Frances Tanzer: “Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City”

Frances Tanzer will discuss her new book, Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (University of Pennsylvania Press), which traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German Anschluss through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna’s cultural history across this period: a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that has relied on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. 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. 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.

About the Speaker:

Frances Tanzer is the Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Culture at Clark University. She is a historian of modern Jewish culture, the Holocaust, and Modern Europe. Her book Vanishing Vienna: Philosemitism, Modernism, and Jews in a Postwar City was just published with University of Pennsylvania Press.  Her second book, Klezmer Dynasty: An Intimate History of Modern Jewish Culture, 1880-2019, will focus on her own family, the Brandwein klezmer musicians of Habsburg Galicia. In addition, she is pursuing a project about portraiture and displacement. She has had articles published in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook and Contemporary European History. In 2021, she received the Sosland Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and in 2024 she was a fellow at the Remarque Institute at NYU.

Sponsored by the Center for European Studies, the Department of History, and GNS+