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This paper presents the life stories of six Jewish women who were born in Vienna, survived the Nazi persecution there or in camps, and stayed in Austria after the war. The subjects were chosen in an effort to reflect a diversity of fates, reactions and coping strategies and to offer a representative overview. I will discuss why these women did not leave Austria after the Nazi takeover, how they managed to survive the years of persecution, why they subsequently decided to remain in Austria, and how their sufferings influenced the course of their lives after liberation. As Marion Kaplan has shown for Germany, I argue that gender, class, age and family ties were important reasons for their choices to stay, both before and after the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of antisemitism in relation to the construction of national identity in late capitalist and post-Nazi societies. Its argument centres on the concept of 'secondary antisemitism', as developed within the Critical Theory tradition. Thus, I will elaborate on the complex relationships between post-Nazi antisemitism, the culture industry and the radical destruction of memory in late capitalist societies. The aim is to show the contemporary relevance of secondary antisemitism beyond the immediate context of the task of remembering the Nazi past. In the second section of this paper I will illustrate this by an analysis of examples from print media debates in Austria on the recent financial crisis and show that instances of secondary antisemitism are utilized for the discursive construction of an exclusive national(ist) unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Frank was Adolf Hitler's personal attorney. In Frank's memoir, published seven years after his execution in 1946 at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Frank claimed to have uncovered evidence in 1930 that Hitler's paternal grandfather was a Jewish man living in Graz, Austria, in the household where Hitler's grandmother was employed. Contemporary historians have largely dismissed Frank's claim, primarily on the grounds that there were purportedly no Jews living in Graz in 1836, when Hitler's father Alois Schicklgruber was conceived. This consensus can be traced to a single historian, Nikolaus von Preradovich, who claimed that 'not a single Jew' (kein einziger Jude) was living in Graz prior to 1856. No independent scholarship has confirmed Preradovich's conjecture. In this paper, evidence is presented that there was in fact eine kleine, nun angesiedelte Gemeinde – 'a small, now settled community' – of Jews living in Graz before 1850. The contemporary consensus regarding Hitler's paternal grandfather does not have a strong evidentiary basis. Other evidence, deriving from earlier sources, suggests that the contemporary consensus may be incorrect. Avenues for further research which might help to clarify the question are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The following contribution is an excerpt from the unpublished memoirs of Austrian Jewish émigrée, Lilian Renée Furst (1931--2009), a pioneer in the field of comparative literature. This journal issue grew out of an April 2011 conference in her memory, held at the National Humanities Center, on "Jewish emigres and the Shaping of Postwar Culture." The nexus between her innovative intellectual contributions and her experience as a Jewish émigré reflects one of the conference's central concerns: How, why, and in what fashion did the émigrés' dislocations shape innovative intellectual paths and cosmopolitan visions of Europe and European culture. Born in Austria and educated in England, Furst pursued an intellectual career in the United States, hoping it would allow her to break out of narrow national boundaries. The excerpt of her memoir here illuminates how her life's work as a pioneer in the field of comparative literary studies grew out of her experience with language as a German-speaking refugee in wartime England. Her memoir written in the third person about "Rachel" also reflects her dual identity as Jew and European. Part I by Dr. Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau, the literary executor of the memoir and a former graduate student of Furst, places "The Rachel Chronicles: A Kind of Memoir" in relation to Furst's other autobiographical writing. Part II includes Furst's own introduction to "The Rachel Chronicles," followed by her chapter on "Growing up in wartime England." (The whole of her unpublished memoir is available to researchers in the "Personal Papers of Lilian R. Furst," Girton College Archives, Cambridge University (http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0271%2FGCPP%20Furst)). Part III is a bibliography of Furst's writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire, the Revolution of 1848 represented a common formative experience, signifying their entrance into the public sphere, their initial participation in politics and civil society. While some revolutionaries were executed or given amnesty, many sought refuge in Zurich, London, Constantinople, and especially Paris. This paper examines this international (and largely 'cosmopolitan') network of 1848ers in exile, focusing in particular on Simon Deutsch (1822-77), a young Austrian Jew who became a radical journalist in Vienna during the Revolution, as well as an ardent proponent of the 'Greater German Solution' [Grossdeutsche Losung], before fleeing the firing squads at the end of 1848. During his thirty years in exile (Zurich, London, Paris, Constantinople, Madrid), this curious figure became involved in the Paris Commune, the International Workingmen's Association, and even helped found the New Ottomans (during his prolonged sojourn in Paris). His contacts with fellow 1848s from the Habsburg Empire and from other European countries (e.g. Karl Marx, Moses Hess) helped inform the perennial tension between liberal nationalism and international socialism that characterised Deutsch's life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shoah destroyed the substance of Austrian Jewishness. The emigration of the survivors after 1945 and the indignation of the Austrian society resulted in the dislocation of the memory of the Shoah itself. The Shoah provoked a massive social amnesia during the first two to three decades after World War II in Europe. The long silence was broken by the American television series Shoah in 1979 and by the Waldheim affair in 1986. Since the second half of the 1990s, a large-scale restitution process and a new government program of commemoration have begun. Seemingly, Austria has successfully joined the mainstream of the European culture of memory. However, Austrian Jews as victims or survivors gradually came to be missing or played a minor role in the daily practice of the local and national politics of memory. One has the impression that the 'local Jews' have been overshadowed by the Europeanisation of the Shoah. The paper presents an Austrian case as a paradoxical example of 'creative forgetting' or 'forgetting by remembering'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apart from SC Hakoah and the Amateure (later Austria) no other Viennese football club of the first division had more Jewish members (sportsmen/sportswomen and officials) than the »First Vienna Football Club 1894«. In the period between the foundation of the club in 1894 and the National Socialist assumption of power in Austria in 1938, one third of the officials and many of the football players of the First Vienna Football Club - who were the pioneers of Austrian football - were Jews or Jewish converts. Jews especially dominated in the Club's leading positions and important functions. The First Vienna Football Club has not yet been researched in detail, which means that most academics remain unaware of the high level of Jewish participation in it. My paper aims at closing this knowledge gap and looks at the reasons for the substantial participation of Jews in the football club. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores the United States' immigration policy as practiced at the U.S. consulate in Vienna, Austria. She focuses on the period from the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, or Anschluss, on March 13, 1938 through July 1941 when the United States and Germany broke off diplomatic relations. U.S. diplomats John Cooper Wiley, Leland Burnette Morris, and Harry Edwin Carlson oversaw the granting of immigration visas during the period preceding American involvement in World War II. The consulate issued visas which allowed 28,615 Austrian Jews to travel to the U.S. during the period. The author also discusses the U.S. immigration laws during the period and explores how the Foreign Service Officers were expected to implement the sometimes conflicting immigration rules.

