Zwischenzeit and Zwischenort : Veza Canetti, Else Feldmann, and Jewish Writing in Interwar Vienna
2006; Indiana University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ptx.2007.0008
ISSN1086-3311
Autores ResumoThis article challenges the myth of a "golden age" of Jewish cultural creativity in Vienna limited by time and gender, by considering the lives and works of Jewish authors who were active there, especially in the period during and following World War I. Jewish women authors such as Else Feldmann and Veza Canetti, among others, became regular contributors of short stories and essays to prominent Viennese newspapers such as the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and also published numerous novels and dramas. Their willingness to depict vividly the stark poverty and harsh violence pervasive in Viennese family life, as well as their emphases on the constantly shifting boundaries between their characters' public and private lives and the borders of class-based sections of the city, did much to illuminate the complexities of urban life. By focusing on those sections of the city located on the margins, or "in between" the urban center and the rest of Austria, these authors underscored the instabilities of a city in the transitional stages between the collapse of empire and the founding of a new nation, and a period of particular uncertainty for Austrian Jews. Examination of Veza Canetti's and Else Feldmann's writings also reveals a complicated web of interrelations between "socialist" and "Jewish" identities in "Red Vienna" and helps clarify how and why Jewish women writers' portrayals of the city from the interwar period should be included in any consideraation of Jewish cultural creativity in twentieth-century Vienna.
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