi que les différentes mesures de plus long terme mises en œuvre les unes après les autres sous le régime nazi.
The following article presents a collection of synopses of recent research trends and innovative concepts from the fields of Jewish, cultural, and migration studies that help to broaden our understanding not only of Jewish history but also of contemporary debates on migration in Austria and beyond. Tim Corbett opens with a brief critique of the assimilation paradigm in Jewish historiography and a survey of the current state of the field. Caroline Kita continues with a discussion of the concept of Jewish difference and how constructed cultural differences are instrumentalized in the field of art and literature. Following this, Susanne Korbel discusses the concepts of indifference and similarity to show how scholarship is delving beyond hegemonic discourses of constructed difference. Klaus Hödl continues with a discussion on interaction and meaningful contacts, fleshing out the widespread impact of everyday encounters that have largely been missed in historiography to date. Finally, Dirk Rupnow closes with a discussion of migration and integration in the context of postwar Austria, thereby highlighting contemporary political discourses that continue to resonate with the Jewish past. It is our hope that this discussion will contribute to a more critical engagement with the interplay between Jewish history and general European history as well as between the European past with regard to cultural inclusion and exclusion and present European discourses on migration and "integration."
‘The old Jewish cemetery has recently been enjoying increasing interest as a historical source of eminent significance.’ These are the opening words of the booklet Der jüdische Friedhof: Seine geschichtliche und kulturgeschichtliche Entwicklung, published in 1930 by the community rabbi of Leipzig, Gustav Cohn (1881-1943). This observation of the growing interest in Europe’s Jewish cemeteries was as true in Cohn’s day as it is in ours, with Jewish cemeteries figuring in works of scholarship, literature, and the fine arts since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. What is often lacking in the ever-growing body of literature, however, is an appreciation for the complex historical development of the Jewish cemetery as a cultural space, a communal institution, and a physical place in the landscape. Gustav Cohn’s Der jüdische Friedhof, although it consists of only 52 pages, offers an interesting - and itself historic - starting point for considerations in this direction. Through the intellectual context of its creation and the issues inherent in its brevity and orientation, it is also metatextually a cultural history of the values of Cohn’s own time and place: the now vanished world of German Jewry, destroyed under National Socialism. Der jüdische Friedhof is thus a memorial, both to Gustav Cohn and to the world to which he belonged. This paper offers an abridged and annotated translation of this key work along with an introduction to its place in the historiography of the Jewish cemetery.
This paper examines the postwar politics of restitution and the
related discourses of historical memory and responsibility
surrounding a small Jewish cemetery in Vienna, in the eighteenth
city district of Währing. A well-tended space and uniquely one of
the only surviving Biedermeier-era cemeteries in the city prior to
the Holocaust, today it is dangerously dilapidated following
extensive desecration and destruction during the Holocaust.
Despite its physical neglect and secretive location, this cemetery
has become one of the most contested Jewish sites in the
present-day Austrian landscape, the focus of intense conflicts over
Austrian restitution in the face of its historical responsibility for
the crimes of National Socialism. This paper examines the origins
of the Währing cemetery’s central place in Austrian memory
discourses in the first twenty years after the Holocaust, in the
context of the re-establishment both of the Austrian Republic and
its Jewish community. It thereby explicates the complex
relationship emerging between Austrian Jewry and the Austrian
state on the one hand, as well as the relationship of both Austrian
Jewry and the state to Austria’s profound, but largely destroyed
Jewish heritage on the other. This paper thus contributes to an
understanding of the conflicted ambivalences of both the
Austrian state and its Jewish community in the present day by
way of examining the reprehensible politics of restitution and
memory at this site in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.
Cemeteries are profound memorial sites for the life of a community, reflecting manifestations of individual, familial, and communal self-understandings in a range of contexts: religiosity, economy, class, gender, profession, education, and other markers. This paper utilizes a novel approach to reading the sepulchral epigraphy of Vienna’s Jewish cemeteries for an analysis of diachronic developments in gender constructions and the commemoration of women in the longue durée of Vienna’s Jewish history from the late Middle Ages into the present day. While demonstrating both the consistent subordination of women in the memorial canon of the Jewish community but also the increasing contestation of gendered and other commemorative codes going into the modern period, this paper demonstrates, through the explication of these cemeteries as communal archives, that a proper understanding of Vienna’s complex Jewish history is impossible without regard to the intersecting discourses of gender, religiosity, class, and Jewishness.
Dieser Beitrag entstand im Rahmen der Tagung „Heeresgeschichtliches Museum neu? Chancen einer angesagten Reform“, die im Mai 2021 im Literaturhaus Wien stattfand. Er bietet einen Überblick über die 250-jährige Geschichte der jüdischen Teilnahme am österreichischen Heeres- und Kriegswesen bzw. die Erinnerung daran im Schatten der Verfolgung und Vernichtung von jüdischen Veteranen während der Shoah.
