Book (sample chapter) by Frances Tanzer
Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City , Jun 11, 2024
In Vanishing Vienna historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from t... more In Vanishing Vienna historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna.
Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna’s history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution―the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s. As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined “Jewish” culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism―instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction.
In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust―a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.
Papers by Frances Tanzer
Central European History , 2026
This article is about the recent transformation of two powerful, paradoxical, and inseparable nar... more This article is about the recent transformation of two powerful, paradoxical, and inseparable narratives of progress that developed in the postwar period: aesthetic autonomy and Holocaust remembrance. As far-right and illiberal parties have gained power across Europe, they adapted these foundational narratives of the liberal-democratic West to assert their own legitimacy and to reimagine the cultural inclinations of the European Union. This article examines how this process has taken place in the reception of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest (2023) and Agnieszka Holland's Green Border (2023)-both international co-productions produced during the repressive eight-year reign of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. A close reading of these films and their reception in different contexts, exposes a world more complicated than one-dimensional dichotomies between the liberal and the illiberal. Likewise, the reception of the two films makes apparent the entanglement of the national and transnational, as well as a process of translation and mistranslation that takes place as cultural materials move across geographical and ideological boundaries. Understanding such dynamics helps us to comprehend the options for criticism available to artists working within repressive contexts.
Vanishing Vienna
University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Feb 8, 2024
Laura Morowitz and Megan Brandow-Faller eds, Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design, 2024
It is likely not good for a Central European artist to get their start in a refugee gallery," art... more It is likely not good for a Central European artist to get their start in a refugee gallery," art dealer and gallerist Otto Kallir admitted to the Austrian painter Theo dor Allesch-Alescha in 1944. 1 The gallery in question was Kallir's Galerie St. Etienne, which he had established upon his arrival as a refugee in New York in 1939. Despite its prestigious address at 46 West Fifty-Seventh Street-an area teeming with art gal leries in the 1940s-and his subsequent successes in New York, Kallir was lamenting the challenges he continued to face reaching mainstream audiences with his exhibi tions. The sole sale, for instance, from Kallir's 1941 exhibition of Egon Schiele was to a refugee collector who apparently paid off the $ 225 total in weekly installments of thirteen dollars for about a year and a half. 2 Kallir's fortunes and self-perception changed by the end of the 1950s. Exhibitions staged by Kallir, particularly those of Egon Schiele, attracted the attention of some of the most prestigious collectors and museums in the United States. In 1954, Por trait of Paris von Gütersloh (1918) (Figure 4.1), one of the most prized paintings in Kallir's collection, entered the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and became the first Schiele painting acquired by an American museum. 3 Following Kallir's 1957 Schiele exhibition, esteemed MoMA director Alfred Barr purchased two Schiele watercolors from Kallir for the MoMA collection (Kallir added two more as a gift). 4 Meanwhile, Kallir found a like-minded comrade in Thomas Messer, who, having spent his childhood in Prague, shared Kallir's origins in the Habsburg Empire and love of Schiele. During his tenure as director of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston and the Guggenheim Museum, Messer collaborated with Kallir on Schiele exhibitions at each institution in 1960 and 1965, respectively. 5 By the 1960s, then, Schiele had become, if not a household name, a key representative of Austrian culture and Vien nese modernism in the postwar American context. Within this well-known narrative of Kallir's trajectory from struggling refugee to anointed member of New York's glamorous art world elite there is another tale about the transformation of Viennese culture in exile. 6 If the term "exile" calls to mind a desire to return to a lost Heimat rather than adjusting to a new home, Kallir's activi ties in New York proved that he and his Vienna were highly adaptable. 7 At the Galerie St. Etienne, Kallir found that the cosmopolitan culture of Vienna's fin-de-siècle could be pursued-and even revised. To this end, Kallir presided over Schiele's symbolic emigration, translation, and assimilation to the United States. Kallir ironically became a proponent of Austrian culture after his forced emigra tion. Kallir's exhibitions during the 1940s and 1950s opined that Schiele represented
Contemporary European History
This article examines how states with a fascist past – Germany, Austria and Italy – used modernis... more This article examines how states with a fascist past – Germany, Austria and Italy – used modernism in the visual arts to rebrand national and European culture at the Venice Biennale of Art after 1945. I argue that post-war exhibitions of modern art, including those at the Biennale, reveal a vast confrontation with Jewish absence after the Holocaust. Christian Democrats and proponents of European integration attempted to reimagine modernism without the Jewish minority that had shaped it in crucial ways. Meanwhile, living Jewish artists resisted their exclusion from the post-war interpretations of modernism, as well as absorbtion of modernism as part of national heritage. Their criticisms lay bare a seeming paradox at the heart of post-war Europe: a desire to claim the veneer of pre-Nazi cosmopolitanism without returning its enabling demographic and cultural diversity. This article points to the significance of philosemitism for establishing post-war national and continental identities.
