We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Archaeology, Cultural Studies, and History along with our new in paperback titles and new Berghahn journal issues published in September.
Continue reading “SIMULATED SHELVES”For the next three weeks, New York City will resonate with the energy of Austria. Vienna: City of Dreams will feature a slate of events presented by Carnegie Hall. Capping the festival will be symphony performances of the Vienna Philharmonic, an orchestra which has been celebrated since its first concert in 1842. This arrangement of musicians became a cultural beacon in post-World War II Austria, the subject of Oliver Rathkolb’s The Paradoxical Republic: Austria 1945-2005. Following, in an excerpt from the volume, which will soon be published as a paperback, Rathkolb discusses the Philharmonic’s presence in a discordant time.
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In 1953 . . . neither the Vienna Staatsoper nor the Burgtheater had yet been rebuilt; they were not yet functional as memory sites. However, this did not detract from the importance of the aesthetic role music, notably classical music, played in the postwar era. The sense of purpose felt when the old and new political and economic elites gathered for the first Philharmonic concerts on 27 and 28 April 1945 was highly significant. There was a strong admixture of the Soviet military in the audience, deliberately encouraged by the liberal dispensation of free tickets by the Philharmonic.
Continue reading “Vienna, Dream City within a ‘Paradoxical Republic’”
The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture was published in January 2013 by Berghahn Books. In the statement below, the editors explain the rationale for the collection.
Continue reading “Viennese Modernism from an Interdisciplinary Perspective”
Anne Marie Scholz’s From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events was published by Berghahn Books in April 2013. In what follows, Scholz discusses the experience of touring Vienna and seeing parts of the city made famous by The Third Man.
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The still on the cover of my book—from the 1949 British/U.S. co-production The Third Man–depicts the American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). He’s had a few too many drinks, and has just seen his old friend Harry Lime—a friend he believed dead— disappear somewhere on the square “Am Hof” in post-WWII Vienna. He is torn between doubts over his own sanity, unrequited love for Lime’s Czech girlfriend Anna, relief that his friend may still be alive, and near certainty that Harry is mixed up in a vicious black market racket. The darkness and mysterious aura of the Vienna square reinforces the haunted expression on Holly’s face. His predicament—that of an enterprising but unwelcome American pulp fiction writer stumbling through the labyrinth of postwar Europe–is inextricably linked with the city where he finds himself.
Britta McEwen is author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934, published earlier this year by Berghahn. Her work uncovers the transformation of sexual knowledge from the realm of specialized medical science to that of social reform for the wider populace. Here she discusses her work, some of the challenges she faced in writing about some of the key historical figures, and how she would utilize her apple pie making skills if she weren’t a historian.
1. What drew you to the study of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century?
I actually got into this field through architecture! Vienna has these amazing public housing projects from the interwar period, and as I investigated them I learned that they were intended for a new kind of people – upright, moral, hardworking small families. This seemed to entail a new sexual system, starting with birth control at the very least. That, combined with a well-timed read of Isabel Hull’s “Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany,” made me think that there was a story to tell in Vienna’s early twentieth century about attitudes towards sex.
2. Did any perceptions on the subject change from the time you started your research to the time you completed the book?
On of my assumptions at the beginning of my project was that science was always a liberating voice vis-à-vis sexuality. While scientific discourse was used to challenge Church teachings about sex, I found that many authors in the early twentieth century were actually using melodramatic language, rather than scientific language, to express the call to sexual and social justice. At first I thought this was just a trick to popularize complex ideas, but as I went on I came to believe that melodrama offered people writing about sex a way to talk about ignorance, shame, and consequences in a way that would be convincing to a wide audience.
3. What aspect of writing this work did you find most challenging? Most rewarding?
I’ll answer that one by combining the questions and talking about what was both challenging AND rewarding… some of the historical characters I met in my research were so very colorful and compelling that they threatened to overshadow the “knowledge” they sought to impart. Here I’m thinking of Wilhelm Reich, Johann Ferch, and above all, Hugo Bettauer. Bettauer became a personal hero of mine as I wrote, which made it difficult to really focus on his journalism, rather than his person, for the book. In another world, I think I would have ditched the reams of research I had collected and simply written about Bettauer’s humanism and his outrageous career.
4. To what extent do you think the book will contribute to debates among academics within the field?
Although one of the arguments of my book is that Vienna was a special site for the production and distribution of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century, I think it would be interesting to see comparative work done on this issue. How unusual were places like Vienna, Paris, and Berlin? What made them unique? I also wonder if books like mine will help dispel the belief that there was only one sexual revolution. Finally, the debate in the German-speaking world about the “repressive” sexual regimes of the twentieth century is really heating up, and I think books like mine will help contextualize what sexual “liberation” meant to different historical actors.
5. If you weren’t a historian, what would you have done instead?
Although I am a hardly an entrepreneur, I do think I might have been able to run a public space. Lord knows I waitressed enough to know a good cup of coffee when I see it, and I make a mean apple pie. So some days I fantasize about running a bookstore specializing in science fiction and mysteries, where you could get something sweet to eat and sit all day (just like in Vienna), reading and gabbing. I imagine it to be the kind of place with a bad pun in the title and a standing feminist knitting circle – come to think of it, the kind of place that could be lampooned on “Portlandia.”
Britta McEwen teaches European History at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.