In diesem Beitrag wird im Kontext der Wiener jüdischen Geschichte der Wandel der Sprache des Todes und der damit verbundenen gemeinschaftlichen Wertvorstellung der Lebenden in der longue durée von den frühesten erhaltenen jüdischen Grabsteinen aus dem Spätmittelalter bis in die Gegenwart skizziert. Die vier Wiener jüdischen Friedhöfe zählen seit der Shoah zu den letzten erhaltenen Denkmälern einer Gemeinschaft, deren Geschichte sich über fast ein Jahrtausend erstreckt und die einst zu den größten und einflussreichsten jüdischen Gemeinschaften der Welt zählte. Die jüdischen Friedhöfe Wiens waren nicht nur einheitliche Gemeinschaftsräume, sondern entstanden chronologisch aufeinanderfolgend. Somit lassen sie sich mit ihren über 100.000 Grabsteinen vorzüglich als Palimpseste spezifischer historischer Epochen und sukzessiver Wiener Judenheiten ‚lesen' und erlauben eine beispiellose Untersuchung von Brüchen und Kontinuitäten in der diachronen Entwicklungsgeschichte der jüdischen Gemeinschaftskultur in Wien von ihren Anfängen im Spätmittelalter bis zum heutigen Tag. Grob zusammengefasst entwickelte sich die Wiener jüdische Sepulkralepigraphrik in markanter Parallelität zur christlichen bzw. nicht-jüdischen, die allesamt in der Neuzeit einen Prozess von Säkularisierung, Fragmentierung der gemeinschaftlichen Wertvorstellungen und Neuorientierung an den Gegebenheiten der modernen Gesellschaft durchmachten. Eine gewaltige Zäsur erfolgte mit der Shoah, die sich eindringlich in der jüdischen Sepulkralepigraphik der Nachkriegszeit niederschlug und zu einer nicht unproblematischen Verklärung der eigenen jüdischen Vergangenheit führen sollte.
Following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, contemporaries and later historians alike remarked that the “only true Austrians” left were the Jewish Austrians. This chapter analyses the memory discourses concerning Jewish participation in the First World War as they emerged around two memorial sites in Vienna: the Kriegerdenkmal (Soldiers’ Memorial), a Jewish memorial created at the Central Cemetery, and the Heldendenkmal (Heroes’ Memorial), an Austrofascist memorial created at the Heldenplatz, as a platform from which to open up a more fundamental discussion into the transformative nature of Austrianness in the interwar period and the role of Jewish memory discourses therein.
The historic Jewish cemetery of Währing, Vienna, spans a long century of Jewish-Viennese history in the time that this community established itself as a quintessential part of Austria’s scientific, cultural and economic elite. A religious space containing mortal remains with a charged spiritual significance, it is thus also a rich site of cultural heritage and of communal memory. The cemetery was severely desecrated during the Shoah, with large numbers of graves being dug up, grave monuments being destroyed, and mortal remains being exhumed and abused for anthropological research by Austrian academics and museum curators. Following the end of the Shoah, Vienna’s decimated Jewish community became embroiled in years of legal battles with the City Council of Vienna over ownership of the site, finally being restituted the property in 1955. Following on from the scandals and conflicts which characterised a profound shift in Austrian politics and society vis-a-vis its Nazi past in the 1980s and 1990s, the Währing cemetery increasingly moved into the spotlight as tensions grew between local, national and international groups; Jewish and non-Jewish agents; grassroot, media, academic and political bodies. This chapter examines the debates over the restoration of the cemetery and the manner in which they reflect, draw upon and influence the multifaceted and sometimes conflicted memory over the destruction of the Shoah and sites of Jewish heritage in the city of Vienna today.
https://www.profil.at/podcasts/sebastian-kurz-mit-karl-lueger-zu-vergleichen-ist-nicht-ganz-falsch/401893250
https://soundcloud.com/botstiberpodcast/o-the-austrian-heritage-collection-in-austrian-children-and-youth-fleeing-nazi-austria
A historian, editor, and translator, Tim Corbett specializes in the modern cultural history of Austrian Jews. He was named as the inaugural 2018 Prins Fellow at the the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Corbett's talk was drawn from his book, "Die Grabstätten meiner Väter: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Wien (The Graves of My Fathers: Jewish Cemeteries in Vienna)" (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht Publishers, 2020).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk7Gj0KPWUo&ab_channel=WagnerCollege
https://www.iwm.at/blog/liebe-osterreicherinnen-liebe-osterreicher-wie-eine-pandemie-zur-re-nationalisierung-europas
Full video of the event available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOxdSPcx_YQ