Art Exhibition And Erasure In Nazi Vienna

This book examines three exhibitions of contemporary art held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus during the period of National Socialist rule and shows how each attempted to culturally erase elements anathema to Nazi ideology: the City, the Jewess and fin-de-siècle Vienna. Each of the exhibits was large scale and ambitious, part of a broader attempt to situate Vienna as the cultural capital of the Reich, and each aimed to reshape cultural memory and rewrite history. Applying illuminating theories on memory studies, collective and public memory, and notions of "memoricide," this is the first book in English to focus on visual culture in the period when Austria was erased as a nation and incorporated into the Third Reich as "Ostmark." The organization, content and publications surrounding these three exhibits are explored in depth and set against the larger political changes and dangerous ideologies they reflect. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, cultural history, memory studies, art and politics and Holocaust studies.

Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design challenges the received narrative on the artists, exhibitions, and interpretations of Viennese Modernism. The book centers on three main erasures—the erasure of Jewish artists and critics; erasures relating to gender and sexual identification; and erasures of other marginalized figures and movements. Restoring missing elements to the story of the visual arts in early twentieth-century Vienna, authors investigate issues of gender, race, ethnic and sexual identity, and political affiliation. Both well-studied artists and organizations—such as the Secession and the Austrian Werkbund, and iconic figures such as Klimt and Hoffmann—are explored, as are lesser known figures and movements. The book’s thought-provoking chapters expand the chronological contours and canon of artists surrounding Viennese Modernism to offer original, nuanced, and rich readings of individual works, while offering a more diverse portrait of the period from 1890, through World War II and into the present. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history, design history, architectural history, and European studies.

Sources for Studying the Holocaust provides a pathway for readers to engage with questions about what sources can be used to study the Holocaust. For many historians, the challenge has been how to rescue the story from oblivion when oft-used sources for other periods of history introduce even more issues around authenticity and reliability. What can be learned of what transpired in villages and towns numbering several thousand people, when all its Jewish inhabitants were totally obliterated through Nazi action? Who can furnish eyewitness testimony, if all the eyewitnesses were killed? How does one examine written records preserving knowledge of facts or events, where none were kept or survived the onslaught? And what weight do we put upon such resources which did manage to endure the destruction wrought by the Holocaust? Each chapter looks at one of a diverse range of source materials from which scholars have rescued the history, including survivor testimony, diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, photographs, trial documents, artefacts, digital resources, memorials, films, literature, and art. Each chapter shows how different types of records can be utilised as accurate sources for the writing of Holocaust history. Collectively, they highlight the ways in which all material, even the most fragmentary, can be employed to recreate a reliable record of what happened during the Holocaust and show how all sources considered can be employed to find meaning and understanding by exploring a range of sources deeply. This book is a unique analysis of the types of sources that can be used to access the history of Holocaust. It will be of invaluable interest to readers, students, and researchers of the Holocaust.

Through developing an ethical-methodological approach of ‘radical care', this book explores how critical artistic practice might contribute to the materialisation of more equal, more collectively fulfilling, possibilities of being. The chapters trace a set of interweaving lineages perpetuating inequalities: through labour, the body, and onto-epistemology. Art’s all too frequent a-criticality, cooption, or even complicity amidst these lineages is observed, and radical care and the disruptive arttext are developed as twin aspects of an alternative, resistant framework. The book contributes to the critical understanding of inequitable, abstracting processes’ growing determination of increasing parts of our world, and foregrounds art’s position amidst these. It also functions as an interface, both extending the fertile current discourse around care to a contemporary art focus, and at the same time exploring how radical art practices might contribute to a politics rooted in an ethics of care. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, studio art, philosophy and politics.

Drawing on thousands of historical documents from Polish and Dutch archives, this book explores Cold War cultural exchange between so-called ‘smaller powers’ of this global conflict, which thus far has been predominately explored from the perspective of the two superpowers or more pivotal countries. By looking at how cultural, artistic and scholarly relations were developed between Poland and the Netherlands, Michał Wenderski sheds new light on the history of the Cultural Cold War that was not always orchestrated solely by its main players. Less pivotal states – for example, Poland and the Netherlands – likewise intentionally created their international cultural policies and shaped their cultural exchange with countries from the other side of the Iron Curtain. This study reconstructs these policies and identifies the varying factors that influenced them – both official and less formal. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of the Cold War, post-war European history, international cultural relations, Dutch studies and Polish studies.

This is the first book to develop a postmigrant analytical perspective for the study of art, concentrating on how postmigration reopens the study of contemporary art and migration. The book introduces art historians and other scholars with a methodological interest in cultural analysis to the innovative concept of postmigration, offering a comprehensive introduction to the various meanings and uses of the term as well as translating it methodologically to an art historical context. The book analyses art projects from Denmark, Germany and Great Britain, which address some of the current challenges to European societies of immigration, and by drawing on theory from fields such as migration studies, transcultural studies and feminist, postcolonial and political theory, as well as re-engaging established concepts such as imagination, commemoration, belonging, identity, racialization, community, public space and participation. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art and politics, migration studies, and transcultural studies.

Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878 is an interdisciplinary work analyzing the historical origins of a dominant concept of Nature in the culture of the United States during the period of its expansion across the continent. Chapters analyze the ways in which “Nature” became a discursive site where theories of race and belonging, adaptation and environment, and the uses of literary and pictorial representation were being renegotiated, forming the basis for an ideal of the human and the nonhuman world that is still with us. Through an interdisciplinary approach involving the fields of visual culture, political economy, histories of racial identity, and ecocritical studies, the book examines the work of seminal figures in a variety of literary and artistic disciplines and puts the visual culture of the United States at the center of intellectual trends that have enormous implications for contemporary cultural practice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, American studies, environmental studies/ecocriticism, critical race theory, and semiotics.

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.