Contemporary Jewish Writing

Austria After Waldheim

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by Andrea Reiter

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > Europe

Keywords

Austria, Jewishness

Publishing date

2018

Publisher

Routledge

Collection

Routledge Studies in Religion

1st publishing

2013

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 256 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-1-138-37713-4

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Book Presentation:
This book examines Jewish writers and intellectuals in Austria, analyzing filmic and electronic media alongside more traditional publication formats over the last 25 years. Beginning with the Waldheim affair and the rhetorical response by the three most prominent members of the survivor generation (Leon Zelman, Simon Wiesenthal and Bruno Kreisky) author Andrea Reiter sets a complicated standard for ‘who is Jewish’ and what constitutes a ‘Jewish response.’ She reformulates the concepts of religious and secular Jewish cultural expression, cutting across gender and Holocaust studies. The work proceeds to questions of enacting or performing identity, especially Jewish identity in the Austrian setting, looking at how these Jewish writers and filmmakers in Austria ‘perform’ their Jewishness not only in their public appearances and engagements but also in their works. By engaging with novels, poems, and films, this volume challenges the dominant claim that Jewish culture in Central Europe is almost exclusively borne by non-Jews and consumed by non-Jewish audiences, establishing a new counter-discourse against resurging anti-Semitism in the media.

About the Author:
Andrea Reiter is a Reader in German in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Southampton, UK.

Press Reviews:
"Reiter’s carefully chosen examples and authors are appropriate to the cultural processes they illustrate. In lucid prose, this astonishingly compact book succeeds in presenting an engaging and informative study on a challenging and important topic." – Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Journal of Austrian Studies

See the publisher website: Routledge