Contemporary European History , 2021
This article examines how states with a fascist past-Germany, Austria and Italyused modernism in ... more This article examines how states with a fascist past-Germany, Austria and Italyused modernism in the visual arts to rebrand national and European culture at the Venice Biennale of Art after 1945. I argue that postwar exhibitions of modern art, including those at the Biennale, reveal a vast confrontation with Jewish absence after the Holocaust. Christian Democrats and proponents of European integration attempted to reimagine modernism without the Jewish minority that had shaped it in crucial ways. Meanwhile, living Jewish artists resisted their exclusion from the postwar interpretations of modernism, as well as absorbtion of modernism as part of national heritage. Their criticisms lay bare a seeming paradox at the heart of postwar Europe: a desire to claim the veneer of pre-Nazi cosmopolitanism without returning its enabling demographic and cultural diversity. This article points to the significance of philosemitism for establishing postwar national and continental identities.
The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 2018
This article examines the changing content and context of the cabaret director Stella Kadmon's re... more This article examines the changing content and context of the cabaret director Stella Kadmon's repertoire as she attempted to establish continuity with the Viennese cabarets of Red Viennaç first in exile inTel Aviv and then after her return toVienna in 1947. Although Kadmon's long-term cultural work has seldom been considered within the framework of German-Jewish history, I propose that Kadmon's stage serves an example of one of the most adequate attempts to rebuild the type of Jewish and non-Jewish conjunction that had existed before the Anschluss. A central contention of this article is that Kadmon's theatreçduring its interwar, exile, and postwar incarnationsçprovided a space to represent Jewish characters and work through issues that Kadmon believed were important to Viennese Jews. These issues included a critique of assimilation; the possibility of restoring an Austrian-Jewish symbiosis after 1945 (and its stark limitations); and a defence of life in the land of the perpetrators (together with criticism of Zionism). And yet, her theatrical productions were misunderstood in both the Yishuv and the Second Republic.
Politically Theology Network, 2021
Over half a century after his death, Martin Buber is still an iconic Jewish philosopher. His whit... more Over half a century after his death, Martin Buber is still an iconic Jewish philosopher. His white-bearded face is immediately recognized as the face of modern Jewish thought, one that reconnects a post-1945 world with the world of prophets on the one hand, and with contemporary theo-politics on the other. When Buber was writing about theopolitics, he was writing not only with and against Carl Schmitt’s stress on the “secularization of theological concepts.” He was writing with and against his closest friends among the liberal theological institution; with and against his academic colleagues in Palestine. With drawings by Frances Tanzer.
Reviews of Vanishing Vienna by Frances Tanzer
Austrian Studies , 2025
This is a study of cultural continuities and discontinuities. The obvious discontinuity is in the... more This is a study of cultural continuities and discontinuities. The obvious discontinuity is in the history of Jewish or (better) Jewish-inflected culture in Austria. As the author reminds us at the outset, Vienna before the Anschluss had some 170,000 Jewish citizens; by the 1960, Jews registered with the Israelitische Kulturgemeinde Wien numbered between 6,000 and 8,000. This was not only a human disaster but a massive cultural loss, given the prominence of Jews in Viennese modernism. Frances Tanzer presents Nazi rule, exile, and the post-1945 period as 'part[s] of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution' (p. 179). Their dominant theme is the fantasy, and eventual reality, of a city without Jews-the title of Hugo Bettauer's novel Die Stadt ohne Juden (1922) and its film version by Hans Breslauer (1924) which was remastered and presented by the Austrian Film Institute in 2015. Disconcertingly, this fantasy seems to underlie also Carl E. Schorske's epoch-making Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1981). Tanzer addresses the relatively unfamiliar Jewish presence, or rather presence and absence, in painting and in cabaret and similar entertainments. The subject is challenging, since the most famous Viennese painters of the early twentieth century-Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, who all figure prominently-were Gentiles. Yet, because of their modernism, their work, especially Kokoschka's, was often perceived ('coded') as Jewish and thus alien. After the Second World War, however, major art exhibitions aimed to rescue all three from Nazi disparagement and claim them as essentially Austrian. In them, 'modern art was to redeem Austria's national culture by virtue of its perceived association with a cosmopolitan orientation, European culture, and democratic values' (p. 114). This was a welcome change after the defiant provincialism of the Ständestaat, but Tanzer points out two grave inaccuracies. Kokoschka, the only one of the three who was still alive in 1945, professed only a slight connection with Austria: he was a naturalized British subject and lived in Britain from 1935 to 1953, and resented (in vain) his appropriation by postwar Austria. Moreover, as Tanzer shows in detail, their work had not been entirely neglected by the Nazis: Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter of Vienna, who had artistic taste, exploited his remoteness from Hitler to authorize exhibitions featuring Klimt and Schiele in 1943. Tanzer provides many insights into the continuity of right-wing sympathies in postwar Austria. Denazification distinguished between 'more incriminated' and 'less incriminated' Party members, enabling many to flourish in the Second
