The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 left all Austrians in a state of political, social, and economic turmoil, but Jews in particular found their lives shaken to the core. Although Jews' former comfort zone suddenly disappeared, the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy also created plenty of room for innovation and change in the realm of culture. Jews eagerly took up the challenge to fill this void, becoming heavily invested in culture as a way to shape their new, but also vexed, self-understandings. By isolating the years between the World Wars and examining formative events in both Vienna and the provinces, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars demonstrates that an intensified marking of people, places, and events as "Jewish" accompanied the crises occurring in the wake of Austria-Hungary's collapse, leaving profound effects on Austria's cultural legacy. In some cases, the consequences of this marking resulted in grave injustices. Philipp Halsmann, for example, was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his father years before he became a world-famous photographer. And the men who shot and killed writer Hugo Bettauer and physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick received inadequate punishment for their murderous deeds. But engagements with the terms of Jewish difference also characterized the creation of culture, as shown in Hugo Bettauer's satirical novel The City without Jews and its film adaptation, other novels by Veza Canetti, David Vogel, A.M. Fuchs, Vicki Baum, and Mela Hartwig, and performances at the Salzburg Festival and the Yiddish theater in Vienna. By examining the role Jewish difference played in the lives, works, and deeds of a broad range of Austrians, this study reveals how the social codings of politics, gender, and nation received a powerful boost with the application of the "Jewish" label.

Although beset by social, political, and economic instabilities, interwar Vienna was an exhilarating place, with pioneering developments in the arts and innovations in the social sphere. Research on the period long saw the city as a mere shadow of its former imperial self; more recently it has concentrated on high-profile individual figures or party politics. This volume of new essays widens the view, stretching disciplinary boundaries to consider the cultural and social movements that shaped the city. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted not in an abandonment of the arts, but rather led to new forms of expression that were nevertheless conditioned by the legacies of earlier periods. The city's culture was caught between extremes, from neopositivism to cultural pessimism, Catholic mysticism to Austro-Marxism, late Enlightenment liberalism to rabid antisemitism. Concentrating on the paradoxes and often productive tensions that these created, the volume's twelve essays explore achievements and anxieties in fields ranging from modern dance, theater, music, film, and literature to economic, cultural, and racial policy. The volume will appeal to social, cultural, and political historians as well as to specialists in modern European literary and visual culture. Contributors: Andrea Amort, Andrew Barker, Alys X. George, Deborah Holmes, Jon Hughes, Birgit Lang, Wolfgang Maderthaner, Therese Muxeneder, Birgit Peter, Lisa Silverman, Edward Timms, Robert Vilain, John Warren, Paul Weindling. Deborah Holmes is Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Lisa Silverman is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Space and place have become central to analysis of culture and history in the humanities and social sciences. Making Place examines how people engage the material and social worlds of the urban environment via the rhythms of everyday life and how bodily responses are implicated in the making and experiencing of place. The contributors introduce the concept of spatial ethnography, a new methodological approach that incorporates both material and abstract perspectives in the study of people and place, and encourages consideration of the various levels from the personal to the planetary at which spatial change occurs. The book s case studies come from Costa Rica, Colombia, India, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

Space and place have become central to analysis of culture and history in the humanities and social sciences. Making Place examines how people engage the material and social worlds of the urban environment via the rhythms of everyday life and how bodily responses are implicated in the making and experiencing of place. The contributors introduce the concept of spatial ethnography, a new methodological approach that incorporates both material and abstract perspectives in the study of people and place, and encourages consideration of the various levels from the personal to the planetary at which spatial change occurs. The book s case studies come from Costa Rica, Colombia, India, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

How the Holocaust is depicted and memorialized is key to our understanding of the atrocity and its impact. Through 18 case studies dating from the immediate aftermath of the genocide to the present day, Holocaust Representations in History explores this in detail. Daniel H. Magilow and Lisa Silverman examine film, drama, literature, photography, visual art, television, graphic novels, memorials, and video games as they discuss the major themes and issues that underpin the chronicling of the Holocaust. Each chapter is focused on a critical debate or question in Holocaust history; the case studies range from well-known, commercially successful works about the Holocaust to controversial examples which have drawn accusations of profaning the memory of the genocide. This 2nd edition adds to the mosaic of representation, with new chapters analysing poetry in the wake of the Holocaust and video games from the here and now. This unique volume provides an unmatched survey of key and controversial Holocaust representations and is of vital importance to anyone wanting to understand the subject and its complexities.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 left all Austrians in a state of political, social, and economic turmoil, but Jews in particular found their lives shaken to the core. Although Jews' former comfort zone suddenly disappeared, the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy also created plenty of room for innovation and change in the realm of culture. Jews eagerly took up the challenge to fill this void, and they became heavily invested in culture as a way to shape their new, but also vexed, self-understandings. By isolating the years between the World Wars and examining formative events in both Vienna and the provinces, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars demonstrates that an intensified marking of people, places, and events as "Jewish" accompanied the crises occurring in the wake of Austria-Hungary's collapse, with profound effects on Austria's cultural legacy. In some cases, the consequences of this marking resulted in grave injustices. Philipp Halsmann, for example, was wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of his father years before he became a world-famous photographer. And the men who shot and killed writer Hugo Bettauer and philosopher Moritz Schlick received inadequate punishment for their murderous deeds. But engagements with the terms of Jewish difference also characterized the creation of culture, as shown in Hugo Bettauer's satirical novel The City without Jews and its film adaptation, other texts by Veza Canetti, David Vogel, A.M. Fuchs, Vicki Baum, and Mela Hartwig, and performances at the Salzburg Festival and the Yiddish theater in Vienna. By examining the lives, works, and deeds of a broad range of Austrians, Lisa Silverman reveals how the social codings of politics, gender, and nation received a powerful boost when articulated along the lines of Jewish difference.

How the Holocaust is depicted and memorialized is key to our understanding of the atrocity and its impact. Through 18 case studies dating from the immediate aftermath of the genocide to the present day, Holocaust Representations in History explores this in detail. Daniel H. Magilow and Lisa Silverman examine film, drama, literature, photography, visual art, television, graphic novels, memorials, and video games as they discuss the major themes and issues that underpin the chronicling of the Holocaust. Each chapter is focused on a critical debate or question in Holocaust history; the case studies range from well-known, commercially successful works about the Holocaust to controversial examples which have drawn accusations of profaning the memory of the genocide. This 2nd edition adds to the mosaic of representation, with new chapters analysing poetry in the wake of the Holocaust and video games from the here and now. This unique volume provides an unmatched survey of key and controversial Holocaust representations and is of vital importance to anyone wanting to understand the subject and its complexities.

At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In "Tortured Subjects," Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period.
Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.