Contemporary Jewish Writing
Austria After Waldheim
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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
> From the same author:
Utopia and Reality (2020)
Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds
Dir. Simon Spiegel, Andrea Reiter and Marcy Goldberg
Subject: Genre > Science Fiction
> On a related topic:
Screening Transcendence (2018)
Film Under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933-1938
Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema (2013)
Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity
Film Societies in Germany and Austria 1910-1933 (2023)
Tracing the Social Life of Cinema
Sensitive Subjects (2020)
The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema