Viennese Jewish Modernism

Abigail Gillman is Associate Professor of German and Hebrew in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Boston University.

• ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Origins of Viennese Jewish ModernismPart 1: Genres of Memory1.Freud’s Modernism in A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci (1910), “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914), and Moses and Monotheism (1938)2.Hofmannsthal’s Jewish Pantomime: Der Schüler (The Student, 1901)Part 2: Hybrid Plots, Virtual Jews3.How a Viennese Modernist Becomes a Jew: Beer-Hofmann’s Der Tod Georgs (The Death of Georg, 1900)4.Anatomies of Failure: Jewish Tragicomedy in Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie (The Road into the Open, 1908) and Professor Bernhardi (1912)Part 3: Performing the Hebrew Bible5.Mythic Memory Theater and the Problem of Jewish Orientalism in Hofmannsthal’s Ballet Josephslegende (Legend of Joseph, 1912)6.The Forgotten Modernism of Biblical Drama: Beer-Hofmann’s Die Historie von König David (The History of King David, 1918–33)ConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

“Gillman’s book is as rich and paradoxical as Jewish assimilation itself, for the author is at once telling a particularly Jewish and a larger European story of aesthetic, cultural, and sometimes even political engagement with tradition.”—William Donahue, Duke University