This article explores the course of events and the background of the Viennese synagogue attack that took place on 29 August 1981. It was part of a series of terrorist strikes orchestrated by the Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO) against the Austrian state between 1981 and 1985. These events have rarely been addressed by researchers since access to primary sources is still limited. Thus, this article presents new evidence from international, but also from Austrian archives. Furthermore, the event of 1981 is put in comparison with the radical-Islamist attack that took place in the same area in 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1938, nearly 200,000 Jews lived in Austria. Within four years, only about 7,000 Jews remained. One of those 7,000 was my grandmother, Rosa Weinberger. My grandfather was a non-Jewish resistance fighter, and together they had a son - my father, Peter - in 1943, born shortly after her family was transported to Auschwitz. My grandmother and my father survived the war hiding in Upper Austria, and eventually returned to postwar Vienna. But with her family gone, she was overwhelmed by feelings of grief, distrust and guilt. Lacking any societal support, and caught in the political turmoil of the time, she found relief only in written letters she exchanged with two surviving family members. Those letters are a rare account of daily life for Jews who were able to remain in Nazi territory, and who after the war struggled to rebuild their lives in a country deeply involved in the atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author examines the socio-economic driving forces and political authorities behind the persecution of Jews in Vienna from 1938 to 1943 in order to demonstrate that the anti-Semitic mobilization of substantial sections of the population was directly related to social and economic interests. This becomes clear through the author's analysis of the radical nature of Viennese anti-Semitism from the pogroms of 1938 and the systematic deportation of Jews to extermination camps. This article is structured as follows: 1. Introduction, 2. Exploration of the Perpetrators' Emotional Potential and Demonstration of Jewish Defencelessness, 3. The Conceptual Delineation and Definition of the Enemy Group, 4. Destruction of Economic Means of Subsistence, 5. Forced Emigration, 6. Radicalization and Reichskristallnacht, 7. Spatial Segregation (Ghettoization), 8. Realizing the Nazi Stereotype of the 'Jew', 9. Removal and Annihilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines Jewish nationalism in Habsburg Dynasty-dominated east central Europe through an analysis of the Jüdische Volksrat (People's Council), an Austrian Zionist group that adhered to a distinctly Jewish brand of realpolitik. In a broad sense, the author is concerned with Austrian-Jewish political culture as well as general themes of ethnonationalism, political autonomy, and democracy.

The article discusses the Jewish identity in Vienna, Austria during the twentieth century. It is inferred that the acculturation of the Jews to the mainstream society has been the subject of debate between the 19th and 20th centuries since the Jews and non-Jews are seen as two distinct social and cultural entities. Moreover, it was noted that the Jews partially withdrew from socializing with non-Jews and compensated by their integrative efforts to return to Judaism.

This article challenges the myth of a "golden age" of Jewish cultural creativity in Vienna limited by time and gender, by considering the lives and works of Jewish authors who were active there, especially in the period during and following World War I. Jewish women authors such as Else Feldmann and Veza Canetti, among others, became regular contributors of short stories and essays to prominent Viennese newspapers such as the "Arbeiter-Zeitung," and also published numerous novels and dramas. Their willingness to depict vividly the stark poverty and harsh violence pervasive in Viennese family life, as well as their emphases on the constantly shifting boundaries between their characters' public and private lives and the borders of class-based sections of the city, did much to illuminate the complexities of urban life. By focusing on those sections of the city located on the margins, or "in between" the urban center and the rest of Austria, these authors underscored the instabilities of a city in the transitional stages between the collapse of empire and the founding of a new nation, and a period of particular uncertainty for Austrian Jews. Examination of Veza Canetti's and Else Feldmann's writings also reveals a complicated web of interrelations between "socialist" and "Jewish" identities in "Red Vienna" and helps clarify how and why Jewish women writers' portrayals of the city from the interwar period should be included in any consideration of Jewish cultural creativity in twentieth-century Vienna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1938 the National Socialists seized power in Austria. One of their first measures against the Jewish population was to confiscate their vehicles. In Vienna alone, a fifth of all cars were stolen from their legal owners, the greatest auto theft in Austrian history. Many benefited from the confiscations: the local population, the Nazi Party, the state and the army. Car confiscation was the first step to the ban on mobility for Jews in the German Reich. Some vehicles that survived World War II were given back to the families of the original owners. The research uses a new online database on Nazi vehicle seizures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]