Frances Tanzer will discuss her forthcoming book, Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (University of Pennsylvania Press, June 2024), which traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s.
Tanzer presents a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that has relied on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. As Tanzer 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. Philosemitism was much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism — instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism defined Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction.
Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust — a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.