Journal of Jewish Identities , 2026
Journal of Austrian Studies , 2025
Times Literary Supplement , 2025
Anson Rabinbach's Review of Vanishing Vienna
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies , 2025
European Journal of Jewish Studies, 2025
Austrian History Yearbook, 2025
Focusing on the 1938 occupation of Austria by the Nazis, World War II, and the postwar periods, T... more Focusing on the 1938 occupation of Austria by the Nazis, World War II, and the postwar periods, Tanzer's book skillfully explores the convergences between anti-and philosemitism in Viennese culture to analyze the 1938 and wartime erasure and postwar reinscription of Jewish presence in Vienna. The author sees these three distinct periods as part of a continuum that helps explain the reconstruction of Viennese culture from one that before 1938 was actively shaped by the artistic, scientific, and intellectual contributions of the city's Jewish population to one that after the war nostalgically reconnected itself to the cosmopolitan culture of fin-de-siècle and interwar Vienna, albeit without reintegrating Austrian Jews into it. This process is explored in five chapters: the first two of which examine the erasure of Jewish presence in Vienna's cultural life and, respectively, the forced emigration of Vienna's Jews and their life in exile, while the last three explore the efforts of postwar Austrian officials to readopt Vienna's modernist culture and restore a sense of cosmopolitan identity through art exhibitions and popular cultural institutions such as the cabaret without enabling a Jewish return en masse and without compensating Jews willing to return for their physical sufferings and loss of property. To chart the mechanisms of Vienna's pre to postwar transformation, Tanzer focuses especially on two groups: Austrian officials, both at home and in exile, who after 1945 instrumentalized the dynamic of Jewish absence/presence to reimagine the city's postwar culture, and Jewish popular performers involved before 1938 in the city's coffeehouse culture and the world of Viennese cabaret, variety theater, and revue-many of whom returned after the war and were initially met with great acclaim by postwar Viennese audiences. Among the Austrian officials who played an important role in shaping cultural policies after the war, there were people like art historian Fritz Novotny, Klimt's biographer Emil Pirchan, and local historian Gustav Gugitz, who after 1938 and during World War II, unlike their ideological brethren in Nazi Germany, embraced the Secession movement in art, the coffeehouse, and the cabaret as key components of Vienna's turn-of-the-century culture, while striving to aryanize their meaning by connecting them to Vienna's non-Jewish cultural traditions. After the war, cultural administrators like Viktor Matejka (a Catholic former political prisoner at Dachau, who after his release joined the Austrian Communist Party and was appointed to Vienna's City Senate), Ernst Fischer (a former Austrian communist who returned from Soviet exile after 1945 and became minister of information in the first postwar Austrian government), and art historians Alfred Stix and Otto Benesch also strongly pushed Viennese modernism (through local and international art exhibitions of works by Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka) and the re-embrace of Vienna's interwar cabaret culture as key to rebuilding the city's postwar cultural identity. Reintegration efforts did not always immediately bear fruit: some prominent Viennese modernist artists in exile, such as Kokoschka, refused invitations to remigrate, and Matejka's effort to bring back modernist musician Arnold Schönberg was initially resisted in an antisemitic vein because of his music's alleged incomprehensibility and Jewishness. In the long run, however, these efforts were successful, aided
Book Reviews by Frances Tanzer
American Historical Review , 2025
A review of Susan Rubin Suleiman's Daughter of History for the American Historical Review's speci... more A review of Susan Rubin Suleiman's Daughter of History for the American Historical Review's special issue on Autobiography and biography.
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Book (sample chapter) by Frances Tanzer
Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna’s history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution―the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s. As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined “Jewish” culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism―instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction.
In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust―a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.
Papers by Frances Tanzer
Reviews of Vanishing Vienna by Frances Tanzer
Book Reviews by Frances Tanzer