The Jewish community of Vienna and fin-de-siècle culture

The Jewish community of Vienna experienced, between the late nineteenth century and 1938, an exceptional cultural golden age, commensurate with the emancipation granted within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the attractiveness of its capital. Viennese Jews or Jews settled in Vienna played a decisive role in nearly every field of creative endeavor: Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig left their mark on literature, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg on music, Ludwig Wittgenstein on philosophy, and Theodor Herzl, a Viennese correspondent confronted with the Dreyfus Affair, conceived political Zionism. This efflorescence unfolded, however, in a city where antisemitism was powerfully organized, exemplified by mayor Karl Lueger, whose rhetoric influenced the young Hitler. The Anschluss of 1938, annexing Austria to the Nazi Reich, was accompanied by an explosion of anti-Jewish violence, dispossession, and the exile or deportation of the community, bringing this brilliant and ambivalent history to a brutal end.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan
• Jewish Virtual Library ↗